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Javier E

China's Sinopharm Vaccine Approved for Emergency Use By W.H.O. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ina-sinopharm-vaccine-who.html

china vaccine Covid-19 emergency Politics

shared by Javier E on 08 May 21 - No Cached
  • Developing countries racing for coronavirus vaccines now have another dependable option — and China’s reputation as a rising scientific superpower just got a big boost.
  • The World Health Organization on Friday declared a vaccine made by a Chinese company, Sinopharm, as a safe and reliable way to fight the virus. The declaration marks a significant step toward clearing up doubts about the vaccine, after little late-phase clinical trial data was disclosed by the Chinese government and the company.
  • “The addition of this vaccine has the potential to rapidly accelerate Covid-19 vaccine access for countries seeking to protect health workers and populations at risk,”
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  • The W.H.O. emergency use approval allows the Sinopharm vaccine to be included in Covax, a global initiative to provide free vaccines to poor countries. The possible inclusion in Covax raises hopes that more people — especially those in developing nations — will get access to shots at a crucial moment.
  • “This should be the golden time for China to practice its vaccine diplomacy. The problem is, at the same time, China itself is facing a shortage,”
  • “The whole world is short of this vaccine,” said a Sinovac spokesman, Pearson Liu. “The demand is just too great.”
  • Andrea Taylor, who analyzes global data on vaccines at the Duke Global Health Institute, called the potential addition of two Chinese vaccines into the Covax program a “game changer.”
  • “The situation right now is just so desperate for low and lower middle income countries that any doses we can get out are worth mobilizing,” Ms. Taylor said. “Having potentially two options coming from China could really change the landscape of what’s possible over the next few months.”
  • China’s vaccines have been rolled out to more than 80 countries, but they have faced significant skepticism, in part because the companies have not released Phase 3 clinical trial data for scientists to independently assess the vaccines’ efficacy rates. An advisory group to the W.H.O. published the data this week.
  • The Sinopharm vaccine developed with the Beijing Institute of Biological Products has an efficacy rate of 78.1 percent, according to the W.H.O. advisory group.
  • The Sinovac vaccine has varying efficacy rates of between 50 percent to 84 percent, depending on the country where Phase 3 trials were conducted.
  • for China’s leaders, the W.H.O. approval can still be seen as a badge of honor. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has pledged to make a Covid-19 vaccine a “global public good.”
  • After India announced export restrictions on vaccines last month, Indonesia and the Philippines said they would turn to China for help. Last week, China’s foreign minister offered to help South Asian nations get access to vaccines.
  • Indonesia said it would get additional doses from Sinovac after President Joko Widodo held talks with Mr. Xi. In a speech the same week, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines said he owed “a debt of gratitude” to China for its vaccines.
  • “They don’t like to subsume their generosity in their products under some U.N. brand,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the global health policy center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They are in a historic phase,” he said. “They want the recipients to know that this is China delivering.”
rerobinson03

Telling Stories of Slavery, One Person at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...museum-slavery-exhibition.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 04 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • “For the longest time, it was mainly displayed as an item that speaks about riches and world power,” said Valika Smeulders, who leads the history department at the Rijksmuseum. In 2013, one of the museum’s curators noticed the images on the lid, she added. “He saw that human beings were being purchased. That allowed us to look at the box in a new way, to relate it to the social history of slavery.”
  • From the 17th century through the 19th century, they enslaved more than a million people, according to the museum’s historians, buying them at trading posts the companies ran in Africa and Asia and transporting them en masse across oceans, creating large-scale forced migrations.
  • Slavery was forbidden in the Netherlands, but it was legal — and crucial to the profitable plantations — in Dutch colonies such as Brazil, Indonesia and Suriname. Goods produced by enslaved people for the companies included sugar, coffee, gold, pepper, tobacco, cotton, nutmeg and silver.
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  • “In the Netherlands, when people did have lessons about slavery, it was usually about the United States and the cotton plantations in the South,” she said. “The story of slavery is the North American story. That’s why it’s important to make sure that it’s clear that it’s not American history, or even colonial history. It’s our national history.”
anonymous

U.S. Lays Out Plans For How It Will Share Surplus COVID-19 Vaccines Abroad : Coronaviru... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rplus-covid-19-vaccines-abroad

shared by anonymous on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The United States will send its first shipments of surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses abroad on Thursday, spelling out for the first time how it will share its wealth of vaccines with parts of the world struggling to get shots in arms.
  • The Biden administration has previously said it would share 80 million doses by the end of June. "We know that won't be sufficient,"
  • We expect a regular cadence of shipments around the world across the next several weeks. And in the weeks ahead, working with the world's democracies we will coordinate a multilateral effort, including the G-7 to combat and end the pandemic," Zients said.
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  • The U.S. has contracts for hundreds of millions more vaccine doses than it could possibly use — and this is a major move by the Biden administration to attempt to exert global leadership after months of pressure from global health organizations.
  • The administration also removed contract ratings under the Defense Production Act that prioritized U.S. contracts for suppliers to AstraZeneca, Novavax and Sanofi — three vaccines not currently authorized for use in the United States.
  • The first priority for doses shared through COVAX will be Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, the White House said.
  • The remaining doses will go to countries that have made their case to the White House, including nations such as India that have seen surges in cases; places such as Gaza, which is grappling to rebuild from recent fighting; and neighboring countries such as Canada and Mexico, the White House said.
  • This won't be enough to end or reduce the life span of the pandemic. And that's why we're working with allies and partners to expand the production of vaccines and raw materials, including here at home,"
  • "We're not seeking to extract concessions. We're not extorting. We're not imposing conditions the way that other countries who are providing doses are doing."
  • In accordance with the administration's framework, the White House announced approximate allocations for the first 25 million doses that will ship:
  • Both Biden and Vice President Harris leave next week on their first official foreign trips and are expected to discuss the U.S. plans for vaccine distribution. Harris is set to travel to Guatemala and Mexico City starting on Sunday, and Biden leaves Wednesday for the U.K., Brussels and Geneva.
  • "It is time to have a global road map to vaccinate the world. That's what we hope will come out of the G-7 summit next week," Reynolds told NPR. "As long as this pandemic is raging anywhere around the world, Americans aren't safe, none of us are safe."
  • Tom Hart, acting CEO of the ONE Campaign, said he was disappointed that the Biden administration has not moved faster to ship 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which U.S. regulators have not yet authorized for emergency use."Less than 1 percent of COVID-19 vaccine doses globally have been administered to people in low-income countries," Hart said in a statement. "This is a once in a generation crisis, and as we approach the G7 next week, the world is looking to the US for global leadership and more ambition is needed."
rerobinson03

U.S. Covid Vaccine Donations Will Go to 'Wide Range' of Nations - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nations-coronavirus-biden.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The White House, besieged with requests from other nations to share its supply of coronavirus vaccine, announced Thursday that it would distribute an initial 25 million doses this month across a “wide range of countries” in Latin America and the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, as well as the Palestinian territories, war-ravaged Gaza and the West Bank.
  • Thursday’s announcement comes a week before Mr. Biden leaves for Cornwall, England, to meet with the heads of state of the Group of 7 industrialized nations, where the global vaccine supply is certain to be a topic of discussion. Officials said the Biden administration would donate additional doses throughout the summer as they become available.
  • Some African nations have less than 1 percent of their populations partly vaccinated, according to data from the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford, and the percentages of vaccinated people in Honduras and Guatemala are around 3 percent of the population.
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  • Mr. Biden’s pledge to donate 80 million doses this month involves vaccines made by four manufacturers. Besides AstraZeneca, they are Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, the last three of which have received U.S. emergency authorization for their vaccines.
  • The president has described the vaccine donations as part of an “entirely new effort” to increase vaccine supplies and vastly expand manufacturing capacity, most of it in the United States. To further broaden supply, Mr. Biden recently announced he would support waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines. He also put Mr. Zients in charge of developing a global vaccine strategy.
ethanshilling

US to Send Millions of Covid-19 Vaccine Doses to Mexico and Canada - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...exico-vaccine-coronavirus.html

Policy mexico canada pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, the White House said Thursday, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border.
  • Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the United States was planning to share 2.5 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada, adding that it was “not finalized yet, but that is our aim.”
  • Tens of millions of doses of the vaccine have been sitting in American manufacturing sites. While their use has already been approved in dozens of countries, including Mexico and Canada, the vaccine has not yet been authorized by American regulators.
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  • Mr. Biden asked President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico in a video call this month whether more could be done to help solve the problem, according to Mexican officials and another person briefed on the conversation.
  • Mexican officials acknowledge that relations between the United States and Mexico, which has suffered one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus epidemics, would be buoyed by a shipment of doses south.
  • Several European countries suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine this week, a precaution because some people who had received the shot later developed blood clots and severe bleeding.
  • Until Thursday, all of Canada’s vaccine supply had come from Europe or India, and Canada’s roll out has proceeded at a slow pace compared with the United States and many other countries.
  • A Biden administration official declined to comment further on the negotiations with Mexico, but noted that both countries shared a common goal of reducing migration by addressing its root causes, and said they were working closely to stem the flow of people streaming to the border.
  • Mexico has agreed to increase its presence on its southern border with Guatemala to deter migration from Central America, one of the government officials said,
  • The Biden administration’s appeal to do more against migration has put Mexico in a difficult position. While Mr. Trump strong-armed Mexico into militarizing the border, some Mexican officials argue that his harsh policies may have at times helped lessen their load by deterring migrants from attempting to make the journey north.
  • Many Canadians have expressed dismay that the United States had not shared any supplies with Canada, where no coronavirus vaccines are manufactured.
  • But on Thursday, Europe’s drug regulator declared the vaccine safe. AstraZeneca has also said that a review of 17 million people who received the vaccine found they were less likely than others to develop dangerous clots.
  • Beijing is shipping vaccines to dozens of countries, including some in Africa and Latin America. Russia has supplied its vaccine to Hungary and Slovakia.
  • Local government officials in Ciudad Juárez and shelter operators say Mexico is dialing up operations to capture and deport migrants along the northern border.
  • Despite the very public tensions with Mexico under Mr. Trump, Mr. López Obrador has been wary of the Biden administration, concerned that it might be more willing to interfere on domestic issues like labor rights or the environment.
  • The need for vaccines in Mexico is clear. About 200,000 people have died in the country from the virus — the third highest death toll in the world — and it has been relatively slow to vaccinate its population.
  • “Mexico needs cooperation from the U.S. in getting its economy jump-started and getting vaccines to get out of the health crisis,” said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
aniyahbarnett

A more contagious coronavirus variant is spreading across the US. But the vaccines shou... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

pandemic

shared by aniyahbarnett on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The B.1.1.7 variant, first spotted in the UK, is not only more easily transmitted, but it also appears to be more deadly.
  • It was first spotted in Colorado
  • "Since then it has been detected in 50 jurisdictions in the United States
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  • one study showing a 64% increased risk of death for people infected with B.1.1.7 compared to those infected with the older
  • implement the public health measures that we talk about all the time
  • That makes it more important than ever to get people vaccinated quickly,
  • To get as many people vaccinated as quickly and as expeditiously as possib
  • But vaccines appear to protect well against B.1.1.7
  • That's because the vaccines cause a broad immune response so that even if it's a little weakened, it's still powerful enough to prevent serious disease and death.
  • "The vaccine remained effective against B.1.1.7 with a slight but significant decrease in neutralization that was more apparent in participants under 55 years of age.
  • "had no significant effect on neutralization by serum obtained from participants who had received the mRNA-1273 vaccine in the phase 1 trial,"
  • if more mutations were acquired by the virus
  • including the B.1.351 variant first seen in South Africa and the P.1 variant that is common now in Brazil.
  • may much more easily evade the immune response prompted by vaccines
  • , it nonetheless strongly protected people against severe disease, hospitalizations and deaths in clinical trials.
  • that makes it even more important to get as many people vaccinated as possible before those variants can spread.
anonymous

Could The Worst Of The Pandemic Be Over In The United States? : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-in-the-u-s-experts-look-ahead

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • A year after the pandemic shut down the country, a growing number of infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, public health officials and others have started to entertain a notion that has long seemed out of reach: The worst of the pandemic may be over for the United States.
  • No one thinks that's guaranteed by any means. There are many ways the pandemic could resurge. But many say it's becoming increasingly possible that the end may finally be in sight.Even experts who have raised the alarm about the severity of the COVID-19 crisis nonstop for more than a year are optimistic.
  • Now, to be clear, more than 50,000 people are still getting infected daily with the coronavirus and hundreds are dying. So there's a great deal of sickness and suffering still in store for the country before the pandemic ends.
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  • And the newfound optimism comes with three big caveats: The worst may be over if too many people don't let down their guard too fast, if the more dangerous variants don't make cases surge before enough people get vaccinated, and if the vaccination campaign doesn't stumble badly.
  • But if none of those problems occurs, life could slowly but steadily return to something much more normal.The optimism is based on the rapid ramp-up of the vaccination campaign combined with the fact that a significant proportion of the country already has some immunity from being exposed to the virus, and the warmer weather that is linked to slower viral spread.
  • Now, not everyone is quite ready to say the worst might be over. Several experts worry about the more contagious variants combining with too many communities lifting mask mandates and other restrictions and too many people letting down their guard, especially over spring break and Easter.
  • In fact, new hot spots look like they could already be emerging, especially in Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, and in the Northeast, especially New York City and New Jersey.But while most experts agree that combination of factors is the big sword of Damocles hanging over the nation's hopes, most think that the country could avoid another big surge such as the one that occurred over the winter.
  • this spring, as more people are vaccinated, more people may be able to return safely to stores, restaurants and work, more children could return to in-person learning, and small groups of fully vaccinated people getting together for dinner parties indoors without masks.
  • the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued guidelines that say vaccinated people can already start to get together that way.And if case counts continue to decline and vaccination rates increase, many public health authorities think the summer could be even better.
  • It could, however, still be causing significant problems in parts of the world that haven't gotten vaccinated, which could spawn new, even more dangerous variants that could travel to the United States.As a result, the country will probably need new versions of the vaccines for the variants and booster shots. And many experts say it's crucial that the U.S. help the rest of the world vaccinate as quickly as possible, too.
  • By the fall, while young children still won't be vaccinated because scientists have just started testing the vaccines on them, their teachers hopefully will be. So in places where infections are low, schools should be pretty safe, experts told NPR.Students will probably still wear masks and may still need to keep their distance from one another. But hopefully no more slogging through school on laptops at the kitchen table for most kids.
  • Researchers such as Fauci hope that more aspects of our day-to-day lives could edge back closer to pre-pandemic times.
  • Some experts worry the virus could follow a seasonal pattern like the flu and surge again in the late fall or early winter. And that threat may be even greater because of the variants, especially the strains originally spotted in South Africa and Brazil that appear to be better at evading natural immunity and the vaccines.
  • The vaccine works against the U.K. variant, says Mokdad of the University of Washington, so with more vaccination, other variants may become dominant. "And by winter we assume these two will become the dominant one unless we have more that show up. And they will cause more infections and more mortality."But even if there is no new winter surge, the virus won't be gone. It just hopefully won't be causing anything like the suffering that's already occurred.
  • Americans still need to be careful: Hot spots could flare up due to the variants, people getting careless, triggering superspreader events, and among pockets of people who haven't gotten vaccinated.
  • But even if the country is on the road out of this, the impact has been tremendous, and the aftereffects are likely to be long-lasting, many experts say.
  • The pandemic revealed some deep problems, such as how society treats older people, poor people and people of color.
  • It could change so many parts of our lives. Our homes. Our work. Travel. How we touch each other. Will the the elbow bump replace the handshake for good?
  • The Black Death led to the Renaissance. The 1918-19 flu pandemic gave way to the roaring 20s. We've just begun the new 20s. It's impossible to know what world will emerge as the virus recedes. But it seems pretty clear we'll be hearing the echoes of this pandemic for a long time.
anonymous

Opinion | So You Want to 'Save Women's Sports'? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-athletes-womens-sports.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This year, lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced legislation to ban transgender kids from girls’ sports, under the guise of protecting women and girls. Bills have already passed in Mississippi and Idaho.
  • The quest to block trans girls from competition has some prominent supporters.Former President Donald Trump embraced female athletes in February, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”
  • The cause is catching on: One recent Politico poll found that 46 percent of women support a ban on transgender athletes (as do 43 percent of young adults born since 1997).
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  • what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women’s sports would really fight for the future of women’s sports? What if they suddenly said, “We demand women’s sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay”? What if these new activists embraced women’s sports and invested in female athletes, instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?
  • The debate around transgender rights in sports feels sometimes like fighting over bunk beds on the Titanic. In almost every case, as soon as money and power are involved, women’s sports take a back seat to men’s.
  • Women’s sports get attention when there’s an egregious slight against us, such as when the world champion women’s national soccer team sued for pay equal to the men’s team, which failed to qualify for the World Cup.
  • That means we get less coverage of us simply playing sports. When the journalist Brenna Greene looked for photos from the women’s basketball tournament this week, she found the N.C.A.A. hadn’t posted any.
  • Male players’ generous March Madness accommodations do not make news, because they are expected. That is because the men’s tournament gets extensive coverage, with the N.C.A.A. earning more than 20 times as much from the television rights for the men’s tournament as from its separate contract that includes rights to the women’s event. The system is set up this way. Investment follows, and inequality grows.
  • The only time I remember seeing an elite women’s track race on a front page in recent years is when one of the women in the race was framed as a threat.
  • It was not a coincidence that the athlete — Caster Semenya, a champion intersex sprinter from South Africa — is Black. Images of her competing incubated the American campaign against trans participation in sport, which is also racist.
  • If things were fair, any time we raved about LeBron James or Usain Bolt, we would also be watching Candace Parker pirouette with a basketball and Allyson Felix sprinting toward an unfathomable fifth Olympics.
  • At the last Olympics — where resources are equally divided among men’s and women’s teams — women earned more than half of American medals. You could argue that we deserve more resources, not less. And yet many Americans wring their hands over transgender inclusion. They are missing the point.
xaviermcelderry

Covid-19 News: Live Global Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-19-coronavirus

Covid spread

shared by xaviermcelderry on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Britain, one of Europe’s worst-hit countries during the pandemic, leads the world in identifying the exact genetic sequence of virus samples, known as genomic surveillance. That capacity enabled it to put the world on notice with an announcement on Dec. 14 that it had detected the variant scientists call B.1.1.7, along with the disturbing news that it was most likely the cause of skyrocketing infections in London and the surrounding area.
  • None of the variants is known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease, but increased transmissibility adds to caseloads that further strain hospitals and result, inevitably, in more deaths. Their emergence adds to the urgency of mass vaccination campaigns, which have had troubled starts in Europe and the United States; are only beginning in many other countries, like India; and are at minimum months away in many others.
  • Nearly 20 European countries have found B.1.1.7 so far. In Denmark on Saturday, the authorities said more than 250 cases had been detected in samples taken since November. The country’s health minister has predicted that the variant will predominate by mid-February. The country’s coronavirus monitor also reported that it had identified a case of the variant found in South Africa, Reuters reported.
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  • On Saturday, Britain reported eight cases of one of the variants found in Brazil, hours after the British authorities imposed a travel ban from Latin American countries and Portugal, which is linked to Brazil by its colonial history and by current travel and trade ties. Italy also suspended flights from Brazil, its health minister, Roberto Speranza, announced on Facebook.
aleija

Opinion | It's Time to Trust China's and Russia's Vaccines - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vid-vaccines-china-russia.html

history opinion pandemic

shared by aleija on 05 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • While the richest countries in the world are grappling with shortages of Covid-19 vaccines, some of the poorest worry about getting vaccines at all. Yet a solution to both problems may be hiding in plain sight: vaccines from China and Russia, and soon, perhaps, India.
  • Chinese and Russian vaccines were initially dismissed in Western and other global media, partly because of a perception that they were inferior to the vaccines produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca. And that perception seemed to stem partly from the fact that China and Russia are authoritarian states.
  • There is suspicion of the Russian vaccine in Iran, of the Chinese vaccines in Pakistan, and of both in Kenya and South Africa.
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  • When those countries vetted these vaccines, they made informed decisions, based on evidence about safety and efficacy released by the Chinese and Russian manufacturers — much of it also published in peer-reviewed scientific journals like The Lancet and JAMA — or after running independent trials of their own. To assume otherwise is to doubt the ability or integrity of these governments, some of which have health regulatory systems on par with those in the United States or Europe.
  • To some extent this is understandable. China’s and Russia’s self-serving propaganda campaigns touting their respective vaccines only increased wariness, especially abroad.
  • The protocols for trials vary, in other words, even for the same vaccine. Considering that, now imagine the potential for differences among results from trials for various vaccines — differences that may reveal as much about the trials’s designs as the vaccines’ performance.
  • The fact is that no Covid-19 vaccine has been developed or released as transparently as it should have been. And while China and Russia may have botched their rollouts more than some Western companies, that doesn’t necessarily mean their vaccines are shoddy.
  • Most vaccines produced in the West have already been bought up by rich countries: as of early December, all of Moderna’s vaccines and 96 percent of Pfizer-BioNTech’s, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organizations calling for wider and fairer access to vaccines worldwide.
  • When a vaccine is developed in and approved by a country on the W.H.O.’s trusted list, the organization usually relies on that assessment to quickly sign off. But when a vaccine maker anywhere else applies for prequalification, the W.H.O. conducts a full evaluation from scratch, including a physical inspection of the manufacturing facilities.
Javier E

The Danger of Delta Holds to 3 Simple Rules - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...619336

pandemic danger consequences 2021 variants

shared by Javier E on 02 Jul 21 - No Cached
  • Highlight
  • 1. The vaccines are still beating the variants.
  • in real-world tests, they have consistently lived up to their extraordinary promise. The vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna reduce the risk of symptomatic infections by more than 90 percent, as does the still-unauthorized one from Novavax.
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  • the available vaccines slash the odds that infected people will spread the virus onward by at least half and likely more. In the rare cases that the virus breaks through, infections are generally milder, shorter, and lower in viral load.
  • Worryingly, a recent study documented several cases during India’s spring surge in which health-care workers who were fully vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine were infected by Delta and passed it on.
  • If other vaccines have similar vulnerabilities, vaccinated people might have to keep wearing masks indoors to avoid slingshotting the virus into unvaccinated communities
  • 2. The variants are pummeling unvaccinated people.
  • Vaccinated people are safer than ever despite the variants. But unvaccinated people are in more danger than ever because of the variants.
  • While America worries about the fate of states where around 40 percent of people are fully vaccinated, barely 10 percent of the world’s population has achieved that status, including just 1 percent of Africa’s.
  • Many nations that excelled at protecting their citizens are now facing a triple threat: They controlled COVID-19 so well that they have little natural immunity; they don’t have access to vaccines; and they’re besieged by Delta.
  • richer nations would be wrong to think that the variants will spare them, because ...3. The longer Principle No. 2 continues, the less likely No. 1 will hold.
  • it’s how we might eventually face variants that can truly infect even vaccinated people.
  • “We have to assume that’s going to happen,” Gupta told me. “The more infections are permitted, the more probable immune escape becomes.”
  • We’re unlikely to be as vulnerable as we were at the beginning of the pandemic. The vaccines induce a variety of protective antibodies and immune cells, so it’s hard for a variant virus to evade them all. These defenses also vary from person to person, so even if a virus eludes one person’s set, it might be stymied when it jumps into a new host.
  • “I don’t think there’ll suddenly be a variant that pops up and evades everything, and suddenly our vaccines are useless,” Gupta told me. “It’ll be incremental: With every stepwise change in the virus, a chunk of protection is lost in individuals. And people on the edges—the vulnerable who haven’t mounted a full response—will end up bearing the cost.”
  • The discussion about vaccine-beating variants echoes the early debates about whether SARS-CoV-2 would go pandemic. “We don’t think too well as a society about low-probability events that have far-reaching consequences,”
  • even highly vaccinated nations should continue investing in other measures that can control COVID-19 but have been inadequately used—improved ventilation, widespread rapid tests, smarter contact tracing, better masks, places in which sick people can isolate, and policies like paid sick leave.
anniina03

Ocean Explorers Made History Far Before Christopher Columbus | Time - 0 views

time.com/...an-exploration-beyond-columbus

culture history economics

shared by anniina03 on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been mastering routes across the world’s oceans.
  • Customs have been decisively altered by the movement of ships across the oceans. No one drank tea in medieval Europe, but once contact had been made with the tea-drinking Chinese, tea became the obsession of millions of people from Sweden to the United States
  • We tend to think that the opening of the oceans was the work of the great explorers, especially the 15th century pioneers who edged their way through uncharted waters to southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and the spice lands of the Indies. These were sailors such as Christopher Columbus, who chanced upon unsuspected lands that blocked the expected sea route from Europe to China and Japan. But while these men did give the Age of Discovery its name, they didn’t start the exploration of the world’s oceans
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  • Already around 2500 BC, merchants were setting out from what is now Iraq, the seat of the ancient Sumerian civilization, carrying silver ingots to India
  • En route, they acquired copper from Oman and brought precious objects such as carnelian and lapis lazuli from India. Accumulating and re-investing profits, they were the first capitalists. The Indian Ocean became one of the great channels of trade between nations. Greek merchants from Egypt exploited the monsoon winds to ensure a swift passage to south India.
  • The Chinese emperors tended to discourage uncontrolled trade, though prohibitions often did more to provoke traders into finding ways around the rules. Early compasses were used for feng shui, not navigation. But in the 12th century AD, when the coasts of China were open to the world, Hangzhou was at the peak of its prosperity.
  • in the open Pacific, hundreds of scattered islands from Hawaii to Easter Island were settled over many centuries — the Polynesians only reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Even without written records, the Polynesians transmitted exact knowledge of how to sail these apparently boundless waters from generation to generation.
  • By 1500 AD, the Portuguese had begun to show interest in what the Atlantic might offer. That interest had resulted in the settlement of uninhabited islands including Madeira, which began to export phenomenal quantities of sugar.
  • When European sailors — from Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, Denmark and France — entered the Pacific and the Indian Ocean starting in the 16th century, they found a lively maritime world that they could never truly dominate. They still depended on the resources and supply lines of the inhabitants of the lands they visited, even as they created routes across the entire globe
  • Since then, the oceans have only continued to tie the world together — most dramatically when new routes were literally carved out, with the building of the Suez Canal in the 19th century and the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. The first goods to pass through the Panama Canal consisted of a cargo of tinned pineapples from Hawaii. The Pacific and the Atlantic were more closely tied together than ever before.
  • In the 21st century, however, new factors have changed entirely the way goods are carried across the seas, even though over 90% of world trade is carried on ships
  • Business is conducted on a scale that utterly dwarfs that of even 20 years ago, transforming a familiar world. And yet, through trade and cultural exchange, the seas continue to connect even the most distant lands.
anonymous

Should DDT Be Used to Combat Malaria? - Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...ddt-use-to-combat-malaria

shared by anonymous on 25 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • the pesticide is sprayed inside homes and buildings to kill mosquitoes that carry malaria.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Nov 19
       
      Maybe a good idea to have some DDT in order to kill off malaria
  • Malaria is one of the world's most deadly diseases, each year killing about 880,000 people,
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Nov 19
       
      Malaria is killing off thousands of people-why DDT is good in some ways
  • should be used with caution, only when needed, and when no other effective, safe and affordable alternatives are locally available."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Nov 19
       
      there are still alternatives
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The scientists reported that DDT may have a variety of human health effects, including reduced fertility, genital birth defects, breast cancer, diabetes and damage to developing brains. Its metabolite, DDE, can block male hormones.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Nov 19
       
      Still, the negatives are awful!
  • In South Africa, about 60 to 80 grams is sprayed in each household per year, Bouwman said.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Nov 19
       
      Used in regular households
Javier E

Opinion | The Chinese Population Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chinese-population-crisis.html

population Crisis demographics birthrate fertility

shared by Javier E on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • even after years of growth, Chinese per capita G.D.P. is still about one-third or one-fourth the size of neighboring countries like South Korea and Japan. And yet its birthrate has converged with the rich world much more quickly and completely — which has two interrelated implications, both of them grim.
  • First, China will have to pay for the care of a vast elderly population without the resources available to richer societies facing the same challenge.
  • a real problem: Having kids, inevitably one of the harder things that human beings do, feels harder still in a society where children are invisible, siblings absent, and large families rare, where there aren’t ready exemplars or forms of solidarity for people contemplating parenthood.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Second, China’s future growth prospects will dim with every year of below-replacement birthrates, because low fertility creates a self-reinforcing cycle — in which a less youthful society loses dynamism and growth, which reduces economic support for would-be parents, which reduces birthrates, which reduces growth …
  • Yes, in an age of stagnation, CO2 levels won’t grow as fast, delaying some of climate change’s effects — but at the same time a stagnant society will struggle to innovate enough to escape the climate crisis permanently.
  • in the worst-case, to cite a recent paper by the Stanford economist Charles Jones, it risks “an Empty Planet result: knowledge and living standards stagnate for a population that gradually vanishes.”
  • the human race is increasingly facing a “global fertility crisis,” not just a European or American or Japanese baby bust. It’s a crisis that threatens ever-slower growth in the best case
  • the Chinese case is also distinctive, because cruel policy choices made its demographic problems worse.
  • by targeting minority and religious populations, Beijing is attacking the country’s more fecund groups, in what amounts to a statement that if Han birthrates have fallen, minority birthrates must be cut to match.
  • there is Western guilt as well, because the one-child policy was linked to a project hatched by Western technocrats, funded by Western institutions, and egged on by Western intellectuals — a classist, sexist, racist, anti-religious program that sought to defuse a “population bomb” that, we know now, would have defused itself
  • The Western effort died away as the population bomb fizzled, and while its Malthusianism endures around the edges of environmentalism and in European anxieties about African migration, mostly the population control crusade is recalled as a mistaken extrapolation, a well-meaning mistake.
  • As we contemplate the demographic challenge of the future, we should reserve particular opprobrium for those who chose, in the arrogance of their supposed humanitarianism, to use coercive and foul means to make the great problem of the 21st century worse.
rerobinson03

Why the Ottoman Empire rose and fell - 0 views

www.nationalgeographic.com/...why-ottoman-empire-rose-fell

shared by rerobinson03 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Known as one of history’s most powerful empires, the Ottoman Empire grew from a Turkish stronghold in Anatolia into a vast state that at its peak reached as far north as Vienna, Austria, as far east as the Persian Gulf, as far west as Algeria, and as far south as Yemen.
  • Osman I, a leader of a nomadic Turkic tribe from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey), began conquering the region in the late 13th century by launching raids against the weakening Christian Byzantine Empire.
  • Around 1299, he declared himself supreme leader of Asia Minor, and his successors expanded farther and farther into Byzantine territory with the help of foreign mercenaries.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In 1453, Osman’s descendants, now known as the Ottomans, finally brought the Byzantine Empire to its knees when they captured the seemingly unconquerable city of Constantinople.
  • It would take a world war to end the Ottoman Empire for good.
  • Now a dynastic empire with Istanbul as its capital, the Ottoman Empire continued to expand across the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa.
  • At its height, the Ottoman Empire was a real player in European politics and was home to more Christians than Muslims.
  • the arts flourished, technology and architecture reached new heights, and the empire generally enjoyed peace, religious tolerance, and economic and political stability.
  • The Young Turks who now ruled the Ottoman Empire wanted to strengthen it, spooking its Balkan neighbors. The Balkan Wars that followed resulted in the loss of 33 percent of the empire’s remaining territory and up to 20 percent of its population.
  • As World War I loomed, the Ottoman Empire entered into a secret alliance with Germany. The war that followed was disastrous. More than two thirds of the Ottoman military became casualties during World War I, and up to 3 million civilians died.
kaylynfreeman

Celebrities who said they'd leave America in 2016 if Trump was elected -- and didn't | ... - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...in-2016-if-trump-elected-didnt

US politics trump

shared by kaylynfreeman on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • "I did buy a house in another country just in case, so all of these people that threaten to leave the country and then don't; I will leave the country," she said.
  • Whoopi Golberg cast doubt on “The View” that Trump would win. "I don't think that's America. I don't want it to be America. Maybe it's time for me to move, you know,” she said.Raven-Symone also said on “The View” that she would move to Canada. "My confession for this election is if any Republican gets nominated, I'm going to move to Canada with my entire family. I already have my ticket,” she said.
  • “If that motherf---er becomes president, I’m moving my Black a-- to South Africa,” he said on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”  per CBS.
    • kaylynfreeman
      kaylynfreeman on 03 Nov 20
       
      lol
Javier E

What Kamala Harris Learned About Power at Howard - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kamala-harris-howard.html

harris education l history personal development

shared by Javier E on 18 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Ms. Rosario, a senior at Howard University in 1982, was the only woman on the school’s debate team. Kamala Harris, a freshman, was earning a reputation at the Punch Out, a gathering place where students would argue the topics of the time — civil rights, apartheid in South Africa and the school’s complicated relationship with President Ronald Reagan.
  • Ms. Harris had substance, but Ms. Rosario was impressed by her style. A confidence, an intensity, a level of preparation that was rare for new students.
  • At the Howard Hotel, one of the city’s only Black-owned hotels, members of the recently formed Congressional Black Caucus would gather for drinks and food, and students could see Black lawmakers like Mickey Leland of Texas and William Gray of Pennsylvania.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • “Everybody was at the top of their class. They were homecoming queen or king, they were student body president, valedictorian, and they all came together in this place called Howard University,” said Lorri Saddler-Rice, who joined the sorority at the same time. “You’re talking about some standout students, but then you had some who were standouts among the standouts and she was definitely one of them. She was very visible.”
  • This transition, from outsider to insider, was typical for Black activism in the 1980s, said Jennifer Thomas, a Howard professor who did not know Ms. Harris but attended the college in the same decade and had overlapping social circles with her. During those years, a generation of students felt a burden to carry the mantle of the civil rights movement of their parents, but there was no consensus on how to do so.
  • When an 18-year-old Ms. Harris arrived in Washington in 1982, more than 70 percent of the residents in the nation’s capital were Black and Howard was the hub of the city’s Black elite, a speaking stop for dignitaries and a social hub for Washington’s Black political class.
  • “She was so spirited and cogent in her arguments,” Ms. Rosario said. “I remember her enthusiasm. And I mostly remember that she was never intimidated.”
  • “What you begin to see at Howard is that Black people are involved in every area of life,” said Eric Easter, who graduated from Howard in 1983 and knew Ms. Harris. “The mayor, the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, everybody’s Black.
  • Younger Black activists now largely reject this framework. They don’t see Blackness, or Black leadership inside a system, as an inherent step toward progress.
  • Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick, the president of Howard, believes the distance between Ms. Harris’s generation and some students today is a natural outcome of progress. Newer movements expand the range of Black possibility, he said, but the pursuit of justice is constant.
  • “Howard alums, every day, they are out in the communities blocking and tackling and giving agency to those who otherwise feel under represented,” Mr. Frederick said.
  • However, he added, “younger people today, there is less willingness to have a conversation with people who don’t agree with you. Because I think younger people today feel that just hasn’t worked for us well in the past.”
  • Mr. Frederick, the Howard president, saw Ms. Harris a few weeks ago, while she was working out of an office at the school. At one point while preparing for the debate, she huddled with staff at the school’s Founders library, the same place that lawyers for Brown v. Board of Education prepared before they argued before the Supreme Court.“She was so nostalgic about being in that space, and that history was not lost on her,” Mr. Frederick said. “It was good to be home.”
Javier E

The Seditionists Need a Path Back Into Society - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...617746

sedition co-existence politics history culture crisis peaceful

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Relatively few of them were at the United States Capitol on January 6, determined to stop Congress from certifying a legitimate election. Millions more cheered the rioters on—and still do.
  • As a group, it’s hard to know what to call them. They are too many to merit the term extremists. There are not enough of them to be secessionists. Some prominent historians and philosophers have been arguing for a revival of the word fascist; others think white supremacist is more appropriate,
  • I’m calling all of them seditionists—not just the people who took part in the riot, but the far larger number of Americans who are united by their belief that Donald Trump won the election, that Joe Biden lost, and that a long list of people and institutions are lying about it: Congress, the media, Mike Pence, the election officials in all 50 states, and the judges in dozens of courts.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • For although Trump will eventually exit political life, the seditionists will not. They will remain, nursing their grievances, feverishly posting on social media, angrily listening to Tucker Carlson
  • even if we put the number of truly seditious Americans at 10 or 15 percent, that’s a very large number of people
  • those who do hold these views are quite numerous. In December, 34 percent of Americans said they did not trust the outcome of the 2020 election. More recently, 21 percent said that they either strongly support or somewhat support the storming of the Capitol building. As of this week, 32 percent were still telling pollsters that Biden was not the legitimate winner.
  • That’s the counterintuitive advice you will hear from people who have studied Northern Ireland before the 1998 peace deal, or Liberia, or South Africa, or Timor-Leste—countries where political opponents have seen each other as not just wrong, but evil
  • the seditionists have in fact declared their independence from the rest of us. January 6 was indeed their 1776: They declared that they want to live in a different America from the one the rest of us inhabit, ruled over by a different president chosen according to a different rule book
  • yet they cannot be wished away, or sent away, or somehow locked up. They will not leave of their own accord, and Americans who accept Biden’s lawful victory won’t either. We have no choice except to coexist.
  • But how? Clearly we need regulation of social media, but that’s years away. Of course we need better education, but that doesn’t help us deal with the armed men who were standing outside the Ohio statehouse this week.
  • Here’s another idea: Drop the argument and change the subject.
  • Perhaps in 2024, seditionists, rather than reality-based Republicans, will be running the elections in Georgia and Arizona. Americans could see worse postelection scenarios than the one we’ve just lived through.
  • in both cases, identification with the group comes to dominate people psychologically. “Other interests and ideas become closed off,” he said. “They dismiss anything that pushes back against them.”
  • The literature in the fields of peacebuilding and conflict prevention overflows with words such as local and community-based and economic regeneration. It’s built on the idea that people should do something constructive—something that benefits everybody, lessens inequality, and makes people work alongside people they hate.
  • That doesn’t mean they will then get to like one another, just that they are less likely to kill one another on the following day.
  • the Biden administration, or indeed a state government, could act on this principle and, for example, reinvigorate AmeriCorps, the national-service program, offering proper salaries to young people willing to serve as cleaners or aides at overburdened hospitals, food banks, and addiction clinics
  • infrastructure investment can produce projects benefiting all of society too. So can a cross-community discussion about infrastructure, or even infrastructure security
  • Ask for ideas. Take notes. Make the problem narrow, specific, even boring, not existential or exciting. “Who won the 2020 election?” is, for these purposes, a bad topic. “How do we fix the potholes in our roads?” is, in contrast, superb.
  • Here’s another tactic from the world of conflict prevention: work with trusted messengers, people who have authority within the seditious community, who sympathize with its shared values but are nevertheless willing to talk their comrades down from the brink.
  • Clearly the Republican Party is well placed to reach out to members who have rejected democracy, which is why it’s important to support the Adam Kinzingers and the Ben Sasses, even the Mitch McConnells who belatedly and self-interestedly switch sides
  • some of the Colombian program’s principles have useful resonance. It focuses on the long term, offering former outcasts the hope of a positive future, and providing training and counseling designed to help them assimilate
  • Not coincidentally, this is exactly the kind of advice that can be heard from psychologists who specialize in exit counseling for people who have left religious cults.
  • In the years before and after the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, for example, many “peacebuilding” projects did not try to make Catholics and Protestants hold civilized debates about politics, or talk about politics at all. Instead, they built community centers, put up Christmas lights, and organized job training for young people.
  • Before they can be convinced otherwise, they will have to see some kind of future for themselves in an America run by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and a Democratic Congress.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 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  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
martinelligi

Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus Vaccine Reviewed In FDA's Briefing Document : Coronavirus... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...accine-finds-it-safe-effective

vaccine pandemic

shared by martinelligi on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The Food and Drug Administration released an analysis of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine Wednesday morning that supports its authorization for emergency use.
  • On Friday, a panel of advisers to the agency will meet to evaluate the vaccine and make a recommendation about whether it should be given the OK. If the agency goes on to authorize the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, it would be the third, after those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, to become available in the U.S.
  • The efficacy figures are lower than Pfizer's 95% for preventing COVID-19 disease and 94% for Moderna. Over the course of the pandemic, the coronavirus has begun to change. Variants first seen in South Africa and Brazil, where the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was tested, mutated in ways that help them evade the immune response prompted by vaccines developed against the original form of the virus.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The authorization of Johnson & Johnson's vaccine could eventually help expand the supply of COVID-19 shots for Americans. But its availability won't make a huge difference right away.
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