Health News at Your Fingertips

Florida governor Ron DeSantis will be at the White House today for Trump’s event on lowering drug prices.

According to DeSantis’ schedule, the Republican governor will also meet with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

DeSantis’ White House visit comes one day after the president announced he was canceling the portion of the Republican convention that was scheduled to take place in Jacksonville, Florida.

DeSantis’ approval rating has been plummeting in recent weeks, as Florida grapples with a surge in new cases of coronavirus.

State health officials reported 12,444 additional cases today, bringing Florida’s total number of cases since the start of the pandemic to 402,312.

Quinnipiac University released a poll yesterday showing DeSantis currently has a negative 41%-52% approval rating, representing a 31-point net drop since April.

Trump has just awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jim Ryun, a former Olympian and former Republican congressman.

“Despite being cut from every athletic team in junior high, Ryun made the track team at Wichita East High School, where he went on to break the world record for the mile and compete in the 1964 Olympic Games,” the White House said of Ryun in a statement about the ceremony.

“Following his outstanding athletic career, Ryun honorably served his home State of Kansas in the United States Congress from 1996 to 2006. He has since written three books and currently gives motivational speeches around the country.”

The president described Ryun as a “a legendary running Olympian” and “an American patriot,” adding that he wished he was in Congress now.

Just before Trump left the ceremony, Ryun told him, “You’re doing a great job, keep it up. We need four more years.”

House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer sharply criticized congressional Republicans for delaying the release of their coronavirus relief bill.

“This weekend, millions of Americans will lose their Unemployment Insurance, will be at risk of being evicted from their homes, and could be laid off by state and local government, and there is only one reason: Republicans have been dithering for months while America’s crisis deepens,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a new statement.

The critical statement comes one day after Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced Republicans would not be able to release their proposal until next week, days before additional unemployment benefits are set to expire.

“We had expected to be working throughout this weekend to find common ground on the next COVID response package,” Pelosi and Schumer said. “It is simply unacceptable that Republicans have had this entire time to reach consensus among themselves and continue to flail. Time is of the essence and lives are being lost.”

A spokesperson for Jim Inhofe, the Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee, responded to questions about Trump’s tweet on the proposal to rename military bases named after Confederal generals.

“The tweet speaks for itself,” Inhofe’s spokesperson told NBC News.

Again, it will be very difficult for Inhofe to remove the provision from the national defense authorization act in committee because the proposal has widespread support, and the House and the Senate have already passed versions of the bill with veto-proof majorities.

Trump claimed senator Jim Inhofe, the Republican chairman of the Senate armed services committee, would move to strip a provision on renaming military bases named after Confederate generals out of the national defense authorization bill.

“I spoke to highly respected (Chairman) Senator @JimInhofe, who has informed me that he WILL NOT be changing the names of our great Military Bases and Forts, places from which we won two World Wars (and more!),” Trump said in a tweet. “Like me, Jim is not a believer in ‘Cancel Culture’.”

However, it will be difficult for Inhofe to amend the bill, which passed the Senate with a veto-proof majority yesterday. The House approved its own version of the bill with similarly overwhelming support earlier this week.

Both the House and Senate bills include provisions on allowing the Pentagon to change the names of military bases named after Confederate generals, which Trump has expressed opposition to. The president even threatened to veto the legislation over the matter.

The only way for the proposal to be stripped out of the bill now would be for Inhofe to try to amend the legislation in committee, but a Democratic member of the House armed services committee indicated that effort would go nowhere.

Nearly half of Americans who suffered a job loss in their families during the pandemic do not think those positions will come back, a new poll found.

According to the AP/NORC poll, 47% of those in households with job losses believe those lost jobs are definitely or probably not coming back.

That figure marks a steep decline in optimism since April, when 78% of such Americans said they thought their job losses were temporary.

The dropping numbers signal Americans are losing hope in the possibility of a quick economic recovery, as coronavirus cases surge in dozens of US states.

The poll was released one day after the labor department announced 1.4 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, ending four months of declines in weekly claims.

Coronavirus cases are surging in Texas, and one county is being forced to make devastating choices about which patients to care for, as many hospitals in the state near full capacity.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports on Starr County near the US-Mexican border:

Starr County is at a dangerous ‘tipping point,’ reporting an alarming number of new cases each day, data show. Starr County Memorial Hospital — the county’s only hospital — is overflowing with COVID-19 patients.

The county has been forced to form what is being compared to a so-called ‘death panel.’ A county health board – which governs Starr Memorial – is set to authorize critical care guidelines Thursday that will help medical workers determine ways to allocate scarce medical resources on patients with the best chance to survive. …

‘Unfortunately, Starr County Memorial Hospital has limited resources and our doctors are going to have to decide who receives treatment, and who is sent home to die by their loved ones,’ [Starr County Judge Eloy Vera] said in a Wednesday news release. ‘This is what we did not want our community to experience.’

Texas has now confirmed 361,125 cases of coronavirus, and the state has lost 4,521 residents to the virus.

Mark Meadows will sit down for a Sunday show interview this weekend, marking his first such interview since becoming White House chief of staff.

ABC News’ “This Week” announced anchor George Stephanopoulos will interview Meadows, a former Republican congressman, on Sunday.

The interview comes as Meadows, treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell have struggled to craft a Republican proposal for the next coronavirus relief bill.

McConnell was supposed to release the bill yesterday, but he instead announced the legislation would be unveiled next week.

That schedule leaves little time for Congress to pass the bill, considering additional unemployment benefits expire next Friday.

The Guardian’s Daniel Strauss reports:

The former acting director of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which works under the Department of Homeland Security, has condemned the Trump administration’s handling of protests in Portland by deploying federal agents into the city.

John Sandweg, the former acting director of Ice, who also served as general counsel for the DHS, said Donald Trump was using the agency as his own “goon squad” by sending federal law enforcement agents to Oregon’s biggest city and vowing to send more to other cities around the country, including Chicago and Albuquerque.

Sandweg, in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, called the administration’s policy a “failure of leadership in the Trump administration”.

He added: “I think it’s an abuse of DHS. I mean really the president’s trying to use DHS as his goon squad. That’s really what’s going on here.”

Sandweg went on to offer scathing criticism of the administration’s handling of the protests, calling it a “manufactured crisis” driven by politics from the president.

“In my experience, this is not coming from the workforce. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions out there that I hope that I can at least clear up,” Sandweg said. “DHS has not so much been unleashed as pushed to do these kinds of things. In my experience the folks that I’ve worked with want to protect national security and public safety.”

The Cook Political Report has changed the electoral college ratings of four states — all in Democrats’ favor.

Most notably, the perennial swing state of Florida has been moved from “toss up” to “lean Democrat.”

Cook’s Amy Walter explains the rating change:

In Florida, as COVID-19 cases started to rise this summer, Trump has seen his vote margin and his job approval rating drop. …

[A] July Quinnipiac poll found Biden leading Trump by 20 points on who is best able to handle the coronavirus, including an eight-point lead with those 65 and older. For months, Trump has questioned the severity of this crisis. But in Florida, 83 percent of voters see coronavirus as a serious problem, and 66 percent are very, or somewhat worried that they will get this virus. The only group not taking coronavirus seriously are Republican voters; 52 percent say they think the virus is under control. …

More important than any polling, however, is the fact that Trump announced on Thursday that the RNC was cancelling their convention in Jacksonville. This is about all the proof you need that he and the campaign realize how big of a hole he’s currently sitting in.

The Cook Report also moved three “solid Republican” states — Missouri, Kansas and Indiana — to “likely Republican.” Here is the full list of Cook’s electoral college ratings.

Good morning, live blog readers, and greetings from Washington.

The US is about 100 days out from its presidential election, and things are not looking good for Donald Trump.

The RealClearPolitics average of national polls shows Joe Biden leading the president by nearly 9 points, and several surveys released this week found the Democrat has a similar advantage in key battleground states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But Biden is warning his supporters that Trump will not go down without a long, drawn-out fight.

During a virtual fundraiser last night, Biden said, “This president is going to try to indirectly steal the election by arguing that mail-in ballots don’t work.”

The former vice president predicted Trump would try to show mail-in ballots are “not real” or “not fair” in order to contest the results of the election if he loses.

Trump has already sought to question the integrity of mail-in voting, which has become even more important this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Last month, the president pushed the false claim that the election could be rigged by foreign countries printing and mailing ballots to US voters.

In reality, voter fraud is very rare, and the country has relied on mail-in voting as a key part of its election system for decades.

On top of that, if the president ends up losing some of these battleground states by double digits, as recent polls suggest he might, it’ll be harder for him to contest the result. But that doesn’t mean Trump won’t try.

Here’s what else the blog is watching:

• Trump will present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Olympian and former Republican congressman Jim Ryun at 11 am ET. He will deliver remarks and sign executive orders on lowering drug prices at 3 pm ET. He will then leave Washington to spend the weekend at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
• Biden is attending a virtual fundraiser.
• The opening ceremonies of the 2020 Olympics would have been held today in Tokyo, but the games have obviously been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.