Meet Christiane Northrup, Maine's Doctor of Disinformation

Maine's very own celebrity doctor, Christiane Northrup of Women's Bodies, Women's Selves fame, has called about by US Senators and banned from Instagram for being one of the "disinformation dozen," a group of anti-vaccine propagandists said to be responsible for nearly two thirds of such content on social media. But, as I described in the Maine Sunday Telegram last week, Northrup's message is much farther "out there" then you'll probably expect.

She's been telling her followers -- and in-person Q-adjacent conference attendees -- to stay away from vaccinated people because they're allegedly contagious with malignant vaccine particles that have turned them -- and maybe you -- into remote-controllable slaves via the micro robots (and two-way 5G antennas) injected into them with the vaccine... all as part of a global plot by an elite to somehow advantage Bill and Melinda Gates (together and separately, one assumes) via the medium of cryptocurrency. And that's just the start of it.

Meanwhile, Maine has been undergoing an ICU surge from unvaccinated people -- many of them under 50 -- who are coming down with very acute forms of COVID-19, a topic I wrote about later in the week in the Portland Press Herald.

Congressional earmarks are back -- Here are Maine's House member's short lists

After a ten year hiatus, the US House is restoring earmarks, the member-directed spending requests that were eliminated after a series of corruption scandals. The change -- which includes a variety of guardrails to make corruption far more difficult -- received bipartisan endorsement in the chamber.

Each member of the House can request ten earmarks, though only a fraction are likely to receive funding in the final cut months from now. But here are the 20 projects the two Democrats in my state, Maine, chose, via the Portland Press Herald. (That's Rep. Chellie Pingree and Rep. Jared Golden for those who don't follow our state as closely as all peoples of the world should.)

I wrote earlier on the earmarks process and how Pingree would have an outsized influence, due to her chairmanship of a Appropriations subcommittee.

Maine's redistricting hits a constitutional Catch-22

As you've probably heard, the pandemic (and the Trump administration) delayed the 2020 US Census, upon which states must redraw their congressional and legislative districts to account for relative population changes over the past decade. 

Here's the problem I wrote about in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram. The Census Bureau won't be able to provide the requisite data until late August. In Maine the state constitution requires these maps be completed in June AND that they be based on said data.

What happens next? Nobody really seems to know, though there's a consensus that the state's highest court will somehow solve it. Details in the story.

Also, I've been neglecting the blog of late because my newly revamped website has had a soft launch and, in theory, will be hosting this blog. The latter is still a work in progress, but you can check out the site here.

What's up with Jared Golden, the most successful Democrat in Trumpland?

Maine's second district U.S. Representative, Jared Golden, has been causing a lot of heartburn among fellow Democrats of late. He was the only member of the party not to vote for both the articles of impeachment against President Trump in December 2019, one of two to vote against enhanced background checks and the George Floyd police reform bill, and the sole dissenter on the recent Covid relief bill, which polling shows has overwhelming public support, including from a majority of Republicans. Add to that his opposition to reappointing Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker and his refusal to endorse Democratic nominee Sara Gideon in her ill-fated race against Sen. Susan Collins last year and a lot of them are unhappy.

Except Golden -- a Marine veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq who studied politics at Bates and worked as a Homeland Security committee staffer for Collins -- has done things few other Democrats can. In 2018 became the first person to defeat an incumbent in his district in 102 years, taking out a two-term Republican who sat on the campaign fund-generating banking committee. Last year he got over 30,000 Trump voters to back his reelection, helping him win a district by 6.3 percent that went for Trump by 7.4. His margin of victory is the highest of any House Democrat in a Trump district.

But what's his governing philosophy? Why does he vote the way he does? Does it work for his constituents? What's it mean for any future bid for statewide office? I sat down the Golden -- who is notoriously inaccessible to the press -- for two hours to answer those questions in this Maine Sunday Telegram profile, which also appeared in his hometown Sun Journal. Hope you find it useful.

The Year of Living Distantly

We're one year into the global pandemic and I, at least, feel my heart rate increase when I think back to those scary days in late March and early April 2020 when nobody knew for sure what was going to happen next. Thankfully it appears clear we're at the beginning of the end, and we didn't end up living in The Road.

Among Americans, we Mainers have gotten off lightly, but it's still be a wrenching experience that will transform society. So for the anniversary of the pandemic I took stock in how the pandemic effected and changed different sectors of life, from the elderly who paid the most terrible price to schools, restaurants, hospitals, and the performing arts. You can read it all in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram, or online here.

Maine: Why the growing regional disconnect between vaccine need and supply?

In yesterday's Portland Press Herald I explored why the state's top public health official had to essentially do a two-minute advertisement to help the mass vaccination site in Bangor fill vaccination slots while the one serving the county with the largest number of still unvaccinated 70+ year olds continued to run under capacity for lack of vaccine.

The answer was surprising, in that that official -- Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention director Nirav Shah -- and the state's largest hospital network and operator of the southern Maine vaccine site -- have completely contradictory ones. Maine CDC says they continue to give large allocations of vaccine to the Bangor site while those in other parts of the state have huge waiting lists because the other sites don't have the capacity to take more. Not so, says MaineHealth, which says they have latent capacity and been begging for bigger supplies for some time, which Maine CDC isn't giving them.

As you'll see in the story, Shah intimates that MaineHealth hasn't demonstrated an ability to take more, likely an allusion to a scandal involving the vaccination of indelible workers.

For wider context on where Maine stands with the pandemic, consider this "step back and assess" feature I wrote on the last five and half months of the crisis.

Penobscot elder Donna Loring on the future of Maine-tribal relations

Donna Loring has for decades been a major figure in Maine-tribal relations: legislator, tribal council member, aide to two governors, author and public intellectual. Now, fresh off her time as tribal relations advisor to Governor Janet Mills, the Penobscot elder took time to speak with me about her take on the future of the fraught relationship and the prospects for a negotiated reform of the Maine Settlement Act, which restricted Maine tribe's sovereignty.

You can read all about it in this article over at the Maine Sunday Telegram.

For more background on the tribes and the Settlement Act, start here, read about Mills's pardoning of the Passamaquoddy tribe's late attorney Donald Gellers -- driven from the county in a state-directed conspiracy -- and the backstory for understanding the tribes' predicament in "Unsettled," a 32-part series I wrote for the Press Herald a few years back.

Four dams, the Kennebec River and the future of US Atlantic salmon in the balance

While the pandemic has been raging across the world, a high-stakes battle over the future of one of Maine's largest river systems has been playing out in an obscure federal online docket, one with the future of Atlantic salmon in the United States in the balance.

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I wrote about the relicensing battle over one of four dams on the lower Kennebec River that stand between salmon, shad, alewives and the pristine habitat of the Sandy River in Western Maine which, oddly enough, is where I learned to swim and spent a lot of my summers staying cool in as a kid. The struggle is between Brookfield Renewable, a subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management, the $100 billion Canadian venture capital firm, (which wants to do technical fixes to let the fish better pass the dams) and the state of Maine, conservationists, and recreational fishing interests (which want at least one and preferably two or three of the dams to be torn down.)

Details in the story.

New allegations against a Maine "medical supply" company led by man facing fraud indictments

It's Election Day 2020. Stay safe and, if you pray, do so for the survival of the American Experiment.

In my Maine reporting, I've been focused on the other crisis facing the world, the now-resurgent pandemic, and over the past few days I've been writing follow-ups on a story I broke in March about a Portland, Maine LLC headed by a man with a five-county criminal fraud indictment against him that had suddenly jumped into the medical supply business, trading in the shortage items desperately needed by hospitals and first responders.

Noble Partners, doing business as Noble Medical Supply, was the subject of my Portland Press Herald stories Friday and today, as allegations surfaced against the company and its founder Sean C. Grady. (Its customer-facing face is Diane Russell, former Democratic state legislator for Portland, who spoke at the 2016 DNC.) 

In Friday's story, news of a federal law suit against Noble and Grady in Florida; accusations of unreturned deposits for undelivered orders in Florida and California; a disgruntled sales representative and damaged masks in Texas; and, on the Internet, the company's website having been taken down by its provider and replaced with a demand for more than $15,000 in unpaid debts and a summary of Grady's legal problems in Maine and New Hampshire.

In today's story, the owner of a local Portland distillery lays out a story of a hand sanitizer production deal gone almost immediately bad, leaving his company out more than $150,000.

Separately, I also had this update on an uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations in Maine and the unusual geography of that uptick. And to round out pandemic-related news coverage, in case you missed it, there is also this in-depth profile of Maine "superspreader wedding" pastor Todd Bell from Sunday's paper.

I last wrote about Noble Partners at the end of March, when they delivered a van load of masks and other supplies to some customers in Massachusetts as promised.

More on politics and the election anon.

Coronavirus in Maine: York, Oxford county enter danger zone

Maine and its northern New England neighbors, New Hampshire and Vermont, have been the three healthiest states for almost the entire pandemic to date, with relatively low prevalence, hospitalizations, and per capita deaths. But, owing in no small part to a defiant independent fundamentalist Baptist preacher and his followers, the disease is poised to spin out of control in interior York County. The Rumford area in Oxford county is also raising red flags.

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I had a detailed update on these developments and the state of the pandemic in Maine as the cold weather season approaches. 

In the past week and a half I also reported on staff getting infected at Waterville's Inland Hospital, but fortunately that appears to be under control.

How Maine won the first rounds against Covid-19

Maine, knock on wood, has weathered the pandemic better than most states, sometimes ranking 50th of the states in key metrics like new infections per capita. The disease can come back in a flash -- an outbreak tied to an illegal indoor wedding reception for 65 in the northern Maine town of Millinocket has infected at least 60 people in three counties and killed one woman who wasn't even there -- but Maine has done something right these past five months. 

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram I explored what the factors were behind Maine's successful flattening of the initial surge, the fading away of a second surge in May, and the absence of a summer explosion as the state reopened its economy and tourists came here in large numbers. The conclusions: a combination of good policy, broad citizen compliance, fortunate geography, and some dumb luck early on.

Maine pandemic updates: testing delays, low hospitalizations, few non-residents testing positive

A few recent updates on the pandemic situation in Maine:

Major national testing labs have been overwhelmed by the pandemic's surge in the Deep South and El Norte, and that's caused one to two week delays in getting COVID-19 results via many Maine providers who rely on these labs, including CVS, Maine Urgent Care, and Intermed. Fortunately, the state's strategy of increasing in-state capacity has limited the damage. The story is in tomorrow's Press Herald.

As of last Thursday, COVID-19 hospitalizations had hit a record low in Maine. That's great news in a state that has the third lowest per capita prevalence of the disease in the country. This usually lags exposures by two or three weeks and is not effected by how much and how well you do testing, so is a very solid indication that Maine was doing well at the end of June. I'll have a fresh update on this metric tomorrow.

And as of July 18 -- the latest date the Maine CDC could provide data for -- the number of non-residents testing positive remained low, and increasing at a rate of only 0.7 per day since the start of July. This is also welcome news as the most likely way in which the pandemic could turn worse here is via the introduction of infections from high prevalence regions to our south during the summer tourist season,.

Racist names banned by Maine law decades ago still on official registry

Based on a reader's tip, last week I discovered that Maine's official registry of coastal islands still contained several with names banned by law decades ago, including three with the "N-word."

How this could be remains unclear, as I reported in the Portland Press Herald, but the state has taken the registry offline for a full review. (The owners of two of the islands in question had already asked for a name change for them June 30 when they discovered the official names on their own.) Details in the story.

Thanks to New England Cable News for speaking with me for their follow up.

[Update, 7/22/20: I did a follow-up on the state's response.]

Coronavirus in Maine at the onset of high tourist season

As the coronavirus spreads across the southern and western United States -- a topic I'll have more to say about tomorrow -- Mainers are simultaneously kicking off their summer tourist season, lifting Covid-19 restrictions, and hoping the state can keep the prevalence of the disease low, where it has been for much of the pandemic owing to low population density and an effective lockdown.

Two updates on how things are playing out here:

First, in today's Portland Press Herald: there's been a recent quadrupling in the pace of new non-resident cases here, though starting from a low level. With concerns about contact tracing of such individuals -- theoretically performed by public health departments in their native state or county -- one Maine community has created their own testing regimen for servers, cashiers, clerks and other front-line tourism workers.

Also in today's paper, your exclusive weekly update on covid hosptializations in the state, by hospital.  Good news: another fairly quiet week, though with upticks at some of the state's largest hospitals.

Two developments I covered in recent days regarding the pandemic here in Maine.

In this week's Maine Sunday Telegram, I revisited the issue of Maine's Covid-19 testing capacity and strategy in light of this past week's announcement by Gov. Janet Mills that the state lab would soon be quadrupling its capacity. The good news: experts say the new capacity (and the testing strategy associated with it) will put Maine in a very good position as it tries to keep ahead of the disease during the phased reopening of the economy. This was very much not the case when I reported on this issue a month ago.

My weekly update on Covid-19 hospitalizations-by-hospital was in Saturday's Portland Press Herald and contained more good news: hospitalizations remain flat or declining across Maine, including at Maine Medical Center and the hospitals in hard-hit Androscoggin County, suggesting many people who were infected by the coronavirus two or three weeks earlier have not been acutely affected.

In unrelated news, my sixth book, Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, goes on sale tomorrow, Tuesday, June 16. For details on the (now virtual) launch event and signing here in Maine and other virtual events and radio appearances, see this post.

Maine pandemic: zip-code data released; hospitalizations, testing updates

In this week of civil rights protests, police violence, and militarized deployments in major cities it's been hard to remember there's a deadly, once-in-a-century pandemic going on, but amazingly there is.

Here are a few developments I covered this week on the pandemic here in Maine.

Wednesday morning I reported on how Maine remains the only state in the country unable to compile negative testing data (and, thus, the positivity rate) each day, and why this is a problem. (It's an issue we've been covering for weeks.) Good news: later that day, the agency quietly updated its cumulative testing data for second day running - making it possible to subtract cases from the day before and calculate the rate. It also updated it Thursday and Friday, so it looks like it may have made good on promises to start reporting the data every day, though its not archived on their website and prior data hasn't yet been broken out by day. Stay tuned for a story on this.

Wednesday evening, the agency began reporting cumulative case counts by zip code for some parts of the state. My analysis was up at the Press Herald Thursday morning and notes that a zip code in Lewiston has the highest number of cases, one in downtown Portland has the highest prevalence; that Portland as a whole has the most cases, but only the fifth highest per capita load, and that the northern Maine town of Medway, of all places, has the highest per capita load of any municipality.

Our weekly update on Covid-19 hospitalizations-by-hospital was up on Friday and showed inpatient levels generally flat, except at the state's largest hospital, Maine Medical Center, where they fell dramatically from pandemic peak levels (c. 35/day) to 10, the lowest since March 24, when the crisis was just beginning in Maine. Story discusses why this is and updates recent county-level new case trends in southern Maine.

More to come. Thanks for reading, and if you value what this pretty small newspaper does, consider supporting it, so it can continue.

Covid hospitalizations return to peak levels in Southern Maine

The number of Covid-19 inpatients at Portland's major hospitals returned to the peak levels of early April last week, data collected directly from Maine's hospitals show. York County's largest hospital also saw increases.

The story -- the latest in my exclusive weekly Press Herald round-ups of the hospitalization situation in Maine -- follows weeks of steadily increasing Covid case counts in Cumberland and Androscoggin counties, suggesting the disease is having a resurgence as social distancing requirements are loosened. The upward case trends in these counties began before the Maine CDC increased testing and the hospitalization trends, of course, are not a product of how many tests were performed (which is why they are valuable to have.) York counties trends are also not encouraging, but Maine's other 13 counties looked relatively good, including Penobscot County (Bangor).

The story also includes an update on the promises the Maine CDC made last week in regards to releasing better data on the pandemic; short answer is they're still working on it.

The spike in hospitalizations in Portland -- now in its second week running -- followed more than a month of declining of flat cases in much of April and the beginning of May, when Gov. Janet Mills began the phased reopening of parts of Maine's (heavily damaged) economy.

Exclusive: pandemic appears resurgent in southern Maine

To kick off your Memorial Day weekend unpleasantly, I have this story in today's Portland Press Herald showing that Covid-19 has been having a clear resurgence in two of Maine's most populous counties, Cumberland (e.g.: Greater Portland) and Androscoggin (includes Lewiston-Auburn) and doesn't look out for the count by any means in York County, which is close to southern New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts, which both have far higher prevalence of the disease than anywhere in Maine.

Talked to Maine CDC's director late Friday afternoon who agreed the weeks-long new case trends -- detailed in the article -- were worrisome and had started before Maine ramped up testing levels. Two top national experts said the state shouldn't be reopening these counties further until the new case counts were under control.

Also in today's paper, my weekly exclusive update on hospitalizations, hospital-by-hospital, day-by-day, show a sharp increase in Covid-19 inpatients at Portland's two major hospitals, Maine Medical Center and Mercy. (Curiously, CMMC in Lewiston did not have such a trend.)

Enjoy your weekend, but stay safe, wear masks when around people outside your bubble, and keep reading.

Maine CDC to improve its pandemic data reporting

Over the past couple of months, I've reported on a variety of shortcomings in the way the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention collects and/or shares data on the pandemic, from early problems keeping track of ICU bed capacity to being the only state in New England to not report cases by town and the only state in the entire Union incapable of calculating and reporting full test results (and positivity rates) daily.

As I reported in today's print edition of the Portland Press Herald, the agency has taken steps to improve and increase the data it shares and has promised to soon start releasing daily testing data and make even town-level case information. Details in the story.

Maine reopening despite missing benchmarks, lacking adequate testing regime

In today's Maine Sunday Telegram I wrote about how Maine has been reopening even as it has missed the prerequisites set by the White House, the testing thresholds advised by public health experts, and some of the benchmark metrics set by Gov. Janet Mills's administration itself. Leading experts from across the country warn such a tact has risks for both the economy and public health.

The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention refused to answer written questions for this story and denied interview requests with its director, Niav Shah, for nearly two weeks. Gov. Mills's office also did not directly answer questions, sending instead a statement that didn't address most of them.

Earlier this week I reported on how Maine is now the only state in the country that cannot compile and present daily testing data.