The New York Times - USA (2020-07-26)

Amazon, Google and Qualcomm are financing a George Mason University institute that pushes a hands-off approach to antitrust issues. PAGE 1

SUNDAY BUSINESS

Tech Aims to Teach Regulators

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The pandemic is battering Brazil, overwhelming it with more in- fections and deaths than any country except for the United States. And the Amazon region, as isolated as it may seem, has been hit particularly hard, with cities along the river suffering far higher death rates than the national average. Even in remote towns, people have been as likely to get sick as in New York City. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have traveled the river,

seeking gold, land and converts — and later, rubber, helping to fuel the Industrial Revolution and change the world. But they have also brought smallpox, measles and other diseases, killing millions and wiping out entire communities. Now the virus, intro- duced to the region by a traveler from England, is spreading along the Amazon River, the region’s most vital artery — and its biggest source of contagion. SPECIAL REPORT, PAGES 15-

The Amazon, Giver of Life, Unleashes the Pandemic

Photographs by TYLER HICKS | Written by JULIE TURKEWITZ and MANUELA ANDREONI

An emergency crew rushed José de Almeida Rocha, 62, from his home to the hospital in Manacapuru, Brazil, last month, using his hammock as a stretcher.

WASHINGTON — Step by step, blow by blow, the United States and China are dismantling dec- ades of political, economic and so- cial engagement, setting the stage for a new era of confrontation shaped by the views of the most hawkish voices on both sides. With President Trump trailing badly in the polls as the election nears, his national security officials have intensified their attack on China in recent weeks, target- ing its officials, diplomats and executives. While the strategy has reinforced a key campaign mes- sage, some American officials, worried Mr. Trump will lose, are also trying to engineer irreversible changes, according to people familiar with the thinking. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has inflamed the fight, brushing aside international concern about the country’s rising authoritarianism to consolidate his own political power and to crack down on basic freedoms, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong. By doing so, he has hard- ened attitudes in Washington, fu- eling a clash that at least some in China believe could be dangerous to the country’s interests. The combined effect could prove to be Mr. Trump’s most con- sequential foreign policy legacy, even if it’s not one he has consis- tently pursued: the entrenchment of a fundamental strategic and ideological confrontation between the world’s two largest economies. A state of broad and intense competition is the end goal of the president’s hawkish advisers. In their view, confrontation and coer-

HAWKS SET CHINA

AND U.S. ON PATH

TO LASTING DIVIDE

HARD TURN IN RELATIONS

Aides to Trump, Fearing

2020 Defeat, Seek an

Irreversible Shift

By EDWARD WONG and STEVEN LEE MYERS

Continued on Page 14

Editors and account managers
at the Time & Life Building in Mid-
town Manhattan could once walk
out through the modernist lobby
and into a thriving ecosystem that
existed in support of the offices
above. They could shop for de-
signer shirts or shoes, slide into a
steakhouse corner booth for lunch
and then return to their desks
without ever crossing the street.
To approach this block today is
like visiting a relative in the hospi-
tal. The building, rebranded a few
years ago and renovated to fit
8,000 workers, now has just 500 a
day showing up. The steakhouse
dining rooms are dark.
On a sidewalk once lined with
food carts, a lone hot-dog vendor
stood one recent Friday on a cor-
ner below the building. His name
is Ahmed Ahmed, and he said he
used to sell 400 hot dogs a day.
How many now? “Maybe 10.”
Midtown Manhattan, the mus-
cular power center of New York
City for a century, faces an eco-
nomic catastrophe, a cascade of
loss upon loss that threatens to al-
ter the very identity of the city’s
corporate base. The coronavirus’s
toll of lost professions, lost profes-

Lost Swagger

Turns Midtown

Into an Omen

By MICHAEL WILSON

Last month, Daryl Marvin got his first taste of voting in Georgia. Mr. Marvin had previously lived in Connecticut, where voting was a brisk process measured in min- utes. But on the day of the prima- ry, June 9, he and his wife waited four hours to vote at Park Tavern, an Atlanta restaurant where more than 16,000 voters were consoli- dated into a single precinct. An electrical engineer by training, Mr. Marvin was baffled by what he saw when he finally got inside: a station with 15 to 20 touch screens on which to vote but only a single scanner to process the printed ballots. “The scanner was the choke point,” he said. “Nobody thought about it, and this is Operations Re- search 101. It’s not very difficult to figure it out.” Captured in drone footage, beamed across airwaves and in- ternet, the interminable lines at Atlanta polling sites became an instant and indelible omen of a voting breakdown in this pandemic- challenged presidential election year. Election workers described a cascade of failures as they strug- gled to activate and operate Geor- gia’s new high-tech voting system. Next came a barrage of partisan blame-throwing: The Republican secretary of state, Brad Raf-

fensperger, accused the liberal- leaning Fulton County, which in- cludes most of Atlanta, of botching the election, while Democratic leaders saw the fiasco as just the latest episode in Republicans’ yearslong effort to disenfranchise the state’s minority voters. Six weeks later, as the political calendar bends toward November and the presidential campaigns look to Georgia as a possible bat- tleground, the faults in the state’s balky elections system remain

largely unresolved. And it has be- come increasingly clear that what happened in June was a collective collapse. On-the-ground planning defi- ciencies emerged across the state, though they were far and away direst in Fulton County, the state’s most populous. With a history of difficulty administering elections, Fulton showed little ability to ad- just three months into the pandemic, struggling to process an

Anatomy of an Election ‘Meltdown’ in Georgia

This article is by Danny Hakim, Reid J. Epsteinand Stephanie Saul.

On June 26, a small South San Francisco company called Vaxart made a surprise announcement: A coronavirus vaccine it was working on had been selected by the U.S. government to be part of Operation Warp Speed, the flag- ship federal initiative to quickly develop drugs to combat Covid-19. Vaxart’s shares soared. Com- pany insiders, who weeks earlier had received stock options worth a few million dollars, saw the val- ue of those awards increase six- fold. And a hedge fund that partly controlled the company walked away with more than $200 million in instant profits. The race is on to develop a coronavirus vaccine, and some companies and investors are betting that the winners stand to earn vast profits from selling hundreds of millions — or even billions — of doses to a desperate public. Across the pharmaceutical and medical industries, senior executives and board members are cap- italizing on that dynamic. They are making millions of dollars after announcing positive de- velopments, including support from the government, in their ef- forts to fight Covid-19. After such announcements, insiders from at least 11 companies — most of them

smaller firms whose fortunes of- ten hinge on the success or failure of a single drug — have sold shares worth well over $1 billion since March, according to figures compiled for The New York Times by Equilar, a data provider. In some cases, company insiders are profiting from regularly scheduled compensation or auto- matic stock trades. But in other situations, senior officials appear to be pouncing on opportunities to cash out while their stock prices are sky high. And some companies have awarded stock options to executives shortly before market-moving announcements about their vaccine progress. The sudden windfalls highlight the powerful financial incentives for company officials to generate positive headlines in the race for coronavirus vaccines and treat- ments, even if the drugs might never pan out. Some companies are attracting government scrutiny for poten- tially using their associations with Operation Warp Speed as market- ing ploys. For example, the headline on Vaxart’s news release declared: “Vaxart’s Covid-19 Vaccine Se- lected for the U.S. Government’s

With Well-Timed Bets, Insiders

Cash In on Sprint for a Vaccine

By DAVID GELLES and JESSE DRUCKER

New research suggests climate change will cause major human movement. We teamed up with ProPublica and data scientists to understand how.

THE MAGAZINE

The Great Climate Migration

Kim Jong-un, the nation’s leader, de-
clared an emergency and locked down a
border city where a possible case of
Covid-19 was being investigated. PAGE 6

TRACKING AN OUTBREAK 4-

North Korea Suspects First Case

Regis Philbin used spontaneous wit to enliven some 17,000 hours of airtime on his morning show and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” He was 88. PAGE 25

OBITUARIES 25-

TV Host Extraordinaire Michelle Cottle PAGE 4

SUNDAY REVIEW

NICOLE CRAINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A string of memorials for Representative John Lewis began Saturday in Troy, Ala., the town where he grew up. Page 24.

A Giant’s Last Journey Home

Late Edition

Today,partly sunny, hot, humid, high 94. Tonight,mainly clear, humid, low 76. Tomorrow,plenty of sunshine, humid, dangerous heat, high 96. Weather map is on Page 10.

$6.

The New York Times - USA (2020-07-26)

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