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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>Correcting prevalence estimation for biased sampling with testing errors</strong> -
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Sampling for prevalence estimation of infection is subject to bias by both oversampling of symptomatic individuals and error-prone tests. This results in naive estimators of prevalence (i.e., proportion of observed infected individuals in the sample) that can be very far from the true proportion of infected. In this work, we present a method of prevalence estimation that reduces both the effect of bias due to testing errors and oversampling of symptomatic individuals, eliminating it altogether in some scenarios. Moreover, this procedure considers stratified errors in which tests have different error rate profiles for symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals. This results in easily implementable algorithms, for which code is provided, that produce better prevalence estimates than other methods (in terms of reducing and/or removing bias), as demonstrated by formal results, simulations, and on COVID-19 data from the Israeli Ministry of Health.
</p>
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.21266254v3" target="_blank">Correcting prevalence estimation for biased sampling with testing errors</a>
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<li><strong>New Approach to the SIR Inversion Problem: From the 1905-1906 Plague Outbreak in the Isle of Bombay to the 2021-2022 Omicron Surge in New York City</strong> -
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We describe a novel approach to recovering the underlying parameters of the SIR dynamic epidemic model from observed data on case incidence or deaths. We formulate a discrete-time approximation to the original continuous-time model and search for the parameter vector that minimizes the standard least squares criterion function. We show that the gradient vector and matrix of second-order derivatives of the criterion function with respect to the parameters adhere to their own systems of difference equations and thus can be exactly calculated iteratively. Applying our new approach, we estimate four-parameter SIR models on two datasets: (1) daily reported cases of COVID-19 during the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron/BA.1 surge of December 2021 - March 2022 in New York City; and (2) weekly deaths from a plague outbreak on the Isle of Bombay during December 1905 - July 1906, originally studied by Kermack and McKendrick in their now-classic 1927 paper. The estimated parameters from the COVID-19 data suggest a duration of persistent infectivity beyond that reported in small-scale clinical studies of mostly symptomatic subjects. The estimated parameters from the plague data suggest that the Bombay outbreak was in fact driven by pneumonic rather than bubonic plague.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.13.23287177v2" target="_blank">New Approach to the SIR Inversion Problem: From the 1905-1906 Plague Outbreak in the Isle of Bombay to the 2021-2022 Omicron Surge in New York City</a>
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<li><strong>Elevated Levels of IL-6 in IgA Nephropathy patients are induced by an Epigenetically Driven Mechanism Triggered by Viral and Bacterial RNA</strong> -
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Immunoglobulin A nephropathy (IgAN) is the most frequent primary glomerulonephritis characterized by the presence of IgA immune complexes in the glomeruli. Recently, a multihit model has been proposed to describe the pathogenesis of IgAN, but it is believed that further predisposing factors are present, including immunological, genetic and environmental factors. Newly, the role of IL-6 in pathogenesis is becoming increasingly important but reason why levels of IL-6 are elevated in IgAN patients is not well understood. One attainable hypothesis on high levels of IL-6 in IgAN comes out from our recent whole genome DNA methylation screening in IgAN patients, that identified, among others, a hypermethylated region comprising Vault RNA 2-1 (VTRNA2-1), a non-coding RNA. Here we confirm that VTRNA2-1 is low expressed in IgAN subjects compared to HS and we found that also in transplanted IgAN patients (TP-IgAN), compared to non-IgAN transplanted patients (TP), the VTRNA2-1 transcript was expressed at level very low. We found that in IgAN patients with downregulated VTRNA2-1, PKR is overactivated, coherently with the role of the VTRNA2-1 that binds to PKR and inhibits its phosphorylation. The loss of the VTRNA2-1 natural restrain caused the activation of CREB by PKR, a classical cAMP-inducible CRE-binding factor interacting with a region of the IL-6 promoter and leading to IL-6 production, both in IgAN and in TP-IgAN patients. PKR is normally activated by bacterial and viral RNA and we found that both the RNA poly(I:C), the and the COVID-19 RNA-vaccine stimulation significantly increase the IL-6 levels in PBMCs from HS but had an opposite effect in those from IgAN patients. In conclusion, the discovery of the upregulated VTRNA2-1/PKR/CREB/IL-6 pathway in IgAN patients may provide novel approach to treat the disease and may be useful for development of precision nephrology and personalized therapy, possibly by checking the VTRNA2-1 methylation level in IgAN patients.
</p>
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.05.22271944v3" target="_blank">Elevated Levels of IL-6 in IgA Nephropathy patients are induced by an Epigenetically Driven Mechanism Triggered by Viral and Bacterial RNA</a>
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<li><strong>Evaluation of the Pilot Wastewater Surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in Norway, June 2022 - March 2023</strong> -
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Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater-based surveillance gained great international interest as an additional tool to monitor SARS-CoV-2. In autumn 2021, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health decided to pilot a national wastewater surveillance (WS) system for SARS-CoV-2 and its variants between June 2022 and March 2023. We evaluated the system to assess if it met its objectives and its attribute-based performance. Methods: We adapted the available guidelines for evaluation of surveillance systems. The evaluation was carried out as a descriptive analysis and consisted of the following three steps: (i) description of the WS system, (ii) identification of users and stakeholders, and (iii) analysis of the system attributes and performance including sensitivity, specificity, timeliness, usefulness, representativeness, simplicity, flexibility, stability, and communication. Cross-correlation analysis was performed to assess the system ability to provide early warning signal of new wave of infections. Results: The pilot WS system was a national surveillance system using existing wastewater infrastructures from the largest Norwegian municipalities. We found that the system was sensitive, timely, useful, representative, simple, flexible, acceptable, and stable to follow the general trend of infection. Preliminary results indicate that the system could provide an early signal of changes in variant distribution. However, challenges may arise with: (i) specificity due to temporary fluctuations of RNA levels in wastewater, (ii) representativeness when downscaling, and (iii) flexibility and acceptability when upscaling the system due to limited resources and/or capacity. Conclusions: Our results showed that the pilot WS system met most of its surveillance objectives. The system was able to provide an early warning signal of 1-2 weeks, and the system was useful to monitor infections at population level and complement routine surveillance when individual testing activity was low. However, temporary fluctuations of WS values need to be carefully interpreted. To improve quality and efficiency, we recommend to standardise and validate methods for assessing trends of new waves of infection and variants, evaluate the WS system using a longer operational period particularly for new variants, and conduct prevalence studies in the population to calibrate the system and improve data interpretation.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.27.23289199v2" target="_blank">Evaluation of the Pilot Wastewater Surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 in Norway, June 2022 - March 2023</a>
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<li><strong>Researching COVID to enhance recovery (RECOVER) pediatric study protocol: Rationale, objectives and design</strong> -
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Importance: The prevalence, pathophysiology, and long-term outcomes of COVID-19 (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 [PASC] or “Long COVID”) in children and young adults remain unknown. Studies must address the urgent need to define PASC, its mechanisms, and potential treatment targets in children and young adults. Observations: We describe the protocol for the Pediatric Observational Cohort Study of the NIH’s REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative. RECOVER-Pediatrics is an observational meta-cohort study of caregiver-child pairs (birth through 17 years) and young adults (18 through 25 years), recruited from more than 100 sites across the US. This report focuses on two of five cohorts that comprise RECOVER-Pediatrics: 1) a de novo RECOVER prospective cohort of children and young adults with and without previous or current infection; and 2) an extant cohort derived from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study (n=10,000). The de novo cohort incorporates three tiers of data collection: 1) remote baseline assessments (Tier 1, n=6000); 2) longitudinal follow-up for up to 4 years (Tier 2, n=6000); and 3) a subset of participants, primarily the most severely affected by PASC, who will undergo deep phenotyping to explore PASC pathophysiology (Tier 3, n=600). Youth enrolled in the ABCD study participate in Tier 1. The pediatric protocol was developed as a collaborative partnership of investigators, patients, researchers, clinicians, community partners, and federal partners, intentionally promoting inclusivity and diversity. The protocol is adaptive to facilitate responses to emerging science. Conclusions and Relevance: RECOVER-Pediatrics seeks to characterize the clinical course, underlying mechanisms, and long-term effects of PASC from birth through 25 years old. RECOVER-Pediatrics is designed to elucidate the epidemiology, four-year clinical course, and sociodemographic correlates of pediatric PASC. The data and biosamples will allow examination of mechanistic hypotheses and biomarkers, thus providing insights into potential therapeutic interventions.
</p>
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.27.23289228v1" target="_blank">Researching COVID to enhance recovery (RECOVER) pediatric study protocol: Rationale, objectives and design</a>
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<li><strong>Lack of detection of SARS-CoV-2 in British wildlife 2020-21 and first description of a stoat (Mustela erminea) Minacovirus</strong> -
<div>
Repeat spill over of SARS-CoV-2 into new hosts has highlighted the critical role of cross species transmission of coronaviruses and establishment of new reservoirs of virus in pandemic and epizootic spread of coronaviruses. Species particularly susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 spill-over include Mustelidae (mink, ferrets and related animals) and cricetid rodents (hamsters and related animals). These predispositions led us to screen British wildlife with sarbecovirus specific qPCR and pan coronavirus PCR assays for SARS-CoV-2 using samples collected during the human pandemic to establish if widespread spill-over was occurring. Fourteen wildlife species (n=402) were tested, including : 2 Red Foxes (Vulpes vulpes), 101 Badgers (Meles meles), 2 wild American Mink (Neovison vison), 41 Pine Marten (Martes martes), 2 Weasels (Mustela nivalis), 7 Stoats (Mustela erminea), 108 Water Voles (Arvicola amphibius), 39 Bank voles (Myodes glareolous), 10 Field Voles ( Microtus agrestis), 15 Wood Mice (Apodemus sylvaticus), 1 Common Shrew (Sorex aranaeus), 2 Pygmy Shrews (Sorex minutus), 2 Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) and 75 Eurasian Otters (Lutra lutra). No cases of SARS-CoV-2 were detected in any animals, however a novel minacovirus related to mink and ferret alphacoronaviruses was detected in stoats recently introduced to the Orkney Islands. This group of viruses is of interest due to pathogenicity in ferrets. The impact of this virus on the health of stoat populations remains to be established.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.28.538769v1" target="_blank">Lack of detection of SARS-CoV-2 in British wildlife 2020-21 and first description of a stoat (Mustela erminea) Minacovirus</a>
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<li><strong>Characterising subgroups of people with severe COVID anxiety by latent profile analysis.</strong> -
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Background: Severe COVID anxiety describes people whose experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are overwhelming, and have lead to patterns of behaviours that add little protective benefit but are at the expense of other priorities in life. It appears to be a complex social and psychological phenomenon, influenced by demographic and social factors. Identifying subgroups of people with severe COVID anxiety would better place clinicians to assess and support this distress where indicated. Methods: Measurement tools assessing depression, generalised and health anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, personality difficulty and alcohol use from 284 people living in United Kingdom with severe COVID anxiety were explored with latent profile analysis. Further analyses examined the associations of identified clusters with demographic and social factors and daily functioning, quality of life and protective behaviours. Results: A model with 4 classes provided the best fit. Distinct patterns of psychopathology emerged which were variably associated with demographic factors and COVID behaviours. Limitations: Given the complex aetiology of COVID anxiety a number of factors which might better cluster subgroups are likely to have gone uncollected. Moreover, using data collected at a single time-point limits these results ability to conclude whether observed relationships were the product of the pandemic or longstanding. Conclusions: People living with severe COVID anxiety are a heterogenous group. This analysis adds to evidence that certain health behaviours and demographic factors are inextricably linked to poor mental health in people with COVID anxiety, and that targeting health behaviours with specific intervention might be beneficial.
</p>
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.28.23289248v1" target="_blank">Characterising subgroups of people with severe COVID anxiety by latent profile analysis.</a>
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<li><strong>Effect of vaccination on time till Long COVID, a comparison of two ways to model effect of vaccination and two outcome definitions</strong> -
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Long COVID, or post-COVID syndrome, is a constellation of symptoms observed in patients at least four weeks after COVID-19 infection. We analyzed the effect of COVID-19 vaccination status on risk of either developing Long COVID symptoms or being diagnosed with Long COVID. In separate analyses we compared the effect of vaccination status at time of COVID-19 infection and the effect of vaccination status as a time-dependent covariate where vaccination could occur at any point with respect to COVID-19 infection. To address this question, we identified a subset of adult patients from Truveta Data who experienced a COVID-19 infection as indicated by a positive laboratory test between 2021-10-01 and 2022-11-31. We considered two distinct ways of modeling the effect of vaccination status (time-independent and time-dependent) and two distinct outcomes of interest (Long COVID symptoms or diagnosis with Long COVID), representing four distinct analyses. The presence of Long COVID symptoms was defined as the presence of one or more new symptoms consistent with COVID-19/Long COVID at least four weeks post COVID-19 infection. Diagnosis of Long COVID was determined by the presence of one or more ICD-10-CM or SNOMED-CT codes explicitly identifying a patient as having been diagnosed with Long COVID. Our analysis focusing on the effect of COVID-19 vaccination status at time of COVID-19 infection found that patients who had completed a primary COVID-19 vaccination sequence or had completed a primary vaccination sequence and received a booster dose at time of COVID-19 infection were on average at lower risk of either developing Long COVID symptoms or being diagnosed with Long COVID than unvaccinated patients (vaccinated versus unvaccinated HR of symptoms 0.9 [0.87-0.94], HR of diagnosis 0.86 [0.74-0.99]; vaccinated and boosted versus unvaccinated HR of symptoms 0.87 [0.83-0.91], HR of diagnosis 0.81 [0.69-0.95]). We do not find evidence that having received a booster dose in addition to having completed a primary vaccination sequence offers additional protection over having completed the primary sequence alone (vaccinated and boosted versus vaccinated HR of symptoms 0.96 [0.91-1.01], HR of diagnosis 0.94-1.13) . Our analysis of COVID-19 vaccination status modeled as a time-dependent covariate yielded similar results for patients who had completed a primary COVID-19 vaccination sequence or had completed a primary vaccination sequence and a booster dose. Both groups were on average at lower risk of developing Long COVID symptoms or being diagnosed with Long COVID than patients who where never vaccinated (vaccinated versus unvaccinated HR of symptoms 0.91 [0.88-0.95], HR of diagnosis 0.86 [0.75-0.99]; vaccinated and boosted versus unvaccinated HR of symptoms 0.88 [0.85-0.91], HR of diagnosis 0.77 [0.67-0.9]). As with the time-independent analysis, we also find that having completed a booster dose in addition to a primary COVID-19 vaccination sequence does not provide additional protection from developing Long COVID symptoms or being diagnosed with Long COVID over having completed the primary sequence alone (vaccinated and boosted versus vaccinated HR of symptoms 0.96 [0.92-1.01], HR of diagnosis 0.89 [0.76-1.06]) . We find that completing a primary vaccination sequence is associated with a decreased risk of developing Long COVID symptoms or being diagnosed with Long COVID compared with no vaccination regardless of whether vaccination status is modeled as a time-independent or time-dependent covariate. We find a similar protective effect in patients who have completed a primary vaccination sequence and a booster dose when compared to the those who are unvaccinated. However, we do not find evidence for a difference in protective effect between patients who have completed a primary vaccination sequence and a booster dose and those patients who have only completed a primary vaccination sequence. Our results support the growing evidence that having complete a primary vaccination sequence is protective against the development of Long COVID symptoms or the diagnosis of Long COVID.
</p>
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.28.23289271v1" target="_blank">Effect of vaccination on time till Long COVID, a comparison of two ways to model effect of vaccination and two outcome definitions</a>
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<li><strong>Temporal Trend in Mortality from COVID-19 Associated with Cardiovascular Disease</strong> -
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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has endured for over three years with over twelve variants afflicting humans worldwide. The impact and longevity of the pandemic has driven the medical community and researchers to identify high-risk populations, yet few studies have explored temporal trends during the pandemic. The objective of this study is to investigate trends in all-cause mortality associated with co-morbid cardiovascular disease (CVD) throughout the consecutive waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on patients with COVID-19 infection who received care at a tertiary care center in Chicago between March 2020 and September 2022. Multivariable logistic regression was used to investigate associations between co-existing CVD (defined as congestive heart failure, myocardial infarction, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral vascular disease) and mortality, adjusting for age, sex, race, and comorbidities defined in the Charlson comorbidity index. Results: The study included 38651 participants (mean age 45 years, 57.6% female, 11.4% with co-existing CVD). All-cause mortality in COVID-19 patients was highest during the Delta wave and remained elevated until the late Omicron wave. Mortality associated with co-existing CVD increased during the early pandemic waves, decreased in the later waves, but remained elevated relative to the overall population. When adjusted for age, sex, and race, all-cause mortality was 2.3-fold higher in patients with co-existing CVD compared to those with non-CVD comorbidities (OR = 2.30, 95% CI 1.95 – 2.62; p &lt; 0.001). Conclusions: While overall mortality rates declined toward the later waves of the pandemic, all-cause mortality associated with CVD remained elevated compared to individuals without CVD.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.26.23289183v1" target="_blank">Temporal Trend in Mortality from COVID-19 Associated with Cardiovascular Disease</a>
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<li><strong>Characterization and Resistance to Mutation of a Single-Channel Multiplex PCR Assay for SARS-CoV-2</strong> -
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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, wastewater surveillance has been used worldwide to provide valuable public health data. RT-qPCR is frequently used as a quantitative methodology for wastewater surveillance but is susceptible to mutations in target regions. These mutations may lead to misinterpretation of surveillance data; a drop in signal could be concluded to be a result of lower viral load, when in fact it is caused by reduced detection efficiency. We describe a novel approach to mitigating the impacts of such mutations: monitoring the cumulative signal from two targets (N1 and N2) via independent amplification reactions using identically labeled probes; a single-channel multiplex approach. Using the IDEXX Water SARS-CoV-2 RT-qPCR test, we demonstrate equivalent intra-assay repeatability and quantitative results from the combined N1N2 test when compared to individual N1 and N2 assays. Furthermore, we show that while mutations in B.1.1.529, BA.5.2, and BA.5.2.1 significantly impact the performance of the N1 assay, the impact on the N1N2 assay was negligible, and nearly within acceptable margin of error for technical replicates. These findings demonstrate that a single-channel multiplex approach can be used to improve the robustness of wastewater surveillance and minimize the risk of future mutations leading to unreliable public health data.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.27.23289205v1" target="_blank">Characterization and Resistance to Mutation of a Single-Channel Multiplex PCR Assay for SARS-CoV-2</a>
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<li><strong>The COV50 classifier predicts frailty and future death, independent from SARS-CoV-2 infection</strong> -
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COV50, a urinary proteomic classifier, predicts disease progression and death from SARS-CoV-2 at early stage, suggesting it might predict pre-established vulnerability. This study investigated the value of COV50 in predicting non-COVID-19 associated death. Urinary proteomic data were extracted from the Human Urinary Proteome Database. In the ICU group (n=1719), an increase in the COV50 score of one unit resulted in a 20% higher relative risk of death (adj. HR 1.2 [95% CI 1.17-1.24]). The same increase in COV50 in non-ICU patients (n=7474) resulted in a higher relative risk of 61% (adj. HR 1.61 [95% CI 1.47-1.76]), in line with adjusted meta-analytic HR estimate of 1.55. A higher COV50 scoring was observed in frail patients (p&lt;0.0001). The COV50 classifier is predictive of death, and is associated with frailty suggesting that it detects pre-existing vulnerability. These data may serve as basis for proteomics guided intervention, reducing the risk of death and frailty.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.28.23289257v1" target="_blank">The COV50 classifier predicts frailty and future death, independent from SARS-CoV-2 infection</a>
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<li><strong>Mediators of monocyte chemotaxis and matrix remodeling are associated with the development of fibrosis in patients with COVID-19</strong> -
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Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) has a fibroproliferative phase that may be followed by pulmonary fibrosis. This has been described in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia, but the underlying mechanisms have not been completely defined. We hypothesized that protein mediators of tissue remodeling and monocyte chemotaxis are elevated in the plasma and endotracheal aspirates of critically ill patients with COVID-19 who subsequently develop radiographic fibrosis. We enrolled COVID-19 patients admitted to the ICU who had hypoxemic respiratory failure, were hospitalized and alive for at least 10 days, and had chest imaging done during hospitalization (n = 119). Plasma was collected within 24h of ICU admission and at 7d. In mechanically ventilated patients, endotracheal aspirates (ETA) were collected at 24h and 48-96h. Protein concentrations were measured by immunoassay. We tested for associations between protein concentrations and radiographic evidence of fibrosis using logistic regression adjusting for age, sex, and APACHE score. We identified 39 patients (33%) with features of fibrosis. Within 24h of ICU admission, plasma proteins related to tissue remodeling (MMP-9, Amphiregulin) and monocyte chemotaxis (CCL-2/MCP-1, CCL-13/MCP-4) were associated with the subsequent development of fibrosis whereas markers of inflammation (IL-6, TNF-α) were not. After 1 week, plasma MMP-9 increased in patients without fibrosis. In ETAs, only CCL-2/MCP-1 was associated with fibrosis at the later timepoint. This cohort study identifies proteins of tissue remodeling and monocyte recruitment that may identify early fibrotic remodeling following COVID-19. Measuring changes in these proteins over time may allow for early detection of fibrosis in patients with COVID-19.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.28.23289261v1" target="_blank">Mediators of monocyte chemotaxis and matrix remodeling are associated with the development of fibrosis in patients with COVID-19</a>
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<li><strong>Characterization of the SARS-CoV-2 BA.5.5 and BQ.1.1 Omicron Variants in Mice and Hamsters</strong> -
<div>
The continued evolution and emergence of novel SARS-CoV-2 variants has resulted in challenges to vaccine and antibody efficacy. The emergence of each new variant necessitates the need to re-evaluate and refine animal models used for countermeasure testing. Here, we tested a currently circulating SARS-CoV-2 Omicron lineage variant, BQ.1.1, in multiple rodent models including K18-hACE2 transgenic, C57BL/6J, and 129S2 mice, and Syrian golden hamsters. In contrast to a previously dominant BA.5.5 Omicron variant, inoculation of K18-hACE2 mice with BQ.1.1 resulted in a substantial weight loss, a characteristic seen in pre-Omicron variants. BQ.1.1 also replicated to higher levels in the lungs of K18-hACE2 mice and caused greater lung pathology than the BA.5.5 variant. However, C57BL/6J mice, 129S2 mice, and Syrian hamsters inoculated with BQ.1.1 showed no differences in respiratory tract infection or disease compared to animals administered BA.5.5. Airborne or direct contact transmission in hamsters was observed more frequently after BQ.1.1 than BA.5.5 infection. Together, these data suggest that the BQ.1.1 Omicron variant has increased virulence in some rodent species, possibly due to the acquisition of unique spike mutations relative to other Omicron variants.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.28.538747v1" target="_blank">Characterization of the SARS-CoV-2 BA.5.5 and BQ.1.1 Omicron Variants in Mice and Hamsters</a>
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<li><strong>The changing mix of gay bar subtypes after COVID-19 restrictions in the United States, 2017-2023</strong> -
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What was the impact on gay bars of COVID-19 occupancy restrictions? Gay bars had been closing steadily for 30 years before public health authorities shuttered all bars and restaurants in March 2020. Trends are drawn from historic data from printed business guides were supplemented with two national censuses of online business listings for LGBTQ+ bars. Results show a rebound from a nadir of 470 gay bars in Spring 2021 to 803 two years later. Not all bars rebounded: bars serving mostly/only cisgender men plummeted in their share from 44.6% of all gay bars to only 24.2% in Spring 2023. Bars serving men’s kink communities also declined, from 8.5% to 6.6% of all gay bars. Bars serving men and women increased from 44.2% to more than 65.6% of all gay bars, by far the largest gay bar subtype. Lesbian bars, a small share of all gay bars, nevertheless nearly doubled from 15 to 29 establishments to 3.6% of the total. Bars serving people of color experienced a small decline in their share 2019-23. The COVID-19 pandemic marked a dramatic change in the gender composition of gay bars and a slowing rate of decline.
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<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4uw6j/" target="_blank">The changing mix of gay bar subtypes after COVID-19 restrictions in the United States, 2017-2023</a>
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<li><strong>In Support of Universal Admission Testing for SARS-CoV-2 During Significant Community Transmission</strong> -
<div>
Many hospitals have stopped or are considering stopping universal admission testing for SARS-CoV-2. We discuss reasons why admission testing should still be part of a layered system to prevent hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections during times of significant community transmission. These include the morbidity of SARS-CoV-2 in vulnerable patients, the predominant contribution of presymptomatic and asymptomatic people to transmission, the high rate of transmission between patients in shared rooms, and the data suggesting surveillance testing is associated with fewer nosocomial infections. Preferences of diverse patient populations, particularly the hardest hit communities, should be surveyed and used to inform prevention measures. Hospitals’ ethical responsibility to protect patients from serious infections should predominate over concerns about costs, labor, and inconvenience. We call for more rigorous data on the incidence and morbidity of nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 infections and more research to help determine when to start, stop, and restart universal admission testing and other prevention measures.
</div>
<div class="article-link article-html-link">
🖺 Full Text HTML: <a href="https://osf.io/unfz7/" target="_blank">In Support of Universal Admission Testing for SARS-CoV-2 During Significant Community Transmission</a>
</div></li>
</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>A Study of mRNA-1283.222 Injection Compared With mRNA-1273.222 Injection in Participants ≥12 Years of Age to Prevent COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Biological: mRNA-1283.222;   Biological: mRNA-1273.222<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   ModernaTX, Inc.<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>Evaluation of the RD-X19 Treatment Device in Individuals With Mild COVID-19</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Device: RD-X19;   Device: Sham<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   EmitBio Inc.<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>Postoperative Sugammadex After COVID-19</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   General Anesthesia;   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Sugammadex Sodium;   Drug: neostigmine 50µg/kg + glycopyrollate 0.01mg/kg<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Korea University Ansan Hospital<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 Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Phase 2/3 Study to Determine the Safety and Effectiveness of Azeliragon in the Treatment of Patients Hospitalized for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: Azeliragon;   Drug: Placebo<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Salim S. Hayek<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>Cognitive-behavioral Therapy for Mental Disorder in COVID-19 Survivors</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Post Acute COVID-19 Syndrome<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Behavioral: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Azienda Socio Sanitaria Territoriale di Lecco<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>Long COVID-19 Syndrome Lifestyle Intervention Study</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   Long COVID-19 Syndrome<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Dietary Supplement: Low carbohydrate diet intervention<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   University of Southern California<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 Coping and Resilience Intervention for Adolescents</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19 Pandemic<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Behavioral: Coping and Resilience Intervention for Adolescents;   Other: Printing materials of Coping and Resilience Intervention for Adolescents<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Taipei Medical University<br/><b>Enrolling by invitation</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>Effectiveness of Modified Diaphragmatic Training for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease Post Covid-19</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   GERD;   Post COVID-19 Condition;   Diaphragm Issues<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Other: modified diaphragmatic training;   Other: standard diaphragmatic training<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Indonesia University<br/><b>Completed</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>Effect of Telerehabilitation Practice in Long COVID-19 Patients</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   Long COVID-19;   Long COVID;   Post COVID-19 Condition;   Post-COVID-19 Syndrome;   Post-COVID Syndrome<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Behavioral: Telerehabilitation;   Behavioral: Standard rehabilitation care<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Indonesia University<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 Safety, Tolerability and Pharmacokinetics Study of RAY1216 in Healthy Adult Participants</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019)<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: RAY1216 dose 1;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 2;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 3;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 4 &amp;ritonavir   Drug: RAY1216 dose 5;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 6;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 7;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 8;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 9;   Drug: RAY1216 dose 10<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Guangdong Raynovent Biotech Co., Ltd<br/><b>Completed</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>Computerized Training of Attention and Working Memory in Post COVID-19 Patients With Cognitive Complaints</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   COVID-19;   Cognitive Impairment;   Cognition Disorder;   Memory Disorders;   Attention Deficit;   Memory Impairment;   Memory Loss;   Attention Impaired<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Device: RehaCom<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Erasmus Medical Center<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>Strategies and Treatments for Respiratory Infections &amp;Amp; Viral Emergencies (STRIVE): Immune Modulation Strategy Trial</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Drug: abatacept infusion;   Drug: Placebo group<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   University of Minnesota<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 Study of Silmitasertib (CX-4945) in Healthy Subject</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Drug: CX-4945<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   Senhwa Biosciences, Inc.<br/><b>Active, not 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>Evaluation of the Efficacy and Safety of Nano-S1</strong> - <b>Condition</b>:   COVID-19 Pneumonia<br/><b>Intervention</b>:   Drug: NANOS1 , argent colloïdal ,<br/><b>Sponsor</b>:   General Administration of Military Health, Tunisia<br/><b>Completed</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>Digital Mental Health Care for COVID-19 High-Risk Populations - Phase 2</strong> - <b>Conditions</b>:   Stigma, Social;   Help-Seeking Behavior<br/><b>Interventions</b>:   Other: Adjusted Content Intervention;   Other: Non-Adjusted Intervention Video<br/><b>Sponsors</b>:   Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, Inc.;   Columbia University<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>Oridonin inhibits SARS-CoV-2 replication by targeting viral proteinase and polymerase</strong> - COVID-19 has become a global public health crisis since its outbreak in China in December 2019. Currently there are few clinically effective drugs to combat SARS-CoV-2 infection. The main protein (M^(pro)), papain-like protease (PLpro) and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) of SARS-CoV-2 are involved in the viral replication, and might be prospective targets for anti-coronavirus drug development. Here, we investigated the antiviral activity of oridonin, a natural small-molecule compound,…</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>Advanced Nitric Oxide Generating Nanomedicine for Therapeutic Applications</strong> - Nitric oxide (NO), a gaseous transmitter extensively present in the human body, regulates vascular relaxation, immune response, inflammation, neurotransmission, and other crucial functions. Nitrite donors have been used clinically to treat angina, heart failure, pulmonary hypertension, and erectile dysfunction. Based on NO’s vast biological functions, it further can treat tumors, bacteria/biofilms and other infections, wound healing, eye diseases, and osteoporosis. However, delivering NO is…</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>Identification of diphenylurea derivatives as novel endocytosis inhibitors that demonstrate broad-spectrum activity against SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A virus both in vitro and in vivo</strong> - Rapid evolution of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and influenza A virus (IAV) poses enormous challenge in the development of broad-spectrum antivirals that are effective against the existing and emerging viral strains. Virus entry through endocytosis represents an attractive target for drug development, as inhibition of this early infection step should block downstream infection processes, and potentially inhibit viruses sharing the same entry route. In this study,…</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 Role of Mitochondria in Phytochemically Mediated Disease Amelioration</strong> - Mitochondrial dysfunction may cause cell death, which has recently emerged as a cancer prevention and treatment strategy mediated by chemotherapy drugs or phytochemicals. However, most existing drugs cannot target cancerous cells and may adversely affect normal cells via side effects. Mounting studies have revealed that phytochemicals such as resveratrol could ameliorate various diseases with dysfunctional or damaged mitochondria. For instance, resveratrol can regulate mitophagy, inhibit…</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>Fighting cytokine storm and immunomodulatory deficiency: By using natural products therapy up to now</strong> - A novel coronavirus strain (COVID-19) caused severe illness and mortality worldwide from 31 December 2019 to 21 March 2023. As of this writing, 761,071,826 million cases have been diagnosed worldwide, with 6,879,677 million deaths accorded by WHO organization and has spread to 228 countries. The number of deaths is closely connected to the growth of innate immune cells in the lungs, mainly macrophages, which generate inflammatory cytokines (especially IL-6 and IL-1β) that induce "cytokine storm…</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 of heparin with key glycoproteins of human respiratory syncytial virus</strong> - Introduction: The unexpected surge of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) cases following pandemic phase of COVID-19 has drawn much public attention. Drawing on the latest antiviral research, revisiting this heightened annual outbreak of respiratory disease could lead to new treatments. The ability of sulfated polysaccharides to compete for a variety of viruses binding to cell surface heparan sulfate, suggests several drugs that might have therapeutic potential for targeting RSV-glycosaminoglycan…</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>Powerful Avidity with a Limited Valency for Virus-Attachment Blockers on DC-SIGN: Combining Chelation and Statistical Rebinding with Structural Plasticity of the Receptor</strong> - The C-type lectin receptor DC-SIGN has been highlighted as the coreceptor for the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A multivalent glycomimetic ligand, Polyman26, has been found to inhibit DC-SIGN-dependent trans-infection of SARS-CoV-2. The molecular details underlying avidity generation in such systems remain poorly characterized. In an effort to dissect the contribution of the known multivalent effects - chelation, clustering, and statistical rebinding - we studied a series of dendrimer…</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>Cognitive inhibition deficit in long COVID-19: An exploratory study</strong> - BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: An increasing number of research studies point toward the importance and prevalence of long-term neurocognitive symptoms following infection with COVID-19. Our objectives were to capture the prevalence of cognitive impairments from 1 to 16 months post-COVID-19 infection, assess the changes in neuropsychological functions over time, and identify factors that can predict long-term deficits in cognition.</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>SNAP@CQD as a promising therapeutic vehicle against HCoVs: an overview</strong> - This report discusses potential therapies for treating human coronaviruses (HCoVs) and their economic impact. Specifically, we explore therapeutics that can support the body’s immune response, including immunoglobulin (Ig)A, IgG and T-cell responses, to inhibit the viral replication cycle and improve respiratory function. We hypothesize that carbon quantum dots conjugated with S-nitroso-N-acetylpenicillamine (SNAP) could be a synergistic alternative cure for treating respiratory injuries caused…</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>GMI, a fungal immunomodulatory protein, ameliorates SARS-CoV-2 envelope protein-induced inflammation in macrophages via inhibition of MAPK pathway</strong> - Clinically, COVID-19 is often accompanied by a severe immune response (cytokine storm) which produces a large number of cytokines, such as TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-12, and consequently causes acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). GMI is a type of fungal immunomodulatory protein that is cloned from Ganoderma microsporum and acts as modulating immunocyte for various inflammatory diseases. This study identifies GMI as a potential anti-inflammatory agent and determines the effects of GMI on the…</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>Innate immune pathway modulator screen identifies STING pathway activation as a strategy to inhibit multiple families of arbo and respiratory viruses</strong> - RNA viruses continue to remain a threat for potential pandemics due to their rapid evolution. Potentiating host antiviral pathways to prevent or limit viral infections is a promising strategy. Thus, by testing a library of innate immune agonists targeting pathogen recognition receptors, we observe that Toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3), stimulator of interferon genes (STING), TLR8, and Dectin-1 ligands inhibit arboviruses, Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), West Nile virus, and Zika virus to varying degrees….</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>Robust SARS-CoV-2-specific and heterologous immune responses in vaccine-naïve residents of long-term care facilities who survive natural infection</strong> - We studied humoral and cellular immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in 152 long-term care facility staff and 124 residents over a prospective 4-month period shortly after the first wave of infection in England. We show that residents of long-term care facilities developed high and stable levels of antibodies against spike protein and receptor-binding domain. Nucleocapsid-specific responses were also elevated but waned over time. Antibodies showed stable…</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>Sulfated endospermic nanocellulose crystals prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1</strong> - Biomaterials with antimicrobial activity are gaining attention due to their biodegradability and efficacy in interacting with a wide range of microorganisms. A new cellulose nano-biomaterial, endospermic nanocellulose crystals (ENC) obtained from parenchymal tissue of ivory nut endosperm, has a natural capacity as a universal binder. This feature is enhanced when it is chemically functionalized, and can be exploited in the fight against microbes. We tested the ability of sulfated ENC in aqueous…</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>MasitinibL shows promise as a drug-like analog of masitinib that elicits comparable SARS-Cov-2 3CLpro inhibition with low kinase preference</strong> - SARS-CoV-2 infection has led to several million deaths worldwide and ravaged the economies of many countries. Hence, developing therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2 remains a core priority in the fight against COVID-19. Most of the drugs that have received emergency use authorization for treating SARS-CoV-2 infection exhibit a number of limitations, including side effects and questionable efficacy. This challenge is further compounded by reinfection after vaccination and the high likelihood of…</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>Recuperative herbal formula Jing Si maintains vasculature permeability balance, regulates inflammation and assuages concomitants of “Long-Covid”</strong> - Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a worldwide health threat that has long-term effects on the patients and there is currently no efficient cure prescribed for the treatment and the prolonging effects. Traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs) have been reported to exert therapeutic effect against COVID-19. In this study, the therapeutic effects of Jing Si herbal tea (JSHT) against COVID-19 infection and associated long-term effects were evaluated in different in vitro and in vivo models. The…</p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-patent-search">From Patent Search</h1>
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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>The Renewed Importance of the Texas Gay Rodeo</strong> - As conservative politicians try to control expressions of gender and sexuality, a rural haven from hostility offers competition and comfort. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-renewed-importance-of-the-texas-gay-rodeo">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A Security Camera for the Planet</strong> - A new satellite, funded by a nonprofit, aims to pinpoint emissions of methane—a gas that plays a major role in global warming. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-climate-action/a-security-camera-for-the-planet">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Risky Gamble of Kevin McCarthy’s Debt-Ceiling Strategy</strong> - In the face of a catastrophic default, the House Speaker has pitted his most extreme members against the President. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/the-risky-gamble-of-kevin-mccarthys-debt-ceiling-strategy">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>The Limits of Joe Biden’s Calls for Press Freedom</strong> - After decades of exposing corruption in Guatemala, the journalist José Rubén Zamora has been jailed. Why can’t the U.S. help him? - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-limits-of-joe-bidens-calls-for-press-freedom">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Deregulating Banks Is Dangerous</strong> - As First Republic Bank is sold to JPMorgan, the Federal Reserve relearns some important lessons. - <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/deregulating-banks-is-dangerous">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-vox">From Vox</h1>
<ul>
<li><strong>A new Supreme Court case seeks to make the nine justices even more powerful</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jD-PHV_O0emD2LIMkcyX6kwb_iw=/0x0:4101x3076/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72241077/656226872.0.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Future Justice Neil M. Gorsuch laughs at a senator’s joke as he testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to be an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, March 21, 2017. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
The Court has spent the last several years claiming the other two branches’ powers for itself.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="snHJOt">
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will reconsider one of its modern foundational decisions, <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/"><em>Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council</em></a><em> </em>(1984), which for decades defined the balance of power between the federal judiciary and the executive branch of government.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="3XDoXY">
<em>Chevron </em>established that courts ordinarily should <a href="https://www.vox.com/23180634/supreme-court-rule-of-law-abortion-voting-rights-guns-epa">defer to policymaking decisions made by federal agencies</a>, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Labor, for two reasons: Agencies typically have far greater expertise in the areas they regulate than judges, and thus are more likely to make wise policy decisions. And, while federal judges are largely immune from democratic accountability, federal agencies typically are run by officials who serve at the pleasure of an elected president — and thus have far more democratic legitimacy to make policy choices.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Unv9Aj">
Nevertheless, next term the Court will hear a case, <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/loper-bright-enterprises-v-raimondo/"><em>Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo</em></a>, which explicitly asks “whether the court should overrule <em>Chevron</em>.” In the reasonably likely event that the Court does overrule this seminal decision, that would mean the death of one of the most cited decisions in the federal judiciary — according to the legal database Lexis Nexis, federal courts have cited <em>Chevron</em> in over 19,000 different judicial opinions.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UOFJWs">
Indeed, <em>Chevron</em> is arguably as important to the development of federal administrative law as <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/347/483/"><em>Brown v. Board of Education</em></a> (1954) was important to the development of the law of racial equality.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LiJ5gl">
And a decision overruling <em>Chevron </em>would also make the United States far less democratic. One of the Supreme Court’s most consequential projects in the last several years, a project that took off after former President Donald Trump remade the Court with three appointees, has been <a href="https://www.vox.com/23180634/supreme-court-rule-of-law-abortion-voting-rights-guns-epa">concentrating authority over federal policymaking within the Court itself</a>. This project necessarily shifts power away from the other two branches, whose leaders are elected, and to the unelected members of the federal judiciary.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="qD64Ur">
The Court has already taken a major leap toward overruling <em>Chevron,</em> although it is still technically good law. Many of its recent decisions regarding federal agencies’ power to set policy turned on the so-called “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/30/23189610/supreme-court-epa-west-virginia-clean-power-plan-major-questions-john-roberts">major questions doctrine</a>,” a judicially created doctrine that traces back to a <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/529/120/">2000 Supreme Court decision</a>, but that became a central force in the Court’s administrative law decisions during the Biden years. This doctrine effectively permits five justices to veto any action by a federal agency that touches upon a matter that those five justices deem to be a matter of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="U9c14Q">
But, while this major questions doctrine gives the Court a veto power over executive branch<strong> </strong>policymaking decisions it deems too significant, <em>Chevron</em> has largely prevented lower court judges from micromanaging the sort of routine, and often highly technical, regulatory decisions that the government makes all the time — questions like <a href="https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-2280/16-2280-2018-07-09.html">how much nitrogen may be discharged by a wastewater treatment plant</a>, or how to conduct hearings that determine <a href="https://casetext.com/case/helen-mining-co-v-elliott">which coal mine workers are entitled to certain disability benefits</a>.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8FJkfT">
Without <em>Chevron</em>, every one of these complicated questions could become the subject of protracted litigation, presided over by judges who know little or nothing about nitrogen pollution, black lung disease, or any of the myriad other areas where specialized agencies have considerable expertise.
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The Supreme Court’s war on federal regulation, briefly explained
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gGrT0f">
Many federal statutes announce a broad policy goal, then <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/11/3/22758188/climate-change-epa-clean-power-plan-supreme-court">delegate to a federal agency</a> the job of implementing this goal through a network of binding regulations. The Clean Air Act, for example, states that certain power plants must use the “best system of emission reduction,” then delegates to the EPA the authority to determine what this system is given the current state of emissions-reduction technology. Other federal statutes permit agencies to determine, within certain guideposts set by Congress, <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/2/22360341/obamacare-lawsuit-supreme-court-little-sisters-kelley-becerra-reed-oconnor-nondelegation">which vaccines must be covered by health insurers</a>, or <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11702436/obama-overtime-rule">which workers are eligible for overtime pay</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xk2Twn">
For many decades, decisions like <em>Chevron</em> established that courts should largely stay away from these kinds of policymaking decisions by federal agencies, and the idea that courts should defer to expert policymakers within these agencies <a href="https://www.vox.com/22276279/supreme-court-war-joe-biden-agency-regulation-administrative-neil-gorsuch-epa-nondelegation">used to enjoy broad bipartisan support</a>. <em>Chevron</em> was a unanimous decision (although several justices were recused from hearing the case).
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VWfv2S">
It is no coincidence that the Court’s right flank united behind deference to federal agencies in the mid-1980s, when President Ronald Reagan was in office and deregulation was ascendant. During the Reagan administration, decisions like <em>Chevron</em> required left-leaning judges to keep their hands off of the Republican Party’s plans to slash regulation. And many of the decision’s most vocal defenders were staunchly conservative judges, including Justice Antonin Scalia, who predicted in a 1989 lecture that “in the long run <em>Chevron</em> will endure and be given its full scope” because it “<a href="https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3075&amp;context=dlj">reflects the reality of government, and thus more adequately serves its needs</a>” than the alternative.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fENYKR">
But this conservative consensus in favor of judicial restraint ended about the same time that Barack Obama moved into the White House. For much of the Obama years, the conservative Federalist Society’s annual conference became a showcase for various plans to <a href="https://archive.thinkprogress.org/the-little-noticed-conservative-plan-to-permanently-lock-democrats-out-of-policymaking-9f776ad16635/">slash federal agencies’ power and shift authority over regulation to the judiciary</a>.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="XT0vgj">
Recall that <em>Chevron</em> is <a href="https://www.vox.com/23180634/supreme-court-rule-of-law-abortion-voting-rights-guns-epa">grounded in two observations</a> about why judges should typically defer to an agency’s policymaking decisions. The first is that “judges are not experts” in the kind of hyper-technical questions that often come before federal agencies. So, if we give too much regulatory authority to judges, we’re going to wind up with a very poorly governed nation.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QZQ7LK">
Meanwhile, <em>Chevron</em>’s second concern is grounded in democracy. “While agencies are not directly accountable to the people,” the Court said in <em>Chevron</em>, agencies answer to a president who is accountable to the voters. And so “it is <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/837/">entirely appropriate for this political branch of the Government to make such policy choices</a>.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AgDT1w">
<em>Chevron</em>, in other words, recognized that agencies will sometimes need to make politically controversial decisions, such as how aggressive they should be in <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/30/23189610/supreme-court-epa-west-virginia-clean-power-plan-major-questions-john-roberts">fighting climate change</a>, or how the government should <a href="https://www.vox.com/22883639/supreme-court-vaccines-osha-cms-biden-mandate-nfib-labor-missouri">encourage people to get vaccinated against Covid-19</a>. And the Court concluded in 1984 that it was best for these decisions to be made by informed and politically accountable officials.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KDtYy7">
This later aspect of <em>Chevron</em>, the respect for democratically accountable decisions over decisions made by lawyers with lifetime appointments, has largely been abandoned by the Supreme Court’s current, Republican-appointed majority. One of the conservative legal movement’s greatest post-Obama triumphs is the “<a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/30/23189610/supreme-court-epa-west-virginia-clean-power-plan-major-questions-john-roberts">major questions doctrine</a>,” which holds that courts should cast an especially skeptical eye on any agency action that concerns matters of “vast ‘economic and political significance.’”
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The Court has applied this doctrine haphazardly. It handed down <a href="https://www.vox.com/22883639/supreme-court-vaccines-osha-cms-biden-mandate-nfib-labor-missouri">two decisions regarding vaccination</a>, for example, that are difficult to reconcile with each other — the first determined that a vaccine mandate that applied to 84 million workers does involve a major question, while the second seemed to say that a mandate which applied to only 10 million workers does not involve a major question. Similarly, at one point the Court struck down a series of environmental regulations that never took effect, and that <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/6/30/23189610/supreme-court-epa-west-virginia-clean-power-plan-major-questions-john-roberts">very well might have done nothing at all if they had gone into effect</a>, on the grounds that they concerned a matter of vast economic and political significance.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8TQtSf">
In practice, in other words, it appears that the Court is willing to strike down regulations that have a good deal of “political significance” even if those regulations have little, if any, economic significance. That’s the opposite of <em>Chevron</em>, which called for courts to defer to the political judgments of executive branch officials.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="P0PMCW">
But the Court has not yet fully repudiated <em>Chevron</em>’s other argument — that it is better for policy experts to make policy, and not judges. And that’s where the <em>Loper Bright</em> case could have its biggest impact.
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<h3 id="2u1Dad">
<em>Loper Bright</em> is primarily a case about small, technical decisions that judges know little about
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ZurBuE">
The specific policy at issue in <em>Loper Bright</em> is not something that many people who don’t own fishing vessels are likely to care about: It involves whether the National Marine Fisheries Service has the authority to require the commercial fishing industry to <a href="https://casetext.com/case/loper-bright-enters-v-raimondo-1">pay for some of the costs of placing observers on fishing vessels</a> “for the purpose of collecting data necessary for the conservation and management of the fishery.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1XVRb2">
The fishing industry plaintiffs in <em>Loper Bright</em> do not claim this question, of who pays for federal monitors on fishing vessels, involves a matter of such great economic or political importance that courts should veto it under the major questions doctrine. Instead, they question a lower court’s decision to defer to the Fisheries Service’s determination that some of these costs should be paid by the industry — a decision that was rooted in <em>Chevron</em>.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="VkdZAl">
<em>Loper Bright</em>, in other words, involves the kind of low-stakes decision by a federal agency that rarely becomes a matter of great political controversy, and that often goes unnoticed except by federal regulators and the industries that they regulate. Taken on its own, it really doesn’t matter all that much whether the federal government or the fishing industry pays for these monitors.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QtuJqD">
But, taken in the aggregate, the many low-stakes regulations handed down by various federal agencies are tremendously impactful. The Code of Federal Regulations <a href="https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/code-federal-regulations-cfrs-print#:~:text=A%20full%20set%20of%20the,16%20as%20of%20January%201">stretches across approximately 200 different volumes</a>, and most of the rules contained in this code deal with relatively uncontroversial matters like fishing monitors, nitrogen emissions by wastewater plants, or who is eligible for black lung benefits.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="uMufng">
Under <em>Chevron</em>, courts will typically tell a party that objects to a federal regulation to <a href="https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1667&amp;context=mlr">take it up with the agency that promulgated that regulation</a>. That doesn’t mean that these parties are powerless — federal law ordinarily requires agencies to seek input from regulated industries and individuals before handing down a new regulation, and those industries are free to lobby the agency to change existing rules. But <em>Chevron</em> does mean that the final decision on matters of policy will be made by policy experts and not by judges.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9mbGKo">
Should the Supreme Court overrule <em>Chevron</em>, or even if it should significantly weaken it, that could introduce chaos into the entire federal government. It would mean that every time the EPA tweaks an emissions standard, every time the Occupational Safety and Health Administration changes which kind of safety goggles certain workers must wear, or every time health regulators determine that a particular vaccine should be covered by health insurers, that this decision may be the subject of protracted litigation.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="radVvd">
Worse, regulated industries are likely to <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2022/12/17/23512766/supreme-court-matthew-kacsmaryk-judge-trump-abortion-immigration-birth-control">shop around for friendly judges</a> who may have an axe to grind against the current administration. And, in a world without <em>Chevron</em>, even longstanding regulations could be the subject of litigation. No one will know what the rules are until judges with no expertise on the relevant subject matter weigh in.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jDPC7m">
That is an inefficient way to run a government, and it is a bad way to run a country. Federal policy should be set by people who know what they are talking about.
</p></li>
<li><strong>A leading cause of maternal mortality is something few moms worry about</strong> -
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<img alt="Silhouette of a pregnant African-American woman on a grey background " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/YH3I7Na8ZJJm-Qlqp0lJ-ILAL0k=/334x0:5667x4000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72241026/GettyImages_1419950629.0.jpg"/>
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Getty Images/Darya Komarova | Getty Images
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Experts want greater awareness about this highly preventable condition.
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Crystal Jackson, who lives in Fort Pierce, Florida, had never even heard of preeclampsia when it nearly took her life.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5iSD4R">
Thirty-three weeks into her first pregnancy, Jackson suddenly developed a terrible headache and severe nausea. Her then-boyfriend took her to a drugstore, where she put her arm in a machine to check her blood pressure: “It was sky high,” she said. She went straight to the hospital, where providers diagnosed her with preeclampsia — a life-threatening condition associated with pregnancy whose first signs include high blood pressure. Just a few hours later, she delivered a healthy but premature baby girl by emergency cesarean section.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8cJ2fq">
She was a college student at the time, and a future nurse — but the risk of a pregnancy-associated blood pressure disorder “never even crossed my radar” until it happened, Jackson said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FSPWJj">
She’s not alone: About <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/pregnancy-mortality-surveillance-system.htm">one-third</a> of maternal deaths are caused by medical problems related to high blood pressure, also called hypertension — a condition that is in many cases preventable.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HyPdJQ">
But hypertension isn’t typically associated with people of childbearing age. “We often think of it as something that happens to our grandpas,” said Laney Poye, who directs communications and engagement at the Preeclampsia Foundation, a non-profit organization that advocates for improving outcomes of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jY4VBQ">
“We don’t think about it as something that’s going to happen to a young woman,” she said. “We don’t think about it in terms of why it’s so dangerous for a pregnant person.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="N9L8Kl">
That’s a big problem. Maternal mortality is at crisis levels in the US: In 2021, for every 100,000 babies born in the US, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2021/maternal-mortality-rates-2021.htm#:~:text=In%202021%2C%201%2C205%20women%20died,20.1%20in%202019%20(Table).">33</a> parents died — and indigenous and Black women are <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/disparities-pregnancy-related-deaths/infographic.html">two to three times more likely</a> to die of a pregnancy-related condition than white women. At the same time, the hypertension disorders that so often cause these deaths are increasingly common in the US: A 2022 study found <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2795600">hypertension complicated twice as many millennial and Gen Z-er pregnancies</a> as it did baby boomer pregnancies.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tM0FaF">
However, experts say a lack of knowledge about one of the most important causes of those deaths, both among patients and providers, keeps us from preventing many of them.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5m3g65">
Here’s what everyone needs to know.
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<h3 id="M6n8V8">
Different types of pregnancy-related hypertension have different causes
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Df4KTe">
Hypertension that affects a pregnancy can start before, during, or after a person becomes pregnant, and it comes in <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458675/">a few different flavors</a> that are associated with different processes taking place in the body.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="RzAFNr">
Preeclampsia is the most concerning type of pregnancy-related hypertension, and affects about <a href="https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/preeclampsia-screening">4 percent</a> of US pregnancies. In this disorder, a pregnant person has above-normal blood pressure — where the first number is at least 140 and the second number is at least 90 — but also, signs that the high blood pressure is damaging other organs. (One of the first organs to show signs of wear are the kidneys; the condition usually gets diagnosed when a provider finds protein in the urine of a pregnant person with high blood pressure.)
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="69CySx">
Experts believe that preeclampsia is caused by problems with the placenta, a temporary organ that grows alongside the fetus inside the womb during pregnancy and provides it with oxygen and nutrients filtered from the parent’s blood. When blood vessels in the womb don’t grow exactly the right way, that leads the placenta to signal that it’s not getting enough blood flow. In response, the pregnant person’s body raises the blood pressure to try to better perfuse the organs. But in preeclampsia, the feedback loop never gets completed — even with an increase in blood pressure, the placenta just keeps signaling that it’s thirsty.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UGx1n1">
A <a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2784499">daily aspirin helps prevent preeclampsia</a> in people who are at high risk for developing it, although it’s <a href="https://www.clinicaladvisor.com/home/topics/ob-gyn-information-center/uspstf-improving-use-of-low-dose-aspirin-preeclampsia-prevention/">often</a> <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556626/">underprescribed</a>. Once a pregnant person develops preeclampsia, the condition can’t be reversed with medications. Only delivering the baby — and the placenta — reverses the process, and even then, does not always completely solve things. In up to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002937811011550">28 percent</a> of cases, preeclampsia persists or worsens after delivery.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="f6k61X">
The outcomes of this kind of pregnancy-related hypertension are the most severe: About <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34033373/">16 percent</a> of maternal deaths in high-income countries are caused by preeclampsia.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NoM4RM">
Preeclampsia is an important threat to maternal health, but it isn’t the only type of pregnancy-related hypertension that exists. High blood pressure can happen before or during pregnancy <em>without</em> damaging the kidneys and other organs, and it’s a risk factor for poor fetal growth and preterm birth.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="FP4IVh">
These kinds of hypertension, categorized as <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458675/">chronic or gestational hypertension</a>, don’t have the same causes as preeclampsia — that is, they don’t start with the placenta. However, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6458675/">25 to 35 percent </a>of people with these conditions go on to develop preeclampsia.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="KpklNM">
But that risk is not inevitable: In one study, pregnant women whose chronic hypertension was well-controlled during pregnancy were more than <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2210778920300362">four times <em>less </em>likely</a> than untreated women to develop preeclampsia.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4mWF3o">
Chronic hypertension is on the rise, and has <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36960717/">doubled</a> over the past decade, now affecting <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.122.19317">13 to 30 percent</a> of women of reproductive age. That makes it important not only to diagnose hypertension early in pregnant people, but also to diagnose and treat it in women who <em>could</em> get pregnant, before they do.
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<h3 id="k6THao">
Pregnancy-related hypertension isn’t getting diagnosed or treated early enough, in part because people don’t see it as a big risk
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7grETw">
All too often, the early diagnosis of hypertension, either before or during pregnancy, doesn’t happen in time to prevent it from causing harm. Why is that?
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="inVTKq">
There’s historically been <a href="https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/HYP.0000000000000208">a lot of disagreement</a> among medical professional societies about what constituted hypertension in pregnancy — and whether lowering elevated blood pressures in pregnancy would harm the fetus. Only last year did the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists <a href="https://www.acog.org/clinical/clinical-guidance/practice-advisory/articles/2022/04/clinical-guidance-for-the-integration-of-the-findings-of-the-chronic-hypertension-and-pregnancy-chap-study">expand its definition</a> to include a greater number of pregnancies (and comport with most other societies’ guidelines).
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The resulting confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that on a global scale, there’s <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0890117119835518?journalCode=ahpa">little shared cultural understanding</a> of what pre-pregnancy care should look like — that is, the care prospective parents get before they even conceive, which could include screening for blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, and other risks. “I don’t think we have a great public perception of what preconception care is,” said Natalie Cameron, a physician at Northwestern University’s medical school who studies pregnancy-related cardiovascular health. “If we don’t optimize medical conditions before pregnancy, it can really have adverse effects for the mom and the baby.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JynLbG">
But in a nation where <a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/unintended-pregnancy-united-states">nearly half of all pregnancies are unplanned</a>, many people who will soon become pregnant may not think of themselves as needing to get preconception care. Access to care also plays a role: The barriers to getting preconception care track with the barriers to getting maternal care — and with risk factors for maternal death. People with <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1049386711000508">low incomes,</a> who live in <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1363/4407812">rural</a> regions, and who <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0002937809002270">aren’t white</a> are less likely to get this type of care.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="AJMTUc">
Compounding that is a public perception of hypertension as something that’s a low-grade, chronic problem that’s easily treatable with medication. Although that might be true for many people, pregnancy really amplifies hypertension’s risk — but many people don’t understand that, said Poye. Often, when pregnant women hear they have high blood pressure, “They think, ‘Oh, okay, it’s not a really big deal. They’ll just give me some medicine and I’ll continue on and then we’ll deliver this baby,’” she said.
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But in reality, once someone’s on the path to preeclampsia, there’s no turning back until delivery.
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Even then, there’s <a href="https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(20)31201-1/fulltext">limited understanding</a> of the risk hypertension poses in the post-delivery period, both by providers and patients. More than 60 percent of maternal deaths due to preeclampsia actually happen <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternal-mortality/docs/pdf/MMR-Data-Brief_2019-h.pdf">after delivery</a>, usually during the first six weeks after birth. Additionally, people who have new-onset hypertension during pregnancy are more likely to live with hypertension for years afterward. “That sort of takes women by surprise,” said Poye.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oWcAYl">
It also surprises some providers. Delivery used to be thought of as the cure for preeclampsia, but while the science now clearly shows that’s not the case, many health care providers still <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/parenting/postpartum-preeclampsia.html">don’t fully grasp</a> how much risk pregnancy-related hypertension poses even after delivery. More than <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32998727/">three-quarters</a> of primary care providers who ask female patients about pregnancy history don’t ask if they had preeclampsia — even if they ask about diabetes or smoking.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="e3MkuM">
When providers aren’t fully aware of the risk, they might not react with the appropriate level of concern to a patient’s complaint about, for example, postpartum headache or leg swelling. Over years of working with preeclampsia survivors, said Poye, “there are almost always signs and symptoms that have occurred, things that are making the patient feel uneasy. And so often she’s just unheard by her providers.”
</p>
<h3 id="DCuZRY">
Racial inequities in diagnosis and treatment are rooted in older, structural inequities
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LTzH8U">
In the US, women of color are more likely to <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953618300698">have serious medical complaints go unheard</a> and to <a href="https://reproductive-health-journal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12978-019-0729-2?fbclid=IwAR3xIiEXnMpA2IboUbFcL0GIoliz9Q-V-bREvkCdwMCf4iozKIxqiLWK0d4">otherwise be mistreated</a> during and after pregnancy. That’s part of what makes them more likely to have a hypertension-related complication go undetected until it becomes a crisis.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="fCHUZy">
However, women of color also encounter other inequities earlier in the process, much of it rooted in historical and structural racism. Differences in access to healthy foods and physical activity opportunities underpin higher rates of obesity in women of color — an important risk factor for hypertension. And there are other inequities: Women of color are more likely to face barriers to accessing care <a href="https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Abstract/2019/05001/Barriers_to_Prenatal_Care_by_Race_Ethnicity_in.240.aspx">before</a> and <a href="https://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Abstract/2019/05001/Barriers_to_Prenatal_Care_by_Race_Ethnicity_in.240.aspx">after</a> conception, often due to <a href="https://scholars.org/contribution/what-drives-racial-and-ethnic-disparities-prenatal-care-expectant-mothers">lower income and education</a> levels, and hypertension in pregnant Black women in particular is <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36847043/">less likely to be controlled</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cylUfK">
“There is historical mistrust in the health care system, which also affects how women will interact with their doctors and how doctors, in turn, can interact with them, even if it’s just on an implicit level,” said Cameron.
</p>
<h3 id="uW7xUN">
Progress is possible
</h3>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jd7lSE">
There’s a lot of room to improve hypertension care during pregnancy, said Poye: “At the end of the day, we know what to do.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="K69YkC">
The US Preventive Services Task Force recently drafted new blood pressure <a href="https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/draft-recommendation/hypertensive-disorders-pregnancy-screening#fullrecommendationstart">screening recommendations</a> for pregnant women. And at the state level, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pqc.htm">Perinatal Quality Collaboratives</a> — networks of hospitals, health departments, professional societies, insurers, and others — are working to improve care at the local level.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="LKwTzx">
But it’s also important to raise awareness among the people most likely to be pregnant, said Crystal Jackson, who has now survived four pregnancies complicated by preeclampsia, and works with pregnant women both as a nurse and volunteer.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2feroj">
“The main thing right now, I think, from the ground up, is just awareness,” Jackson said. “A lot of women, especially young or first-time moms, they’re really not thinking about the what-ifs — they’re not thinking about complications that could arise.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kVHwXM">
“It’s an afterthought — until it’s not,” she said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="pbMQEh">
</p></li>
<li><strong>BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti and Gawker’s Nick Denton on why the 2010s digital media boom went bust</strong> -
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jeJtdaoGqAnrBYeSusW4uRwSeMY=/0x0:1617x1213/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72240876/nick_denton_code_2016.0.jpg"/>
<figcaption>
Nick Denton onstage at the 2016 Code Conference. The empty chair was reserved for investor Peter Thiel, who financed a lawsuit that bankrupted Denton’s Gawker Media. | Asa Mathat for Recode
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom">
A conversation with two media pioneers — plus Ben Smith, whose new book chronicles their rise and fall.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="IGmu1X">
Who do we blame for <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/20/media/buzzfeed-news-shuts-down/index.html">the demise of BuzzFeed News</a>?
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="C5WWLJ">
This was a news outfit once heralded as the future of journalism, and a bona fide threat to the likes of the New York Times. Now it’s been shuttered because it never made money and its owner says it can’t figure out how it ever would.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mgfX2a">
For most people, the villains of BuzzFeed News’s story are the same people we blame for the demise of any digital media publication that had its go-go days between 2010 and 2017 or so. You’ve seen lists like this before:
</p>
<ul>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eUq8uP">
Misguided media executives
</li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="HnfE6D">
Rapacious investors
</li>
<li data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7b0rDw">
Fickle platforms like Facebook
</li>
</ul>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TIQVuw">
And the nice thing about this kind of blame game is that any answer you choose — including all of the above — will be at least truthy. Media founders and executives did raise too much money from investors who did have outsized expectations that were spurred on tacitly and explicitly by the likes of Facebook.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="K4FRyV">
Then when things turned — when it became clear that the money publishers spent generating content meant to engage Facebook’s audience wasn’t going to be covered by advertisers and that Facebook itself didn’t really care whether those publishers were happy about it — things turned quickly.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="f3kMpD">
But you can also look at all of those same facts and reach a different, less comfortable conclusion. Many, if not most, of these publications wouldn’t have existed without the combined collusion by the usual suspects.
</p>
<aside id="Qj2AXz">
<div>
</div>
</aside>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="t2sM3s">
The anomaly isn’t that the likes of BuzzFeed News, Mashable, Mic, Vice, and many others have struggled or disappeared entirely in recent years. It’s that they were able to get as large as they were — measured by workforce or buzz or valuation — in the first place.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6o9aXt">
This isn’t a novel insight. And even at the time it was happening — when we collectively told ourselves that this time, money-losing media businesses really could <a href="https://youtu.be/KodqIPMbyUg">make it up on volume</a> — there were people in the middle of it raising red flags. Gawker Media owner Nick Denton, for instance, didn’t take on venture capitalists’ investments when his peers did, and frequently bemoaned the Facebook fueled-growth of his competitors. (<a href="https://digiday.com/media/nick-denton-facebook-dominance-better-convoluted-ad-tech/">Until he stopped moaning about it</a> and tried it out for himself.)
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9eZqBS">
And Gawker’s eventual demise didn’t come because he’d mistakenly followed a Facebook pivot-to-video or the like: Gawker Media was forced into bankruptcy because <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html">billionaire Peter Thiel financed a legal campaign to shutter the company</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4at7E6">
But even so, Denton told me recently, Gawker would have been unlikely to have survived the digital media boom of the last decade. “I don’t think anybody really could have made it through intact,” he said.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="0dhpnt">
“I think the big shift was the discovery of digital media as a category and the infusion of vast amounts of capital. That really started with the AOL acquisition of Huffington Post in 2011 and the Andreessen investment in BuzzFeed [in 2014],” Denton explained. “Transactions like that, transactions in the early period of the teens that really caused costs to increase, and caused all of our ambitions to inflate — and ultimately led to a reckoning. In our case, the reckoning of legal costs that we couldn’t withstand, and in other people’s case, other competitive pressures.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="R7iGk0">
Denton’s comments came during a conversation that I believe most participants didn’t think would actually happen, right up until it did: a podcast taping between Denton, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, and journalist Ben Smith, whose book <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678592/traffic-by-ben-smith/"><em>Traffic</em></a> details the rise and decline of both Denton’s and Peretti’s companies.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="4t3Wem">
Smith was particularly surprised by the chat, since he never spoke directly to Denton himself while reporting his book. Denton, who has kept a very low profile since 2016, only communicated to Smith via text messages and emails.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MlDMKx">
You can hear the entire conversation — taped a couple days after Peretti announced he was shuttering BuzzFeed News after years of investor pressure to cauterize the money-losing operation — on the newest episode of <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode-media-podcast"><em>Recode Media</em></a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Qgd18E">
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so find <em>Recode Media</em> on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/recode-media/id1080467174">Apple Podcasts</a>, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/0yW8lq5dBrXHEeiNPFqMeh?si=5Ea8HqYSSxG0M0CFbQL7Kg">Spotify</a>, <a href="https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/recode-media-with-peter-kafka">Stitcher</a>, or <a href="https://link.chtbl.com/recodemediapod">wherever you listen to podcasts.</a>
</p>
<div id="WGdSYV">
</div>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7223ke">
And yes, this is, in part, a nostalgia exercise, aimed at a not-super-tiny group of people who felt passionately, one way or another, about the likes of BuzzFeed and Gawker a decade ago (I was one of those people because I was both working at and covering digital media startups myself).
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OAfeml">
But it’s also aimed at people thinking about the next wave of media companies and how they can avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="e5nndh">
<a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/10/26/23423591/semafor-ben-smith-interview-news-launch-peter-kafka-column">Smith, for instance, is six months into the launch of Semafor</a>, a news startup aimed at plugged-in people and the people who’d like to advertise to those people. And he’s trying to do so when lots of the tools a media startup relied on in the past — referral traffic from Facebook and Google, buzz from Twitter — are severely crippled. Bonus wrinkle: He and his business partner Justin Smith also need to replace $10 million in funding that was supposed to be supplied by former crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried. (Disclosure: In August 2022, SBF’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/1/7/21020439/support-future-perfect">grant</a> for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.)
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="eeeRdv">
Peretti, meanwhile, used to extoll the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/3/16/11560308/buzzfeeds-new-strategy-fishing-for-eyeballs-in-other-peoples-streams">virtues of making content that lived on Facebook</a> and other platforms he didn’t own. Now he’s <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jonah/predictions-for-the-future-of-digital-media-2023">preaching about the power of a publisher’s home page</a>, as well as talking up creators and generative AI.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Pc3rvA">
My severely timid prediction: Both Smith and Peretti will have to muddle through something that looks a little bit like what they predicted, while making a lot of accommodations to reality.
</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-YETBi8Vc_PqdT-IuLXLixbE6ak=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24626024/peretti_and_smith_code_2015.jpg"/> <cite>Asa Matt for Recode</cite>
<figcaption>
BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and Jonah Peretti at the 2015 Code Conference.
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h4 id="qrJrYb">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nXzG1Q">
Jonah, I’m talking to you in late April, a couple of days after you shuttered BuzzFeed News. You had a memo explaining your decision. I want to quote from that because I think it’s relevant to this whole conversation: “I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I loved their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium free journalism, purpose-built for social media.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GqsY2U">
Wasn’t there a way to create a large, important, meaningful, free publication that didn’t require Facebook or Google or another platform to actively support it? Is there some other way you could have pulled this off?
</p>
<h4 id="Gdm4Uv">
Jonah Peretti
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6EQh9m">
I mean, HuffPost is profitable and doing well. And being able to focus our news efforts for BuzzFeed Inc behind HuffPost made a lot of sense given the way that social has changed.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TVz6tT">
Although it is true: Over many years, BuzzFeed News lost a lot of money. And I love Ben and I love all the amazing work that we did together. It wasn’t the most fruitful financial partnership. We spent a lot of money defending lawsuits. We had advertisers pull because of our coverage. We spent a lot on amazing journalists and investigations that were beyond, you know, the sort of logic of profitability.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="m0NLDC">
And we did that for a lot of different reasons, but I think when you look at the current environment, the ending of BuzzFeed News is a new beginning for both HuffPost as well as some of the other initiatives that we’re doing with creators and AI and other things that are starting to really grow in the Internet.
</p>
<h4 id="RNdxHz">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="OFjzU9">
I want to get to the future in a bit, but just to stick with the past: Is there an alternate version where you create BuzzFeed News but you don’t do it dependent on infusions of investor cash? And so the thing grows slower. You hire less people, you still make great journalism, you just do less of it. And then you have a viable news operation in 2023.
</p>
<h4 id="gJpWk1">
Jonah Peretti
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="bxRfiF">
I think there are people who did that. There’s some examples of what you’re describing. We were just excited about this amazing explosion of audience that was happening on these social platforms and the lack of quality news on those platforms and feeling this need of reaching millions of people on the platforms where they were and giving them quality news. And that approach worked for a while.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="t2Qg5r">
I think what you’re seeing now is there’s a lot of news fatigue, and people want to navigate directly to news and spend time on news when they’re in the mood for it. And the BuzzFeed business of lists and quizzes and entertainment works great on social.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="7Jdfxr">
That business is really working. It’s just [that] news is special and different. It’s more expensive. And it’s also something that people only want in certain moments and not necessarily when they’re trying to blow off steam and entertain themselves and kill time and connect with friends.
</p>
<h4 id="PzAdic">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lOehWy">
Ben, your book covers roughly a 15-year span, mostly in New York, when digital media was booming, largely dominated by Gawker and BuzzFeed. And you were there — you were the editor of BuzzFeed News when it was on its ascent. You write in your book: “This book has been, for me, a humbling exercise in what I missed, even when I was there.” What was the one big thing you missed back then?
</p>
<h4 id="nIUt5Q">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lBzeHw">
Oh, a million things. As Jonah said, there was a real logic when we started BuzzFeed News. We’d had a kind of brand logic and we thought of who BuzzFeed was. But we weren’t thinking about being profitable, and we should have, obviously.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="au5xJo">
In retrospect, if you had that back, we could have and should have spent less money and made more. Particularly starting in the 2015-2016 period, when it needed to mature. And that’s on Jonah, and it’s on me.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NjWTmz">
I was a bit of an outsider in the early 2000s, when Jonah was going to cool parties at Nick’s house and I was wishing I was invited. And I copied a lot of Gawker in particular when I was a young political blogger. But I also wasn’t paying that close attention and didn’t really understand what either of these guys was doing in terms of changing the media business, reacting to these huge trends.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="QXotn3">
To me, some of the most revelatory stuff was looking back at <a href="https://jezebel.com/">Jezebel</a> in 2007 and just seeing how that kind of blew that whole world of women’s media open — how freaked out by it these powerful glossies were.
</p>
<h4 id="JOSD4a">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="cD6wNG">
Remind people who weren’t in that world what Jezebel was.
</p>
<h4 id="9IphC7">
Ben Smith <strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="21Vk0E">
So Nick Denton was interested in starting a women’s blog because women’s media is this huge category commercially, among other things. And also it was unbelievably sclerotic and disruptable. And Anna Holmes, who Nick hired, was this very alienated product of the women’s magazines and came in to blow them up. Whether around frank conversations about the way women actually felt or around there not being any black models in the magazines.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6zuRom">
Their audience had this unbelievably intense kind of parasocial relationship with them that made them obsessed with their jobs, but also drove them totally nuts. And it felt like, “Oh my God, they were living inside Twitter in 2007” and just the crucible of social media and identity and politics playing out like that. That was almost the first place that I realized it was playing out, which was really interesting to me, and I knew nothing about it at the time.
</p>
<h4 id="UKxyM5">
Peter Kafka<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ljZpFq">
Nick, Ben gives you a lot of credit in the book for seeing the future, even if sometimes you didn’t understand you were seeing the future, like in the Jezebel case.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JLqVB6">
Obviously, you were forced into bankruptcy because you lost the Hulk Hogan sex tape court case, financed by billionaire Peter Thiel. If we excised that tape from Gawker Media’s history, where is Gawker now? Is it a standalone company? What do you do with Gawker in 2023?
</p>
<h4 id="TpVSIS">
Nick Denton
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Sef6xR">
Are there any companies from the list of digital darlings of that period that still stand completely intact? The Daily Beast is for sale. BuzzFeed News sadly had to cut back. Vice is leaderless. I don’t know whether a Gawker would have made it. <a href="https://gizmodo.com/">Gizmodo</a> might have.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="bTMkBp">
But I think this is a bigger shift, and I don’t think anybody really could have made it through intact.
</p>
<h4 id="iK21bS">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="gU3ECt">
Underline what that shift was. Because for a while, you guys were taking advantage of the fact that you were the shift. Right? You were the upstarts, you were challenging the sclerotic publishers Ben’s talking about. So what’s the shift that would have made it impossible for Gawker to survive in 2023?
</p>
<h4 id="qeUzeY">
Nick Denton<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="9n57s1">
I think the big shift was the discovery of digital media as a category and the infusion of vast amounts of capital. That really started with the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/07/business/media/07aol.html">AOL acquisition of Huffington Post in 2011</a> and the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-buzzfeed-investment/venture-capitalist-andreessen-horowitz-invests-50-mln-in-buzzfeed-idUSKBN0GB0W920140811">Andreessen investment in BuzzFeed in 2014</a>.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mWyXhX">
Transactions like that, transactions in the early period of the teens that really caused costs to increase, and caused all of our ambitions to inflate. And ultimately led to a reckoning. In our case, the reckoning of legal costs that we couldn’t withstand. And in other people’s case, other competitive pressures.
</p>
<h4 id="nuiFM8">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="B7R3Bq">
So if digital media sort of remained a kind of a backwater and people with money don’t get excited and don’t decide to invest in it, we’d have a different reality today?
</p>
<h4 id="q6dKA8">
Nick Denton
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="YCuuRD">
Gawker had a good four, eight, 10 years without a huge amount of heavily funded competition. I mean, there was the Huffington Post [co-founded by Peretti] — we were definitely very aware of that. And even that amount of competition really changed the nature of the sites that were in the market.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DEvohf">
I remember — Jonah, correct me if I’m wrong — but I remember a coffee or a lunch with you at <a href="https://balthazarny.com/">Balthazar</a>, where you said that if Gawker continued to tie our targets to page views — just the satisfaction of our core subscribers — that we were going to miss out on the growth that would come if we targeted unique visitors.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="5QlTMO">
And that seems like a technical distinction. But I feel that my competitive instincts were sharpened in that time. And, you know, we did as you had advised. And we grew as a result. But sometimes I look back at that as being a juncture.
</p>
<h4 id="rZaqBg">
Peter Kafka<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="wEkUwJ">
That discussion is in Ben’s book, and it seems like a very technical discussion. So why does shifting what a publisher focuses on from page views — the number of times a story is served up to anyone — to uniques, which is theoretically measuring how many times individual people visited a site, why does that matter?
</p>
<h4 id="6lPFZO">
<strong>Nick Denton </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tuulYa">
Before I do that, can I just give Jonah the chance to correct me if my recollection of that was wrong?
</p>
<h4 id="ln99Wd">
Jonah Peretti<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="u1142v">
No, we did talk about that. And we also had that conversation about the difference between indie rock and hip-hop where …
</p>
<h4 id="UcdzKS">
Nick Denton<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="kpUN9f">
Exactly.
</p>
<h4 id="6iaBBn">
Jonah Peretti
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Lplr5r">
… where I was suggesting that Gawker was like indie rock, where any time a band gets popular, you don’t listen to it anymore because it’s sold out if it’s popular. And I was making the argument that media companies should be more like hip-hop, where you don’t sell out, you blow up. And being big and becoming a superstar is part of the goal.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="NtHhGD">
And I think that analogizes to media in an interesting way because the way you monetize something that has a small audience that is very loyal lends itself to subscription. Peter was mentioning before: If you had spent less money, grew slower, and had a subscription model, you could build something much more sustainable.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6RM9Bv">
But then there’s the other approach of “make things that are viral, that blow up culture, that have the maximum amount of impact, that reach new people.” And that was always what got me most excited. And that lends itself to business models that are more about advertising and scale and things where you’re monetizing the fact that you’re reaching. You know, BuzzFeed Inc now reaches the majority of millennials and Gen Z in the country every month because we are still taking that approach of making content that people want to share and consume broadly. And focusing on those big uniques as opposed to getting more page views from that same audience who visits again and again and again.
</p>
<h4 id="8t5sk9">
Nick Denton
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="Kcixpl">
To be frank, we were, I think, following to some extent the demands of the ad agencies and the media that would follow the ad agencies. The numbers that we were all measured on were monthly uniques. And there was room for three digital media companies in every journalist’s list. You know, when they would say “digital media companies such as Vox Media, BuzzFeed, and X” — who was going to be in that third position? There’s only room for three, and the three were determined by the monthly uniques. And so that’s what we ended up chasing after we all opted to blow up, so to speak — Gawker more spectacularly than most.
</p>
<h4 id="3S9hDM">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oj9Nuw">
Does the story of BuzzFeed and Gawker seem like a book to you?
</p>
<h4 id="Z8iIah">
Nick Denton<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="q3EmJY">
Look, it was a scene. It was clearly a scene, and it’s probably worth a book as a scene. It was bigger than just BuzzFeed and Gawker. There was a good long five or 10 years there where, you know, there was a creative ferment and journalists would be hired to or from one place. They would go and start out their own ventures, even. We would complain — the owners would complain — about how pay rates were escalating and how this was looking like an increasingly unprofitable business.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="x2fKUn">
But it was an exciting, lively time. And it’s frankly kind of depressing right now.
</p>
<h4 id="e3TlBZ">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sgrHAZ">
You know how whenever you arrive in a scene, everyone who was there before tells you how amazing it was before you got there and how you missed the really golden time? I got there in 2012, which is actually really toward the end of this. I would put the end in 2016 maybe. But wherever you put it, this huge amount of venture money and this escalating spending in some ways marked the end of this experimental, totally kind of un-self-conscious phase of this.
</p>
<h4 id="RtL9MG">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="SxNQLA">
Ben, you’re six months into starting your new thing, Semafor. Is any part of the history you’re digging up [for this book] helping you plot out your course? “I can see what they did there. That was wrong. Let’s do this.” And additionally, lots of the mechanical things that a new publication would have used to launch itself up until a couple of years ago don’t really seem to exist anymore or certainly aren’t useful for publishers.
</p>
<h4 id="2iRUxE">
Ben Smith<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="hxxBNu">
Are you referring to Facebook?
</p>
<h4 id="Vlyp1D">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ZRDK6v">
All of it, really.
</p>
<h4 id="9TRQXk">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UvHXnj">
Google continues to exist.
</p>
<h4 id="w44a82">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="oIiDLh">
They are there. But they are definitely stingy on sending referral traffic. Twitter is its own thing. So how is that affecting what you’re trying to do now?
</p>
<h4 id="BouM5l">
<strong>Ben Smith </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JXdBTH">
The thing that I really, really learned from Jonah — but also learned from kind of obsessing about Nick and writing about them — it’s that you have to start in the moment you’re in. There are huge disadvantages to starting from scratch. Bigger, I think, than I’d realized, in terms of people not knowing your brand and things like that. But the huge advantage is just that you start in the moment you’re in, you’re not freighted with people’s kind of organizational expectations of what a newsroom is supposed to be.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="6TrY5W">
The fact that all these tools that people are using aren’t available anymore is a huge asset to a newcomer. The notion that things are different again and that you can just sort of come out and try to reach people where they are in this moment is basically a big competitive asset compared to people who are doing things the way they’ve been doing them. That have sunk a lot of cost in it and are organizationally connected to it.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="jykCB5">
The biggest single one of those to me is the extent to which — and this isn’t particularly a media thing — but that people have shifted their attention and their connection tends to be with individuals over institutions. So trying to build a newsroom around individual voices, that feels to me like a big competitive advantage right now and also a way to reach readers.
</p>
<h4 id="C2Jyi7">
Peter Kafka<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="UgtulC">
That’s a good lemonade-from-lemons answer. But when you guys break a scoop, aren’t you just wishing, “Oh, man, I wish we could blast this out on Facebook, Twitter, or Google” and get all these eyeballs?
</p>
<h4 id="hIDgRg">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="ISJ0le">
Yeah. What’s so kind of wild is that Max Tani, our great media reporter, said to me the other day that he’s realized, “I’m looking at the Drudge Report just to see what’s going on. Not to see what Drudge is saying, but just because there’s nowhere anywhere, if you just wake up in the morning you can learn what is happening today.”
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="GYr0OP">
Twitter doesn’t do that anymore. Twitter is still pretty amazing to see what is happening on Twitter, but it’s not a good place to figure out what’s happening in the world. And so homepages have sort of come back.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="McllWy">
So Max wrote a story about that and got a huge link on the Drudge Report and got a lot of traffic. And it did feel like, “Wow, it’s 2007.”
</p>
<h4 id="oSiGL3">
<strong>Peter Kafka </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="tNriEJ">
Jonah, I’ve asked you about your non-sale to Disney many times and you always demurred and stonewalled me. <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/ben-smith-disney-buzzfeed">Ben finally wrote about it in detail</a>. There’s a great scene of you and Peretti and former BuzzFeed COO Jon Steinberg getting high in Hollywood and Steinberg begging you to sell the company for about $500 million. How much do you regret not selling the company back then? That valuation is much more than <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=bzfd&amp;sxsrf=APwXEdcqCmh26sVZPlsJHgxAfMq9po4jBw%3A1682951051230&amp;ei=i8tPZNHdDbaYptQPzMeWyAk&amp;oq=bzfd&amp;gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAxgAMg8IIxCKBRAnEJ0CEEYQ-gEyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBQgAEIAEMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQ6CggAEEcQ1gQQsAM6BAgjECc6BwgjEIoFECc6DQguEIoFEMcBENEDEEM6BwgAEIoFEEM6CAgAEIoFEJECOgsILhCDARCxAxCKBToOCC4QgAQQsQMQxwEQ0QM6CAguEIAEELEDOggILhCxAxCABDoKCAAQigUQsQMQQzoLCC4QgAQQxwEQrwE6CAgAEIAEELEDOgUILhCABEoECEEYAFCSBVjvDWC6F2gBcAF4AIABmQOIAYoGkgEHMS4yLjQtMZgBAKABAcgBBMABAQ&amp;sclient=gws-wiz-serp">BuzzFeed is currently worth</a>. And if you had sold it to Disney, what would BuzzFeed be like now?
</p>
<h4 id="UfGzNu">
Jonah Peretti
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="faLZJi">
A lot of the amazing stories in Ben’s book never would have happened had we sold. The freedom we had and the impact on culture we had and the ability to continue to innovate and change and evolve would have been a lot harder inside of a big company.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DR9Ws6">
I think what Nick was saying about the scene is really important. Everything great seems to come out of an interesting scene. So I saw some of the interesting technology stuff coming out of MIT Media Lab, and went to grad school, which was kind of a scene. I think early New York media was a scene. In LA, BuzzFeed video came out of a scene of all these creators making new kinds of video about their own lives and own experiences. I think there’s a great scene right now in generative AI, which is another interesting area.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="DtZpaj">
But those kinds of scenes, it’s harder to stay connected to them inside of giant corporations. We did a lot of work that I’m really proud of as an independent company. And I’m excited about future work that we’re going to be able to do with more autonomy and freedom as an independent company.
</p>
<h4 id="AtNesv">
<strong>Peter Kafka </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nZqO7N">
Ben, what’s your favorite coulda, woulda, shoulda story from your book? The Disney one gets a ton of attention. But there’s also Mark Zuckerberg wanting to buy Jonah or “acqhire” the company.
</p>
<h4 id="glefSD">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="x6lLtQ">
Yeah, I don’t …
</p>
<h4 id="6oNIfy">
Peter Kafka<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JtORwO">
And Jonah flirting with Ozy founder Carlos Watson.
</p>
<h4 id="dKJfAY">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="vblKmU">
Wow, what a missed opportunity that was.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="aF2VCj">
Honestly, I think my regrets are about not understanding the business of news — which is a different and worse business, a harder business than entertainment — better earlier.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="JXbEvl">
I mean, Jonah and I were working on it by the time I left, but it wasn’t my strong suit or experience. My personal regrets are about that.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="y5kbqf">
The Disney thing — I did have one of my colleagues read that excerpt and walk up to me just now and was like, “Hey, so if somebody offers to buy our company for $600 million, you should say yes.” But I actually also don’t have any regrets at all.
</p>
<h4 id="68PLK4">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="TV3kNe">
Nick, you have been out of media since 2016. How have your views about media and particularly transparency in journalism — that was something you were really obsessed with for a long time when you were running Gawker Media — how have those changed now?
</p>
<h4 id="jsOgT9">
Nick Denton
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="PsjpuK">
The idea — and it wasn’t really my idea, it was something that was kind of around in the internet scene of 2000 or 2005 — the idea was that if we connect everybody and all information is available, that collectively, through the internet we will piece it all together and come to a better mutual understanding of how the world works, how we can affect change. And the jury is still out that that is for sure.
</p>
<h4 id="0EhkGJ">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="F7yl7I">
That sounds like an Elon Musk view of the world right now. I’m surprised to hear you say the jury is still out, so you still think there’s hope for: “Let everyone say whatever they want — we’ll sort it all out in the mix.” And then, we’ll end up with a better vision of the world than if we rely on X number of gatekeepers or credentialed people, as we call them now.
</p>
<h4 id="lsd2Uz">
Nick Denton
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="xpghCH">
It’s pretty much the view of Silicon Valley now. If you look at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen">Marc Andreessen</a>, one of his most recent essays, he talks about <a href="https://pmarca.substack.com/p/for-polarization">the sharpness of the divide as being a feature, not a problem</a>. And that it’s the old establishment, the old managerial class, that is so afraid of these populist voices and so afraid of argument. I don’t know.
</p>
<h4 id="AnXQqB">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="8M52we">
I expected you to say, “That’s absolutely wrong. I don’t believe that anymore.“
</p>
<h4 id="bayqwV">
Nick Denton<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="nOiB3k">
You didn’t hear me say that.
</p>
<h4 id="jppwyN">
Peter Kafka<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="sOpEyZ">
I did not. Ben, you mentioned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in your book a couple of times.
</p>
<h4 id="tJWlLj">
Ben Smith<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="2mRbG7">
Oh, God.
</p>
<h4 id="sD2udl">
Peter Kafka<strong> </strong>
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="mfuDyo">
They’re minor characters in Hamlet. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead">They got their own play</a>. What does that allusion have to do with Gawker and BuzzFeed? And you?
</p>
<h4 id="OBHPbO">
Ben Smith
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="lP0Pyt">
It seems like questionably too pretentious to include. And also, I definitely read it in high school. But there’s a passage — and I assume this is true of every scene, of every thing — where you feel like you are shaping the forces of history. And at some point you realize that you’re riding the tide.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="MbTOE7">
I think actually the folks involved here had a very clear sense — not that they’ve created these sort of digital forces, but they were channeling them. But I do think there was an extent to which at least I was under the illusion that I could control them a lot more than I could.
</p>
<h4 id="22RlLh">
Peter Kafka
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="1g8E94">
Nick, you are the longest-tenured person in this conversation. You kind of kicked a lot of this off. You get the last word. What’s the future of digital media look like?
</p>
<h4 id="rnpNzH">
Nick Denton
</h4>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="BPtZHT">
TikTok and Substack.
</p>
<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom" id="bwkysV">
Well, those are the places where I spend more of my time than anywhere else these days. Maybe I’m extrapolating from my personal habits, but people like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald on whatever platform he’s on now — they have thrived since leaving media organizations. They’re making good money. They’re part of a platform that takes a very thin cut of the total revenues. They’re basically living the old blogging dream.
</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>Ashish overcomes Gheshlaghi to enter pre-quarterfinals</strong> -</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>Archers confirm four medals in Asia Cup Stage 2</strong> - The top-seeded Indian men’s recurve team of Mrinal Chauhan, Tushar Shelke and Jayanta Talukdar eliminated hosts’ Uzbekistan’s Chen Yao Yuy, Mirjalol Karorov and Amirkhan Sadikov in the semifinal</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>India overtake Australia to become No. 1 Test side</strong> - India were last at the top for a month in December 2021</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>IPL 2023: PBKS vs MI | Punjab to test Mumbai’s class in crucial game</strong> - The Mumbai team is currently placed seventh with eight points from eight matches and things are not looking great for Rohit Sharma’s side.</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>IPL 2023: LSG vs CSK | Rahul’s injury big concern for Lucknow as they get ready for Chennai challenge</strong> - The extent of Rahul and Unadkat injuries are yet to be ascertained but the skipper came out to bat at No. 11 in LSG’s unsuccessful run chase</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>Coal mining to be resumed in Meghalaya</strong> - Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma said the Centre had approved mining leases for four persons in the State</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>Senior CPI(M) leader M. Chandran dead</strong> -</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>Air Marshal B. Manikantan takes over as AOC-in-C, SAC</strong> -</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>IAF chief meets Sri Lanka’s top military leaders, exchange views on matters of bilateral importance</strong> - Air Chief Marshal Chaudhari, who arrived in Sri Lanka on Monday on a four-day official visit to Sri Lanka, called on the Commander of the Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF), Air Marshal Sudarshana Pathirana at Air Force Headquarters</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>Bilkis Bano case | SC defers to May 9 hearing on pleas challenging remission of 11 convicts</strong> - On April 18, the Supreme Court questioned the Gujarat Government over the remission granted to the 11 convicts last year, saying the gravity of the offence should have been considered</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>Ukraine war: More than 20,000 Russian troops killed since December, US says</strong> - Another 80,000 Russian soldiers have been wounded in fighting since December, the White House estimates.</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>Dog diplomacy: Turkey sends Mexico puppy after search dog’s death</strong> - The puppy is meant to “carry on the legacy” of a Mexican search dog that died after Turkey’s quake.</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>Scores of riot police hurt in French May Day protests</strong> - Almost 300 people are arrested across France in clashes with demonstrators angry at pension reforms.</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>Ukraine war: Russia launches second pre-dawn missile attack in three days</strong> - The city of Pavlohrad, a logistics hub, was hit ahead of a much-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive.</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>Pope Francis urges Hungarians to ‘open doors’ to migrants</strong> - The pontiff addressed up to 100,000 people, including Hungary’s nationalist PM Viktor Orban.</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>T-Mobile discloses 2nd data breach of 2023, this one leaking account PINs and more</strong> - Hack affecting 836 subscribers, lasted for more than a month before it was discovered. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1935885">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Why champagne has stable “bubble chains” and other carbonated drinks do not</strong> - Surfactants give champagne its signature stable rising column of bubbles. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1934996">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>May the 4th is here again—so save some credits on this Star Wars merch</strong> - Get solid deals on a haul of era-spanning Star Wars stuff. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1932300">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>AI plus MRI yields the ability to recognize what the mind is hearing</strong> - System can also reconstruct speech a person imagines. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1935842">link</a></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Stone-hearted researchers gleefully push over adorable soccer-playing robots</strong> - DeepMind tests “robustness to pushing” in football robot breakthrough. - <a href="https://arstechnica.com/?p=1935756">link</a></p></li>
</ul>
<h1 data-aos="fade-right" id="from-jokes-subreddit">From Jokes Subreddit</h1>
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<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>I used to be into sadism, bestiality and necrophilia!</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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But then I figured I was just flogging a dead horse.
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/amerkanische_Frosch"> /u/amerkanische_Frosch </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/135eoyq/i_used_to_be_into_sadism_bestiality_and/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/135eoyq/i_used_to_be_into_sadism_bestiality_and/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A train conductor kills 2 people and is sentenced to the electric chair…</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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A train conductor ends up killing two people while on the job. He is found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair. When the day comes, he is asked what he would want for his last meal, and he requests a banana. After finishing his meal, he is strapped to the chair and electrocuted. However, by some miracle, he ends up surviving.
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Seeing as he technically served his sentence, he is released from prison, where he gets a job as a train conductor. This time, he ends up killing three people while on the job and is sentenced to the electric chair. The day comes, and for his last meal, he asks for two bananas. He finishes them and gets strapped to the chair, but he ends up surviving the electrocution again. He was released from prison for the same reason as before.
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He gets another job as a train conductor and ends up killing four people this time. He is sentenced to the electric chair again, and for his last meal, he asks for three bananas. He finishes his meal and gets strapped to the chair. The guards shock him for longer than necessary and use more power, but he ends up surviving again.
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The guards, all surprised, ask him, “How do you keep surviving every time? And why do you keep ordering bananas, do they save you?” The man replies, “It has nothing to do with the food, I’m just a really bad conductor.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/adorkablegiant"> /u/adorkablegiant </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/134x7a6/a_train_conductor_kills_2_people_and_is_sentenced/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/134x7a6/a_train_conductor_kills_2_people_and_is_sentenced/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Two Astronauts are chilling on the space station when one turns to the other and says, “I can’t find any milk for my coffee.”</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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The second astronaut replies, “In space no one can, here use cream.”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Professor_Hazel"> /u/Professor_Hazel </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/134zrb3/two_astronauts_are_chilling_on_the_space_station/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/134zrb3/two_astronauts_are_chilling_on_the_space_station/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>A business man is leaving his wife for a week and has concerns about her straying while away.</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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He visits a number of adult toy stores looking for something that will keep his wife “busy” while he’s gone. After hours of searching he eventually stumbles into a Chinese Herb and Erotic Tincture shop in Chinatown. After telling the old man running the store of his dilemma, the old shopkeeper thinks for a bit.
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He says, “I think I have something that will work, but it’s not for the faint of heart or for the undisciplined. In fact, it may be too much for your wife.”
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The man’s interest piqued, says, “If it wears her out, that’s even better. I’ll take it.”
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After many more warnings and even more haggling over the price, the shopkeeper produces an old wooden box, inscribed in gold with beautiful pictograms and unknown writing. “This is the voodoo dick. To make it work, your wife must simply say ‘Voodoo Dick - vagina’.”
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The man, not sure if he believes what he’s hearing asks for a demonstration. The shopkeeper opens the box and exclaims, “Voodoo dick - the cabinet”. Pointing to an old cabinet in the corner of the shop, the voodoo dick rises out of its box and flies across the shop and starts pounding at the keyhole. As it’s pounding, the cabinet begins to shake as the voodoo dick chips away until the cabinet eventually crumbles into a pile of wood and splinters.
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The old shopkeeper then says “Voodoo dick - your box.” The voodoo dick obediently flies back into the box with the lid snapping shut behind it.
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Agreeing to the exorbitant price and happy with his purchase, the man leaves the store with his wife’s new toy.
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The next morning as the business man gets ready for his trip, he tells his wife that he’s got a present for her. He has her get undresses and lie on the bed and then opens the box and exclaims, “Voodoo dick - her vagina.” The man then tells his wife that she only need to say “voodoo dick - your box” when done.
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In her state of excitement, however, she completely ignores and disregards his instructions. The husband, leaves for his business trip comforted in the knowledge that his wife will have no reason to stray.
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After several hours of orgasms and immense pleasure, and a few half hearted attempts at getting the voodoo dick to stop, the woman finally decides she has had enough. Unfortunately she still can’t remember how to stop it. She yells everything she can think of, “voodoo dick, stop”, “voodoo dick, halt”, and on and on. Nothing is working.
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She finds the receipt with the address of the shop and decides to head to the shopkeeper for help. She struggles to get dressed as the voodoo dick continues to relentlessly give her orgasm after orgasm. She gets in her car and heads towards Chinatown, swerving across lanes and squirming around in her seat.
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A policeman sees the erratic driving and behavior and pulls the woman over. Seeing her disheveled appearance, he asks, “Is everything ok, are you having a medical emergency?”
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The woman collects herself the best she can and says, “My husband got me a voodoo dick and it won’t stop. I’ve had like 60 orgasms. I can’t figure out how to get the voodoo dick to stop. So I’m heading to Chinatown to ask the man that sold him the voodoo dick.”
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The officer looks at the woman in disbelief and says, “Voodoo dick - my ass!”
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/vegasmacguy"> /u/vegasmacguy </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/134zwc6/a_business_man_is_leaving_his_wife_for_a_week_and/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/134zwc6/a_business_man_is_leaving_his_wife_for_a_week_and/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
<li><p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"><strong>Yo mama so fat…</strong> - <!-- SC_OFF --></p>
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The only scale she could use is the Richter Scale
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<p data-aos="fade-left" data-aos-anchor-placement="bottom-bottom"> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Hashashin455"> /u/Hashashin455 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/1352rxy/yo_mama_so_fat/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/1352rxy/yo_mama_so_fat/">[comments]</a></span></p></li>
</ul>
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