Manila's Mayor Returns to Office to Face Mountains of Trash
Weeks before, piles of garbage had started taking over the city, the Philippine capital. In some areas, roads became impassable for cars. Mountains of refuse lined crowded commercial areas, as well as the wide avenues leading to City Hall and the country's Supreme Court. Trash bags and discarded crates floated down streets flooded by the monsoon rains.
Litter is a fact of life in Manila, where grand colonial buildings are cramped by modern high-rises and dense shanty towns. But for weeks, the smell of rot has grown inescapable for nearly two million residents as uncollected waste stewed in the humid Southeast Asian weather.
'It hurts the eyes, it hurts the nose, and it hurts public health,' Mr. Domagoso said, speaking on a livestream on Monday, where he asked residents to store garbage in their homes until collection returned to normal. He declared a state of emergency in the city the next day.
The mayor himself, a former actor known as Isko Moreno, worked as a garbage collector before beginning his acting career.
In a speech to the City Council on Tuesday, Mr. Domagoso blamed the government of the previous mayor, Honey Lacuna, for leaving the city in debt to the garbage collectors.
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RFK Jr. is quietly reshaping vaccine policy. This is the man helping him do it.
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'I'll catch the football on that one,' said Burns, who had been recently appointed as senior adviser to the CDC director (a position that is still sitting vacant). 'We've been working really hard over the past few days — over the weekend in particular — to bring on the new ACIP members,' he said with a smile. Burns said he had been on calls with agency staff, working nights and weekends ahead of the July ACIP meeting, to ensure the replacements were in place — new panelists who, critics later said, would bring anti-vaccine views and conflicts of interest to a group once respected for its scientific rigor and independence. 'We're making good progress,' Burns said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by MSNBC. He added that several agenda items would be delayed while the new panel got up to speed. Though not everyone in the room recognized him, Burns had been named in an April memo from Matt Buzzelli, the CDC's newly politically appointed chief of staff, announcing interim leadership changes after mass terminations and resignations. But among the CDC's longest-serving employees, especially those in offices related to vaccines, Burns was a known entity. He had been a staffer for congressional Republicans since the early '90s — best known as a key operator for the anti-vaccine movement. Originally from Georgia, Burns spent the last three decades in Florida, Texas and Washington, D.C., with his longest tenure, from 1995 to 2008, as legislative director and deputy chief of staff to former Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had wanted Weldon as CDC director, but that nomination was pulled over his anti-vaccine views. But because an adviser position doesn't require Senate confirmation, Kennedy got Weldon's number two. 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