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All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project. “Our experience with vaccine development is that you can’t anticipate where you’re going to stumble,” says Hatchett, meaning that diversity is key. And the stage where any approach is most likely to stumble is clinical or human trials, which, for some of the candidates, are about to get under way.

An illustration of that is a vaccine that was produced in the 1960s against respiratory syncytial virus, a common virus that causes cold-like symptoms in children. In clinical trials, this vaccine was found to aggravate those symptoms in infants who went on to catch the virus. A similar effect was observed in animals given an early experimental Sars vaccine. It was later modified to eliminate that problem but, now that it has been repurposed for Sars-CoV-2, it will need to be put through especially stringent safety testing to rule out the risk of enhanced disease.

Once a Covid-19 vaccine has been approved, a further set of challenges will present itself. “Getting a vaccine that’s proven to be safe and effective in humans takes one at best about a third of the way to what’s needed for a global immunisation programme,” says global health expert Jonathan Quick of Duke University in North Carolina, author of The End of Epidemics (2018). “Virus biology and vaccines technology could be the limiting factors, but politics and economics are far more likely to be the barrier to immunisation.”

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines. During the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, for example, vaccine supplies were snapped up by nations that could afford them, leaving poorer ones short. But you could also imagine a scenario where, say, India – a major supplier of vaccines to the developing world – not unreasonably decides to use its vaccine production to protect its own 1.3 billion-strong population first, before exporting any.

• This article was amended on 19 March 2020. An earlier version incorrectly stated that the Sabin Vaccine Institute was collaborating with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) on a Covid-19 vaccine.

the cost of treatment for Covid-19 can run around $35,000. As the patient in the report exclaimed: “I was pretty sticker-shocked. I personally don’t know anybody who has that kind of money.”

Many will sadly lose their jobs over the coming weeks – with one estimate projecting as many as 30%. And as they do, Americans are about to learn something horrifying: how irrational and irresponsible it is for so many to be dependent on employers for health insurance.

Take it from me. I’m a former health insurance executive who once profited from this system. It’s time for it to stop.

Even in better times, this arrangement was a bad idea from a health perspective. Most Americans whose families depend on their employers for coverage are just a layoff away from being uninsured.

During the last big recession, researchers at Cornell University found that 9.3 million Americans lost their health insurance between 2007 and 2009

During this time, roughly six in 10 Americans who lost their jobs became uninsured.

this problem compounds itself. If the reason you lost your health insurance is that you no longer have steady employment, how are you now going to be able to afford monthly premiums for some other private health care plan?

even in good times, the employer-based model fails to cover enough of us, with the number of Americans covered through an employer steadily dropping in general. Since 1999, the percentage of those with job-based coverage has declined by nine points.

at a time in our nation’s history where more will need quality care than ever before, the human cost will simply be too much to bear.

But this protest, contrary to his defense, was advertised unambiguously as a white nationalist rally.

We have all observed the administration’s decisions over the past several months that aligned with the white nationalist agenda,

Until Trump’s comments, few critics seemed to identify the larger relationship the alt-right sees between its beliefs and the ideals of the American founders.

Yet President Trump stepped in to salvage the message that the rally organizers had originally hoped to project:

But I had never believed Trump’s administration would have trouble distancing itself from the actual white nationalist movement.

The most fundamental legislative goal of the white nationalist movement is to limit nonwhite immigration. It is important to remember that such limits were in place during the lifetimes of many current white nationalists; it was the default status until the 1960s.

I do, however, think it is essential that we recognize that the white nationalist history embedded in American culture lends itself to white nationalist rallies like the one in Charlottesville. If you want to preserve Confederate memorials, but you don’t work to build monuments to historical black leaders, you share the same cause as the marchers.

His comments supporting the rally gave new purpose to the white nationalist movement, unlike any endorsement it has ever received. Among its followers, being at that rally will become something to brag about, and some people who didn’t want to be associated with extremism will now see the cause as more mainstream. When the president doesn’t provide condemnation that he has been pressed to give, what message does that send but encouragement?

The United States was founded as a white nationalist country, and that legacy remains today. Things have improved from the radical promotion of white people at the expense of all others, which has persisted for most of our history, yet most of us have not accepted the extent to which white identity guides so much of what we still do. Sometimes it seems that the white nationalists are most honest about the very real foundation of white supremacy upon which our nation was built.

The president’s words legitimized the worst of our country, and now the white nationalist movement could be poised to grow. To challenge these messages, we need to acknowledge the continuity of white nationalist thought in American history, and the appeal it still holds.

It is a fringe movement not because its ideas are completely alien to our culture, but because we work constantly to argue against it, expose its inconsistencies and persuade our citizens to counter it. We can no longer count on the country’s leader to do this, so it’s now incumbent upon all of us.

an outbreak erupted in the Yuan Empire and may have hastened the end of Mongol rule over China. Three years later, the disease killed over 90 percent of the Hebei Province's populations

with deaths totaling over 5 million people.

From its origin at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the Black Death rode trade routes west stopping at Central Asian caravansaries and Middle Eastern trade centers and subsequently infected people all across Asia.

"The Land of Darkness," or Central Asia. From there, it spread to China, India, the Caspian Sea and "land of the Uzbeks," and thence to Persia and the Mediterranean.

The Central Asian scourge struck Persia just a few years after it appeared in China — proof if any is needed that the Silk Road was a convenient route of transmission for the deadly bacterium.

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish

The region's population was slow to recover, in part due to the political disruptions caused by the fall of Mongol rule and the later invasions of Timur (Tamerlane).

In 1335, the Il-Khan (Mongol) ruler of Persia and the Middle East, Abu Said, died of bubonic plague during a war with his northern cousins, the Golden Horde. This signaled the beginning of the end for Mongol rule in the region

He goes on to charge that the Mongol leader "ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside."

This incident is often cited as the first instance of biological warfare in history. However, other contemporary chroniclers make no mention of the putative Black Death catapults.

European observers were fascinated but not too worried when the Black Death struck the western rim of Central Asia and the Middle East

, the holy city of Mecca was hit by the plague, likely brought in by infected pilgrims on the hajj.

It seems more likely, however, that traders from further east brought diseased fleas

It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed."

Perhaps the most significant impact that the Black Death had on Asia was that it contributed to the fall of the mighty Mongol Empire. After all, the pandemic started within the Mongol Empire and devastated peoples from all four of the khanates.

The massive population loss and terror caused by the plague destabilized Mongolian governments from the Golden Horde in Russia to the Yuan Dynasty in China. The Mongol ruler of the Ilkhanate Empire in the Middle East died of the disease along with six of his sons.

Although the Pax Mongolica had allowed increased wealth and cultural exchange, through a reopening of the Silk Road, it also allowed this deadly contagion to spread rapidly westward from its origin in western China or eastern Central Asia. As a result, the world's second-largest empire ever crumbled and fell.

Already a counter-majoritarian institution, the Senate was made even more so by the rise of the modern filibuster in the 20th century, which allows a minority to block majority-supported legislation. That means most substantive legislation must get 60 votes in the Senate to pass — often an exceedingly difficult threshold to reach.

In the minds of many gun control proponents, American life has become — or perhaps always was — a zero-sum game in which one party’s freedom to exist in peace has lost out to another’s prerogative to kill. In this view, mass death is simply the cost gun owners are willing to inflict on the country for the right to bear arms.

“The N.R.A. is powerful for precisely the reason most potent progressive organizations are powerful,” David French has written in National Review. “Like those progressive counterparts, the N.R.A. is an effective part of a larger community, and it is effective precisely because it persuasively expresses the will of its members and allies.” In his view, the N.R.A. does not manipulate people into supporting gun rights; rather, it reflects and channels the desires of people who already do

Gun control proponents often argue that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the right of state militias, not individuals, to bear arms. This interpretation is disputed by gun rights proponents, but not exclusively: The historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who favors the Second Amendment’s repeal, has argued that it was expressly designed to enshrine not only the right but also the obligation of individual colonial settlers to violently appropriate Native land and to control Black populations, both free and enslaved.

This interpretive turn has led to calls for the Second Amendment’s repeal, including from the retired justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Stevens was one of the four dissenters in the Heller case, whose ruling he believed could be overturned only with a new constitutional amendment that voided the second. Doing so, he wrote in The Times in 2018, “would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

But none of them — not universal background checks, not red flag laws, not even a ban on assault-style weapons — would confront the core issue: America simply has too many guns.That is the view of Mr. Lopez, who contends that stamping out gun violence would require a Green New Deal-size plan that offers solutions at the scale of the problem. “If the key difference between America and other countries is how many more guns the U.S. has, then something has to be done to quickly reduce the number of firearms here,” he writes. “It could mean banning more types of guns — perhaps all semiautomatic weapons or all handguns — and coupling that with an Australian-style mandatory buyback program, which the research supports.”

In 2015, OSHA fined the company for 12 violations, which included issues related to machinery safeguards, according to those records. In two separate incidents from 2017, two employees suffered finger amputations after getting their hands stuck in equipment. No other violations involved issues with refrigeration or gas leaks.

With such a huge food supply, food marketing got better and restaurants got cheaper. The low cost of food fueled the growth of the fast-food industry. If food were expensive, you couldn’t have fast food.

The epidemic was caused by the overproduction of food in the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, there was a change in national agricultural policy. Instead of the government paying farmers not to engage in full production, as was the practice, they were encouraged to grow as much food as they could. At the same time, technological changes and the “green revolution” made our farms much more productive. The price of food plummeted, while the number of calories available to the average American grew by about 1,000 a day.

Well, what do people do when there is extra food around? They eat it! This, of course, is a tremendously controversial idea. However, the model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.

There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life.

Americans are wasting food at a progressively increasing rate. If Americans were to eat all the food that’s available, we’d be even more obese.

What new information did your equation render? That the conventional wisdom of 3,500 calories less is what it takes to lose a pound of weight is wrong. The body changes as you lose. Interestingly, we also found that the fatter you get, the easier it is to gain weight. An extra 10 calories a day puts more weight onto an obese person than on a thinner one. Also, there’s a time constant that’s an important factor in weight loss. That’s because if you reduce your caloric intake, after a while, your body reaches equilibrium. It actually takes about three years for a dieter to reach their new “steady state.” Our model predicts that if you eat 100 calories fewer a day, in three years you will, on average, lose 10 pounds — if you don’t cheat. Another finding: Huge variations in your daily food intake will not cause variations in weight, as long as your average food intake over a year is about the same. This is because a person’s body will respond slowly to the food intake.

People don’t wait long enough to see what they are going to stabilize at. So if you drop weight and return to your old eating habits, the time it takes to crawl back to your old weight is something like three years. To help people understand this better, we’ve posted an interactive version of our model at bwsimulator.niddk.nih.gov.

we should stop marketing food to children.

weight change, up or down, takes a very, very long time. All diets work. But the reaction time is really slow: on the order of a year.

I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds

People think that the epidemic has to be caused by genetics or that physical activity has gone down. Yet levels of physical activity have not really changed in the past 30 years. As for the genetic argument, yes, there are people who are genetically disposed to obesity, but if they live in societies where there isn’t a lot of food, they don’t get obese. For them, and for us, it’s supply that’s the issue.

I think childhood obesity is a major problem. And when you’re obese, it’s not like we can suddenly cut your food off and you’ll go back to not being obese. You’ve been programmed to eat more. It’s a hardship to eat less. Michelle Obama’s initiative is helpful. And childhood obesity rates seem to be stabilizing in the developed world, at least. The obesity epidemic may have peaked because of the recession. It’s made food more expensive.

I think the food industry doesn’t want to know it. And ordinary people don’t particularly want to hear this, either. It’s so easy for someone to go out and eat 6,000 calories a day.

Michigan's surge is a combination of two factors, Gounder says: the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant combined with people relaxing on mitigation measures before enough residents are vaccinated.

Florida has the highest number of cases of the variant, followed by Michigan, Minnesota and Massachusetts, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Experts say it's more contagious, may cause more severe disease and may potentially be more deadly. And it's rapidly spreading across the country.

Here's why: It takes about two weeks after the Pfizer and Moderna second doses and about two weeks after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine before people are immune, she said. Meanwhile, Gounder added, "the incubation period, which is the time from when you are exposed to when you are infected with coronavirus, is four to five days."close dialogSign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifeSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicySign up for the Results Are In NewsletterGet the latest expert advice to live a healthier and happier lifePlease enter aboveSign me upNo, ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy PolicyYou have successfully subscribed.By subscribing you agree to ourPrivacy Policyclose dialog

"So there is no way that a surge in vaccination is going to help curb this when transmission is happening right now," she said.

the only thing that will curb transmission right now are measures that take effect immediately.

Michigan is now reporting thousands of new Covid-19 cases daily, when just weeks ago, state data showed the daily reported case count was as low as 563 cases.

"Hospitals are being inundated," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, told CNN. "Michigan needs to shut down."

One of the officials said Harris appears eager for a portfolio that will allow her to achieve political victories, especially in foreign policy, an area where she is far less experienced than Biden.

Harris' performance is critical to her future political career, which could well include a run for president. It's also of special concern right now as she prepares to depart for a trip to Guatemala and Mexico next week as part of this project. It will be her first official foray into in-person, in-country talks about the troubles that push Central American migrants toward the US.

Harris and her staff have made it clear that they want to focus narrowly on diplomatic efforts in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where they believe they are more likely to achieve tangible results in addressing the root causes of migration, like economic despair, said the officials.

"Everything you're doing in Central America is always towards an eye on the border and what's happening in the United States," said Cris Ramon, an immigration consultant. "With the current dynamics in migration, what's happening at the US-Mexico border has implications in the Northern Triangle and vice versa."

Tens of thousands migrants from Central America arrive at the US-Mexico border monthly. In April, of the 178,622 migrants encountered by US Customs and Border Protection, 79,190, or roughly 44%, were from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, according to the agency's data, the very countries where Harris is supposed to be addressing migration to the US.

The pandemic has taken a dramatic toll on Latin America, where Covid-19 cases and deaths soared and economies once projected to grow have been decimated. The region was also hit with two devastating hurricanes last year.

The decline in economic growth in 2020, according to the Congressional Research Service, is expected to worsen income inequality and poverty in the region. That, combined with pent-up demands and the perception of the Biden administration being more lenient, has fueled people trying to cross the US-Mexico border.

Harris' role -- which mimics that of Biden under President Barack Obama -- is intended to target what's driving people to the US.

But following Biden's announcement, both the President and vice president's staff clarified repeatedly that Harris would be focused solely on diplomatic efforts to stem the current flow of migrants and develop a larger strategic partnership with Central America.

Harris has stressed that her role is to address the "root causes" of migration beginning in the Northern Triangle countries and Mexico, rather than the "symptoms" of it manifesting at the border, which are being addressed by the Homeland Security secretary. Without a diplomatic push in those countries, "we are just in a perpetual system of only dealing with the symptoms," she said in April.

Immigration advocates and regional experts who have participated in roundtables with the vice president describe Harris asking detailed questions on a variety of issues, like agricultural science and water irrigation strategies to tackle food insecurity and infrastructure needs.

Internally, Harris has been intimately involved in the crafting of a regional strategy, communicating regularly with National Security Council officials. Cabinet members, along with other administration officials, are also putting together proposals on the administration's root-causes strategy, which Harris is expected to discuss while in Mexico and Guatemala in June, a senior administration official previously told CNN.

The McDougal payment was orchestrated by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign violations stemming from his role in two hush-money payments: the one AMI made to McDougal and a separate $130,000 payment he made to another woman, Stormy Daniels, who also alleged an affair that Trump denies.

When the FEC's vote on the matter became public in May, Trump praised the results, saying it closed the book on what he called the "phony case against me."

An investigation into the true origins of the virus is essential not only for scientific reasons, but also because policymakers around the world need this knowledge to better prepare themselves for future pandemics.

The lab leak theory has been judged by at least one US intelligence agency as the more likely explanation for Covid-19's origins, while two agencies think the virus was more likely spread to humans from an infected animal

It should be no surprise, then, that the WHO's own investigation into the origins of Covid-19 concluded that a lab leak was probably not the cause of the pandemic and that infection from natural sources was more likely. But investigators were only permitted to examine research conducted by Chinese state scientists and did not have full access to the data or facilities that would have allowed them to assess whether the virus that causes Covid-19 may have been present before cases of the disease were first confirmed in China in December 2019.

Beijing, for its part, considers the case closed and has argued that the attention should be turned to other countries for the role they may have played in the early days of the pandemic.

More specifically, the Biden administration is calling on the WHO to complete a second phase of its investigation in a way that allows "international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak."

Biden has been eager to redouble our engagement and work together with America's friends and allies around the world. Getting to the root cause of a pandemic that has already killed nearly 3.5 million people globally presents a golden opportunity to do just that.

"Diplomacy is always our goal. Our goal is to reduce the risk of escalation. But, to date, we have not received any response," Psaki said, noting that the outreach "follows over a year without active dialogue with North Korea, despite multiple attempts by the US to engage."

However, experts told CNN prior to Kim Yo Jong's message that Pyongyang was likely to rebuff diplomatic efforts for the time-being for a number of reasons including the coronavirus pandemic, the Biden team's ongoing North Korea policy review, the meetings in the region and above all, the administration's rhetoric.

"That's just a non-starter for the North Koreans," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

On Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that the administration had reached out to North Korea, noting they have "a number of channels, as we always have had, that we can reach out through."

"It has to be nuanced because you can't just say, you know, we want to have talks, and the talks are going to be about North Korea's complete denuclearization, because that sounds very one sided," he told CNN. "It would have to be long term and not the Libya model of complete denuclearization upfront before we give them anything they want."

But after the summit, Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said the agreement pledged North Korea to the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program, despite the fact that it said nothing of the sort.

Former officials and experts also noted that Biden administration officials' commitments not to lift tariffs on North Korea during confirmation hearings did not go unnoticed, which could be one factor driving Pyongyang's decision not to engage directly with the US.

"What if the US and China come out of their meetings this week and make it clear that they are headed for escalating US-China tensions? If you are Kim Jong Un you would read that as meaning that it is less likely that China will put the squeeze on North Korea," said Anthony Ruggiero, a former National Security Council official. "If that happens, maybe Kim now knows he can go to China to buy more pieces for its nuclear programs, or to go to China and sell more coal. That would be a bad sign for the future of any US-North Korea diplomacy."

Aum said that he doesn't think they'd "want to do anything to provoke the US prior to some greater signal that the US is going to take a very hostile approach."

Biden rolled back a number of Trump-era immigration policies, including the “Remain in Mexico” policy that advocates say gutted the nation’s asylum system and the "zero tolerance" policy of separating families at the border.

"Fox News Sunday" blasted the Biden administration's immigration policies, saying "empirically, [they're] entirely" responsible for the surge in unaccompanied minors at the southern border.

"As I mentioned in April of 2020, under the harshest of conditions, a Trump administration and Covid, we still saw people arriving at our front door," Escobar said. "Even the president of Mexico, that comment, obscures what we have to do, which is what I believe President Biden finally will achieve — which is address the root causes of migration. We're going to be having this conversation year in and year out until we have leaders in this hemisphere who are willing to work together."

"This is a challenge that we've been seeing for several years. It's not going away — until we fix it," Escobar said.

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.

In Donetsk, these included not just the Red Flag of the defunct Soviet Union and the black-yellow-white tricolor of the long-gone Tsarist empire, but at times also the emblem of an even more distant, failed venture, the Confederate States of America.

But what was most familiar about the insurrectionists in Washington on Wednesday was their certitude, an unbending conviction that, no matter what anyone else or the law might say, right was on their side.

“Victory is ours. All we need is courage,” shouted a self-declared commander of the “army of patriots” who, in the fall of 1993, helped take control of the White House that at the time housed the Russian legislature on the banks of the Moscow River.

When insurrections began in Moscow in 1993, and then in eastern Ukraine in 2014, failure looked inevitable. The leaders, along with their followers, seemed deranged, intoxicated by nostalgia, wild conspiracy theories and fantasies about the depth of their public support.

A barrage of propaganda on Russian television, the main source of news for much of the population, spread fear and anger, embedding a conviction that anti-Russian protesters in the distant Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would soon descend on Donetsk with guns and knives to wreak havoc.

The war that followed has now dragged on for six years, killing more than 13,000 people, nearly all civilians. People who wanted nothing to do with the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” who, according to opinion polls carried out shortly before its declaration, constituted a large majority, have mostly left the “republic” that no other country, including even Russia, recognizes.

But the winners squandered the victory, unleashing a wave of crooked privatizations and staging a deeply flawed presidential election in 1996 that kept an infirm and increasingly erratic Mr. Yeltsin in the Kremlin for a second term. When that was nearly done, he handed over power to Vladimir V. Putin.

A former KGB officer who believed in order above all else, Mr. Putin had no time for insurrection but he embraced the revanchist cause, reviving Russia’s ambitions as a global power, the reach of the security services, the music of the Soviet national anthem, Soviet-era emblems for the military and patriotism as a cudgel against his critics.

Commenting on the tumult in Washington, Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Russia’s upper house and a Putin loyalist, scoffed at American democracy as “limping on both feet.”

Your antibodies may be not as effective, but they’re still going to be effective. If you have 10 times the amount of antibody that you need and you lose half of that, you’re still going to be well protected. And I think that’s where these variants are. Most people will be well protected from the worst aspects of disease.

There are four or five common-cold coronaviruses. Many of them have their roots in animals, whether they be bats or cows or other animal species, and then jumped into humans. None of those viruses cause severe disease. They’re all relatively transmissible, and you can get infected every two or three years with them.

There is some possibility [SARS-CoV-2] will go along that route. Once we’ve all gotten some level of baseline immunity—we’ve seen a virus like this or very similar to this—the next time you have it, it [may cause] a mild infection but, for the most part, you won’t end up in a hospital or on a respirator. That’s kind of the trajectory that you could expect, but again, we don’t know.

This event could have happened in 2002 with [SARS-CoV-1], but that virus was effectively stopped through quarantining and other procedures. We have an event now where most of the world will have seen this virus, either through a vaccine or through natural immunity, and so its trajectory in a few years is really hard to predict. I’m hopeful that it’s going to be more like a common-cold coronavirus. The best outcome would be that it’s like SARS 1 and it just disappears from the Earth.

“I want to stress that we are deeply concerned that this strain is more transmissible and can accelerate outbreaks in the U.S.

Covid cases and deaths have broken record after record across the country, with a peak number of deaths, 4,400, announced on Tuesday. At least 3,973 new deaths and 238,390 new cases were reported on Thursday, and the nation is nearing a milestone of 400,000 deaths.

The new variant, called B 1.1.7 was first identified in Britain, where it rapidly became the primary source of infections, accounting for as many 60 percent of new cases diagnosed in London and surrounding areas.

In the new report, C.D.C. scientists modeled how quickly the variant might spread in the United States, assuming about 10 percent to 30 percent of people have pre-existing immunity to the virus, and another 1 million people will be vaccinated each week beginning this month.

It’s not yet clear what makes the new variants more contagious. They share at least one mutation, called N501Y, that is thought to be involved. One possibility, researchers said, is that the mutation may increase the amount of virus in the nose but not in the lungs — potentially explaining why it is more contagious, but not more deadly.A higher amount of virus in the nose means anyone infected would expel more virus while talking, singing, coughing or even breathing, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle

Federal health officials sounded the alarm Friday about a fast spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that is projected to become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.

The variant is not known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease. But the dire warning — hedged by limited data about just how prevalent the variant first identified in Britain has become — landed in a week where the nation’s nascent vaccination campaign was hampered by confusion and limited supplies as demand grew among growing numbers of eligible people

Only 76 cases of the variant have been identified so far in the U.S., but the actual number is believed to be higher and is expected to spiral upward in the next few weeks, officials said.

One in 860 Americans have died of Covid-19 in the last year, according to new figures released by the C.D.C. But the burden of deaths has not fallen equally across racial, ethnic lines and geographic regions, and there is concern that vaccines will not reach the hardest hit communities, where access to health services is limited and distrust is rampant. Editors’ PicksFor Pro Athlete Leading Social Justice Push, a Victory and UncertaintyJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sHow ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose InsultAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyImage

But spikes in cases threaten to cripple already overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes in many parts of the country. Some are at or near capacity. Others have faced troubling rates of infection among their staff, causing shortages and increasing patient loads.

If the variant is about 50 percent more contagious, as suggested by data from Britain, it will become the predominant source of all infections in the United States by March, the model showed. A slow rollout of vaccinations will hasten that fate.

The result was an aggressive monetary expansion that effectively ended deflation.

The economy responded strongly. From 1933 to 1937, real gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of almost 10 percent, and unemployment fell from 25 percent to 14. To put that in perspective, G.D.P. growth has averaged just 2.5 percent in the current recovery, and unemployment has barely budged.

The lesson here is that fiscal stimulus can help a depressed economy recover — an idea supported by new studies of the 2009 stimulus package. Additional short-run tax cuts or increases in government investment would help deal with our unemployment crisis.

What of the idea that monetary and fiscal policy can do little if unemployment is caused by structural factors, like a mismatch between workers’ skills and available jobs

businesses and workers found a way to get the job done. Factories simplified production methods and housewives learned to rivet.

Here the lesson is that demand is crucial — and that jobs don’t go unfilled for long. If jobs were widely available today, unemployed workers would quickly find a way to acquire needed skills or move to where the jobs were located.

at the end of World War II, that ratio hit 109 percent — one and a half times as high as it is now. Yet this had no obvious adverse consequences for growth or our ability to borrow.

what about the national debt? Given the recent debt downgrade, it might seem impossible for the United States to embark on fiscal stimulus that would increase its ratio of debt to G.D.P.

Everyone understood then why the nation was racking up so much debt: we were fighting for survival, and for the survival of our allies. No one doubted that we would repay our debts. We had done it after every other war, and raising taxes even before the attack on Pearl Harbor showed our leaders’ fiscal resolve.

someone needs to explain to the nation and to world markets just why we must increase the debt in the short run. Unemployment of roughly 9 percent for 28 months and counting is a national emergency. We must fight it with the same passion and commitment we have brought to military emergencies in our past.

“Planes just don’t blow up in mid air,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at Teal Group, an aviation consulting firm. “It doesn’t work like that.”

Iranian news organizations tied to the government referred to technical problems with the plane, but they did not elaborate or cite evidence.

An airliner should be able to fly even if one engine fails. An “uncontained” engine failure, in which parts of the engine disintegrate, can spray shrapnel that damages and even destroys the plane, but such events are rare.

After the crash, Ukraine’s embassy in Iran initially issued a statement ruling out terrorism or a rocket attack as a cause of the crash. But the statement was later removed from the embassy’s website and replaced by one saying it was too early to draw any conclusions.

After an accident, the “black boxes” are often sent to the plane’s maker for analysis, but Iran would not send the flight data recorders to Boeing, an American company, Mr. Abedzadeh said in an interview with Mehr. “We will not give the black box to the manufacturer and the Americans,” Mehr quoted him as saying.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he had ordered the prosecutor general to open a criminal investigation into the crash and that the country’s entire civil aviation fleet would be checked.

On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration barred American airliners from flying over Iran, citing a risk that commercial planes would be mistaken for military aircraft. Several non-American carriers rerouted flights on Wednesday to avoid Iraq and Iran, according to Flightradar24.

The airline said it was canceling flights to Tehran indefinitely and promised a full investigation into the causes of the crash, involving officials from Ukraine, Iran and Boeing.

The airline began in the 1990s as newly independent Ukraine’s state flag carrier but was subsequently privatized. Its website calls the business a “public private entity.”