The Good, the Bad, and the Embarrassing in America’s COVID-19 Response - Were Americans too unruly, or did elected officials expect too little of them? - link
Why Won’t Amnesty International Call Alexey Navalny a Prisoner of Conscience? - The Russian regime has used both its vast media infrastructure and its judicial system to vilify its opponents. - link
Inside Xinjiang’s Prison State - Survivors detail the scope of China’s campaign of persecution against ethnic and religious minorities. - link
Tanya Selvaratnam on Eric Schneiderman, Andrew Cuomo, and the Abuse of Power - The filmmaker and writer discusses her abusive relationship with New York’s former attorney general, and the harassment allegations against the current governor. - link
Trump’s Strategy for Returning to Power Is Already Clear - The former President is positioning himself and his audience as the only true Americans. - link
From Vox
Why Fox News is having a day-long meltdown over Dr. Seuss -
Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, in 1985. | Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty Images
Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in his Read Across America Day statement. All hell broke loose from there.
Conservative media turned 2021’s National Read Across America Day into an epic culture war meltdown.
On Tuesday morning and into the afternoon, programming on Fox News and Fox Business ceaselessly harped upon the purported “cancellation” of legendary children’s author Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, as the latest example of woke liberalism run amok — conveniently ignoring the fact that Dr. Seuss has not, in fact, been canceled.
“The cancel culture is canceling Dr. Seuss,” lamented Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, adding later, “It’s out of control.”
“People are too scared,” echoed co-host Ainsley Earhardt. “They don’t want to be involved in all of this, so they’d rather just cancel it all … the places we are going in this country right now.”
Fox & Friends continues its emotional meltdown over the “radical” plot to “eliminate children’s books” by Dr. Seuss, and “people are too scared” to speak up so “they’d rather just cancel it all.” It’s like there’s some anti-Seuss cabal pulling the levers of power. pic.twitter.com/FDtmKYa6on
This Fox & Friends segment wasn’t an isolated incident. Before 9 am Tuesday, Dr. Seuss had been mentioned more than 30 times on Fox News and Fox Business. Fox Business host Stuart Varney even touted Dr. Seuss’s alleged cancellation as one of the big stories of the day.
Dr. Seuss was an even bigger topic on Newsmax — a Trumpier, further right alternative to Fox News — where it was mentioned more than 20 times during the network’s Wake Up America morning show.
It’s just 10AM and Fox News has already had 8 segments on Dr. Seuss “quite literally being canceled” [Narrator: He wasn’t] pic.twitter.com/uSHnBT8sXn
Given what they were being told, viewers of the two networks could be excused for believing that the Dr. Seuss controversy is the biggest news story of the day.
And it didn’t stop with the morning shows. A Fox News reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki a question during Tuesday’s briefing about why Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in his statement commemorating Read Across America Day, and Fox News then tried to spin Psaki’s response (she referred the reporter to the Department of Education) as some sort of scandal. (Fox News hasn’t responded to a question seeking comment about its Seuss coverage, as this is published.)
In a world where 2,000 Americans are still dying each day from Covid-19, and Congress is grappling with issues like a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill and major voting rights reforms, this level of focus on Dr. Seuss would be silly no matter what. But making it even more ridiculous is the fact that five minutes of research indicates all the outrage is much ado about very little.
Dr. Seuss hasn’t been canceled
The right-wing outrage over Dr. Seuss can be traced back to a February 26 article in Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire publication about a left-wing educators group that encouraged public schools to stop “connecting Read Across America Day with Dr. Seuss,” citing “racial undertones” in some of his books. The two are linked, as the National Education Association has previously used March 2, Geisel’s birthday, as an opportunity to encourage literacy.
At least one school district — the Loudoun County public school system in northern Virginia — did indeed decide to try to separate Read Across America Day from Dr. Seuss, providing guidance to schools “to not connect Read Across America Day exclusively with Dr. Seuss’ birthday.”
The Daily Wire cited this guidance as evidence that Dr. Seuss was being “canceled.” In response to the outrage the article generated, Loudoun County schools released a statement trying to correct the record.
“Dr. Seuss books have not been banned in Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS),” it says, adding later: “We continue to encourage our young readers to read all types of books that are inclusive, diverse and reflective of our student community, not simply celebrate Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss books have not been banned and are available to students in our libraries and classrooms, however, Dr. Seuss and his books are no longer the emphasis of Read Across America Day in Loudoun County Public Schools.”
Then, on March 1, President Joe Biden released a statement about Read Across America Day that broke with years of precedent by not mentioning Dr. Seuss. This led to headlines like, “Biden CANCELS Dr. Seuss.”
More fuel was added to the right-wing outrage fire on Tuesday, when Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that publishes and licenses the author’s work, announced that six Seuss books will no longer be published because they portray people of color “in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”
Why is this reevaluation of Dr. Seuss happening now? In part, it has to do with a 2019 study conducted by a nonprofit linked with Read Across America Day called Learning for Justice that concluded Seuss’s works traffic in “Orientalist tropes” and “anti-Blackness.” Here’s a key expert from that study:
Of the 2,240 (identified) human characters [in 50 Dr. Seuss books], there are forty-five characters of color representing 2% of the total number of human characters.” Of the 45 characters, 43 exhibited behaviors and appearances that align with harmful and stereotypical Orientalist tropes. The remaining two human characters “are identified in the text as ‘African’ and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness.” It’s also important to note that each of the non-white characters is male and that they are all “presented in subservient, exotified, or dehumanized roles,” especially in their relation to white characters.
That study led to a reevaluation of some of Seuss’s work, including the six books that Dr. Seuss Enterprises is no longer publishing. But there is no indication this private company’s decision resulted from pressure from the “woke mob,” and it’s not as though Dr. Seuss’s works are being pulled from the shelves of libraries and bookstores.
Conservatives aren’t about to let facts get in the way of their narrative
It’s perfectly reasonable to reassess classic works of culture through the prism of the prevailing values of today. Doing so does not mean that those works have been “canceled” or are worthless — it just means being honest about the ways in which they have fallen short in terms of inclusivity and respect for other people.
But in the months since Donald Trump lost the presidency, right-wing media and Republican members of Congress have leaned into so-called “cancel culture” as a way to make the case against Democrats without having to discuss policy or really anything of substance at all. Instead, Republicans have used insinuations that Democrats want to prohibit traditions that are central to conservative identities. In short, they’re stoking the grievances of their base.
The last week has seen a couple noteworthy examples of this. Perhaps most absurdly, right-wingers spent days getting mad about Hasbro’s purported cancellation of Mr. Potato Head.
Ainsley Earhardt worries about how she’ll know which gender of potato toy to buy (they’re labeled “Mr.” and “Mrs.”,) and Steve Doocy assumes Hasbro was trying to be politically correct until “the backlash was enormous” and it backtracked in a panic (that’s not what happened.) pic.twitter.com/yrPAo7yqrI
It turned out that all the fuming over Mr. Potato Head rested on a misinterpretation of a Hasbro press release. While the brand is now being referred to as “Potato Head,” Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head are not being “canceled” by the company — they will live on as characters in the broader Potato Head universe.
Yet even after Hasbro cleared up the confusion, conservatives at CPAC kept bringing up Mr. Potato Head’s pronouns as an example of liberal woke-ism gone wild.
“They tried to cancel Kermit the Frog and Mr Potato Head. You see that? They backed off Mr Potato Head. I think he told them his preferred pronounces are ‘he, his, him.’” – Jim Jordan pic.twitter.com/gU9pwYh3rk
By Tuesday morning, the Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head claims had merged into a single object of right-wing performative outrage. During a Fox & Friends interview, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. used a question about Dr. Seuss to rail against liberal “cancel culture” in general.
This might seem silly — and it is. But Republicans and their media enablers use this sort of culture war grievance to avoid talking about real issues, including those they advocate for that are unpopular.
One egregious example of this came during Fox & FriendsFirst’s interview on Tuesday with Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC). Despite the fact that both BuzzFeed and the Washington Post published exposés in recent days detailing numerous accusations of sexual harassment against him, Cawthorn was not asked a single question about that. Instead, he was given an opportunity to complain at length about the fake cancellation of Dr. Seuss.
Madison Cawthorn was on Fox & Friends First for an interview this morning. He was never asked about the multiple sexual harassment allegations made against him, but he was given an opportunity to rail against the purported cancelation of Dr. Seuss. pic.twitter.com/fC0XpVj8Lg
Later Tuesday, as FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before a Senate committee about the January 6 insurrection and how it was an instance of right-wing domestic terrorism, Fox News was the only network to not cover it live.
Instead, they talked more about cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) completed the circle of right-wing disinformation by using a floor debate over voting rights legislation to complain about Dr. Seuss in the sort of soundbite tailor-made for additional Fox coverage.
“First they outlaw Dr. Seuss and now they want to tell us what to say,” he lied.
Beyond the silliness of using overhyped culture war issues to distract from real issues, there are a couple of ironies in the right-wing obsession with “cancel culture.” First, as writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out on Twitter, schools are much more likely to ban books with LGBTQ themes than they are books containing racism or bigotry.
And I found out that for the most recent year for which we have data (2019), of the 10 books most challenged and banned, EIGHT of them were solely because of LGBTQ themes.
It seems social conservatives have worked overtime to, uh, “cancel” LGBTQ books.https://t.co/lRa4Yfc6zB
And second, despite the racial insensitivity of some of his books, other works by Dr. Seuss indicate he wouldn’t identify with the agendas of right-wing politicians who are now using him as a cudgel.
Describing Dr Seuss’s wartime output [during World War 2] as “very impressive evidence of cartooning as an art of persuasion”, [graphic novelist Art] Spiegelman explains how they “rail against isolationism, racism, and anti-semitism with a conviction and fervor lacking in most other American editorial pages of the period… virtually the only editorial cartoons outside the communist and black press that decried the military’s Jim Crow policies and Charles Lindbergh’s anti-semitism”. Dr Seuss, he argues, “made these drawings with the fire of honest indignation and anger that fuels all real political art”.
But that the network is making this big of a deal over Dr. Seuss on a day when so much else is happening illustrates how much the network is still struggling to establish an identity for itself in the post-Trump world. And it’s also a reminder of how far it’s willing to go to construct an alternative reality for its viewers, where the most important things are their grievances.
Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.
Neera Tanden is Biden’s first Cabinet-level nominee to withdraw -
Neera Tanden, nominee for director of the Office and Management and Budget, speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee confirmation hearing on February 9, 2021, in Washington, DC. | Ting Shen/Getty Images
After a tough few weeks, Tanden announced she’s withdrawing her nomination as OMB director.
President Joe Biden has lost his first Cabinet-level pick.
Neera Tanden, the embattled nominee for Biden’s Office of Management and Budget director, has officially withdrawn her nomination for the position after days of uncertainty over whether she had enough votes to be confirmed in the US Senate.
“Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” Tanden, the president of the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, said in a statement released Tuesday.
With her withdrawal,Tanden becomes the first nominee to a White House Cabinet post to be sunk by her old tweets, which were sharply critical of a number of lawmakers.Biden’s administration had emphasized the historic nature of Tanden’s nomination; she served in President Bill Clinton’s White House and had experience running a major think tank, andif confirmed, she would have been the first woman of color and first Asian American woman to lead OMB.
But much of Tanden’s résumé was overshadowed by her proliferous online posting — at least 1,000 tweets raking both Republicans and leftist Democrats over the coals — that Tanden quietly started deleting in November 2020.
Tanden’s decision comes after an intense few days of trying to win over Republican senators whose votes she needed to get confirmed. In a Senate where Democrats have a one-vote majority, Tanden needed Republican support given she had already lost a critical Democratic vote she needed in West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who recently announced he’d oppose Tanden’s confirmation.
Tanden and the Biden White House had been holding out hope that Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), might flip and give them the one vote they needed. Indeed, up until Tanden officially withdrew her nomination, Murkowski had told reporters she was still undecided on the nomination.
Biden released a statement accepting Tanden’s resignation, and mentioned that he’d like to find another spot for her in his administration, one where she wouldn’t need Senate confirmation.
“I have the utmost respect for her record of accomplishment, her experience and her counsel, and I look forward to having her serve in a role in my Administration,” Biden said in the statement.
Biden’s administration could have a quick replacement for Tanden
On Tuesday, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young had her confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Budget Committee. And it went much better than Tanden’s had weeks prior.
Young is a former staff director for the House Appropriations Committee, with deep ties to the Hill and respect from lawmakers and staffers on both sides of the aisle. Also importantly, she does not have a Twitter account.
While Republican senators had plenty of spent time admonishing Tanden for her social media posts in her hearing, they had relatively glowing things to say about Young.
“Everybody who deals with you on our side has nothing but good things to say. You might talk me out of voting for you, but I doubt it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Young during her Tuesday hearing.
With Republicans looking likely to vote to confirm Young, the Biden administration may well want to move her up to Tanden’s spot. Some Republicans, including Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Richard Shelby of Alabama, had already said they’d vote to confirm Young if she were Tanden’s replacement.
And with congressional Democrats looking poised to soon pass a major Covid-19 stimulus bill through Congress using budget reconciliation, the Biden administration will likely want to quickly confirm a head of OMB — a key office tasked with planning and overseeing the implementation of the federal budget once Congress passes it.
Tanden’s dilemma demonstrates the tricky math of an evenly split Senate and the power of individual senators to stymie pieces of Biden’s agenda. Even though Tanden did plenty to anger the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party over the years, moderates were ultimately the ones who sank her.
The vaccine race against the coronavirus variants, explained -
The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson began distribution this week, just as new variants of the virus are gaining ground. | Timothy D. Easley/Getty Images
Covid-19 vaccines are here. So are new mutations. Here’s what you should know.
The world is now locked in an arms race with Covid-19, as multiple effective vaccines are being deployed (at staggeringly different rates) around the world. At the same time, new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been rapidly spreading.
The Covid-19 vaccines that are being distributed in the US, as well as the newly authorized Johnson & Johnson vaccine, have been shown to almost eliminate deaths and hospitalizations from the disease, even for people infected with the new mutations. For a disease that has infected more than 114 million people around the world in just over a year, this is tremendously good news.
But it’s no time to kick back.
There’s evidence that the virus is evolving in ways that can reduce the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines — particularly when they’re up against the variant discovered in South Africa. Both Johnson & Johnson and Novavax’s vaccine efficacy rate dropped in the South Africa arm of their clinical trials (from 72 in the US to 64 percent in South Africa and from 89 in the UK to 49 percent, respectively).
The vaccines still worked against their new foe in the majority of trial participants. The human immune response, after all, is robust and multi-layered. It can adapt to different versions of the virus that come along, which is why vaccine-induced immunity is unlikely to “fall off a cliff and go from 95 percent to zero,” as University of Utah evolutionary virologist Stephen Goldstein told Vox.
However, the situation is still dicey. “Eventually, when the majority of the susceptible population is vaccinated with effective vaccines, the variant better suited for survival in the new host will be one that has the ability to evade the vaccine-induced immunity,” researchers warned in a March 1 letter published in Nature. Such a variant could “decrease, and even abolish, the beneficial effects of a broad immunization program.”
And the more people the virus infects, the more mutations it acquires — mutations that may eventually evade the protection provided by prior infections or from vaccinations. The slow pace of the global vaccine rollout, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, then means that even if people in rich countries like the US are fully vaccinated, variants may still emerge in less vaccinated regions, increasing the risk of new outbreaks everywhere.
That’s why, while global health groups work to get more vaccines to more people around the world, vaccine developers are quickly trying to find new strategies to cope with the variants. They’ve already brought new vaccines to the market in record time. Now they are investigating everything from booster shots to entirely reformulated vaccines.
What we know about the coronavirus variants and Covid-19 vaccines
All viruses mutate as they move through populations, and until recently, the mutations in SARS-CoV-2 weren’t cause for much concern. (A mutation is a change in the genetic makeup of a virus, while a variant is a virus that has a suite of mutations that alter how it behaves.) That changed in mid-December, when a more contagious variant known as B.1.1.7 was discovered in Britain, just as the first Covid-19 vaccines were coming online.
That was only the beginning of a new chapter in the pandemic. Since then, several new variants and mutations of concern — what the WHO calls changes to the virus that are worrisome — have surfaced in dozens of countries around the world, becoming the dominant strain in some.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that B.1.1.7 could overtake other versions of the virus in the US this month. And evidence is mounting that B.1.1.7 is not only more transmissible but potentially also deadlier than prior versions of the virus.
Another variant, B.1.351, first identified in South Africa, has proven more difficult to immunize against. And still another immune-evading variant discovered in Brazil, known as P1, has already spread to at least 25 other countries, including the US. Scientists reported that in several instances, the P1 variant was behind reinfections in people who already survived an earlier course of the illness. And two new variants may have emerged in the United States, in New York and in California. These new variants of concern stand to undermine precious progress against the pandemic because they’re either more contagious, potentially more dangerous, or threaten the vaccines we have. And perhaps even more ominously, they’re a reminder that far more — and perhaps even more threatening — variants will emerge in the future.
Adding to the threat is that many parts of the world, including the US, are not doing enough genetic sequencing of SARS-CoV-2. That makes it harder to identify and prepare for new variants when they emerge, increasing the chances of them spreading undetected.
The good news is that, for the most part, vaccines still seem to provide good protection against the SARS-CoV-2 variants discovered so far. So does prior infection.
But there have been some worrying signs that current Covid-19 vaccines are less effective against some new variants — again, B.1.351, first identified in South Africa.
How can seemingly minor mutations change the virus’s susceptibility to a vaccine? When a vaccine is administered, the human immune system responds by producing targeted antibodies, proteins that can stick to a specific pathogen. Antibodies that prevent that pathogen from causing an infection are said to be neutralizing.
Studies show that the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and by AstraZeneca/Oxford lead to a lower concentration of neutralizing antibodies to B.1.351 than to the older versions of the virus, explained Benhur Lee, a professor of microbiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. However, these vaccines generate such a high level of neutralizing antibodies to begin with that the reduced protection is still effective.
Antibodies are also just one component of the immune response. A recent preprint found that immune protection provided by T cells generated in response to a Covid-19 vaccine was just as potent against the new variants.
“This is probably the reason why you see other vaccines still being efficacious in South Africa,” Lee said in an email. So a drop in efficacy doesn’t mean the vaccines are rendered useless, but it does mean they’ll be less protective in environments where variants like B.1.351 are spreading.
In South Africa, the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, which has not been approved in the US, has been pulled from the country’s vaccination campaign. Officials found that it was less effective against the new variant, but the findings came from a small trial of roughly 2,000 people. “Since they had the option of Pfizer and J&J coming down the line, South Africa chose to go ahead with those other vaccines,” Lee said.
The vaccines may also provide less resistance to milder forms of Covid-19 spawned by the new variants. Even if they don’t land someone in the hospital, such infections can still reduce quality of life, especially for people with other preexisting health conditions. And we’ve already seen that even seemingly mild cases of the disease can have lasting effects: persistent fatigue, brain fog, and so on.
Another public health concern with regard to vaccines is how well they block transmission of the virus. This is a crucial factor in controlling the pandemic in the population, particularly when vaccination rates are still so far away from reaching herd immunity.
For now, there is less information about how well vaccines block transmission than there is when it comes to stopping the disease in people. Identifying infections, particularly asymptomatic cases, requires aggressive testing for the virus within a study, an expensive and time-consuming task. But the research that is emerging so far is encouraging.
A recent preprint study from the UK reported that the full course of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine reduced the chances of developing a transmissible infection by 86 percent. Another preprint study, looking at Covid-19 vaccines in Israel, saw an 89.4 percent drop in transmissible infections.
Will the variants also erode protection against transmission?
It’s possible, but there’s little research to date. The variants already seem to cause more cases of disease with symptoms — early evidence about B.1.1.7 suggests this is the case — so it’s likely that infected people may generate and shed more virus, helping it spread. If SARS-CoV-2 variants lead to more infections breaking through the protection barrier of vaccines, those infections in turn could spur further transmission.
But as with the vaccine protection for individuals, a barrier to transmission, even if it’s lower, would still slow the spread of the virus within a community.
“Even a less efficacious vaccine will be an important tool to tamp down a highly transmissible strain,” Lee said.
How Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers are preparing for the variants
One advantage that we have in this race against the variants is that the new vaccines being rolled out around the world so far are also very nimble.
The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine both use a molecule called mRNA as their platform. This molecule delivers instructions to the body to make a spike protein found on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, educating the immune system to fend it off if it encounters the actual virus in the future.
Meanwhile, the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca that recently received approval in the UK (but not yet in the US) uses a reprogrammed version of another virus, an adenovirus, to shuttle DNA that codes for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to use as target practice. The one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine that recently received an emergency use authorization from the FDA also uses an adenovirus vector.
In both of these fairly new vaccine platforms, developers only need to modify the code of DNA or mRNA to tweak the vaccine to reorient it to new variants, something they can do quickly if necessary.
But while it may be possible to alter the vaccine to adapt to new mutations, it’s not ideal: It requires expensive changes in the vaccine production process and eats up valuable time.
“It takes time to manufacture hundreds of millions of doses,” Lee said.
Another approach is to build off of existing vaccine formulations but add on another shot. For example, companies like Pfizer are considering adding a third, booster dose to their two-dose Covid-19 vaccine regimen to solidify the response to the new variants. “We believe that the third dose will raise the antibody response 10- to 20-fold,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told NBC News on February 25.
In an email, a Pfizer spokesperson explained that the company hasn’t seen a loss of protection against the new variants in its laboratory studies, but is proactively gaming out several responses, like a booster dose, through further clinical trials. “We need to focus both on vaccinating the world with an initial regimen and be driven by the science of our clinical studies for the boost,” according to the spokesperson. “We are focused on enrolling the full study and should have the findings soon.”
Moderna, meanwhile, announced on February 24 that it has sent a version of its vaccine optimized to handle the South Africa variant to the National Institutes of Health for further study. The company is also investigating a booster dose.
Johnson & Johnson’s phase 3 clinical trial commenced after those from other manufacturers, so they were able to capture the efficacy of their vaccine against some of the new variants. “The [Johnson & Johnson] Covid-19 vaccine candidate also provided protection against multiple Covid-19 variants,” according to a spokesperson for the company. Johnson & Johnson is also studying a two-dose version of its vaccine.
“If Covid-19 becomes an endemic, potentially seasonal virus, we can establish a regulatory pathway that will allow us to move expeditiously to update and validate an updated vaccine, similar to what is done with the flu every year,” said a Pfizer spokesperson.
However, researchers say one shouldn’t hold out for a reformulated vaccine and should take the first shot they’re offered. Whether a vaccine manufacturer opts for a booster, a reformulation, or decides to stick with the existing protocol, timing is critical, and people need to be vaccinated as fast as possible to contain the pandemic.
What do variants and vaccines mean for how the pandemic ends?
There are at least several possibilities for how the pandemic will fade away. Covid-19 could become a largely intermittent threat, with sporadic outbreaks. It could also become seasonal, with surges in the fall and winter. These possibilities make the evolution of the pandemic in 2021 even less predictable than 2020.
“The question mark is going to be next fall, next winter. Is there going to be a new variant that becomes dominant again? Are we going to see efficacy from the vaccines start to wane by that time?” said Anish Mehta, medical director for clinical quality and virtual health at Eden Health, and a professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “That’s what’s really going to be the big test for us.”
One thing we do know is that the suite of public health strategies used so far — social distancing, hand-washing, mask-wearing — remain useful. “A lot of the things that we’ve been doing throughout this pandemic will continue to work when it comes to these variants,” said Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, during a press call.
If vaccination rates continue rising while new infections decline, the United States may be able to stay ahead of the virus. Life could return to something approaching normal for most Americans by this summer, according to Mehta.
But it’s turning out that many parts of the world, especially developing countries, aren’t able to keep up. There are places that still aren’t able to get vaccines at all — and probably won’t for a couple of years. As SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread, the likelihood of even more mutations arising will increase. And as has already been demonstrated, new variants don’t stay behind borders for long.
That’s part of why it’s so important to work toward equity in Covid-19 vaccine distribution around the world. As long as the virus can spread anywhere, it’s a threat everywhere.
Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.
From The Hindu: Sports
Ashton Agar takes 6-30 as Australia beats New Zealand in 3rd T20 - Glenn Maxwell’s 70 from 31 balls set Australia on course to its commanding total of 208-4.
Kohli bats for rotation policy in age of bio-bubbles - ‘Till the bubble exists, we need to keep the mental factor in the picture as well, because mental fatigue would be a huge, huge factor’
Rahul retains second spot, Kohli climbs to 6th in ICC T20I rankings - England’s Dawid Malan retains top spot with 915 points.
A day after saying cricket gets forgotten in IPL, Steyn apologises - In January this year, Steyn announced that he is opting out of the IPL 2021 but will play other leagues around the world.
Too much noise about spin-friendly tracks: Kohli - England managed 112 and 81 in the Ahmedabad Test after scoring 134 and 164 in Chennai as Ravichandran Ashwin and Axar Patel tormented them in turns.
From The Hindu: National News
President takes the first shot of COVID-19 vaccine - Ram Nath Kovind urges all eligible citizens to get vaccinated
In Kochi, frequent price rise of cooking gas triggers squabbles between customers and agencies - Overnight price hikes burn a hole through the pocket of the customers, leaving distribution agents and their delivery boys at the receiving end of the former’s ire
PM photo on COVID vaccine certificates violates poll code, Trinamool tells EC - PM photos have been used on the COVID-19 vaccination certificates even after the announcement of poll dates, alleges Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien
Govt okays 12 new SSB battalions to fortify Nepal, Bhutan borders, tri-junction area - The SSB, with an estimated strength of about 90,000 personnel, is the designated force to guard the open Indian fronts with Nepal (1,751 km) and Bhutan (699 km)
HC dismisses Ebrahim Kunju’s plea as withdrawn - He sought to lift bail condition that he shall not leave Ernakulam
From BBC: Europe
Germany to spy on far-right AfD party, reports say - The intelligence services have not publicly confirmed the move, which the AfD is fighting in court.
Ali Boumendjel: France admits ‘torture and murder’ of Algerian nationalist - President Macron acknowledges that an Algerian nationalist was killed by the French army in 1957.
Covid: France approves AstraZeneca vaccine for over-65s - Older French patients can now get the jab, which had been initially limited to those aged under 65.
Alexei Navalny: US imposes sanctions on Russians - The Biden administration targets Russian officials and entities, in a move co-ordinated with the EU.
Covid: What’s the problem with the EU vaccine rollout? - The coronavirus vaccine is being rolled out across the EU but there have been delays.
From Ars Technica
Jane Does v. GirlsDoPorn: How 22 millennial women brought down a porn empire - GirlsDoPorn deceived vulnerable women to profit off amateur porn—until Jane Does fought back. - link
Merck/J&J deal may help US get enough vaccine for all adults by end of May - Merck will dedicate two facilities to making the newly authorized J&J vaccine. - link
Cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test - Cuttlefish that were better at self-control also performed better on learning tests. - link
Intel hit with $2.2 billion patent judgment - Patents claim methods of varying voltages and clock frequencies to save power. - link
Dish tries to disrupt SpaceX’s Starlink plans as companies fight at FCC - Dish is trying to “expropriate the 12 GHz band” for itself, SpaceX tells FCC. - link
Doctor: I’ve looked at your lab reports and I’m afraid I have some bad news.
Karen: Don’t give me this lab nonsense. I believe in homeopathic medicine, faith-based approaches and healing crystals. All my life, they have never failed me. Now will you do things my way or do I need to see the manager?!?
Doctor: Sure, we’ll do things your way. No need to raise your temper. Why don’t we try an astrology based approach?
Karen: At last a sensible approach.
Doctor: So, what’s your star sign?
Karen: it’s cancer.
Doctor: Well what a fucking coincidence.
1st cake day, this is my favourite joke of the year. Thanks to you all.
