Here’s what you need to know:
- Trump supporters gather indoors as journalists ask why he played down the virus.
- Scientists are alarmed by companies’ secrecy about vaccine clinical trials.
- A refugee camp in Greece on virus lockdown was burned to the ground. Now officials want to rebuild.
- The N.F.L. returns, offering fans a tense and unlikely paradox during the pandemic.
Trump supporters gather indoors as journalists ask why he played down the virus.
President Trump on Sunday held a campaign rally indoors for the first time since late June, when he appeared at an event in Tulsa, Okla., that was later blamed for a surge in coronavirus cases in the area.
The rally on Sunday night, held at a manufacturing plant outside Las Vegas in defiance of a state directive limiting indoor gatherings to 50 people, was attended by thousands of supporters, the vast majority of whom did not wear masks.
Steve Sisolak, the Democratic governor of Nevada, said on Twitter that Mr. Trump was “taking reckless and selfish actions” that endangered the lives of people in the state. “This is an insult to every Nevadan who has followed the directives, made sacrifices and put their neighbors before themselves,” he said. “It’s also a direct threat to all of the recent progress we’ve made, and could potentially set us back.”
The Trump campaign had vetted several outdoor venues, but they were all blocked by the governor, according to an administration official familiar with the planning. Tim Murtaugh, a campaign spokesman, defended the indoor setting, saying in a statement, “If you can join tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets, gamble in a casino, or burn down small businesses in riots, you can gather peacefully under the First Amendment to hear from the president of the United States.”
Earlier in the day, White House and Republican officials struggled to respond to sharp questioning by Sunday morning news hosts about why Mr. Trump knowingly played down the coronavirus in the crucial early months of the pandemic, as revealed by the journalist Bob Woodward in his new book, “Rage.”
The White House trade adviser, Peter Navarro, claimed on the CNN program “State of the Union” that “nobody knew” how dangerous the virus was at the time the president spoke to Mr. Woodward in February and March. In fact, Mr. Navarro himself wrote a memo in late January warning Trump administration officials that the virus could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.
Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, provided a different defense of the president, saying that Mr. Trump had understood the serious threat the virus posed by early February but was “calm and steady and methodical” because he did not want to cause a panic.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under Mr. Trump, suggested on the CBS program “Face the Nation” that the president might have chosen to underplay the seriousness of the virus in part because he was getting bad information early on from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday night, Mr. Woodward discussed interviews he recorded with the president. He said Mr. Trump was warned about the danger at a Jan. 28 meeting by a deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger.
“Pottinger said his contacts in China told him, ‘This is going to be like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 675,000 people in this country,’” Mr. Woodward said.
Scientists are alarmed by companies’ secrecy about vaccine clinical trials.
Independent scientists and public health experts are criticizing vaccine companies for a lack of public transparency, particularly their refusal to release their criteria for deciding whether to stop a trial for safety concerns.
The outcry was galvanized by the news that AstraZeneca’s chief executive disclosed why it had recently halted its vaccine trial — because a person given the vaccine had experienced serious neurological symptoms — at a closed meeting organized by J.P. Morgan, the investment bank.
AstraZeneca said on Saturday that an outside panel had cleared its trial in Britain to begin again, but the company has not given any details about the patient’s condition, nor has it released a transcript of the executive’s remarks to investors, which were reported by the news outlet STAT and later confirmed by an analyst for J.P. Morgan.
Another front-runner in the vaccine race, Pfizer, made a similarly terse announcement on Saturday: The company is proposing to expand its clinical trial to include thousands more participants, but it gave few other details.
Critics say American taxpayers are entitled to know more since the federal government has committed billions of dollars to vaccine research and to buying the vaccines. And greater transparency could also help bolster faltering public confidence in vaccines.
“Trust is in short supply,” said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and health care researcher at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., who has spent years prodding companies and academic researchers to share more trial data with outside scientists. “And the more that they can share, the better off we are.”
global roundup
A refugee camp in Greece on virus lockdown was burned to the ground. Now officials want to rebuild.
It was Europe’s largest refugee camp. Its squalid conditions made it one of the most notorious. Then the coronavirus found its way in.
If the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos was a tinderbox, the virus was the spark.
When the authorities tried to quarantine the residents, a small group of asylum seekers, angry that their living situations were somehow about to get even worse, began setting blazes, officials and aid workers say.
Now, with the camp destroyed, some 8,000 adults and 4,000 children, among them hundreds of infants, are stranded without shelter or sanitation.
“We escaped from fire, but everything is black,” said Mujtaba Saber, sitting on a thin blanket spread on a street, next to his napping 3-year-old son. His 20-day-old baby slept nearby in her mother’s arms.
The Times’s Matina Stevis-Gridneff, who is on Lesbos, reports that the Greek army has been setting up a new camp. The authorities said they hoped to relocate the migrants, nearly two-thirds of whom are Afghans, into 2,000 tents.
For now, they’ve been sleeping on tombstones and the side of the road, in parking lots and dried weeds on the hillsides. Some have pitched makeshift tents with bamboo poles and blankets. They’ve used the few clothes they have to make mattresses so their babies don’t sleep on tarmac.
“I think sleeping on the street is bad, but Moria is bad-bad,” said Mahbube Ahzani, 15, who had been in the camp with her family for 10 months. But what will be worse, she said, is the “new Moria.”
In other developments around the world:
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New Zealand is likely to end coronavirus restrictions on Sept. 21, with the exception of its largest city, Auckland, where an outbreak occurred last month. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday that current alert levels would be maintained for another week and then be lowered if case numbers stayed the same. She also said physical distancing rules on planes and other public transportation would be dropped, allowing more passengers to travel at the same time, though they still must wear masks. New Zealand reported one new case on Monday linked to the Auckland cluster, bringing the country’s total to 1,798.
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India reported 92,071 new cases on Monday, the fifth consecutive day that new cases exceeded 90,000 in the country, according to a New York Times database. India has the world’s second-highest number of cases after the United States. On Monday, members of Parliament were gathering for a session with social-distancing precautions.
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Starting Monday, Britain has lowered the limit on the number of people allowed to meet to six from 30. The country recorded 3,330 new infections on Sunday, the third consecutive day of new case counts surpassing 3,000, a level not seen in Britain since May.
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Also in Britain, London’s West End will reopen its first musical since March. “Six,” the hit about the wives of King Henry VIII, will start an 11-week run at the Lyric Theater on Nov. 14. It was supposed to debut on Broadway the day New York’s theaters closed.
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Antarctica, the only continent free of the coronavirus, is preparing for an influx of researchers in the coming months as a change of season makes studies on the icy South Pole more feasible. The first researchers, from the United States, arrived on Monday after quarantining in New Zealand.
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Israel will be returning to a nationwide lockdown for at least three weeks, starting on Friday, the eve of the Jewish New Year.
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A health official in Australia said on Monday that she was under police protection because of death threats amid rising opposition to her pandemic policies. Dr. Jeannette Young, the chief health officer of Queensland, had been criticized over a requirement that travelers from other parts of Australia quarantine for two weeks, especially after a woman in quarantine was not allowed to attend her father’s funeral.
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Ethiopia, which has some of the highest virus cases and deaths in Africa, formed a partnership with a Chinese company to increase testing capacity. On Sunday, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed presided over the opening of a commercial test-kit production facility in the capital that he said would produce kits for both the local market and export, with a focus on African nations.
The N.F.L. returns, offering fans a tense and unlikely paradox during the pandemic.
The National Football League’s season got into full swing on Sunday, and Kurt Streeter, a sports columnist for The Times, was watching. He writes:
The return of professional football to a nation living on a raw and perilous edge, still struggling to confront a lethal virus and trying to heal its deep racial wounds, offered fans a tense and unlikely paradox. I loved watching the games, but I loathed it, too.
After so many endless, pent-up weeks, maybe you couldn’t wait to see the impossible tackles and stunning touchdowns. But at the same time, maybe you worried about what the return of professional football might mean for sports, for the nation and for all of us.
Hold tight. We could be one big outbreak of Covid-19 away from a calamity and deep regret.
Reporting was contributed by Livia Albeck-Ripka, Abdi Latif Dahir, Jennifer Jett, Annie Karni, Isabel Kershner, Alex Marshall, Jennifer Medina, Anna Schaverien, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Kurt Streeter, and Katie Thomas.
