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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+Many of this year’s breakthroughs and lessons have the potential to make our future much brighter. +

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+2020 has been a lousy year. Time magazine’s cover story declared it the “worst year ever” (or at least “in living memory for most Americans”). And it is finishing on a miserable note, with coronavirus deaths reaching horrifying new heights — worse than a 9/11 every single day — while public health experts beg us to celebrate the winter holidays alone. +

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+But 2020 wasn’t all bad news. In fact, I’ll go further than that: 2020 had good news that would stand out as astonishing triumphs of human achievement in any other year. In areas ranging from public health to medicine, from poverty alleviation to food technology, there were some tremendous leaps. To highlight them — as I’d like to do here — isn’t to deny the misery and grief that were visited upon so many around the world in 2020. Rather, it’s to remind us that there’s so much to fight for, and to honor the work of the many people who, under adverse conditions in an extraordinarily difficult time, still made tremendous progress on key problems. +

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+The world will start 2021 having lost many things we shouldn’t have lost. More than 1.5 million preventable deaths have occurred so far. Hundreds of millions have been pushed into a spiral of poverty. In the US, the transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden promises to be ugly as Trump and his allies refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any election that their opponent won. +

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+But beneath all that, there is still real work going on in the world, work that transforms our lives, helps people, treats disease, and makes the future brighter. That work deserves a spotlight. Here are seven things that give me optimism about the future. +

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  1. The record speed of the vaccine rollout won’t just end this pandemic soon. It’s also a reminder that humanity is still capable of astonishing leaps. +

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+The first vaccines for the coronavirus have begun, 11 months after the existence of the virus started to become widely known. Impressive results have been published from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, with other vaccines publishing results in the upcoming weeks as well. Overall, things look very good. The vaccines are safe, with a very low rate of adverse effects, and several of the vaccines are more than 90 percent effective at preventing serious coronavirus symptoms. When they are widely distributed, they should cut deaths dramatically. +

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+Public health experts have cautioned that people should continue to wear masks until everyone’s vaccinated. And it remains to be seen how much the vaccines will prevent transmission of the virus (if at all). +

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+But likely by mid-year, high-risk people and essential workers will be vaccinated. The worst horrors of the pandemic will soon be under control: Health care workers will have a vaccine and their lives will be less in danger while they work long hours to protect us. Hospitals will be less overwhelmed as enough at-risk people have vaccines to keep ICU beds open. And by late 2021, a vaccine will likely be available to everyone who wants one, and it will be safe to return to the activities we’ve put on hold during the pandemic. +

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+This crisis has dragged on long enough that it seems endless. It isn’t. The vaccines —produced and distributed with astonishing speed — change everything. In a time when it seemed like so much around us broke down, the vaccine success story is a reminder that humanity is still capable of groundbreaking achievements. +

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  1. The coronavirus vaccine is also a good sign for new vaccine technologies +

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+In the past, vaccines have taken years or even decades to develop. It’s striking to learn that some of the ones now hitting the market were developed in the space of days or weeks (the time since then has been for safety testing). +

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+That sped-up process took a long time to develop. For the past several years, researchers have been working on new ways to develop vaccines. The success of the coronavirus vaccines is a major vindication of that work and a really good sign of how well it could work for other diseases. +

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+One breakthrough here is something called “mRNA vaccines.” The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus shots are examples of this kind of vaccine. Unlike most vaccines, mRNA vaccines don’t use a dead or inactivated version of the virus. Instead, the vaccine uses mRNA: a single-strand RNA molecule that the ribosomes inside your cells use as a template or instruction set to learn what proteins they should build next. The vaccine injects the mRNA into your body, telling it to produce a “spike protein” present on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; your cells will follow the instructions, producing the unfamiliar protein and spurring the body to make antibodies. +

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+Researchers have hoped for years that mRNA vaccines will make it possible to vaccinate against diseases we otherwise struggle to vaccinate for and to do so on a much faster timeline than usual. “mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration,” a 2018 paper in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery by University of Pennsylvania medical researchers argued. +

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+Even before the pandemic hit, there was already a lot of exciting work going on to make mRNA vaccines possible. But 2020 put that work to the test as vaccine researchers the world over tried to rapidly retool to fight Covid-19. Now, with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the technology has been tested and it has succeeded. That success is likely to drive development of tons more mRNA vaccines targeting other diseases. +

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+Meanwhile, the Oxford research institute that produced the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is also moving into late-stage clinical trials with another major achievement: a vaccine for malaria, which has stubbornly resisted research efforts over the past century. If the malaria vaccine works, it could put one of the world’s biggest killers to rest for good. And even if it’s only moderately effective, it can save a lot of lives. +

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+Other good news to look forward to on the vaccine front: Moderna is reportedly working on a flu vaccine that lasts for life instead of requiring a yearly update. And mRNA vaccines might also be used to train the body to — one day — fight cancer. +

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  1. America is likelier to be ready for the next pandemic +

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+Scientists and policy experts have been warning for years that the United States was unready for the next pandemic. No one could have predicted that it would happen this year, of course, but we knew it would happen someday — and the US wasn’t ready. +

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+In February and March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made mistakes with testing that hampered the US’s ability to stop the spread of the coronavirus into the country. Confusing public messaging around masks resulted in low adoption, a problem that persists today. There were personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages despite stockpiles intended to solve that exact problem. Many institutional weaknesses were suddenly and humiliatingly laid bare. +

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+But there’s a silver lining. The coronavirus pandemic has been awful, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been. “The coronavirus appears not to be deadly enough to kill tens of millions of people, as was initially feared,” I wrote on February 6, “but this is more or less a matter of luck. The virus could easily have been deadlier, and the world would currently be in the grip of a horrifying mass casualty event.” Perhaps 2020’s single biggest stroke of luck — one that, as a parent of young kids, I appreciate every single day — is that the disease largely isn’t deadly to children. +

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+Other pandemic diseases might be different. It is possible for a disease to spread like Covid-19 while being deadlier to younger people, and particularly deadly to young children as influenzas typically are. One thing the country can take a small measure of comfort in is that its unreadiness was exposed and its lessons were learned now, with this virus, instead of something much, much worse. Countries that faced SARS in the mid-2000s handled Covid-19 better, and hopefully having faced Covid-19 will help the US be ready for the next pandemic. +

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+“I think we’ve learned an enormous amount in the course of this year,” Steve Morrison, who studies pandemic preparedness at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Health security prior to this was a kind of niche domain. It was one prone to these cycles of crisis and complacency. It was underfinanced, underprioritized.” That came back to bite the US — but hopefully, having learned its lesson, it can do better. +

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+Post-pandemic accountability will make a big difference in determining how much America lets its mistakes this time around make it stronger for the next time. Morrison, for his part, believes the country will have a better response next time around because of what it went through in 2020. It’s the thinnest of silver linings, but I’ll take it. +

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  1. Our digital infrastructure for remote work was tested — and passed +

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+As rough as 2020 was, it would have been much worse without remote communications tech. After a decade of asking, “What is tech even getting us?” we saw an answer: the ability for fully 40 percent of the labor force to stay home during a pandemic. Zoom and similar tools, for all we complain about them, enabled companies to switch to remote meetings more or less overnight. The amount of traffic online jumped dramatically, and the internet mostly handled it without visible strain. +

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+That’s easy to take for granted, since we mostly experience it as an absence — websites that load when we expect them to, devices that work. But it’s really pretty remarkable, and it points at one of our modern world’s greatest strengths, a strength that has survived the pandemic. +

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+“Internet traffic carried by AT&T, one of the nation’s largest internet providers, rose almost immediately by 20 percent starting in mid-March,” Charles Fishman pointed out in an Atlantic article: +

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+By the end of April, network traffic during the workweek was up 25 percent from typical Monday-to-Friday periods in January and February, and showed no signs of fading. That may not sound like much, but imagine suddenly needing to add 20 percent more long-haul trucks to U.S. highways instantly, or 20 percent more freight trains, or 20 percent more flights every day out of every airport in the country. In fact, none of those infrastructure systems could have provided 20 percent more capacity instantly — or sustained it day after day for months. +

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+AT&T also told the Atlantic it experienced even more dramatic spikes in time spent on the phone and in text messages sent. As the pandemic made it unsafe to connect with one another in person, we connected digitally. +

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+If we’d suffered a pandemic like this only a few decades ago, the way we responded would have been basically impossible. The infrastructure simply didn’t exist to allow most white-collar workers to safely work from home. In 2020, it did — and where it didn’t, we built it. “At one point in March, for instance,” Fishman writes, “traffic was rising so fast in Chicago and Atlanta that dozens of technicians and engineers in those cities worked all night, adding fresh fiber connections and routers.” +

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+ Phil Barker/Future Publishing via Getty Images +
+Detail of a home office setup on a kitchen worktop, including a laptop computer with Zoom videoconferencing software, taken on September 9, 2020. +
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+There are, of course, still galling inequities in access to the internet. In some parts of the country, kids were switched to “remote school” despite not having reliable internet access at home. The CARES Act contained money for expanding broadband access in poorly served communities, though there have been challenges in ensuring the money is spent usefully by the end-of-year deadline. And most people don’t have the luxury of doing their jobs from home, and they didn’t reap this benefit as much as knowledge economy workers. +

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+That said, the resilience of the home internet infrastructure was an undeniably good thing. And it might only get better: Over the course of the year, innovative engineers worked to make online meeting tools better and more reliable, and to mimic many of the missing bits of regular life. In the past few months, I’ve attended online parties where people get louder or quieter as you walk toward them, to imitate how normal parties work; I’ve tested out special technology to enable group singing, which usually doesn’t work over video calls because of lag. +

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+The tech industry has lots of problems. But it can also be innovative, flexible, and fast-moving, and in 2020 it lived up to its promise as a source not just of shiny distractions but of critical tools. The engineers who made working and connecting from home possible saved lives, and it should be an opportunity to reflect on how much technology can do when it’s directed at important problems. +

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  1. Biotech is making huge leaps in other sectors +

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+If you’ve ever seen a three-dimensional model of a protein, you might have noticed that the way the atoms twist and fold up into a shape looks kind of random. For a long time, scientists have tried to identify principles that explain what shape proteins will take when they fold. They’ve had only moderate success. There are more than a googol possibilities for any given protein, and which form a protein will take depends on incredibly complex interactions among its thousands of amino acids. +

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+Researchers have kept at it, though, because the “protein-folding problem” is one of the most critical ones in biology. Successfully predicting how proteins fold will make it possible to design new drugs with a particular desired structure. It opens the door to breakthroughs in everything from new cancer treatments to new antidepressants. +

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+2020 saw a big leap in these efforts, thanks to AI. Every two years at an annual competition called the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP), biologists compete to design systems that predict how unfamiliar proteins will fold. Their predictors are judged by how far their best guess at a protein’s structure is from the experimentally determined structure — the one the protein has when it is built out of amino acids and measured how it folds. +

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+Last CASP, in 2018, the leader of the pack was Alphabet’s DeepMind, an AI research organization. At this year’s CASP, DeepMind didn’t just win again — it improved on its previous performance by an enormous margin, producing results almost as good as those you would get if you laboriously built and laboratory-imaged all of the proteins. +

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+“This is a big deal,” CASP co-founder John Moult told Nature. “In some sense the problem is solved.” +

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+ Source: DeepMind, published in Nature +
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+DeepMind’s results are good enough that researchers should be able to use them for all kinds of biomedical research, custom-designing drugs that have desired receptors. It would also let researchers quickly scan every existing drug to learn which ones will work against some novel disease. And there’s no reason to think that the progress will stop here. +

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+“It’s a breakthrough of the first order, certainly one of the most significant scientific results of my lifetime,” Columbia computational biologist Mohammed AlQuraishi told Nature. Skeptics have protested that while DeepMind has made progress, they haven’t “solved” protein folding, and there are many other steps before this work will produce new drugs. But there’s no arguing that this has been a major goal in biology and in pharmaceutical research for a long time. +

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+DeepMind made its name in the AI field with its work beating top players at Go, chess, and Starcraft. Those triumphs involved impressive technical achievements, but they were easy for some to dismiss as being novelties — an AI that can play video games better than a human won’t change the world. This achievement makes it clear that AI breakthroughs are also coming to scientific fields and are poised to be hugely consequential. +

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+While many of the implications of highly advanced AI systems give me pause, there’s lots of cause for optimism here. If we get AI right, we can use it to tackle many of the thorniest problems we face. +

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  1. We’ve learned more about what works to fight poverty +

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+This year is ending with a poverty crisis. But during April, May, and June — as the economy ground to a halt because of the pandemic — poverty in the US actually fell. +

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+Why? The CARES Act, the landmark $2 trillion pandemic relief bill that Congress passed last March, briefly left many Americans better off. Transferring $1,200 to most taxpayers and padding out unemployment benefits with an extra $600 a week caused poverty rates to fall in April and May, at the depth of the crisis, as you can see on the chart below (the March decline is due to tax refunds). Poverty doesn’t usually fall in the middle of an economic crisis. But the US had never tried anything on the scale of CARES before. +

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+ Christina Aminushaun/Vox +
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+The CARES Act’s provisions for unemployment insurance eventually expired, the act wasn’t renewed, and now poverty is spiking to record levels. +

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+That’s awful news. But it also provides some useful perspective for policymakers. For a long time, there have been claims that America doesn’t really know how to tackle poverty, or that it requires solving lots of complex problems all at once. The CARES Act made it pretty clear that the country does know. A bill doesn’t have to be perfectly targeted, ideally designed, or incredibly clever to reduce poverty. It just has to send money to people who are struggling. +

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+This lesson has been reflected in the ways macroeconomists think about policy, economist and finance commentator Noah Smith argues. “At least as far as policy debates go, arguments about optimal fiscal policy based in formal macroeconomic models seem to be out, replaced by a consensus that giving people money is necessary and good (at least, for the foreseeable future),” Smith wrote recently. Since the new consensus seems to reflect the empirical evidence a lot better than the old one — and presents policymakers with a lot more options to fight poverty — that’s great news. +

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  1. The meat of the future is closer to the present +

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+Currently, farms around the world produce chicken for sale by raising fast-growing chicken breeds in batches of tens of thousands, tightly packed in warehouses that are a public health hazard, a fire hazard, a worker safety hazard, and a hazard to the well-being of the chickens themselves. +

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+What if, instead, we could grow the meat without the chickens? +

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+Researchers all over the world have been chasing that dream, of “lab-grown” or “cultured” meat, for years. This year, lab-grown meat took one step closer to reality as the Singapore Food Agency approved the sale of cultured chicken meat grown in bioreactors, becoming the first agency in the world to issue such an approval. Its sign-off means that chicken bites from the US company Eat Just will be available to consumers in Singapore. (There are a few other places in the world where you can try lab-grown meat, such as an experimental restaurant in Israel.) +

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+While the US isn’t close to commercial approval, the government is interested in figuring out how to foster lab-grown meat work stateside, as well: The US government gave out its first university research grant for lab-grown meat this winter. +

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+While meat consumption is still rising, these steps have the potential to grow into much more than a novelty. If scale and cost concerns can be resolved, this can be a path to ending our reliance on barbaric factory farming practices, and building a food system that meets the world demand for meat ethically. +

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+Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good. +

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+It includes another round of stimulus checks — and more unemployment relief. +

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+Days before the holidays, Congress has passed a $900 billion bill to extend unemployment insurance, pay out additional stimulus checks to Americans and provide more loans for small businesses. +

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+The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the relief bill Monday night on a vote of 359-53, just hours after the final legislative text was released to members. A few hours later, the Republican-controlled US Senate did the same with a vote of 92-6. +

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+“It is a good bipartisan bill,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor Monday morning, mentioning provisions Democrats secured like additional food assistance and a temporary extension of an eviction moratorium. Pelosi also nodded to the $600 direct payments that will be going out to Americans. “I would have liked them to have been bigger, but they are significant and they will be going out soon,” she said. +

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+The bill is designed to be a short-term bridge to get financial relief to Americans as the country enters a particularly difficult stretch of the coronavirus pandemic, with about 200,000 new confirmed cases per day. At the same time, an end may be in sight, with the first vaccines going out to health care workers and more on the way. +

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+“We can finally report what our nation has needed to hear for a long time: More help is on the way,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday night. Pelosi and McConnell themselves received a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine last week, and President-elect Joe Biden also received his on Monday. +

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+There are still a number of big things that didn’t make it into the final relief bill, including broad aid to state and local governments that Democrats wanted, and liability protections for companies that were a top priority for Republicans. Addressing the Senate Sunday night, Schumer admitted while states and cities would receive some funding specifically for education, Covid-19 testing, and public transit, “the agreement we reached is far from perfect.” +

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+Democratic leaders and President-elect Joe Biden have said they want Congress to pass additional stimulus when Biden takes office. +

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+“Immediately, starting in the new year, Congress will need to get to work on support for our COVID-19 plan, for support to struggling families, and investments in jobs and economic recovery,” Biden said in a statement Sunday. “There will be no time to waste.” +

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+But additional federal stimulus may well hinge on a pair of undecided Senate races in Georgia that will decide which party controls the Senate. Passing another deal may not be easy. +

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+What the stimulus deal contains +

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+While there’s a lot that the stimulus agreement omits, it is expected to offer much-needed aid on a few fronts. Here’s what we know so far on the details. +

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+Stimulus checks: There is a second round of stimulus checks, though they are smaller than those distributed earlier this year. These direct payments include $600 for individuals who made $75,000 a year or less in adjusted gross income in 2019, and $1,200 for couples who made $150,000 or less. Individuals and couples with children who qualify for the stimulus checks would also receive an additional $600 per child. Payments will be incrementally reduced for people who make more in annual income, much like they were in the spring. +

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+Unemployment insurance (UI): The plan includes an additional $300 in weekly federal UI payments through March 14, 2021. This supplemental payment is set to bolster the weekly payment that recipients would get from their state unemployment programs, much like a prior provision did in the CARES Act. The bill would also extend the pandemic unemployment insurance programs that are expiring at the end of December. These pandemic-specific programs currently provide roughly 12 million Americans with UI benefits. +

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+Small-business support: $325 billion is dedicated to small-business aid including repurposed funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, a forgivable loan program that business owners can apply for to cover payroll and operational costs. These loans are aimed at businesses that have seen revenue declines this year. For many, however, this aid comes too late — according to a Fortune report, almost 100,000 small businesses have already closed permanently during the pandemic. +

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+Rental assistance and eviction moratorium: $25 billion in rental assistance is included as well as the establishment of a federal eviction moratorium. As Vox’s Jerusalem Demsas previously reported, tenant advocates have argued that at least $100 billion in rental aid is needed to cover current shortfalls. Additional action would be required to ensure that millions of Americans would not be evicted at the end of January. +

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+Food aid: $13 billion for food aid to help fund a monthly 15 percent increase in individual SNAP benefits, aid for children who received food support at school, and money for other programs including Meals on Wheels and WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children). Demand for such aid has spiked dramatically during the pandemic, with food banks across the country facing overwhelming need in recent months. +

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+Paid sick leave: There are tax credits for businesses that voluntarily provide paid leave, which continues a policy established in the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, but companies are not mandated to offer such benefits. Previously, workers who had coronavirus or those caring for children dealing with school closures were guaranteed paid leave if their workplaces were covered by FFCRA. +

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+The legislation contains a number of other provisions: The bill includes $82 billion to help schools reopen; $45 billion for public transit systems; $27 billion to help states ramp up Covid-19 testing; and $15 billion in small business loans specifically targeted to theaters and small venues that have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. The bill also includes $15 billion in aid for airlines — which would be required to bring furloughed employees back — according to Reuters. +

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+It also includes language to ban surprise medical bills for emergency care, the product of months of bipartisan negotiations to end the practice that contributes to some patients getting steep medical bills from out-of-network providers. +

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+Finally, the bill also has new guidelines for the Federal Reserve after Republicans — led by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — demanded recent emergency lending programs at the Fed be canceled in any final version of the bill. +

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+As Vox’s Emily Stewart has explained, the Fed will be forced to eliminate several emergency lending programs created with CARES Act funding in the spring, and will be barred from restarting them without congressional approval. It will also return the unused portion of the $454 billion Congress allotted it under the CARES Act to the Treasury Department, something the Fed had agreed to do in November. +

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+The bill doesn’t provide direct aid for state and local governments, a Democratic priority, or the liability protections that shield businesses from coronavirus-related lawsuits Republicans had advocated for. Additional deferment of federal student loan payments is also not included in the agreement, Politico’s Michael Stratford reports. +

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+How long it will take people to receive help +

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+Speaking on CNBC Monday morning, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin laid out an optimistic timeline for when Americans will see relief in the form of stimulus checks. +

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+“The good news is this is a very, very fast way of getting money into the economy,” Mnuchin said. “Let me emphasize: People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week.” +

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+But based on the timing of aid from the CARES Act, it could be a few weeks before people see direct relief from the legislation. +

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+Earlier this year, the first round of direct payments was deposited in people’s bank accounts around mid-April: “Within two weeks of the CARES Act going into effect in March, more than 81 million payments were disbursed, totaling more than $147 billion, all through electronic transfers to recipients’ bank accounts, according to the Government Accountability Office,” CNBC recently reported. +

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+People who do not have bank accounts, or whose information is not on file with the IRS, will likely see a more delayed distribution of the payments. For more information on what to expect with stimulus payments in the coming weeks, you can read Vox’s explainer here. +

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+The timing of the implementation of enhanced unemployment insurance payments will also depend on the state. States began distributing $600 in supplemental UI roughly two weeks after the CARES Act was approved this past spring, which means the weekly $300 addition could begin in early January. +

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+And when it comes to the Paycheck Protection Program, banks and other financial institutions began taking applications about a week after the funds were approved by Congress in March. That could set up applications for a new round of loans to kick off at the end of December or early January. +

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+This lag time could be costly for those waiting on assistance; by the time much of this money gets to those who need it, the programs they are meant to extend will have been expired for weeks. +

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+Nevertheless, such aid comes at a crucial time: According to the latest Labor Department report, 19 million people are currently receiving unemployment insurance. In November, job growth slowed significantly compared to the prior month, suggesting that the unemployed are facing limited opportunities for new work. And this winter, coronavirus cases are projected to soar — forcing thousands of businesses to shutter or slow their operations to prevent the spread of the illness. +

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+Bridgerton tries to put a fresh perspective on historical romance, but it forgets to be interesting. +

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+As a huge fan of historical romance, I once longed for Netflix to make a lush, extravagant, twisty series in the vein of the books I loved. But now that it’s actually gone ahead and made one, I’ve found that I have to eat my words. +

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+Bridgerton, Shonda Rimes’s first collaboration with Netflix, promises a story of upper-crust debutantes with secrets and their fight to marry well in Regency London. But instead of filling that opulent, 19th-century setting with true passion and heart, the show comes off like many of the aristocrats it’s skewering: soulless and vapid. +

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+That’s not to say that I didn’t inhale the entire first season anyway. Written by Shondaland veteran Chris Van Dusen (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy), Bridgerton’s eight episodes fly by, and its Regency-era setting is easy to get lost in. It even utilizes two of the most irresistible plots in romance history: fake dating and a marriage of convenience. +

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+But Bridgerton’s story of two neighboring London families and the blossoming romance between a debutante and a mysterious duke ultimately contains more window dressing than substance. It pivots around deeply shallow characters, conniving matchmakers, and turgid sex scenes — and even includes a distressing onscreen rape that’s never really addressed. It all makes for a compulsively snackable marathon, but it’s not easy to digest in the end. +

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    <img alt="Spoilers below!" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/NRVFKBJOWkX6yayj9JEVuLDSUh4=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8635113/spoilers_below.png" />
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+Bridgerton is a typical Regency romance, with a few bulletproof tropes working in its favor +

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+Bridgerton is based on romance veteran Julia Quinn’s epic eight-part romance novel series of the same name. (That might sound daunting, but for the romance genre, a series of that size is fairly common.) The series, like most historical romances, sets itself within a loose version of the Regency period — that particular moment of pre-industrial 19th-century Britain when London aristocracy was rich and bored enough to revolve around an annual “season” of nightly parties and events. (The era was named after George IV, who at the time was prince acting as the Regent — or proxy ruler — for his father, George III, who had succumbed to his famous “madness.” “Prinny” was mainly known for caring more about high society, or the haut ton, than boring government concerns, and the Regency period likewise borrowed his character traits of frivolous vanity.) London social functions had a complex etiquette and were usually held with the tacit purpose of matchmaking eligible men and women. This ritual, as the show explains to us early on, was known as the marriage mart, and as ridiculous as it might seem now, the stakes were very high. +

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+So many romance novels have been set in this period that “regencies” form their own subgenre. Usually, however, the mainstream media only bothers with the Regency when it’s adapting a Jane Austen novel — puzzling since she only wrote six of them, and annoying since they were all set far from London, where all the action of the era was centered. Indeed, Regency London is the sort of heady, scandal-ripe setting that pairs perfectly with the soapiness of Shondaland storytelling. +

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+The moment the title card for the first episode, “A Diamond of the First Water,” appeared, I felt the thrill of recognition known to anyone who’s grown up with shelves full of regencies filled with such idiomatic references. The phrase conjured up the insular, coded vernacular of the regency novel: lords in deerskin trousers and Hessian boots that judged the ton through quizzing glasses and wielded intricate put-downs at the famous gentlemen’s club White’s, where the layers in a man’s cravat and the elegance with which he drove his curricle determined where he fell along the narrow spectrum of fashionable gentility — whether he was a true Corinthian or a mere fop. Women in empire-waisted sprigged muslin dresses would exchange delicious innuendo-filled barbs with reformed rakes over lemonade at the famous assembly rooms at Almack’s, and Prinny himself would occasionally appear to create havoc like a deranged Muppet. Reader, I could not wait. +

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+Bridgerton delivers on some of these luxury items, but it also applies a few prominent twists to this old formula. The Prince Regent is nowhere in sight; instead, Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, presides over London society, in a casting choice that leans into recent arguments by historians that the queen may have been Black. The aristocracy itself is likewise peppered with men and women of color elevated to their positions by the benevolent king, whose madness renders their social status precarious. +

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+Chief among these gentry of color is dashing rake Simon, the newly titled Duke of Hastings (Regé-Jean Page, exuding so much ripped-shirt romance hero energy, even fully clad). Despite his eligibility, for reasons of his own, Simon has vowed never to marry. +

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+But Simon isn’t prepared for the gorgeous debutante Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor), the fourth child of a powerful aristocratic family. Among Daphne’s siblings are the reckless elder son, Anthony (Jonathan Bailey), and her ballroom-hating younger sister Eloise (Claudia Jessie), both of whom loathe the marriage mart for very different reasons. Daphne, however, immediately becomes the prize of society: She draws praise from the queen herself and the attention of so many suitors that Anthony begins fending them off in droves, suddenly possessed with a nigh-sociopathic certainty that none of the men are good enough for his sister. +

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+Across the street from the elegant Bridgertons are the hapless Featheringtons. With a degenerate father and a tasteless mother, the three Featherington daughters are unfortunately dowdy marriage mart goods — and that was before their gorgeous cousin Marina (Ruby Barker) abruptly came to stay with them. Marina trails gossip and scandal in her wake, thrusting all of the Featheringtons uncomfortably into the spotlight, overshadowing Daphne. This development unfolds much to the glee of a pseudonymous scandal sheet writer known only as Lady Whistledown (voiced by Julie Andrews), who turns the aristocracy on its ear by naming names. Daphne, the scandalmonger declares, is out — Marina, in. +

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+As her prospects for a suitable marriage wane thanks to the double whammy of her brother’s interference and Whistledown’s disapproval, Daphne takes her fate in her own hands and negotiates a fake courtship with Simon, having judged correctly that her star will rise once more if she’s seen with a duke. Simon has no plans to marry because of his aforementioned vow, so their arrangement allows him to avoid seriously participating in the marriage mart — but of course, in between bickering and pretending to be in love, the two fake lovebirds soon develop a very real romance. +

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+Because of all those inescapable Jane Austen adaptations, you might think that a show like this would focus on creating then resolving tensions en route for the couple to marry, ending with a wedding. Bridgerton isn’t done pulling romance tropes out of its pockets, however. Through an unlucky turn of events involving epic misunderstandings, fights, and secret love trysts — the usual — the storyline scoots Daphne and Simon into a hastily arranged marriage. This leads to lots and lots of sex scenes, but also creates a whole new set of problems arising from the secret that underpins Simon’s original vow never to marry. +

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+This subplot contributes to Bridgerton’s most interesting thematic idea: the relationship between scandal, secrets, and informed consent. The show highlights the way scandalous withheld secrets can be tools of power or forms of entrapment, particularly for members of society who had little control over their circumstances to begin with. But this idea also leads to the show’s wildest and most alarming moment — a moment of non-consent that arguably undermines all the work done to explore its unwieldy power dynamics. +

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+Bridgerton is a historical Gossip Girl, with even less depth — as well as a deeply disturbing rape scene +

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+Throughout Bridgerton, characters use secrets to exert control over their social positions. That’s nothing new for such romances or for the Shondaland oeuvre. But what’s interesting is how frequently the show frames these scenarios through the perspective of the non-consenting party who’s been duped due to a kept secret. Simon’s secret threatens his entire relationship with Daphne. The Featheringtons as a household are at the mercy of their father’s secret gambling addiction. And Marina tries in desperation to find someone who will marry her before a scandal around her own secrets breaks and destroys her reputation — and his along with her. +

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+Yet despite its attempts at raising issues of consent and control and how they operate in society, Bridgerton rarely moves below the surface. The show fails to consider its potent class differences beyond perfunctory nods, and for all its attention to diversifying its cast, it doesn’t actually diversify its focus on characters or explore what interesting perspectives and conflicts its diverse cast might bring to the story. Half-hearted attempts to inject queer characters into the mix come off as nearly homophobic rather than tantalizing. Simon’s best friend, a boxer, is essentially just a device — at times a literal punching bag — to remind Simon of his working-class roots within the Black community and for other characters to react to. A working-class opera singer and would-be courtesan gets some rote speeches about her lot in life — as does one servant whose only real role is to deliver a hilarious monologue about how none of the Bridgertons’ servants have any time to moonlight as Lady Whistledown because they’re too busy being, uh, servants. +

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+Marina’s storyline offers the show its best chance for delving into these areas — but instead it’s Marina’s arc that epitomizes how shallow Bridgerton ultimately feels. Instead of fueling an interesting exploration of how the aristocracy might react to a poor, clever woman of color like her, she gets turned into a device for drama between the Bridgertons and Featheringtons. She’s used to center the Featherington’s own issues with class, money, and race; then she’s used to raise questions of informed consent surrounding her attempts to marry well. But after being turned into a convenient social justice megaphone, she’s eventually handwaved into the sunset with little to no development or greater lasting impact on the plot or the other characters. +

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+The show’s sidelining of its characters of color and its other marginalized characters is an uncomfortable position for the show to leave us with. It’s especially frustrating in Marina’s case because her story arc puts her in an overtly predatory position which the show does little to ameliorate; she’s one of two main characters of color holding a huge secret over the heads of their (white) love interest while manipulating them. +

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+In Simon’s case, as the other main character of color, his duplicity is a bit more unwitting — but it’s still a major plot point, and it contributes to the show’s most galling moment, in which a character rapes another character in a way that’s fast, fleeting, and seemingly brushed-over. In the Bridgerton novel The Duke and I, author Julia Quinn clearly wrote the corresponding scene as non-consensual, and the creative team changed some details to make it less rapey — but that just makes it unclear to me whether the creative team realized that the scene they left in the storyline was still non-consensual. +

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+This deeply disturbing scene alone undermines the show’s work at exploring consent issues — and lacking even that thematic complexity to ground it, Bridgerton falters badly in the home stretch. Its most interesting ideas — like Simon’s precarious place in society as a duke of color or his mysterious time abroad — get almost no attention. Most of its characters are unlikeable, flat, barely developed, or all of the above. The other eight books in Quinn’s series focus on each of the other Bridgerton siblings, but it seems improbable that the current cast, particularly Bailey as Anthony, the next sibling in line to be married off, can carry such a frivolous story for many more rounds. Even the eventual reveal of Lady Whistledown’s identity seems more like an afterthought than a grace note on careful character development. +

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+I hate to conclude as much because Bridgerton has so many flourishes of Regency romance that are delightful to see brought to life on the screen. The production values are sumptuous; there are fanciful strolls in Hyde Park and gorgeous lantern shows at Vauxhall. +

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+It certainly looks like a true Regency — but if there’s anything the genre has taught us, it’s never to judge a romance by its cover. +

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