Former felons have the potential to swing close 2020 races

As many as 2 million former felons are poised to regain their voting rights ahead of the November election, an influx that could swing critical elections in states like Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Iowa.

The move to restore the vote to former felons or people on parole or probation has been gathering speed for several years, with many states passing new laws or taking executive action well before this summer. But the result means a significant number of people with firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system will have their right to vote returned at a time when law and order, police brutality, public safety and race are dominating the presidential race.

“The numbers of people that are eligible to cast their ballot are huge. We know that that will absolutely impact any election, from state to local to federal, if all of those people exercise their right to vote,” said Stephanie Young, chief officer of culture, communications and media partnerships at When We All Vote.

Iowa became the latest to act when Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed an executive order in August restoring the right to vote and hold public office for Iowans with felony convictions who have completed their sentences. The policy will impact an estimated 40,000 people.

August polling shows former Vice President Joe Biden and Democrat Theresa Greenfield trailing President Donald Trump and Republican Sen. Joni Ernst within the margin of error in Iowa.

Reynolds’ executive action comes with an asterisk. It doesn’t apply to felons convicted of homicide or related crimes, and the policy can be rescinded by a new governor unless the legislature ratifies an amendment to the state’s constitution. But, for now, the move erases Iowa’s status as the only state in the country to permanently ban residents with felony convictions from voting without appealing to the governor.

Voting rights advocates believe no one deserves to lose the right to vote, and argue that disenfranchising felons is a Jim Crow-era practice that disproportionately targets people of color.

“At the end of the day, who does it impact? Black people and brown people, period,” Young said. “It doesn’t impact anybody else at these levels. This is another way of figuring out how can we create more barriers for people of color. That is not right.”

Activists frame Iowa’s action as a step in the right direction but caution that the country has a long way to go to protect the rights of those who are currently or formerly incarcerated.

“The trend has been very much one of reform over the years, and with relatively little backlash of any kind,” said Marc Mauer, a senior advisor and former executive director of The Sentencing Project, which estimated that felony disenfranchisement prevented 6.1 million Americans from voting in 2016.

Indeed, a 2018 HuffPost/YouGov poll found that 63 percent of adults supported the restoration of voting rights for individuals convicted of a felony who have completed their sentences. A majority also said those individuals should automatically have their rights restored after completing their sentences rather than having to go through a process.

“I don’t want to suggest it’s been easy — it’s been a struggle in every state — but it’s very much been moving in that direction,” Mauer said.

The biggest advancement for felon voting rights came when nearly two-thirds of voters in Florida backed a constitutional amendment in 2018 to automatically restore felons' ability to vote after completion of their sentences. But Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation last year that defined “completion of sentence” to include full payment of any restitution or fines, fees and other costs, something voting rights advocates have decried as a modern-day poll tax.

The amendment itself restored the right to vote for roughly 1.4 million Floridians, but the fate of hundreds of thousands of ex-felons who must meet legal financial obligations hangs in the balance of a court decision expected sometime this month. Florida’s voter registration deadline is Oct. 5.

DeSantis, who appealed a court decision in May that allowed former felons to vote without paying fines or fees, has said victims of crimes deserve restitution and argued that someone convicted of stealing money, for example, hasn't completed his or her sentence until that money is paid back, as ordered.

Julie Ebenstein, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said Florida’s constitutional amendment was the biggest expansion of democracy since the voting age was changed to 18.

“That means there’s enough people who are disenfranchised in Florida by a felony conviction that it expanded the electorate nationwide in a very significant way,” she said.

There are no races for statewide office on the ballot this year in Florida, but the presidential race there is likely to be another nail biter. Trump carried the state in 2016 by just 1.3 percentage points, the equivalent of about 113,000 votes.

The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition has spent more than $3 million helping thousands of people cover their fines and fees, according to Deputy Director Neil Volz.

“On the one hand, this is a huge celebration and advancement of democracy in our country, and on the other hand we see that there are hundreds of thousands of returning citizens who thought they were going to be able to vote who look like they won’t be able to vote this year,” said Volz, who called the ongoing litigation an exhausting legal roller coaster.

“We’ll be ready to respond to whatever the court decision is in a way that’s focused on real people’s lives and continuing to push forward to break down the barriers that people need to fully participate in their community,” he said.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, felons in 16 states lose their voting rights while they’re incarcerated. In 21 states, felons lose their voting rights during incarceration and for additional time after, typically while on parole or probation or until outstanding fines, fees or restitution are paid. And in 11 states, felons face stricter even policies.

Vermont and Maine, whose populations are 94 percent white, are the only states in the U.S. where no citizens can lose their right to vote. But Washington, D.C., joined them in allowing its residents to vote from prison when Mayor Muriel Bowser signed a bill in July.

At the very least, voting rights advocates say, states should allow returning citizens to vote once they’ve completed their sentences, even if they’re on parole or probation.

“For the states that do disenfranchise, the most sensible policy is to just enfranchise people who are not incarcerated once they’re back in their community,” said the ACLU's Ebenstein. “That’s always the cleanest point at which somebody could have their rights restored. Once you start putting additional restrictions like ‘after parole,’ ‘after probation,’ ‘after payment,’ ‘after two years after incarceration ends,’ etc., ... that can be another barrier to getting their rights restored.”

In North Carolina, a three-judge panel restored the vote to felons who have been released from prison but remain on probation due to court costs and fees, striking down state voting restrictions. Those challenging the law argued it disenfranchised roughly 70,000 North Carolinians. Trump won North Carolina by roughly 170,000 votes in 2016. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who is up for reelection, won his 2014 race by less than 50,000 votes.

Last year, a half-dozen Democratic governors took steps to eliminate similar kinds of barriers. Gov. Steve Sisolak of Nevada signed a bill restoring voting rights for an estimated 77,000 convicted felons who have been released from prison or discharged from probation. That’s larger than the margin of victory for Sisolak and Sen. Jacky Rosen in 2018 and Hillary Clinton and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto in 2016. Trump lost the state by just 27,000 votes four years ago.

Elsewhere, Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado signed legislation restoring voting rights to more than 9,000 people on parole, while Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky signed an executive order automatically restoring the right to vote to more than 140,000 convicted felons who completed their sentences.

Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey signed a bill restoring voting rights to more than 80,000 people who are on probation or parole. And by the end of last year, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York had restored the voting rights of more than 49,000 parolees after signing an executive order in 2018, though such rights were revoked for nearly 8,000 people due to either a parole violation or new conviction.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s office announced nearly a year ago that he had restored the rights of more than 22,000 Virginians convicted of felonies, though voting rights advocates note that, as is the case in Iowa and Kentucky, a new governor in Virginia has no obligation to continue policies that enfranchise returning citizens. It will take a constitutional amendment to codify the executive actions into law.

Despite the many gains over the last few years, some states continue chipping away at voting rights. Republican Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee signed a bill last month making it a felony to camp out on state property, punishable by up to six years in prison, after activists had demonstrated outside the state capitol for months. Convicted felons automatically lose their voting rights in Tennessee.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, defended existing restrictions on voting, saying people often make the mistake of thinking that prison time is all there is to a sentence. Some sentences, however, include probation and an order to pay restitution to the victim.

“I don’t think that it’s right to restore the vote of people until they’ve completed all aspects of their sentence,” he said, echoing DeSantis.

Von Spakovsky also questioned the motive behind the expansion of voting for people with felony convictions, noting that voting isn’t the only civil right a felon loses.

“If they’re not just interested in getting that vote, then why are they not restoring all of the other rights that felons lose, like their right to own a gun?” he asked of politicians. “The fact that they don’t push to restore all those other rights make the people pushing this bill look like absolute hypocrites.”

Mauer said that expanding the electorate through public policy is just one step in what he described as a painstaking process that also involves informing people how to vote and encouraging them to do so. And it all comes amid a global pandemic that has killed more than 190,000 Americans and legitimate uncertainty about who can vote at a time when the president is warning of voter fraud.

“You have this whole pool of new formerly incarcerated voters, but you also have this pool of voters who have sat out, and they sat out in 2016 or they sat out during the midterm elections in 2018,” Young, of When We All Vote, said. “You couple former incarcerated Americans with other nonvoters, and they could be the largest voting bloc.”

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A Secret Service agent 'choke slammed' him at a Trump rally. DHS said it was fine.

During a presidential campaign that took acrimony with the press to unprecedented heights, the violent encounter between a Secret Service agent and a photographer at a Donald Trump rally at Radford University in southwest Virginia in February 2016 still manages to stand apart.

Viral videos of the confrontation show that as Time magazine photographer Christopher Morris stepped out of a so-called press pen to snap pictures of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, a Secret Service agent William Figueroa grabbed Morris by the neck, lifted him and threw him onto a table.

After the pro-wrestling-style “choke slam,” Morris fell to the ground, could be seen kicking at Figueroa and briefly put his hand on the agent’s throat in what appeared to be an outraged reenactment of the earlier takedown.

Now, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general report and other documents obtained exclusively by POLITICO show that federal investigators cleared the agent of any wrongdoing in the episode, finding his actions to have been “reasonable.”

Press advocates and Morris himself blasted that finding, contending that the body slam was an excessive use of force and that claims that the agent was in any real danger from the veteran photographer are absurd.

The newly released records and interviews with witnesses also reveal other previously undisclosed aspects about the jarring altercation and its aftermath, including:

— Federal prosecutors considered whether to bring criminal charges against Morris and Figueroa, but decided not to file a case against either man.

— Figueroa, the agent who slammed Morris, had never been assigned to guard the press before, aside from briefly filling in for a colleague on one occasion.

— Although Time issued a statement at the time expressing concern about the episode and the agent’s response, Morris declined to speak with investigators — on advice from a high-powered lawyer hired by the magazine.

— A particular focus of the probe was whether Figueroa sought to choke Morris. The agent denied any intention of doing so. Investigators said that if the agent ended up holding the photographer by the throat, it was an accident.

— Among the factors the report cited as justifying the decision to grab Morris and slam him onto a table was the possibility that the photographer might use his camera as a weapon.

— The veteran photographer was not even assigned to cover the rally, but was simply there to catch a ride to the campaign plane to take behind-the-scenes shots of Trump to accompany a Time interview with the candidate. After the altercation, the interview was abruptly canceled.

During a probe that spanned nearly two years, investigators from the Department of Homeland Security Office of inspector general consulted with a handful of witnesses and interviewed law enforcement training personnel before concluding that the body slam that stunned many observers was a legitimate use of force to resolve a potentially dangerous situation.

“We thus find that [the agent’s] use of force was reasonable based on the totality of the circumstances [and] was in keeping with USSS use of force policies and training tactics,” the DHS watchdog office declared in its report.

Journalists complained during the 2016 race that the Trump campaign was stricter than predecessors about confining the press to so-called pens, from which it was difficult to photograph or interview protesters. And some alleged that the Secret Service was drawn into enforcing those policies, even though they had more to do with public relations than security.

The inspector general report found that Figueroa had been instructed not to let camera crews leave the pen, that the use of such pens is “standard practice at large events,” and that Figueroa’s refusal to let Morris leave followed “established USSS security guidelines.” However, press advocates — including the longest serving member of the U.S. Senate — sharply criticized several conclusions in the report and urged the Secret Service to change its procedures to prevent future violence against journalists.

“In recent years there’s been a disturbing pattern of some law enforcement agencies and some officers neither appreciating nor respecting the constitutionally protected role of the press,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), an amateur photographer who is known as a key defender of photojournalists.

“Journalists and photographers should not be confined to ‘press pens’ for widely attended public events,” Leahy added in a statement to POLITICO. “They should not be body-slammed. And they certainly should not be shot with rubber bullets or tear gassed for simply doing their jobs and covering demonstrations, as they have been in Portland under the Trump administration. This is America, after all, where our Founders wisely determined that a free press is essential to a free society.”

Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, said he was troubled by several aspects of the DHS inspector general report, including its support for the press pens.

“It is extremely disappointing but unsurprising that the report was such a self-serving justification for the clear overreaction by the agent to Mr. Morris’ attempt to cover the removal of protestors from the 2016 Trump campaign rally and another apparent attempt by an agency of the executive branch to support the president’s bidding,” said Osterreicher.

Osterreicher said he was also troubled that the report seemed to accept that it was reasonable to use force to prevent a journalist from leaving the press pen.

“The concept here is that once the press pen has been swept, the public should not be allowed into this secure area – not that the press shall only be allowed to gather news and images from inside the pen,” the attorney added. “Had the agent not acted as if Mr. Morris was committing a serious crime or security breach by attempting to leave the press pen, no force would have been needed or justified.”

Another press advocate said the report reflects confusion about the proper role of the Secret Service at political events.

“These journalists were all ‘credentialed’ and had gone through security screening. The agent, presumably, would have known that, and that they did not constitute a threat to Trump, nor were they BLM protesters trying to cause a disturbance,” said University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

“And yet, the agent treated the photographer as if he was simply a member of the crowd. It seems to me that the Secret Service role should be to protect Trump from direct threats, not to engage in crowd control. … This was an overreaction on the agent's part,” Kirtley said.

Morris, in his first interview about the episode since the day it grabbed headlines four years ago, expressed disappointment in the results of the DHS review. He said the report contained errors, but he also acknowledged that investigators never had his complete account because he declined to be interviewed.

“There are so many inaccuracies in the thing because I wasn’t able to give my side of the story, but now I’m glad I didn’t give my side of it,” the photographer said. He said he initially wanted to share his account, but an attorney retained by Time — former federal prosecutor and DHS official Baruch Weiss—said it was unwise to do so.

“He said: You have no idea how they are going to frame things. They can turn that right around into evidence against you, unless you get them to guarantee your testimony is not going to be used against you in a court of law,” Morris added.

Morris hadn’t received any update on the investigations until POLITICO provided him with a copy of the report. Reading it during a summer of tension involving police, protesters and minority communities, gave him fresh sympathy for those involved in fraught encounters with law enforcement.

“I’m a journalist … I’m white,” Morris said. “I can only imagine what black people or others in society go through when they go through something with law enforcement and then they read about it in a police report.”

Shortly after the incident, Morris acknowledged he should not have cursed at the agent during the encounter. He sought to apologize to Figueroa that day, but colleagues led the agent away.

Nevertheless, Morris maintains that the agent was also in the wrong and that the first person to get physical was the agent, not him.

Trump’s inflammatory anti-press rhetoric also played a role in stoking the incident, the photographer contends. “These agents sit in these rallies and listen to speaker after speaker trashing the press and then the candidate for president calling them the enemy of the people,” Morris said.

Morris said that prior to the altercation he believed that the agent was intentionally trying to block him from photographing the protesters as they were being escorted out.

“Trump starts going off on the media [and] this agent stands in front of me and he starts blocking me from taking photographs,” Morris said. “He’s standing in front of me to try to block me.”

“I stepped one foot out and one foot in. He grabs me and basically throws me back in the pen,” the photographer recalled.

“All he had to do when I stepped out was say, ‘Step back in.’ I know what to do. I said, ‘Don’t fucking touch me.’ He yelled, ‘What did you say?’ I look down both his fists are in a clenched, punch attack mode. He is ready to pop.”

While the report says Morris “chest bumped” the agent after they came face to face, Morris denies it.

“They say I chest bumped him. I did not. I was stepping up to talk to him,” Morris said. “He said, ‘What did you say to me?’ I said, ‘Fuck you!’ And he slams me. … The only thing I did was I assaulted him with my voice.”

Morris, who made his name covering wars in places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Chechnya before spending almost a decade photographing the White House, says he’s no hothead but was enraged by the agent’s aggressiveness.

“I’m kicking. He just assaulted me and I want him off me. He was still coming at me when I hit the ground. He says he was going to handcuff me, handcuff me for what? For saying, ‘fuck you’?” the photographer added.

The inspector general report appears to accept claims by the agent that he felt physically threatened by Morris prior to slamming him onto the table, but the veteran photographer says that’s laughable.

“I’m 135 pounds and 60 years old. My chest isn’t going to break anything,” he said. “This guy did not fear me. This guy hated me.”

Morris also scoffed at claims from the agent and Secret Service instructors that he was a greater threat because he was carrying a camera — something that could seem to justify using authorities using force against any photographer covering the president or a presidential campaign.

“When in the history of the White House and politics has any accredited member of the press attacked anybody with a camera, much less a fist? This is absurd,” the photographer said.

Morris wasn’t seriously hurt in the episode. In an email to investigators, Time’s lawyer said Morris suffered from a sore neck and lower back pain for about a week after the event.

The inspector general report shows investigators questioned eight experts, all of whom worked as law enforcement trainers either for the Secret Service or the broader federal government. All backed the agent’s actions. While giving their blessing to the agent’s conduct, the experts appeared to disagree about whether his takedown of Morris used a technique taught to Secret Service personnel.

Some experts said the move looked like a maneuver known as a “chin tilt” where a suspect is subdued by simultaneously grabbing his chin and pressing on his back, although one said that it was “poorly executed” if that’s what the agent was attempting because he ended up holding Morris by the neck.

“The USSS does not teach chokes or any techniques involving the throat,” an unnamed Secret Service sergeant assigned to the Service’s training site in Beltsville, Maryland said.

“The situation was dynamic and typically agents can grab any area of the body available to gain control of the subject especially if the subject is moving,” a Secret Service agent who works on Trump’s protective detail every few weeks told the inspector general’s office.

The agent involved told investigators he was not actually trying to take Morris down, but to handcuff him. According to the report, the agent “stated he had limited space, his hand may have slipped, and he did not intend to grab [Morris’] neck.”

Journalists on the scene had a different perspective from the experts, saying that the agent clearly overreacted to a mild infraction on Morris’ part.

Joe Perticone, who made a couple viral videos of the incident and was a reporter at the time with Independent Journal Review, described the agent as first chest bumping Morris as he tried to maneuver to get shots of the protesters being led out. In an interview included in the report, Perticone said both men acted “unprofessionally,” but “the USSS agent let his anger take over control and the ‘violence’ of the encounter was on the USSS agent.”

POLITICO reporter Gabby Orr, then with the Washington Examiner, also had a close-up view of the incident.

“The agent saying he used minimal force is laughable,” she said in an interview for this story. “There was no preliminary incident or attempt to diffuse the situation with minimal force. It was just a full-on choke slam onto a table.”

An eyewitness to the entire confrontation, Orr rejected the agent’s account that Morris “somehow fell to the ground." The moment unfolded amid "complete mayhem," she recalled, as she, Morris and other journalists rushed to a corner of the press pen to see the protesters.

Some of the law enforcement experts’ observations and opinions seem open to dispute, particularly about procedures involving the press at political events. “A press pen is usually within close proximity of the protectee,” the sergeant said.

“When an agent stands post, it’s the agent’s job to stop anyone entering an area in which the agent is charged with protecting.”

But a diagram in the report shows that the press pen at the Radford event was in the center of the arena, more than 50 feet away from the candidate. And Morris appeared to be trying to leave the pen, not enter it.

The report also reflects disagreement about whether members of the press were told they could not exit that area. Some, including the agent who tussled with Morris, said campaign personnel briefed the journalists on that rule that day. However, Morris said there was no such briefing. A reporter from WFXR-TV told investigators he “was not given any instructions on-site from Trump Campaign staff or USSS personnel aside from being told to be in the pen by 11:00 A.M.”

A union attorney who represented Figueroa during the investigation, Lawrence Berger of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said he and the agent would have no comment.

Most of the identifying information about the agent was redacted from the IG report, but it he was relatively junior at the Secret Service and based at its New York office. His name and age — he was 33 at the time — were released in a police report POLITICO obtained from Radford.

Morris said another agent told him that Figueroa had joined the Secret Service after serving in Iraq . An Army captain by the same name authored an article in a military police bulletin in 2007 describing the pressures of transporting planes full of prisoners there after the Abu Ghraib scandal.

“Squad leaders ensured that their Soldiers knew how to defuse situations with the least amount of force while exercising authority over the detainees,” Figueroa wrote. “The willingness of leaders to maintain all aspects of military discipline among the ranks kept our military police Soldiers out of the hospital, out of jail, and out of the news.”

Morris said his interactions with the agent hours before the Trump rally incident left him with the feeling that he was both a rookie and on edge.

“This guy, I could tell, was a recent hire. I could sense something was up with this guy,” the photographer said. He also speculated that Figueroa may have harbored some resentment against him after prominent Trump aide Hope Hicks stopped by the platform and told the agent that Morris needed to be there — with heavy lighting gear — because he was getting on the Trump campaign plane after the event.

TV crews had been on the platform all day, leaving food wrappers and other debris, which Morris said he decided to toss into a trash can about ten feet away.

“This agent puts his hands on me, touches me—something I hadn’t encountered with an agent in all my career,” the photographer said. “He got in front of me and stopped me and said, ‘You can’t leave the pen. You need to be escorted.’”

A Trump campaign advance aide, Haley Baumgardner, was called to the scene to walk Morris to the trash can. She seemed surprised, he said. “She said to the agent, ‘You need to relax with him,’” Morris recalled.

Baumgardner, who is now a strategic adviser on energy issues who registered as a lobbyist for Malaysia in 2017, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Morris’ perception that the agent did not have much experience dealing with the press turned out to be on the mark, according to the watchdog report. It says Figueroa never served as a press agent for a full event before the one involving the altercation with Morris. The agent had briefly relieved another agent doing press duty at one prior event, the report says.

The report also says Figueroa missed the pre-event briefing for Secret Service personnel working the Radford Trump rally. He was later filled in on his duties by another agent.

While some press advocates faulted the report for failing to delve into the wisdom of the agent’s actions or whether related Secret Service procedures or training should be changed, a spokeswoman for the DHS inspector general said that was not the purpose of the probe.

“This was a criminal investigation to determine whether the USSS agent’s use of force violated Title 18 U.S.C. Section 242,” OIG spokeswoman Tanya Alridge said, referring to a federal law against civil rights violations by government agents. “Given that this was a criminal investigation, an evaluation of the USSS’s existing policies was not within its scope.”

A Secret Service spokesperson declined to comment on the report and on whether any discipline was imposed against the agent.

The inspector general report indicates that about four months after the incident the Secret Service updated its policies governing protective work for political candidates, but the agency refused to comment on whether any changes were made as a result of the episode.

“The Secret Service does not comment on personnel matters,” the spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

It’s unclear how seriously the feds considered prosecuting Morris, but he said that as he was led out of the arena the lead Secret Service agent whispered to him: “Eighteen years—18 years for assaulting a federal officer in the line of duty.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western Virginia, which considered whether to charge Morris, declined to comment on the scope of its review or the rationale for the decision.

Asked about the decision not to prosecute the agent, Justice Department spokesman Matt Lloyd offered this statement: “Evidence in the matter was reviewed by career civil rights division prosecutors who determined that the evidence was insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer had willfully used excessive force.”

Spokespeople for Time magazine, which has changed owners twice since the 2016 incident, did not respond to requests for comment.

POLITICO first sought details on the inspector general’s probe under the Freedom of Information Act in 2017, but the request was denied because the investigation was ongoing. A new request sent in July 2018 led to 86 pages of records being approved for release to POLITICO in March 2020, but the email was misaddressed.

After further inquiry, the records were finally sent earlier this summer, although large portions were blacked out on privacy grounds or on claims that they reveal sensitive law enforcement techniques.

Besides the foul language, Morris has one other regret: that after years putting his life on the line to cover wars and conflicts, he’ll be remembered for what happened at a small Virginia university on Leap Day 2016.

“It’s ironic that with my whole career, when you google my name what comes up are not my photos, but images of this incident with the Secret Service agent,” he said.

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Inside Oxford’s Vaccine saga: From Wild Hype to Sobering Reality

In April, Sarah Gilbert, the British scientist leading Oxford University’s Covid-19 vaccine effort, said she was 80 percent confident her team would be able to produce a successful vaccine by September.

It was a remarkable statement—conspicuously confident—especially given the timing: Oxford’s vaccine had yet to be tested in a single human, and the results from a preliminary trial involving monkeys hadn’t yet been published.

With pandemic death rates in the U.S. and Britain ratcheting upward, Gilbert’s forecast soothed panicky citizens who had been told that it typically takes years to develop a successful vaccine. The New York Times wrote that Oxford had leapt ahead of the competition and was “sprinting fastest” to the finish line. Within weeks, Oxford had partnered with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the two were inking deals around the world to manufacture and distribute hundreds of millions of doses. The vaccine became one of the world’s best hopes: By late August, with Phase III trials to determine safety and efficacy ongoing, the world had ordered more of the Oxford candidate than any other, at least 2.94 billion doses.

Now, Gilbert’s, and the world’s, hopes are coming back down to earth, with the news that AstraZeneca paused Phase III trials after one participant in Britain showed symptoms consistent with transverse myelitis, a rare neurological disease caused by inflammation of the spinal cord. Obstacles like this one are not unexpected in vaccine development, experts say. The fact that AstraZeneca is pausing trials to investigate, they point out, is a good thing—a signal that that system is working as it should, that drug companies are taking safety seriously, that there are some scientific norms that politics hasn’t trampled.

But the interruption is also a reminder that no amount of hype—from the endless media headlines, from politicians on Twitter, from the vaccine scientists themselves—is going to save the world from the deadliest pathogen in a century. This week’s news is a cautionary note for those who think a magic bullet might be around the corner—or who think that it might be worth slashing safety protocols to get one.

In fact, the Oxford/AstraZeneca group’s self-assurance raised some eyebrows right from the start.

“I felt this way about a number of the companies,” says Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and co-creator of a rotavirus vaccine. “They would do small Phase I trials, basically dose-ranging trials, and then talk about how they could make tens of millions of doses.”

“How about a little humility?” he thought.

Gilbert’s prediction reflected more “pride than reality,” says Michael Kinch, director of the Centers for Research Innovation in Biotechnology and Drug Discovery at Washington University in St. Louis. “The reality is that developing a vaccine … is generally quite challenging. Oftentimes, you don’t see the big problems coming.”

This week, that reality arrived for the Oxford vaccine. An independent committee must now determine whether the illness is directly linked to the vaccine or not—both outcomes are possible. If the two are related, that will likely be the end of this vaccine. If not, the trial will likely resume after several weeks.

The hitch is also a reminder that a lot of Covid-19 science is uncharted territory. “We don’t have much experience with these types of vaccines,” says Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Adenovirus vectored vaccines, like Oxford’s, are relatively new, and mRNA vaccines—like those developed by Moderna and Pfizer—have never been used before in humans. The Trump administration is reportedly making plans to distribute the Moderna and Pfizer candidates, which are still in Phase III trials, in the U.S. by early November.

Kinch is worried that many countries are placing big bets on these newer vaccine technologies, while shunning old, established ones like inactivated-virus vaccines, which China is pursuing. That’s one more reason to take safety with Covid-19 vaccines very, very seriously.

“Well designed and executed studies are so crucial,” he wrote in an email. “Autoimmune sensitives can be rare … and often take time (weeks or months) to develop.” Which means rushing a trial can be deadly. “A one in a thousand [reaction] sounds rare except when you scale those numbers up to 350 million Americans, or seven billion humans worldwide, the outcomes can be disastrous.”

***

Oxford was at the front of the pack from day one.

A few years ago, Gilbert, a top scientist at the university’s Jenner Institute, created a MERS vaccine by inserting genetic material of the MERS surface spike protein into a weakened chimpanzee adenovirus (a common cold virus). Once in the body, the adenovirus infects cells and unloads the gene, hopefully generating an immune response. The vaccine started trials in December in Saudi Arabia, where MERS is still a concern.

A month later, in January, when Gilbert heard about a mysterious, deadly pathogen raging through Wuhan, she was ready: Her team simply inserted genetic material from the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus inside the chimp adenovirus instead, theorizing that would confer immunity to the new virus.

“The MERS study was absolutely critical,” one of Gilbert’s vaccine colleagues told Bloomberg. “We could say, ‘OK, we can start tomorrow.’”

In the first test of the vaccine, scientists inoculated six monkeys before exposing them to a large dose of SARS-CoV-2. Adrian Hill, Gilbert’s colleague who leads the Jenner Institute, called the results “fantastic”—none of the vaccinated monkeys showed signs of sickness after being exposed. In April, around the time the monkey results came in, the Jenner team began planning to mass produce their vaccine. “The aim is to have at least a million doses by about September,” Hill said at the time, describing that number as a “fairly modest target.” The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed announced a billion-dollar investment in May.

The results of a combined Phase I/II trial in July reported no serious safety issues and showed that the vaccine produced neutralizing antibodies in those tested—an outcome that was deemed “encouraging” and “promising.” “This is very positive news. A huge well done to our brilliant, world-leading scientists & researchers at @UniofOxford,” tweeted British Prime Minister Boris Johnson before adding: “There are no guarantees.”

But the vaccine had its skeptics, too. Nasal swabs showed the monkeys from the first test still had the virus in their nose, meaning they might still be able to spread the virus to others, and their neutralizing antibody count was quite low. In a Forbes article, former Harvard Medical School professor and prominent cancer and HIV researcher William Haseltine argued the Jenner Institute researchers didn’t have the data to support their claim that their vaccine protected the monkeys. “Time will tell if [proceeding to human trials] is the best approach,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t bet on it.” The Phase I/II trial, meanwhile, reported levels of neutralizing antibodies comparable to those seen in recovered Covid-19 patients, but lower than those generated by other vaccine candidates. And the scientists administering the trial tested only 35 participants for antibodies out of 543 who had received the vaccine.

It was too early, scientists cautioned, to know whether this vaccine, or any other, was effective or safe. Incremental and early trial data might bump up stock prices, or even land a government contract, but it can’t predict the future.

The final determination would come only at the end of large Phase III trials, which AstraZeneca began in the U.S. in late August. (The company began smaller Phase II/III trial in Britain, Brazil and South Africa in July.) Today, there are nine other vaccines currently in the Phase III stage—with no definitive results yet. “Let’s be clear: No one knows anything” about the specifics of the vaccine timeline right now, says Zeke Emanuel, former Obama adviser and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “We’re all bullshitting.”

That doesn’t mean that governments shouldn’t be dealing for doses or investing in vaccine projects—that is no doubt why the Covid-19 vaccine process is unfolding historically fast. But scientists have worried that all the vaccine hype could push politicians to cut off the normal scientific process too soon. While Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top U.S. government health officials insist the U.S. will not rush science, President Donald Trump continues to agitate scientists with his rosy vaccine predictions, now a keystone of his reelection campaign, that the U.S. will have a vaccine ready by Election Day; just last month the Financial Times reported the Trump administration was considering fast-tracking approval of the Oxford vaccine if results from a 10,000-person late-stage clinical trial looked promising, rather than waiting until the 30,000-person Phase III U.S. trial was complete. (AstraZeneca said it had not discussed this with the Trump administration.)

But the news of AstraZeneca’s pause seems to have relaxed scientists a bit, confirming that drug companies are proceeding with caution and not neglecting safety even as they’re under pressure from governments to produce. It even soothed some early skeptics of the Oxford team’s bravado.

“This is a hopeful sign that the organizations (both the private sector sponsors and the regulators) are taking their responsibilities seriously,” wrote Kinch in an email, adding that it would be premature to presume the vaccine is toxic. “The fact that the trial was halted, despite the considerable pressure to push on, is a good sign that the system is working as it normally does.”

At the same time, some see the incident as confirmation that Phase III vaccine trials must not be cut short before the full 30,000 people have been enrolled—even if a vaccine has already been shown to be effective.

Consider the Oxford trial, which was scheduled to give 20,000 people the vaccine and 10,000 a placebo. To determine effectiveness—that is, whether inoculation protects against severe Covid-19—enough of the placebo patients need to get very sick to show that there is a statistically significant difference between the two groups. That takes a total of only about 150 Covid-19 cases—a threshold that can be reached fairly quickly, especially while a virus is still widespread. It could happen before all 30,000 people have been enrolled in the trial.

But stopping too soon might mean a failure to catch rare side effects. “What many of us are afraid of is that the FDA will find an efficacy signal before the enrollment of the 30,000 has completed,” Frieden says, “and then they will approve it for at least some groups” with an Emergency Use Authorization. “It’s much easier to document efficacy than it is to document safety,” he cautions.

So, what’s next for the Oxford vaccine? This is the second time that AstraZeneca has paused trials for safety reasons; in the first case, the participant was eventually diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, deemed to be unrelated to the vaccine. But this second incident might prompt reconsideration of that last case.

“This is routine,” says Michael Mina, professor of epidemiology at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, referring to pauses in vaccine trials. “But these also are the ‘routine’ items that can cause a vaccine to tank—which is why we focus so intently on safety at this stage ... We just don’t have enough information to know what to make of this.”

“However, transverse myelitis is both rare and a complication that can arise from ... vaccines,” he adds.

If the illness is found to be unrelated, AstraZeneca’s trials will continue. The company’s CEO said Thursday that its vaccine could still be ready by the end of the year. If the vaccine did cause the illness, experts guess, AstraZeneca will cancel its trials and retire the vaccine. It is theoretically possible for a company to seek approval of, and for the FDA to approve, a vaccine that carries a very rare, severe side effect. But that’s extremely unlikely. “The reputational damage to a company could be fierce,” says Kinch.

“Even if it’s not a regulatory death sentence, it’s a public trust one,” adds Emanuel.

If this vaccine is shown to be toxic, that isn’t a reason to panic. There are over 200 in development, and most experts are confident that at least several are likely to work.

Whatever happens, scientists say, this is a reminder that vaccine developers can never predict how safe their vaccine is going to be. Emanuel mentioned Maurice Hilleman—a famed microbiologist who created over 40 vaccines in his career, saving countless lives: “He used to say he didn’t sleep comfortably about the safety of one of those vaccines until 3 million people had the vaccine.”

Offit says he didn’t discover a rare, serious side effect of his rotavirus vaccine until after the FDA had approved it. His Phase III trial had enrolled 72,000 infants in 11 countries and had taken four years to complete. The vaccine is still used—because it saves many more lives than it takes. But the experience taught him a lesson: “The road is often lined with tragedy. There’s often a human price.”

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Trump's first TikTok move: A China quagmire of his own making

President Donald Trump has browbeaten his way into yet another expensive and politically loaded standoff with China — this time over an app populated with dancing ferret videos and at-home lip syncs.

Trump’s order that TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, sell off its U.S. operations — initially seen as a potential opportunity for an American company — has turned into a quagmire.

China has issued new export restrictions that raise uncomfortable questions about what the American company might have to do to satisfy Beijing. TikTok is suing the Trump administration over the president’s order, which claimed the app could potentially funnel Americans’ personal data back to the Chinese government. And the U.S. government is apparently exploring alternate ways for TikTok to operate in America without selling off its entire business, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Essentially, Trump has backed himself into a corner. His moves against TikTok are part of a broader tough-on-China push he has made a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, an outlet to deflect blame for mishandling the coronavirus. But each time he has chosen to face off with China — over trade, 5G technology or Hong Kong — he has ended up at a critical moment when he has to find his way out of a jam.

This time around, Trump’s way out isn’t clear. If China delays a TikTok sale — or scuttles the deal altogether — Trump will be forced either to relent with Beijing or to ban the viral video app outright from U.S. soil. If Trump blinks, he risks looking like he caved to Beijing weeks before the election. If Trump follows through with his threats, he risks Chinese retaliation against the U.S. business community, not to mention angering millions of TikTok-loving Americans.

And a deadline looms — Trump asked for a deal to be completed by the week of Sept. 20, and he said on Thursday that he wouldn’t extend the deadline.

“This is an escalatory move,” said Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the foreign policy think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, referring to China’s recent moves. “If China blocks the deal, then that puts the Trump administration in the position of having to actually follow through with the ban it put on place on TikTok.”

Trump’s August announcement of restrictions on the popular video app, downloaded by over a billion people, marked a new phase in the president’s anti-China crusade, which has become central to his reelection message. Previously, Trump has focused on placing tariffs on China and sanctioning Chinese tech manufacturers. But the campaign against TikTok shows the Trump administration is also willing to target Chinese social media platforms. Officials have also made pledges to go after WeChat, the uber-popular Chinese messaging and payment app.

The pledges have raised concerns in the U.S. business community, with industry leaders saying a crackdown could restrict their business interests in China, the world’s second-largest economy. Barring American companies from working with WeChat, for instance, could deprive major firms of access to a critical commercial platform.

But administration officials insist the national security threats posed by these platforms are too grave to let them operate in the U.S. economic ecosystem without heavy restrictions. The Trump administration claims companies like TikTok and WeChat are simply a vehicle for Chinese government espionage of Americans — though it has offered no proof of these accusations. On TikTok, specifically, the Trump administration has pointed to the application’s ability to “build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” according to the administration’s executive order on TikTok. The company has denied those claims, and the administration has not specifically shown evidence that TikTok improperly used or shared data.

A recent report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian government-funded think tank, found a history of TikTok and WeChat censoring topics considered sensitive in China — a typical feature for content platforms operating in the country. It also noted the Chinese government has leverage over both companies, given the country’s national security laws.

“TikTok has a documented history of censoring free speech to conform to [Chinese Community Party] propaganda,” said a senior administration official. “This administration will not allow the CCP to exploit the private information of U.S. citizens.”

The Commerce Department has not yet clarified the scope of the administration’s orders on TikTok and WeChat, or when potential bans could go into place. And ByteDance is currently negotiating to sell its U.S. TikTok operations with Oracle, and with Microsoft, which is partnering with Walmart on its bid. Microsoft is seen as the top bidder, according to one person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The person, however, raised concerns about what China’s new export restrictions might mean for a deal. The rule requires companies to get a special license from the Chinese government for the transfer of artificial intelligence technologies, such as algorithms, text analysis and content recommendation — all aspects central to TikTok.

So while TikTok could be a moneymaking prize for any winning bidder, there is unease about the potential political headaches that would come with navigating the deal with the Chinese government. ByteDance is currently trying to get a license from the Chinese government for the sale to either Oracle or Microsoft, complicating the timeline for the deal, the person said.

If the new requirement scuttles a deal, it could force Trump to follow through with an outright ban on TikTok. A person close to discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the U.S. government will be ready with other options for the president if a deal is not reached by his deadline, without offering specifics. The Wall Street Journal’s report said even if there is not a full sale, the U.S. is exploring a potential restructuring of TikTok. If Trump chooses to ban TikTok outright, the process could be delayed by the lawsuit the company has filed.

“The Trump administration may have overshot the landing here because it thinks leverage over the U.S. markets is so strong it can set the terms for decoupling actions, but China is trying to show they have significant leverage as well,” Blanchette said.

“Now,” he added, “the U.S. and China are facing an unpalatable situation. For China, the humiliation of having a company extorted from their control by the Trump administration. And now with China’s involvement, the Trump administration may have to follow through on their course of actions.”

The Trump administration has invested considerable energy in its tough-on-China campaign as election season ramps up. Since the beginning of the year, the administration has sanctioned some Chinese officials over Beijing's treatment of the Uighur minority group, its militarized building in the South China Sea and its crackdown on pro-democracy efforts in Hong Kong. More recently, Trump has been chiding Beijing over its handling of the coronavirus, which he derides as the “China virus,” shuttered a Chinese consulate in Houston and restricted Chinese diplomats in America.

The crackdown has caused consternation in the business community. Industry leaders have expressed fears over losing access to China’s rapidly growing market and large population, and are still smarting over Trump’s trade war with China, during which involved he slapped steep tariffs on numerous products. A U.S.-China Business Council survey found 86 percent of its member companies said bilateral trade tensions have negatively affected business with China.

And while TikTok’s high-profile American users are young liberals — including the group that requested thousands of tickets to a Trump rally, hoping to troll the campaign and drive down attendance — there are still many conservative users on the platform whom Trump may alienate with a full ban.

“The gains are all difficult to grasp right now and the loss is really obvious,” said Derek Scissors, a China policy expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “As a result, China might think the president might change his mind, but I don’t know how the president would get away with backing down here.”

Essentially, he said, China has “raised the odds of TikTok in the U.S. just dying.”

Still, Trump’s advisers insist hitting China over trade and national security is a winning issue.

“President Trump is the first one to hold China accountable for their cheating on trade, and has also pinpointed them as the source of the coronavirus outbreak which lied about it and put the entire world behind the curve on responding,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in a statement. “To this day, Joe Biden doesn’t view China as an economic threat. Joe Biden has a China problem and it is a major issue in the campaign.”

Biden, for his part, has knocked Trump for consistently downplaying China’s human rights abuses, referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “thug” and vowed to strengthen alliances so the U.S. can present a united front and counter Beijing.

The Trump administration has shown few signs it plans to back down on its efforts to ban TikTok if no American buyer is found. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and trade adviser Peter Navarro both even said the administration plans to crack down on more Chinese companies, though they did not state which might be targeted.

"It is critical that this country not use apps that are made in China, or that can take our data and go to servers in China. That data will be used to surveil, monitor and track you,” Navarro said last week on Fox Business. “That's the policy position underlying why we have gone after TikTok and WeChat, and there will be others because China is basically going out around the world trying to acquire technology and influence.”

A second senior administration said the White House is committed to policing any tech platform that can be manipulated to suppress speech and abuse its users.

“Where we find efforts to harvest and surveil intimate data, and use that to intimidate and coerce people in our country or their relatives back in China, we are going to take step — in some cases aggressive steps like you saw against TikTok and WeChat — to protect freedom of thought as well as freedom of speech in the United States,” the official said in a call with reporters Friday.

“At the end of the day,” the official added, “the data we produce in this day and age is roughly equivalent to our thoughts. So what you have is a modern day crystallization of the thought police that George Orwell wrote about in his novel, ‘1984.’”

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Issa Rae jokes about mannequin sex on ‘Insecure’ after TV clip goes viral

A viewer shared footage on TikTok of the latex human-doll being used during a kissing scene with actor Lawrence Saint-Victor.

Producers of The Bold and The Beautiful are taking quite a creepy approach to filming intimate scenes while following safety protocols amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis.  

A viewer shared footage on TikTok of a mannequin used in place of actress Kiara Barnes during a kissing scene with actor Lawrence Saint-Victor.

“The Bold and The Beautiful got their cast making out with mannequins during Covid,” the user wrote.

Read More: Issa Rae, HBO partner for Black TV history documentary

Once the clip went viral, many Twitter users mocked the scene and had plenty of jokes, including Insecure creator/star Issa Rae. She retweeted the video with the caption, “Can’t wait to f—- some mannequins this season.”

Watch the scene via the clip below:

I'm cryinggg pic.twitter.com/TyWPx52wbx

— This is an Airfryer Stan Acc (@simsimmaaz) September 4, 2020

Barnes replied to Rae’s comment, writing, “Yoooo let me tell you how awkward this was to film.”

Bradley Bell, an executive producer on the show told the New York Times, “At first, we took out the love scenes, and the show was falling a little flat because we’re all about romance and family interactions,” he said. “One of the first ideas we had was to bring in mannequins for the intimate scenes and hospital scenes, and it’s working quite well — we’re shooting it from a great distance or in a way you can’t see the form is inanimate.”

According to reports, The Bold and the Beautiful have been shooting intimate scenes with mannequins since early this summer. 

Yoooo let me tell you how awkward this was to film😂😂😂 @IssaRae #soaplife https://t.co/5sM34XyeS2

— Kiara Barnes (@KiaraBarnes_) September 5, 2020

In related news, Rae is set to make appearances during the Primetime Emmys awards show later this month. She joins already confirmed stars Anthony Anderson, America Ferrera, Gabrielle Union, J.J. Watt, Lena Waithe and Oprah Winfrey on the Sept. 20 show.

The 72nd Emmy Awards will be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, will  broadcast at 5 p.m. PT/8 p.m. ET on Sept. 20 on ABC.

Have you subscribed to theGrio’s podcast “Dear Culture”? Download our newest episodes now!

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