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States Fight Over How Our Data Is Tracked And Sold Online, As Congress Stalls : NPR - 0 views

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shared by anonymous on 06 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Only two states, California and Virginia, have passed laws to give people more control over how technology companies mine personal details and online behavior, each bringing vastly different protections for users.
  • Last year, states introduced more than 20 data privacy measures, according to the International Association of Privacy Professionals, which has been tracking state bills.
  • A review by The Markup, a technology publication, found the vast majority of state proposals — 14 — were based on the Virginia framework that has been pushed by Big Tech.
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  • The industry is hoping that by winning battles on the state level, it can set a friendly precedent for a federal privacy bill, which could override any state law.
  • Some members of Congress have said privacy legislation is a priority this year. But until Washington acts, a hodgepodge of proposals for regulating data tracking are emerging from state to state.
  • The fight over data privacy in Connecticut provides a window into how the debate is playing across the country. Connecticut Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, a Democrat, was frustrated that Congress was dragging its feet on the issue. Without any data protections, Duff said the country was in the grip of a "data privacy crisis."
  • He introduced a bill last year that would allow people in Connecticut to opt out of data collection and to sue tech companies if the tracking continued.
  • Duff recalls a packed hearing for the bill. But he did not see concerned citizens. Instead, he glimpsed seat after seat filled with lobbyists paid by Facebook, Google and other tech companies.
  • Now, Duff has re-introduced the bill — without the right to sue tech companies — with some similarities to Virginia's new law, but he said he plans to strengthen the provisions to favor consumers before its final passage.
  • Regulation on data privacy, and a host of other issues, has become something Silicon Valley now sees as inevitable, with companies like Facebook running advertisements saying the company actually welcomes new laws.
  • Soltani views this messaging effort with skepticism. "They're not doing it out the goodness of their heart," he said. "Kind of like a Taekwondo move, they want to capture that momentum and then direct it toward something that benefits them."
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A COVID-19 Vaccine Could Get West Virginians Cash, Guns Or Trips : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...rizes-for-vaccinated-residents
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  • West Virginia is giving its vaccine incentive program a boost to get more residents immunized from the coronavirus, Gov. Jim Justice announced on Tuesday.
  • All residents who get a COVID-19 vaccine will be enrolled in the chance to win a college scholarship, a tricked-out truck, or hunting rifles, in addition to a $1.588 million grand prize. The program, which will run from June 20 through Aug. 4, will be paid for through federal pandemic relief funds.
  • Justice announced in April that West Virginians ages 16 to 35 who got vaccinated could get a $100 savings bond. The immunization drive in the state has since drastically slowed after showing a strong early start.
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  • The state reports that 51.1% of West Virginia's population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine. Justice hopes the state's new offers of a $588,000 second prize, weekend vacations to state parks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses, and custom hunting shotguns will boost that number.
  • West Virginians who have been fully vaccinated will need to register to be entered to win the newly announced prizes at a later date.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported as of Tuesday night that 40.9% of the population has been fully vaccinated. President Biden is aiming for at least 70% of the U.S. adult population to have one vaccine shot and 160 million adults to be fully vaccinated by July 4..
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We'll Probably Need Booster Shots for Covid-19. But When? And Which Ones? - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-vaccine-boosters.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • For now, scientists are asking a lot of questions about Covid-19 booster shots, but they don’t yet have many answers.
  • Different pathogens affect our immune system in different ways. For some diseases, like the measles, getting sick once leads to lifelong protection from another infection. But for other pathogens, our immune defenses wane over time.
  • But early signs are encouraging. Researchers have been drawing blood from volunteers in vaccine trials and measuring their levels of antibodies and immune cells that target the coronavirus. The levels are dropping, but gradually. It’s possible that with this slow rate of decline, vaccine protection will remain strong for a long time.
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  • Scientists have already found that vaccines using different technologies can vary in their effectiveness. The strongest vaccines include Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, both of which are based on RNA molecules.
  • Some preliminary studies suggest that these markers — known as correlates of protection — exist for Covid-19 vaccines. Research is underway to find them.
  • Clinical trials showed that the vaccine had an efficacy of 95 percent against the original version of the coronavirus. But a variant called Alpha, first identified in Britain, lowered the effectiveness to 89.5 percent.
  • Pfizer has begun a trial to test both options. Some volunteers who have already received two doses of their vaccine will get a third dose of the same shot as a booster. As part of the same trial, researchers will give other volunteers an experimental booster designed to protect against the Beta variant.
  • Dr. Hensley says it’s wise to prepare for the possibility that boosters will be needed. But he hoped that they didn’t become a distraction from the pressing need to get first doses to billions of people across the world.
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Opinion | Congress Needs to Defend Vote Counting, Not Just Vote Casting - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oting-law-rights-congress.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It is a legislative assault motivated by the failure of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and justified by baseless allegations about the legitimacy of his defeat. Mr. Trump and his supporters pursued indiscriminate lawsuits to overturn the results and then, urged on by Mr. Trump, some of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the completion of the election process. Now they are seeking to rewrite the rules to make it easier for Republicans to win elections without winning the most votes.
  • The new restrictions have a disproportionate impact on Black and other minority voters. There is little comfort in the fact that these rules are much less restrictive than those in the olden days. The Jim Crow regime was constructed gradually.
  • At least 13 states have joined Georgia in passing new restrictions. Among them are a Montana law that ends the practice of allowing voters to register on Election Day and an Iowa law that requires the state’s polling places to close one hour earlier.
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  • Because there is little chance the bill will pass in its current form, Democrats face a clear choice. They can wage what might be a symbolic (and likely doomed) fight for all the changes they would like. Or they can confront the acute crisis at hand by crafting a more focused bill, perhaps more palatable for more senators, that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.
  • Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.
  • Senators with hesitations about H.R. 1 need to put forward their own ideas for protecting the rights of voters. The power of the states to administer elections is unquestioned, but it is not unlimited. In a representative democracy, the legitimate power of the representatives cannot extend to acts designed to undermine democracy.
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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.
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As Virus Rages in South America, No End in Sight to Covid-19 Suffering - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-latin-america.html pandemic
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  • In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
  • “I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”
  • Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
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  • As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
  • Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest.
  • But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
  • Inequality, a longstanding scourge that had been easing before the pandemic, is widening once again, and millions have been tossed back into the precarious positions they thought they had escaped during a relative boom.
  • “This is a story that is just beginning to be told,” Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation’s Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.
  • But with millions of people working in the informal sector, enforcing quarantines became unsustainable. Cases rose quickly and hospitals soon fell into crisis.
  • “The worst-case scenario is the development of a new variant that is not protected by current vaccines,” he said. “It’s not just an ethical and moral imperative, but a health imperative, to control this all over the world.”
  • Across the region, doctors say that the patients coming into hospitals are now far younger and far sicker than before. They’re also more likely to have had the virus already.
  • Official daily death tolls have exceeded previous records in recent days in most of South America’s biggest countries. Yet scientists say that the worst is yet to come.
  • The region is not prepared. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford. Several of its neighbors have achieved half that, or less.
  • By contrast, the United States, which bought up vaccines ahead of other countries, is at 43 percent.
  • The virus arrived in Peru in March last year, like much of Latin America, and the government moved quickly to lock down the country.
  • Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
  • Last month was the deadliest of the pandemic by far, according to official data, with health experts blaming the increase on holiday gatherings, crippled health systems and the new variants.
  • Vaccines arrived in Peru in February, followed quickly by anger after some politically connected people jumped the line to get vaccinated first.
  • Rafael Córdova, 50, a father of three, sat on a square drawn in the sand that marked his claim to land overlooking the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Coast.
  • in May, he became sick with Covid and was fired. He believes his bosses let him go because they feared that he would sicken others, or that his family would blame them if he died.
  • “I left the hospital with my daughter in a black plastic bag and got in a taxi and went to the cemetery,” he said. “There was no Mass, no wake. No flowers. Nothing.”
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Turkey's Looming Lockdown Prompts a Rush to Stock Up - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-turkey-lockdown.html pandemic turkey
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  • The streets of Istanbul were abuzz, the grocery stores packed, the seaside promenades crowded — but it was not the bustle of an ordinary spring Thursday. People were flocking to take advantage of the last day before a new lockdown takes hold, the strictest in Turkey since the pandemic began.
  • The country’s heath minister, Fahrettin Koca, has said that more contagious variants of the virus are partly to blame for the accelerating spread. Critics say the government relaxed too soon in March, before the country had made much progress with vaccination.
  • Turkey has fully vaccinated only about 11 percent of its people so far — 8.8 million out of a population of 83 million — using mainly the CoronaVac vaccine developed in China and the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.
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  • For weeks, scientists have been calling for a total lockdown to stem the surge, but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held off, mainly for economic reasons. He changed course after a cabinet meeting on Monday, and announced a new three-week lockdown to take effect Thursday evening and last through the end of Ramadan.
  • The announcement prompted a rush to stock up on groceries, alcohol and other supplies for the lockdown, which will include Eid al-Fitr, the three-day festival to mark the end of Ramadan. And many city dwellers hurried to reach rural hometowns or holiday resorts while travel was still allowed.
  • The lockdown will land hardest on the many Turks who depend on informal day work. A single mother with five small children in Istanbul who collects and sells paper said her family can eat only on days when she can work.
  • “I really don’t know what to do,” she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing her welfare payments from the government. “I wish the state would give me a job.”
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Opinion | The Covid-19 Pandemic Ends With Exponential Decay - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-exponential-decay.html vaccine herd immunity US
shared by lmunch on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States has vaccinated more than half of its adults against Covid-19
  • Exponential growth means case numbers can double in just a few days. Exponential decay is its opposite. Exponential decay means case numbers can halve in the same amount of time
  • Reaching herd immunity is a key goal. It drives cases toward zero by slowing the spread of the virus through a combination of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity to maintain exponential decay — even as society resumes normal activities.
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  • Fortunately, the exponential dynamics that lead to wild swings in case numbers when cases are high lead to far less dramatic swings when cases are low.
  • The United States is still a long way from reaching herd immunity, but things could improve a lot before then. The worst of the pandemic may be over sooner than you think.
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TSA Keeps Face Mask Requirement On Public Transportation Through September : Coronaviru... - 0 views

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  • Wearing a face mask will continue to be a requirement at airports, aboard commercial flights and on other public transportation across the country through the summer.
  • The federal mask mandate, which was set to expire on May 11, will remain in effect through Sept. 13, according to updated guidance issued by the Transportation Security Administration on Friday.
  • The rule, which also applies to buses and rail systems, was first put in place by President Biden shortly after he took office in January.
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  • For about a year, major U.S. commercial airlines have required all passengers who are older than 2 to wear face masks on flights.
  • Just this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said people who are fully vaccinated do not need to wear a mask when they're outdoors unless they're in a crowd.
  • According to NPR's vaccine tracker, over 40% of the U.S. population has received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and about 30% is fully vaccinated. CDC data also projects that close to 85% of the country could be fully vaccinated by the end of August.
  • Travel numbers are also rising. TSA reported that 1.56 million people traveled through airport checkpoints on Friday, compared with about 171,000 on the same day in 2020.
  • At the beginning of April, the CDC announced that Americans who are fully vaccinated can safely travel in the U.S. while still wearing a mask and social distancing. The guidance specifically notes that nonessential travel should continue to be avoided when possible.
  • India is the latest country to face heightened restrictions from the U.S., following a continuing surge of COVID-19 cases throughout the country. The ban on travelers from India is set to officially take effect Tuesday.
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As Biden Confronts Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy, Republicans Are a Particular Challenge -... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-vaccine-republicans.html US Politics
shared by kaylynfreeman on 16 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • As President Biden pushes to vaccinate as many Americans as possible, he faces deep skepticism among many Republicans, a group especially challenging for him to persuade.
  • A third of Republicans said in a CBS News poll that they would not be vaccinated — compared with 10 percent of Democrats — and another 20 percent of Republicans said they were unsure. Other polls have found similar trends.
  • Other supporters of Mr. Trump believe Democrats exaggerated the toll of the pandemic to hurt the former president.
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US could be on the cusp of Covid-19 infection surge officials have been dreading, exper... - 0 views

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  • he US may be on the cusp of another Covid-19 case surge, one expert says -- a surge that health officials have repeatedly warned about as state leaders eased restrictions and several lifted mask mandates.
  • "I think we are going to see a surge in the number of infections,"
  • "I think what helps this time though is that the most vulnerable -- particularly nursing home residents, people who are older -- are now vaccinated. And so we may prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths."
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  • The first warning sign came when case numbers, after weeks of steep declines, appeared to level off -- with the country still averaging tens of thousands of new cases daily.
  • But governors cited fewer Covid-19 cases and more vaccinations while lifting measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus.
  • Chicago officials earlier this month raised indoor capacity for bars, restaurants and other businesses and Baltimore leaders announced Wednesday they were easing restrictions on places including religious facilities, retail stores and malls, fitness centers and food service establishments -- changes that will go into effect next week.
  • Delaware, Montana, Alabama and West Virginia have also seen big increases.
  • The B.1.1.7 variant, she said this week, is projected to become the dominant variant in the US by the end of this month or early April.Despite the warnings, spring break crowds are gathering -- with Florida officials reporting too many people and not enough masks -- and nationwide, air travel numbers are hitting pandemic-era records.
  • Now, as the country inches closer to 30 million reported infections, cases are rising by more than 10% in 14 states this week compared to last week,
  • We're in a race to get the population vaccinated. At the same time, we're fighting people's exhaustion with the restrictions that public health has put in place and we're fighting the move by so many governors to remove the restrictions that are keeping us all safe."
  • Michigan cases are increasing the fastest, with more than a 50% jump this week compared to last,
  • All that while cases of the worrying variants -- notably the highly contagious B.1.1.7 variant -- climbed. The variants have the potential to wipe out all the progress the US made if Americans get lax with safety measures,
  • In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said Wednesday that Covid-19 hospitalizations have "jumped up" slightly
  • Those include the rolling back of restrictions, a prison outbreak, Covid-19 fatigue, a failure to wear masks, and the B.1.1.7 variant fueling the surge, Morse told CNN. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer eased restrictions earlier this month, upping capacity limits at restaurants as well as in retail stores, gyms and other facilities.
  • There's a long list of factors contributing to the spike in cases in Michigan,
  • Justice had eased restrictions earlier this month, increasing capacity at bars, restaurants and other businesses to 100% and upping the social-gathering limit.
  • During Wednesday's news briefing, he added that the state has had "seven outbreaks in our church community" across five counties.
  • what could play a key role in helping control the pandemic will be more accessible, inexpensive coronavirus tests, top health officials
  • "I do believe that once we have teachers vaccinated that we can use testing in the schools -- serial testing, cadence testing -- to identify potential infections, asymptomatic infections, shut down clusters and keep our schools open."
  • Her remarks came the same day the CDC released updated guidance about testing, saying more and better testing should help catch asymptomatic cases and control the spread.
  • More than 73.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. And more than 39.9 million people are fully vaccinated -- roughly 12% of the US population. But challenges -- including vaccine hesitancy, disinformation and inequities -- remain, and it's not entirely clear when the US will hit herd immunity -
  • On Wednesday, both Fauci and Walensky pushed back against questions about herd immunity, saying a lot depended on how quickly Americans take vaccines.
  • For now, the US still has a long way to go to overcome vaccine hesitancy,
  • Vaccination is the country's best hope to get beyond the pandemic, he said, "and yet there's all this overlay, and some of it is politics and some of it's social media conspiracy theories and some of it is just distrust of anything that the government had anything to do with."
  • Additionally, in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, counties considered to have high social vulnerability had lower vaccine coverage than counties considered to have low social vulnerability,
  • The agency's social vulnerability index identifies communities that may need additional support during emergencies based on more than a dozen indicators across four categories: socioeconomic status, household composition, racial/ethnic minority status and housing type.
  • By March 1, vaccination coverage was about 2 percentage points higher in counties with low social vulnerability than in counties with high social vulnerability -- and the differences were largely driven by socioeconomic disparities, particularly differences in the share of the population with a high school diploma and per capita income.
  • Only five states -- Arizona, Montana, Alaska, Minnesota and West Virginia -- had higher coverage in counties with high social vulnerability.
  • Achieving vaccine equity, the CDC said, is an important goal requiring "preferential access and administration to those who have been most affected"
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COVID-19 Vaccines Won't Stop All Infections - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618330 pandemic vaccine results
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  • Breakthrough infections, which occur when fully vaccinated people are infected by the pathogen that their shots were designed to protect against, are an entirely expected part of any vaccination process. They’re the data points that keep vaccines from reaching 100 percent efficacy in trials; they’re simple proof that no inoculation is a perfect preventative.
  • nearly 40 million Americans have received the jabs they need for full immunization. A vanishingly small percentage of those people have gone on to test positive for the coronavirus. The post-shot sicknesses documented so far seem to be mostly mild, reaffirming the idea that inoculations are powerful weapons against serious disease, hospitalization, and death.
  • The goal of vaccination isn’t eradication, but a détente in which humans and viruses coexist, with the risk of disease at a tolerable low.
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  • “Being vaccinated doesn’t mean you are immune. It means you have a better chance of protection.”
  • Immunity is not a monolith, and the degree of defense roused by an infection or a vaccine will differ from person to person, even between identical twins. Some people might have underlying conditions that hamstring their immune system’s response to vaccination; others might simply, by chance, churn out fewer or less potent antibodies and T cells that can nip a coronavirus infection in the bud.
  • An ideal response to vaccination might create an arsenal of immune molecules and cells that can instantaneously squelch the virus, leaving no time for symptoms to appear. But sometimes that front line of fighters is relatively sparse
  • Should the virus make it through, “it becomes a race [against] time,” Ellebedy told me. The pathogen rushes to copy itself, and the immune system recruits more defenders. The longer the tussle drags on, the more likely the disease is to manifest.
  • The range of vaccine responses “isn’t a variation of two- to threefold; it’s thousands,”
  • dislikes the term breakthrough case, which evokes a barrier walling humans off from disease. “It’s very misleading,” she told me. “It’s like the virus ‘punches’ through our defenses.”
  • The number of post-vaccination infections is also contingent on “the ongoing transmission situation,” Omer told me. “It depends on how much people are mixing.”
  • Vaccination is actually more like a single variable in a dynamic playing field—a layer of protection, like an umbrella, that might guard better in some situations than others. It could keep a lucky traveler relatively dry in a light drizzle, but in a windy maelstrom that’s whipping heavy droplets every which way, another person might be overwhelmed.
  • under many circumstances, vaccines are still best paired with safeguards such as masks and distancing—just as rain boots and jackets would help buffer someone in a storm.
  • Even excellent vaccines aren’t foolproof, and they shouldn’t be criticized when they’re not. “We can’t expect it’s going to be perfect, on day one, always,” Borio said.
  • The numbers for asymptomatic infections are still crystallizing, but they’re likely to be lower.
  • “Whenever someone tests positive, the real question is, are they sick, and how sick are they? That’s a big difference.”
  • Efficacy, a figure specific to clinical trials, also doesn’t always translate perfectly to the messiness of the real world, where there’s immense variability in how, when, where, by whom, and to whom shots are administered
  • The vaccine’s performance under these conditions is tracked by a separate measure, called effectiveness. Studies rigorously examining vaccine effectiveness are challenging, but early data suggest that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots are living up to their initial hype.
  • he circumstances of exposure to any version of the coronavirus will also make a difference. If vaccinated people are spending time with groups of unvaccinated people in places where the virus is running rampant, that still raises their chance of getting sick. Large doses of the virus can overwhelm the sturdiest of immune defenses, if given the chance.
  • A vaccine with a recorded efficacy of 95 percent, for example, doesn’t give everyone who’s vaccinated a 5 percent chance of getting sick. Not all of those people will even encounter the virus
  • The key is how vaccination changes the outcome for those who are meaningfully exposed: Among 100 individuals who might have fallen ill without the vaccine, just five symptomatic cases might appear.
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White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ovid-vaccine-evangelicals.html US vaccination religion
shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.
  • Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”
  • Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”
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  • No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches.
  • “If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.
  • There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.
  • Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination.
  • Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being “coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”
  • Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute oppression.
  • “Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”
  • “Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to temporal powers.
  • The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA being an ingredient in the vaccines.
  • White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans as for white Americans.
  • There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.
  • Mr. Rainey helped his own Southern Baptist congregation get ahead of false information by publicly interviewing medical experts — a retired colonel specializing in infectious disease, a church member who is a Walter Reed logistics management analyst, and a church elder who is a nurse for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
  • “It is necessary for pastors to instruct their people that we don’t always have to be adversaries with the culture around us,” he said. “We believe Jesus died for those people, so why in the world would we see them as adversaries?”
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Pink Dolphins in Hong Kong Find Respite Thanks to the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hong-kongs-pink-dolphins.html hong kong dolphins
shared by ethanshilling on 06 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The most popular reward for hiking to the top of Fu Shan, a hill near Hong Kong’s westernmost point, is a selfie backed by the setting sun, the gleaming new bridge across the Pearl River or a flight landing at the nearby airport.But for those who look more closely, there is the chance of a rarer prize: a glimpse of Chinese white dolphins swimming among fishing boats and cargo ships in the milky jade water.
  • The species, also known as the pink dolphin for the flush coloration it gets while swimming actively in warm waters, is found through much of coastal south China and Southeast Asia.
  • The marine mammals have maintained a precarious existence in the Pearl River Delta, which has the world’s second-highest volume of freight shipments, several cities with populations in the millions and an unrelenting pace of development in and along its waters.
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  • But the number of dolphins in Hong Kong have declined as much as 80 percent over the past 15 years, according to a report by 15 conservation groups and regional universities, as pollution, marine traffic and large-scale land reclamation projects have made the environment increasingly hostile.
  • The construction of a new runway for Hong Kong’s international airport and a bridge that links the city with the western side of the Pearl River has also disrupted areas that were once prime dolphin habitat but now rarely see the animals.
  • “If we identify individuals, we can follow their life history — where they like to hang around, whether they have calves,” he said. “This is important, because one of the worries is reproductive rate of dolphins is quite low. To keep the population healthy, we want to see calves. But that’s not happening in Hong Kong.”
  • “All vessel traffic is an issue, but high-speed ferries are a particular issue,” said Laurence McCook, the head of oceans conservation for the WWF-Hong Kong. “They move so fast there’s a risk of vessel strike, but they also just physically disturb the dolphins because the dolphins run away from them.”
  • “People want to hear this news about the benefit of the pandemic for wildlife, but it’s not true for dolphins,” said Vincent Ho, the vice chairman of the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society.
  • “Every time we have a project like the bridge,” Mr. Ho said, “they set up a marine park as some kind of compensation. But we think it’s too late.”
  • “What we have documented fairly clearly is that dolphins are moving back out into the ferry zone,” Mr. McCook said. “That actually is their most prime habitat under current circumstances.”
  • Conservation groups say they hope the benefits of the ferry suspension will encourage regional governments and ferry companies to reconsider routes across the Pearl River. By traveling somewhat farther south, they could bypass key areas of dolphin habitat along Lantau, Hong Kong’s largest island.
  • “Rerouting the ferries is not a magic cure-all,” Mr. McCook said. “But we think that can help us catalyze other actions and demonstrate it’s not a fait accompli that we lose the dolphins.”
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Alabama Trans Youth Dismayed By State's Effort To Block Medical Care : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ates-banning-medical-treatment alabama trans youth
shared by hannahcarter11 on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • So Hall is watching with alarm as the Alabama legislature advances bills that would outlaw hormone treatment for him and other trans youth in the state.
  • Thinking of the bills' proponents, he says, "Why should some guy who has never met me ... why should he get to tell me what I can and can't do? Why does he get to decide what is right for people who just want to be happy?"
  • This year, state legislatures have proposed a record number of anti-transgender bills.
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  • Alabama is one of 20 states that have introduced bills that would prohibit gender-affirming medical care for trans youth.
  • Alabama's bill is one of the toughest. It would make it a felony to provide transition-related medical treatment, such as puberty blockers, hormones or surgery, to transgender minors.
  • Hall was assigned female at birth. But, he says, when he hit puberty around fifth grade, "That's when I started to fully get uncomfortable with, like, the way that I looked or the way that I felt. Like, in my head I looked a different way than I looked in the mirror."
  • This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling bills that prohibit trans medical care, or that ban trans girls from women's sports teams, "dangerous."
  • The Alabama legislation is called the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act.
  • It passed overwhelmingly in the state Senate, by a vote of 23-4, and could go before the full House as early as this week.
  • At a House health committee hearing this month, lawmakers heard an impassioned plea from Sgt. David Fuller with the Gadsden, Ala., police department, who is father to a transgender girl.
  • Those who treat transgender youth say remarks like these are not just factually wrong; they also stigmatize an already marginalized and vulnerable population.
  • The swift progress of the trans medical care ban through the Alabama legislature has caused anxiety for families like theirs.
  • She points out that in their Birmingham clinic, no minor child is making the decision for treatment on their own. There is a detailed informed-consent process, and the child, their parents and the entire medical team all have to agree on a treatment plan.
  • But if the Alabama bill becomes law, she and her medical team could be charged with class C felonies for prescribing puberty blockers or hormones.
  • That means they could face up to 10 years in prison.
  • LGBTQ advocacy groups are gearing up for immediate court challenges if any of the medical care bans bubbling up around the country become law.
  • For Hall, Alabama's legislation would deny something essential: the person he knows himself to be. And, he says, the notion that he's a "gender-confused child" who's just "going through a phase" causes real pain.
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Vaccine Slots Go Unused in Mississippi and Other States - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...accine-mississippi-demand.html Politics US vaccines crisis
shared by saberal on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • There are more shots available. The challenge is getting people to take them.
  • On Thursday, there were more than 73,000 slots to be had on the state’s scheduling website, up from 68,000 on Tuesday.
  • But public health experts say the pileup of unclaimed appointments in Mississippi exposes something more worrisome: the large number of people who are reluctant to get inoculated.“It’s time to do the heavy lifting needed to overcome the hesitancy we’re encountering,” said Dr. Obie McNair, an internal medicine practitioner in Jackson, the state capital, whose office has a plentiful supply of vaccines but not enough takers.
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  • The hesitancy has national implications. Experts say between 70 percent to 90 percent of all Americans must be vaccinated for the country to reach herd immunity, the point at which the virus can no longer spread through the population.
  • A closer look at Mississippi’s demographics explains why hesitancy may be especially pronounced.The state reliably votes Republican, a group that remains highly skeptical of the coronavirus vaccine. Nearly half of all Republican men and 40 percent of Republicans over all have said they do not plan to get vaccinated, according to several recent surveys. Those figures have barely budged in the months since vaccines first became available. By contrast, just 4 percent of Democrats have said they will not get the vaccine.
  • A number of other heavily Republican states are also finding themselves with surfeits of doses. On Thursday, officials in Oklahoma, which has delivered at least one dose to 34 percent of its residents, announced they would open up eligibility to out-of-state residents, and in recent weeks, Republican governors in Ohio and Georgia voiced concern about the lackluster vaccine demand among their residents.
  • “I had about 18 hours of turbulence,” Governor Reeves said, describing the mild, flulike symptoms he had felt after his second injection. “But I was able to continue and move on and work, and I feel much better waking up every day knowing that I have been vaccinated.”
  • Demand among African-Americans was still robust, she said, noting long lines that formed this week outside a tent in Indianola, a small city in the Delta, where the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine was being offered. (The tents offering the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which require two doses, were nearly empty.)
  • “By relaxing Covid restrictions, elected leaders in states like Florida, Mississippi, Texas and Georgia are pushing narratives about coronavirus that are working against a narrative that promotes the urgency of vaccinations,” he said. “And unfortunately, our vaccine campaigns are being undone late at night by Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.”
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Analysis: Covid-19 vaccinations are climbing. But familiar mistakes could lead to more ... - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html pandemic
shared by martinelligi on 09 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • "We are so close -- so very close -- to getting back to the everyday activities we all miss so much," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a recent White House Covid-19 briefing. "But we're not quite there yet."
  • Tens of millions of Americans are not yet protected from the virus while the B.1.1.7 variant -- now the dominant strain in the US -- is fueling a rise in cases and hospitalizations, predominantly in younger groups, and threatening to create another surge. And while vaccine eligibility is expected to open to all adults in the next 10 days, some may have to wait months more for immunity.
  • xperts are worried about the quick abandonment of safety measures as the virus still runs rampant. They've worried before -- and they were right. Rewind to one year ago -- when more than 90% of Americans were in lockdown as the first Covid-19 wave hit the country. Some of those measures lasted just a few weeks, even as the US led the world with the highest number of reported infections.
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  • "The wave across the Southern states in the summer, that was due to premature lifting of restrictions and masks," said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. "It bears some resemblance to what we're seeing now."
  • Public mitigation measures are our best bet to beat another surge as we build up our vaccination numbers. With only about 25% of American adults fully vaccinated, experts say the US is nowhere near where it needs to be to control the virus from spreading.
  • "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," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said during an interview with "Axios on HBO'' in February. "And I think you could make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
  • "I really worry and I'm actually quite certain that we're not going to reach herd immunity because of it," Wen said. "At least we're not going to reach herd immunity in 2021. I can't see us getting to that point because of how vaccines have been so politicized." Experts including Fauci have estimated somewhere between 70% to 85% of Americans would need immunity -- either through a vaccine or from recovery after a Covid-19 infection -- to get control of the virus in the US.
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Airstrike Damages Gaza's Only Covid-19 Testing Lab, Officials Say - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-gaza-covid-lab.html israel palestine pandemic
shared by ethanshilling on 18 May 21 - No Cached
  • Since Covid-19 first emerged in the blockaded Gaza Strip, a shortage of medical supplies has allowed authorities to administer only a relatively tiny number of coronavirus tests.
  • Now, the sole laboratory in Gaza that processes test results has become temporarily inoperable after an Israeli airstrike nearby on Monday, officials in Gaza said.
  • The strike, which targeted a separate building in Gaza City, sent shrapnel and debris flying across the street, damaging the lab and the administrative offices of the Hamas-run Health Ministry, said Dr. Majdi Dhair, director of the ministry’s preventive medicine department.
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  • The Israeli Army did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strike. Since Israel began its bombing campaign in Gaza on May 10, the army has said that its airstrikes aim solely at militants and their infrastructure.
  • Over the past week, the authorities in Gaza have tested an average of 515 Palestinians daily for the virus. Only 1.9 percent of Gaza’s two million people were fully vaccinated as of Monday, according to official data, compared with 56 percent in Israel.
  • Unvaccinated Palestinians were crowding into schools run by the United Nations relief agency in Gaza, turning them into de facto bomb shelters. Matthias Schmale, the U.N. agency’s director of operations, said last week that those schools “could turn into mass spreaders.”
  • Mr. Schmale and the top World Health Organization official in Gaza, Sacha Bootsma, also said that all vaccinations had stopped when hostilities broke out, and that any vaccine supplies headed to the territory had been delayed by the closure of Gaza’s border crossings.
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The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html trump
shared by katherineharron on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.
  • Trump got even worse after November 3. Since then, he has spent the final months of what has been a wildly dishonest presidency on a relentless and dangerous lying spree about the election he lost.
  • The most telling lie: It didn't rain on his inaugurationclose dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-group bx-group-default bx-group-1245864-3DW
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  • It rained during Trump's inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain "just never came" until he finished talking and went inside, at which point "it poured."
  • The President would say things that we could see with our own eyes were not true. And he would often do this brazen lying for no apparent strategic reason.
  • The most dangerous lie: The coronavirus was under control
  • This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one -- the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was "totally under control"; the lie that the virus was "disappearing" -- suggested to Americans that they didn't have to change much about their usual behavior.
  • more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus.
  • The most alarming lie saga: Sharpiegate
  • Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm
  • Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.
  • The most ridiculous subject of a lie: The Boy Scouts
  • When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump's claim that "the head of the Boy Scouts" had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts' National Jamboree was "the greatest speech that was ever made to them," I didn't expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.
  • A senior Scouts source -- a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC -- confirmed to me that no call ever happened.
  • The ugliest smear lie: Rep. Ilhan Omar supports al Qaeda
  • The most boring serial lie: The trade deficit with China used to be $500 billion
  • It was a problem for the country that the President was not only a conspiracy theorist himself but immersed in conspiracy culture, regularly stumbling upon ludicrous claims and then sharing them as fact.
  • So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China -- though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.
  • The most entertaining lie shtick: The burly crying men who had never cried before
  • according to the President, they kept walking up to him crying tears of gratitude -- even though they had almost always not previously cried for years.
  • The most traditional big lie: Trump didn't know about the payment to Stormy Daniels
  • he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to porn performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious -- Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen -- and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.
  • The biggest lie by omission: Trump ended family separation
  • ere's what he told NBC's Chuck Todd in 2019 about his widely controversial policy of separating migrant parents from their children at the border: "You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it." Yes, Trump signed a 2018 order to end the family separation policy.
  • The most shameless campaign lie: Biden will destroy protections for pre-existing conditions
  • When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions -- though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them,
  • Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them
  • The lie he fled: He got Veterans Choice
  • Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn't good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.
  • That's not the story he did tell -- whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama's legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over -- more than 160 times before I lost count -- that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.
  • The Crazy Uncle lie award: Windmill noise causes cancer
  • At a White House event in 2019, Trump grossly distorted a 2013 quote from Rep. Ilhan Omar to try to get his supporters to believe that the Minnesota Democrat had expressed support for the terrorist group al Qaeda.
  • his 2019 declaration that "they say" the noise from windmills "causes cancer."
  • The most hucksterish lie: That plan was coming in two weeks
  • Trump's big health care plan was eternally coming in "two weeks."
  • My personal favorite lie: Trump was once named Michigan's Man of the Year
  • Trump has never lived in Michigan. Why would he have been named Michigan's Man of the Year years before his presidency?He wouldn't have been. He wasn't.
  • The most depressing lie: Trump won the election
  • Trump's long White House campaign against verifiable reality has culminated with his lie that he is the true winner of the 2020 presidential election he clearly, certifiably and fairly lost.
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Opinion | Biden Should Boost Covid Vaccine Supply With New Manufacturing Plan - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-covid-vaccines.html
shared by rerobinson03 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Most Americans will wait months to get immunized, and poorer countries are scrambling to find any vaccines at all.
  • The goal of Pepfar, as it’s called, was to ensure that people in countries with limited resources could get medication to treat H.I.V. Pepfar has received consistent bipartisan support and is recognized as one of the most successful global health initiatives ever implemented, responsible for saving an estimated 18 million lives to date, according to the U.S. government.
  • The promise and possibility of Pepvar are rooted in the type of Covid-19 vaccines now being distributed in the United States. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots use genetic material called mRNA, and their technology is based on teaching human cells to make proteins that trigger a strong and protective immune response to a virus or other pathogen. The other leading Covid vaccine candidates use different technologies, like engineered adenovirus and inactivated coronavirus.
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  • The Moderna vaccine is a particularly attractive candidate for rapid scaling, since it can be kept at normal freezer and refrigerator temperatures, which makes it easier to store and transport.
  • After all, viruses know no borders. Protecting Americans from Covid-19 requires protecting all people from the disease. We will not end the pandemic until everyone, across the world, can receive highly effective vaccines. And the U.S. can help the world more quickly this time. Pepfar was launched seven years after effective H.I.V. treatments were available in rich countries.
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