Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• Why Texas’s Power Grid Still Hasn’t Been Fixed - After last winter’s deadly failures, regulators promised solutions. But who would profit? - link

• Did Omicron Come from Mice? - Throughout the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 has transmitted easily from humans to other species. Some scientists now believe that animals could spread new variants back to us. - link

• Mikaela Shiffrin’s Stunning Slalom Collapse - A great athlete sat on the side of the Olympic slalom course and reminded us how hard skiing can be. - link

• The New Doves on Ukraine - An unconventional assortment of progressives and conservatives argues that the U.S. could prevent a war by giving up on NATO expansion. - link

• In “The Sky Is Everywhere,” a Conventional Melodrama Meets a Visionary Director - Josephine Decker is an original filmmaking talent, and her new film, adapted from a Y.A. novel, is at its best when her ecstatic authorship is clearest. - link

From Vox

• Democratic governors are trying to move on from a pandemic that’s still happening -

  

  New policies unveiled this week are clashing with public health guidance.

  As an exhausted nation continues to grapple with the coronavirus, Democrats are facing growing public pressure to move on to the pandemic’s next phase even as high case rates, hospitalizations, and death rates persist.

  This week, several Democratic governors responded by rolling back their state’s mask mandates.

  Leaders in New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Oregon announced changes to such policies in schools, while those in New York, Illinois, Nevada and California did the same for indoor mask requirements.

  “This is a huge step back to normalcy for our kids,” New Jersey Gov.  Phil Murphy said on Monday.

  Such decisions come as many Americans eye a new stage of the pandemic. According to a January 20-24 Monmouth University poll, 70 percent of Americans think it’s time to accept that “Covid is here to stay and that we need to get on with our lives,” including 47 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents and 89 percent of Republicans. Democrats have also weathered months of critiques from Republicans who’ve sought to frame them as the party of lockdowns, and questioned the need to mask children in schools.

  Governors’ decisions this week, however, clashed with public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the White House.

  “Now is not the moment” to drop mask requirements, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief Rochelle Walensky said in an Reuters interview this week.

  The CDC still recommends masking in schools and in indoor spaces in jurisdictions with “high” or “substantial” rates of transmission. According to an NBC News analysis published on February 8, 99 percent of counties in the US would qualify by that measure.

  Several of the state mask mandate changes won’t take place for weeks, and new reported cases and hospitalizations are declining nationwide. For now, it’s still unclear what the situation will be when the mandates eventually lift.

  These policy changes have prompted mixed reviews from public health experts.

  “I think this is a matter of political expediency, not a public health response,” John Hopkins University infectious disease epidemiologist David Celentano said of the recent moves to relax masking. “New Jersey was a ‘hot spot’ until recently; not sure they are wise to drop masking, at least for older kids.”

  Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security noted that the decision to rescind school mask mandates in Pennsylvania has had “no major consequences.” An ABC News report has found that Covid-19 transmissions have increased in places like a Wyoming school district that recently rolled back school mask requirements, an outcome likely due to low vaccination rates among children.

  The public has been divided about such policies as well. A February Axios/Ipsos poll found that just 21 percent of people support getting rid of all Covid-19 restrictions, 29 percent want to move toward opening up with “precautions,” 23 percent want leaders to mostly keep existing precautions in place, and 21 percent want more vaccine and mask requirements.

  The masking rollbacks are one way Democrats are trying to navigate this confusion. And they reflect how the party is acknowledging pressure from those who want to decide for themselves how to deal with the pandemic. The new policies come despite the fact that loosening restrictions at a time with such high case rates could spur new transmissions, and could make it tougher to reinstate mandates if there were another surge. For example, in 2021, more than 20 states allowed their mask policies to expire. When the omicron variant hit this past winter, just a fraction of those states brought their mask mandates back.

  “The challenge that any politician and any scientist has to grapple with is there are no 100 percent sure answers,” says Kaiser Family Foundation director of global health policy Jennifer Kates. “Do you act more cautious and risk people being angry that you’re not supporting more of a new normal or do you throw caution to the wind and risk having a setback?”

  There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the pandemic

  Unlike governors, the Biden administration has stopped short of indicating a shift to a new stage of the pandemic response — and instead focused on the progress made so far.

  “We’ve got a way to go on that, in my view, but we’re moving,” President Joe Biden said during a January meeting with state governors, when some urged him to “move away from the pandemic.”

  Part of this caution likely stems from the blowback the White House faced last year, when Biden said the country was “closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus” in a July Fourth speech, only to have delta variant cases surge in the months afterward.

  “They are continuing to evaluate and there’s ongoing discussions and work happening internally,” Psaki said at a recent press conference.

  There have been major strides in the US’s pandemic response since January 2021: More than 200 million people are now fully vaccinated, the unemployment rate has gone down, and the overwhelming majority of schools are now open. Covid-19 cases are also down from the omicron peak: As of Thursday, the average number of daily cases has dipped 65 percent compared to two weeks ago, according to the New York Times tracker.

  Still, according to Thursday’s data, the average number of daily cases — 205,004 — remains at 82 percent of the level seen in January 2021, and is significantly higher than the peak of 164,418 average daily cases during the Delta wave. And even though the impact of the omicron variant is waning, hospitalizations and death rates are still high as well.

  As of Thursday, an average of 103,455 people have been hospitalized in the US per day, or 31 hospitalizations per day for every 100,000 people, according to the New York Times tracker. That average is comparable with the roughly 104,000 people who were hospitalized with Covid-19 at the peak of the delta wave.

  In states that have recently changed policies, hospitalizations have stayed high as well. For example, New Jersey is seeing 23 hospitalizations per day per 100,000 people, Delaware is seeing 32 hospitalizations per day per 100,00 people, and New York is seeing 29 hospitalizations per day per 100,000 people.

Thursday’s national death average of 2,575 people per day is higher than it was during the delta surge as well, when there was an average of 2,000 people dying per day.

“It is troubling because it feels like this rush to ‘normal’ outweighs more preventable illness [and] death as well as is really tone deaf to the reality that literally for millions of people across the country — there is no normal for them,” says Kristen Urquiza, the founder of Marked by Covid, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of people who’ve lost loved ones to coronavirus.

State leaders have called for the CDC to offer more clarity about what metrics they should be looking for to determine which policies to roll back and when — but thus far, they have been left to make this decision on their own.

In that vacuum, Kates said that these decisions were likely a byproduct of both public health information and politics. “Politics is a factor here: people are tired of restrictions and governors are listening to that,” Kates told Vox.

Governors are pushing for a return to normalcy

Ahead of midterms in which Democrats are already facing headwinds, “Democrats can’t be the party of mandates,” says progressive strategist Rebecca Katz, the founder of New Deal Strategies.

Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats’ campaign arm, has signaled he’s also of this school of thought. He’s among those emphasizing the need for the party to “start getting back to normal.”

Governors’ actions this week in several states including New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut seem to echo this viewpoint, though they’ve pushed back against suggestions that these changes were driven by political pressure.

“It’s a combination of cases, hospitalizations, positivity rates, rates of transmission all going dramatically in the right direction,” Murphy said this week.

There’s some evidence to indicate that Democrats have borne a political cost for previous Covid-19 policies, which have included school closures, though it’s far from conclusive. Masking children in schools has also become a political flashpoint in recent months.

After the Virginia gubernatorial election last year, data gathered from an 18-person focus group by Democratic strategist Brian Stryker suggested that Republicans were able to brand Democrats as the ones behind unpopular restrictive policies, including school lockdowns, and win an edge with certain voters as a result. “They felt Democrats closed their schools and didn’t feel bad about it,” Stryker’s memo reads.

A recent New Republic article by Rachel Cohen, however, noted that these policies didn’t necessarily doom Democrats, citing polling showing a majority of parents were satisfied with how their children’s schools handled the pandemic. A Hart Research Associates and Lake Research Partners survey conducted in December found that 78 percent of parents were satisfied with how their school handled the pandemic and 83 percent supported efforts the school had implemented to keep students safe. (Biden has previously been a client of Lake Research Partner.)s

The January Monmouth survey saw that state mask mandates and social distancing guidance still have 52 percent of people’s support, a decline from 63 percent in September. Support for mandates was divided along party lines, with 85 percent of Democrats backing these policies, 51 percent of independents and 24 percent of Republicans.

Still, the pushback that’s accompanied policies including school closures and mask mandates is likely a factor for Democratic leaders hoping to advance a different message in the midterms.

“The majority of the public supports mask mandates in the US and a supermajority of Democratic voters support mask mandates,” says Harvard social epidemiologist Justin Michael Feldman. “They’re not going after mainstream Democrats, they’re targeting swing voters.”

Some Democrats who recently announced changes to Covid-19 restrictions, or who have previously declined to reinstate mask mandates, are up for election this fall, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Beyond moving away from mask mandates, Democrats are also focused on a drawing a contrast with Republican leaders — including pointing to failures of GOP lawmakers to back Covid-19 relief policies, and the misinformation that Republicans leaders have spread about the pandemic.

“We really are going to talk about when Republicans were in charge, they failed to crack down on the coronavirus. They unanimously opposed Democrats’ coronavirus programs that helped people get back to work, [kids] get back to school,” said DSCC spokesperson Jazmin Vargas. “Overall, it’s going to be about how we took steps to take on the coronavirus. We can effectively call out Republicans for opposing us every step of the way.”

In a study on messaging strategies, the left- leaning firm Data for Progress found “that focusing on Democratic achievements to recover from the pandemic is an effective strategy to counter Republican attacks on government interference.”

Many Republican leaders have been criticized by public health experts for lies they’ve spread about vaccines and failures to adequately promote masks and testing. But the challenge Democrats face while calling out Republicans is that Democrats are currently the party in power in the White House and Congress, and in the 16 states where Democratic governors are up for reelection.

As a result, Democrats are likely to bear any blame for continuing struggles in places where they’re in charge. That’s one reason for the growing Democratic interest in promoting an idea of “normalcy” as part of a counter to GOP critiques and public pressure — even as the pandemic is still very much happening.

• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is making sure no one can call him a RINO -

  

  With Trump’s endorsement, Abbott has subdued threats from his right ahead of the 2022 primary.

  Greg Abbott, Texas’s dependably conservative Republican governor, is running for reelection this year. He’s campaigning on the back of a record packed with recent far-right wins that can help him fend off his most serious challengers, all of whom are coming from his right.

  It’s a dynamic that can be seen across 2022’s Republican primary contests, where candidates are clamoring to convince voters that they are the most conservative, most Trump-like option available. And Abbott has given his fellow incumbents a powerful playbook for combating rivals on the right: Pursue an ultraconservative agenda and align yourself as closely as possible with former President Donald Trump.

  In Texas, a state where Republicans have held trifecta control for more than two decades, incumbent Republicans like Abbott have more to fear from their own base than from Democrats. That’s especially true in a year where Democrats are facing a challenging midterm election season nationally and President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings have Republicans believing they have an edge with independents and moderates.

  The March 1 primary in Texas will therefore likely decide whether Abbott will serve a third term — Abbott is favored in the general election against the expected Democratic nominee, former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. Abbott appears poised to win the primary in light of his efforts to prove his conservative bona fides and allegiance to Trump, who remains the most popular Republican in Texas. Abbott’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

  Abbott has been a staunch conservative for his entire career in Texas politics and made a name for himself by suing the Obama administration at least 44 times. The fact that even he feels pressure to move to the right demonstrates just how much Republicans are at the mercy of their pro-Trump base in 2022. A decadeslong conservative record isn’t enough to persuade Trump voters; they are demanding displays of loyalty to the former president from every incumbent.

  “Arguably one of the principal leaders of the national Republican Party, the governor of the largest red state, has felt compelled to leave as little daylight between him and former President Donald Trump as possible, which highlights the extremely dominant role that Trump continues to play within the Republican Party,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.

  Over the last year, Abbott led Texas Republicans through one of the most conservative sessions of the state legislature in decades. The GOP majority passed legislation addressing a slew of right-wing priorities — including guns, abortion, “critical race theory,” and sweeping restrictions on voting — in a performance that left little for Texas conservatives to complain about.

  Once tepid on Trump, Abbott has also sought to attach himself to the former president. He has backed some of the former president’s key political priorities, like building a wall on the US-Mexico border. Abbott has also repeatedly appeared alongside Trump at public events in the state, earning his endorsement. That’s left his Republican rivals with little oxygen to argue that he isn’t a true Trump supporter, though some top Trump donors have reportedly asked the former president to withdraw his endorsement over concerns about Abbott’s true loyalties.

  With just weeks before early voting starts, Abbott’s strategy seems to be working. As of late January, Abbott was leading the field — which also includes ex-Rep. Allen West and former state Sen. Don Huffines — with 59 percent of the vote, according to a University of Texas at Tyler poll for the Dallas Morning News. He only needs 50 percent of the vote in the primary to avoid a runoff election. He also has a double-digit polling advantage over O’Rourke.

  “In Texas politics, it’s adapt or die. Greg Abbott didn’t start his career as a right-wing Republican, but he’s certainly ended up there, in part because the party has shifted significantly to the right in the last decade,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a professor of political science at the University of Houston. “Conservative activists have demanded more conservative policies for years and Donald Trump’s presidency accelerated this trend in Texas.”

  Abbott pursued ultraconservative policies in anticipation of challengers from his right

  Abbott shaped the agenda for 2021 sessions of the state legislature in which Texas Republicans successfully implemented a slew of their party’s national priorities.

The GOP majority notably passed bills that allow any adult in the state to carry a handgun without a license or permit. It banned abortions after six weeks, in a case that ultimately ended up in the Supreme Court. Texas moved to prevent transgender K-12 students from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity, and it restricted the way that public school teachers can talk about race and racism in America. The state also passed a bill to prohibit social media companies from removing Texas users based on their political viewpoints, and introduced a slew of new restrictions on voting.

Abbott’s recent record marks a big shift from his last reelection campaign, when he was much more cautious about sticking to bread-and-butter state government issues like property taxes and school finance that wouldn’t offend independents and Democrats. Now, he’s on the front lines of America’s culture war, and has built a national profile that could well propel a rumored 2024 presidential run.

Enacting those national Republican priorities ensured that Abbott’s primary opponents don’t have much ammunition to call him a RINO (Republican in name only), despite their best efforts.

“There’s virtually nothing that Republican primary voters could point to that Abbott did not do,” Jones said. “His entire strategy during the legislative session was to protect his right flank.”

His primary opponents have taken credit for pushing him to the right. Huffines, for instance, said in a statement to Vox that his campaign “forced Greg Abbott’s hand” on the abortion ban and permitless carry — two of the former state senator’s longtime causes — and on the elimination of “critical race theory” in public school curriculums. Huffines said he has also pressured Abbott to send troops to the southern border to address unauthorized migration, as the governor has done through the beleaguered Operation Lone Star.

Huffines is a long-shot candidate, but he’s been making joint campaign appearances with West, and together, they’re a force that Abbott can’t ignore.

“The governor’s primary opponents might not win the primary, but their presence pushed the governor as far to the right ideologically as he’s been since he was elected,” Rottinghaus said.

Abbott has sought to closely align himself with Trump

To further shore up his credentials with the right, Abbott has sought to make himself synonymous with Trump. He has made multiple campaign appearances with the former president, including at a recent rally in Conroe where he said Trump’s name more than two dozen times over the course of a less than six-minute speech. And he has embraced some of Trump’s key political priorities, including militaristic border policies and restrictions on voting rights in the name of what Republicans call “election integrity.”

All of that earned Abbott the former president’s endorsement over Huffines, who has accused the governor of not supporting Trump enough and declared himself the only true Trump candidate in the race, implicitly suggesting Trump made a mistake with his endorsement. Some wealthy Trump donors have shared similar sentiments with the Trump camp, arguing tweets from Abbott campaign political director Mitch Carney that were critical of Trump show the governor is only pretending to be pro-Trump. Carney reportedly retweeted and liked tweets that disparaged Trump’s attempts to undermine the results of the 2020 election.

It’s difficult to say for sure how squarely Abbott is in Trump’s camp. But it was only recently that Abbott went all-in on Trumpism. He didn’t support Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries. When he last sought reelection in 2018, he distanced himself from Trump, fearing that the then-president could turn off potential Latino supporters. And he was notably absent from several border roundtables convened by then-President Trump in Texas.

But Trump has proved to have an iron grip over Texas Republicans, and Abbott needs them to win reelection.

“The Republican Party of Texas now is no longer that weak and compromising party,” Matt Rinaldi, the chair of the Texas GOP, told the crowd in Conroe. “We are the bold party of Donald Trump and will stay that way.”

Trump’s support comes at a price: breathing life into the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. For his part, Abbott backed an audit of the 2020 election results in Texas at Trump’s request. (An initial review did not identify any significant issues in the state’s electoral system, though further examination of election records will follow this year.)

And Trump could call on Abbott’s help with obfuscating the results again if he runs for president in 2024. At the Conroe rally, Trump said that Texas is “never, ever turning blue — that is, unless they rig the election.”

“Don’t let them do it, governor,” Trump told Abbott.

Despite closely aligning himself with Trump, some Texas Trump voters still don’t think Abbott has gone far enough. Their complaints center on Abbott’s early measures to curb the pandemic in 2020, including a statewide mask mandate and business closures that he lifted well before other states did the same. They also don’t think that he did enough to further conservative priorities, despite the legislature’s historically conservative 2021 session. For instance, nothing short of a complete ban on abortion would satisfy them.

The GOP’s right wing is putting pressure on incumbent Republican governors

Abbott isn’t the only Republican governor facing pressure from his party’s right wing, and his success thus far has created a model other governors could follow.

Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp and Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine, for example, are both facing conservative challengers who have tried to make their primaries into contests over loyalty to Trump.

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Trump endorsed former US Sen. David Perdue over Kemp, whose close relationship to the former president crumbled when he did not challenge the results of the 2020 election following a state-ordered audit. To shore up Perdue’s chances, Trump even negotiated with another Republican candidate, Vernon Jones, to drop out of the race, endorse Perdue, and instead run for Congress.

Former US Rep. Jim Renacci has also secured a Trump endorsement over DeWine, a more traditional conservative who has at times clashed with his party’s right wing, particularly on the pandemic. Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, is advising Renacci’s campaign.

“Jim Renacci’s the only Trump candidate,” Parscale told Politico. “And it is clear from the data that Mike DeWine is the anti-Trump candidate.”

DeWine didn’t carry out a blitzkrieg of conservative policy priorities in the Ohio legislature the way Abbott did in Texas, but he has been more cooperative with right-wing state lawmakers on issues spanning from redistricting to gun control over the last year. For his part, Kemp has offered up a proposal to allow Georgians to carry a concealed handgun without a state license as bait for Republican voters — but only after Perdue unveiled a similar proposal weeks before and criticized him for not taking more action on gun rights.

At the moment, these moves seem as though they may help both governors hang onto power. DeWine, who didn’t even try to publicly court Trump’s endorsement, held a healthy 41 to 23 percent lead over Renacci in one recent Trafalgar Group poll. And before Jones dropped out, Kemp was leading the primary, with 43 percent support to Perdue’s 36 percent in a Quinnipiac University poll. But it’s possible that Jones’s supporters could bolster Perdue’s numbers and make the race much closer.

Even incumbents who aren’t seeking reelection have felt pressure from the right flank. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a moderate who has been critical of Trump, decided not to run for a third term this year due in part to his party’s rightward shift and the prospect of facing a conservative primary challenger endorsed by the former president.

• Will schools require Covid-19 vaccines for students? -

  

  It’s complicated.

  Vaccines were supposed to be a game changer for Covid-19 in schools. Back in the more innocent days of spring 2021, it seemed as though once the shots were approved for children, education could pretty much go back to normal — kids would get vaccinated, infections would drop, quarantines would become unnecessary, and teachers and families alike could settle into a new normal that looked a lot like the old one.

  It didn’t happen exactly like that. Right now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that everyone age 5 and older get vaccinated against Covid-19. The Food and Drug Administration has given the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine full approval for people 16 and older, and emergency use authorization (a form of limited approval that still requires data showing a treatment is safe and effective) for children 5 to 15. However, families have been slow to vaccinate their kids; by early February, just 22 percent of 5- to 11-year-olds were fully vaccinated.

  At the same time, the omicron variant has increased transmission, driven up cases, and forced closures of classrooms, schools, and even entire districts due to quarantines, staffing shortages, and labor disputes. The surge now appears to be easing, but it’s still far from normal out there.

  All this has led to renewed debate about vaccines in public schools. Should they be required for attendance? Would such requirements stand up in court? Will we ever get to a place where Covid-19 vaccines will be considered standard for schoolchildren the way measles vaccines are today?

  These are all difficult questions, but after years of a pandemic and months of a vaccination program, experts have some insight into the future — as well as some lessons from the past. “I have to believe that we will get to a point where a lot of things related to Covid” — including vaccines — “are routine,” said Ibukun Kalu, a pediatric infectious disease physician and professor at Duke University. “I just don’t know when that will be.”

  Why is the Covid-19 vaccine important for kids?

  In some ways, it’s not surprising that Covid-19 vaccines for children have been a tougher sell than those for adults. Children are less likely to become severely ill from Covid-19, perhaps decreasing the urgency of vaccination for some families. What’s more, parents are often more anxious and cautious about their children’s health than their own, said Richard Meckel, an emeritus professor of American studies at Brown, who has studied the history of childhood and health policy. Parents who were willing to get vaccinated themselves may be more concerned about side effects when it comes to their children.

  However, public health experts emphasize that vaccinating children against Covid-19 is important for them, their families, and their communities. “We do not want to leave children as the only group susceptible to an infection,” Kalu said. Vaccinations help protect children from Covid-19 (which can be severe in younger people, even if it’s less common), as well as protecting the entire population by bringing up the percentage of people who have some immunity. Also, kids will become adults one day: Doctors begin vaccinating people for many diseases as children, Kalu said, so they can build up their protection over time.

  Indeed, Covid-19 vaccines are no different from the other vaccines children typically need to get in order to attend public school, which include TDAP (a vaccine that protects against tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis), MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), polio, and varicella (chickenpox). Vaccinations are one of the ways that public health officials “keep all children, across age groups across all of our different demographics, attending school safely,” Kalu said. “There is no reason why a vaccine-preventable illness, which SARS-CoV-2 or Covid-19 is becoming — should be taken out of that equation that we’ve all accepted for years and years.”

  So are school districts requiring vaccines?

  Nonetheless, Covid-19 is outside that equation, at least for now: Vaccination against the virus, especially for kids, remains a politically charged issue. In part because of this, public school districts have been slow to add the vaccine to their lists of required shots. (In some cases, private schools have more leeway to make their own decisions, and some have imposed mandates.)

  In fact, they’ve been moving in the opposite direction: A number of districts, like those in Oakland and San Diego, announced vaccine mandates for students and then pushed back their deadlines, said Bree Dusseault, principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), which has been tracking Covid-19 policies at 100 large districts nationwide. In many cases, the reason is simply low vaccination rates. In Oakland, for example, so many children remained unvaccinated that it would have been impossible to accommodate them at the district’s virtual school.

  So far, New Orleans is the only large school district that CRPE is aware of in which a vaccine mandate has actually gone into effect, Dusseault said. That mandate started on February 1, and students will be able to obtain a waiver for medical, religious, or philosophical reasons, so it may take some time to know what effect, if any, the rule will have. Still, the district is “one to watch” to gauge the impact of mandates in the months ahead, Dusseault said.

  What about teacher vaccination mandates?

  Vaccination requirements for teachers and staff have been less controversial than student mandates, but only slightly. As of last December, 17 districts in CRPE’s sample required teachers and staff to be vaccinated, while another 28 required them to be vaccinated or test regularly.

  Though teachers unions have often pushed for stricter Covid-19 protocols during the pandemic, such as distancing and testing, their stance on vaccine mandates has been more complicated.

  The largest national teachers unions have been broadly supportive of vaccinations, but they have not come out in favor of mandates for teachers and staff, said Bradley Marianno, a professor of education policy and leadership at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. In part that’s to give local unions flexibility in their bargaining: “If a school district wants a vaccine mandate for teachers, the union’s going to see what they can negotiate along the way” in return, Marianno said.

  That position on staff mandates makes it harder for unions to push for student mandates because they could be seen as hypocritical. The situation also varies by region, Marianno said, with some local unions in the West and Northeast coming out in favor of teacher mandates. Meanwhile, “you won’t see unions in the southern half of the United States necessarily come out in favor of vaccine mandates for their membership, because they know where some of their membership stands on that issue,” Marianno said. Local variations in support for teacher mandates “largely align with the politics you would expect them to align with.”

  Will more districts require Covid-19 vaccines in the future?

  Like everything related to the pandemic, school vaccination policies change all the time, and what’s true today may not be the case tomorrow. For example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last year that as of July 2022, children in the state would have to be vaccinated to attend school. It’s possible that the state mandate will give districts more impetus — and political cover — to enact and enforce their own mandates, Dusseault said.

  At the same time, the California mandate will only take effect if the FDA grants full approval to vaccines for children. It also currently only applies to students in 7th through 12th grade.

  Meanwhile, 17 states have taken the opposite approach, banning Covid-19 vaccine mandates in schools. In these states, which include Texas, Georgia, and Florida, districts couldn’t require the vaccine even if they wanted to. The federal government is unlikely to step in; any effort by the Biden administration to require vaccines for public school students would likely generate enormous conservative backlash and be blocked by the Supreme Court. (The Court in January blocked a Biden administration rule requiring school districts and other employers to mandate vaccines or testing for staff.)

  All of this means that vaccination policies will likely be a state-by-state patchwork for some time to come. To understand what’s coming — and to help districts craft policies that work — it helps to understand what’s gone before.

  How did school vaccine requirements come about in the first place?

  Vaccines and anti- vaccine sentiment have a long history in America. The first method of vaccination, practiced during the colonial period, involved intentionally infecting yourself with smallpox in order to — hopefully — get a mild case and gain immunity, said Meckel, the Brown professor. One popular method was “arm to arm,” lancing a smallpox pustule on a sick person’s arm and rubbing the resulting pus into a cut on the skin of a healthy person. This was, obviously, disgusting, and sometimes the (formerly) healthy person ended up dying of smallpox. Many people feared and opposed the practice for these reasons.

  Over time, though, vaccines became more sophisticated and effective, and in the 19th century, cities began requiring them for public school attendance as part of a larger effort to control epidemics. This, too, inspired backlash. Some parents were worried about the safety of vaccines — which, though better than the old slice-open-a-boil technique, were poorly regulated and sometimes contaminated. Others had more ideological objections.

  The 19th century saw “a kind of health reform that was centered on the idea of resisting toxins and purifying the body,” and “the state forcefully putting something into your body” went against that, Meckel said. At the same time, there was a growing resistance to organized medicine, and to state power more generally.

  The result was a series of court battles, culminating in the 1922 Supreme Court decision Zucht v. King, which upheld a school vaccination mandate in Texas. That case set a precedent that stands today, Meckel said: A school district has the legal right to require vaccines for attendance.

  Even after Zucht v. King, however, enforcement of mandates remained a challenge, and districts were forced to create a number of exceptions to the rules, Meckel said. In contrast, there’s another approach that could have more success today.

  Short of mandates, how can schools encourage families to vaccinate kids?

  While cities required vaccination against smallpox, another vaccine — against diphtheria — remained largely voluntary, Meckel said. Instead of mandates, public health officials in the 1920s “borrowed from the new advertising and motion picture industry to essentially pass on the message that you were a good parent if you got your child vaccinated.”

  That kind of large-scale public relations campaign might be what’s needed when it comes to Covid-19, Meckel said. Mandates, he fears, will only lead to more resistance, as they have in the past. What’s needed is messaging linking Covid-19 vaccination to being a good parent, because right now, many people believe good parenting means protecting your child against vaccines.

Beyond PR campaigns, there are other ways schools and districts can motivate families to vaccinate children. Some have used incentives, like money, gift cards, or free tickets to prom. Many — about two-thirds of the districts CRPE studies — offer vaccine clinics on campus to make it easy for students to get the shot.

It’s also important for clinicians and public health officials to be able to talk with families about the vaccine. Parents’ view on vaccines often depends on “if they have access to information or reliable experts that can help address questions,” Kalu said.

Overall, experts emphasize the importance of normalizing the Covid-19 vaccine as just another part of the childhood immunization process. “People that do not have young kids, or do not remember being a young child, may forget how often vaccines are a part of normal preventive care for children,” Kalu said. “Approaching it from that perspective, somewhat removed from the chaos of Covid itself, might be helpful.”

At the same time, even what many people now accept as normal childhood immunizations have been the subject of controversy and resistance for centuries. Public health officials and school districts may have a long road ahead of them — but if it’s any consolation, it’s one many have traveled before.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Ind vs WI | Shreyas, Pant steer India to competitive total after top-order collapse - Continuing to experiment, India made four changes, bringing in Kuldeep Yadav, Shreyas Iyer, Deepak Chahar and Shikhar Dhawan.

• Vettel looking for winning feeling from new Aston Martin F1 challenger - Winner of four straight drivers’ titles with Red Bull between 2010-2013, the 34-year-old last tasted victory at the 2019 Singapore Grand Prix when he was still with Ferrari

• NRAI signs an MoU with AISCD - To hold selection trials from February 24 for Deaflympics

• AFI’s trials to pick team for race walking Worlds - Trials for 29 athletes at Bengaluru’s SAI Centre on February 12

• CAB requests BCCI to allow spectators during T20Is against West Indies - The Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) has requested the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to allow spectators at the Eden Gardens during

From The Hindu: National News

• Goods train derails in Thrissur - Train services in both directions affected

• Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls | BJP is sweating in the winter of north India, says Naresh Tikait - Hindus and Muslims came together for the farmers’ agitation; its impact is being seen in the election, says the BKU chief

• Hijab controversy: Bidar medical college director denies stopping students at exam hall - He issued a note to mediapersons in the evening stating that all students were allowed to appear for the examination, and that the allegations made by some persons on social media platforms are false

• Pondy govt. college teachers to protest from Feb. 16 - They are upset at non-provision of 7th Pay Commission allowances

• Morphed pic of Cong. leader Harish Rawat: ECI warns Uttarakhand BJP to be more careful - The 70-member Uttarakhand Assembly is scheduled to go to polls on February 14 and the counting of votes will be taken up on March 10.

From BBC: Europe

• Ukraine tensions: Joe Biden says US citizens should leave Ukraine now - The US president says he has issued the warning due to “increased threats of Russian military action”.

• Macron refused to take Russian Covid test - A source says the health procedure was unacceptable amid reports France was protecting Mr Macron’s DNA.

• Ukraine tensions: Can diplomacy prevent war? - Diplomats hope that warring sides can get off the road to war - but finding such a path is not easy.

• Russian figure skater’s failed drug test confirmed - The International Testing Agency confirms teenage Russian Olympic Committee figure skater Kamila Valieva failed a drugs test in December.

• China halts Lithuania beef, dairy and beer imports amid Taiwan row - The move may bolster a European Union case against China, which alleges discriminatory trade practices.

From Ars Technica

• Rocket Report: Astra launch fails, Georgia spaceport comes to a vote - “How can the government better leverage your commercial conops?” - link

• Hundreds of e-commerce sites booby-trapped with payment card skimming malware - Magecart hackers strike again. - link

• Old friends return to save us from extinction in Jurassic World Dominion trailer - Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum reunite for the first time since 1993 film. - link

• So nice they killed it twice: Google+’s business pivot is dead - Who remembered that “Google Currents” was still available for businesses? Anybody? - link

• US Army turns to microgrids, EVs to hit net zero by 2050 - New strategy aims to slash emissions without compromising readiness. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• (NSFW) Things have been going great since my doctor told me I can masturbate whenever I want. -

  His email said I could have a stroke at anytime.

  submitted by /u/SockTacoz
  [link] [comments]

• The bartender says “No time travelers allowed in this bar” -

  Two time travelers walk into a bar

  submitted by /u/violentorifice
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• A Christian, a Muslim, and a Witch all die and go to the afterlife. -

  A Christian, a Muslim, and a Witch of the Norse gods all die and go to the afterlife.

  They find that, waiting for them at the entrance to the afterlife is Anubis, waiting with a set of scales, with a feather on one side.

  Above Anubis is a sign, “You wait with your heart, if less than feather- wait, you may enter paradise.”

  The Christian takes out his heart from his soul, and sets it on the scales. He stares at Anubis defiantly, “I should pass, I made sure to do what FOX news told me every day.” They tip heavily to the side, and Anubis waves his hand. The Christian’s soul disintegrates instantly.

  The Muslim takes out his heart from his soul, and sets it on the scales. He looks timidly at Anubis, “I did my best to live a good life, I always gave to the poor…” Although not as heavy as the Christian’s heart, it was weighed down by life. Anubis sadly waved his hand, and the Muslim’s soul disintegrated instantly.

  The Witch then looked at the scales, looked at the plaque, and checked her watch. About three minutes went by, and Anubis was getting annoyed at her taking too long, and started tapping his foot. She then looks at Anubis and asks, “Has that feather been here long?”

  Anubis nods, “Yes, left by the god Maat, millennia ago.”

  She nods, “And how long ago did we arrive here?”

  Anubis thinks for a moment, “Maybe six minutes?”

  The witch smiles, and then strides confidently forward, and enters paradise.

  Anubis sighs, “At least Witches know how to spell.”

  submitted by /u/starfyredragon
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• Hello Baby!! -

  Three nuns were talking. The first nun said “I was cleaning in the fathers room the other day, and do you know what I found? A bunch of pornographic magazines.”

  “What did you do?” the other nuns asked.

  “Well, of course I threw them in the trash.”

  The second nun said, “Well I can top that. I was in the fathers room putting away the laundry, and I found a bunch of condoms!”

  “Oh my!” gasped the other nuns. “What did you do?”

  “I poked holes in all of them!”

  The third nun fainted.

  submitted by /u/hdlt21
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• You should respect people who wear glasses. -

  They paid money to see you.

  submitted by /u/chacham2
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