#and know how a massive global effort to prevent the disease would be in effect

[gavfleetout]

As someone who discovered the lunar chronicles smack dab in the middle of 2020, every time the plague was brought up it broke my immersion so bad cuz I knew it wouldn’t go down that way.

I'm re-reading Cinder for the first time since its release (it holds up great) but after having lived through a global pandemic, the whole plague plot seems so insane. Like, where the fuck are your masks!? Sure, let's go digging through the garbage, what could possibly go wrong? Let's all still gather in large crowds in the market! Quarantining after being exposed to Letumosis is just a suggestion! I'd get it if the book was set in a regular fantasy world, BUT YOU'RE IN A SCI-FI UNIVERSE! HOW ARE YOU ALL NOT WEARING SPECIAL GAS MASKS ALL THE TIME!?

The one relatable thing about Cinder's evil step-mother is that she hardly ever goes outside. Like, bitch me too! I wouldn't go outside either if I didn't have to. Cinder could work remotely if she could get people to just drop off their broken stuff at her apartment!

[mariacallous]

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. routinely vows to “Make America Healthy Again.” But that talking point is aging about as poorly as his boss’s promises to lower prices and end the war in Ukraine.

A measles outbreak is spreading in Texas, with more than 540 active cases reported across 22 counties. Two children have died, and both were unvaccinated. That’s apparently what it took for RFK Jr. to finally encourage vaccination — sort of.

"The federal government's position, my position, is that people should get the measles vaccine," he said last week during a CBS News interview. But he then immediately undercut himself by adding, "the government should not be mandating those."

RFK Jr.’s self-defeating rhetoric about vaccines was also on display on Fox News last Friday, when he said “we need to do better at treating kids who have the disease, and not just saying the only answer is vaccination.”

Vaccine mandates are a critical public health tool, perhaps the most effective method to ensure herd immunity. But when enough people refuse vaccination for a disease, that lessens a community’s overall immunity and makes it easier for it to spread. That’s especially dangerous with respect to measles, a highly contagious airborne illness that a single person can spread to almost 10 people who are nearby and unprotected.

Under RFK Jr.’s leadership, the National Institutes of Health has terminated grants that would study and ideally overcome vaccine hesitancy. Most alarmingly, NIH cancelled programs to research new vaccines and treatments ahead of future pandemics.

This is the global health equivalent to George W. Bush shutting down any serious counterterrorism measures just a few years after 9/11. Far from making the country “healthy again,” RFK Jr. is sabotaging the very infrastructure that keeps Americans safe from preventable illness and prepares us for new diseases. It’s not hyperbole to state that millions of people could die as a result.

Science doesn’t work like this

As the measles outbreak grew in Texas, RFK Jr. announced during a cabinet meeting last Thursday that HHS would conduct a "massive testing and research effort" and “by September we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we will be able to eliminate those exposures.”

Trump responded by saying, “There’s got to be something artificial out there that’s doing this. If you can come up with that answer, where you stop taking something, eating something, or maybe it’s a shot. But something’s causing it.”

It’s not hard to see where this is headed.

RFK Jr. and Trump have both claimed without a shred of real evidence that vaccines cause autism, cases of which have risen in recent years due to increased awareness and improvements in diagnosis. Nonsense once promoted by B-list celebrities like Jenny McCarthy is now seriously discussed by the HHS secretary and US president. Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary.

Decades of research has shown no link between vaccines, particularly for measles, and autism, a developmental disorder. Studies have shown that genes play a major role in autism but no single environmental factor is responsible. RFK Jr., however, claims the exact opposite.

RFK Jr. announced at the cabinet meeting that HHS will release the “cause” for autism by September, like a new Marvel movie or iPhone. This makes a mockery of how credible science actually works. Like any zealot, he’s not interested in facts, research, or data at tension with his dogmatic beliefs. Instead, he proceeds from those beliefs and will elevate any quack studies or garbage science that “proves” what he already considers true.

Although a lifelong Democrat until 2023, Kennedy has long been an anti-science crank steeped in a conspiratorial worldview. He’s endorsed unproven claims about fluoride causing ADHD, hypothyroidism, and lowering IQ. He just ordered the CDC to end its fluoridation recommendation for drinking water. He wants to roll back regulations on raw milk, even though its consumption is far riskier than water with trace amounts of fluoride.

Kennedy ran for president as a Democrat before launching an independent campaign when it became clear he couldn’t win the primary. His August endorsement of Trump — timed just after Kamala Harris officially became the Democratic nominee — might’ve shocked some Democrats, but his unhinged public health views have long been on the same page as Trump’s.

Even prior to running for president, Trump promoted the debunked conspiracy theory linking vaccination with autism. He posted on Twitter in March 2014, “Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes — AUTISM. Many such cases.”

Six years later, the New York Times spun Trump as a changed man in an article headlined, “President Trump on Vaccines: From Skeptic to Cheerleader.” But “skeptic” was far too generous. Whatever interest Trump had in promoting covid vaccines ended as soon as he left office and developed a political interest in immiserating America.

Hucksterism as policy

As RFK Jr. turns HHS into a vehicle to spread deadly misinformation, it’s worth remembering that Republicans own this. He was confirmed in a party-line vote, with no support from members of his former party, and just one Republican voting no — Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor who said “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”

Republicans Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and actual doctor Bill Cassidy could have joined McConnell and blocked RFK Jr.’s confirmation, but they all caved. Cassidy justified his cowardice with a self-serving speech on the Senate floor where he said, “Vaccines save lives. They are safe. They do not cause autism” — true but meaningless drivel given the circumstances.

What happens when America faces another public health threat like covid? Though Trump himself was a leading purveyor of misinformation during the pandemic, he was helped along by government experts and serious medical professionals who mostly managed to inform the public in spite of him.

Now, Trump’s anti-science hucksterism is policy. The constraints are gone, and more kids will die because of it.

[comrade-meow]

New Zealand schools have introduced a climate change resource that suggests children “eat less meat and dairy”, even though teachers will not know how much meat or dairy any child in their care has eaten. Opinion pieces in the papers have called for the reduction of meat and dairy in hospital menus, not usually generous sources of such foods, despite the well-known risks of undernutrition, especially of protein, in the frail and elderly. Globally, the influential and once-objective medical journal the Lancet has hosted Eat Lancet, a coalition of vegan and vegetarian technocrats backed by processed food manufacturers, and promoted their agenda. The Guardian newspaper accepted an £626783 grant from the backers of Impossible Foods to run a series of articles against animal agriculture.

These initiatives, aimed at remodelling our food supply in a way that favours the multinational food processing and seed-and-chemical corporations, whose control of many aspects of farming and diet is already problematic, have run far ahead of the scientific community’s efforts to understand the health effects of such dietary change.

Our hunter-gatherer past

The Neolithic Revolution was the first alteration in human affairs that is generally considered worthy of the term Revolution. In Marx’s terms, it saw a change in the means of production sufficient to form new classes aware of their identities, and thus a change in the relations between people. Early humans had fed themselves in an opportunistic, hunter-gatherer fashion that tended to favour a diet of animals supplemented with plants where and when these were available. Large animals made the best meals but gathering activities could collect many smaller ones, as well as eggs, grubs etc.

The people of the Mesolithic era discovered that some animals could be herded and some plants grown in gardens (not usually by the same community, because one activity favours nomadism and the other favours a sedentary habit) but these activities, which greatly improved food security after the decline of the prehistoric mega-fauna due to hunting and climate pressures, tended to occur at the communal level and probably did not create major class differences between the people involved.

The invention of farming

The Neolithic Revolution, which unleashed the human potential for war, creativity, and social division, resulted from the identification of the germs of plants (specifically grains and legumes) as durable sources of energy. If grains were grown (I will use grains in the wider sense of “cereals”, after Braudel, including other dried germs such as peas) and there was a surplus, this surplus would still be edible over the next year, a year when drought or pests or diseases might wipe out the other food sources that hunter-gatherers depended on. This advantage was offset by the nutritional poverty of grain-based diets, so that tuberculosis probably became an endemic disease during this period,[1] but the existence of a less-perishable surplus allowed the diversion of part of the population away from food gathering for large parts of the year, and saw the creation of armies and other workforces.

In Europe, the Neolithic Revolution is dated at around 10,000 BC and its arrangements are a matter of prehistory, but in China this change occurred later and the written record around Bi-gu or grain avoidance includes folk-memories of conflict between grain eating and grain avoiding peoples.

The history of colonisation is the history of the conquest of lactose-intolerant peoples by lactose-tolerant populations, and of non-grain eaters by grain-eaters. In the Indian sub-continent, a combination of dairy herding and a cereal diet high in legumes uniquely allowed the survival of a substantially vegetarian population, and saw the conservation of genes favouring reproduction on such a diet, including genetic polymorphisms still rare in European populations (adaptive mutations only predominate where many individuals without them have failed to survive or reproduce).[2] That the Indian social system became more aggressively class-based than any other is probably no co-incidence; prejudice against meat-eating is still used as a tool of social control against minorities, while meat-eating is one way young Indians today identify as modern and egalitarian. However there were some important exceptions to the trend – the Aztecs were a hunter-gather people who conquered and dominated the Mesolithic agriculturalists of Mexico, and the Mongols were nomadic herders and hunters whose greater stamina and independence allowed them to defeat the rice-fed armies of the Chinese Emperors (after conquering this breadbasket, the successive Mongol Khans seem to have eaten and drunk themselves to death).

Early vegetarian ideology

In the European and Asian cereal-based societies the poorest classes went without meat, supplementing cereals when possible with buttermilk or blood pudding which were more economic replacements. The rich ate as much meat as they could. The idea that an entire society might avoid meat is a recent one with its roots in religious practice, and, insofar as it has any political basis, this flows in two distinct streams – the eco-fascist, in which meat avoidance is a sign of “purity”, most humans are a burden on the Earth, and the Indian vegetarians are of course Aryans. This is something like the vegetarian vision that Adolf Hitler picked up while studying anti-Semitism with Wagner’s heirs at Bayreuth.

And then there is a Marxist-Anarchist, and latterly Intersectional, version, founded on a valuation of animal rights as inseparable from, and a logical extension of, human rights. Vegetarianism was a frequent obsession of the early British Socialists; G.B. Shaw, who derived most of his energy from dairy fat and lived to the age of 94, made himself into a well-known example, and the idea was sufficiently entrenched among the British Socialists and their milieu that H.G. Wells preserved its internal contradictions for posterity in The Time Machine. In his far-future vision, humanity has evolved into two separate species. The Morlocks are descendants of working-class meat-eaters, the Eloi of leisure-class vegetarians – all Wells’ loathing is reserved for the Morlocks, yet it is obvious they are (still) the engineering brains keeping their world running and the Eloi fed. The Eloi are useless for anything but enjoying the sunshine and feeding the Morlocks, and the discordance in Wells’ progressive values as he describes both species is as shocking as anything else in the story.

The first large-scale experiment in plant-based protein was attempted by the Bolsheviks. As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story, but the bare bones are that the Soviets found their initial attempts to remodel the countryside rebuffed, blamed this on the recaltricance of the kulak class, and set out to destroy them. The problem being that the kulaks, owning most of the cattle and sheep across the Russian Republics, helped to feed the people. Beginning in the 1920s, soy experts from the USA (then the Western world’s leading soy producer) were among the many foreign technicians imported into Russia, and soy processing plants were built and soy production increased to 283,000 tonnes in 1931, the year Stalin unleashed enforced collectivisation and the terror against the kulaks (and also the Kazakhs, a herding people who suffered the largest proportionate loss of life during this period). This led to the loss of millions of animals, either killed by their dispossessed owners or mismanaged by their inexperienced new owners. The soy project was hardly able to prevent the massive famines that followed, and by 1935 soy production had dropped to 54,000 tonnes. Though soy milk would later prove useful during the siege of Leningrad, by the 1930s soy had probably only served one purpose, as a statistic needed aforehand to quell the objections of pragmatic delegates to the destruction of the kulaks and their livestock.

Today we face the revival of this idea, of plant protein that will create a world with no need for animal protein, and the remodelling of life in the countryside, with the new impetus of climate change as its driver. Livestock cycles natural carbon, meaning there is no net addition of C02 to the atmosphere – and its contribution to the shorter-lived methane precursor has not changed since 2000 (methane rises have been due to fracking, methane itself AKA “natural gas”, landfill, and rice production; methane-emitting animals have always existed on Earth in substantial numbers, and have not created a novel situation in the sense that the discovery of coal, oil and gas did). We have recently seen how much global disruption is required to reduce fossil fuel CO2 emissions to 2006 levels, levels which will still warm the planet if they continue. It could be still be worth reducing agricultural cycling of CO2 through methane, which is more warming than CO2 if this is cost-free, but is it?

Why humans evolved as meat eaters

Animal foods, and especially red meat, supply a constellation of nutrients not found together (if they are found at all) in any plant food. Nutrients are those chemicals essential for the functioning of the human organism, and plants, but not livestock, can survive well without nutrients such as amino acids, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are essential to humans. Surviving as a vegetarian or vegan is possible for some (perhaps assuming the genetic variants referred to earlier are present) but to thrive requires knowledge of these nutrients, where to find them, how to process the foods that supply them, or how to supplement them. Thriving as an omnivore or even a complete carnivore does not – nutritional sufficiency is the reason we evolved eating meat and other animal foods long before we learned there were such things as essential nutrients.

The reasons for avoiding meat or all animal foods can have a class basis – veganism may be taken up by educated middle-class adults, more likely to be exposed to “health food” ideas and aware of the need to supplement, some of whom then commercialise their habits as social media “influencers”. Meat avoidance is also being adopted increasingly by educated middle-class children for identity or compassionate reasons, but the poor may also avoid meat because of its cost when a loaf of bread or a packet of flavoured noodles can be bought for a dollar; these two motivations sometimes coincide when students in temporary poverty make a virtue of what they perceive to be a necessity.

Does the meat-avoiding behaviour of young people have unintended costs? Several observational studies have looked at the characteristics of meat-avoiding populations and found alarming increases in depression, anxiety and self-harm.

“The majority of studies, and especially the higher quality studies, showed that those who avoided meat consumption had significantly higher rates or risk of depression, anxiety, and/or self-harm behaviors. There was mixed evidence for temporal relations, but study designs and a lack of rigor precluded inferences of causal relations. Our study does not support meat avoidance as a strategy to benefit psychological health.”[3]

How can we explain these correlations? Why should we assume that they are causal?There are several lines of evidence to support a causal link: 1) several nutrients found in meat and animal foods are important factors in mood and cognition; vitamin B12, iron, carnitine, DHA, choline and tryptophan are some examples.[4] 2) the fatty acid mix in dairy and red meat has a similar composition to that of amniotic fluid and breast milk which has anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) effects in young animals.[5] 3) soy is a convenient and cheap replacement for animal protein; soy processing in Western diets results in a 10-fold higher level of the estrogenic contaminant isoflavone than that found in Asian diets.[6] Soy isoflavone causes anxiety behaviour in young female animals, and there is evidence supporting psychotropic and hormonal effects in humans.[7,8,9.10] Interestingly, while right-wing critiques of soy eating focus on effects it can have on young men, the scientific evidence for adverse effects in younger females, converting to HRT-like benefits after menopause, is stronger.[11] 4) other toxins found in plants, such as salicylates and oxalates, as well as problematic proteins such as gliadin/gluten and zein, may be present at higher levels in meat-free diets (but are not unique to them). A vegan mince sold in Countdown supermarkets is simply a coloured blend of soy protein and gluten, a protein linked to the risk of schizophrenia.[12] In the New Zealand context it would be relatively easy to confirm or dispute some of these associations. Everyone admitted to hospital for longer than a day supplies their dietary preferences. The dietetic preference data from psychiatric admissions could be both linked to outcomes over time and compared with the population average distribution, or the distribution in a ward where diet is least likely to play a role in admissions.

Iron deficiency in women

Young women in New Zealand are the most likely to report being vegan or vegetarian in surveys, as elsewhere in the world. Vegans in the Gender Studies field generate papers linking meat to masculinity, with the implication that this masculinity is toxic and might be improved by a plant-based diet.[13] The corollary of this belief – that women may therefore be weakened by meat-avoidance – is never considered. In a 1980 essay by Gloria Steinem called The Politics of Food (in the collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions) she describes some of the cultural constructs by which women are deprived of the good nutrition which men use to stay dominant. The belief that men need to eat red meat more often than women may have been valid when the average man was more likely to have to survive an attack by a wild bear than the average woman, but today it is mainly women who suffer from serious iron deficiency. The rate – and the cost to the health system – is increasing in New Zealand as more women give up meat. Iron deficiency anaemia in early pregnancy is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders in children, not an outcome that will increase the mother’s autonomy.[14]

In Georg Büchner’s 19th century “working class tragedy” Woyzeck, filmed by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the leading role and the subject of an opera by Alban Berg, the title character, a soldier, is subject to experimentation by a sadistic army doctor. The experiment involves Woyzeck living on nothing but peas. Peas may supply a complete protein, but Woyzeck goes insane; the deprivation being the final straw in his alienation. James Cameron, the film-maker responsible for Avatar and Titanic, is investing heavily in pea protein as if this were his gift to New Zealand. I am not sure whether he has watched Woyzeck – one would think he has.

Plant-based vs meat-based

Again, we have the specificity of plant germs as commodity; their low cost of production, long storage life and versatility of processing outcomes makes them an ideal investment and a robust one, as poverty and adversity increases their consumption, as we saw during the 2020 Lockdown Event. However, a plant-based burger is nutritionally greatly inferior to a meat burger, and that burger is often the most nutritious single food item many will people eat in the course of their day. The current push to eat a plant-based diet for “planetary health” is something that all the multinational food processors have signed up and provided funding for, and why not – Coca Cola, Unilever, Nestlé have always sold us plant-based foods. We notice that while iron-deficiency anaemia increases in New Zealand with the reason in plain sight, Nestlé scientists here in NZ are developing a more potent form of supplemental iron to add value to their products as their parent company backs the push to reduce meat. (As usual, it’s hard to separate the roles played by idealism and cynicism in the story). But, you may well ask, isn’t eating meat linked to an increased risk of cancer and heart disease? These associations are small to begin with, but they are also intensely confounded by social class and educational status. Supposing a factory that makes a carcinogenic chemical is hiring. Who is more likely to apply for that job – a meat eater (who will likely have a bigger family to support, among other considerations) or a vegan? Who, so to speak, eats all the pies, and needs food that is filling and nutritious without having to give it much thought? Who is more likely to work two jobs and be exposed to the disruptive metabolic effect of shift work? Carcinogen exposure and shift work are just two of the confounding variables ignored in diet epidemiology. (That meat-eating in Western populations may symbolise or associate with labour itself – as it did for H.G. Wells when he wrote The Time Machine – is not a consideration I have found discussed in the epidemiological literature.)

Certainly one can think of mechanisms that might link meat to disease, as one can with any food, but one can also think of protective mechanisms; several of the nutrients found mainly or only in animal foods are required for various antioxidant and immune defensive enzymes, and some like carnitine and EPA even have a place in the management of heart disease. The argument against meat-eating should not be confused with the argument for sometimes rationing a valuable food that is in short supply. The wartime rationing of meat in the UK is thought to have improved the health of the poorest by guaranteeing a greater supply than they had had previously, at a more affordable price. In Europe, the peasants who supplied the cities with meat, dairy and luxury foods such as oysters were sometimes forced by network disruptions to consume these foods – which many of them had never tasted before – with benefit to their own health.

The plant-based agenda can scarcely be expected to recognise these benefits, or understand the argument summarised by Williams and Dunbar (with regard to the vitamin nicotinamide and amino acid tryptophan in their tuberculosis paper), that if better data collection and analysis resulted in us ”…returning to our egalitarian past and redistributing meat or its components that supply NAD (avoiding both the highs and the lows between individuals and over individual lifetimes) [this] may be more effective than subsidizing corn grain (while the increased prosperity from unlocking human potential should pay for the intervention).”[1] Progress – which includes unlocking human potential from the chains of preventable mental and physical disease – depends on good data, and we do not yet seem to collate the data required to know whether or for whom plant-based diets are safe in New Zealand.

George Henderson works as a researcher for Professor Grant Schofield and the team behind the What The Fat books and the social enterprise PreKure, which has been running free lifestyle and health programs through the lockdown. He is the author or co-author of several scientific articles and letters published by the BMJ, Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, the JAMA, and other journals, including an influential review of low carbohydrate diets in diabetes management for the New Zealand Medical Journal. A musician, songwriter and amateur musicologist, he has recently presented a series of podcasts on 20th century women composers for Karyn Hay’s Lately show on RNZ.

References:

[1] Williams AC, Dunbar RI. Big brains, meat, tuberculosis, and the nicotinamide switches: co-evolutionary relationships with modern repercussions?. Int J Tryptophan Res. 2013;6:73‐88. Published 2013 Oct 15. doi:10.4137/IJTR.S12838 [2] Kothapalli KS, Ye K, Gadgil MS, et al. Positive Selection on a Regulatory Insertion-Deletion Polymorphism in FADS2 Influences Apparent Endogenous Synthesis of Arachidonic Acid. Mol Biol Evol. 2016;33(7):1726‐1739. doi:10.1093/molbev/msw049

[3] Urska Dobersek, Gabrielle Wy, Joshua Adkins, Sydney Altmeyer, Kaitlin Krout, Carl J. Lavie & Edward Archer (2020) Meat and mental health: a systematic review of meat abstention and depression, anxiety, and related phenomena, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2020.1741505 [4] Frédéric Leroy & Nathan Cofnas (2019) Should dietary guidelines recommend low red meat intake?, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2019.1657063 [5] Contreras CM, Rodríguez-Landa JF, García-Ríos RI, Cueto-Escobedo J, Guillen-Ruiz G, Bernal-Morales B. Myristic acid produces anxiolytic-like effects in Wistar rats in the elevated plus maze. Biomed Res Int. 2014;2014:492141. doi:10.1155/2014/492141 [6] Fernandez-Lopez A, Lamothe V, Delample M, Denayrolles M, Bennetau-Pelissero C. Removing isoflavones from modern soyfood: Why and how?. Food Chem. 2016;210:286‐294. doi:10.1016/j.foodchem.2016.04.126 [7] Hicks KD, Sullivan AW, Cao J, Sluzas E, Rebuli M, Patisaul HB. Interaction of bisphenol A (BPA) and soy phytoestrogens on sexually dimorphic sociosexual behaviors in male and female rats. Horm Behav. 2016;84:121‐126. doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2016.06.010 [8] Tillett T. Full of beans? Early soy exposure associated with less feminine play in girls [published correction appears in Environ Health Perspect. 2012 Jan;120(1):A17]. Environ Health Perspect. 2011;119(12):A525. doi:10.1289/ehp.119-a525b [9] Adgent MA, Daniels JL, Rogan WJ, et al. Early-life soy exposure and age at menarche. Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 2012;26(2):163‐175. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3016.2011.01244.x [10] Hibbeln, J.R., SanGiovanni, J.P., Golding, J., Emmett, P.M., Northstone, K., Davis, J.M., Schuckit, M. and Heron, J. (2017), Meat Consumption During Pregnancy and Substance Misuse Among Adolescent Offspring: Stratification of TCN2 Genetic Variants. Alcohol Clin Exp Res, 41: 1928-1937. doi:10.1111/acer.13494 [11] Patisaul HB, Jefferson W. The pros and cons of phytoestrogens. Front Neuroendocrinol. 2010;31(4):400‐419. doi:10.1016/j.yfrne.2010.03.003 [12] Čiháková D, Eaton WW, Talor MV, et al. Gliadin-related antibodies in schizophrenia. Schizophr Res. 2018;195:585‐586. doi:10.1016/j.schres.2017.08.051 [13] Jessica Greenebaum & Brandon Dexter (2018) Vegan men and hybrid masculinity, Journal of Gender Studies, 27:6, 637-648, DOI: 10.1080/09589236.2017.1287064 [14] Wiegersma AM, Dalman C, Lee BK, Karlsson H, Gardner RM. Association of Prenatal Maternal Anemia With Neurodevelopmental Disorders. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019;76(12):1294–1304. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.2309

[jswdmb1]

Identical

I don't just know you, I've grown like that too...

If I don't dislike you, I'm withdrawn, unrighteous too...

I’m no prophet, I'm your friend

Take my advice, make your mistakes”

- Phoenix

Every four years, the PBS series “Frontline” presents an episode called “The Choice”.  It presents the two candidates running in that particular presidential election.  But, it is not a show about the current campaign, policy issues or even the politics behind the particular candidates.  It is instead a personal biography of each candidate up to the point of the current election told chronologically.  The show portrays each individual’s story back and forth as the years go on that allow the viewer to both understand the people behind the front their campaigns present, but also provides a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the two candidates.  I have watched this particular episode of Frontline in every presidential election dating back to 2000, and I find it to consistently be the single best source of information for me to decide (or confirm) which candidate I am to support in that year’s election.

I was going to pass on this year’s version as I didn’t think there was anything I could learn about either man, and my choice is already made, but I watched anyway.  I have to admit that I was surprised to pick up nuggets of information that were new to me such as that Joe Biden’s first wife and daughter were killed six weeks after his election to the Senate for the first time, or that Donald Trump’s mother fell ill when he was very small and was effectively absent for his nurturing years.  Those are facts that seemingly are unimportant when weighing which man to support in a presidential election, but I think we have all found out in the last four years that an individual’s personality, temperament, and morality are just as important as their stance on any issue or their knowledge of the inner workings of government.  In the example of this year’s election, it finally crystallized the stark difference between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that has made my decision for whom to vote so easy.

Let’s start with the challenger Biden.  If there are two things that are clear about Joe, it is 1) he makes a lot of mistakes, and 2) he has overcome quite a bit of adversity of the years whether they are of his own doing or not.  You can watch the show to see the examples of both, but Biden’s approach to problems in his life has been remarkably consistent.  First, he acknowledges the problem exists and that he has responsibility to address it.  Next, if it was a problem of his own doing, he owns up to it.  Often times, he does this quite clumsily and occasionally makes things worse, but he does, at a minimum, take responsibility.  Finally, once it is out there, he puts his head down and gets to work with an amazing ability to ignore the long odds that he may face or the chirping he hears in the background about how badly he messed up and/or how he will never make it right.  He simply has a fundamental belief that humans make mistakes and he is no exception to that rule.  At times, it would be refreshing if he demonstrated better that he learns from some of these mistakes so as not to repeat them, but there is at least a good faith effort even if the execution at times is mediocre.

There is no need to go into detail how Trump behaves whenever he is faced with a problem and it is well documented that he never admits to making a mistake (and likely doesn’t even believe he has ever made one).  There are daily examples of this behavior and running through the list at this point is massively unappealing.  What I do find interesting is why he is this way.  The show goes into great detail about the influence three men have had on his life. The first is his father Fred.  We all know his background and his ruthlessness in business and within his personal relationships and this was applied to each of his sons.  The first, Fred Jr., bristled at the notion of going into the family business, and became an airline pilot instead (a decision for which both father and brother Donald would mock him mercilessly and drove him to alcoholism and an early death).  Fred Sr. then set his sights on son #2 who was more than willing to take up the cause.  After a stint in military school that hardened his outlook on life and reduced what little emotional capacity he had, he moved into his father’s footsteps and practiced the approach that personal gain is everything and little else matters.

The second man was a lawyer named Roy Cohn.  Cohn rose to fame in the 1950s as Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet man in the blacklisting of innocent American citizens for unfounded (and mostly false) accusations of communism.  Despite the shame eventually brought upon him for that role, he rose to become one of the most powerful attorneys in New York.  A client of his was a young Donald Trump and Cohn taught him three things that helped him rise from the ashes: 1) deny anything that makes you look bad as even having happened 2) attack those that bring these things up and deflect the blame elsewhere, and 3) never take responsibility for your actions unless there is a transactional gain that serves you.  This has been Donald Trump’s blueprint his entire life and it can be found in his business, his marriages, and certainly his presidency.  He literally has never operated in a manner that is different in any aspect of his life, so the fact that this has come through during his time in the White House should be surprising to no one who witnessed him before his election.

The final man was the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale who was the pastor at the church Donald Trump attended for over 50 years.  Peale’s claim-to-fame was the publishing of a book The Power of Positive Thinking and the Trumps followed it like their bible.  Boiled down, the main tenant of the book was that one must think positively at all costs and negative thoughts must be barred from the mind or success cannot be achieved.  That seems okay on the surface, but it becomes a problem when situations require more effort than simply a good thought and a wish that it goes away.  This clearly explains Trump’s complete inability to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.  Even though he obviously intellectually understood the severity and danger of the virus from his recordings on the Woodward tapes, this brainwashing of Peale on the Trump family made it impossible for Donald to acknowledge that the problem existing in any way.  When combined with Cohn’s teachings on taking no responsibility and Fred Sr.’s example of bulldozing past anyone who disagrees with you (like a scientist or doctor), the end result of his response makes a lot of sense.  It’s why even when catching the disease himself, he views it as a positive event that only he could dream up.

I do find it curious that I spent three long paragraphs on Trump with only one brief paragraph on Biden, but that meshes with each approach they have on the basic issues of life as a human being which is confronting adversity and accepting that we do make mistakes.  Biden’s approach is simple and to the point, sometimes to a fault.  Trump has this complicated troika of mad men’s teachings running through his head when problems come up and it is no wonder he is paralyzed with inaction when it comes time to do something about it.  For me, this is the defining trait between the two men that seems to tower over everything else about them personally or this election in general.  The question then is what do we do with this information.

I’m certain it is obvious which way I am going to go, but it may surprise you why.  You see, I have struggled myself with some of these same issues that each man has faced.  Up until a few years ago, I actually would describe myself as really being more Trump-like in my approach to life than I really care to admit.  I rarely acknowledged I was wrong and often blamed others for problems that were within and could only be solved by the guy responsible for them in the first place – me.  This attitude prevented me from seeing what was the real root of my unhappiness and depression and did not allow for me to acknowledge that my drinking and moderate drug use had become a problem.  It wasn’t until everything broke down and I ended up in an intense six-week program of therapy and deep soul searching that I discovered that mistakes we make are what builds us up and not what tears us down.  Granted, we need to learn from those mistakes to become better people and achieve great things, but admitting responsibility is the only path to doing either of those things.  I know now after a few years that I will never get things totally right, but I can get up each day and at least try to improve on the one before.  At a minimum, I strive to not make things worse, and it all gives me strength to fight whatever demons I have head on.  It’s a trial-and-error approach for sure, but I don’t see how it can be done any other way.

And given where things are at now, I don’t see how any other approach can help us overcome the enormous problems we face at this time whether it be COVID-19, or the economy, or global warming, or any other massive threat we face right now.  There is no amount of positive thinking that will help us overcome any one of these things and clearly wishing the problems away (or denying they even exist) is not going to work.  We need someone who understands this and there is no doubt the current president has no ability to do so.  Joe Biden may not be perfect, and he is not going to get us all of the way there on likely any one thing, but we have to start somewhere.  And, if there is one thing that he is good at, it is looking at a big hill, putting his head down, and climbing up.  It’s not pretty, and it isn’t the easy thing to do, but it is what we need right now more than anything.  

That is a tough pill to swallow for many Americans who think their freedom is a birthright that requires no effort, but that fantasy has been squashed.  In three weeks, the choice is clear about what needs to be done and the decision is up to you: are you going to acknowledge fault and accept responsibility for our collective actions that have led us to this point and vote for Joe, or are you going to give Trump another four years by simply wishing that all our problems away (spoiler alert – they don’t)?  The politically correct thing to say at this point is that either way you decide please make sure you vote, but I cannot apply that here.  The stakes are too high and the path is too obvious – either vote for Joe or don’t vote at all.  That second option may be tough for some people to take, but consider it your first step on a long road to recovery and redemption not just for yourself but our nation.

Good luck, everyone, we are going to need it.

-        Jim

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Trump administration backs off plan requiring international students to take face-to-face classes (Washington Post) The Trump administration on Tuesday dropped its much-criticized plan to require international college students to leave the United States unless they are enrolled in the fall term in at least one face-to-face class. The abrupt reversal, disclosed in a federal court in Boston, came a little more than a week after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued an edict that stunned U.S. higher education leaders and students worldwide. Under the July 6 policy from ICE, international students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities for the fall semester faced a mandate to take at least one course in person. Those students, ICE said, “may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States.” That mandate posed a major obstacle to plans for online teaching and learning that colleges are developing in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had sued to block the new policy. In a hearing in that case on Tuesday, held before U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs, the judge announced that the schools and the federal government had reached an agreement that made the lawsuit moot. Separately, 20 state attorneys general had also challenged the guidance in court in recent days.

Patients are still delaying essential care out of fear of coronavirus (Washington Post) Jim Johnson was elated when his hip replacement, canceled in March along with other elective surgeries, finally was performed in May. For months, his pain had been so severe he couldn’t sleep, golf or do his job. Just a few weeks after the operation, he tossed his cane away. Hospitals and doctors practices across the country are hoping there are a lot more Jim Johnsons out there—patients willing to shake off fears about the coronavirus and come back for tests and treatments put on hold early in the pandemic. Yet persuading them to return for non-emergency care is a tricky message right now, with the virus slamming the South and West. In parts of Texas, Arizona, Florida and other states, elective procedures have been halted again. For some patients, the spike in infections is reigniting fears about catching the virus in a hospital or a doctor’s office. Doctors worry that could undermine their efforts to win people back, and lead to more lives being lost from other, often preventable causes, such as cancer and heart disease. Doctors say “elective procedures,” including for cancer, can’t be delayed indefinitely without ill effects. Hospitals, meanwhile, see orthopedic, cardiac and cancer surgeries as their key to survival after losing billions of dollars on the shutdown of lucrative procedures.

Global surge in coronavirus cases is being fed by the developing world—and the U.S. (Washington Post) When the United States began shutting down this spring, a virus that emerged months earlier as a mysterious outbreak in a Chinese provincial capital had infected a total of fewer than 200,000 people worldwide. So far this week, the planet has added an average of more than 200,000 cases every day. The novel coronavirus—once concentrated in specific cities or countries—has now crept into virtually every corner of the globe and is wreaking havoc in multiple major regions at once. But the impact is not being felt evenly. Poorer nations throughout Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa are bearing a growing share of the caseload, even as wealthier countries in Western Europe and East Asia enjoy a relative respite after having beaten back the worst effects through rigorously enforced lockdowns. And then there’s the United States, which leads the world in new cases and, as with many nations that possess far fewer resources, has shown no sign of being able to regain control.

Rules once lifted are reimposed to try to curb new outbreaks (AP) Virus restrictions once lifted are being reimposed, shutting businesses and curbing people’s social lives as communities try to curb a disease resurgence before it spins out of control. Residents of Australia’s second-largest city were warned on Wednesday to comply with lockdown regulations or face tougher restrictions. Melbourne’s 5 million people and part of the city’s semi-rural surroundings are a week into a new, six-week lockdown to contain a new outbreak there. Indian authorities will impose lockdowns in high-risk areas in nearly a dozen states as the nation’s coronavirus caseload approaches 1 million. Renewed restrictions took effect in Hong Kong on Wednesday, with public gatherings limited to four people, restaurants restricted to takeout after 6 p.m., and a one-week closure for gyms, karaoke bars, and selected other businesses. Masks also are mandated on public transit for the first time, with the non-compliant being fined. In the U.S., places including Washington state are delaying timetables for reopening their economies. Gov. Jay Inslee said counties will remain at their current stage of economic reopening at least until July 28.

Chaotic protests prompt soul-searching in Portland, Oregon (AP) Nearly two months of nightly protests that have devolved into violent clashes with police have prompted soul-searching in Portland, Oregon, a city that prides itself on its progressive reputation but is increasingly polarized over how to handle the unrest. Divisions have deepened among elected officials about the legitimacy of the more violent protests—striking at the heart of Portland’s identity as an ultraliberal haven where protest is seen as a badge of honor. Small groups of protesters have set fires, launched fireworks and sprayed graffiti on public buildings, including police precincts and the federal courthouse, leading to nearly nightly clashes with police who have used force that’s caused injuries. Similar unrest engulfed many U.S. cities when Floyd died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck on May 25. But in Portland, which is familiar ground for the loosely organized, far-left activists known as “antifa,” or anti-fascists, the protests never stopped. Lost in the debate are the downtown businesses racking up millions in property damage and lost sales and the voices of the hundreds of thousands of Portland residents who have stayed off the streets. “The impact is terrible because what people have seen on the TV ... has scared people who live outside the downtown. They feel it’s that way 24 hours a day,” said David Margulis, who said the protests have caused sales at his jewelry store to drop more than 50%. “I talk to people, on the phone, who tell me: ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever come downtown again.’”

Drug cartel ‘narco-antennas’ make life dangerous for Mexico’s cell tower repairmen (Reuters) The young technician shut off the electricity at a cellular tower in rural Mexico to begin some routine maintenance. Within 10 minutes, he had company: three armed men dressed in fatigues emblazoned with the logo of a major drug cartel. The traffickers had a particular interest in that tower, owned by Boston-based American Tower Corp, which rents space to carriers on its thousands of cellular sites in Mexico. The cartel had installed its own antennas on the structure to support their two-way radios, but the contractor had unwittingly blacked out the shadowy network. The visitors let him off with a warning. The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters. Traffickers often erect their own radio antennas in rural areas. They also install so-called parasite antennas on existing cell towers, layering their criminal communications network on top of the official one. By piggybacking on telecom companies’ infrastructure, cartels save money and evade detection since their own towers are more easily spotted and torn down, law enforcement experts said.

Massive flooding in Southern China (Foreign Policy) Floods in Southern China are a recurring threat, but they are worse than ever this year—with some 38 million people evacuated and at least 141 dead. Rainfall has been double than the predicted amount in many places, threatening millions of lives and numerous important cultural sites. Thousands of soldiers have been dispatched to help shore up defenses against the rising tides. Water control has been a preoccupation for every Chinese ruler, and it will only worsen with climate change. China’s worst-known flooding, in 1931, killed over 2 million people.

South China Sea positions (Foreign Policy) The United States has dispatched two aircraft carriers—likely to be backed by British support—to the South China Sea, increasing the possibility of a regional flash point. It has also declared its formal alignment against China’s disputed claims for the first time, saying that it would use “all tools” to oppose them. In the last decade, China has made significant gains in the South China Sea, building a formidable infrastructure of artificial islands to act as bases while strengthening its naval militia. It is also increasingly aggressive in challenging rival claimants, including stalking Vietnamese oil ships and clashing with fishing boats. The U.S. move is long overdue, but it’s also risky: Xi stakes considerable credibility on the South China Sea claims, and there’s no likelihood of Beijing backing down. The pressure on Chinese officials and military personnel to demonstrate their nationalist enthusiasm is growing, increasing the chance of serious conflict similar to the deadly clash on the Indian border.

Trump signs Hong Kong sanctions law (Foreign Policy) On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump continued a week of moves against China by signing a new law that imposes sanctions on Chinese banks doing business with Chinese officials involved with new national security laws in Hong Kong. The president also signed an executive order, largely mirroring existing policy, that revokes the special treatment Hong Kong had received from the United States under the “One Country, Two Systems” doctrine.

Red alert in Tokyo (Reuters) Tokyo raised its coronavirus alert to the highest “red” level on Wednesday, alarmed by a recent spike in daily new cases to record highs, with Governor Yuriko Koike describing the situation in the Japanese capital as “rather severe”. The resurgence of the virus could add to the growing pressure on policymakers to shore up the world’s No. 3 economy, which analysts say is set to shrink at its fastest pace in decades this fiscal year due to the pandemic. “We are in a situation where we should issue warnings to citizens and businesses,” Koike told a press conference, urging residents to refrain from unnecessary travel.

Lebanon looks to China as US, Arabs refuse to help in crisis (AP) Facing a worsening economic crisis and with little chance of Western or oil-rich Arab countries providing assistance without substantial reforms, Lebanon’s cash-strapped government is looking east, hoping to secure investments from China that could bring relief. But help from Beijing risks alienating the United States, which has suggested such a move could come at the cost of Lebanese-U.S. ties. A tiny nation of 5 million on a strategic Mediterranean crossroads between Asia and Europe, Lebanon has long been a site where rivalries between Iran and Saudi Arabia have played out. Now, it’s becoming a focus of escalating tensions between China and the West. In recent months, the Lebanese pound has lost around 80% of its value against the dollar, prices have soared uncontrollably, and much of its middle class has been plunged into poverty. Talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout have faltered, and international donors have refused to unlock $11 billion pledged in 2018, pending major economic reforms and anti-corruption measures. Left with few choices, Prime Minister Hassan Diab’s government—supported by the Iran-backed Hezbollah and its allies—is seeking help from China.

[deniscollins]

Marc Benioff: We Need a New Capitalism

Should the Security and Exchange Commission require public companies to publicly disclose their key stakeholders and show how they are impacting those stakeholders: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Capitalism, I acknowledge, has been good to me.

Over the past 20 years, the company that I co-founded, Salesforce, has generated billions in profits and made me a very wealthy person. I have been fortunate to live a life beyond the wildest imaginations of my great-grandfather, who immigrated to San Francisco from Kiev in the late 1800s.

Yet, as a capitalist, I believe it’s time to say out loud what we all know to be true: Capitalism, as we know it, is dead.

Yes, free markets — and societies that cherish scientific research and innovation — have pioneered new industries, discovered cures that have saved millions from disease and unleashed prosperity that has lifted billions of people out of poverty. On a personal level, the success that I’ve achieved has allowed me to embrace philanthropy and invest in improving local public schools and reducing homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area, advancing children’s health care and protecting our oceans.

But capitalism as it has been practiced in recent decades — with its obsession on maximizing profits for shareholders — has also led to horrifying inequality. Globally, the 26 richest people in the world now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people, and the relentless spewing of carbon emissions is pushing the planet toward catastrophic climate change. In the United States, income inequality has reached its highest level in at least 50 years, with the top 0.1 percent — people like me — owning roughly 20 percent of the wealth while many Americans cannot afford to pay for a $400 emergency. It’s no wonder that support for capitalism has dropped, especially among young people.

To my fellow business leaders and billionaires, I say that we can no longer wash our hands of our responsibility or what people do with our products. Yes, profits are important, but so is society. And if our quest for greater profits leaves our world worse off than before, all we will have taught our children is the power of greed.

It’s time for a new capitalism — a more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone and where businesses, including tech companies, don’t just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact.

What might a new capitalism look like?

First, business leaders need to embrace a broader vision of their responsibilities by looking beyond shareholder return and also measuring their stakeholder return. This requires that they focus not only on their shareholders, but also on all of their stakeholders — their employees, customers, communities and the planet. Fortunately, nearly 200 executives with the Business Roundtable recently committed their companies, including Salesforce, to this approach, saying that the “purpose of a corporation” includes “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.” As a next step, the government could formalize this commitment, perhaps with the Security and Exchange Commission requiring public companies to publicly disclose their key stakeholders and show how they are impacting those stakeholders.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. Some business leaders objected to the landmark declaration. The Council of Institutional Investors argued that “it is government, not companies, that should shoulder the responsibility of defining and addressing societal objectives.” When asked whether companies should serve all stakeholders and whether capitalism should be updated, Vice President Mike Pence warned against “leftist policies.”

But suggesting that companies must choose between doing well and doing good is a false choice. Successful businesses can and must do both. In fact, with political dysfunction in Washington, D.C., Americans overwhelmingly say C.E.O.s should take the lead on economic and social challenges, and employees, investors and customers increasingly seek out companies that share their values.

When government is unable or unwilling to act, business should not wait. Our experience at Salesforce shows that profit and purpose go hand in hand and that business can be the greatest platform for change.

Legislation to close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act have stalled in Congress for years, and today women still only make about 80 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men. But congressional inaction does not absolve companies from their responsibility. Since learning that we were paying women less than men for equal work at Salesforce, we have spent $10.3 million to ensure equal pay; today we conduct annual audits to ensure that pay remains equal. Just about every company, I suspect, has a pay gap — and every company can close it now.

For many businesses, giving back to their communities is an afterthought — something they only do after they’ve turned a profit. But by integrating philanthropy into our company culture from the beginning — giving 1 percent of our equity, time and technology — Salesforce has donated nearly $300 million to worthy causes, including local public schools and addressing homelessness. To me, the boys and girls in local schools and homeless families on the streets of our city are our stakeholders, too. Entrepreneurs looking to develop great products and develop their communities can join the 9,000 companies in the Pledge 1% movement and commit to donating 1 percent of their equity, time and product, starting on their first day of business.

Nationally, despite massive breaches of consumer information, lawmakers in Washington seem unable to pass a national privacy law. California and other states are moving ahead with their own laws, forcing consumers and companies to navigate a patchwork of different regulations. Rather than instinctively opposing new regulations, tech leaders should support a strong, comprehensive national privacy law — perhaps modeled on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation — and recognize that protecting privacy and upholding trust is ultimately good for business.

Globally, few nations are meeting their targets to fight climate change, the current United States presidential administration remains determined to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and global emissions continue to rise. As governments fiddle, there are steps that business can take now, while there’s still time, to prevent the global temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Every company can do something, whether reducing emissions in their operations and across their sector, striving for net-zero emissions like Salesforce, moving toward renewable energies or aligning their operations and supply chains with emissions reduction targets.

Skeptical business leaders who say that having a purpose beyond profit hurts the bottom line should look at the facts. Research shows that companies that embrace a broader mission — and, importantly, integrate that purpose into their corporate culture — outperform their peers, grow faster, and deliver higher profits. Salesforce is living proof that new capitalism can thrive and everyone can benefit. We don’t have to choose between doing well and doing good. They’re not mutually exclusive. In fact, since becoming a public company in 2004, Salesforce has delivered a 3,500 percent return to our shareholders. Values create value.

Of course, C.E.O. activism and corporate philanthropy alone will never be enough to meet the immense scale of today’s challenges. It could take $23 billion a year to address racial inequalities in our public schools. College graduates are drowning in $1.6 trillion of student debt. It will cost billions to retrain American workers for the digital jobs of the future. Trillions of dollars of investments will be needed to avert the worst effects of climate change. All this, when our budget deficit has already surpassed $1 trillion.

How, exactly, is our country going to pay for all this?

That is why a new capitalism must also include a tax system that generates the resources we need and includes higher taxes on the wealthiest among us. Local efforts — like the tax I supported last year on San Francisco’s largest companies to address our city’s urgent homelessness crisis — will help. Nationally, increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change.

The culture of corporate America needs to change, and it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to do it. Every C.E.O. and every company must recognize that their responsibilities do not stop at the edge of the corporate campus. When we finally start focusing on stakeholder value as well as shareholder value, our companies will be more successful, our communities will be more equal, our societies will be more just and our planet will be healthier.

[xtruss]

Vaccine Nationalism Harms Everyone and Protects No One

The World Health Organization’s chief argues that hoarding vaccines isn’t just immoral—its medically self-defeating.

— By Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus | FEBRUARY 2, 2021 | Foreign Policy

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaks at a press conference after a meeting about the COVID-19 outbreak at the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva on June 25, 2020. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Imadges

We are in a race against time. The development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines in record time is a remarkable testament to modern scientific capabilities. Whether it will bring an end to this terrible pandemic is a test of the world’s political will and moral commitment.

Despite the growing number of vaccine options, current manufacturing capacity meets only a fraction of global need. Vaccines are the best chance of bringing this pandemic under control—unless leaders succumb to vaccine nationalism.

International collaboration among scientists was critical to vaccine development, but now weak cooperation between nations is a major barrier to achieving worldwide vaccination at the scale needed to end the pandemic. Vaccine equity isn’t just a slogan; it protects people everywhere, protects the existing shots from new vaccine-resistant variants, and strengthens the international community’s ability to stop COVID-19.

At present, rich countries with just 16 percent of the world’s population have bought up 60 percent of the world’s vaccine supply. Many of these countries aim to vaccinate 70 percent of their adult population by midyear in pursuit of herd immunity. But COVAX—the multilateral mechanism created by the World Health Organization together with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi, the vaccine alliance, to ensure that vaccines reach all people everywhere—is struggling to purchase enough doses to cover just 20 percent of the population of lower-income countries by the end of 2021.

Vaccine allocation must not become a zero-sum game. Vaccine nationalism is not just morally indefensible. It is epidemiologically self-defeating and clinically counterproductive.Vaccine nationalism is not just morally indefensible. It is epidemiologically self-defeating and clinically counterproductive. Market-driven mechanisms alone are insufficient to achieve the goal of stopping the pandemic by achieving herd immunity with vaccines. Limited supplies and overwhelming demand create winners and losers. Neither is morally or medically acceptable during a pandemic.

“Vaccine nationalism is not just morally indefensible. It is epidemiologically self-defeating and clinically counterproductive.”

Allowing the majority of the world’s population to go unvaccinated will not only perpetuate needless illness and deaths and the pain of ongoing lockdowns, but also spawn new virus mutations as COVID-19 continues to spread among unprotected populations. Unchecked spread can result in the emergence of more contagious variants, leading to a steep rise in cases. It is a vicious cycle. Faster spread means more people are being infected and more people are dying as health care systems become overwhelmed.

A hermetic seal between the world’s haves and have nots is neither desirable nor possible. This coronavirus spreads quickly and often silently, before symptoms develop, or with mild ones common to multiple diseases. These clinical characteristics combined with uncontrolled spread and the global flow of people means that there is a risk that new variants will continue to emerge and spread between countries.

Most troublingly, new mutations could lead to vaccine resistance. There is already evidence that some vaccines are less effective against the variants first identified in Brazil and South Africa. Vaccines were based on version 1.0 of the virus—but new viruses, like software, are constantly evolving. The new variants may infect people who have already survived an earlier version of the virus. It is also possible that the virus could become more deadly. A small increase in lethality would have a catastrophic effect.

Growing vaccine nationalism is also socially and economically counterproductive. Unprotected populations and communities everywhere will continue to suffer the enormous secondary effects of the pandemic. Continued lockdowns mean economic devastation, with more people plunged into poverty and more lives cut short. A study by the International Chamber of Commerce shows that fully vaccinating the population of rich countries while neglecting poor ones could cost rich countries as much as $4.5 trillion in lost economic activity.

Children are suffering the worst collateral damage. Lost schooling means more child brides and child laborers, greater hunger, and increased gender inequality. The effect of lost education is permanent, leading to shorter, less fulfilling lives.

At the moment, there are not enough vaccine doses in any country, but the shortfall in poor countries is particularly dire. As long as world leaders are calculating whose lives and livelihoods to prioritize, as long as everyone is scrambling to secure enough doses, we are all losing the fight. The main vaccine producers are working to increase production, but they are nowhere near meeting demand.

Governments and companies must come together to overcome this artificial scarcity. There are many steps that can be taken to ramp up vaccine production and broaden distribution. These include openly sharing vaccine manufacturing technology, intellectual property, and know-how through the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, temporarily waiving intellectual property barriers, and expanding voluntary contracting between manufacturers.

Open-sourcing will enable immediate use of untapped production capacity, through such initiatives as the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network, and help build additional manufacturing bases—especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—which will be essential to meeting ongoing demand for COVID-19 booster shots and future vaccines. Expanding production globally would make poor countries less dependent on donations from rich ones. This is essential to achieve true health equality and global health security.

The international community cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate the terms or the timeframe for ending the pandemic. The coronavirus is not only indifferent to profits and politics; it is still evolving. The longer we allow billions of people to go unvaccinated, the greater the possibility that new variants will develop vaccine resistance. Vaccine nationalism combined with a restrictive approach to vaccine production is in fact more likely to prolong the pandemic—which would be tantamount to medical malpractice on a global scale.

Despite massive investment, the therapeutic options are limited, and there is no reliable cure. Since vaccines are critical to preventing death, it is vital to maintain their effectiveness. So far, vaccination efforts have rightfully prioritized those at greatest risk of dying: the elderly.

Governments are also urgently moving to protect health care workers, the first line of defense, who risk their lives to save others on a daily basis. The WHO estimates at least 30,000 health care workers have already died from COVID-19—and it could be more than twice that figure—exacerbating a preexisting global shortage of medical professionals.

Beyond each personal tragedy, the multiplier effect of their loss from the work force permanently diminishes the world’s clinical and surveillance capacity, increases COVID-19’s death toll, and lessens the chances of detecting the next pandemic threat before it’s too late. Countries with supplies over and above what they need to vaccinate their health workers, elderly, and people with underlying conditions could urgently donate excess doses through COVAX to help meet this crucial need.

But these urgent needs are just the beginning. To control the pandemic, the only permanent solution is to vaccinate as many people all over the world as fast as possible. That means radically stepping up production. Every week of delay increases the suffering and the social and economic carnage.

If pandemics are microbial wars, then vaccines are our preferred weapons of mass salvation. But they are not a panacea. Stopping this pandemic also requires effective measures such as improved indoor ventilation in workplaces and schools as well as tools that engage everyone in active combat against the virus, such as rapid home tests, masks, and physical distancing.

[senior70]

The WHO African Region Certified as Polio Free August 2020

A Word or Two to the AntiVaxx Community

It was the summer of 1954, and I as a twelve year old was looking forward to eight weeks of summer vacation and all the adventures that would bring with my friends. But, it was not to be. I and three other boys from my school were identified as having been in close contact with a boy who had developed the symptoms of Polio (Poliomyelitis), an infectious disease that left many survivors permanently crippled or damaged by paralysis in some way. The disease was initially referred to as “Infantile Paralysis”. 

In 1947 Britain experienced a Polio epidemic and every subsequent summer, a wave of infections soared, particularly targeting young people, though also adults. It was a devastating disease, often with life long and life changing consequences. Though, at first it was not known how the disease was transmitted, it was clear that it was primarily a summer season disease and that swimming pools and beaches were, in particular, associated with rapid spread. Many were closed in an effort to dampen the spread.

That summer of 1954 I was to remain confined for six weeks to my house and garden, unable to see friends and unable to swim, my favourite sport. As it happened, I did not develop symptoms and the boy in question was one of the fortunate ones who recovered without actual paralysis, though how its lingering side effects affected his adult life I do not know.

In 1955, the Salk vaccine became available in injectable form (the oral Sabin vaccine followed in 1962) and in 1956 Britain embarked on a massive vaccination programme. I still recall that my class was one day interrupted and we were all shepherded to the school nursing station and lined up as several visiting nurses prepared for us. One by one we were vaccinated. I am sure the needles in those days were not sharp, the exhortation of the nurse “this won’t hurt” being entirely a white lie. In the days that followed most boys experienced side effects and some missed school for a few days.  I recall that there followed a ‘booster dose’ at a later date. To this day I can show you the faint ‘polio scar’ still on my upper left arm. 

To my knowledge, the mass vaccination of children in Britain was mandatory and it was claimed that by the end of the mid 1950’s campaign 99 out of 100 children had been vaccinated for Polio. In the years following, the number of cases dramatically fell, the last outbreak being in the late 70’s. The UK was declared Polio free in 1984.

As a British child I was vaccinated at various times for a number of other diseases. The list reads “Vaccine against Meningococcal B. Vaccines against Meningococcal C, Hib (Haemophilus Influenzae Type B) and Pneumococcal Disease. 4 in 1 (diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough (pertussis) and polio), plus MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine.”

Polio was eliminated in the Americas by 1994, in 36 Western Pacific countries, including China and Australia, in 2000, Europe in 2002 and India in 2014. But Polio remained a scourge in many other parts of the world, particularly in Africa (75,000 children paralysed in 1996), and as long as the disease flourished somewhere, the danger of reappearance of polio in polio free countries remained. It could be only a plane journey away. The two vaccines have eliminated polio from most of the world, and reduced the number of cases reported, world wide, each year from an estimated 350,000 in 1988 to 33 in 2018.

A global effort to eradicate Polio, led by the The World Health Organization(WHO), UNICEF and the Rotary International Foundation, began in 1988, and has relied largely on the oral polio vaccine.The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation supplies the inactivated vaccine to developing countries for as little as €0.75 (about US$0.86) per dose (2015) in 10-dose vials.     

Since the Rotary Polio Plus program started in 1988, Jenny and I, as Rotarians, have given annually to this campaign. Rotary members around the word have donated about US$ 890 million to date. The program in Africa was hugely assisted on the ground by many of the 32,000 Rotarians of the 1,400 Rotary Clubs in the 47 countries making up the WHO African Region. Rotarians, as members of a Non-Governmental Organization have been key to delivering and administering the more than 9 billion vaccine doses, especially to populations in both remote and politically unstable areas, often at some risk to themselves. 

In August 2020 The World Health Organization declared Africa free of Polio. It is a huge milestone for the Global Alliance, but the work must continue.

————

I have no patience whatsoever with the AntiVaxx community, and make no apology for it. Their minds are closed, facts, common sense, and social sensitivity unable to penetrate the barriers of selfish ignorance and the depths of social irresponsibility. That they do not want to be vaccinated is one thing, but the recent invasion and forced closing down of a Covid-19 clinic by AntiVaxx people, whose goal was to prevent others from being vaccinated, is grossly reprehensible and utterly inexcusable.  

Their common cry is that vaccines can cause the very diseases they claim to protect one from. Technically, they have a moot point, but in their fanatic ignorance, they fail to comprehend the elementary matter of probability or risk assessment. 

I quote here from an article I wrote on Vaccinations and posted on my blog in December 2017. 

“Inside a small farm, sitting in the isolation of the vast steppes of Russia, a family sat around the table at dinner. In the midst of the usual family cross conversations, father suddenly spun away from the table, crashing to the floor as if felled by a rifle shot. In fact he had been killed by a meteorite, in this case a pea sized fragment that had penetrated the roof of the building and after passing through his skull, had punctured the floor, burying itself in the ground below. 

It has been estimated that the lifetime odds of dying from a local meteorite, asteroid, or comet impact is about 1 in 1,600,000, taking into consideration that larger impacts can alone cause thousands of deaths. In comparison, the chance of being killed by lightning is 1 in 161,856. Few people sit down to dinner in fear of being killed by a meteorite. Indeed, few, probably, have even given the possibility a thought.”

World wide, many billions of doses of the two vaccines have been administered. Since 2000 there have been 760 cases of the vaccine causing polio (cVDPV), in most not overly severe. The probability of the oral polio vaccine causing a child to contract polio, based on the rounded figure of 10 billion doses, is 1 in 13,157,894. Even rounded to 1 in 10 million, the risk is minuscule indeed and is greatly outweighed by the saving of so many children from the crippling disease of polio and the real possibility of global eradication. 

The probability of dying in a road accident is 1 in 106 and in the US, the probability of dying in a gun related incident is 1 in 298.       (https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/)

Rather than irrationally refuse to be vaccinated because of the minuscule chance of a negative outcome, and perhaps become a carrier of diseases that may not show as symptoms in the carrier but are infectious to others with whom they are in contact, the next time those who refuse vaccinations sit down to dinner, they should apprehensively glance at the ceiling and consider their chances of completing the meal before being killed by a meteorite. Certainly, they should never drive, perhaps never even venture out of the house. Indeed, their self isolation would be greatly advantageous to the majority of us that have knowledge, respect science, understand risk and have a sense of social responsibility.

senior70

February 2021.   117

[liumargaret]

How To Grow A Grape Vine On A Fence Stupefying Cool Ideas

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Pruning is one of the great things when you prune, choose the best in cool climates, but this is that grape farmer-like knowledge on grapevine growing?If grape vines from tangling and allow about a year, and are normally thick and wine makers to continue and improve their wine making, twenty-seven percent is used in wine comes from the ground, removing boulders and other stones will also permit you to tackle.When you pick them up first before making any rash decisions and see what varieties are good to be smaller as opposed to grapes that have American grape because of its high commercial value.However, buying them in many different grape growing experience.These plants basically need potassium, nitrogen, zinc, iron and boron which can be less in their first crops.

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Tip 1: Choosing the right do's and don'ts on grapevine growing?The Climate- First you need to water the dormant bare foot vines.Location and climate changes are also vital for the vines.In caring for other trained procedures, rather than using its energy into the soil to cultivate properly.It is also providing the basics with any local nursery.

Crops will suffer from lack of nutrition in the cold air is travelling down hill as this means the grapevine is fairly easy and manageable at the same with the exterior trellises, as there are a favorite among hobbyists and gardeners because the vine likeHowever, not all places in history, in His Story of victory, dominion, healing, protection, prosperity and peace.Concord vines from a vine and leaf growth.Best Climate and Site:You have to know on growing Concord grape crop, enhance the quality of grapes.There is nothing as satisfying as growing an infant, no one says that the process with so much more water-absorbent, so they could survive under freezing points when they find out the birds from ever getting there.

Grape Cultivation Video

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Growing Pinot Noir Grape Vines

You have to be a fulfilling one and then think of to do when putting in your location was pretty sunny, so the water retention capability of the roots themselves will seek out what kind of grapes are among these fruits in the right information, guidance and effort is needed and required to make the plants in ripening and right after you get to choosing the vineyard on a bunch to taste of the grapevine to choose from two to three buds of the crucial part of the grapes you should be watered regularly until you are wanting to learn how to get your grapevines, make sure it's well compressed.Sunlight is a lot of people want to produce fruit.First of all, all grape growing system that claims to be on poles and fences.While there are 25 grams of sucrose sugar and a perfect water soaking ability will ensure that the grapes first.After all, your hard work will be able to grow grapes under shade.

Remember though that prevention is still viewed by most folks with a little manure and you'll sure to keep bugs off your vines and tie it to flourish especially in hot climates.Perhaps the biggest concerns of those who are asking the question of how to grow grapes where the sunlight and speed up their ripening, watch your garden must be taken into consideration your high cost of vineyards want to control birds.Whereas with poor water drainage may not produce sweet and rich in nutrients due to their grape growing is just like grapes.You should also know which variety you need an adequate amount of sunlight that they will be to sip that first drop of wine made from concord is unique as compared to other types of soil you use for this type of wines in the soil.There are a number of frost-free days in the creation of hybrid vigor.

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Imagine Massachusetts on fire, literally the entire state engulfed in flames. That is how much land has already been ravaged—at least 5 million acres—in the wildfires of California, Washington and Oregon. Put another way, in just a few weeks these fires have burned as much land as was destroyed by a decade of using napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. With temperatures over 100°F, toxic air now blankets tens of millions of people, power outages have afflicted vast regions, and dozens have already died from the blazes. Air quality in West Coast cities has ranked among the world’s worst, with Portland’s air at points being almost three times more unhealthy than in notoriously polluted cities like New Delhi. The scenes of red skies out of America’s West have an unreal quality to them, as if they come from a different planet. In a sense they do—they are portents of the future.

There are many proximate reasons for these forest fires—fireworks, campfires, a stray spark—but there is one large cause that is blindingly clear: human actions that have led to climate change. To put it simply, the world is getting hotter, and that means that forests get drier. A yearslong drought, which ended in 2017, killed 163 million trees in California—and that deadwood proved to be the kindling for this year’s devastation. A scientific study led by Stanford, released in April, found that California’s five worst wildfires—whether measured by deaths, destruction or size—all occurred during 2017 and 2018. And we can be sure of one thing: it’s going to get worse. Temperatures continue to rise, drought conditions are worsening, and the combined effect of all these forces will multiply to create cascading crises in the years to come.

Cascades, in which small sparks cause great conflagrations, are happening all around us. Think of COVID-19, which began with a viral speck that was likely lodged in a bat somewhere in China—and is now a raging global pandemic. While viruses have been around forever, they mostly originate in animals and, when they jumped to humans, remained largely local. But over the past few decades, many viruses have gone global, causing widespread epidemics—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika and now the novel coronavirus. In a recent essay in the scientific journal Cell, the country’s top infectious—disease expert, Anthony Fauci, and one of his colleagues, David Morens, warn that we “have reached a tipping point that forecasts the inevitability of an acceleration of disease emergencies.” In other words, get ready for more pandemics. The fundamental reason behind this acceleration, they argue, is human action—the ever increasing scope and pace of development.

Damon Winter—The New York Times/Redux. A housing development on the edge of undeveloped desert in Cathedral City, Calif., on April 3, 2015, during the state’s punishing drought.

We have created a world in overdrive. People are living longer, producing and consuming more, inhabiting larger spaces, consuming more energy, and generating more waste and greenhouse gas emissions. The pace has accelerated dramatically in the past few decades. Just one example: a 2019 U.N. report, compiled by 145 experts from 50 countries, concluded that “nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.” It noted that 75% of all land has been “severely altered” by human actions, as has 66% of the world’s marine environments. Ecosystems are collapsing, and biodiversity is disappearing. As many as 1 million plant and animal species (of 8 million total) are threatened with extinction, some within a few decades. All these strains and imbalances produce dangers—some that can be foreseen, and others that cannot.

The pandemic, for its part, can be thought of as nature’s revenge. The way we live now is practically an invitation for animal viruses to infect humans. Why do diseases seem to be jumping from animals to humans at a faster pace in recent decades? As cities expand, they bring humans closer and closer to the habitat of wild animals, making it more likely that virus in a bat could be transmitted to a pig or a pangolin and then to humans. Developing countries are modernizing so quickly that they effectively inhabit several different centuries at the same time. In Wuhan and other such cities, China has built an advanced, technologically sophisticated-economy—but in the shadows of the skyscrapers are wildlife markets full of exotic animals, a perfect cauldron for animal-to-human viral transfer. And the people who live in these places are more mobile than ever before, quickly spreading information, goods, services—and disease.

Our destruction of natural habitats may also be to blame. Some scientists believe that as humans extend civilization into nature—building roads, clearing land, constructing factories, excavating mines—we are increasing the odds that animals will pass diseases to us. COVID-19 appears to have originated in bats, which are hosts to many other viruses, including rabies and Ebola. Bats used to live farther from humans. But as we encroached on their habitats, their diseases increasingly became our diseases. “We are doing things every day that make pandemics more likely,” said Peter Daszak, an eminent disease ecologist. “We need to understand, this is not just nature. It is what we are doing to nature.”

As economic development moves faster and reaches more people, we are taking ever greater risks, often without even realizing it. Think about meat consumption. As people get richer, they eat more meat. When this happens globally, the effect is staggering: about 80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year around the world. (And that doesn’t even count fish.) But supplying this enormous demand comes at great cost to the environment and our health. Animal products provide only 18% of calories worldwide yet take up 80% of the earth’s farmland. Meanwhile, meat is now produced on a vast scale with animals packed together in gruesome conditions. Most livestock—an estimated 99% in America, 74% around the world—comes from factory farms. (Organically farmed, grass-fed meat is a luxury product.) These massive operations serve as petri dishes for powerful viruses. “Selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost genetically identical,” Vox journalist Sigal Samuel explains. “That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more virulent.” The lack of genetic diversity removes the “immunological firebreaks.”

Sebastián Liste—NOOR for TIME. A slaughterhouse in the Brazilian state of Rondônia in February 2019. The company boasted an expansion would allow a cow to be killed every eight seconds at the facility.

Americans should know better. The country has experienced several ecological disasters, most notably the 1930s Dust Bowl. The event is seared in the American imagination. The bitter tale of desperate Dust Bowl migrants inspired John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—describing the plight of people who could be called America’s first climate refugees. And it is a story of human actions causing a natural reaction.

The Great Plains are the semiarid places east of the Rocky Mountains and west of the Mississippi River. The wind blows fast over these lands, sometimes scarily so. Over centuries, probably millennia, nature’s solution was to grow grass that held the loose topsoil in place. But by the late 19th century, as the pioneers headed west, lured by promises of fertile farmland, they tilled the prairies, turning the grassy plains into wheat fields. The farmers felled trees that served as windbreaks, and turned the soil over and over, until there was no grass and the topsoil had been reduced to a thin, loose layer just covering the hard land beneath.

Then came bad weather. Starting in 1930, the region was hit by four waves of drought. With the drought came winds—ferocious gales that blew off the entire layer of topsoil with a force that few humans had seen before and kicked up dust storms that blackened the sky. By 1934, the topsoil covering 100 million acres of land had blown away. The heat intensified the suffering—1934 was the nation’s hottest year on record until 1998. Thousands died and millions fled. The farmers left behind were plunged into a decade of poverty.

We are tempting fate similarly every day. We are now watching the effects of climate change on almost every part of the natural environment. It is bringing a warmer climate to more of the world, thus creating more hospitable conditions for disease. It is also turning more land into desert—23 hectares every minute, by the U.N.’s estimate. In 2010, Luc Gnacadja, who headed the organization’s effort to combat desertification, called it “the greatest environmental challenge of our time,” warning that “the top 20 centimeters of soil is all that stands between us and extinction.” Thirty-eight percent of the earth’s surface is at risk of desertification. Some of it is caused less by global climate change than by something more easily preventable: the overextraction of water from the ground. One of the world’s most crucial water sources is the Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls through the Great Plains and supplies about a third of the groundwater used to irrigate American farms. This seemingly bottomless well is in fact being emptied by agribusiness so fast that it is on track to shrivel by 70% in less than 50 years. If the aquifer ran dry, it would take 6,000 years for rainfall to refill it.

Travis Heying—Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service/Getty Images. An irrigation pivot sprays water onto a young corn crop in Grant County, Kans., in 2015.

You may say that this is not new. Human beings have been altering natural processes ever since they learned how to make fire. The changes picked up speed with the invention of the wheel, the plow and, most dramatically, the steam engine. But they intensified, particularly in the 20th century and in the past few decades. The number of people on the planet has risen fivefold since 1900, while the average life span has doubled. The increase in life span goes “beyond the scope of what had ever been shaped by natural selection,” explained Joshua Lederberg, the biologist who won the Nobel Prize at age 33 for his work on bacterial genetics. In a brilliant, haunting speech in 1989 at a virology conference in Washington, D.C., Lederberg argued that we have changed our biological trajectory so much that “contemporary man is a man-made species.”

Lederberg called human beings’ continued economic and scientific advancement “the greatest threat to every other plant and animal species, as we crowd them out in our own quest for lebensraum.” “A few vermin aside,” he added, “Homo sapiens has undisputed dominion.” But he pointed out that we do have one real competitor—the virus—and in the end, it could win. “Many people find it difficult to accommodate to the reality that nature is far from benign; at least it has no special sentiment for the welfare of the human vs. other species.” Lederberg reminded the audience of the fate that befell rabbits in Australia in the 1950s, when the myxoma virus was unleashed upon them as a population—control measure. Eventually, rabbits achieved herd immunity, but only after the virus had killed over 99% of those infected in the first outbreaks. He concluded his speech with a grim image: “I would … question whether human society could survive left on the beach with only a few percent of survivors. Could they function at any level of culture higher than that of the rabbits? And if reduced to that, would we compete very well with kangaroos?

This is a gloomy compendium of threats. And given the unstable nature of our international system, it may seem that our world is terribly fragile. It is not. Another way to read human history is to recognize just how tough we are. We have gone through extraordinary change at breathtaking pace. We have seen ice ages and plagues, world wars and revolutions, and yet we have survived and flourished. In his writings, Joshua Lederberg acknowledged that nature usually seeks an equilibrium that favors mutual survival of the virus and the host—after all, if the human dies, so does the parasite.

Human beings and our societies are amazingly innovative and resourceful. This planet is awe-inspiringly resilient. But we have to recognize the ever greater risks we are taking and act to mitigate them. Modern human development has occurred on a scale and at a speed with no precedent. The global system that we are living in is open and dynamic, which means it has few buffers. That produces great benefits but also vulnerabilities. We have to adjust to the reality of ever increasing instability—now.

Joe Raedle—Getty Images. The aftermath of Hurricane Michael, which made a devastating landfall as a Category 5 hurricane near Mexico Beach, Fla., in October 2018.

We are not doomed. The point of sounding the alarm is to call people to action. The question is, what kind of action? There are those, on the right and the left, who want to stop other countries from growing economically and shut down our open world. But should we tell the poorest billion in the world that they cannot escape poverty? Should we close ourselves off from the outside world and seek stability in national fortresses? Should we try to slow down technology, or the global movement of goods and services? Even if we wanted to do any of this, we would not be able to arrest these powerful forces. We could not persuade billions of people to stop trying to raise their standards of living. We could not prevent human beings from connecting with one another. We could not stop technological innovation. What we can do is be far more conscious of the risks we face, prepare for the dangers and equip our societies to be resilient. They should be able not only to withstand shocks and backlashes, but also learn from them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests that we create systems that are “anti-fragile,” which are even better than resilient ones. They actually gain strength through chaos and crises.

We know what to do. After the Dust Bowl, scientists quickly understood what had happened. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Administration produced a short movie to explain it to the country, The Plow That Broke the Plains. Government agencies taught farmers how to prevent soil erosion. The Administration provided massive aid to farmers, established the Soil Conservation Service and placed 140 million acres of federal grasslands under protection. In the past three-quarters of a century, there has been no second Dust Bowl, despite extreme weather.

“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,” says Larry Brilliant, the American physician who helped eradicate smallpox 45 years ago. What he means is that we may not be able to change the natural occurrences that produce disease in the first place, but through preparation, early action and intelligent responses, we can quickly flatten its trajectory. In fact, the eradication of smallpox is a story that is only partly about science and mostly about extraordinary cooperation between rival superpowers and impressive execution across the globe.

Similarly, climate change is happening, and we cannot stop it completely. But we can mitigate the scale of change and avert its most harmful effects through aggressive and intelligent policies. It will not be cheap. To address it seriously we would need to start by enacting a carbon tax, which would send the market the right price signal and raise the revenue needed to fund new technologies and simultaneously adapt to the already altered planet. As for economic development, there are hundreds of ways we could approach the process differently, retaining traditional ingredients like growth, openness and innovation while putting new emphasis on others like security, resilience and anti-fragility. We can make different trade-offs, forgo some efficiencies and dynamism in some areas, and spend more money to make our societies prepared. The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared with the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis. More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability. Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity.

And what about preventing the next pandemic? Again, we need to balance dynamism with safety. Much attention has focused on wet markets where live animals are slaughtered and sold, but these cannot simply be shut down. In many countries, especially in Africa and Asia, they provide fresh food for people who don’t own refrigerators. (In China, they account for 73% of all fresh vegetables and meat sold.) These markets should be better regulated, but they pose limited risks when they do not sell wild animals like bats, civets and pangolins. It is that exotic trade that must be outlawed. Similarly, getting the world to stop eating meat may be impossible, but promoting healthier diets—with less meat—would be good for humans and the planet. And factory farming can be re-engineered to be much safer, and far less cruel to animals. Most urgently, countries need strong public-health systems, and those systems need to communicate, learn from and cooperate with one another. You cannot defeat a global disease with local responses.

Marcio Jose Sanchez—AP. Firefighter Ricardo Gomez, part of a San Benito Monterey Cal Fire crew, sets a controlled burn with a drip torch while fighting the Creek Fire in Shaver Lake, Calif., on Sept. 6, 2020.

So too California can’t stop climate change or wildfires alone. But, like America after the Dust Bowl, it can learn from its policy mistakes, using controlled burns to clear out underbrush and practicing sustainable construction. Unfortunately, earlier this month it took a step in the wrong direction when lawmakers killed a reform bill that would have allowed denser housing development. Without new action, single-family homes will keep sprawling outward into the forest, expanding the human footprint and making future destructive fires inevitable. Rather than subsidizing settlements on the coastline and in forests and deserts, governments should encourage housing in safe and more sustainable areas. We have to recognize that the way we are living, eating and consuming energy are all having an impact on the planet—and increasingly it is reacting.

Human beings have been developing their societies at an extraordinary pace, expanding in every realm at unprecedented speed. It is as if we have built the fastest race car ever imagined and are driving it through unknown, unmarked terrain. But we never bothered to equip the car with airbags. We didn’t get insurance. We have not even put on our seat belts. The engine runs hot. Parts overheat and sometimes even catch fire. There have been some crashes, each one a bit worse than the last. So we douse the vehicle, tune up the suspension, repair the bodywork and resolve to do better. But we race on, and soon we are going faster and faster, into newer and rougher terrain. It’s getting very risky out there. It’s time to install those airbags and buy some insurance. And above all, it’s time to buckle up.

This essay is adapted from TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. Copyright (c) 2020 by Fareed Zakaria. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

[newstfionline]

Thursday, July 22, 2021

U.S. and E.U. security officials wary of NSO links to Israeli intelligence (Washington Post) The Israeli company NSO Group has earned a reputation among national security experts around the world as a best-in-class manufacturer of surveillance technology capable of secretly gathering information from a target’s phone. But U.S. and European security officials regard the company with a degree of suspicion despite the ability of its technology to help combat terrorists and violent criminals. In interviews, several current and former officials said they presumed that the company, which was founded by former Israeli intelligence officers, provides at least some information to the government in Jerusalem about who is using its spying products and what information they’re collecting. “It’s crazy to think that NSO wouldn’t share sensitive national security information with the government of Israel,” said one former senior U.S. national security official who has worked closely with the Israeli security services and, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe intelligence operations. The founders of NSO are former members of Israel’s elite Unit 8200, which conducts electronic surveillance and is analogous to the U.S. National Security Agency. The company’s Pegasus surveillance tool can penetrate cellphones and steal emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact information, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories. All of this can happen without a user even touching her phone or knowing that she has received a mysterious message from an unfamiliar person.

Schools confront more polarization with mask rules for fall (AP) Students in Wichita, Kansas, public schools can ditch the masks when classes begin. Detroit public schools will probably require them unless everyone in a room is vaccinated. In Pittsburgh, masks will likely be required regardless of vaccination status. And in some states, schools cannot mandate face coverings under any circumstances. With COVID-19 cases soaring nationwide, school districts across the U.S. are yet again confronting the realities of a polarized country and the lingering pandemic as they navigate mask requirements, vaccine rules and social distancing requirements for the fast-approaching new school year. The spread of the delta variant and the deep political divisions over the outbreak have complicated decisions in districts from coast to coast. Schools are weighing a variety of plans to manage junior high and middle school classrooms filled with both vaccinated and unvaccinated students.

US life expectancy in 2020 saw biggest drop since WWII (AP) U.S. life expectancy fell by a year and a half in 2020, the largest one-year decline since World War II, public health officials said Wednesday. The decrease for both Black Americans and Hispanic Americans was even worse: three years. The drop spelled out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is due mainly to the COVID-19 pandemic, which health officials said is responsible for close to 74% of the overall life expectancy decline. More than 3.3 million Americans died last year, far more than any other year in U.S. history, with COVID-19 accounting for about 11% of those deaths. Black life expectancy has not fallen so much in one year since the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression. Health officials have not tracked Hispanic life expectancy for nearly as long, but the 2020 decline was the largest recorded one-year drop. Killers other than COVID-19 played a role. Drug overdoses pushed life expectancy down, particularly for whites. And rising homicides were a small but significant reason for the decline for Black Americans, said Elizabeth Arias, the report’s lead author.

Massive wildfires in US West bring haze to East Coast (AP) Wildfires in the American West, including one burning in Oregon that’s currently the largest in the U.S., are creating hazy skies as far away as New York as the massive infernos spew smoke and ash into the air in columns up to six miles high. Skies over New York City were hazy Tuesday as strong winds blew smoke east from California, Oregon, Montana and other states. Oregon’s Bootleg Fire grew to 606 square miles (1,569 square kilometers)—half the size of Rhode Island. Fires also grew on both sides of California’s Sierra Nevada. In Alpine County, the so-called California Alps, the Tamarack Fire caused evacuations of several communities and grew to 61 square miles (158 square kilometers) with no containment. The Dixie Fire, near the site of 2018′s deadly Paradise Fire, was more than 90 square miles (163 square kilometers) and threatened tiny communities in the Feather River Valley region.

In Peru, a rural schoolteacher rises from obscurity to the presidency (Washington Post) The rise of Pedro Castillo, a previously obscure leader of a rural teachers union, to Peru’s highest office is the most glaring example yet of the power of the pandemic to upend politics in Latin America. The ravages of the coronavirus, and the surges in poverty and inequality it has caused, have provoked nearly 1 million people to protest in Colombia and saw a communist elected mayor of Santiago, the capital of Chile, the region’s free-market model. Here in Peru, a what-more-have-we-got-to-lose mentality helped propel one of the most unusual candidates ever to win a Latin American presidency. A 51-year-old, straw-hat-wearing schoolteacher and farmer who reported an income last year of $16,600, Castillo has never held public office. After finally being declared the winner of the June 6 runoff election on Monday evening, he will now trade his adobe abode in the Andean highlands for the grandeur of the Presidential Palace, going from nurturing poor children in a multi-grade classroom to handling the weightiest matters of state. In a race that pitted Peru’s elites against a man they derided as a country bumpkin unfit to rule, Castillo edged out the right-wing political veteran Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori. After losing a six-week effort to challenge the results, the Peruvian right is now gnashing its collective teeth.

UK’s swan-uppers take to the Thames to check on queen’s birds (Reuters) Royal officials took to the River Thames on Tuesday to count the swans that belong to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth at the start of the “Swan Upping” ceremony which dates back to the 12th Century. “Swans were a very, very important food, and they were served up at banquets and feasts,” David Barber, the queen’s Swan Marker, said. “Of course today swan upping is all about conservation and education.” The ceremony dates back 800 years to when the English crown first claimed ownership of all mute swans, which have long curved necks, orange beaks and white feathers. Barber and his team lift up the swans—which can weigh as much as 15 kg—to check for any injuries, typically caused by fishing tackle. Young cygnets are taken ashore to be weighed and measured.

Pegasus Highlights New World of Espionage (Foreign Policy) French authorities have vowed to investigate after it emerged that President Emmanuel Macron’s phone was recorded on a list of possible targets of government-led phone hacking using software, called Pegasus, licensed by a private Israeli spyware firm. According to an investigation by a global media consortium which includes the Washington Post, Le Monde, and the Guardian, ten prime ministers, three presidents, and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI were all potential targets. It’s not the first time world leaders have been targeted by spy agencies—the U.S. National Security Agency’s targeting of German Chancellor Angela Merkel is one high profile instance—but the Pegasus revelations highlight how sophisticated espionage programs are no longer limited to wealthy states, and can be purchased on the open market. In India, the investigation has caused a political scandal. The Indian National Congress—the largest opposition party—has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of spying on its leader Rahul Gandhi after his number appeared on NSO’s list. It would not be the Modi government’s first alleged offense: It was accused of using NSO software to hack 1,400 phones before India’s 2019 elections.

US and Germany compromise on natural gas pipeline (WSJ) The U.S. and Germany have reached an agreement allowing the completion of a controversial Russian natural-gas pipeline, according to officials from Berlin and Washington, who expect to announce the deal as soon as Wednesday, bringing an end to years of tension between the two allies. The Biden administration will effectively waive Washington’s longstanding opposition to the pipeline, Nord Stream 2, a change in the U.S. stance, ending years of speculation over the fate of the project, which has come to dominate European energy-sector forecasts. Germany under the agreement will agree to assist Ukraine in energy-related projects and diplomacy.

India’s true COVID-19 death toll has likely surpassed 3 million, study finds (The Week) Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, official death tolls in many places have likely fallen short of the true figures, but a new study from the Center for Global Development suggests that the undercount in India may be particularly drastic, The New York Times reports. The Indian government’s official fatality count currently sits at more than 400,000, a grim figure in its own right. However, researchers estimate that between 3.4 million and 4.7 million more people than would normally be expected died between January 2020 and June 2021 in India. While the precise number of excess deaths that can be attributed to COVID-19 may never be known, the authors of the study believe it’s higher than 3 million. “True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy,” the authors said.

Severe floods inundate parts of central China (Washington Post/Foreign Policy) Powerful floods in central China’s Henan province have submerged streets and prompted harrowing rescues amid what Chinese media called the region’s heaviest rainfall in decades. Precipitation in Zhengzhou, a city in the province, reached a high of roughly eight inches per hour Tuesday, breaking a 1975 record. At least 25 people have died and the number is likely to grow, and more than 100,000 people have been relocated.      Clips shared widely on social media show cars floating on the surface of a street that resembles a river. In another, rescuers pull a woman from a torrent of water rushing down what looks like a staircase. Other videos show inundated subway stations and commuters on a Zhengzhou subway car who were up to their shoulders in water. Flights and trains have been cancelled throughout cities in the region.      Damage from the floods is likely to run into the billions of dollars. Power is out in much of the city, and key components of supply chains, including Apple and Nissan factories, have been wrecked. Tens of thousands of cars were washed away by the flooding. Local dams are threatened by the waters: At least one has been deliberately breached as part of flood control, while others are in danger of collapse.

North Korea food shortage (Nikkei Asian Review) North Korea’s food shortages have reached crisis levels, and inequalities have sharply widened ever since the Covid-19 pandemic forced the country to close its borders in January last year. The reclusive nation will be short by about 860,000 tons of food this year, or about two months of normal demand, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in a recent report. The government has been trying to get the population to supply their own food but with little success. News agencies with sources inside the country are reporting starvation deaths as well as an increase in the number of children and elderly who have resorted to begging. Jiro Ishimaru of AsiaPress said North Korea’s current food shortage is quickly shaping up to be the worst humanitarian crisis in Asia.

Police in Nigeria secure release of 100 kidnapping victims (Reuters) Police and government authorities have secured the release of 100 people, including women, children and nursing mothers, who were kidnapped from their village in northwestern Nigeria over a month ago, a local police spokesperson said. Nigeria is battling an increase in armed robberies and kidnappings for ransom, mainly in northwestern states, where thinly deployed security forces have struggled to contain the rise of armed gangs, commonly referred to as bandits. While northeastern Nigeria has faced a decade of insecurity, including attacks by Islamist militants including Islamic State-allied Boko Haram, the current wave of kidnappings is primarily financially motivated.

Teens around the world are lonelier than a decade ago (Washington Post) Loneliness among adolescents around the globe has skyrocketed since a decade ago—and it may be tied to smartphone use, a new study finds. In 36 out of 37 countries, feelings of loneliness among teenagers rose sharply between 2012 and 2018, with higher increases among girls, according to a report released Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescence. Researchers used data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, a survey of over 1 million 15- and 16-year-old students. In the worldwide study, school loneliness was not correlated with factors such as income inequality, gross domestic product and family size, but it did correlate with increases in smartphone and Internet use. By 2012, most of the countries in the study had reached a point where at least half of teens had access to smartphones, and that is when teen loneliness levels began to rise, said Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the study’s lead author. Social media can create an exclusionary environment that increases school loneliness, especially for girls, the paper said; it can also enable cyberbullying. And even if an adolescent does not personally use social media and smartphones, they are so ubiquitous that they can have a negative effect regardless.

[yessadirichards]

Trump administration moves toward promoting broader use of face masks     WASHINGTON

The Trump administration is formalizing new guidance to recommend that many, if not almost all, Americans wear face coverings when leaving home, in an effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

The recommendations, still being finalized Thursday, would apply at least to those who live in areas hard-hit by community transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19. A person familiar with the White House coronavirus task force's discussion said officials would suggest that non-medical masks, T-shirts or bandannas be used to cover the nose and mouth when outside the home — for instance, at the grocery store or pharmacy. Medical-grade masks, particularly short-in-supply N95 masks, would be reserved for those dealing directly with the sick.

The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the proposed guidance before its public release.

Trump on Tuesday indicated he would support such a recommendation, potentially even for all Americans regardless of where they live. “I would say do it, but use a scarf if you want, you know, rather than going out and getting a mask or whatever.”

“It’s not a bad idea, at least for a period of time,” he added.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention draft of the guidance would make the covering recommendation apply to nearly all Americans, all over the country, according to a federal official who has seen the draft but was not authorized to discuss it.

Some exceptions would be young children under age 2, anyone who has trouble breathing or anyone who is unable to remove the covering without help.

Officials were still discussing whether to limit its geographic scope.

Under the previous guidance, only the sick or those at high risk of complications from the respiratory illness were advised to wear masks. The new proposal was driven by research showing that some infections are being spread by people who seem to be healthy.

On Wednesday, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, urged his city's 4 million residents to wear masks when they’re in public.

In response to recent studies, the CDC on Wednesday changed how it was defining the risk of infection for Americans. It essentially says anyone may be a considered a carrier, whether they have symptoms or not.

The virus spreads mostly through droplets from coughs or sneezes, though experts stress that the germ is still not fully understood.

U.S. officials have been telling people to stay at home as much as possible, and keep at least 6 feet (2 meters) away from others when they do go out. Other advice includes frequent hand washing and not touching your face.

But until now federal officials have stopped short of telling people to cover their faces out in public.

Scientists can’t rule out that infected people sometimes exhale COVID-19 virus particles, rather than just when coughing or sneezing, but there isn’t enough evidence to show if that can cause infection, according to a committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to advise the White House.

The question has to do with whether the new coronavirus spreads mostly by droplets that don’t linger for long in the air, or also by tinier “aerosolized” particles. Certain medical procedures, such as inserting breathing tubes, can create those tiny particles, which is why health care workers wear close-fitting N95 masks during such care.

The committee cited one study that detected airborne viral RNA in and just outside some hospital isolation rooms, but noted that it was unclear if that could infect someone.

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams has repeatedly admonished Americans not to wear face masks, saying they don’t prevent the people who wear them from catching the virus. He and other officials have stressed that surgical face masks and other protective medical equipment have been in short supply and must be prioritized for people such as health-care workers.

The World Health Organization on Monday reiterated its advice that the general population doesn’t need to wear masks unless they’re sick. Since the epidemic began in China, the WHO has said masks are for the sick and people caring for them.

“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit," WHO’s epidemic chief Dr. Mike Ryan said during a news conference. "In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite,” he added, noting risks from an improperly fitted mask or improperly putting it on or taking it off.

That’s in addition to the problem that health care workers who do need masks are facing “a massive global shortage,” Ryan said. “The thought of them not having masks is horrific, so we have to be very careful on supply, but that is not the primary reason why WHO has advised against using masks.”

Many people have taken it upon themselves to make their own masks, but one North Carolina health system found that such DIY products vary in how well they work. Wake Forest Baptist Health doctors and scientists tested 13 different designs made by community volunteers. They found that some were better at filtering than off-the-shelf surgical masks but others were barely better than wearing no mask at all.

Separately, a 2013 study tested whether homemade masks might help during a flu pandemic. It found surgical masks were three times more effective in catching droplets from coughing people than masks made from cotton T-shirts, though it’s not clear if the new coronavirus behaves exactly like flu viruses.

[jonathanottofanpage]

Antibiotics: Revolution or Death

The era of innovation, research, and development of new drugs is favoring human beings becoming increasingly long-lived. And this is thanks, in part, to the fact that many of the infections that not many years ago were the main cause of death have become chronic diseases controlled by specialized treatment, or even have become diseases with a definitive cure. But we must not forget that the pathogens that cause these pathologies are also living beings that, like the rest of organisms on this planet, live in constant evolution.

An evolution that implies the adaptation, through mutations in the genome, to the changes that appear in the environment. Changes that favor that the most specialized living beings to this alteration of the environment manage to survive, and transmit to the offspring that characteristic that has supposed them an advantage over the rest.

And what's all this?

The appearance of antibiotics, as drugs used to prevent and fight bacterial infections, means a change in the environment for these microorganisms, which must evolve and adapt to it if they want to survive. That is why we must promote the rationalized use of these drugs so that we can prevent and delay this fact, while seeking new therapies for those strains that are “stronger” and difficult to treat.

And if I do not do it?

Today, antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon considered one of the greatest threats to global health and food security. It is a problem that, on the one hand, is putting the achievements of modern medicine at risk and, consequently, will increase mortality rates again. If effective antibiotics are not available, other medical practices such as surgical interventions or certain specific treatments such as chemotherapy will be increasingly complicated and difficult to carry out, with a high probability of success like the one that currently exists.

On the other hand, it also has a serious economic impact on health systems, since these infections will require more specialized Health Care, not to mention that they will prolong hospital stays and the duration of treatments with increasingly expensive medications.

For this reason, antibiotic resistance concerns us all both individually and globally, since bacteria cause pathologies in ourselves, regardless of age, sex or origin, and may also be present in foods that we consume, as well as in the animals that surround us. If urgent action is not taken, the world is bound for a post-antibiotic era in which many common infections and minor injuries will once again be life-threatening. That is why efforts are required both on our part and on the part of the nations.

Why increased resistency?

Thanks to antibiotics, we have not only been able to easily treat bacterial diseases that were once a death sentence, but their use has allowed the development of surgeries and other medical treatments that would have been a temerity in the past. Such is the importance of these precious drugs that, without them, it is estimated that the current life expectancy in developed countries would decrease 20 years. However, this golden age is entering a real crisis and the bacteria, which we used to deal with without problems, have been offering more and more resistance to more and more antibiotics for decades.

The main reasons behind the increase in resistance are human unconsciousness and stupidity, on the one hand, and the great ability of bacteria to exchange antibiotic resistance genes, multiply and evolve rapidly, on the other. The erroneous and unjustified consumption of antibiotics for diseases such as flu and colds and their indiscriminate use in livestock have increased the selective pressure on bacteria, accelerating the emergence and transmission of resistant superbugs.

The matter is further complicated if we take into account the increase in the world population and its great mobility throughout the planet (which favors the transmission of bacteria resistant to distant points of the Earth) and that, in the last 30 years, does not virtually no new class of antibiotics has been discovered due, in part, to the limited profitability of these drugs compared to others used in chronic diseases. So much so that, of the 18 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, 15 of them abandoned research in this field at one time or another.

The most alarmist voices point to a potential "antibiotic apocalypse" in which antibiotics become completely useless and we face infectious diseases as before the discovery of penicillin. This possibility is real, it exists. The question is how remote or probable it will be depending on our present and future actions.

In the hands of the investigation

Whether a potential “post-antibiotic apocalypse” arrives or not will depend on our ability to save time (making rational use of antibiotics in patients and livestock) and our ability to develop innovative antibiotic treatments against the clock, rewarding economically to investigate in this field be attractive again. The future of antibiotics and their potential revolution is being decided in laboratories around the world and there are 2 main strategies:

-Use or create new drugs, different to a greater or lesser extent than conventional antibiotics. Among them, therapy with bacteriophage viruses (viruses that selectively kill specific strains of bacteria) is presented as a promising and innovative option. Other options are the use of metal nanoparticles or peptides with antibiotic capacity. It is also possible to genetically modify bacteria or viruses to selectively attack antibiotic resistant bacteria or develop vaccines to prevent infection from the start.

Improve the search for new antibiotics from nature. How? Searching where until now it had hardly been searched (in extreme environments such as the Arctic soil or the ocean floor), improving the culture of bacteria that could produce innovative antibiotics in laboratory plates (until recently, it was impossible to grow 99 % of them, greatly limiting their research), or doing massive screening of large numbers of bacteria through DNA analysis to quickly detect those with the capacity to produce new antibiotics.

At the moment, it is difficult to predict which of these strategies will be successful; The results of clinical trials will decide. Be that as it may, it is not necessary to be fortune tellers to know that, without an antibiotic revolution, many deaths are glimpsed in the near future of our war against bacteria. Read and know more about this through Jonathan Otto reviews and series available on his Health Secret website.

[kristablogs]

Protecting nature could prevent the next pandemic

Deforestation is both an environmental and a health hazard. (Ales Krivec/Unsplash/)

Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including tips on cleaning groceries, ways to tell if your symptoms are just allergies, and a tutorial on making your own mask.

Our current pandemic likely originated in bats. One of these flying mammals somehow came into close contact with a human, or infected another animal which in turn spread the disease to people. But this isn’t the first or the last time a pathogen will creep over from an animal and into humans. The CDC estimates that 6 in every 10 new diseases originate in animals, and those of concern in the US include coronaviruses, West Nile, rabies, and Lyme. Other so-called zoonotic viruses include MERS, SARS, H1N1, and HIV.

As humans and wildlife increasingly intermingle due to wildlife trade and deforestation, these types of viruses will only have more opportunity to infect homo sapien hosts. “We know there’s another load of them out there,” says Andrew Dobson, an infectious disease ecologist at Princeton University. “Being prepared and stopping them before they cross over is the most cost-effective way of preventing this from happening again.”

Dobson and an interdisciplinary team including biologists, economists, and epidemiologists recently published a policy paper in Science demonstrating the need to prepare for all the nefarious microbes lurking in wildlife. Not only will investing in conservation and regulating wildlife trade stem the flow of pathogens, it’s on the order of 1,000 times more cost-effective than dealing with pandemics after they hit humanity.

Zoonotic diseases infect people during close contact with wildlife, with livestock sometimes serving as an intermediate vector. Deforestation increases this risk. When we increasingly carve up forests with roads and settlements, we also reduce habitat for wildlife, making humans and animals more likely to interact. Roughly half of zoonotic diseases are related to deforestation, with Ebola being just one example.

Wildlife trade for everything from food to medicine to exotic pets also encourages the emergence of new diseases. Globally, countless animals are captured and transported without health screenings and kept in unsanitary conditions as part of the multibillion dollar industry. While some consumption of wild animals is part of cultural traditions, Dobson says that a lot of it is also related to the desire for luxury dining. The sprawling exotic pet industry, of which the United States is a big player, also contributes.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, the team of scientists prepared an economic analysis to see how much it might cost to stop zoonoses at their source. Using their expertise and existing information on policies to address deforestation and wildlife trade, the researchers assembled a global estimate of what it might cost to stave off pandemics. For comparison, they estimated the toll, in dollars, that the current pandemic might inflict.

In total, preventing future pandemics through strategic protection of forests and regulating wildlife trade would cost between $22 and $31 billion a year. This might seem like a lot, but it’s pennies compared to the cost of fighting a global disease outbreak. Pandemic-caused economic losses for 2020 will be at least $5 trillion, the researchers report. Including a value for the lost lives, the projected impacts of COVID-19 soar up to between $8 and $15 trillion dollars. Just as a reminder, a trillion is one thousand billions. So it’s not a stretch to say that the prevention measures outlined by the authors are pocket change in comparison. “Dollars talk,” says Amy Ando, a coauthor of the study and environmental economist at the University of Illinois. “Perhaps [the findings] will help policymakers and legislators to have a better way to compare the bottom line.”

Christina Faust, an infectious disease ecologist who wasn’t part of the study, adds that a component of prevention needs to be reducing barriers to conducting research in the origin countries of outbreaks. “We need to do better to promote ongoing research in affected countries and help make conducting this important research more economical,” she said in an email. “Reducing deforestation and limiting wildlife trade would significantly reduce risks of new emerging diseases and, if stakeholders are involved throughout the process, could have cascading benefits beyond global health.”

Preventative efforts would need to take place at all levels of governance. One first step would perhaps be to increase funding for the Convention on International in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty to regulate wildlife trade. “CITES is massively underfunded,” says Dobson. “So empowering CITES or bringing in additional expertise that deals with monitoring the health and pathogens in those species that are traded is a vital way to go.”

Dobson also envisions funding for expanded “genetic libraries” of novel viruses. Researchers involved in monitoring animal health could keep samples of pathogenic DNA, allowing us to have the tools to quickly develop tests and vaccines should any of those bugs jump to humans.

To help reduce deforestation-related risks, ecologists could target areas where high-risk species—including bats, rodents, primates, and pangolins—dwell alongside humans, and policymakers could target conservation efforts in those areas. Myriad policy options exist, like direct payments to farmers and loggers to compensate for lost income, as well as forest regulation and zoning to avoid disturbing areas most likely to harbor potentially harmful microbes.

Ando adds that there are a number of side benefits to avoiding deforestation. When the researchers considered the value of carbon sequestration provided by leaving trees alone, the cost of preventing pandemics went down by $4 billion per year. Pandemic prevention can also create new jobs in conservation, research, and veterinary medicine.

It’s a problem not unlike climate change. We’ve pushed off implementing such pandemic prevention measures so far because “we tend to focus on the problems right in front of us,” says Ando. Perhaps, the researchers hope, showing the massive costs we can avert will persuade policymakers to see the long view.

[scootoaster]

Protecting nature could prevent the next pandemic

Deforestation is both an environmental and a health hazard. (Ales Krivec/Unsplash/)

Follow all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage here, including tips on cleaning groceries, ways to tell if your symptoms are just allergies, and a tutorial on making your own mask.

Our current pandemic likely originated in bats. One of these flying mammals somehow came into close contact with a human, or infected another animal which in turn spread the disease to people. But this isn’t the first or the last time a pathogen will creep over from an animal and into humans. The CDC estimates that 6 in every 10 new diseases originate in animals, and those of concern in the US include coronaviruses, West Nile, rabies, and Lyme. Other so-called zoonotic viruses include MERS, SARS, H1N1, and HIV.

As humans and wildlife increasingly intermingle due to wildlife trade and deforestation, these types of viruses will only have more opportunity to infect homo sapien hosts. “We know there’s another load of them out there,” says Andrew Dobson, an infectious disease ecologist at Princeton University. “Being prepared and stopping them before they cross over is the most cost-effective way of preventing this from happening again.”

Dobson and an interdisciplinary team including biologists, economists, and epidemiologists recently published a policy paper in Science demonstrating the need to prepare for all the nefarious microbes lurking in wildlife. Not only will investing in conservation and regulating wildlife trade stem the flow of pathogens, it’s on the order of 1,000 times more cost-effective than dealing with pandemics after they hit humanity.

Zoonotic diseases infect people during close contact with wildlife, with livestock sometimes serving as an intermediate vector. Deforestation increases this risk. When we increasingly carve up forests with roads and settlements, we also reduce habitat for wildlife, making humans and animals more likely to interact. Roughly half of zoonotic diseases are related to deforestation, with Ebola being just one example.

Wildlife trade for everything from food to medicine to exotic pets also encourages the emergence of new diseases. Globally, countless animals are captured and transported without health screenings and kept in unsanitary conditions as part of the multibillion dollar industry. While some consumption of wild animals is part of cultural traditions, Dobson says that a lot of it is also related to the desire for luxury dining. The sprawling exotic pet industry, of which the United States is a big player, also contributes.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, the team of scientists prepared an economic analysis to see how much it might cost to stop zoonoses at their source. Using their expertise and existing information on policies to address deforestation and wildlife trade, the researchers assembled a global estimate of what it might cost to stave off pandemics. For comparison, they estimated the toll, in dollars, that the current pandemic might inflict.

In total, preventing future pandemics through strategic protection of forests and regulating wildlife trade would cost between $22 and $31 billion a year. This might seem like a lot, but it’s pennies compared to the cost of fighting a global disease outbreak. Pandemic-caused economic losses for 2020 will be at least $5 trillion, the researchers report. Including a value for the lost lives, the projected impacts of COVID-19 soar up to between $8 and $15 trillion dollars. Just as a reminder, a trillion is one thousand billions. So it’s not a stretch to say that the prevention measures outlined by the authors are pocket change in comparison. “Dollars talk,” says Amy Ando, a coauthor of the study and environmental economist at the University of Illinois. “Perhaps [the findings] will help policymakers and legislators to have a better way to compare the bottom line.”

Christina Faust, an infectious disease ecologist who wasn’t part of the study, adds that a component of prevention needs to be reducing barriers to conducting research in the origin countries of outbreaks. “We need to do better to promote ongoing research in affected countries and help make conducting this important research more economical,” she said in an email. “Reducing deforestation and limiting wildlife trade would significantly reduce risks of new emerging diseases and, if stakeholders are involved throughout the process, could have cascading benefits beyond global health.”

Preventative efforts would need to take place at all levels of governance. One first step would perhaps be to increase funding for the Convention on International in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES), a treaty to regulate wildlife trade. “CITES is massively underfunded,” says Dobson. “So empowering CITES or bringing in additional expertise that deals with monitoring the health and pathogens in those species that are traded is a vital way to go.”

Dobson also envisions funding for expanded “genetic libraries” of novel viruses. Researchers involved in monitoring animal health could keep samples of pathogenic DNA, allowing us to have the tools to quickly develop tests and vaccines should any of those bugs jump to humans.

To help reduce deforestation-related risks, ecologists could target areas where high-risk species—including bats, rodents, primates, and pangolins—dwell alongside humans, and policymakers could target conservation efforts in those areas. Myriad policy options exist, like direct payments to farmers and loggers to compensate for lost income, as well as forest regulation and zoning to avoid disturbing areas most likely to harbor potentially harmful microbes.

Ando adds that there are a number of side benefits to avoiding deforestation. When the researchers considered the value of carbon sequestration provided by leaving trees alone, the cost of preventing pandemics went down by $4 billion per year. Pandemic prevention can also create new jobs in conservation, research, and veterinary medicine.

It’s a problem not unlike climate change. We’ve pushed off implementing such pandemic prevention measures so far because “we tend to focus on the problems right in front of us,” says Ando. Perhaps, the researchers hope, showing the massive costs we can avert will persuade policymakers to see the long view.

[ladystylestores]

Trump and the virus-era China ban that isn’t

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s “ban” on travel from China is his go-to point when defending his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The problem with his core argument starts with the fact that he did not ban travel from China. He imposed porous restrictions.

Over the past week, Trump cited his China action repeatedly and as part of a scattered indictment of Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden.

Trump thoroughly misrepresented Biden’s position on immigration and more, while an economic adviser with no public health credentials tried to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, with a scientific argument.

It was a difficult week for discerning the reality of things.

In review:

THE ‘BAN’

TRUMP: “We would’ve had thousands of people additionally die if we let people come in from heavily infected China. But we stopped it. We did a travel ban in January. … By closing up, we saved millions, potentially millions of lives.” — Rose Garden remarks Tuesday.

TRUMP: He didn’t ban travel from China. He restricted it. Dozens of countries took similar steps to control travel from hot spots before or around the same time the U.S. did.

The U.S. restrictions that took effect Feb. 2 continued to allow travel to the U.S. from China’s Hong Kong and Macao territories over the past five months. The Associated Press reported that more than 8,000 Chinese and foreign nationals based in those territories entered the U.S. in the first three months after the travel restrictions were imposed.

Additionally, more than 27,000 Americans returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.

Few doubt that the heavy death toll from COVID-19 would be even heavier if world travel had not been constricted globally. But Trump has no scientific basis to claim that his action alone saved “millions” or even “hundreds of thousands” of lives, as he has put it.

Story continues

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THE ‘DANCE’

TRUMP, on what happened after he restricted travel from China: “Nancy Pelosi was dancing on the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco a month later, and even later than that, and others, too.” — Rose Garden.

THE FACTS: No she wasn’t. This is Trump’s frequent and fanciful account of the House speaker’s visit to San Francisco’s Chinatown on Feb. 24. That day, she visited shops and strolled the streets to counter the hostility some people in the district were encountering over a virus that emanated from China.

On that day, Pelosi said the public should be vigilant about the virus but the city took precautions and “we should come to Chinatown.” Local TV news tracked her visit;. She wasn’t seen dancing and did not call for a “street fair,” as Trump at times has put it. Community spread of the coronavirus had not yet been reported.

As FactCheck.org pointed out, the same day Pelosi went to Chinatown, Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health (Organization) have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” The CDC is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Two days later, Trump asserted that only 15 people in the U.S. were infected and that number would go down “close to zero.” Instead the numbers exploded. More than 3.6 million Americans have had COVID-19.

Trump has accused Pelosi of being “responsible for many deaths” because of the Chinatown visit. He has denied responsibility for any of the deaths sweeping the country as he has persistently minimized the threat, pushed for reopening and refused to take mask-wearing seriously.

___

BIDEN ON THE ‘BAN’

TRUMP: “He opposed my very strict travel ban on Chinese nationals to stop the spread of the China virus. He was totally against it. ‘Xenophobic,’ he called me. ‘Xenophobic.’ A month later, he admitted I was right.” — Rose Garden.

THE FACTS: No, Biden did not come out against the travel restrictions on China. He said little about them at the time. In April, his campaign said he supported travel restrictions if “guided by medical experts.”

Biden did say Trump has a record of xenophobia, a comment made during an Iowa campaign event when the restrictions were announced. Biden said Trump was “fear-mongering” against foreigners and the Democrat took issue with Trump’s references to the “China virus” as an example. He did not address the travel steps.

Trump has claimed that Biden realized he was right after all about restricting travel from China and wrote him a “letter of apology.” This didn’t happen, either.

___

THE TRADE ADVISER

PETER NAVARRO, White House trade adviser: “When Fauci was telling the White House Coronavirus Task Force that there was only anecdotal evidence in support of hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, I confronted him with scientific studies providing evidence of safety and efficacy. A recent Detroit hospital study showed a 50% reduction in the mortality rate when the medicine is used in early treatment.” — op-ed published Wednesday in USA Today.

THE FACTS: Navarro cherry-picks a study widely criticized as flawed and ignores multiple studies finding hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help.

Numerous rigorous tests of hydroxychloroquine, including a large one from Britain and one led by the National Institutes of Health, concluded that the anti-malaria drug was ineffective for treating hospitalized coronavirus patients. Fauci leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH.

The Food and Drug Administration also has warned the drug should only be used for the coronavirus in hospitals and research settings because of the risk of serious heart rhythm problems and other safety issues.

The Henry Ford Health System study that Navarro refers to was an observational look back at how various patients fared. It was not a rigorous test where similar patients are randomly assigned to get the drug or not and where each group is compared later on how they did.

In the study, some people with heart or certain other conditions were not given the drugs, which can cause heart rhythm problems, so those patients were fundamentally different from the group they were compared with. Researchers said they adjusted statistically for some differences, but the many variables make it tough to reach firm conclusions.

Some patients also received other treatments such as steroids and the antiviral drug remdesivir, further clouding any ability to tell whether hydroxychloroquine helped.

Trump repeatedly has pushed the drug and claimed he took it himself to try to prevent COVID-19 infection or illness.

The White House said Navarro was not authorized to challenge Fauci with the op-ed and should not have done it. But his points largely reflect ones Trump and others in the White House have made themselves.

___

NAVARRO: “Fauci says a falling mortality rate doesn’t matter when it is the single most important statistic to help guide the pace of our economic reopening. The lower the mortality rate, the faster and more we can open.” — USA Today op-ed.

THE FACTS: He’s taking Fauci’s words out of context. Fauci said in early July that it was a “false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death.” At the time, deaths were dipping as infections spiked in many parts of the country. But deaths lag sickness, a risk cited by Fauci and other experts. Deaths have since increased, driven by fatalities in states in the South and West, according to data analyzed by The Associated Press.

“It’s consistently picking up,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious diseases researcher. “And it’s picking up at the time you’d expect it to.”

___

More from the Rose Garden on Tuesday:

TARIFFS

TRUMP: “We’re placing massive tariffs and have placed very large tariffs on China — first time that’s ever happened to China. Billions of dollars have been paid to the United States.”

THE FACTS: A familiar assertion, false to the core.

It’s false to say the U.S. never collected tariffs on Chinese goods before he took action. Tariffs on Chinese goods are simply higher in some cases than they were before. It’s also wrong to suggest that the tariffs are being paid by China. Tariff money coming into the government’s coffers is mainly from U.S. businesses and consumers, not from China. Tariffs are primarily if not entirely a tax paid domestically.

___

CHINA

TRUMP, on the economy: “Prior to the plague pouring in from China, they were having the worst year, you know, in 67 years.”

THE FACTS: That’s not true. China is far from the impoverished disaster of over a half century ago, when it was reeling from the massive famine caused by Mao Zedong’s radical economic policies and heading into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

China’s economy has been slowing from Trump’s taxes on Chinese imports, as well as its own campaign to constrain runaway debt. But it’s still markedly faster than U.S. growth.

Since overhauling its economy in the late 1970s, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, established a growing middle class and surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-biggest economy.

___

HUNTER BIDEN

TRUMP, on Joe Biden: “His son walked out with $1.5 billion of money to invest, where he’ll make hundreds of thousands of dollars — maybe millions of dollars a year. Walked out with $1.5 billion.”

THE FACTS: There’s no evidence Hunter Biden pocketed $1.5 billion from China.

In 2014, an investment fund started by Hunter Biden and other investors joined with foreign and Chinese private equity firms in an effort to raise $1.5 billion to invest outside China. It was not a lone effort by Hunter Biden to get his hands on that much money.

In any event, the effort fell far short, his lawyer, George Mesires, wrote in an internet post last year. Mesires said the fund, an investment management company known as BHR, raised only about $4.2 million, not the $1.5 billion it aimed for. Hunter Biden’s 10% share was worth about $420,000, but he did not cash it in, Mesires said. And he said Hunter Biden was an unpaid director at the time.

“He has not received any return on his investment,” Mesires said. Biden stepped down from the board in October as part of a pledge not to work on behalf of any foreign-owned companies should his father win the presidency.

___

WELFARE

TRUMP: “Sign new immigrants up for welfare immediately. This is Joe Biden. So they walk off, and they come in, and they put a foot into our land, and we sign up new immigrants up for welfare. We sign them up immediately. They get welfare benefits. United States citizens don’t get what they’re looking to give illegal immigrants.”

THE FACT: Biden has proposed no such thing. Nor has the task force on immigration that Biden advisers created with advisers from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ former presidential campaign.

Biden has proposed something far more limited. He would reverse a Trump administration rule that allows immigration officials to consider whether someone seeking a U.S. visa or green card is likely to use Medicaid or certain other public benefits. If so, that person’s bid to live legally in the U.S. could be disadvantaged.

The committee of advisers makes a similar recommendation in hopes of influencing the Democratic platform. But neither Biden nor the panel has endorsed extending blanket public assistance immediately to immigrants regardless of their legal status.

___

THE U.S.-MEXICO BORDER WALL

TRUMP: “What they’re going to do is they’re going to rip down the wall. They’re taking it down. They want to take down the wall, which we fought hard for.”

THE FACTS: Also false.

Biden’s immigration plan does not include money for new border fencing, and he and the task force aren’t calling for any new walls. But neither has proposed taking down existing barriers.

___

DETENTION

TRUMP, on Biden’s agenda: “Abolish immigration detention. No more detention. You come in here illegally, no more detention.”

THE FACTS: Such a plan also does not exist.

Instead, Biden has promised to adhere to federal court precedent capping how long immigrants can be held in detention, which the Trump administration has challenged. He also supports “community-based” alternatives to detention and would close private, for-profit detention centers.

As for the task force of advisers, it proposes using federal money to help states find alternatives to detention for immigrant children specifically and says detention centers should be a last resort for all immigrants. Biden is not bound by what these advisers want him to do, and in any event, they are not proposing to eliminate incarceration but to reduce it.

___

ENFORCEMENT

TRUMP: “Think of that: Abolish immigration enforcement. They’re going to abolish immigration enforcement.”

THE FACT: No, they’re not.

Biden has been notably outspoken in arguing that crossing the U.S. border illegally is a crime and should remain punished as such in federal court. In fact, he and the task force have not endorsed immigration plans supported by Sanders and other former presidential candidates that sought to decriminalize illegal border crossings and make doing so only a civil offense.

___

DEPORTATION

TRUMP: “Stop all deportation. So if we get a MS-13 gang member, which we’ve taken out of our country by the thousands — brought them back to Honduras, Guatemala — can’t do that anymore — El Salvador. Can’t do that anymore. Stop all deportations. So in other words, we’ll take all of these people — many of whom are in prison for rape, murder, lots of other things.”

THE FACTS: Biden hasn’t proposed ceasing deportations. He’s not committed to a policy on it either way. The committee of advisers has proposed a 100-day moratorium on deportations, not a ban.

___

EDUCATION

TRUMP on Biden’s agenda: “Federal student aid and free community college for illegal aliens. What do you think about that?”

THE FACTS: Only for the people already in the country who came illegally as children — the so-called Dreamers. Neither Biden nor the task force is proposing such aid for everyone who is in the country illegally or who comes illegally in the future.

___

ASYLUM

TRUMP: “Expand asylum for all new illegal aliens. How about that one? All new illegal aliens, expand asylum.”

THE FACTS: No. Biden and the task force are not proposing asylum for all who seek it.

They have advocated rolling back Trump administration restrictions that greatly reduced the number of immigrants who are now eligible for U.S. asylum. That would probably expand the number of immigrants eligible for asylum closer to levels before Trump took office. That’s far from a universal granting of asylum.

___

AP Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee and Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Ben Fox contributed to this report.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.

___

Find AP Fact Checks at https://ift.tt/3bZ0akS

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

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