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2. Seriously ramp up testing The Biden campaign says the goal is to "ensure that all Americans have access to regular, reliable and free testing." It would work to double the number of drive-through testing sites and invest in "next-generation testing" including home tests and instant tests.

3. Establish a U.S. public health jobs corps The Biden campaign pledges to "mobilize" 100,000 Americans to work with local organizations around the country to perform contact tracing and other services that would help address unmet needs in populations at high risk for COVID-19.

4. Help people get health insurance Millions of American have lost health insurance during the pandemic. Biden's coronavirus plan proposes to have the federal government cover 100% of the costs of COBRA coverage for the duration of the crisis. "So when people lose their employer-based health insurance, they can stay on that insurance, given the moment we are in and the pandemic," says Stef Feldman, Biden's national policy director.

5. Create a caregiving workforce During the pandemic, Biden says many families are struggling to find affordable care for their children, aging relatives or loved ones with disabilities. "At the same time, professional caregivers have either lost their jobs or continue to work while putting their lives at risk without sufficient pay," his campaign plan notes.

6. Bolster resources for vaccine distribution and PPE production States will need a lot of money to distribute a vaccine and make sure it gets to everyone who wants it. There are complex logistics that will require planning and resources. For instance, states may need freezers to store their vaccines, and given how many people are hesitant to be vaccinated, they will need public education materials and guidance. Currently state governors are asking for more guidance and financial assistance.

On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, a “pastel QAnon” has emerged that repackages conspiracies in “live, laugh, love” fonts and with softer and more aesthetically pleasing imagery than has been typical for sites that propagate conspiracy theories. This repackaging acts as “breadcrumbs” that first grab women’s attention and then lead them deeper into the QAnon world.

The outsized numbers of Republican women who are being influenced by QAnon isn’t a problem that can be ignored. Nationally, almost thirty congressional candidates on the ballot in November have either endorsed the theory or supported it or content related to it—and more than half of them are women

It is easy to discount QAnon—but the reality is it is quickly emerging from the shadows into a full-blown political movement that periodically receives the passive, and at times, active support of the president of the United States.

Until the 1930's, Antioch's remains were almost entirely literary; its physical glories had been obliterated by earthquakes, floods and invasions from the east.

Since then, however, as the study of history has focused as much on ordinary citizens as on their leaders, attention has shifted from throne rooms to dining rooms. Only 10 percent of Antioch's population was rich, according to the fourth-century pagan philosopher Libanios, and only 10 percent was poor. The remaining 80 percent lived remarkably well, and at its height, Antioch's population numbered more than 400,000 citizens and freedmen, not counting women, children and slaves.

The exhibition focuses on their dining rooms, or triclinia, in order to recreate the city's great middle-class era, and for middle-class America at the beginning of the third millennium, those ancient houses reveal a familiar ostentation.

Antioch: The Lost Ancient City'' reunites many of the artifacts and objects excavated by the expedition, including some of the most beautiful mosaics. During the five years of preparations for this show, scholars examined for the first time in decades some of the material from the excavations that had been in storage, and the show's catalog presents much of their new research.

Antioch marked the crossroads of trade routes between Persia and the Far East, Egypt and Rome.

During the centuries of the Roman peace, Antioch flourished; its baths and wide arcaded streets were theaters where strangers -- Romans, Syrians, Jews, Christians, Persians, Greeks -- mingled and learned from one another. Its dining rooms set a more intimate stage upon which to continue the dialogue.

The city's pivotal geography proved the source of both its vitality and its vulnerability. Persian emperors of the Sasanian dynasty coveted Antioch, sacked it twice -- in A.D. 256 and 540 -- and incorporated the phrase ''better than Antioch'' into the names of the cities they built closer to home. Sasanian stylized art, using birds and animals in patterned design -- a mosaic border of ram's heads, for instance -- found its way into Antioch's houses.

Probably they discussed religion. The Pax Romana, of course, has found its modern parallel in the Pax Americana, in the worldwide exportation of American culture. Ideas, art, politics and religions circulate, blend and clash. The yearning for a spiritual haven was perhaps even more urgent in Roman Antioch than it is today.

The expeditions of the 1930's dug up no pagan temples or synagogues, but they did uncover in Antioch's port remnants of a church whose ambulatory was paved with a mosaic of animals and birds. Elephants, flamingos, zebras, gazelles, peacocks, a lioness and her cubs: all creation circled the church in a docile parade.

In this floor, pagan entertainment translated into a vision from Genesis: the bloody staged hunt has been converted to a peaceable kingdom.

“You have [U.S. Republican senator] Lindsey Graham talking about the deep state; you could argue the President was elected around conspiracy theories. So Kennedy’s well placed to fit into that trend. He appeals to the notion that there are dark forces working against us.”

Larry Sabato, one of America’s leading political scientists, believes the confusion created by the President will find its denouement on Nov. 3, presidential election day, when “we’ll find out whether the truth matters in American politics.” Mr. Sabato said: “What is disturbing is that for tens of millions, it doesn’t matter anymore. We are in the postfactual era, not just in America, but around the world.

“Almost all of these theories are pretty, pretty darn boring. And I hate to complain about my job. It’s the same crap over and over again. Same theories, different nouns. There’s nothing to even QAnon, which people look at and say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so wacky.’ Well, the idea of a pedophile deep state working against the president is the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie that came out 30 years ago. ... The idea that your enemies are pedophiles and Satanists and sex traffickers goes back millennia. So there’s really even nothing new there.”

Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s siblings Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former congressman Joseph Kennedy, as well as niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, published an excoriating article in Politico claiming that “he has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines."

“We love Bobby,” they said, and praised his record on environmental issues. “However, on vaccines he is wrong.”

The DFC financing is meant to help ApiJect build a million square foot campus in North Carolina for a speedier fill-finish operation. It will take pharmaceutical-grade plastic resin, pour it into a mold and then move it to a sterile filling space where the drug or the vaccine will be inserted before it is sealed.

DHS has moved slowly to grant them security clearances

denied Murphy pre-deposition access to all but unclassified materials he worked on

Mr. Biden has long been an intense target of Mr. Trump and his allies over the range of business ventures he pursued around the world during his father’s time as vice president and beyond

The investigation could also complicate Mr. Biden’s efforts to instill public confidence that the department can operate independent of the personal interests of the president after it became deeply politicized under President Trump. L

“It’s not my Justice Department. It’s the people’s Justice Department.”

t also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son, a case his political opponents are certain to seize on to try to damage the early days of his presidency.

Mr. Biden and a group of partners — including his uncle James Biden, the president-elect’s brother — were also involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy in 2017, documents provided by a jilted former business partner show.

The Republican report, which was released weeks before Election Day in an apparent effort to damage the Biden campaign, found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president.

Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post, which obtained materials from Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, reported that the laptop had been seized by the F.B.I.

The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.

Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died last month, utterly rejected this account of faith and reason. 

The God of the Hebrew Bible, he believed, was never the God of the Academy to begin with. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither the unmoved mover nor the ground of being, but a historical God, who has put himself in dialogue and relationship with one people, the Jews.

little about him could be deduced by processes of reason. He is best known, rather, through the moral revolution heralded by Abrahamic faith: Judaism first, followed by Christianity and Islam.

De-Hellenization was thus no skin off the back of biblical faith, rightly understood. For, in this telling, the faith of the Jews, including Jesus, had always sat uneasily with the “faith” of Plato and Aristotle.

The synthesis between the two collapsed once its Greek metaphysical structure gave way to the battering ram of modern science.

The God of the Bible, Sacks contended, was lost in the bargain of Saint Paul’s ambition to spread his newfound faith to the Greco-Roman sphere. More to the point, God was lost in translation. The Greek language, with its left-to-right script, per Sacks, tends toward abstraction and universalization, whereas Hebrew is fundamentally a “right-brained” language, tending toward narrative and particularity.

The result was that the West received an abstract, theoretical version of a supremely narrativistic deity.

The Hebrew Bible, Sacks believed, has no “theory” of being itself, of natural law or of political regimes.

Sacks was, in truth, a pure anti-metaphysicist. In his 2011 book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, he declared: “We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists.”

he was thrilled by his atheist teachers’ demolition of the classical proofs for God, which he’d always considered a kind of cheap sleight of hand.

“Neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge.” All of these statements are a matter of “interpretation,” rather than of “explanation,” and all interpretations are beyond proof or falsification.

The quest for ultimate meaning, he argued, falls into the same territory as “ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics”—and “in none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved.”

Ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are great “repositories of human wisdom,” to be sure, but they simply don’t belong in “the same universe of discourse” as science.

If we distinguish the two discourses, neither need threaten the other: The one (science) explains the world by “taking things apart,” as Sacks put it; the other (religion) puts them back together via interpretation and moral formation.

For many Catholic intellectuals, not least Benedict XVI, restoring religion to its rightful place in human affairs involves undoing the philosophical mistakes of nominalism and of the Reformation, which the pope emeritus singled out for criticism in his much-misunderstood 2006 Regensburg Lecture.

We must dilate reason’s scope, Benedict thought, so that “reasoning” might again include more than merely observing phenomena and identifying their efficient material causes. Sacks did not think faith and reason could be reunited in this way.

But shouldn't we try? I seek ultimate meaning, yes, but I want that meaning to be true in a way that satisfies reason’s demands. And there lies the disagreement, I think, between “Regensburg Catholics,” if you will, and the various de-Hellenizing strands of contemporary religious thought.

despite rejecting almost in toto the Church’s account of faith and reason, Sacks nevertheless credited it for the fundamental humaneness of Western civilization.

More than that, the rabbi blamed the mass horrors of modernity on the narrow and arrogant rationalism that supplanted the old synthesis.

“Outside religion,” he wrote, there is no secure base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.

Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded. None has stood firm under pressure. That has been demonstrated four times in the modern world, when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of sanctities, lives are lost.

As a student of Jewish history, Sacks knew well that the old synthesis of faith and reason wasn’t always a guarantee against unreason when it came to the treatment of Jews within Christendom. Nevertheless, he was far more wary of the merciless abstractions of the post-Enlightenment era

Sacks, to be clear, was no counter-Enlightenment thinker. And he paid gracious tribute to the modern scientific enterprise as an almost-miraculous instance of human cooperation with divine creativity.

Nevertheless, he insisted, the Enlightenment ideology, with its tendency to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to all of life, “dehumanize[d] human beings.” Its universalist “reason” detested particularity, not least the stubborn particularity of the Jewish people

Moreover, it targeted for demolition, in the name of humanity and reason, “the local, the church, the neighborhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached.”

Sacks saw similar dangers at work in today’s market liberalism: “a loss of belief in the dignity and sanctity of life”; “the loss of the politics of covenant, the idea that society is a place where we undertake collective responsibility for the common good”; “a loss of morality”; “the loss of marriage”; and the loss of “the possibility of a meaningful life.” In short, the technocratic dystopia we are stumbling into.

Except, Sacks rightly insisted, we don’t have to, provided we can make room in our lives and societies for “the still-small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God”:

Sacks felt that divine voice couldn’t be definitively reasoned about, certainly not in the way that, say, Benedict XVI called for. Yet the rabbi’s own public presence—supremely learned yet humble and unfailingly charitable, even to his most vicious secularist opponents—was and will remain an enduring testament to the reasonableness of faith. 

Putnam concludes that during the Progressive Era (1890-c. 1910) “the institutional, social, and cultural seeds” of what he labels the “Great Convergence” were sown. Out of those seeds emerged more than six decades (up until the late 1960s) of “imperfect but steady upward progress toward greater economic equality, more cooperation in the public square, a stronger social fabric, and a growing culture of solidarity,”

“then suddenly and unexpectedly . . . the Great Convergence was reversed in a dramatic U-turn, to be followed by a half century of Great Divergence.”

the USA “entered the Sixties in an increasingly ‘we’ mode—with communes, shared values, and accelerating efforts toward racial and economic equality—and we left the Sixties in an increasingly ‘I’ mode—focused on ‘rights,’ culture wars, and what would be almost instantly dubbed the ‘Me Decade’ of the 1970s.”

Each Upswing chapter from 2 through 5 is devoted to a separate field--economics, politics, society, or culture. And each deals with the trends from the 1890s, when the Progressive Age began, up to the present era.

the “we” of the Great Convergence was often meant for white males more than for all Americans.

Although Putnam discusses many historical explanations for the transformation beginning in the late 1960s, like the backlash against the gains of African Americans and women, he is wise enough to realize that major historical occurrences, like the transformation considered here, almost always have innumerable causes.

It was then, in reaction to a “Gilded Age” similar to our own, that the turn toward a more cooperative, less self-centered society began

describes the Progressivism of the that time as a diverse movement “to limit the socially destructive effects of morally unhindered capitalism, to extract from those [capitalist] markets the tasks they had demonstrably bungled

“Communitarian sentiment,” he declares, “was at the heart of the Progressive mood. Teddy Roosevelt, Jane Addams, and other progressives were explicit in rejecting ‘individualism,’

The 1920s, with its three consecutive Republican presidents, slowed down the growth of communitarianism.

with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and World War II, it renewed itself until it began in the late 1960s to reverse itself

some of the accomplishments of the Progressive Era: “the secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; . . . women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities;

a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds all owe their origins to the efforts of a diverse array of Progressive reformers.”

“Progressivism . . . was not confined to the Progressive Party but affected in a striking way all the major and minor parties and the whole tone of political life. . . . It was a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation.”

To make his point that Progressivism was primarily a “bottom up” movement involving countless citizen reformers, he provides brief biographical sketches on some of them such as Frances Perkins (b. 1880), Paul Harris (b. 1868), Ida B. Wells (b. 1862), and Tom Johnson (b. 1854).

Generalizing about the Progressive movement, Putnam writes it “was, first and foremost, a moral awakening.”

Aided in part by the religious thinking of the Social Gospel thinkers, “Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.”

The movement was also pragmatic, not ideological, for “true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.

Putnam believes that Progressives came to realize that “to succeed they would have to compromise—to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals

These lessons regarding moral urgency, pragmatism, and compromise are ones that Putnam thinks modern reformers need to apply.

he does not yet “see a truly nonpartisan movement” bringing “issue-specific efforts together in a compelling citizen-driven call for large-scale reform.” Nor does he see “a broader vision for the future of America.”

we should, Putnam insists, learn from what they did wrong. Most significantly, they failed to make the “we” they stressed inclusive enough, paying insufficient attention to gender and racial discrimination.

“The question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both.”

Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV, in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started.

Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19.

SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest.

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community

Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

“There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate

They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months

the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out.

Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled.

negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM, used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions. Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published

Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,

published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,”

In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

entists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured.

New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color.

These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research, but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way

COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

Expanding its base of young users is vital to the company’s more than $100 billion in annual revenue, and it doesn’t want to jeopardize their engagement with the platform.

Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

More than 40% of Instagram’s users are 22 years old and younger, and about 22 million teens log onto Instagram in the U.S. each day, compared with five million teens logging onto Facebook, where young users have been shrinking for a decade, the materials show.

In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects on teens, and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it.

“The research that we’ve seen is that using social apps to connect with other people can have positive mental-health benefits,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a congressional hearing in March 2021 when asked about children and mental health. In May, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.”

He said he believes Facebook was late to realizing there were drawbacks to connecting people in such large numbers. “I’ve been pushing very hard for us to embrace our responsibilities more broadly,” he said. He said the research into the mental-health effects on teens was valuable, and that Facebook employees ask tough questions about the platform. “For me, this isn’t dirty laundry. I’m actually very proud of this research,” he said.

What Facebook knows The Instagram documents form part of a trove of internal communications reviewed by the Journal, on areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. They offer an unparalleled picture of how Facebook is acutely aware that the products and systems central to its business success routinely fail. The documents also show that Facebook has made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public.