Here & Now

Here & Now for December 3, 2021

Announcer:

The following program is a PBS Wisconsin original production.

Frederica Freyberg:

Wisconsin battles Delta as the new Omicron variant of concern is officially in the U.S. and the coronavirus is running rampant in deer. An expert epidemiologist gives their take. The latest on the continuing saga of election investigations, including a complaint against one of the state election commissioners and what millions of dollars could mean for Wisconsin communities struggling with opioid addiction. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” we speak with Dr. Michael Osterholm about Omicron. And UW Professor Tony Goldberg explains concern over coronavirus in deer. Attorney Jeff Mandell weighs in on election infighting. And finally tonight, we hear from a paramedic fighting opioid overdoses. It’s “Here & Now” for December 3rd.

Announcer:

Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Ashok Rai:

In a single day here in Green Bay one of our hospitals had to say no to 28 patients being transferred in that needed them, including three strokes. And those families unfortunately had to have their family members transferred over to one 200 miles away just to get basic care that they needed. This wouldn’t happen if we had those beds and staff available to take care of them which are now being occupied by COVID patients.

Frederica Freyberg:

As the Delta COVID-19 variant causes case numbers to surge in Wisconsin, with positive cases now surpassing 5,000 a day and ICU beds nearly full up, another threat: the Omicron variant. How big a threat is it here? We turn to Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He joins us from Minneapolis. Thanks very much for doing so.

Michael Osterholm:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

What is your threat assessment on the Omicron variant?

Michael Osterholm:

It’s a real concern. It is a 210-mile curve ball thrown into this whole mix of COVID. This virus combines both the ability to be much more infectious and I think all the evidence we see in this first week of data collection is that in fact it is more infectious than Delta and it also has the ability to evade immune protection from previously having been infected or from the vaccines. That we’re still working on but early data shows us that many, many individuals who had previously been infected in South Africa are getting infected again. I think the one real question we still have yet is just what proportion of these people who do get infected whether they’ve been previously protected or not, how many of them have serious illness. And we are starting to see hospitalizations grow quite dramatically in South Africa and in particular in kids under the age of five.

Frederica Freyberg:

We know that it has been detected in several states, including Minnesota now. From what you know about its transmission, is it just a matter of time before there are widespread outbreaks, including where we are?

Michael Osterholm:

You know, it’s a hard thing to be talking about when here we sit here today with 95,000 new cases of Delta being reported today nationwide and the seven-day average going up every day. So that when you think about, well, could it get worse, this unfortunately is just that. I think that within the next three or four weeks, in many locations Omicron will become the dominant variant that we see. Last weekend, about one week ago, I said it wouldn’t surprise me if we found it in at least 50 countries and a number of the states by the end of this week. Well, here we are on Friday and it’s right on track for those numbers. So I think that we surely can expect to see global distribution and where it’s at it will spread readily.

Frederica Freyberg:

You spoke a moment ago about the severity of the disease that’s being seen. Initial reports it seemed were that it wasn’t as severe, but that is looking differently at this point?

Michael Osterholm:

Well, we cautioned people all along for two reasons, to come up with any conclusions about that. The first cases being reported out of South Africa were largely in young, healthy adults where we’d expect to see the least of the serious illnesses. Bit in addition, as we’ve talked about time and time again with this entire pandemic, we have to be concerned about what we call lagging indicators. Basically severe illness, hospitalizations and deaths often occur two to three weeks or more after individuals become infected and we are in the very earliest days of widespread transmission in South Africa. We even said last week it will probably take well into mid-December before we have a better handle on that. But what we’ve seen with hospitalizations in the last 24 to 36 hours in the Johannesburg and Pretoria area suggests that this is causing serious illness in a number of individuals. And just how that all shakes out in terms of who and when they become seriously ill is still something we’re trying to understand.

Frederica Freyberg:

For now, again, it’s the Delta variant causing case surges in Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. When vaccinations were made widely available did you ever expect to see us back in this place and now looking ahead to something potentially worse?

Michael Osterholm:

Well, actually I did. You may actually recall and I believe it was actually on this program last April when I saw what Alpha was doing and the fact that we now had Beta and Gamma, two variants that could evade immune protection but didn’t basically survive overall because they were not that infectious. At that time I said I was concerned that I thought that some of the darkest days of the pandemic might be ahead of us yet. That was not well received, discounted by many. I think based on what we’ve seen the last six months and now with this new 210-mile-an-hour curveball, I think people are beginning to understand this isn’t going to be like an influenza pandemic where basically you’re in it for 18 months to two years and then it just becomes seasonal influenza. This one keeps throwing surprises at us. As we’re seeing right now with the burden of illness even with Delta, what we are likely to see with Omicron, I think people can understand even though they may be done with the pandemic, the virus is not done with us. And that’s the challenge we have right now in trying to control the transmission of this virus in our communities.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We leave it there. We hope to check back in with you in future weeks. Dr. Michael Osterholm, thanks very much.

Michael Osterholm:

Thank you very much, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:

More than 175,000 white-tail deer were harvested during Wisconsin’s nine-day gun deer hunting season which ended Sunday. Shortly before the season opened, the Department of Health Services issued guidance that hunters should take extra precautions after recent studies have found the virus that causes COVID-19 surging through deer populations. Scientists say there’s no evidence yet that the virus can travel back to humans from deer but possibility is obviously a serious concern. “Here & Now” reporter Marisa Wojcik this week asked Tony Goldberg, an epidemiologist at the UW School of Veterinary Medicine about COVID in deer.

Marisa Wojcik:

You’ve characterized this new emergence as a game-changer. Why?

Tony Goldberg:

This finding of SARS Coronavirus 2 in deer is potentially a game-changer because up to that point we really didn’t think that the virus was going to take off in other animal species. We knew it could infect them. We may remember stories of tigers and lions and great apes in zoos getting sick, but that seemed to be sort of a dead-end. The game-changer part of this is that if a virus gets into a wildlife species and spreads and perpetuates and importantly, if it can get back into humans, which we don’t know in this case, then it’s very hard to control. We have other examples of this like West Nile virus, for example, which is still circulating in birds and mosquitoes throughout the United States and throughout North America actually and we’re never going to get rid of it because what do you do? You can’t catch all the birds and vaccinate them or kill off all the mosquitoes. So if it turns out that deer are a reservoir for SARS Coronavirus 2, in other words, that they carry and can transmit it to people, that will make controlling this virus even more difficult than it already is.

Marisa Wojcik:

And so how do variants factor into this? Are the deer carrying any variants that are circulating in humans? Or are they carrying something that’s specific to the deer herd and mutations that have developed in deer?

Tony Goldberg:

The amazing thing is that deer had I think it was 12 human variants in them, which means that it wasn’t just one unlucky event where one sick person sneezed on a deer somewhere. It looks like it’s happening multiple times. So right now, all we’ve ever found in deer are variants that we know are circulating in people. That being said, one of the big fears is that what went into deer might not be the same as what comes out of deer or what sustains itself in deer. Because as we all know now from now it’s the Omicron variant, this constant changing of the guard with SARS Coronavirus 2 variants, this virus is very prone to evolve, to change, to change its genetics and to change its disease-causing abilities. That’s because it’s trying to make a living and it’s trying to evade immunity and do all these nasty things viruses do. So when a virus like this finds itself in a new environment, deer, the fear is that it’s going to evolve in a new direction. And if it can be transmitted out of deer, then the worst case scenario is that deer could be spewing out variants of the virus that we haven’t seen in humans but that could pose a problem for humans.

Frederica Freyberg:

In other news, a not unexpected win for Republicans from the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a ruling on how to draw new voting maps. The conservative majority on the high court ruled this week that it will make the minimum changes necessary to the current district maps and that the court will not consider partisan balance. The ruling informs how parties must draw maps they submit to justices for their consideration. A trial to set lines could happen as soon as January.

At the state Capitol this week, tempers flared as former Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman provided another update on his election investigation.

Michael Gableman:

I never said anything about overturning any election. Stop making things up, Mark.

Frederica Freyberg:

Democrats criticized Gableman for new hires on his staff which include a lawyer who worked to overturn the state’s election results.

Mark Spreitzer:

If you are serious about this, shouldn’t we bring in somebody who is above partisanship, above reproach and have them get to the bottom on this?

Frederica Freyberg:

During the hearing, Gableman also announced he is seeking a court order to compel testimony from the mayors of Madison and Green Bay.

Michael Gableman:

Of all the clerks and of all the mayors, those two simply failed without reason or excuse to appear for their depositions.

Frederica Freyberg:

Madison city attorney said the city has been working since October under an agreement that would prevent city officials from testifying. He says the city has not received an updated formal request for anyone to testify. A court will hear the issue December 22. Former justice Gableman’s latest filings threatened to jail the mayors of Madison and Green Bay if they don’t appear to testify before him. More on that in a moment, but first, as the Gableman investigation was getting a hearing in the Capitol, the state Elections Commission was meeting to review the Legislative Audit Bureau Report on the 2020 election. Commissioners unanimously approved several recommendations made in the audit for conducting elections, including promulgating rules on ballot drop boxes and what information clerks can fill in on absentee ballot envelopes. But the commission again expressed anger that the audit bureau went public with its report before inaccuracies in it could be corrected.

Dean Knudson:

I think they fell into the trap of succumbing to political pressure that they would not allow a review, and a simple review like they always do helps prevent this kind of inaccuracy seeping into the final report.

Frederica Freyberg:

Republican commissioner Dean Knudson said the audit bureau acted in an unprofessional manner.

Also related to the 2020 election, there’s a longstanding complaint alleging criminal wrongdoing on the part of ten Republicans in Wisconsin who, following Joe Biden’s victory, convened as presidential electors for Donald Trump. Attorneys with Law Forward called these people fraudulent electors who cast their votes for Trump and mailed certificates of votes to Congress for Wisconsin’s electoral votes to be counted on January 6 for the losing candidate. The complaint over the erroneous electors is sitting with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, one of whose Republican commissioners was among the ten. Attorney Jeff Mandell is lead counsel at Law Forward and brought this complaint. He’s also representing the city of Green Bay in the Gableman probe. And that’s where we start. Thanks very much for being here.

Jeff Mandell:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

So former justice Gableman’s investigation into the Wisconsin 2020 election has a key focus on the nearly $9 million in grants the Center for Tech and Civic Life gave to the state’s largest and Democratic-leaning cities, including Green Bay and Madison. You represent Green Bay as outside counsel. Now justice Gableman is going to court and threatening jail to compel testimony from those mayors as he alleges a cover-up. What is your response to this?

Jeff Mandell:

The latest gambit is that Mr. Gableman has filed papers in Waukesha County trying to have the mayors of Green Bay and Madison arrested for failing to provide testimony. But this is completely crazy. This is the latest example of Mr. Gableman throwing around big legal words but not following Wisconsin law. This is not a remedy that is available, and the facts are simply not with him. No one has refused to give testimony. The city of Green Bay provided 20,000 pages of documents to the special counsel’s office, and the special counsel’s office expressly agreed that because we provided those documents, there was no need for testimony at this point and they would let the city know if there was going to be a request later. We never heard from them until on Wednesday Mr. Gableman, in a public hearing before the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections, said that he was having these people arrested and that he had filed court papers to do so. He never even notified the city or had us served with those court papers.

Frederica Freyberg:

There’s a lot to unpack there and the reporting on that continues, including by us. But I want to get back to the Republican electors. Why address this so long after the certification of the election with parenthetically the insurrection that it caused on January 6?

Jeff Mandell:

Well, to be fair, the delay here is entirely on the part of the elections commission. We filed our complaint in February. It’s been pending for nearly ten months. We filed it in mid-February on president’s day. But regardless, what is so important is that this does get resolved. We can’t allow the delay in adjudicating this to make people dismiss it as ancient history. Because as you have explained, what happened here was a deliberate effort to defraud the people of the choice that they made through their vote here in Wisconsin and to defraud the Congress by fooling them. And that — it is exactly that effort, these fraudulent papers that were submitted to Congress that fueled the January 6 insurrection. There would have been no insurrection if people did not believe that there is a basis for asking Vice President Pence to choose one slate of electors over the other. These papers and this fraud, that’s what created that possibility.

Frederica Freyberg:

As we mentioned, one of the Republicans on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Bob Spindell, was among those electors. At the commission’s meeting last month, Spindell defended himself for his and others’ actions. Let’s take a listen.

Bob Spindell:

This was mandatory and necessary according to the Trump and RPW legal opinions to preserve Trump’s record and the RPW position in these many federal and state cases that were swirling around Wisconsin at the time, at this time. And so should a case or two be found in favor of Trump, it was necessary to not have forfeited his rights for an appeal or whatever. I would have thought and I’m sure it would have been malpractice on the part of any attorney not to have the Trump campaign and RPW take all steps to preserve its records and options.

Frederica Freyberg:

Commissioner Spindell says they were only trying to protect their options should Donald Trump prevail in any challenge to election results. What about that?

Jeff Mandell:

That’s just not true and that’s true for several reasons, Frederica. First, there were not, as Mr. Spindell says, many federal and state lawsuits swirling around. The courts had taken great pains to make sure before the Electoral College met on December 14th that those cases were resolved. The recount, partial recount here in Wisconsin had been resolved all the way through the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The cases in federal court had been resolved. There was no further litigation that was necessary. Number two, and perhaps even more importantly, what the fraudulent electors here in Wisconsin did differs in kind from what happened in other states. In some other states, the electors met and they put at the beginning of their papers words that said in the event that a court decides that there was something wrong with the election, this is how our state would cast its electoral votes. But that’s not what happened here in Wisconsin. There was no such in case of emergency break glass clause at the beginning of these papers. These papers were deliberately designed to be identical in every respect to the actual papers casting the actual electoral votes that reflected the will of the voters in Wisconsin. They were designed to defraud the people, to confuse the Congress and to create exactly the situation that led to the January 6 insurrection. That’s what’s wrong with them.

Frederica Freyberg:

We will watch where this goes. We appreciate you describing it for us. Jeff Mandell, thanks very much.

Jeff Mandell:

Thank you, Frederica.

Frederica Freyberg:

$429 million will go to 87 different local governments throughout Wisconsin as part of a multi-state lawsuit against companies that manufacture and distribute prescription opioids. The Joint Finance Committee approved the amount Tuesday and released a statement, saying, “The settlement we approved today will ensure that as much funding as possible goes toward opioid abuse prevention and recovery – a critically needed support after overdose deaths increased more than 25% and hit a record high last year.” Despite holding big pharma accountable for their part in the opioid epidemic, communities across Wisconsin are and will be struggling with addiction and overdoses for years to come. One paramedic has seen firsthand how the problem has gotten worse during the pandemic and in the smaller, northern community of Ashland, it hits close to home. David Rekemeyer joins us now from Ashland and thanks very much for being here.

David Rekemeyer:

Thank you, Frederica. How are you today?

Frederica Freyberg:

I’m very well. Thank you. But describe what your days are like as a first responder in the midst of a surge in overdoses.

David Rekemeyer:

Well, like every other problem with health or trauma that paramedics and fire departments deal with, some days there are — there’s nothing going on and other days, you know, we’ll respond to one or more opioid overdose calls. Often it depends on if there’s a new batch of drugs that has come into the community. Sometimes those drugs are stronger than what people with substance use disorder are used to having and so they’ll overdose on those. And, you know, there was one day we got three calls right in a row.

Frederica Freyberg:

What you’re seeing too as you just described is not just opioids and heroin but other drugs are in increasing use as well. Is that right?

David Rekemeyer:

Well, I think probably the largest problem we’re having now is with an opioid analog called fentanyl. This is an opioid-like drug that is created in laboratory and there’s large amounts of it that are coming into the United States from Mexico, making its way throughout all of our communities. And a lot of the drugs that, you know, we see that people are, you know, abusing are cut with fentanyl. Fentanyl is a really strong opioid so people often don’t know they’re ingesting fentanyl or they think they’re ingesting a certain amount and they ingest more than they planned on taking and they overdose on it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Yeah.

David Rekemeyer:

We have to respond to that.

Frederica Freyberg:

Ashland is ranked as one of the least healthy counties in Wisconsin, with a high child poverty rate. How in your mind do those conditions play into drug use and abuse and where you find yourself?

David Rekemeyer:

Well, you have to, you know, think of things in terms of, you know, what are the social determinants of health? You know, social determinants of health are things like access to education, access to food security, access to good health care. And all of those things are a challenge for people who live in poverty. And in this area of Wisconsin, a lot of people live at or under the poverty line. And I think because our communities, you know, are — you know, drugs are easy to get. Our communities are flooded with them. And, you know, I think people, once they get started, you know, in the beginning I think it can be easier to look at — to face life in an altered state than to face life, you know, head-on from a position of poverty and no opportunity. And so I think that they’re related in that way.

Frederica Freyberg:

How do you think the pandemic played into this problem?

David Rekemeyer:

Well, I think the pandemic played into it because there are already the conditions that have made this a bad problem. And you add on to that the fact that, you know, people are now, you know — they have a greater degree of anxiety about, you know, going out and about. There are people who are, you know, getting sick. We’re stuck in our homes. All of those things kind of create the perfect storm of psychological conditions that make people more anxious. And when people are more anxious and they have a predilection towards substance use disorder, be it alcohol, be it heroin, whatever you’re talking about, they tend to do more of that as a means to mitigate the stress they’re feeling.

Frederica Freyberg:

Well, we want to thank you for joining us to describe what it’s like on the ground and also for your work. So, David Rekemeyer, thank you very much.

David Rekemeyer:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

For more on all the week’s biggest news, you can visit our website at PBSwisconsin.org and then click on the news tab. That’s our program for tonight. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a good weekend.

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Funding for “Here & Now” is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.