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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="covid-19-sentry">Covid-19 Sentry</h1>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#from-preprints">From Preprints</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-clinical-trials">From Clinical Trials</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-pubmed">From PubMed</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-patent-search">From Patent Search</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-preprints">From Preprints</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>Characterizing all-cause excess mortality patterns during COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Background: Low testing rates and delays in reporting hinder the estimation of the mortality burden associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. During a public health emergency, estimating all cause excess deaths above an expected level of death can provide a more reliable picture of the mortality burden. Here, we aim to estimate the absolute and relative mortality impact of COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. Methods: We obtained weekly mortality time series due to all causes for Mexico, and by gender, and geographic region from 2015 to 2020. We also compiled surveillance data on COVID-19 cases and deaths to assess the timing and intensity of the pandemic and assembled weekly series of the proportion of tweets about death from Mexico to assess the correlation between media interaction of people about death and the rise in pandemic deaths. We estimated all-cause excess mortality rates and mortality rate ratio increase over baseline by fitting Serfling regression models and forecasted the total excess deaths for Mexico for the first four weeks of 2021 using the generalized logistic growth model. Results: We estimated the all-cause excess mortality rate associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico in 2020 at 26.10 per 10,000 population, which corresponds to 333,538 excess deaths. Males had about 2-fold higher excess mortality rate (33.99) compared to females (18.53). Mexico City reported the highest excess death rate (63.54) and RR (2.09) compared to rest of the country (excess rate=23.25, RR=1.62). While COVID-19 deaths accounted for only 38.64% of total excess deaths in Mexico, our forecast estimate that Mexico has accumulated a total of ~61610 [95% PI: 60003, 63216] excess deaths in the first four weeks of 2021. Proportion of tweets was significantly correlated with the excess mortality (ρ=0.508 [95% CI: 0.245, 0.701], p-value=0.0004). Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily affected Mexico. The lab-confirmed COVID-19 deaths accounted for only 38.64% of total all cause excess deaths (333,538) in Mexico in 2020. This reflects either the effect of low testing rates in Mexico, or the surge in number of deaths due to other causes during the pandemic. A model-based forecast indicates that an average of 61,610 excess deaths have occurred in January 2021.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.02.21252763v2" target="_blank">Characterizing all-cause excess mortality patterns during COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>COVID-19, PHYSICAL DISTANCING IN THE WORKPLACE AND EMPLOYEES’ MENTAL HEALTH: IMPLICATIONS AND INSIGHTS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL INTERVENTIONS - NARRATIVE REVIEW</strong> -
<div>
Physical distancing is one of the non-pharmaceutical measures adopted to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Although it appears to be effective in mitigating this spread, its implementation in workplaces may undermine employees’ mental health. In fact, torn between the fear of contagion and the need to maintain their jobs, employees must also comply with physical distancing measures in the workplace, which alter social interactions and set a predetermined frame and distance that guide employees’ behaviors within the organization while they need empathy. This situation might increase their level of stress. This paper is a narrative review that addresses the impact of physical distancing in the workplace on employees’ mental health. It presents the main factors that might moderate this impact and it recommends organizational interventions that can help to mitigate it. Physical distancing measures in workplaces are necessary and inevitable. Notwithstanding, they might undermine employees’ mental health, whence the importance to implement proper organizational actions to support employees and to facilitate their adaptation, in this unprecedented organizational change. This paper examines a relatively unexplored topic. It goes beyond examining social isolation to explore how setting a predetermined frame and distance can have an impact on employees’ mental health and recommends interventions that might help organizations to prevent mental health issues.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/w6s32/" target="_blank">COVID-19, PHYSICAL DISTANCING IN THE WORKPLACE AND EMPLOYEES’ MENTAL HEALTH: IMPLICATIONS AND INSIGHTS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL INTERVENTIONS - NARRATIVE REVIEW</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>The human factor between airborne pollen concentrations and COVID-19 disease dynamics</strong> -
<div>
In their seminal paper, Damialis and colleagues (2021, PNAS) report that, in early 2020, higher airborne pollen concentrations were related to higher COVID-19 infection rates. As a mechanism, the authors propose that “pollen exposure weakens the immunity … by diminishing the antiviral interferon response.” Although they assume an effect for the whole population, they speculate that it could be stronger for those with allergies. As a limitation, they acknowledge that they did not account for the countries’ testing strategies. As allergic people may be more likely to show symptoms that may be mistaken for those of COVID-19 (runny nose, headache, increased temperature), we explored whether people with allergies were more prone to get a rapid SARS-CoV-2 antigen test. Moreover, we assessed whether the test result was more likely to be positive among those with allergies.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://psyarxiv.com/hw9gf/" target="_blank">The human factor between airborne pollen concentrations and COVID-19 disease dynamics</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Daily Fluctuations in Occupation with and Worry about COVID-19</strong> -
<div>
In the first week after the first COVID-19 patient was reported in the Netherlands, we conducted a pre-registered momentary assessment study (7 surveys per day, 50 participants, 7 days) to study the dynamic relationship between individuals’ occupation with and worries about COVID-19 in daily life, and the moderating role of neuroticism in this relationship. At the group level, higher scores on occupation and worry co-occurred, and occupation predicted worry one hour later, but not vice versa. There were substantial individual differences in the magnitudes and directions of the effects. For instance, occupation with COVID-19 was related to increases in worry for some, but decreases in worry for others. Neuroticism did not predict any of these individual differences in the links between worry and occupation. This study suggests that it is important to go beyond group-level analyses and to account for individual differences in responses to COVID-19.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://psyarxiv.com/nf3ja/" target="_blank">Daily Fluctuations in Occupation with and Worry about COVID-19</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER: A Challenge for Medically Optimal Coronavirus Social Distancing Policies</strong> -
<div>
Public health efforts to slow the COVID-19 epidemic and protect the vulnerable have focused on reducing interpersonal contact and increasing interpersonal physical distance. They have achieved considerable success, with over three-quarters of Americans reporting that they follow all the recommended precautionary practices of social distancing, so it is likely that, at least, they follow most of them most of the time. But there is an elephant in the room: Overnighting – staying overnight at someone else’s home or having them stay overnight at your place is rarely, if ever, mentioned publicly. But we will show that this is a widespread practice in American society, throughout the epidemic thus far. In the past month, over half of all Americans had at least one overnight guest and about the same number (but not always the same people) spent at least one night in the past month at somebody else’s home. The consequences are striking: People who overnight are more than twice as likely to report that they have had COVID-19. Who overnights? The practice is much more common among young adults (over 60% for those 25-34) than among their seniors (dipping below 30% for those age 65 and over). Moreover, risk seekers are hugely more likely to overnight than are their otherwise similar risk averse peers. Data: International Social Science Survey, Round 21, Cohorts 1-5, collected April – July 2020, N=4,815. Methods: Descriptive statistics and multiple regression.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/aqhe5/" target="_blank">LET’S SPEND THE NIGHT TOGETHER: A Challenge for Medically Optimal Coronavirus Social Distancing Policies</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>A Scale for Measuring Social Distancing Behavior: Survey Questions and National Norms, USA 2020</strong> -
<div>
“Social distancing”, a set of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” or NPIs in the medical literature, is a primary defence, perhaps the primary defence, against infectious disease, universally advocated by medical authorities in the US and throughout the world during the current coronavirus pandemic. The idea is not new. Perhaps the first government-directed quarantine system was mid-fourteenth-century Venice’s “quaranta giorni”, forty days of mandated isolation for incoming ships. We propose a 5-item primary scale of “social distancing” behavior (KEK-3) and a slightly extended variant (KEK-3m), developed for use during the COVID-19 epidemic (and, potentially, beyond). The candidate items all had 7 answer categories. Assessment aligns very well with the classical measurement model for multi-item scales: interitem correlations are high; alpha reliability is 0.86; correlations with criterion variables are similar across the candidate items; factor analysis (oblimin rotation) finds a single dimension with an eigenvalue over 1 and loadings around .7. We provide behavioral norms for America during the 2020 pandemic and describe KEK-3’s links to demographic and socioeconomic factors. Developing a replicable scale is especially important now, because many researchers are making erroneous comparisons using the same terminology to describe aspects of the epidemic which have been measured differently. To successfully assess the “…meaning of social change related to COVID-19, the newly emerging social practices due to lockdown measures…” (Esposito, Stark and Squazzoni 2020), high-quality measurements sufficiently reliable and robust to be replicated in different times as the epidemic evolves and in different settings are desperately needed: KEK-3 contributes to such a set of measures. Data: four large national sample surveys conducted April - July, 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. Data collection was through Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. This scale may be freely used by other researchers so long as its origin is acknowledged.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qnjwg/" target="_blank">A Scale for Measuring Social Distancing Behavior: Survey Questions and National Norms, USA 2020</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Eating Disorders Spectrum during COVID Pandemic: a systematic review</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Background: Several data suggest that COVID-19 pandemic might exacerbate or trigger Eating Disorders (EDs). The aim of this paper was to summarize present literature on COVID pandemic and EDs. Methods: Literature search, study selection, methods, and quality evaluation were performed following PRISMA Guidelines. Results: The systematic search permitted the identification of 91 studies; 21 papers were eligible and included in the review. Nine papers (42.9%) evaluated the effect of pandemic and associated protective and risk factors in EDs patients, ten (47.6%) explored the prevalence of disturbed eating behaviours and risk factors for exacerbating EDs in the general population, and the remaining two (9.5%) were qualitative studies describing the impact of lockdown and quarantine on EDs patients. Their analysis revealed five main findings: 1) changes in physical activities routines were related to a worsening of preoccupation on weight/body shape; 2) food access limitation during pandemic represented a risk factors for both triggering and exacerbating EDs; 3) restriction in healthcare facilities contributed to increase anxiety levels and modifies treatment compliance; 4) social isolation was related to symptoms9 exacerbation in EDs patients who are home-confined with family members; 5) conflicts and difficulties in relationships with 9no way out9 were maintenance factors for EDs symptoms, especially in adolescents and young adults. Conclusion: COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on EDs that might be triggered or worsened by the exceptional conditions deriving from COVID-19-related stress in predisposed subjects. Patients already affected by EDs experienced a worsening of their clinical conditions and related quality of life.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.16.21255390v1" target="_blank">Eating Disorders Spectrum during COVID Pandemic: a systematic review</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccination: machine learning and statistical approach to identify and classify incidences of morbidity and post-vaccination reactogenicity</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Good vaccine safety and reliability are essential to prevent infectious disease spread. A small but significant number of apparent adverse reactions to the new COVID-19 vaccines have been reported. Here, we aim to identify possible common causes for such adverse reactions with a view to enabling strategies that reduce patient risk by using patient data to classify and characterise patients those at risk of such reactions. We examined patient medical histories and data documenting post-vaccination effects and outcomes. The data analyses were conducted by different statistical approaches followed by a set of machine learning classification algorithms. In most cases, similar features were significantly associated with poor patient reactions. These included patient prior illnesses, admission to hospitals and SARS-CoV-2 reinfection. The analyses indicated that patient age, gender, allergic history, taking other medications, type-2 diabetes, hypertension and heart disease are the most significant pre-existing factors associated with risk of poor outcome and long duration of hospital treatments, pyrexia, headache, dyspnoea, chills, fatigue, various kind of pain and dizziness are the most significant clinical predictors. The machine learning classifiers using medical history were also able to predict patients most likely to have complication-free vaccination with an accuracy score above 85%. Our study identifies profiles of individuals that may need extra monitoring and care (e.g., vaccination at a location with access to comprehensive clinical support) to reduce negative outcomes through classification approaches. Important classifiers achieving these reactions notably included allergic susceptibility and incidence of heart disease or type-2 diabetes.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.16.21255618v1" target="_blank">Adverse effects of COVID-19 vaccination: machine learning and statistical approach to identify and classify incidences of morbidity and post-vaccination reactogenicity</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Will the Large-scale Vaccination Succeed in Containing the COVID-19 Epidemic and How Soon?</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The availability of vaccines provides a promising solution to containing the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, we develop an epidemiological model to quantitatively analyze and predict the epidemic dynamics of COVID-19 under vaccination. The model is applied to the daily released numbers of confirmed cases of Israel and United States of America to explore and predict the trend under vaccination based on their current epidemic status and intervention measures. For Israel, of which 53.83% of the population was fully vaccinated, under the current intensity of NPIs and vaccination scheme, the pandemic is predicted to end between May 14, 2021 to May 16, 2021 depending on an immunity duration between 180 days and 365 days; Assuming no NPIs after March 24, 2021, the pandemic will ends later, between July 4, 2021 to August 26, 2021. For USA, if we assume the current vaccination rate (0.268% per day) and intensity of NPIs, the pandemic will end between February 3, 2022 and August 17, 2029 depending on an immunity duration between 180 days and 365 days. However, assuming an immunity duration of 180 days and with no NPIs, the pandemic will not end, and instead reach an equilibrium state with a proportion of the population remaining actively infected. Overall the daily vaccination rate should be chosen according to the vaccine efficacy and the immunity duration to achieve herd immunity. In some situations, vaccination alone cannot stop the pandemic, and NPIs are necessary both to supplement vaccination and accelerate the end of the pandemic. Considering that vaccine efficacy and duration of immunity may be reduced for new mutant strains, it is necessary to remain cautiously optimistic about the prospect of the pandemic under vaccination.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.16.21255543v1" target="_blank">Will the Large-scale Vaccination Succeed in Containing the COVID-19 Epidemic and How Soon?</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Conspiratorial thinking during COVID-19: The roles of paranoia, delusion-proneness, and intolerance of uncertainty</strong> -
<div>
The COVID-19 global pandemic has left many feeling a sense of profound uncertainty about their world, safety, and livelihood. Information that can help make sense of this uncertainty is offered by both official health-organizations as well as sources espousing misinformation and conspiracy theories. Individuals high in intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may be particularly impacted by the impoverished epistemic environment and may thus be more drawn to conspiratorial thinking (CT). In the present study we show that endorsement of COVID-19-specific conspiracy theories is associated with higher levels of intolerance of uncertainty as well as anxiety, delusion-proneness, and paranoid ideation. Furthermore, delusion-proneness and paranoia explained the relationship between IU and CT, and emerged as independent partial predictors of CT even when controlling for other facets of schizotypy. In contrast, anxiety did not explain the relationship between IU and CT, suggesting a stronger role of cognitive traits as opposed to affective factors. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of individual differences in IU, delusion proneness and paranoia in the development of CT in the context of the acute uncertainty of a global crisis, in which CT is more prevalent and salient. Informational intervention designs may benefit from leveraging the body of work demonstrating the efficacy of targeting IU to incite meaningful changes in thinking.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://psyarxiv.com/mb65f/" target="_blank">Conspiratorial thinking during COVID-19: The roles of paranoia, delusion-proneness, and intolerance of uncertainty</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Expanding access to SARS-CoV-2 IgG and IgM serologic testing using fingerstick whole blood, plasma, and rapid lateral flow assays</strong> -
<div>
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Serologic testing for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies can be used to confirm diagnosis, estimate seroprevalence, screen convalescent plasma donors, and assess vaccine efficacy. Several logistical and infrastructure challenges limit access to SARS-CoV-2 serologic testing. Dried blood spot (DBS) samples have been used for serology testing of various diseases in resource-limited settings. We examined the use of DBS samples and capillary blood (fingerstick) plasma collected in Microtainer tubes for SARS-CoV-2 testing with the automated Abbott ARCHITECT SARS-CoV-2 IgG (List 6R86) and IgM assays and use of venous whole blood with a prototype PANBIO rapid point-of-care lateral flow SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay. The ARCHITECT SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay was initially optimized for use with DBS, venous and capillary plasma, and venous whole blood collected from patients with symptoms and PCR-confirmed COVID-19 and negative asymptomatic controls. Assay linearity and reproducibility was confirmed with 3 contrived DBS samples, with sample stability and signal recovery after 14 days at room temperature. ARCHITECT SARS-CoV-2 IgG and IgM assay results showed high concordance between fingerstick DBS and venous DBS samples, and between fingerstick DBS and venous whole blood samples (n=61). Discordant results were seen in 3 participants (2 IgG, 1 IgM) who were in the process of seroreversion at the time of sample collection and had results near the assay cutoff. Use of fingerstick plasma collected in Microtainer tubes (n=109) showed 100% concordant results (R2=0.997) with matched patient venous plasma on the ARCHITECT SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay. High concordance of assay results (92.9% positive, 100% negative) was also observed for the PANBIO SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay compared to the ARCHITECT SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay run with matched venous plasma (n=61). Fingerstick DBS and plasma samples are easy and inexpensive to collect and, along with the use of rapid point-of-care testing platforms, will expand access to SARS-CoV-2 serology testing, particularly in resource-limited areas.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.16.21255130v1" target="_blank">Expanding access to SARS-CoV-2 IgG and IgM serologic testing using fingerstick whole blood, plasma, and rapid lateral flow assays</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Prospective predictive performance comparison between Clinical Gestalt and validated COVID-19 mortality scores.</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
ABSTRACT Background: Most COVID-19 mortality scores were developed in the early months of the pandemic and now available evidence-based interventions have helped reduce its lethality. It has not been evaluated if the original predictive performance of these scores holds true nor compared it against Clinical Gestalt predictions. We tested the current predictive accuracy of six COVID-19 scores and compared it with Clinical Gestalt predictions. Methods: 200 COVID-19 patients were enrolled in a tertiary hospital in Mexico City between September and December 2020. Clinical Gestalt predictions of death (as a percentage) and LOW-HARM, qSOFA, MSL-COVID-19, NUTRI-CoV and NEWS2 were obtained at admission. We calculated the AUC of each score and compared it against Clinical Gestalt predictions and against their respective originally reported value. Results: 106 men and 60 women aged 56+/-9 and with confirmed COVID-19 were included in the analysis. The observed AUC of all scores was significantly lower than originally reported; LOW-HARM 0.96 (0.94-0.98) vs 0.76 (0.69-0.84), qSOFA 0.74 (0.65-0.81) vs 0.61 (0.53-0.69), MSL-COVID-19 0.72 (0.69-0.75) vs 0.64 (0.55-0.73) NUTRI-CoV 0.79 (0.76-0.82) vs 0.60 (0.51-0.69), NEWS2 0.84 (0.79-0.90) vs 0.65 (0.56-0.75), Neutrophil-Lymphocyte ratio 0.74 (0.62-0.85) vs 0.65 (0.57-0.73). Clinical Gestalt predictions were non-inferior to mortality scores (AUC=0.68 (0.59-0.77)). Adjusting the LOW-HARM score with locally derived likelihood ratios did not improve its performance. However, some scores performed better than Clinical Gestalt predictions when clinician9s confidence of prediction was &lt;80%. Conclusion: No score was significantly better than Clinical Gestalt predictions. Despite its subjective nature, Clinical Gestalt has relevant advantages for predicting COVID-19 clinical outcomes.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.16.21255647v1" target="_blank">Prospective predictive performance comparison between Clinical Gestalt and validated COVID-19 mortality scores.</a>
</div></li>
<li><strong>Enumerating asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and estimating SARS-CoV-2 fecal shedding rates via wastewater-based epidemiology</strong> -
<div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) was utilized to monitor SARS-CoV-2 RNA in sewage collected from manholes specific to individual student dormitories (dorms) at the University of Arizona in the fall semester of 2020, which led to successful identification and reduction of transmission events. Positive wastewater samples triggered clinical testing of almost all residents within that dorm; thus, SARS-CoV-2 infected individuals were identified regardless of symptom expression. This current study examined clinical testing data to determine the abundance of asymptomatic versus symptomatic cases in these defined communities. Nasal and nasopharyngeal swab samples processed via antigen and PCR tests indicated that 79.2% of SARS-CoV-2 infections were asymptomatic, and only 20.8% of positive cases reported COVID-19 symptoms at the time of testing. Clinical data was paired with corresponding wastewater virus concentrations, which enabled calculation of viral shedding rates in feces per infected person(s). Mean shedding rates averaged from positive wastewater samples across all dorms were 6.84 ± 0.77 log10 genome copies per gram of feces (gc/g-feces) based on the N1 gene and 7.74 ± 0.53 log10 gc/g-feces based on the N2 gene. Quantification of SARS-CoV-2 fecal shedding rates from infected persons has been the critical missing component necessary for WBE models to measure and predict SARS-CoV-2 infection prevalence in communities. The findings from this study can be utilized to create models that can be used to inform public health prevention and response actions.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.16.21255638v1" target="_blank">Enumerating asymptomatic COVID-19 cases and estimating SARS-CoV-2 fecal shedding rates via wastewater-based epidemiology</a>
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<li><strong>The new SARS-CoV-2 variant and reinfection in the resurgence of COVID-19 outbreaks in Manaus, Brazil</strong> -
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Manaus, a city of 2.2 million population, the capital of Amazonas state of Brazil was hit badly by two waves of COVID-19 with more than 10,000 severe acute respiratory syndrome deaths by the end of February 2021. It was estimated that the first wave infected over three quarters of the population in Manaus based on routine blood donor data, and the second wave was largely due to reinfection with a new variant named P1 strain. In this work, we revisit these claims, and discuss biological constraints. In particular, we model the two waves with a two-strain model without a significant proportion of reinfections.
</p>
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.25.21254281v2" target="_blank">The new SARS-CoV-2 variant and reinfection in the resurgence of COVID-19 outbreaks in Manaus, Brazil</a>
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<li><strong>Excess Mortality probably due to COVID-19 in Tokyo, Japan between August and October, 2020</strong> -
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Background: As of March, 2021, the COVID-19 outbreak has been record the highest peak in the end of December, 2020. Nevertheless, no remarkable excess mortality attributable to COVID-19 has been observed. Object: We sought to quantify excess mortality in April using the National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) model. Method: We applied the NIID model to deaths of all causes from 1987 up through January, 2021 for the whole of Japan and up through November for Tokyo. Results: Results in Japan show very few excess mortality in August and October, 2020 It was estimated as 12 and 104. Conversely, in Tokyo, 595 excess mortality was detected between August and October, which was 3.1% and 1.7% of baseline. Discussion and Conclusion: We detected substantial excess mortality in Tokyo but a few in Japan. It might be important to continue to monitor excess mortality of COVID-19 carefully hereafter.
</p>
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20143164v16" target="_blank">Excess Mortality probably due to COVID-19 in Tokyo, Japan between August and October, 2020</a>
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</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-clinical-trials">From Clinical Trials</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Virgin Coconut Oil as Adjunctive Therapy for Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Drug: Virgin Coconut Oil<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   University of the Philippines;   Philippine Coconut Authority;   Philippine Council for Health Research &amp; Development<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Clinical Study in the Treatment of Patients With Moderate Course of COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: COVID-globulin;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Microgen<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Rehabilitation for Patients With Persistent Symptoms Post COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Other: Concentrated rehabilitation for patients with persistent symptoms post COVID-19<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   Western Norway University of Applied Sciences;   Helse-Bergen HF<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Efficacy and Safety of Three Different Doses of an Anti SARS-CoV-2 Hyperimmune Equine Serum in COVID-19 Patients</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Biological: Anti SARS-CoV-2 equine hyperimmune serum;   Biological: placebo<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social;   Universidad de Costa Rica;   Ministry of Health Costa Rica<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Viral Clearance, PK and Tolerability of Ensovibep in COVID-19 Patients</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Drug: ensovibep<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Molecular Partners AG<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Clinical Study Evaluating Inhaled Aviptadil on COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Inhaled Aviptadil;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   Centurion Pharma;   Klinar CRO<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>ACTIV-3b: Therapeutics for Severely Ill Inpatients With COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Biological: Remdesivir;   Drug: Remdesivir Placebo;   Biological: Aviptadil;   Drug: Aviptadil Placebo;   Drug: Corticosteroid<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID);   International Network for Strategic Initiatives in Global HIV Trials (INSIGHT);   University of Copenhagen;   Medical Research Council;   Kirby Institute;   Washington D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center;   AIDS Clinical Trials Group;   National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI);   US Department of Veterans Affairs;   Prevention and Early Treatment of Acute Lung Injury (PETAL);   Cardiothoracic Surgical Trials Network (CTSN);   NeuroRx, Inc.;   Gilead Sciences<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Effects of a Multi-factorial Rehabilitation Program for Healthcare Workers Suffering From Post-COVID-19 Fatigue Syndrome</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Other: Exercise<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Medical University of Vienna<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>COVID-19 Close Contact Self-Testing Study</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Behavioral: COVID-19 self-test;   Behavioral: COVID-19 test referral<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   University of Pennsylvania<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Nurse-Community Health Worker-Family Partnership Model: Addressing Uptake of COVID-19 Testing and Control Measures</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Behavioral: Nurse-Community-Family Partnership Intervention<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   New York University<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Total-Body Parametric 18F-FDG PET of COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Device: uEXPLORER/mCT<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   University of California, Davis<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Safety and Immunogenicity of the Inactivated Koçak-19 Inaktif Adjuvanlı COVID-19 Vaccine Compared to Placebo</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19 Vaccine<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Biological: Koçak-19 Inaktif Adjuvanlı COVID-19 Vaccine 4 µg/0.5 ml Vaccine;   Biological: Koçak-19 Inaktif Adjuvanlı COVID-19 Vaccine 6 µg/0.5 ml Vaccine;   Biological: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Kocak Farma<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Study on Sequential Immunization of Recombinant COVID-19 Vaccine (Ad5 Vector) and RBD-based Protein Subunit Vaccine</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Biological: recombinant Ad5 vectored COVID-19 vaccine;   Biological: RBD-based protein subunit vaccine (ZF2001) against COVID-19;   Biological: trivalent split influenza vaccine<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Jiangsu Province Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Omega-3 Oil Use in COVID-19 Patients in Qatar</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Drug: Omega 3 fatty acid<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Hamad Medical Corporation<br/><b>Recruiting</b></p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>SLV213 Treatment in COVID-19 Patients</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Covid19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: SLV213;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   Kenneth Krantz, MD, PhD;   FHI Clinical, Inc.<br/><b>Not yet recruiting</b></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-pubmed">From PubMed</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Interleukin-6: obstacles to targeting a complex cytokine in critical illness</strong> - Circulating concentrations of the pleiotropic cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) are known to be increased in pro-inflammatory critical care syndromes, such as sepsis and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Elevations in serum IL-6 concentrations in patients with severe COVID-19 have led to renewed interest in the cytokine as a therapeutic target. However, although the pro-inflammatory properties of IL-6 are widely known, the cytokine also has a series of important physiological and…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Interactions between SARS coronavirus 2 papain-like protease and immune system: a potential drug target for the treatment of COVID-19</strong> - Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a large family of respiratory viruses which can cause mild to moderate upper respiratory tract infections. Recently, new coronavirus named as Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been identified which is a major threat to public health. Innate immune responses play a vital role in a host’s defense against viruses. Interestingly, CoVs have evolved elaborate strategies to evade the complex system of sensors and signaling molecules to suppress…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Acute Cardiac Injury in Coronavirus Disease 2019 and Other Viral Infections-A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis</strong> - CONCLUSIONS: Acute cardiac injury may be associated with whether the virus binds angiotensin-converting enzyme-2. Acute cardiac injury occurs in half of critically ill coronavirus disease 2019 patients, but only 12% of patients infected by viruses that do not bind to angiotensin-converting enzyme-2.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Multifunctional Peptide From Bacillus Fermented Soybean for Effective Inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 S1 Receptor Binding Domain and Modulation of Toll Like Receptor 4: A Molecular Docking Study</strong> - Fermented soybean products are traditionally consumed and popular in many Asian countries and the northeastern part of India. To search for potential agents for the interruption of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Spike glycoprotein 1 (S1) and human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor interactions, the in silico antiviral prospective of peptides identified from the proteome of kinema was investigated. Soybean was fermented using Bacillus licheniformis…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Virtual screening by targeting proteolytic sites of furin and TMPRSS2 to propose potential compounds obstructing the entry of SARS-CoV-2 virus into human host cells</strong> - BACKGROUND AND AIM: The year 2020 begins with the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that cause the disease COVID-19, and continue till today. As of March 23, 2021, the outbreak has infected 124,313,054 worldwide with a total death of 2,735,707. The use of traditional medicines as an adjuvant therapy with western drugs can lower the fatality rate due to the COVID-19. Therefore, in silico molecular docking study was performed to search potential…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>MicroLet-7b Regulates Neutrophil Function and Dampens Neutrophilic Inflammation by Suppressing the Canonical TLR4/NF-κB Pathway</strong> - Sepsis is a heterogeneous syndrome caused by a dysregulated host response during the process of infection. Neutrophils are involved in the development of sepsis due to their essential role in host defense. COVID-19 is a viral sepsis. Disfunction of neutrophils in sepsis has been described in previous studies, however, little is known about the role of microRNA-let-7b (miR-let-7b), toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), and nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) activity in neutrophils and how they participate in…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Possible Potential Effects of Honey and Its Main Components Against Covid-19 Infection</strong> - Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a viral pneumonia that is spreading rapidly worldwide. The main feature of this disease is a severe acute respiratory syndrome and caused by coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). There are several unknowns about the pathogenesis and therapeutically treatment of COVID-19 infection. In addition, available treatment protocols have not been effective in managing COVID-19 infection. It is proposed that natural anti-oxidants such as lemon, green tea, saffron, curcuma…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Discovery of anti-MERS-CoV small covalent inhibitors through pharmacophore modeling, covalent docking and molecular dynamics simulation</strong> - Middle east respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is a fatal pathogen that poses a serious health risk worldwide and especially in the middle east countries. Targeting the MERS-CoV 3-chymotrypsin-like cysteine protease (3CL^(pro)) with small covalent inhibitors is a significant approach to inhibit replication of the virus. The present work includes generating a pharmacophore model based on the X-ray crystal structures of MERS-CoV 3CL^(pro) in complex with two covalently bound inhibitors….</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>In-silico pharmacophoric and molecular docking-based drug discovery against the Main Protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2, a causative agent COVID-19</strong> - COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019) caused by a novel ‘SARS-CoV-2’ virus resulted in public health emergencies across the world. An effective vaccine to cure this virus is not yet available, thus requires concerted efforts at various scales. In this study, we employed Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) based approach to identify the drug-like compounds - inhibiting the replication of the main protease (M^(pro)) of SARS-CoV-2. Our database search using an online tool “ZINC pharmer” retrieved ~1500…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Babaodan controls excessive immune responses and may represent a cytokine-targeted agent suitable for COVID-19 treatment</strong> - It has become evident that the actions of pro-inflammatory cytokines and/or the development of a cytokine storm are responsible for the occurrence of severe COVID-19 during SARS-CoV-2 infection. Although immunomodulatory mechanisms vary among viruses, the activation of multiple TLRs that occurs primarily through the recruitment of adapter proteins such as MyD88 and TRIF contributes to the induction of a cytokine storm. Based on this, controlling the robust production of pro-inflammatory…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Antiviral strategies should focus on stimulating the biosynthesis of heparan sulfates, not their inhibition</strong> - Antiviral strategies for viruses that utilize proteoglycan core proteins (syndecans and glypicans) as receptors should focus on heparan sulfate (HS) biosynthesis rather than on inhibition of these sugar chains. Here, we show that heparin and certain xylosides, which exhibit in vitro viral entry inhibitory properties against HSV-1, HSV-2, HPV-16, HPV-31, HVB, HVC, HIV-1, HTLV-1, SARS-CoV-2, HCMV, DENV-1, and DENV-2, stimulated HS biosynthesis at the cell surface 2- to 3-fold for heparin and up to…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>High-throughput screening identifies established drugs as SARS-CoV-2 PLpro inhibitors</strong> - A new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has been identified as the etiologic agent for the COVID-19 outbreak. Currently, effective treatment options remain very limited for this disease; therefore, there is an urgent need to identify new anti-COVID-19 agents. In this study, we screened over 6,000 compounds that included approved drugs, drug candidates in clinical trials, and pharmacologically active compounds to identify leads that target the SARS-CoV-2 papain-like protease (PLpro). Together with main…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Multi-conformation representation of Mpro identifies promising candidates for drug repurposing against COVID-19</strong> - The COVID-19 main protease (Mpro), one of the conserved proteins of the novel coronavirus is crucial for its replication and so is a very lucrative drug target. Till now, there is no drug molecule that has been convincingly identified as the inhibitor of the function of this protein. The current pandemic situation demands a shortcut to quickly reach to a lead compound or a drug, which may not be the best but might serve as an interim solution at least. Following this notion, the present…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Orally delivered MK-4482 inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in the Syrian hamster model</strong> - The COVID-19 pandemic progresses unabated in many regions of the world. An effective antiviral against SARS-CoV-2 that could be administered orally for use following high-risk exposure would be of substantial benefit in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. Herein, we show that MK-4482, an orally administered nucleoside analog, inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication in the Syrian hamster model. The inhibitory effect of MK-4482 on SARS-CoV-2 replication is observed in animals when the drug is administered…</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Novel inhibitors of the main protease enzyme of SARS-CoV-2 identified via molecular dynamics simulation-guided in vitro assay</strong> - For the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2, there are currently no effective drugs or vaccines to treat this coronavirus infection. In this study, we focus on the main protease enzyme of SARS-CoV-2, 3CL^(pro), which is critical for viral replication. We employ explicit solvent molecular dynamics simulations of about 150 compounds docked into 3CL^(pro)’s binding site and that had emerged as good main protease ligands from our previous in silico screening of over 1.2 million compounds. By…</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-patent-search">From Patent Search</h1>
<ul>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Compositions and methods for the treatment of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-COV-2) infection</strong> - - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=AU321590214">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>5-(4-TERT-BUTOXY PHENYL)-3-(4N-OCTYLOXYPHENYL)-4,5-DIHYDROISOXAZOLE MOLECULE (C-I): A PROMISING DRUG FOR SARS-COV-2 (TARGET I) AND BLOOD CANCER (TARGET II)</strong> - The present invention relates to a method ofmolecular docking of crystalline compound (C-I) with SARS-COV 2 proteins and its repurposing with proteins of blood cancer, comprising the steps of ; employing an algorithmto carry molecular docking calculations of the crystalized compound (C-I); studying the compound computationally to understand the effect of binding groups with the atoms of the amino acids on at least four target proteins of SARS-COV 2; downloading the structure of the proteins; removing water molecules, co enzymes and inhibitors attached to the enzymes; drawing the structure using Chem Sketch software; converting the mol file into a PDB file; using crystalized compound (C-I) for comparative and drug repurposing with two other mutated proteins; docking compound into the groove of the proteins; saving format of docked molecules retrieved; and filtering and docking the best docked results. - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=IN320884617">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>AQUEOUS ZINC OXIDE NANOSPRAY COMPOSITIONS</strong> - Disclosed herein is aqueous zinc oxide nano spray compositions comprising zinc oxide nanoparticles and a synthetic surfactant for controlling the spread of Covid-19 virus. - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=IN321836709">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>一种肝素类药物组合物、喷鼻剂及其制备方法及应用</strong> - 本发明公开了一种肝素类药物组合物、喷鼻剂及其制备方法及应用。该肝素类药物组合物包括肝素钠和阿比朵尔。本发明中的肝素类药物组合物首次采用肝素钠和阿比朵尔联合使用，普通肝素钠联合1μM/L以上的阿比朵尔病毒抑制效率显著高于单独普通肝素钠或单独阿比多尔组（p&lt;0.05）。 - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=CN321712860">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>USING CLINICAL ONTOLOGIES TO BUILD KNOWLEDGE BASED CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR NOVEL CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) WITH THE ADOPTION OF TELECONFERENCING FOR THE PRIMARY HEALTH CENTRES/SATELLITE CLINICS OF ROYAL OMAN POLICE IN SULTANATE OF OMAN</strong> - - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=AU320796026">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>抗SARS-COV-2中和抗体</strong> - 本公开提供了针对SARS‑COV‑2的新颖中和抗体和其抗原结合片段。还提供了包括其的药物组合物和试剂盒以及其用途。 - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=CN321712812">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Peptides and their use in diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection</strong> - - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=AU319943278">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">**一种4-肟-5<code>-（2-甲基丙酰基）尿苷的制备方法** - 本发明公开了一种4‑肟‑5</code>‑（2‑甲基丙酰基）尿苷的制备方法，包括：S1：在酸存在条件下，使得化合物1和2,2‑二甲氧基丙烷在有机溶剂中反应得到化合物2；S2：在碱存在条件下，使得化合物2在有机溶剂中反应得到化合物3；S3：在羟胺水溶液存在条件下使化合物3在有机溶剂中反应得到化合物4；S4：在酸存在条件下使化合物4在有机溶剂中反应得到化合物I。本发明制备得到的结晶性能良好的固体，且制备条件简单，转化率以及原子经济性好。 - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=CN321712529">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>一种COVID-19假病毒及其制备方法和用途</strong> - 本发明涉及生物技术领域，特别是涉及一种COVID‑19假病毒及其制备方法和用途本发明，所述COVID‑19假病毒由外壳蛋白质粒与辅助质粒经病毒包装而成，所述外壳蛋白质粒包括表达COVID‑19 S蛋白的质粒、表达COVID‑19 M蛋白的质粒和表达COVID‑19 E蛋白的质粒。本发明的COVID‑19假病毒采用三质粒系统包装，以S/M/E蛋白替代表达VSV‑G蛋白，比仅含有S蛋白的假病毒感染能力更强、灵敏度更高。而且，COVID‑19假病毒携带两种荧光报告基团，不同的荧光报告基团可应用于不同的场景，使得COVID‑19假病毒应用时更简便。 - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=CN321712520">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A PROCESS FOR SUCCESSFUL MANAGEMENT OF COVID 19 POSITIVE PATIENTS</strong> - - <a href="https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=AU319942709">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
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<h1 data-aos="fade-down" id="daily-dose">Daily-Dose</h1>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" data-aos-anchor-placement="top-bottom" id="contents">Contents</h1>
<ul>
<li><a href="#from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-vox">From Vox</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</a></li>
<li><a href="#from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-new-yorker">From New Yorker</h1>
<ul>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Andrew Cuomo, Matt Gaetz, and the New “Never Resign” School of Politics</strong> - In recent years, many politicians have seemed to realize that remaining in office is often the best path out of a scandal—for their own sake if no one else’s. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/andrew-cuomo-matt-gaetz-and-the-new-never-resign-school-of-politics">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Georgia Voting Law and the End of the New South</strong> - Republican state legislators once were allies of the business establishment. Now they seem to have little use for it. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-populism/the-georgia-voting-law-and-the-end-of-the-new-south">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Biden Finally Got to Say No to the Generals</strong> - Critics be damned, the President is ending the Forever War waged by Bush, Obama, and Trump in Afghanistan. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/biden-finally-got-to-say-no-to-the-generals">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>How COVID-19 Surged Again in India</strong> - A conversation about the crisis in Mumbai and the risks of rapid reopening. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-covid-19-surged-again-in-india">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Doctor’s Dark Year</strong> - In the heart of the pandemic, a trauma surgeon travels to the edge and back. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/a-doctors-dark-year">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>The First Amendment has a Facebook problem</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sitting at a desk and wearing a suit and tie for his testimony before Congress in 2018. The room behind him is packed with seated people." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9_fgr_ONZ5PQPC0qz-OLOLpNENM=/506x0:4550x3033/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69155155/947025224.jpg.0.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Capitol Hill on April 10, 2018.  | Xinhua/Ting Shen/Getty Images
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Big Tech poses an enormous challenge to free speech — but we aren’t having the right debate about it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ycJDDw">
America’s commitment to free speech is uniquely radical.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FshZT0">
The US Constitution treats freedom of expression as the master freedom that makes every other possible. And our legal system reflects this view, which is why it has always been incredibly difficult to suppress or punish speech in this country.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Pygqu3">
But there has never been a consensus on how to implement the First Amendment. Free speech law has evolved a ton over the years, especially in the aftermath of revolutions in media technology. The birth of radio and television, for example, altered the information landscape, creating new platforms for speech and new regulatory hurdles.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="h54pM6">
Today, the big challenge is the internet and the many ways it has transformed the public square. In fact, if a public square exists at all anymore, it’s virtual. And that’s problematic because our communication platforms are controlled by a handful of tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EG8LLB">
So what happens when companies like <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-facebook-twitter-decided-take-down-trump-s-accounts-n1254317">Facebook and Twitter</a> decide, as they did in the aftermath of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/1/6/22217657/us-capitol-breach-trump-rally-presidential-election">insurrection on January 6</a>, to ban the president of the United States for “glorifying violence” and spreading dangerous misinformation about the election? Is that a violation of the First Amendment?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IzXhSV">
The conventional response is no<strong>: </strong>Facebook and Twitter are private companies, free to do whatever they want with their platforms. That’s not wrong, but it is oversimplified. If the public square is controlled by a few private companies and they have the power to collectively ban citizens whenever they want, then doesn’t that give them the ability to effectively deny constitutionally protected liberties?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="S8HGRi">
There are no simple answers to these questions, so I reached out to Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an expert on the history of the First Amendment, to explore some of the tensions. Lakier believes our current debate about deplatforming — and free speech more generally — is too hollow.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BcnDIQ">
We talk about why contemporary First Amendment law is poorly equipped to handle threats to speech in the internet era, why we don’t want tech CEOs arbitrarily policing speech, what it means to have private control of the mass public sphere, and what, if anything, we can do on the policy front to deal with all of these challenges.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1JJzqO">
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
</p>
<h4 id="5S8Onx">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="epk4n2">
What does the law actually say about the right of private companies like Twitter or Facebook to censor or ban users at will? Is it legal?
</p>
<h4 id="mWjySl">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Cuywm8">
It is definitely legal. The First Amendment imposes very strict non-discrimination duties on government actors. So the government isn’t allowed to ban speech just because it wants to ban speech. There’s only going to be a limited set of cases in which it’s allowed to do that.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="abv2Nz">
But the First Amendment only limits government actors, and no matter how powerful they are under current rules, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter are not going to be considered government actors. So constitutionally they have total freedom to do whatever they want with the speech on their platforms.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="p3jUmt">
The only caveat here is that they can’t permit unlawful speech on their platforms, like child pornography or speech that violates copyright protections or speech that’s intended to communicate a serious threat or incite violence. Bun in those cases, it’s not the tech companies making the decision, it’s the courts.
</p>
<h4 id="xLsSnT">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="q5GYlV">
So why do you believe that our current legal framework is inadequate for dealing with free speech and tech platforms?
</p>
<h4 id="80WMzP">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="PosiJ1">
It’s inadequate because it rests on a false understanding of the speech marketplace. The best explanation for why we have a strict state action restriction on the scope of the First Amendment is the government is a regulator of the speech marketplace, so we want to limit its ability to kick anyone out of the marketplace of ideas.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="U64l4n">
Ideally, we want to give people who participate in the marketplace of ideas a lot of freedom to discriminate when it comes to speech because that’s how the marketplace of ideas separates good ideas from bad ideas. You couldn’t have an effective marketplace of ideas if people couldn’t decide which ideas they want to associate with and which ideas they don’t.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uv2OFY">
And that makes sense at a certain level of abstraction. But the world we live in is not the one where the government is the only governor of the marketplace of ideas. The whole public-private distinction doesn’t really map onto the world of today. If that was the world we lived in, the current rules would work fantastically. But as the platforms make clear, private actors very often are themselves governors of the marketplace of ideas. They’re dictating who can speak and how they may speak.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="z41KQI">
Facebook and Twitter are not government actors, they don’t have an army, you can leave them much more easily than you can leave the United States. But when it comes to the regulation of speech, all the concerns that we have about government censorship — that it’s going to limit diversity of expression, that it’s going to manipulate public opinion, that it’s going to target dissident or heterodox voices — also apply to these massive private actors, yet under the current First Amendment rules there is no mechanism to protect against those harms.
</p>
<h4 id="fiJwEf">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LcwDXT">
I absolutely don’t want Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or John Roberts deciding what kind of speech is permissible, but the reality is that these tech platforms are guided by perverse incentives and they do promote harmful speech and dangerous misinformation and that does have real-world consequences.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Yg6a7K">
But if we want a truly open and free society, are those just risks we have to live with?
</p>
<h4 id="d1uTbc">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vCIphv">
To some degree, yes. People love to talk about free speech as an unadulterated good, but the truth is that the commitment to free speech has always meant a commitment to allowing harmful speech to circulate. Free speech means little if it only means protection for speech that we don’t think is objectionable or harmful. So yeah, a society organized on the principle of free speech is going to have to tolerate harmful speech.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="phoK97">
But that doesn’t mean that we have to tolerate all harmful speech, or that we can’t do anything to protect ourselves against harassment or threats or violent speech. Right now we have what’s widely seen as a crisis of speech moderation on these platforms. The platforms themselves are responding through effective self-regulation. But those efforts are always going to be guided by the profit motive, so I’m skeptical about how far that’s going to get us when it comes to sustainable speech moderation policies.
</p>
<h4 id="FjsrnN">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="EBoJF7">
Do you want the government telling Zuckerberg or Dorsey how to moderate content?
</p>
<h4 id="ucJQt9">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gkeHFs">
We might, as democratic citizens, think that our democratic government should have something to say about the speech that flows through the platforms. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we want Congress telling Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg what speech they may or may not allow. There’s a tremendous amount of disagreement about what’s harmful speech, or where to draw the lines, and you might not think Congress is in a good position to make those kinds of decisions.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yJesmb">
Perhaps we want a diversity of approaches to content moderation across the platforms, and the government establishing a uniform speech code would undermine that. But at the same time the platforms are governors of speech, they’re the regulators of incredibly important forums of mass communication. And so I, as a democratic citizen who thinks the free speech principle is intended to facilitate democratic ends, want there to be more democratic oversight of what happens on the speech platforms.
</p>
<h4 id="hyHjfS">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xPT1h4">
That sounds perfectly reasonable in the abstract, but what would “democratic oversight” look like in practice?
</p>
<h4 id="aoUwZF">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kp4OLj">
One way is to mandate transparency. To require the platforms to give more information to the public, to researchers, to the government, about how they’re making content moderation decisions, so ordinary citizens can assess if it’s good or bad, or what the effects of the policies are. That’s tricky because you’d have to think about what kind of information the platforms should be required to give and whether or not it would offer us any real insight. But I do think there’s a role for transparency here.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="07Xdfa">
Alternatively, if we recognize that these private actors are playing such a tremendously important role in our public life, we could think about ways to make their decision-making more democratic or more democratically legitimate. So there have been proposals to create a kind of regulatory agency that would potentially collaborate with some of the platforms on developing policies. That might create more democratic structures of governance inside these platforms.
</p>
<h4 id="rwwJ7F">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Xd6OrS">
What do you make of <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-197_5ie6.pdf">Justice Clarence Thomas’s</a> recent suggestion that we should consider treating tech platforms like “common carriers” and regulate them like public utilities? Is that a good idea?
</p>
<h4 id="DiKSG0">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="bp2hf2">
This is an idea that people on both the left and the right have suggested in recent years, but that had always been viewed as very constitutionally problematic. So it’s interesting that Justice Thomas thinks a common carrier platform law would be constitutional.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vZoaNg">
Practically, it’s hard to see how a common carrier regime would work. Common carrier laws— which prevent private actors from excluding almost any speech — work well when applied to companies whose job primarily is moving speech from one place to another. But the social media companies do a lot more than that: one of the primary benefits they provide to their users is by moderating content, to facilitate conversation, to flag news or videos as relevant, etc.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="V1rBPG">
Common carrier obligations would make it difficult for the companies to perform this service, so the common carrier analogy doesn’t really work. Justice Thomas also suggested the possibility of subjecting the platforms to <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/5/22368045/clarence-thomas-social-media-regulation-knight-v-trump">public accommodations law</a>. Now, that seems more viable, because public accommodations law doesn’t prevent private companies from denying service to customers altogether, it merely limits the bases on which they could do so.
</p>
<h4 id="Ys9mtg">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Cfm4RQ">
Going back to your point about transparency, even if a company like Twitter formulated what most people might consider transparent and responsible speech policies (which I doubt, but let’s just grant that possibility), I don’t see any way to enforce it consistently over time. There is just too much ambiguity and the boundaries between free and harmful speech are impossible to define, much less police.
</p>
<h4 id="MJlrOY">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="iMeuhe">
Regulation of speech is always tricky, and the scale of the speech and the transnational scope of these platforms creates enormous challenges. The best we can do is to try and develop mechanisms, appeals, processes, reviews, and transparency obligations where the platform’s disclosing what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. I think that’s the best we can do. It won’t be perfect, but it would be good to get to a system where we have some reason to believe that the decision-making is not ad hoc and totally discretionary.
</p>
<h4 id="6DSwlW">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CIAM5S">
Are there free speech models around the world that the US could follow or replicate? A country like Germany, for example, isn’t comfortable with private companies deplatforming citizens, so they <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42510868">passed a law in 2017</a> restricting online incitement and hate speech.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2YYsuF">
Is there any room for an approach like that in the US?
</p>
<h4 id="wU6kIA">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8PD5BG">
The First Amendment makes it extremely difficult for the government to require platforms to take down speech that doesn’t fall into some very narrow categories. Again, incitement is one of those categories, but it is defined very narrowly in the cases to mean only speech that is intended, and likely, to lead to violence or lawbreaking. Hate speech is not one of those categories. That means that Congress could make it a crime to engage in incitement on the platforms but that would apply only to a very limited range of speech.
</p>
<h4 id="lM2NLM">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hTHJjE">
I know you believe the platforms were justified in banning Trump after <a href="https://www.vox.com/22217039/capitol-attack-trump-rally-election-biden-explained">the assault on the Capitol in January</a>, but do you also believe that we should punish or censor public officials for lying or perpetrating frauds on the public?
</p>
<h4 id="knKxmY">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uioxAu">
I think politicians should be able to be punished for lies, but I also think it’s very dangerous because the distinction between truth and lies is often difficult or subjective, and obviously democratic politics involves a lot of exaggeration and hyperbole and things that skirt the line between truth and lying. So we wouldn’t want a rule that allows whoever’s in power to silence their enemies or critics.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="L2HqCY">
But on the other hand, we already prosecute all kinds of lies. We prosecute fraud, for instance. When someone lies to you to get a material benefit, they can go to jail. When prosecuted, the fact that you used speech to effectuate that fraudulent end is not a defense. As a subspecies of this, we criminalize election fraud. So if someone lies to you about the location of a polling place or they give you intentionally incorrect information about how to vote, they can go to prison.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="b1wc9K">
Political lies that constitute fraud or that contribute to confusion about an election are in a narrow category of their own. So for example, I think President Trump’s lies about the outcome of the election are a species of election fraud. When used to achieve material benefit or electoral benefit where he’s going to use those lies in order to justify staying in power, that feels like the kind of lie that perhaps we want to include in our election fraud category.
</p>
<h4 id="wHoW0f">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ejXBtt">
I just can’t imagine political speech, which is very different from commercial speech, ever being controlled that way. A border case like Trump inciting violence might be as clear-cut as it gets, but what about propaganda? Sophistry? And the innumerable forms of bullshit that have always constituted democratic politics? Democracy is a contest of persuasion and politicians and parties are always going to deceive and manipulate in pursuit of power and money.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gpncSX">
That’s just baked into the democratic cake, right?
</p>
<h4 id="GeMeTm">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qHApQs">
So I agree that there’s a category we could call election fraud that maybe we feel okay prosecuting and then there’s ordinary political bullshit that maybe we don’t. But I’m going to throw a question back at you, because I think that there are cases on the border that are really difficult. For example, what about <a href="https://www.vox.com/21820485/trump-misleading-fundraising-emails-post-election">the lies that Trump told his supporters</a> in order to keep contributing to his fund after the election?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mQL3vP">
To me, that looks like fraud. If it wasn’t a politician, we would just call it classic fraud. But in the political domain, we call it something else. I’m not entirely sure about to think about this, but it’s an interesting case.
</p>
<h4 id="pyhwE8">
Sean Illing
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8liPtG">
Oh, no doubt it’s fraudulent, but I guess my point is that a great deal of politics is fraudulent in the same way, though it’s usually less overt than Trump’s hucksterism. Parties and politicians and special interest groups lie and peddle half-truths all the time. There’s so much bullshit in our political system that Trump appealed to a lot of people precisely because he was so transparently full of shit, which says quite a bit about where we’re at. The idea that we could ever meaningfully punish lying strikes me as fantastical.
</p>
<h4 id="I2jr3G">
Genevieve Lakier
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NLfB4c">
What’s so interesting is that when you look at commercial speech cases, it’s not even controversial to prosecute false advertising. There’s no debate that false advertising is outside the scope of First Amendment protection.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7EqslQ">
The justification for that is often that the person who’s selling you the commercial good has information about the good that the consumer doesn’t have and cannot get, so if they tell you it will cure bad breath or whatever, you have to trust them. When there’s a clear imbalance in knowledge and access between the speaker and the listener, the court says it’s okay to prosecute lying.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cZDs3q">
One approach I’ve thought about, though I’m not sure it would work, is when a politician is lying about something that the member of the public has no way of checking or verifying either on their own or through public sources.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2EebT6">
One of the reasons that the lies about the election were so damaging is because the people who were listening to those lies, they didn’t have any way of knowing whether this was or was not happening. I suppose they did though, they could rely on other news sources. But it was very difficult for them to verify what was happening in the black box of the election machinery.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="PjSTTs">
So yeah, I agree that lying is an intrinsic part of democratic politics, but I also think that there are certain kinds of lies that are very difficult to respond to just through the ordinary marketplace of ideas. A huge challenge moving forward will be navigating these kinds of questions in a rapidly changing landscape.
</p></li>
<li><strong>HIPAA, the health privacy law that’s more limited than you think, explained</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BR-oeQSTuwRv4O1udVDAlMGeisw=/454x0:2587x1600/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69154998/hipaa_final.0.png"/>
<figcaption>
Amanda Northrop/Vox
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
You probably don’t know what HIPAA really means. Let’s fix that.
</p>
<div class="c-float-left">
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Open Sourced logo" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/lcj6gww0ZKRDdVz0qOCNWvVxgYw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19433750/open_sourced_story_logo.png"/>
</figure>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="avHTuP">
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="q3O61x">
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Wo1zuY">
The first thing you should know about HIPAA is that it’s HIPAA, not HIPPA. There is only one P, and that P doesn’t stand for “privacy.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AJy1vy">
“People make up what that acronym stands for,” Deven McGraw, co-founder and chief regulatory officer of medical records platform Ciitizen and former deputy director for Health Information Privacy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR), told Recode.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WXYbOD">
“More often than not, [they think it’s] Health Information Privacy Protection Act: HIPPA. Yeah, that law does not exist.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Ld4gS2">
Both the misspelling and the widespread belief that HIPAA confers a strict set of privacy protections to any and all health data — and that everyone is subject to those laws — are common and understandable mistakes: HIPAA is pronounced like “hippo” but with an “a,” and most patients only come across it when signing the notice of privacy practices that the law mandates their health care providers have them sign. Plus, most people consider their health information to be very sensitive and assume their lawmakers have put the appropriate guardrails in to keep it as private as possible. But HIPAA’s privacy rules are more limited than they may realize.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jII1a8">
“HIPAA has great branding, because everyone knows it, even if they spell it wrong,” Lucia Savage, chief privacy and regulatory officer at Omada Health and former chief privacy officer at HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, told Recode. “What is not well understood is its limits. It’s very specifically a law that regulates information that is collected because a person is seeking health care.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="V9m7m8">
Normally, the misunderstanding would be an innocuous if annoying one. But the pandemic has helped bring health privacy issues to the fore. As with many other things over the last year, we’ve moved many of our health interactions online. Some of those may not be covered by HIPAA, but many people simply assume they are. And as the pandemic became increasingly politicized, many people cited HIPAA as an excuse to get out of mask mandates and to declare vaccine passports to be illegal. Neither of these assertions is true, but that hasn’t stopped many people from making them — even though using them to avoid public safety measures could be harmful to everyone.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9k3Kyt">
“It sure seems to have gotten worse in the Covid era, because the misinformation that’s being promulgated through social media channels is wildly off-base and yet asserted with such a high level of confidence that people believe it,” McGraw said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aiJURa">
The perception that HIPAA is solely a health privacy law that everyone is subject to has become so common that there’s now a Twitter account to document it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cCNBju">
A few months into the pandemic, <a href="https://twitter.com/BadHippa">Bad HIPPA Takes</a> — the misspelling is an intentional nod to how often people who claim to know the law get the acronym wrong — emerged. It was created by an anonymous former health care provider who told Recode they were sick of seeing rampant misinformation about HIPAA and concerned that it could cause harm.
</p>
<div id="3BbiaE">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" dir="ltr" lang="nl">
HIPA, HIPPA, HOORAY <a href="https://t.co/1fhvDNVtZr">pic.twitter.com/1fhvDNVtZr</a>
</p>
— Bad HIPPA Takes (<span class="citation" data-cites="BadHippa">@BadHippa</span>) <a href="https://twitter.com/BadHippa/status/1380163887442526210?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 8, 2021</a>
</blockquote></div></li>
</ul>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tmolGs">
The Bad HIPPA Takes account creator says some of the most common HIPAA inaccuracies over the last year have been about wearing masks, contact tracing, mandatory temperature checks, and, now, vaccine passports.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LxPHwq">
“There is a massive amount of confusion about who and what HIPAA actually applies to,” they said. “The sheer volume of bad information about it is nearly insurmountable.”
</p>
<div id="TH56WW">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" dir="ltr" lang="en">
In other news, your doctor can’t ask you health questions because of HIPAA. <a href="https://t.co/dTx0CC3r8n">pic.twitter.com/dTx0CC3r8n</a>
</p>
— Bad HIPPA Takes (<span class="citation" data-cites="BadHippa">@BadHippa</span>) <a href="https://twitter.com/BadHippa/status/1382386895636766722?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 14, 2021</a>
</blockquote>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UtxJKj">
Suffice it to say, Bad HIPPA Takes has plenty of material to draw from for its more than 11,000 followers. But actually informing the general public about what HIPAA does is another matter.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YvEc89">
“Trying to get people to understand what a Covered Entity or Business Associate is in 280 characters is not an easy task,” the person who runs the account said. “I can write the words, but of course this platform doesn’t lend itself well to considered, nuanced discussion.”
</p>
<h3 id="QvrpQ0">
What HIPAA actually does
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DkliGP">
So, what does that one P stand for if not privacy? Portability, obviously.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Fv5kIS">
HIPAA is short for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The 1996 law’s origins lie in creating federal standards for digitizing medical claims data and records (“accountability”) and allowing employees to have health insurance coverage, including for preexisting conditions, when they changed jobs (that’s the “portability”) — rights they did not have before the Affordable Care Act.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KNco4G">
The privacy provision that most of us associate HIPAA with today wasn’t actually the focus of the law at the time.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="11ZXWf">
“When Congress was passing this law, they realized that there was going to be this massive digitization of health data, and there might need to be privacy protections for that,” McGraw said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Fi56PW">
It took a few years to work those out, so HIPAA’s privacy rules weren’t issued until the end of 2000, and didn’t fully take effect until 2002. They were most recently <a href="https://www.hipaajournal.com/2013-hipaa-guidelines/">updated</a> in 2013.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oqXis4">
There are several elements to HIPAA, including provisions to prevent health care fraud, simplify and standardize medical records, rules for pre-tax employee medical savings accounts, and to ensure continuous health insurance coverage for employees who lost or changed their jobs. For the purposes of this explainer, we’re focusing on the privacy rule, which falls under its <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/hipaa-simplification-201303.pdf">administrative simplification</a> section.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uJnMqN">
HIPAA only applies to what are called “<a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-entities/index.html">covered entities</a>.” Those are, essentially, health care providers (doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, for instance), health insurers, and health care clearinghouses (which process medical data). It also covers their “business associates,” or contractors who have to handle medical records in some way to do work for those covered entities. Those parties are required to follow certain protocols to keep your protected health information secure and private.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="07PfbH">
And that’s why your health care provider or insurer might require you to communicate with them through secure, HIPAA-compliant channels and patient portals, or take other steps to verify your identity before discussing protected health information with you. HIPAA’s privacy rule also requires that health care providers give you, the patient, a <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ocr/privacy/hipaa/npp_layered_hc_provider.pdf">notice of their privacy practices</a> and allow you to access your own medical records. In fact, a lot of HIPAA complaints from patients aren’t about privacy violations but about lack of access to medical records.
</p>
<div id="gpD78u">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" dir="ltr" lang="en">
Better yet, tell him you did then we he asks to see your car card as proof, hit him with a HIPPA lawsuit.<br/><br/>College for free!!!
</p>
— I am going to upset to drive self inflections (<span class="citation" data-cites="JASONWI72430456">@JASONWI72430456</span>) <a href="https://twitter.com/JASONWI72430456/status/1382451011789406214?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 14, 2021</a>
</blockquote>
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="r1XYBf">
If you think your HIPAA rights have been violated, you can complain to the HHS <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/index.html">Office of Civil Rights</a>. But — and this is another common misconception, as indicated by the above tweets — you can’t sue the alleged offender yourself. The Office of Civil Rights takes action, if warranted, for instance by issuing fines or even criminal penalties to offenders.
</p>
<h3 id="BSUNVn">
What HIPAA doesn’t do
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FFs4aP">
It’s important to note that medical privacy didn’t begin with HIPAA, and it’s not the only health privacy law out there. There are other laws that protect <a href="https://www.aidslawpa.org/alpp-services/confidentiality-of-hiv-related-information/#:~:text=State%20and%20federal%20laws%20prohibit,with%20HIV%20is%20still%20pervasive.">certain</a> types of health information: Some <a href="https://consumercal.org/about-cfc/cfc-education-foundation/cfceducation-foundationyour-medical-privacy-rights/confidentiality-of-medical-information-act/">states</a> have their own stricter medical privacy laws, or things like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates that employers must keep disability-related medical information about their employees confidential. And the concept of doctor-patient confidentiality has existed for a long time — it’s part of the Hippocratic Oath (which is not a law) — and that trust is a necessary part of good medical care.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gomRKV">
“If I’m the doctor and you’re the patient, you come to me, you might tell me some really secret things,” Savage said. “And I need to know that to give you the right care and diagnose you properly.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2AVjFl">
At the same time, many of us freely give our health information away to <a href="https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/non-covered_entities_report_june_17_2016.pdf">all kinds of places</a> and people who have no real legal obligation to keep that information private or secure. With the internet, there are more ways to do that than ever.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6tLSx0">
“I think, generally, when you’re talking about interactions with the health care system, the likelihood that they’re protected by HIPAA is very strong,” McGraw said. “Now, where those things break down: obviously, if you’re recording your steps on a Fitbit or you’re using a nutrition app, that’s not going to be covered by HIPAA.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VM0hWx">
That therapist appointment you tweeted about? Your vaccine Instagram selfie? Your membership in a Facebook support group for people who have herpes? The period tracker app on your phone? The heart rate monitor on your wrist? Browsing WebMD for information about your recent lupus diagnosis? The mail-order DNA test? The Uber trip you took to the emergency room? That’s all health information, most of it is directly tied to you, it can be sensitive, and none of it is covered by HIPAA<strong> </strong>(unless protected health information is shared with a covered entity, as is the case with <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/health-law-and-business/health-care-provider-apps-are-private-but-fitness-apps-not-so-much">some digital health services</a>).
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RpHmkD">
And then we’ve got the organizations that handle health data but aren’t covered by HIPAA, including most schools, law enforcement, life insurers, and even <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/employers-health-information-workplace/index.html">employers</a>. They may be covered by other privacy laws, but HIPAA isn’t one of them.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AHyyZB">
And, right now, even some things that actually are covered by HIPAA have been given a temporary enforcement waiver due to the pandemic. The Office of Civil Rights will <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/emergency-preparedness/notification-enforcement-discretion-telehealth/index.html">not be enforcing</a> its rule requiring health care providers to use HIPAA-compliant portals for telehealth, <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/01/19/ocr-announces-notification-enforcement-discretion-use-online-web-based-scheduling-applications-scheduling-covid-19-vaccination-appointments.html">nor will it require</a> covered entities to use HIPAA-compliant systems to schedule vaccines — an issue that arose when some health services’ sign-up portals crashed and they <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22213913/florida-vaccine-eventbrite">turned to Eventbrite</a>. Eventbrite is a good service for getting a lot of people signed up for an event in high demand, but it’s <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/security/">not HIPAA-compliant</a>. The Office of Civil Rights told Recode that enforcement discretion will remain in effect “until the Secretary of HHS determines that the public health emergency no longer exists.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="CP7Af7">
All this is to say that if you go to Starbucks (not a covered entity) and refuse to wear a mask because you say you have a health condition, it is not a HIPAA violation if the barista asks you what that condition is, nor is it a HIPAA violation if Starbucks refuses service to you.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YDNr94">
If your doctor were to walk into that Starbucks and broadcast your health information to anyone within earshot without your permission, <em>that</em> would be a HIPAA violation. It would also be a good time to consider changing doctors. Fortunately, HIPAA allows you to request your medical records and bring them to a new provider. And if someone else happened to record your doctor’s outburst and put it on TikTok, that’s not a HIPAA violation, even though it does include information that was once protected by HIPAA.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eY47vs">
“The protections don’t cling to the data and protect it all the way downstream,” McGraw said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="s2VBRn">
Additionally, someone asking if you’ve been vaccinated is not a HIPAA violation. In fact, it’s not a HIPAA violation for anyone to ask about any health condition you may have, though it might be considered rude. A business requiring you to show proof that you’ve been vaccinated before you can enter is not a HIPAA violation. Your employer requiring you to be vaccinated and show proof before you can go to the office is not a HIPAA violation. Schools requiring that students get certain vaccinations before they’re allowed to attend is not a HIPAA violation.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="iFYCar">
Oh, and vaccine passports — which the Biden administration has <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22349266/vaccine-passports-vaccination-record-commpass-walmart-walgreens">already said</a> it has no plans to mandate and which have been around for decades <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/04/08/985253421/the-history-of-vaccine-passports-in-the-u-s-and-whats-new">if not longer</a> — are also not HIPAA violations. Let’s look at New York’s Excelsior Pass. To use it, you are voluntarily giving the app permission to access your health records, and, as the app’s disclaimer <a href="https://epass.ny.gov/terms">clearly states</a>: “[T]he website is not provided to you by a health care provider, so, as such, you are not providing protected health information for health care treatment, payment, or operations (as defined under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)).”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SHNEmF">
That’s not to say there might not be other, non-HIPAA violations at play here. Certain anti-discrimination laws limit what medical information employers and businesses can require their employees or customers to provide, and they are mandated to make reasonable accommodations for qualifying health conditions. But even those other laws do not, as we’ve seen, mean that businesses <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-warns-inaccurate-flyers-and-postings-regarding-use-face-masks-and">have to allow unmasked people</a> in their establishments or that they can’t require employees to get vaccinated (unless they have a medical or religious reason why they can’t be).
</p>
<h3 id="5Iwkzy">
Closing the health privacy law gap
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HvWpsG">
So HIPAA isn’t the all-inclusive health privacy law so many people assume it is, but that mass assumption suggests that such a law is both wanted and needed. HIPAA has a lot of gaps that a privacy law can and should fill. The pandemic has only made this more apparent.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uazrAJ">
“People are fairly protective of their health information,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told Recode. “They just assume it would be covered because it’s absurd that it’s not.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2Iw80x">
Experts believe that this coverage must come from comprehensive federal privacy laws that include provisions for sensitive information, like health data, or for what could be considered sensitive uses of data.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SVYcqg">
“What we need is for Congress to pass a comprehensive privacy law that sets limits on what the companies can use this data for, how long they can keep it, who they can disclose it to, and doesn’t put the burden of dealing with that on the individual,” Fitzgerald said. “The burden needs to be on the company that’s collecting the data to protect it and to minimize its use.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WWDitW">
Savage said people who are concerned with health privacy laws might find a more productive use of their time in contacting their legislators to advocate for the health privacy laws they believe they are entitled to.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Q6T3hr">
“For individual legislators to move on something, they have to understand why it’s important,” Savage said. “And that’s where the human stories come in. Even just an email to your legislator saying, ‘I had this thing happen and I was really worried, it made me vaccine-hesitant. Can you please fix this?’”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="G5W9qg">
Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) is one of several lawmakers who has pushed for better health privacy protections during the pandemic, including as a co-sponsor of the Public Health Emergency Privacy Act, a bill that was introduced in both houses of Congress in 2020 and <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22251118/vaccine-health-data-privacy-laws-philadelphia">reintroduced</a> in early 2021. It would protect digital health data collected for the purpose of stopping the pandemic (for instance, by contact tracing apps or vaccine appointment booking tools) from being used for unrelated purposes by the government or private businesses.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KAPtbo">
“HIPAA provides some protections for our health information, but technology has advanced must faster than our laws,” DelBene told Recode. “The Public Health Emergency Privacy Act shows how we can protect consumers’ information during the pandemic, but I believe we need to go further since this issue permeates every part of our digital lives.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0E84UC">
DelBene <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22301174/federal-privacy-bill-suzan-delbene">recently introduced</a> the Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act, which includes added protections for sensitive information like health data. It’s one of what will likely be several consumer privacy bills introduced this session, any one of which could give Americans better health privacy protections. That is, of course, assuming any of them actually pass.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JlCHfy">
In the meantime, well, at least we have the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which can — and has — gone after apps and websites that violated their own privacy policies — <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2021/01/developer-popular-womens-fertility-tracking-app-settles-ftc">including a period tracker app</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="b1fvxC">
And while Bad HIPPA Takes is no fan of how the law has been misinterpreted to erroneously declare that vaccine passports are illegal, they are concerned with where individual privacy (not HIPAA) rights stop and where a business’s property rights begin when it comes to those passports.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6wAD7X">
“If you live in rural America and Walmart is your only grocery store, do you just have to shop online forever, at additional cost and expense, because they decide to require vaccination to enter their stores?” they asked. “What if you are in that situation and are unbanked? The so-called digital divide could make things worse for a lot of people in the short term if implementation of a vaccine passport system is done recklessly.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UHgcdi">
That’s not a HIPAA take, but it is a take worth considering.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lpG1kD">
<a href="http://www.vox.com/open-sourced"><em>Open Sourced</em></a><em> is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.</em>
</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Mark Zuckerberg says he’s standing up for you. Yes, you.</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/RbosYdWBHWyXz_HnWWBm374XW6A=/75x0:4799x3543/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69153079/1178141587.jpg.0.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at a press event hosted by News Corp in October 2019. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The CEO of Facebook makes the case for Facebook.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="yZ9lue">
What does the man who singlehandedly controls the world’s most important tech platform think about that platform’s role in the world?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nyDrAF">
He thinks it’s making the world a better place. Even if it causes some damage — mostly to people and institutions that are threatened by its rise.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7sC18c">
The first part, of course, is what you would expect the CEO of Facebook to say in public. But the second part, which Mark Zuckerberg also said today in an interview where he rolled out <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/4/18/22390742/facebook-podcasts-clubhouse-audio-launch-spotify-zuckerberg-apple">plans to build a set of audio tools</a>, is a sort of new and important idea.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8bLlgB">
Sort of, because it’s what Zuckerberg and many of his employees — and, in fact, lots of Silicon Valley folks — have thought and said to each other for a long time: That the stuff they were making was a benefit for society, even if it also created serious problems along the way. That if you weighed it all out, they were doing more good than bad.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lIZ1W7">
“<a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data#.eeggDmkA3">De facto good</a>,” as Facebook exec Andrew Bosworth put it in a memo to his coworkers in June 2016.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="WKLtrV">
But Zuckerberg and crew haven’t talked like that in public for a long time — specifically, since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, followed by a series of damning and embarrassing scandals and disclosures.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1m6zRR">
Since then, they’ve been in a defensive crouch, allowing — <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/12/sheryl-sandberg-facebook-owes-us-an-apology-over-russian-meddling">over</a> and <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/25/17161398/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-apology-cambridge-analytica-full-page-newspapers-ads">over</a> — that they have a lot of responsibility and a lot of work to do. And, not coincidentally, telling government regulators around the world that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/3/31/18289375/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-regulation-washington-post-op-ed">they look forward to more regulation</a> so they could be even more responsible.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fcvvOV">
That public posture makes plenty of sense in a world where Facebook (along with other big tech companies) faces increased scrutiny from lawmakers, and where its users who once celebrated Facebook now <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/poll-americans-give-social-media-clear-thumbs-down-n991086">often resent Facebook</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7bAkcx">
But even though many of his top lieutenants have left in recent years, and even though his rank-and-file <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-employee-leaks-show-they-feel-betrayed">employees often question whether they’re harming the world</a>, it would be weird if the guy who built Facebook and very much still runs Facebook thought Facebook was Fundamentally Bad.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0FA94T">
Zuckerberg doesn’t think that. And today we got to hear him make his case for Facebook out loud, in an interview with tech journalist (and Vox Media contributor) <a href="https://www.platformer.news/">Casey Newton</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IQ3wv7">
Specifically, Zuckerberg argued, Facebook, and tech like Facebook, is good because while it can undermine the old, it helps people — individual people, as opposed to Big Faceless Authorities — create the new. And, crucially, that a lot of people complaining about Facebook and tech like Facebook are afraid of losing power.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="STSQuL">
It’s a way of thinking about the world that used to be common, and praised, in Silicon Valley and among technologists. It’s a mindset that melds the <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588&amp;xs=1&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fnews%2Fletter-from-silicon-valley%2Fthe-complicated-legacy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog&amp;referrer=vox.com&amp;sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2Frecode%2F2021%2F4%2F19%2F22392635%2Fmark-zuckerberg-case-for-facebook-audio-products-clubhouse-podcasts" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Whole Earth Catalog</a> with <a href="https://aynrand.org/novels/the-fountainhead/"><em>The Fountainhead</em></a> and a healthy dose of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction">creative destruction</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OA51KA">
We have heard a lot less of that lately as the world reckons with some of the unintended consequences Silicon Valley has brought us in the last couple decades — like giant platforms that can quickly and effectively <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-the-capitol-riot-tells-us-about-online-power/id1080467174?i=1000505283254">mislead huge swaths of the population</a> about objective reality. But Zuckerberg, it’s clear, is still a believer.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GiTTSN">
Here’s the transcript of this part of the exchange between Zuckerberg and Newton:
</p>
<blockquote>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1rVhCb">
<strong>Casey Newton:</strong> You know that you run a very polarizing company. Some folks, I think, have maybe given up on the idea that Facebook can be a net positive in the world. So what is the case that you make to yourself every day that it is?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="rjAlBq">
<strong>Mark Zuckerberg:</strong> I think that this is about enabling people. Right, so the question for me is, ‘Do you believe, at some basic level, that if you empower individuals that that leads to more good?’
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8H0PT7">
And, you know, I think that we’re in a very tumultuous time, and a lot of institutions and the things that have been around for decades — people are losing faith in. And I think some for good reasons and some for not, but that dynamic is really shifting,
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HjCqGw">
And I think a lot of the people in those institutions, or who are primarily sympathetic to it, look at a shift in the world, as a vision of the future where there’s more individuals who have more power and can kind of do what they want, rather than going through those channels — that that’s not a good future.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="rIf53a">
And you know, we tell stories about things like, you know how without traditional gatekeepers on information you have things like misinformation, running rampant — and look, I’m not trying to downplay that, right? I think misinformation is a real issue and I think that there should be things that [we] are focused on, on the basic stuff from spreading. We invest a lot in that.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JSKxGS">
But I think if you look at the grand arc here, what’s really happening is individuals are getting more power and more opportunity to create the lives and the jobs that they want. And to connect with people they want. And to connect to the ideas that they want and to share the ideas that they want. And I just think that that will lead to a better world. It will be different from the world that we had before. I think it will be more diverse, I think more different ideas and models will be able to exist. And I think it inevitably means that some of the people who kind of had control over that world in the past will lose it, and I could see why those folks will lament the direction that it’s going in.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Y3geDn">
But my concern is that we’re too frequently telling the negative sides of it, from the perspective of the institutions that may be not on on the winning side of these changes. Where I think the people who are on the winning side of these changes are individuals, you know, whether that’s the people who are going to use these tools and share how to connect to the people that want to have all kinds of new experiences. Or this whole new set of people in the creator economy who are now going to be able to participate in a whole new set of jobs that didn’t exist in the past, but allow fundamentally more creativity in the world.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3eF1Lx">
So, I mean I’ve learned over the last several years not to be too pollyannish about this. There are real issues that need to be dealt with. But my own sense is that the narrative is a little too biased or maybe a lot too biased towards telling the negative side of the issues rather than all the value and opportunity that is being created.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IPujSe">
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9WQv81">
Zuckerberg is at least partially correct — there are lots of upsides to technology. And Facebook provides lots of value to me, and presumably to most of the 2.8 billion people who use it worldwide. I also believe he believes that he’s helping people make choices about what they want to do and how they want to do it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="N9r6DG">
The problem is that Facebook, Inc. isn’t just a tool that individuals can use. It’s a mammoth network, run largely without any oversight at all from the world’s citizens and governments. And even if you never use it, it can be enormously consequential. See, for instance, the evolution of the “<a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/5/21551437/stop-the-steal-facebook-group-takedown-members-violence-election-fraud-trump">stop the steal” movement</a> from Facebook-enabled chat groups to a <a href="https://www.vox.com/22215120/trump-stop-the-steal-protests-downtown-washington-dc-electoral-college">force</a> behind the <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22221285/trump-online-capitol-riot-far-right-parler-twitter-facebook">Capitol riot</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pUj2KX">
My hunch is that this won’t be the last time we hear Zuckerberg play up the notion that Facebook stands for individual liberty and choice. For one thing, Zuckerberg doesn’t do a lot of improv in public settings, and this isn’t the kind of messaging he just blurts out. More to the point: When you’re facing <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/10/6/21505027/congress-big-tech-antitrust-report-facebook-google-amazon-apple-mark-zuckerberg-jeff-bezos-tim-cook">public pressure to shrink yourself</a>, somehow, because you’re Too Big and Too Unaccountable, telling the world that you’re simply helping people make their own choices may seem like a good retort. Especially if you believe it.
</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-sports">From The Hindu: Sports</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Desperate SRH look for inspiration from Warner for turnaround in fortune</strong> - A big innings is due from the SRH captain.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Dhoni-led CSK eye another win as fresh challenge awaits struggling KKR</strong> - The MS Dhoni-led side has come on its own with the ‘Captain Cool’ making the most of his resources.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>All Proteas captains express concern over possible suspension by ICC</strong> - “The Proteas Men’s team has an ICC World T20 event in November.”</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>European Super League designed to “save football”, says Real Madrid’s chief Florentino Perez</strong> - A controversial decision to form a breakaway European Super League was taken “to save football” and in part motivated because “young people are no lon</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Premier League | Liverpool and Leeds share spoils amid Super League protests</strong> - A draw left sixth-placed Liverpool two points adrift of fourth-placed West Ham in the Premier League.</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-the-hindu-national-news">From The Hindu: National News</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Cabinet gives ex-post facto approval for amendments to Finance Bill, 2021</strong> - The Finance Bill became the Finance Act, 2021 on March 28, 2021 after receiving the President’s nod</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Boeing 737 MAX 8s can overfly India: DGCA</strong> - The aircraft continues to be banned for commercial operations in the country</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Transport strike: Not the right time for it, says HC</strong> - Hopes employees resume work without prejudice to their demands; says it violates fundamental rights of other citizens</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Impose lockdown in Gujarat to curb COVID-19 spread: IMA tells HC</strong> - “The government should completely ban all kind of gatherings.”</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Maharashtra imposes additional restrictions</strong> - Food and vegetable shops to stay open only for four hours a day</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-bbc-europe">From BBC: Europe</h1>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Germany CDU: Armin Laschet backed by Merkel party in chancellor race</strong> - Armin Laschet wins the backing of the CDU executive for the chancellor’s job in September’s elections.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>France seeks conspiracy theorist over kidnapping</strong> - Police issue an international warrant after a little French girl is abducted and rescued.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>European Super League created to ‘save football’ - Real Madrid president Florentino Perez</strong> - The European Super League has been created “to save football”, says Real Madrid president Florentino Perez.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>European Super League: How Europe has reacted</strong> - ‘The bonfire of greed’ and ‘the worst announcement in football history’ is just some of the reaction across Europe to the Super League.</p></li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>‘I would like Russia to be more free’</strong> - The BBC’s Steve Rosenberg travels 2,000 miles east of Moscow to gauge the mood of ordinary Russians.</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-ars-technica">From Ars Technica</h1>
<ul>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Google Play apps steal texts and pepper you with unauthorized purchases</strong> - Google removes eight apps after receiving report from researchers. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1758227">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 will (finally) enter the 64-bit world</strong> - Next year’s upgrade—out for preview later this summer—looks like a doozy. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1758188">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Marvel drops first teaser for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings</strong> - Simu Liu stars as a gifted martial artist seeking to escape his dark family history. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1757928">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>More J&amp;J troubles: Vaccine manufacturing halted and more possible clot cases</strong> - CDC advisory committee will meet Friday to decide the fate of the troubled vaccine. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1758178">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Parler re-platformed as Apple allows social network back into App Store</strong> - “Free speech” social media network reportedly revamped its moderation approach. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1758123">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>My wife says we should split up because I keep pretending I’m a detective</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
<div class="md">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
I said good idea, we can cover more ground that way
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Edit: Thank you for all the awards. I’ve never had silver before let alone 5 silver awards
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Edit 2: Wow my first ever gold. Thank you
</p>
</div>
<!-- SC_ON -->
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/sewn_of_a_gun"> /u/sewn_of_a_gun </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/mumtqa/my_wife_says_we_should_split_up_because_i_keep/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/mumtqa/my_wife_says_we_should_split_up_because_i_keep/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><strong>The local bar was so sure that its bartender was the strongest man around that they offered a standing $1000 bet</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
<div class="md">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The local bar was so sure that its bartender was the strongest man around that they offered a standing $1000 bet.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The bartender would squeeze a lemon until all the juice ran into a glass, and hand the lemon to a patron. Anyone who could squeeze one more drop of juice out would win the money.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Many people had tried over time (weight-lifters, longshoremen, etc.) but nobody could do it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
One day this scrawny little man came into the bar, wearing thick glasses and a polyester suit, and said in a tiny squeaky voice.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
“I’d like to try the bet.” After the laughter had died down, the bartender said OK, grabbed a lemon, and squeezed away.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Then he handed the wrinkled remains of the rind to the little man.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
But the crowd’s laughter turned to total silence as the man clenched his fist around the lemon and six drops fell into the glass.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
As the crowd cheered, the bartender paid the $1000, and asked the little man.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
“What do you do for a living? Are you a lumberjack, a weight-lifter, what?”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The man replied, “I work for the IRS.”
</p>
</div>
<!-- SC_ON -->
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Discko14"> /u/Discko14 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/mu5657/the_local_bar_was_so_sure_that_its_bartender_was/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/mu5657/the_local_bar_was_so_sure_that_its_bartender_was/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><strong>Wife said the grandkids were coming over for the first time..I spent five hours child-proofing the house.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
<div class="md">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
They still got in.
</p>
</div>
<!-- SC_ON -->
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/in_sane_carbon_unit"> /u/in_sane_carbon_unit </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/muhzpt/wife_said_the_grandkids_were_coming_over_for_the/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/muhzpt/wife_said_the_grandkids_were_coming_over_for_the/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><strong>A teacher told his students, “The person who answers my next question correctly gets to leave class early.”</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
<div class="md">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
Suddenly, a pen came flying across to room, practically hitting the teacher in the face.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
“Who threw that?!” the teacher shouted, angrily.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
“Me!” piped up a voice from the back of the classroom. “Can I leave now?”
</p>
</div>
<!-- SC_ON -->
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/JeffersonComingHome"> /u/JeffersonComingHome </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/muemdy/a_teacher_told_his_students_the_person_who/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/muemdy/a_teacher_told_his_students_the_person_who/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><strong>What do Chris Hemsworth and Mike Tyson have in common after a workout?</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF -->
<div class="md">
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
They’re both Thor.
</p>
</div>
<!-- SC_ON -->
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/WantedDadorAlive"> /u/WantedDadorAlive </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/muhe1g/what_do_chris_hemsworth_and_mike_tyson_have_in/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/muhe1g/what_do_chris_hemsworth_and_mike_tyson_have_in/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
</ul>
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