BYWilliam Rivers Pitt, TruthoutPUBLISHEDApril 8, 2021SHAREShare via FacebookShare via TwitterShare via Email

I Got My Second Shot Yesterday — and the US Saw 73,200 New COVID Cases

Despair and Disparity: The Uneven Burdens of COVID-19

I’m not sure what I was expecting after receiving my second COVID vaccine shot. Would the skies part in glory? Would flights of angels sing me a tune? Maybe some dancing Grateful Dead bears on the hood of my car? “One way or another, this darkness has got to give…”

What happened was this: We rolled through a long line of cars to get into the vaccination site, parked at the direction of a smiling National Guardsman who was clearly enjoying her role in the endeavor, and waited. After about 15 minutes, a woman in PPE gear with a nametag that read “Dr. Nancy” came to my window and asked if I was ready. Yes, I replied. Yes, yes, oh hell yes.

Sleeve rolled up, needle went in, plunger went down, needle came out, and I hit the hazard lights for the obligatory 15-minute side-effects wait. Those minutes passed to the sound of Simon & Garfunkel on my radio, and I will long remember surveying that field packed with parked cars while quietly singing along to, “They’ve all come to look for America…”

Never miss another story

Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day.

• Email

… and just like that, I had joined the growing millions in becoming a tiny part of scientific history. I still have two weeks to go before the full protections kick in, but even as I sat there counting my heartbeats in the low throb of the injection site, I felt my fear — my ocean of dread, my yearlong companion, my inescapable shadow — puddling out of me and slowly washing away.

“Grateful” is not a large enough word. It took a ruthlessly lethal pandemic combined with the deliberate indifference of authority to inspire it, but the science behind these vaccines represents the kind of forward leap that has only happened a few times in history. “Now, with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the technology has been tested and it has succeeded,” writes Kesley Piper for Vox. “That success is likely to drive development of tons more mRNA vaccines targeting other diseases.”

There is a hollowness to the moment for me, however. I’m aware that I’m taking pleasure from survival when half a million of my fellow countrymen are gone forever; I feel selfish. I’m glad I didn’t get sick, and I worked very hard not to get sick, but how much of all that is luck? This thing could have had me as easily as picking an apple from an orchard, despite all my precautions.

There is, as ever, the rage. It did not have to be this way, and the authors of this misery are currently huddled down in Florida trying to game plan how to smash their way back into power, all the while turning a buck every which way they can. The negligent homicides of hundreds of thousands of people, the infection of and perhaps permanent harm done to millions more, goes unpunished to this day. It is a stone in my stomach I cannot sick up, and so long as it remains there, I will know no peace.There is a hollowness to the moment for me.

There is also very much this: It is not over yet by any measure. On the day I was vaccinated for the second time, there were 73,200 new cases of COVID reported in the U.S. The more virulent B.1.1.7 variant that emerged from Britain is now the dominant strain — not the dominant variant, the dominant strain — of COVID in this country. A fourth wave of infections is well underway because of this, and states like Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and New York are getting clobbered with new cases.

In India and Brazil, the virus is running rampant. These kinds of mass COVID petri dishes are ripe for the emergence of new and more virulent strains, some of which could very well be capable of defeating our miraculous vaccines. To our immediate north, Canada has reached Level Four on infections, the highest measurement, and the CDC recommends no one travel there without being fully vaccinated. In Vancouver, the entire Canucks NHL hockey team is under quarantine after 25 players and coaches tested positive. That’s basically the entire team.

Because of all that, it feels too early for any kind of substantive What It All Means navel-gazing. In this moment, though, I feel strangely like a survivor from the Titanic bobbing in a lifeboat in the dark North Atlantic night. The analogy is apt if you imagine that doomed ship as an allegory for the nation, a gilded behemoth encrusted with the wealthy elite, while below in steerage sat the poorest passengers, who bore the brunt of the iceberg’s wrath.

COVID was our iceberg, and it exacted a murderous price, particularly among those who exist in the steerage quarters of our modern economy. I cannot avoid counting myself — vaccinated and alive — among the privileged, and I am unavoidably roiled with the queasy seasick sense that so many others deserve this more than I do.

Bollocks, I try to tell myself. Self-indulgent tripe. The vagaries of fate are no more mine to control than the tide that washed over Canute’s feet. Every medical professional I know is adamant: No one should feel guilty about getting vaccinated, because the more people get the vaccine, the closer we come to a possible end to this nightmare. I have these entirely valid sentiments playing on repeat in my head, but it is hard. It is hard. This has been a long, bleak passage, and the end is not yet in sight.

So here I sit in my lifeboat, Band-Aid on my arm, watching this awesome and terrible thing get cracked open like an egg by its own blundering incompetence, watching as it breaks in half and the lights go out, watching as it is swallowed by a frigid midnight sea, watching for sign of the rescue boats, and wondering what comes next.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/the-public-eye/article250441186.html

BY RYAN SABALOWAPRIL 07, 2021 04:55 AM, UPDATED 4 HOURS 52 MINUTES AGO

Joe Frater and Chris Stone were on their way to social media stardom in the elite world of trophy deer hunting.

The two law enforcement officers — Frater is a corrections officer at a local prison; Stone is an investigator for the Amador County district attorney — regularly showed off their trophies from just a few years of hunting with bows and arrows in the Sierra foothills of Northern California.

They posed with impressive, mature bucks that they somehow managed to pull from a place known mostly for its scrawny deer with tiny racks. The men appeared on hunting websites, podcasts and YouTube videos, and they had sponsorships with companies that sell hunting equipment.TOP ARTICLES

Along the way, California wildlife officers were beginning to grow skeptical of the steady feed of social media posts featuring Frater and Stone. Most of their kills looked like the bruisers that celebrity hunters brag about on hunting shows — that is, extraordinary.

What unfolded next over five months in 2019 could be an episode of “CSI,” as wardens undertook a complex operation with covert stakeouts, DNA evidence, aerial surveillance and vehicle tracking devices — tactics that the men’s attorneys say went too far in upholding California’s stringent and complex hunting rules.

Get unlimited digital access

Subscribe now for only $1CLAIM OFFERhttps://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

From the beginning, investigators thought the two archery hunters may have been cheating. They suspected Frater and Stone had lured in the deer using bait, a practice that’s considered unsporting. It’s also illegal in California.

“The caliber/type of deer is very rare for a legal CA hunter to harvest, especially with only using archery equipment,” Game Warden David Moskat wrote in a 2019 search warrant. “I have known many archery and rifle hunters who would be satisfied to harvest even one of this caliber of buck in a lifetime of legal hunting in California.”

In California — and elsewhere around the country — breaking the hunting rules can be a criminal offense. Violators can face misdemeanor charges for breaking even the most technical rules in a thick rule book dedicated to hunting and wildlife protection.

In 2010, one of the biggest names in the hunting world, rock musician Ted Nugent, showed himself hunting over bait as he killed a small “spike” buck on an episode of his “Spirit of the Wild” hunting program on the Outdoor Channel.

Nugent — who often hunts in Texas, where using bait is legal — pleaded no contest to two misdemeanors: illegally baiting a deer, and failing to have a hunting permit signed by a government official after a kill.

The Public Eye

Get The Bee’s big stories and major investigations into government wrongdoing, school spending, political corruption and more on Thursdays.SIGN UP

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

To figure out the methods used by Frater and Stone, a team of officers went on their own hunt, using the same tactics as any elite law enforcement agency would.

They used a surveillance plane to trail the men from overhead. They set out motion-activated cameras. They put tracking devices on their pickups. They took samples from the guts left behind from kills and swabbed the bed of Frater’s pickup for deer blood and hair for DNA evidence. They combed through their text messages and tallied who they called and the minutes they were on the phone.

After weeks of stakeouts both day and night, they raided the two men’s homes, going room to room, rifling through drawers, freezers and closets, seizing deer-head trophies, archery equipment, cell phones, frozen venison, computers, trail camera memory cards and taxidermy and butcher receipts.

At Frater’s home, they seized salt licks, mineral blocks and bags of feed, the sorts of bait used to lure in deer.

When the investigation was complete, the wardens said they found enough evidence the men were hunting deer using bait. Among several other violations: failure to report harvested deer as required by law, intentionally misrepresenting the location of their kills, and trespassing.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Because of a recently enacted state law designed to punish poachers specifically targeting trophy-class deer, Stone and Frater faced special sentencing enhancements that included up to a year in jail and up to $40,000 in fines.

In the end, the California Attorney General’s Office allowed the men to sign plea bargains that included no jail time and fines nowhere near the maximum the law allows. (The state agency prosecuted the case in Amador County Superior Court, given that Stone worked for the local district attorney.)

Stone’s and Frater’s attorneys argue the Attorney General’s Office knew the state’s case was overblown, which is why the trophy enhancement was never filed. They argue that the two men didn’t deliberately intend to violate the state’s strict prohibition on hunting deer using bait.

As for the other allegations, John Holbus, Stone’s Sacramento attorney, said they were for technical and “so meritless that the Attorney General’s office declined to even file them.”

Frater’s Sacramento attorney, Candice Fields, said the amount of time and resources spent on the case were wasted on her client “who has been licensed since around age 13, (and) has a spotless record.”https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

“My client and I are both disappointed that significant and precious law enforcement resources were expended on what the California Attorney General’s Office obviously deemed was an overblown investigation based upon the limited code violations which were ultimately charged,” she said in an email.

“If violent crime investigations receive less funding than did this investigation, the public really should be left wondering about the prioritization of how their tax dollars are spent.”

READ NEXT

STATE-WORKER

Here’s our best subscription deal, California state workers. Thank you for what you do

APRIL 08, 2020 5:00 AM

---

Holbus said that when he met with Fields and the attorney general’s prosecutor to go over the case, the seasoned criminal law attorneys were stunned at the number of DNA tests the wardens had ordered done.

“There were more DNA tests done than all three of us had seen in our careers put together,” Holbus said.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

But some say that given what the wardens uncovered during their investigation, the punishment wasn’t severe enough — the latest example of what they say is a troubling trend.

“Judges, courts never take wildlife cases as seriously as drug offenses or violent crimes — they just don’t,” said former federal wildlife officer Michael Sutton, past president of the California Fish and Game Commission, the agency sets state hunting laws.

“There’s a big need to educate both prosecutors and judges about the serious nature of these offenses.”

The Attorney General’s Office said in an emailed statement that prosecutors were “unable to discuss charging analysis.”

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS BECOME EVIDENCE

https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Frater and Stone may have been the victims of their own desire, like millions of other people, to boast about their accomplishments and build their brand on social media. That’s exactly where the case began in August 2019, according to a pair of Department of Fish and Wildlife search warrants unsealed at The Sacramento Bee’s request in Amador County.

Moskat, the game warden, wrote in his affidavit that he was suspicious of Frater and Stone based on what he saw on their Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Stone had posted a picture from that year’s hunting season of him holding the antlers of a buck he’d shot with his bow. The deer didn’t have an orange piece of paper tied around its antlers, a state-issued “deer tag.” The state issues those permits to deer hunters, allowing them to kill one deer per tag. California hunters are allowed up to two deer tags each season.

A 2013 YouTube hunting video featuring Stone also showed him posing with three giant bucks that didn’t have tags on their antlers, Moskat wrote.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The law says hunters are required to “immediately” write on the form the date, time and exact location where the deer was killed, and tie it to the animal’s antlers. The purpose of the rule is to help prevent hunters from bagging too many deer or shooting them in areas where they’re not allowed to hunt.

Many hunters snap a photo with their kill just before they tag it, even though it’s technically a crime under the state’s strict rules.

Stone’s attorney, Holbus, said that’s what his client did when he posed for the cameras. He tagged the bucks moments later before they were moved from the site, Holbus said.

But for Moskat, it was a sign that Stone and his hunting partner were willing to bend or break the state’s hunting rules. He used it as his first example in his affidavit to convince the judge that he had probable cause to conduct his search.

Moskat wrote that he started digging into the online system that hunters use to report their kills after a successful hunt.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Frater and Stone had an impressive track record. Between 2012 and 2019, the men had reported killing around two dozen deer, most of them trophy-class bucks with large antlers and multiple tines and points.

But Moskat wrote that Stone didn’t report to the state at least three of the deer he killed and posed with in social media pictures and on the YouTube video. Moskat also pulled the deer tags the men had filed with the state. Moskat noted the men didn’t write down exactly where they’d killed the buck on the tags, instead merely noting a general landmark like a road or a ridgetop, according to the affidavit.

Holbus, Stone’s attorney, said this is another example of the highly technical violations the men were accused of committing, akin to how almost all drivers drive at least a little bit over the speed limit.

“If the rules were strictly enforced by the text of the law only, then every single hunter could be arrested on every single successful hunt,” Holbus said.

Capt. Patrick Foy, a spokesman for the wardens at the Department of Fish and Wildlife, however, said when it comes to this case, those technical distinctions mattered. In the game wardens’ minds, he said, it showed the two didn’t want to formally alert law enforcement to exactly where they killed a buck while trespassing or if they shot it over a pile of apples.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Around the time Moskat was digging into Frater’s and Stone’s hunting records, Moskat found evidence of baiting by looking at Frater’s small parcel from a neighbor’s place. Moskat wrote that he spotted “several heavily used deer trails,” “salt/mineral blocks” used to attract deer, birdfeeders, bales of feed and partially buried buckets placed near motion-activated trail cameras.

It’s not clear in the search warrants whether Frater was hunting on his property, but regardless of if he was, intentionally feeding large wildlife in California is a crime. It became another piece of evidence Moskat used to convince the judge he had probable cause to conduct searches that eventually led to the wildlife officers getting permission to track the hunters’ vehicles, read through their text messages, phone call logs, search their homes and seize their property.

WHAT THE WARDENS UNCOVERED

In September 2019, the wardens received the court’s approval to put tracking devices on Frater’s and Stone’s pickups, which they monitored for several weeks during the middle of the state’s deer hunting season.

At one area that Frater frequented, Moskat wrote that he found a pile of around 100 apples next to a trail camera.

At another site Frater visited, one of Moskat’s fellow wardens allegedly found a tree stand that hunters use to shoot deer from above. A pile of apples and a salt or mineral block was placed nearby, Moskat wrote.

The wardens set out motion-activated surveillance cameras at the site, which later showed Frater carrying a bow and wearing a climbing harness, a sign that he was hunting, according to the affidavits. Meanwhile, a plane overhead was tracking Frater’s movements. The pilot spotted him one day practicing with his bow before driving to go hunt at a baited site, Moskat wrote.

Stone also was being surveilled. A camera on the road outside his home took photos of him coming and going. His vehicle, which has a customized license plate that translates to “Turkey Slayer” was spotted at a site where Moskat wrote he found bait pellets in front of one of Stone’s trail cameras, and a spray-painted bottle filled with “sweet smelling liquid similar to molasses” hanging from a tree.

This, Moskat alleged, was another form of attractant to lure in deer. Later, the wardens also later found plum skins and pits that they say were evidence the fruit had been intentionally placed in one of Stone’s hunting areas to lure in deer.

Moskat put out a camera at one site, which later showed Stone walking past it with a rifle slung over his shoulder.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Holbus, Stone’s attorney, said that was the only violation for which Stone ended up being charged. He said Stone hadn’t actually been hunting that day, but he had merely been going to check the memory cards on his game cameras.

“While checking on one of them, he walked through a field that was baited two months previously,” Holbus told The Bee in an email. “Mr. Stone did not think the bait, from two months earlier, was still in the field.”

Holbus said his client, who prefers to archery hunt, didn’t have any intention to shoot a deer that day and even walked up on a nice buck he didn’t shoot with his rifle.

But there was evidence that bucks had died on Stone’s baited properties, according to the affidavits. Wardens said during their stakeouts they watched as Stone hunted with friends other than Frater. Over the course of their investigation, they found four gut piles from where the hunters cleaned their kills, Moskat wrote. The warden took samples from the guts to be used as DNA evidence in the case.

In his affidavit, Moskat wrote that he believed the untagged buck Stone had posed with on social media earlier that season was likely shot over bait.https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

He also wrote he believed that Frater’s kills that year — two bucks and a black bear — had been targeted over bait as well.

It was enough for the judge to authorize searching the men’s trucks, homes and properties in December 2019. The Attorney General’s Office filed formal charges against the men in August in Amador County.

That same month, Stone, 41, pleaded no contest to one count of hunting over bait. He was fined $780 and placed on three-years probation along with a suspension of his hunting privileges during the probationary period.

Frater, the 38-year-old prison guard, pleaded no contest in January to two counts of hunting deer over bait. He was fined $5,000, placed on one year of informal probation and agreed to forfeit his hunting privileges for a year.

“He has accepted responsibility, paid a fine to one of CDFW’s wildlife conservation funds, and surrendered one of his bows which he understands will be used to raise additional conservation funds,” Fields, Frater’s attorney, told The Bee. “He is happy to support a cause so close to his heart.”https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Frater remains employed at Mule Creek State Prison where he’s worked for the past seven years. A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman declined to comment on whether he’d been disciplined, citing personnel confidentiality rules.

It’s also not clear whether Stone was disciplined as a result of the case by his bosses at the Amador County District Attorney’s Office.

District Attorney Todd Reibe declined to comment, citing the same personnel rules.

Fields said that since baiting is what’s known as a “strict liability” regulation, it means wardens don’t have to prove that a hunter intended to violate the law.

“In other words, if there are apples on the ground from a nearby tree, a hunter who otherwise legally hunts a deer within 400 yards of those apples (that’s four football fields) violates the regulation,” she said in an email. “That’s what happened here.”https://d9a47f024a3d4e0b131a2bac81881a0c.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Capt. Foy, the game warden spokesman, said the evidence the wardens uncovered clearly showed the men repeatedly killing big bucks over bait and then boasting of their successes, “claiming they’re legitimate and then posting them on multiple social media platforms.”

That was no accident or simple misunderstanding, Foy said.

“Not when it happens,” he said, “over and over again.”

RELATED STORIES FROM SACRAMENTO BEE

ENVIRONMENT

Nothing Wild: California’s relationship with the animal kingdom is broken. Can it be fixed?