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World

U.S. warns of China’s growing threat to Taiwan

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“War over Taiwan would be unthinkable,” said Eric Sayers, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “A major challenge Washington faces is that Taiwan has been viewed by many as a 2035 planning problem. … The [Chinese army’s] capabilities have now matured to such a degree that this is no longer a dilemma we can afford to push off.”

How to prevent that scenario, though, is a question that has confounded previous U.S. administrations, as China each year appears to move one step closer to moving on Taiwan. The new Biden team must signal its willingness to go to the mat for Taiwan and help ensure the island can defend itself, but without further spooking Beijing.

“If we interject ourselves, we are the reagent catalyst that will make this problem hotter,” said one senior defense official, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss sensitive operational planning. “Militarily we know that if we do too much, push too hard, China will use that optic and they will do more against Taiwan.”

The warning comes after four years of mixed signals from President Donald Trump and his administration. Trump angered Beijing soon after taking office with a phone call to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and his administration routinely touted big-ticket arms sales and high-profile visits.

However, Trump also indicated America might not come to Taipei’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion, reportedly telling a Republican senator in 2019 that “Taiwan is like two feet from China. … We are eight thousand miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f—ing thing we can do about it.”

The new Biden team knows the U.S. is in a competition with China, and Beijing’s coercion of Taiwan will be a major point of discussion. For now, they are keeping pressure on Beijing applied by Trump through tariffs and sanctions. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are in Japan for the first stop on a joint visit to Asia, where countering China’s rise will be at the top of the agenda. The two will travel next to South Korea, before Austin heads to India and Blinken to Alaska, where he will be joined by national security adviser Jake Sullivan.

Washington and Taipei have robust economic ties but do not have formal diplomatic relations. The Trump administration sought to strengthen this relationship with controversial arms sales and senior-level visits. Officially, the United States has a “One China” policy that recognizes China and Taiwan’s historic connection but has consistently opposed the coerced resolution of the status of the island.

Biden has given some early indications that he will continue that outreach toward Taiwan, inviting the island’s de facto ambassador to attend the U.S. presidential inauguration for the first time and raising his concerns about Beijing’s pressure against Taipei in a call with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

Adm. Phil Davidson, head of U.S. forces in the Pacific, warned in testimony to Congress last week that China could invade Taiwan by 2027 — a significant acceleration compared to officials’ previous estimates of 2035.

“Preparing for Taiwan contingencies has been a focus in China’s military modernization for some time, so as their capabilities are increasing, obviously, we are paying very careful attention to the military balance in the Taiwan Strait,” David Helvey, the acting assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, told reporters traveling with Austin to Japan.

Officials came to that conclusion after watching China over the last few years increase its military capability while taking more risks on the world stage, from attacking Indian forces on the disputed line of control in the Himalayas to cracking down on protesters in Hong Kong. Xi’s increasingly aggressive moves, both on military and political fronts, signal that an invasion of Taiwan could be imminent, the senior defense official said.

Despite a global pandemic, in 2020 China commissioned 25 advanced new ships, including cruisers, destroyers and ballistic missile submarines — capabilities designed to keep America and its allies that might interfere on Taiwan’s behalf at bay, a second senior defense official said. Meanwhile, Beijing is integrating its new equipment into an increasingly sophisticated force, demonstrated in a loudly publicized live-fire event last fall in which Chinese forces took out an “enemy” with ballistic missiles, and developing a theater command structure much like that of the U.S. military.

“China has built a global-sized navy for a regional mission,” the second official said. “We look at the capacity that they’ve built and it’s impressive and it’s increasingly to their advantage … we just don’t have the same kind of capabilities against China that we used to because of numbers.”

At the same time, several upcoming milestones may help pinpoint the timing of a potential invasion. China accelerated its timeline for modernizing its army from 2035 to 2027 — the group’s 100-year anniversary. That year is also the conclusion of Xi’s presumed third term.

“None of those are definitive and says, ‘We think we’re going to go by here,’ but we think that the circumstances become more viable in the near term,” the second defense official said. “If we look only at the longstanding Chinese messaging of 2035 at the soonest, 2049 realistically for a world class military, we are deceiving ourselves and we run the risk of falling into a misdirection from Beijing.”

Meanwhile, officials are increasingly concerned that Taipei may force Beijing into action by unilaterally declaring its independence, particularly after Taiwan’s president was reelected in a landslide last year. Polling data consistently shows the Taiwanese people want a separate identity that is not Chinese, the second official said.

Short of an invasion, military officials are also concerned that China could effectively occupy Taiwan under the pretext of offering humanitarian aid.

“The nightmare scenario is a typhoon goes through Taiwan,” the first official said. Beijing then moves in “under good pretenses to help out, and never leaves.”

The Trump administration exacerbated the Taiwan problem, the second official said. Trump sought to use Taipei as a cudgel against Beijing during the tariff-driven trade war he launched against China, increasing the number of senior-level visits and publicizing arms sales and an anti-China military strategy.

“It played into China’s sense that things were changing and that it might necessitate more of a physical counter were it to continue to trend in the wrong direction,” the second defense official said.

Trump’s aggressive tactics, from the trade war to condemning China’s persecution of its Uighur Muslim population, also gave Beijing an excuse to adopt increasingly anti-American rhetoric, the first defense official said.

So what’s the answer? Top U.S. and Japanese officials are expected to send a strong message to their Chinese counterparts over Beijing’s coercive measures in the region during the Alaska summit. The U.S. can’t afford to do nothing, as China pressures Taiwan on both the military and economic fronts. Every day, Beijing sends fighter aircraft into Taiwan’s air identification zone with the intention of burning out Taipei’s small, U.S.-made F-16 force, and recently conducted military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

Sayers urged the new administration to increase investment in its forward-based forces in the Pacific, strengthen ties with Japan and Australia to deter Beijing, and take steps to bolster Taiwan’s defenses.

“The United States needs to expeditiously ensure it has a force in place that will convince Beijing that it cannot be successful if it resorts to military coercion to resolve its political dispute with Taipei,” Sayers said. “No one is calling for a strategy to dominate in a military conflict, but instead to deter by denying Beijing its military objectives.

But one wrong step could be the trigger for Beijing to act.

“If we were to all of a sudden militarize the engagement, if we were to do a lot more to push back on China, if [Taiwan’s] government declares independence — those are all bellwether events that could significantly alter the facts or the assumptions that we have about a military crisis,” said the first senior defense official.

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Business

White House warns of ‘active threat’ from Microsoft email hackers

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“This is an active threat,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday. “Everyone running these servers — government, private sector, academia — needs to act now to patch them.”

Psaki’s warnings followed a tweet by national security adviser Jake Sullivan Thursday evening that underscored how concerned the Biden administration is. He urged IT administrators nationwide to install software fixes immediately. Sullivan said the US government is monitoring reports that US think tanks may have been compromised by the attack, as well as “defense industrial base entities.”

Later on Friday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency underscored the risk in unusually plain language, stating in a tweet that the malicious activity, if left unchecked, could “enable an attacker to gain control of an entire enterprise network.”

In a rare step, White House officials have urged private sector organizations running localized installations of Microsoft Exchange server software to install several critical updates that were released in what information security experts described as an emergency patch release.

The cybersecurity firm FireEye said Thursday it had already identified a number of specific victims, including “US-based retailers, local governments, a university, and an engineering firm.”

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters Friday the Defense Department is currently working to determine if it has been negatively affected by the vulnerability.

“We’re aware of it, and we’re assessing it,” Kirby said. “And that’s really as far as I’m able to go right now.”

Microsoft disclosed this week that it had become aware of several vulnerabilities in its server software being exploited by suspected Chinese hackers. In the past, Microsoft said, the hacker group responsible — which Microsoft is calling Hafnium — has gone after “infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs.” The group in question had not been previously identified to the public, according to Microsoft.
The announcement marked the latest information security crisis to hit the US after FireEye, Microsoft and others reported a suspected Russian hacking campaign that began by infiltrating the IT software company SolarWinds. That effort has led to the compromise of at least nine federal agencies and dozens of private businesses.

But the malicious activity disclosed this week is not in any way related to the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft said Tuesday.

Microsoft typically releases software updates on the second Tuesday of each month. But in a sign of the seriousness of the threat, Microsoft published the patches addressing the new vulnerabilities — which had never been detected until now — a week early.

‘We urge network operators to take it very seriously’

The Department of Homeland Security also released an emergency directive on Tuesday requiring federal agencies to either update their servers or to disconnect them. It is only the sixth such directive since the formation of CISA in 2015, and the second in three months.

“We urge network operators to take it very seriously,” Psaki said of the directive. The administration is concerned there as a “large number of victims,” she added.

Once the Hafnium attackers compromise an organization, Microsoft said, they have been known to download data such as address books and to gain access to its user account database.

One person working at a Washington think tank told CNN both her work and personal e-mail accounts were hit by the attackers. Microsoft sent her a warning that a foreign government was behind it. AOL sent a similar notification for the personal account.

The person was then visited by FBI agents who showed up on her doorstep, repeating that this was indeed an ongoing, sophisticated hack by a foreign government and that there is a nationwide FBI investigation underway.

The attackers had used their unauthorized access to e-mail the person’s contacts, “tailoring [the messages] in a way that the recipient will not doubt I am the sender.” The attackers’ fraudulent emails sent in the person’s name included invitations to non-existent conferences and referred to an article in her name and a book in a colleague’s name, neither of which was written by them.

Each message, the person said, came with links asking people to click on them.

“This is the real deal,” tweeted Christopher Krebs, the former CISA director. “If your organization runs an OWA server exposed to the internet, assume compromise between 02/26-03/03.”
In its own advisory, CISA urged network security officials to begin looking for evidence of intrusions as far back as September 2020.

The US government’s unusually public response to the incident was a surprise to many experts, a reflection of both the Biden administration’s focus on cyber issues compared to the Trump White House as well as the scale of the threat.

“Is this the first time the National Security Advisor has promoted a specific patch?” John Hultquist, the vice president of FireEye’s Mandiant Threat Intelligence arm, wondered aloud.
“When you wake up to the [National Security Advisor] and [Press Secretary] tweeting about cyber,” tweeted Bailey Bickley, a top spokesperson for the National Security Agency, appending a “starstruck” emoji and quoting Sullivan’s tweet from the night before.

CNN’s Michael Conte and Oren Liebermann contributed to this report.



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US

Domestic Terrorism Threat Is ‘Metastasizing’ in U.S., F.B.I. Director Says

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WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. director warned senators on Tuesday that domestic terrorism was “metastasizing across the country,” reaffirming the threat from racially motivated extremists while largely escaping any tough questions about the bureau’s actions before the siege of the Capitol.

The director, Christopher A. Wray, who had largely remained out of public view since the riot on Jan. 6, condemned the supporters of former President Donald J. Trump who ransacked the Capitol, resulting in five deaths and scores of injuries to police officers.

“That attack, that siege, was criminal behavior, plain and simple, and it was behavior that we, the F.B.I., view as domestic terrorism,” Mr. Wray said. “It’s got no place in our democracy.”

He also revealed that the number of domestic terrorism investigations at the F.B.I. had risen to 2,000 since he became its director in 2017. The Capitol riot was part of a broader threat that had grown significantly in recent years, Mr. Wray said.

He did not break down the inquiries along an ideological divide, but The New York Times has reported that agents opened more than 400 domestic terrorism investigations last year as violence flared during racial justice protests, including about 40 cases into possible adherents of the far-left antifascist movement known as antifa and another 40 into the Boogaloo, a far-right movement seeking to start a civil war. The F.B.I. also investigated white supremacists suspected of menacing protesters.

Mr. Wray’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was his first in front of Congress since the assault on the Capitol. It was free of the drama after similar testimony last year, when Mr. Trump — who appointed Mr. Wray to his post — attacked him for detailing the threat from far-right extremists and stoked a false narrative that anti-fascists were the real danger. In contrast, the Biden administration has made fighting domestic terrorism a priority.

As a result of the violence last year, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department decided to elevate the threat posed by antigovernment and anti-authority extremists such as militias and anarchists. Still, bureau officials listed the threat a tier below the one presented by racially motivated violent extremists like neo-Nazis.

The F.B.I. and the Justice Department make those determinations based on violent attacks such as shootings or bombings and use the levels to decide where to focus resources.

Mr. Wray pointed out another alarming trend: The number of white supremacists arrested in 2020 had almost tripled from when he started running the F.B.I. three years earlier.

White supremacists have killed dozens of people in the United States since 2015, opening fire at a Black church in South Carolina and at synagogues in Pittsburgh and California, as well as targeting Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in Texas.

The political implications of the threats played out at the hearing. While Republicans condemned the Capitol attack, some were quick to point to unrest last year in Portland, Ore., and other cities, highlighting the destruction of property and attacks on the police. In one spasm of violence, a self-professed antifa supporter shot to death a pro-Trump protester in Portland in August.

Still, it was the first killing in more than 20 years by what the bureau classifies as an “anarchist violent extremist.”

Mr. Wray repeatedly said in response to questions from Democratic senators that people associated with antifa were not involved in storming the Capitol and that rioters were genuinely Trump supporters, not posing falsely as them.

Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic chairman of the committee, accused the Trump administration of playing down the threat from white supremacists while stoking a narrative that left-wing anarchists such as those who identify with antifa were the greater danger to the country.

Rattling off the litany of mass shootings, Mr. Durbin added, “Let’s stop pretending that the threat of antifa is equal to the white supremacist threat.”

The Capitol Police has largely shouldered the blame for the Jan. 6 attack. Its acting chief, Yogananda D. Pittman, has acknowledged to Congress that the authorities failed to do enough to thwart the “terrorist attack.”

Indeed, there were several indicators of the potential for violence on Jan. 6. Federal law enforcement officials knew that members of militias such as the Oath Keepers and far-right groups such as the Proud Boys planned to travel to Washington, some potentially with weapons. Many adherents of QAnon, a dangerous conspiracy theory that has emerged as a possible domestic terrorism threat, were also expected to attend a protest rally where Mr. Trump spoke before the attack.

In addition, the F.B.I.’s office in Norfolk, Va., produced a report a day earlier warning of possible violence and mentioned people sharing a map of tunnels at the Capitol complex. However, the information was unverified, and a portion quoting a warning of an impending “war” appeared to come from a single online thread.

The F.B.I. provided the report to the Capitol Police, although its former chief, Steven A. Sund, has said it never made it up the ranks.

Mr. Wray said that F.B.I. officials relayed the Norfolk information on at least three occasions to other law enforcement agencies. He said that he had not seen the report until after the riot, but that the handling of it was typical for such intelligence.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, asked what Capitol Police leaders should have done had they seen the Jan. 5 report.

“I really want to be careful not to be an armchair quarterback,” Mr. Wray said. He later said he did not have a “good answer” as to why Mr. Sund did not get the report.

With the signs pointing to violence or worse on Jan. 6, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, pressed Mr. Wray on why the F.B.I. did not “sound the alarm in some more visible and ringing way.”

Mr. Wray said the bureau had for months released intelligence reports related to domestic terrorism — some specifically tied to the election — publicly and to other law enforcement agencies such as the Capitol Police.

He said the bureau was reviewing its actions but agreed that the insurrection was not an “acceptable result.”

“We aim to bat a thousand,” Mr. Wray said.

But it was clear that federal law enforcement underestimated the potential for violence on Jan. 6 among Trump supporters, many of whom portrayed themselves as backers of law enforcement.

The focus on antifa among Mr. Trump and some of his cabinet officials and the shifting of law enforcement sources last spring and summer might have contributed to the F.B.I. failing to heed the rising anger among Mr. Trump’s supporters about false claims of election fraud that culminated in the storming of the Capitol, current and former law enforcement officials have said. Mr. Trump himself had pushed that conspiracy theory, influencing his followers with the baseless notion that the election had been stolen.

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Health

Coronavirus Today: California variant is a homegrown triple threat

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Good evening. I’m Thuc Nhi Nguyen, and it’s Tuesday, Feb. 23. Here’s what’s happening with the coronavirus in California and beyond.

Coronavirus variants aren’t just an international problem anymore.

Scientists at UC San Francisco are ready to tag California’s homegrown coronavirus strain as a “variant of concern,” putting it in the company of those from the United Kingdom, South Africa and Brazil. The state’s dominant strain packs a triple-threat punch: It can spread more easily than its predecessors, it shows some resistance to antibodies generated by COVID-19 vaccines or prior infection, and it’s associated with severe illness and death, my colleague Melissa Healy reports.

“The devil is already here,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, who led the UCSF team of geneticists, epidemiologists, statisticians and other scientists in a wide-ranging analysis of the new variant. “I wish it were different. But the science is the science.”

They call the new variant B.1.427/B.1.429. It will likely account for 90% of California’s infections by the end of the month, Chiu said.

Since Sept. 1, the California strain has risen from complete obscurity to account for more than 50% of all coronavirus samples that were subjected to genetic analysis in the state. It has shown an enhanced ability to spread compared to strains that were prominent here in early fall — but just how much more contagious it is remains to be seen.

One of the reasons why scientists believe the California strain is more contagious is a mutation that helps the virus attach more firmly to the human cells it targets. It is one of three mutations in the homegrown variant’s genome that affect the spike protein, which the virus uses to sneak into human cells and convert them into factories for its own production.

The scientists found that B.1.427/B.1.429 was more resistant to the neutralizing antibodies that are generated in response to COVID-19 vaccines or to a coronavirus infection, cutting their effectiveness in half. That’s not on the same level as the South African variant, which reduced the effectiveness of neutralizing antibodies to one-sixth their usual levels. But it’s still enough for Chiu to fret that it could blunt the effects of vaccines over time.

As if that weren’t enough motivation to keep sticking with public health strategies to slow the spread of the coronavirus, the scientists also found that the California variant was associated with worse health outcomes. Examining a relatively small sample of 324 patients hospitalized at UCSF, researchers found that 21% of these patients were infected with the California strain, and compared to patients battling other strains, they were more likely to have been admitted to the ICU and 11 times more likely to die of COVID-19.

Chiu said the increased risk of death doesn’t necessarily mean the California strain is more lethal. It could reflect the fact that greater virus transmissibility caused hospitals to become overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, and the higher death rate may have been due to healthcare resources being stretched too thin. Experts are already analyzing the extent to which the surge in Southern California may have impacted health care.

UCSF’s analysis is currently under review by the public health departments of San Francisco County and the state, which collaborated in the new research.

By the numbers

California cases, deaths and vaccinations as of 5:53 p.m. Tuesday:

Track California’s coronavirus spread and vaccination efforts — including the latest numbers and how they break down — with our graphics.

Across California

The pandemic has disproportionately affected communities of color, and health officials have responded by bolstering their efforts to get COVID-19 vaccines to underserved people. Today, my colleague Julia Wick reports on one such effort that seems to have backfired — and on the state’s move in response to make changes to that program. For more from her on the story, read her Essential California newsletter from today, and sign up to get it if you don’t.

Her story centers on a program launched by the state to reserve appointments for Black and Latino Californians. It was supposed give special access codes to community organizations that would distribute them to people in the underserved communities who are vaccine eligible, including healthcare workers and those older than 65. When entered into the My Turn vaccine scheduling website, the codes unlock a specific block of appointments at the federally run Cal State L.A. and Oakland Coliseum vaccination sites.

The system was supposed to make it easier for people who might otherwise struggle to get an appointment. Instead, the codes have ended up in the hands of the wealthier, work-from-home set in Los Angeles. Many of these recipients are not yet eligible for the vaccine, but were able to get their shots anyway.

How this happened remains unclear. Some people received access through forwarded messages from friends in group chats on social media. They thought it was a pilot program for a new testing site, and that the appointment times were “leftovers” open to everyone.

In response, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that the state would be “moving away” from the group code system, though he didn’t provide details about what changes would be made to the program. “We don’t like to see those abuses,” he said.

For those who were supposed to have gotten the codes, it was another source of frustration. “People are getting greedy and butting in line, coming to be first in line and pushing out those who are dying and in most need,” said Dr. Don Garcia, medical director at Clínica Romero, which serves Spanish-speaking Latino and Indigenous people from Mexico and Central America in Boyle Heights and Pico-Union.

Alas, that is just another pitfall in a growing list of problems with the state’s vaccine program. Among them: A communication breakdown between state and local officials has kept many vaccination sites from running smoothly, my colleagues Laura J. Nelson and Maya Lau report.

Every Tuesday morning, Gov. Gavin Newsom learns how many doses the state will receive over the next three weeks. It’s a critical piece of information needed to keep vaccine sites operating efficiently. But this information doesn’t make its way to many local leaders, who can’t schedule appointments and plan for the administration of second doses.

“Every vaccine planner right now, we all have nerves in our stomach. We’re nervous about it,” said Joe Prado, community health division manager for the Fresno County Department of Public Health. “We would all like to have a three-week window, but until then we will just continue to do it week to week.”

The communication problems have added more roadblocks to a process already plagued by supply issues and inclement weather. But with winter storms thawing in other parts of the country, the city of L.A. was able to resume operations at its large vaccination sites Tuesday. Priority will go to those who had their appointments canceled after delayed shipments forced the sites to close over the weekend.

And here’s some more good news: The number of counties that are no longer in the state’s most restrictive purple tier nearly doubled on Tuesday, to 11. The promotions were concentrated in Northern California, where San Mateo, Marin, Yolo, Shasta and Humboldt counties all moved to the second-most-restrictive red tier. Six sparsely populated counties in the northern part of the state — Alpine, Del Norte, Mariposa, Plumas, Sierra and Trinity — were already outside of the purple tier.

Among the indoor operations allowed in red-tier counties is the resumption of indoor restaurant dining at up to 25% capacity or 100 people, whichever is fewer. Not only is that welcome news for diners, it’s good for restaurants that have been limited to take-out and delivery service for much of the past year.

In addition to the loss of business, some restaurants are also battling a slew of fraudulent charges. It’s a new version of dine and dash, my colleague Jenn Harris reports, as people scam restauranteurs with fraudulent credit cards or refund requests where they claim they never received an order. Scammers are able to take advantage of restaurants that have prioritized safety over in-person security measures, such as checking driver’s licenses and manually swiping credit cards.

Crushed by a series of disputed charges for hundreds of dollars each, Spoon by H, a celebrated Korean restaurant in Fairfax, will close this weekend. “We lost orders, time, precious ingredients, and the problems accumulated to the point where we just couldn’t stay in business anymore,” owner Yoonjin Hwang said. “We’re losing money to these issues, despite all the evidence we provide.”

Businesses hurt in the pandemic could get help from California’s new COVID-19 relief plan, which Newsom signed into law Tuesday. The package sets aside $2.1 billion for small business owners in addition to $600 stimulus checks for low-income Californians.

Small businesses with annual gross revenue of up to $2.5 million are eligible to apply for grants ranging from $5,000 to $25,000, but not every business will be awarded one. The decision process will consider factors like location, whether the business is owned by people of color and whether it is in an industry sector most affected by the pandemic. State officials estimate the approval process will take 45 days. For more on the help available to small businesses, get our Business team’s newsletter.

See the latest on California’s coronavirus closures and reopenings, and the metrics that inform them, with our tracker.

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Around the nation and the world

Last summer, LeBron James took over Walt Disney World as he led the Los Angeles Lakers to the NBA championship. This summer, it will be a group of middle school kids taking center stage at ESPN’s Wide World of Sports campus.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee will return in 2021 with a dozen finalists gathering on the same campus that housed the NBA bubble. Instead of the customary “Bee Week” that brings together competitors from across the country for a whole week of spelling, the bee will span several weeks, with the early rounds taking place virtually. The in-person finals will be televised on ESPN on July 8.

The competition that started in 1925 asks kids up to eighth grade to spell obscure words for which they’ve researched roots, definitions and language patterns. Why would a middle schooler choose such a hobby? The $50,000 prize is a good start, not to mention the opportunity to be on national TV during a prestigious competition. The event wasn’t held last year because of the pandemic, and that was the first time it had been canceled since World War II.

With coronavirus cases dwindling, there’s hope that canceling annual events could soon be a thing of the past — especially with more doses of vaccine on the way.

COVID-19 vaccine makers assured Congress on Tuesday that there will be large deliveries of doses over the next month. By the end of March, Pfizer and Moderna expect to have sent a total of 220 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the U.S. government. The delivery would be a sharp increase from the roughly 75 million doses shipped so far.

What’s more, the one-dose COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson‘s Janssen Biotech unit could get the green light from regulators soon, and the Biden administration said it expects about 2 million doses of the new shot to be shipping in the first week after it is authorized for emergency use. The company said it could provide enough doses for 20 million people by the end of March.

The combined efforts from the three companies should result in enough vaccines for every American adult by the end of the summer, the companies say. Pfizer and Moderna, whose vaccines each require a two-shot regimen, expect to deliver 300 million doses apiece, while Johnson & Johnson aims to provide an additional 100 million doses.

What will things be like when many more shots are delivered? If the experience of Scotland is any guide, we can look forward to a sharp drop in hospitalizations.

The vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University reduced hospital admissions for COVID-19 by up to 94% four weeks after people received their first dose, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Strathclyde and Public Health Scotland. In addition, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine cut hospital admissions by up to 85%.

The preliminary findings offer encouraging evidence of the shots’ real-world impact. But independent experts didn’t want to jump to conclusions, particularly because relatively few people overall were hospitalized with COVID-19 after receiving vaccinations during the study period of Dec. 5 to Feb. 15.

Your questions answered

Today’s question comes from readers who want to know: When will I get my California stimulus check?

Relief is on the way. But first, you’ll have to do your taxes.

Californians who qualify for the $600 state stimulus payment could see the money in their bank accounts within a month after filing their tax returns, my colleague Patrick McGreevy reports. To get the fastest results, sign up for direct deposit when you file your 2020 return with the state Franchise Tax Board. If you opt for a check, you could find yourself waiting for up to seven weeks.

A majority of these stimulus payments, which are part of the new COVID-19 relief plan, will go to households that qualified for the state earned income tax credit for 2020, which is available to residents who make less than $30,000 a year. Others who qualify include:

  • People with individual tax identification numbers who did not receive federal stimulus payments and whose income is below $75,000. Californians in this group who make less than $30,000 a year would receive $1,200 from the state.
  • People who are part of the state’s welfare-to-work CalWORKS program. CalWORKS payments will be placed on EBT cards and issued by mid-April.
  • People who receive money from the federal supplemental security income or state supplementary payment programs. The timing and method of grant payments for people in this category is not yet confirmed, and will depend on input from the federal Social Security Administration.
  • People who are part of the Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants.

In total, state officials anticipate sending 5.7 million stimulus payments adding up to $2.3 billion.

We want to hear from you. Email us your coronavirus questions, and we’ll do our best to answer them. Wondering if your question’s already been answered? Check out our archive here.

Resources

Need a vaccine? Keep in mind that supplies are limited, and getting one can be a challenge. Sign up for email updates, check your eligibility and, if you’re eligible, make an appointment where you live: City of Los Angeles | Los Angeles County | Kern County | Orange County | Riverside County | San Bernardino County | San Diego County | San Luis Obispo County | Santa Barbara County | Ventura County

Practice social distancing using these tips, and wear a mask or two.

Watch for symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath, chills, shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and loss of taste or smell. Here’s what to look for and when.

Need to get tested? Here’s where you can in L.A. County and around California.

Americans are hurting in many ways. We have advice for helping kids cope, resources for people experiencing domestic abuse and a newsletter to help you make ends meet.

We’ve answered hundreds of readers’ questions. Explore them in our archive here.

For our most up-to-date coverage, visit our homepage and our Health section, get our breaking news alerts, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

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Technology

Mysterious macOS malware discovered with M1 optimization, threat remains unclear

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Security researchers have discovered a previously undetected piece of malware affecting Mac users around the world, including the new M1-powered Macs. Red Canary researchers say that this “Silver Sparrow” malware forces infected Macs to check a control sever once per hour, but the actual threat remains a mystery.

As reported by Ars Technica, the researchers have yet to observe an actual “delivery of any payload” on the infected machines. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this malware is unknown. “The lack of a final payload suggests that the malware may spring into action once an unknown condition is met,” the repot explains.

The malware also comes with its own “self-destruct” mechanism, but there’s no evidence that it has yet been used. Silver Sparrow has been found found on 29,139 macOS endpoints around the world:

The malicious binary is more mysterious still, because it uses the macOS Installer JavaScript API to execute commands. That makes it hard to analyze installation package contents or the way that package uses the JavaScript commands.

The malware has been found in 153 countries with detections concentrated in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany. Its use of Amazon Web Services and the Akamai content delivery network ensures the command infrastructure works reliably and also makes blocking the servers harder.

The Silver Sparrow malware also runs natively on Apple’s M1 chip. This makes it the second piece of malware discovered that is optimized for Apple Silicon, with the first coming earlier this week. This doesn’t mean that M1 Macs are specifically targeted, but the malware can equally affect M1 Macs and Intel Macs.

Optimization for the M1 chip combined with things like the infection rate and maturity is what worries Red Canary researchers:

“Though we haven’t observed Silver Sparrow delivering additional malicious payloads yet, its forward-looking M1 chip compatibility, global reach, relatively high infection rate, and operational maturity suggest Silver Sparrow is a reasonably serious threat, uniquely positioned to deliver a potentially impactful payload at a moment’s notice. Given these causes for concern, in the spirit of transparency, we wanted to share everything we know with the broader infosec industry sooner rather than later.”

Again, so far researchers haven’t yet found that the binary does anything — but it’s a threat that looms. You can read more on the Red Canary blog post right here.

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Health

U’s Osterholm joins a call for respecting COVID-19 aerosol threat

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University of Minnesota infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm joined with leading aerosol and occupational scientists Monday to call for clearer federal guidance on the risk of COVID-19 spreading through tiny aerosols floating in the air.

The researchers criticized the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for acknowledging the aerosol risk last fall but offering no changes in the national COVID-19 response strategy to confront it. The national strategy primarily targets the risk of people projecting larger, virus-carrying droplets at others nearby.

“Aerosols produced through breathing, talking, and singing … can remain in air and viable for long periods of time and travel long distances within a room and sometimes farther,” the authors wrote in a letter to the CDC and the White House pandemic response leader.

The warning comes amid improving pandemic metrics in Minnesota and plans by Gov. Tim Walz to hasten the reopening of middle and high schools to in-person learning. Walz will announce a school reopening strategy at noon Wednesday, and noted in a news release that Minnesota is aggressively testing teachers for COVID-19 and is one of eight states prioritizing them for vaccine.

The state on Tuesday reported two more COVID-19 deaths and 456 infections with the coronavirus that causes the disease — the lowest one-day total since Sept. 15. Minnesota has reported 6,380 COVID-19 deaths and 474,621 infections.

The state also reported a 3.8% positivity rate of diagnostic testing for COVID-19 — below the 5% caution threshold that suggests uncontrolled spread of the virus. The number of COVID-19 patients in Minnesota intensive-care beds also dropped from a peak of 399 on Dec. 1 to 57.

Only 15 COVID-19 cases were reported last week in nursing homes — the lowest count since March and an indication that priority vaccination of long-term care facility residents is working, said Jan Malcolm, state health commissioner.

“Our goal is absolutely to get the number of cases, hospitalizations and certainly deaths due to COVID-19 down to zero, and we see evidence that the vaccines are helping bring those numbers even further below where we have been,” she said.

At least 686,210 people in Minnesota have received at least the first of two doses of COVID-19 vaccine. Of them, 240,027 have completed the series. Limited doses have gone to a group of more than 1.5 million long-term care residents, health care workers, senior citizens and educators.

The federal government pledged an increase in doses next week, but some of that is only “on paper” because vials of Pfizer vaccine are officially considered to contain six doses rather than five, said Kris Ehresmann, state infectious disease director. Minnesota providers already had been routinely extracting sixth doses out of those vials.

Ehresmann warned that winter storms in the southern U.S. are disrupting vaccine delivery and could result in some vaccine appointments being delayed or rescheduled.

Beyond expanding access to vaccines, Ehresmann said the state COVID-19 response has focused on the established threat of viral transmission through respiratory droplets — rather than aerosols. A public indoor mask-wearing mandate and social distancing guidelines both target that method of transmission.

Airborne transmission is more of an acknowledged risk in health care settings, she said, especially when COVID-19 patients receive respiratory procedures that could spread aerosols. Many COVID-19 treatment rooms have been fitted with negative-airflow systems to prevent particles from spreading outside rooms.

Ehresmann agreed with the need for caution because of the emergence of new and more infectious variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Minnesota has encountered 40 COVID-19 cases involving the B.1.1.7 variant found in the United Kingdom, she said. Minnesota also has seen two of three verified infections in the U.S. so far with the P.1 variant identified in Brazil.

“It’s really important that we celebrate where we are at, but we do not move too quickly” in scaling back mitigation measures, Ehresmann said. “We want to make sure we are not giving a foothold to these variants.”

Osterholm and colleagues noted in their letter to the CDC and the White House pandemic response leader the emerging risk of variants as a reason to take the existing risk of aerosol COVID-19 transmission seriously. Two top aerosol scientists — Donald Milton of the University of Maryland and Linsey Marr of Virginia Tech — were among the 13 experts who signed the letter.

“While COVID-19 infections and deaths have started to decline in recent weeks, they remain at a very high level,” they wrote. “Unless strengthened precautionary measures are implemented, the new variants will likely bring an explosion in new infections.”

The group called for guidelines that address how indoor ventilation can lower risks, and an expansion in occupational groups required to wear N95 respirators — fitted masks that substantially reduce the risk of particle inhalation. More workers in health care and essential front-line industries should wear them, the group argued, especially since manufacturing has overcome a springtime shortage.

Minnesota has a reserve inventory of 2.7 million respirators, according to its pandemic response dashboard.

The group also called for increased filtration standards for common store-bought masks to improve public protection against smaller airborne particles.

Government health agencies have maintained that closer droplet transmission is the most common method of COVID-19 transmission and have been less certain about aerosols. The risk appears less than with other viruses such as measles, which was famously shown by Minnesota researchers to have spread during a 1991 Special Olympics event from the surface of the Metrodome to the upper deck stands.

A separate team of U engineers conducted tests and simulations about how particles carrying SARS-CoV-2 could spread in indoor environments such as elevators, classrooms and grocery stores.

They published a series of studies analyzing air flowing from instruments in Orchestra Hall and what measures could protect the musicians and patrons, and recently partnered with Ford Motor Co. on the development of low-cost filtration kits to improve air quality in tight classrooms and indoor spaces.

Some restaurants and businesses in Minnesota have taken the precaution of installing stronger filters in their ventilation systems or portable air cleaners to address the risks.

Jeremy Olson • 612-673-7744

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Science

The Colossal Weight of Cities Is Making Them Sink, Even as Sea Levels Are Rising

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Cities don’t just have sea level rises to worry about – they’re also slowly sinking under the weight of their own development, according to new research, which emphasises the importance of factoring subsidence into models of climate change risk.

 

Geophysicist Tom Parsons, from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) agency, looked at San Francisco as a case study of how large urban developments could be affecting and depressing the actual surface of the Earth.

By his calculations, San Francisco might have sunk as much as 80 millimetres (3.1 inches) as the city has grown over time. Considering the Bay Area is under threat from as much as 300 mm (11.8 inches) of sea level rise by 2050, the extra variation added by slow subsidence is significant enough to be concerning.

“As global populations move disproportionately toward the coasts, this additional subsidence in combination with expected sea level rise may exacerbate risk associated with inundation,” writes Parsons in his paper.

Taking into account an inventory of all the buildings in the city and their contents, the study calculated the weight of San Francisco (population: 7.75 million) as being around 1.6 trillion kilograms – about 3.5 trillion pounds, or roughly 8.7 million Boeing 747s.

That could be enough to both bend the actual lithosphere on which the urban centre sits, and perhaps more significantly, to change the relative levels of fault blocks – the floating chunks of rock that make up Earth’s surface.

 

In fact the 80 mm of slip is likely to be a conservative estimate, as the weight calculations didn’t include things outside buildings – including transport infrastructure, vehicles, or people. The same sort of sinking is likely in other parts of the world, though it partially depends on the local geology.

“The specific results found for the San Francisco Bay Area are likely to apply to any major urban centre, though with varying importance,” writes Parsons.

“Anthropogenic loading effects at tectonically active continental margins are likely greater than more stable continental interiors where the lithosphere tends to be thicker and more rigid.”

There are plenty of other causes of subsidence to think about too, including tectonic plate shifting and the groundwater pumping necessary to support a growing population – something we’ve seen cause significant city sinking in other parts of the world.

While this current study only looked at San Francisco, and made some broad assumptions in terms of modelling, the findings are notable enough to make city weight another consideration when scientists are figuring out how geography might change over time, and which areas are under threat as the sea level gets higher.

There’s still plenty of detail to dig into as well, particularly in cities already under threat from subsidence. The compaction of sediment and aquifer systems under San Francisco International Airport on the coast – the heaviest building in the city – has already been calculated as causing 4 mm (0.16 inches) of sinking each year.

“It should be possible to improve on the methods presented here by using satellite or air photos to make more detailed analyses in likely flood zones,” writes Parsons.

“Such detailed analyses might also yield better insights about changes to subsurface porosity changes and resultant fluid flow.”

The research has been published in AGU Advances.

 

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World

`Woke’ American Ideas Are a Threat, French Leaders Say

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PARIS — The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.

The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.

French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.

Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.

Pitted against them is a younger, more diverse guard that considers these theories as tools to understanding the willful blind spots of an increasingly diverse nation that still recoils at the mention of race, has yet to come to terms with its colonial past and often waves away the concerns of minorities as identity politics.

Disputes that would have otherwise attracted little attention are now blown up in the news and social media. The new director of the Paris Opera, who said on Monday he wants to diversify its staff and ban blackface, has been attacked by the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, but also in Le Monde because, though German, he had worked in Toronto and had “soaked up American culture for 10 years.”

The publication this month of a book critical of racial studies by two veteran social scientists, Stéphane Beaud and Gérard Noiriel, fueled criticism from younger scholars — and has received extensive news coverage. Mr. Noiriel has said that race had become a “bulldozer’’ crushing other subjects, adding, in an email, that its academic research in France was questionable because race is not recognized by the government and merely “subjective data.’’

The fierce French debate over a handful of academic disciplines on U.S. campuses may surprise those who have witnessed the gradual decline of American influence in many corners of the world. In some ways, it is a proxy fight over some of the most combustible issues in French society, including national identity and the sharing of power. In a nation where intellectuals still hold sway, the stakes are high.

With its echoes of the American culture wars, the battle began inside French universities but is being played out increasingly in the media. Politicians have been weighing in more and more, especially following a turbulent year during which a series of events called into question tenets of French society.

Mass protests in France against police violence, inspired by the killing of George Floyd, challenged the official dismissal of race and systemic racism. A #MeToo generation of feminists confronted both male power and older feminists. A widespread crackdown following a series of Islamist attacks raised questions about France’s model of secularism and the integration of immigrants from its former colonies.

Some saw the reach of American identity politics and social science theories. Some center-right lawmakers pressed for a parliamentary investigation into “ideological excesses’’ at universities and singled out “guilty’’ scholars on Twitter.

Mr. Macron — who had shown little interest in these matters in the past but has been courting the right ahead of elections next year — jumped in last June, when he blamed universities for encouraging the “ethnicization of the social question’’ — amounting to “breaking the republic in two.’’

“I was pleasantly astonished,’’ said Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who last month helped create an organization against “decolonialism and identity politics.’’ Made up of established figures, many retired, the group has issued warnings about American-inspired social theories in major publications like Le Point and Le Figaro.

For Ms. Heinich, last year’s developments came on top of activism that brought foreign disputes over cultural appropriation and blackface to French universities. At the Sorbonne, activists prevented the staging of a play by Aeschylus to protest the wearing of masks and dark makeup by white actors; elsewhere, some well-known speakers were disinvited following student pressure.

“It was a series of incidents that was extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called cancel culture,’’ Ms. Heinich said.

To others, the lashing out at perceived American influence revealed something else: a French establishment incapable of confronting a world in flux, especially at a time when the government’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has deepened the sense of ineluctable decline of a once-great power.

“It’s the sign of a small, frightened republic, declining, provincializing, but which in the past and to this day believes in its universal mission and which thus seeks those responsible for its decline,’’ said François Cusset, an expert on American civilization at Paris Nanterre University.

France has long laid claim to a national identity, based on a common culture, fundamental rights and core values like equality and liberty, rejecting diversity and multiculturalism. The French often see the United States as a fractious society at war with itself.

But far from being American, many of the leading thinkers behind theories on gender, race, post-colonialism and queer theory came from France — as well as the rest of Europe, South America, Africa and India, said Anne Garréta, a French writer who teaches literature at universities in France and at Duke.

“It’s an entire global world of ideas that circulates,’’ she said. “It just happens that campuses that are the most cosmopolitan and most globalized at this point in history are the American ones. ’’

The French state does not compile racial statistics, which is illegal, describing it as part of its commitment to universalism and treating all citizens equally under the law. To many scholars on race, however, the reluctance is part of a long history of denying racism in France and the country’s slave-trading and colonial past.

“What’s more French than the racial question in a country that was built around those questions?’’ said Mame-Fatou Niang, who divides her time between France and the United States, where she teaches French studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ms. Niang has led a campaign to remove a fresco at France’s National Assembly, which shows two Black figures with fat red lips and bulging eyes. Her public views on race have made her a frequent target on social media, including of one of the lawmakers who pressed for an investigation into “ideological excesses’’ at universities.

Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies in France, said it was no coincidence that the current wave of anti-American rhetoric began growing just as the first protests against racism and police violence took place last June.

“There was the idea that we’re talking too much about racial questions in France,’’ he said. “That’s enough.’’

Three Islamist attacks last fall served as a reminder that terrorism remains a threat in France. They also focused attention on another hot-button field of research: Islamophobia, which examines how hostility toward Islam in France, rooted in its colonial experience in the Muslim world, continues to shape the lives of French Muslims.

Abdellali Hajjat, an expert on Islamophobia, said that it became increasingly difficult to focus on his subject after 2015, when devastating terror attacks hit Paris. Government funding for research dried up. Researchers on the subject were accused of being apologists for Islamists and even terrorists.

Finding the atmosphere oppressive, Mr. Hajjat left two years ago to teach at the Free University of Brussels, in Belgium, where he said he found greater academic freedom.

“On the question of Islamophobia, it’s only in France where there is such violent talk in rejecting the term,’’ he said.

Mr. Macron’s education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, accused universities, under American influence, of being complicit with terrorists by providing the intellectual justification behind their acts.

A group of 100 prominent scholars wrote an open letter supporting the minister and decrying theories “transferred from North American campuses” in Le Monde.

A signatory, Gilles Kepel, an expert on Islam, said that American influence had led to “a sort of prohibition in universities to think about the phenomenon of political Islam in the name of a leftist ideology that considers it the religion of the underprivileged.’’

Along with Islamophobia, it was through the “totally artificial importation’’ in France of the “American-style Black question” that some were trying to draw a false picture of a France guilty of “systemic racism’’ and “white privilege,’’ said Pierre-André Taguieff, a historian and a leading critic of the American influence.

Mr. Taguieff said in an email that researchers of race, Islamophobia and post-colonialism were motivated by a “hatred of the West, as a white civilization.’’

“The common agenda of these enemies of European civilization can be summed up in three words: decolonize, demasculate, de-Europeanize,’’ Mr. Taguieff said. “Straight white male — that’s the culprit to condemn and the enemy to eliminate.”

Behind the attacks on American universities — led by aging white male intellectuals — lie the tensions in a society where power appears to be up for grabs, said Éric Fassin, a sociologist who was one of the first scholars to focus on race and racism in France, about 15 years ago.

Back then, scholars on race tended to be white men like himself, he said. He said he has often been called a traitor and faced threats, most recently from a right-wing extremist who was given a four-month suspended prison sentence for threatening to decapitate him.

But the emergence of young intellectuals — some Black or Muslim — has fueled the assault on what Mr. Fassin calls the “American boogeyman.’’

“That’s what has turned things upside down,’’ he said. “They’re not just the objects we speak of, but they’re also the subjects who are talking.’’



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US

Newsom faces intensifying recall threat as pandemic frustrations grow in California

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While Newsom’s approval rating has remained above 50%, his precarious position is an example of how quickly the wrath of the Covid-19 pandemic can shift the fortunes of even the most ascendant governors and local politicians. In the early months of the pandemic, Newsom — a charismatic speaker with a photogenic family who frequently reminds his audiences that he approaches governing through the lens of a former small business owner — was widely viewed as a future candidate for the White House.

Over the past week, Newsom has taken a series of steps to accelerate the pace of vaccinations, noting during a news conference Wednesday that the state has tripled that pace in the past few weeks. He acknowledged this week that California’s vaccination program got off to a troubled start, originally ranking near the bottom of the 50 states in terms of the percentage of vaccine doses received that made it into people’s arms.

“We don’t want to be average,” Newsom said Wednesday, on a day when data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that California was ranking 27th among the states in the percentage of vaccine administered. “We want to do more and better.” (The average share of doses administered in California Monday through Friday was 59%, which placed it at 36th out of 50 states, according to a CNN analysis of data published by the CDC. Nationally, the five-day average for that time frame was 62%.)

Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications and the University of California Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, noted that with anger rippling across the country about the short supply of the vaccine and high unemployment, voters are going to exact their revenge on any leader in a position of power on the ballot.

“He obviously didn’t cause the pandemic, but” — if the recall qualifies — “he’s the one who will be in the voters’ crosshairs,” Schnur said of Newsom. One of the lessons learned from 2003, when California voters recalled Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, is that “qualifying for a recall has nothing to do with the political landscape or voter opinions,” Schnur said. “The only question is whether someone is willing to write a big enough check to put it on the ballot.”

If a recall election qualifies for the ballot, the state’s voters will be asked to vote yes or no on the recall, and then to answer a second question about who they want to see replace Newsom as governor — which could draw a large and varied cast of characters, as it did in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Davis.

About 52% of likely California voters approve of Newsom’s job performance, according to a new poll from Public Policy Institute of California, a dip from last May, when his approval rating had risen to 64% among likely voters in the same survey. Mark Baldassare, the president and CEO of Public Policy Institute of California, noted in an analysis of those poll numbers that only 43% disapprove of Newsom, and by comparison some 7-in-10 voters had disapproved of Davis when he was recalled.

Veteran California Democratic strategist Bill Carrick pointed out that the state’s political landscape in 2003 was different than it is today, given that Democrats now outnumber Republicans 2-1 and Public Policy Institute of California surveys have consistently shown that the state’s independent voters lean Democratic. With that built-in advantage, Newsom’s current numbers don’t show him to be in dangerous political territory yet.

“There’s been a whole bunch of issues that have been very tough to solve,” Carrick said. “Things are going to get better, because the vaccine is going to get more universally available to people. And so that’s going to change a lot of people’s attitudes.”

Anger about a never-ending public health crisis

Retired Yolo County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Orrin Heatlie, who was joined by 124 other people in filing the recall petition, began organizing in early 2020, before coronavirus had entered the public consciousness. They were intent on ousting Newsom because of what they viewed as high taxes, rampant homelessness, the lack of affordable housing, seemingly uncontrollable wildfires and rolling blackouts in hot summer months. But they acknowledge that the effort has evolved, and it is now channeling the anger and loss of control that so many people feel in the midst of a public health crisis that seems interminable.

Heatlie said there was a noticeable shift in momentum in the recall’s direction in the late fall and early winter as Californians chafed at coronavirus restrictions.

“At first everybody really supported what was going on and realized that there are sacrifices that have to be made for the better good,” Heatlie said. But frustration built about policies Newsom announced, like a 10 p.m. curfew, the maze of different rules that varied county to county and a ban on outdoor dining after restaurant owners had spent thousands of dollars to revamp their outdoor spaces.

“You started to see an open revolt against what he was doing,” Heatlie said. “People started to look at him like he was a bird in a tornado.”

“People want consistency; they want normalcy; they want something concrete they can rely on,” he added. “That’s not something that the governor has offered.”

Newsom declined to comment on the recall. But one of his longtime advisers, Dan Newman, said the governor is deeply cognizant of the frustration Californians are feeling about the limited supply of the vaccine and understands that he will be held responsible for whatever happens in his state, even things beyond his control like fires, pandemics and vaccine development.

“The pandemic has caused a lot of pain and a lot of suffering and people are frustrated — so that’s why the governor is so relentlessly, obsessively focused on getting us through the pandemic and helping businesses and schools open as quickly and safely as possible,” Newman said.

Allies of the governor note that the situation in California — a state of nearly 40 million people — grew increasingly complex throughout last year, with guidance from both the federal government and scientists changing daily as more was discovered about the virus and how it is transmitted.

In the early days, Newsom had been one of the most visible front-line governors, widely praised for having the courage to institute one of the first statewide stay-at-home orders in the country. He enlisted the state’s entrepreneurs to help procure masks and rehabilitate outdated ventilators. He even built a productive working relationship with Trump, securing his help in getting a Navy ship that became a temporary hospital ready to handle a surge of patients in the Los Angeles region. For a time, California seemed to avoid the crush of cases that spread through other large states like New York, Florida and Texas.

But the rapid spread of the virus last fall forced Newsom to go in a more restrictive direction.

Because of that, his November 6 attendance at the 50th birthday party of a lobbyist and longtime adviser at a renowned Napa Valley restaurant prompted widespread outrage. He visited the Michelin-starred French Laundry at the same time he was asking Californians to mask up, stay home and avoid socializing with other households, crystallizing the perception that he and the lobbyists who attended were not playing by the same rules that the state was demanding average people follow, said Randy Economy, a longtime California political strategist who is advising the recall effort.

“That changed everything in such a powerful manner,” Economy said. People looked at the pictures and asked, ” ‘Why can’t I do that?’ ” he said.

“It will go down in his political obituary,” Economy argued, “because that’s the day he lost all sense of reality — that’s the day every person in California saw through their own eyes exactly who this man was.”

Newsom said in his apology that he’d made a “bad mistake.” Upon realizing the group was larger than anticipated, he said, he should have “stood up and walked back, got in my car and drove back to my house.”

But leaders of the recall campaign, who include many average Californians whose efforts are now being supported by top GOP operatives in the state, said that moment was a turning point that flipped on their fundraising spigot. It drove thousands of Californians to download the recall petition from the website of its lead proponents — recallgavin2020.com — and convinced prominent members of the state’s Republican Party, as well as many members of its GOP congressional delegation, to back the effort.

Still, Newsom’s allies said that one incident should not overshadow a year of exhaustive efforts to immerse himself in every detail of the pandemic as he tried to keep Californians safe and get the state back on stronger footing.

A lasting economic headache

One of the challenges for Newsom is that the state’s problems will take considerable time to resolve: Its economy is still struggling, and many business owners are still reeling from Newsom’s controversial decision to enforce regional stay-at-home orders in December as the intensive care unit capacity at the state’s hospitals hovered around 0% in some of the most populous regions.

Recall proponents also believe they have a potent weapon against Newsom because of the scandal at the state’s Economic Development Department. Officials revealed last week that $11.4 billion in unemployment claims that the state paid out during the pandemic — about 10% — are fraudulent.
The California State Auditor also discovered that the department had sent out at least 38 million pieces of mail over eight months that included claimants’ full Social Security numbers, dramatically increasing the risk of identity theft for those recipients, and was slow to correct the problem.
When the number of people filing for unemployment in California surged last spring, the Economic Development Department’s call center was able to answer only less than 1% of the calls it received from residents, according to a state audit last month. And that response rate barely budged when the state quadrupled its call center staff.

Though Newsom made major staffing changes at the department and set up a task force to coordinate investigations into the fraud, the problems have reflected poorly on his administration — and the efforts to stop the fraud have in some cases frozen the payments to legitimate unemployed workers, amplifying the anger toward the governor and his administration.

As those pressures mount, Democratic lawmakers have begun voicing frustration about what they view as Newsom’s abrupt policy changes when it comes to the pandemic — including his sudden decision to lift regional stay-at-home orders last week.

A furious campaign effort before March 17

In their first major attempt to push back on the recall, California Democrats overreached by calling the effort a coup and comparing its proponents to the insurgents who stormed the US Capitol on January 6.

In the backlash, many Republicans and even some Democrats said the language was wrong and inappropriate given that recall proponents are using legal procedures to try to oust Newsom.

But social media posts show that the recall movement has drawn supporters who include some fringe extremists within the Republican Party, as detailed in a recent front-page story by the Los Angeles Times.

Heatlie said in an interview that he and his fellow organizers and petition gatherers have tried to keep vitriol and falsehoods off the group’s official posts, but he noted that it would be impossible for him to vet the personal backgrounds of every person who signs the petition or donates to the cause.

After winning an extension to collect signatures because of the constraints of doing so in the middle of a pandemic, recall organizers claim they have collected more than 1 million of the nearly 1.5 million signatures they need by March 17 to get a recall on the ballot.

The most current report from the California secretary of state’s office said recall proponents have submitted 723,886 signatures and 410,087 had been verified as of January 6. So far about 84% of the signatures verified have been valid.

Heatlie’s recall effort is being supported by several other campaign organizations that have helped raise money and expand its reach. Former GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox, who was defeated by Newsom in 2018, is backing the effort, along with former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who this week announced that he is running for governor in 2022, when Newsom is up for reelection.

Major funders of the effort include Doug Leone, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital; the California Revival PAC, which was co-founded by former California Republican Party Chairman Tom Del Beccaro; and a group listed on campaign finance records as Prov 3:9 LLC that donated $500,000.

Anne Dunsmore, a prominent fundraiser who heads Rescue California-Recall Gavin Newsom, a committee that is integrally involved in the effort, said last week that her group has raised $1.9 million toward the goal she set of $2.5 million by the March 17 deadline. Though campaign finance reports are not yet available, Dunsmore says the vast majority of the money raised has been put into 3 million pieces of direct mail asking people to sign the petition.

As the pace of the campaign picks up, Dunsmore said she is receiving an average contribution of $38 in response to the mail, far exceeding her expectations, which she interprets as an indication of the level of voter frustration.

“What he’s done is he’s hurt people in their homes. We didn’t make that up,” Dunsmore said, alluding to the impact of the stay-at-home orders and business closures.

“We don’t have to tell people that. We just have to say, ‘Over here. If you’re angry, here’s what you can do about it: Come in, volunteer, sign the petition, give money,’ ” she said.

CNN’s Deidre McPhillips contributed to this report.

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