What A Day - Hack In The USSR

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

The US, Canada, and Britain are alleging that Russian cyberspies are trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research. In more upbeat pharma news, the biotech company Moderna is making progress with its vaccine, which will soon undergo Phase 3 testing. Last week was the 17th week in a row that new unemployment claims have exceeded 1 million countrywide. A new study showed that high unemployment has resulted in over 5 million people losing their insurance coverage between February and May. And in headlines: a culture of sexual harassment at Washington’s NFL team, the Supreme Court will allow Florida to enforce a poll tax, and Trump switches up his campaign manager.Donate to Florida Rights Restoration Coalition: FloridaRRC.com

It's Friday, July 17th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What The Day, where we are getting better at determining whether people in masks are smiling. Yeah, if I have like eye cues, chin cues, and cheek cues, I'm actually pretty accurate. My smile radar is military grade. Watch out. On today's show, the latest on economic woes and a quickly approaching deadline for aid, then some headlines. But first, the latest. The United States, Canada and Britain are alleging that Russian cyber spies are trying to steal coronavirus vaccine research. The hackers in question, which have several aliases, including Cozy Bear and the Dukes, were also one of the two Russian spy groups

that breached the Democratic Party's computers in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. So if you've been thinking about how far we've all come since 2016, the answers not vary. The governments that uncovered the hack haven't confirmed if the hack was successful, but they say the intention is clearly data theft. Canada's version of the NSA said the attacks, quote, serve to hinder response efforts, and the U.S. believes a desire for global prestige and

influence, i.e. being the first to figure out the vaccine, may be to blame. Moscow denies the allegations, but don't they always? The joint announcement follows FBI and Department of Homeland Security's warning two months ago that China was also targeting COVID-19 research and that healthcare, pharmaceutical, and research labs should take steps to protect their systems. Yeah, I mean, honestly, if they get a vaccine and it helps everyone else or we just steal it back, all's well that ends well. No sweat off our back. And we have a little bit more upbeat news on vaccine treatments, right? Yeah, that's right.

So we got more details on the vaccine being developed by the biotech company Moderna. According to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier in the week, the experimental vaccine appeared safe in the first 45 patients who received it. And it provoked a positive immune response, which is exactly what we all want, our bodies to beat the shit out of COVID-19. In the next 10 days, Moderna will begin large phase three testing of the drug on 30,000 people.

Half of those participants will receive placebos and that trial will aim to prove that those who get the vaccine are less likely to contract COVID-19 than those who got the placebo. The study is looking to recruit people who are at high risk of getting COVID-19 due to location or circumstance.

And it's also important to remember that we'll likely need more than one type of vaccine because a single company simply can't pump out billions of doses. To that point, another leading vaccine candidate being developed by scientists out of Oxford in the UK is also progressing. It's already been tested in a thousand volunteers and full results will be published on Monday in the journal Lancet. What's interesting here is that as a next step, scientists are going to test this vaccine in what's called a challenge trial, which is controversial because they will give people the vaccine

and then intentionally expose them to the coronavirus. With no treatment, scientists can't guarantee that participants won't get terribly sick or die, but the benefit is that the trial can be completed in weeks and requires far fewer people than what we're doing over here with the standard phase three trial. So good luck to them. Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't be

me. All right. Well, let's shift gears here for a bit to talk about where things stand with the economy, beginning with what we know about new unemployment numbers out yesterday. Yeah. So the top line numbers are a scary and familiar story. An additional 1.3 million people filed state unemployment claims last week, marking the 17th week in a row that claims have exceeded 1 million, which is just unprecedented. And it's also shocking that this number is actually better than where we were in late March and early April when claims were at times clipping 6 million per week. But sustaining over a million a week in unemployment is just another indication that things are still very bad out there while the virus is far from under control. And if you drill down to the state level, you see that Florida, Georgia, California, and Washington saw these jobless claims spike. And all of those states are where outbreaks are worsening to varying degrees. One exception, though, was Texas, which actually saw claims fall slightly from a prior week,

although the number was still high, exceeding 100,000. Yeah. And before we look forward to what's going to happen in the next few weeks, let's talk about where things stand for people who have already filed for COVID relief. Yeah, for sure. So that process also has not been great, to say the least. State unemployment systems have been backed up in a lot of places. So people have been waiting weeks for their money to come through. According to the Washington Post, by the end of May, only about 57% of claims had been paid out, which was a large improvement from the end of March when only 14 had been paid out. And in terms of what this looks like for people in practice, we've seen people waiting in

eight-hour lines in Kentucky to speak with state employees about unemployment benefits. There's some reporting out of Wisconsin of people waiting 10 weeks or longer for their claims to be processed. Then there are a number of states that are experiencing difficulties processing the pandemic unemployment assistance, which is a new program for gig and self-employed workers. And to qualify for that, you actually have to wait to get rejected from regular unemployment insurance first. Wow. Well, and as a part of this, people are losing health insurance when they lose their jobs. There was a new study on this that showed that over 5 million people lost their coverage between February and May. Yeah, it's just crazy.

And it's almost 40% higher than the prior record during the 2008-09 recession. And this time, it also is during the middle of a pandemic. Finally, one last thing to mention on real-world impacts of the current moment. So for people who are operating small businesses, the seesawing of reopening and closing is causing major problems to the New York Times, for instance, talked to a karaoke bar owner in Texas, for instance, who spent $1,000 for masks, hand sanitizer and jello shots, among other things, who ended up having to throw it all in the trash and shutting down permanently when the governor closed down bars again at the end of June. And then getting small business aid from the federal government's Paycheck Protection Program has continued to be particularly challenging for

Black business owners. So here we are with all of these overlapping crises for people, job losses, difficulty getting benefits, being pulled off of health care, uncertainty around whether and when businesses will be able to operate again. And it's coming at a time when emergency federal unemployment aid is about to run out at the end of July, which just creates more uncertainty and potential pain for people. Yeah, I think it's important to remember that it really doesn't have to be this way. I mean, other countries are clearly setting a better example. Oh, yeah. And in them, it's not a situation where the continuation of a $600 weekly payment could be the difference between being able to feed a family or pay rent. So in a bunch of European countries like Denmark, Ireland, France, the UK, just name a few,

they basically heavily subsidize wages, allowing paychecks to keep going out and preventing greater job loss. In Spain, they called it an act of God subsidy program that paid in some cases 70% of wages. And then back in March, Denmark devised a plan to cover 75 to 90 percent of worker salaries for a period of three months. This kind of nationalizing of payrolls is very different than largely leaving people to their own devices to get through these crummy old state unemployment systems. But back in our beautiful country, Congress is set to return next week, facing down a deadline to deal with all of this before the August recess. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to pitch a $1 trillion bill nearly two months after the Democratic-led House passed a $3 trillion package that they said no to. We'll get into more of that, a looming potential eviction crisis in our country, and whether we suddenly start nationalizing payrolls in the coming weeks, but that Squad, and for today's temp check, we're talking about space.

So yesterday, NASA and the European Space Agency published the closest ever image of the sun. Taken from just 48 million miles away from its surface by the Solar Orbiter probe, the shots reveal solar flares that have never been seen with this much detail. So Giddy, what part of space are you trying to see next? I would take the sun if I could be shot directly into it, or I would take a black hole deeper in space and travel through it interstellar style potentially back in time to exist in a an altered reality that is not this one just a couple ideas I've been kicking around but is there a place that you're trying to go

are you into thinking about other farther reaches of our universe that are better well I'm definitely into photos of it. I really have no desire to go there. Like I think other people can absolutely leave. I don't have to leave. I like it here. But yeah, I mean, I think my favorite space photos of things that seem appealing to travel to, I really like those ones that are like different colors of places like Mars or Saturn, where you expect it to be like the little kid painting that you've always seen in every book where you're like, oh, okay, so it's like orange and there's like yellow around it. And they're like, actually, it's green and purple and blue

and a color you've never seen before. And I'm like, oh, well, that's nice because clearly these scientists lacked imagination when they were trying to figure this out. Or I guess maybe they had just shittier photos. They were taking them on like a blackberry they needed to get the new the newest latest androids and iphones to get that crispy shot i i feel like all of the planets when we were younger we were told like the first grouping besides earth was like red and then they turned blue and then they got like deeper blue and that was like all we understood about like what the color range could have been yeah yeah they were just like pretty unimaginative and i think that that's part of the reason i didn't care. I was like, yeah, but the ocean looks pretty colorful. So like, I'm going to focus all my energy on that diorama.

Thanks though. We only have so much space in our heads for, you know, these different color palettes. And the truth is Mercury always looks like the moon. Like, what's that about? It can be a little bit more creative. I can't tell the difference. But just like that, we have checked our temps. They are cold like space, but maybe also hot like the sun.

Stay safe, and we will check in with you all again next week. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. Fifteen women came forward yesterday to share their experiences of sexual harassment while working for Washington's NFL team. Yes, the team that's in the process of changing its racist name. In an interview with the Washington Post, the women described a culture of unwanted sexual advances and inappropriate comments that were tolerated by executives, including owner Daniel Snyder. The team only had one HR person for over 200 employees, which left veteran female staffers to informally warn other women,

which male employees to avoid. Since the complaints were raised this week, two male employees have been fired and one quickly announced his retirement. Man, they got to blow up that team and start from scratch. The Supreme Court will allow Florida to enforce a law that prevents people with felony convictions from voting unless they've paid court fines and fees. The decision represents a major setback to efforts within the state to restore the voting rights of over a million people with felony convictions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her dissent that the order, quote, prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida's primary election

simply because they are poor. Civil rights groups and voters in the initial suit argued that a law requiring people to pay in order to vote sounds a little bit like a poll tax, which is unconstitutional. If you want to help people with past convictions pay off their fees and vote in these upcoming elections, check out the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. A link is in our show notes. USA Today now says the Peter Navarro op-ed that they published taking down Dr. Fauci didn't meet their editorial standards. More evidence that when you mess with the Fauci, you get the ouchie. Navarro is a top trade advisor to Donald Trump, and he apparently accessed some sort of WordPress,

I guess, that lets you just publish heated rants to USA Today without anybody at all reviewing them first. His article titled Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I've interacted with him on claimed that Fauci opposed an early travel ban from China and downplayed the risk of COVID-19. USA Today now admits these claims were, quote, misleading or lacked context. To add insult to injury, Navarro's allies have also distanced themselves from his op-ed, with Trump's director of strategic communications saying that Navarro, quote, didn't go through normal White House clearance processes, and Trump himself saying that Navarro, quote, shouldn't be doing that.

For Navarro, there are now two pandemics, COVID-19 and fake friends. You hate to see it, but actually you really do love to see it. Trump wants to move his presidential campaign in a new direction since the current direction is vaguely towards losing. He has replaced his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, with Parscale's former deputy, Bill Stepien. So Parscale is a compulsive poster after Trump's own heart. He was the main hype man for Trump's disastrous Tulsa rally and has taken some heat for using Trump's campaign to promote himself. In contrast, Stepien is a more traditional data-driven political operative who prefers to work behind the scenes where real

meaningful bad stuff can be done. Also in repairs to the Trump train, the RNC will restrict attendance to its convention in Florida for COVID safety reasons next month. About 2,500 people will be able to attend the first three days, but more than 7,000 will be able to attend Trump's closing speech, where they can sit outside in 90 degree heat and hear the president discuss the important issues, like he did yesterday at the White House. So we made it so dishwashers now have a lot more water. And in many places, in most places of the country, water is not a problem. They don't know what to do with it.

It's called rain. Yes, that's right. Ignore the pandemic. This election will be won or lost on minor improvements to household appliances. Yeah, it's called rain. And those are the headlines. Quick heads up before we go. If you aren't listening to Crooked's new bonus series

on the vice presidential selection process, you're doing it wrong and missing out. You're doing both at the same time. It's called That's the Ticket, and it's hosted by Dan Pfeiffer and Alyssa Mastromonaco, who have both worked inside the Veepstakes process before. On the latest episode, they talk with FiveThirtyEight senior writer Perry Bacon Jr.

about what polling does and doesn't tell us about the impact of a VP pick. You can find that episode and the rest of the series on the Pod Save America feed. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, help us utilize all this water, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just factually inaccurate rants in USA Today like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter.

Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And have a very safe weekend. That's just so earnest and true. We hope you're safe. We don't want you to get an ouchie.

What a Day is a Crooked Media production. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tan is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kshaka.