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

• Suddenly, (Some) Republicans Are All In on the Vaccine - The new G.O.P. politics of the pandemic follow the grim new math of the coronavirus for Red America. - link

• Is Cuba’s Communist Party Finally Losing Its Hold on the Country? - Historic protests across the island cast doubt on the regime’s staying power. - link

• Tokyo’s Olympics Have Become the Anger Games - The Olympics are supposed to be a symbol of global togetherness, but Tokyo’s are shaping up to be the least wanted in history. - link

• The Case for Masking Up Again Indoors in New York City - Mark Levine doesn’t want New Yorkers to overreact or underreact to the Delta variant. He does want them to cover their faces when indoors with strangers. - link

• Reconsidering the History of the Chinese Communist Party - On the centenary of the C.C.P., a scholar examines the roots of Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism. - link

From Vox

• Anti-abortion lawyers are finally being honest about what they want from the Supreme Court -

  

  For decades, abortion opponents urged the Court to lie about abortion restrictions. They don’t need to anymore.

  The state of Mississippi begins its brief in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization with a bold claim: The case for overruling Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), two seminal Supreme Court decisions protecting the right to an abortion, is “overwhelming.”

  Dobbs, which the Court will hear this fall, concerns a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. It’s the first major abortion case to receive a full briefing and oral argument since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave the Court a 6-3 conservative majority. And abortion opponents have every reason to be optimistic that the Court’s new majority will use Dobbs to undo the right to an abortion.

  That probably explains why Mississippi’s brief, which argues that “the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion or limit States’ authority to restrict it,” breaks with the tactics anti-abortion lawyers have used to defend restrictions on reproductive freedom. Rather than explicitly asking the Court to overrule Roe, in the past, these lawyers tried to chip away at the abortion right until it is functionally impossible to obtain an abortion in many states.

  Take, for example, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court’s 2016 decision striking down two provisions of a Texas law that imposed expensive architectural requirements on abortion clinics, while also requiring abortion providers to obtain a difficult-to-acquire credential. The goal of this law wasn’t to explicitly ban abortion, it was to secure the Supreme Court’s permission to ban abortion indirectly — by layering so many legal burdens on top of abortion providers that they are eventually unable to comply with the law.

  The law at issue in Dobbs doesn’t explicitly ban all abortions either. But Mississippi’s litigation strategy hopes to make such a ban permissible. If the Court overrules Roe and Casey, that’s the ballgame. State lawmakers will be free to ban abortion outright, and without having to dress their ban up as an attempt to regulate the width of hallways in abortion clinics.

  Anti-abortion lawyers, in other words, are finally being honest about their ultimate goal. Rather than asking the Court to place some arcane and nonsensical limit on Roe and Casey, while simultaneously pretending that these two cases remain good law, Mississippi just asked the Court to eliminate the right to an abortion altogether.

  Justice Anthony Kennedy turned abortion litigation into a dishonest game

  Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired from the Court in 2018, held the pivotal vote on the Supreme Court in abortion cases for many years.

  Kennedy is quite conservative, and he tended to be skeptical of abortion rights. As David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, noted in 2013, Kennedy “has voted to strike down only one of the 21 abortion restrictions that have come before the Supreme Court since he became a justice.”

  Yet, while Kennedy was open to many laws making it harder to obtain an abortion, he refused to overrule Roe outright. Kennedy was one of three co-authors of the Court’s decision in Casey, which weakened Roe, while also retaining “Roe’s essential holding” affirming “the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before [fetal] viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State.”

  Kennedy, in other words, would not have upheld an explicit ban on abortions. But he was willing to uphold many laws burdening abortion rights. So abortion opponents spent the years when Kennedy held the balance of power on the Court drafting more and more aggressive abortion restrictions that purported to be something other than an outright ban.

  The culmination of this strategy was the two provisions of the Texas law struck down in Whole Woman’s Health. That law required physicians who perform abortions to obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, and it also required abortion clinics to comply with the same rules that apply to “ambulatory surgical centers,” facilities that are equipped to perform medical and surgical procedures that are far riskier and more complicated than an abortion.

  Abortion-rights advocates often deride these kinds of laws as “targeted restrictions on abortion providers,” or “TRAP” laws, because they masquerade as regulations intended to make abortion safer, when their real purpose is simply to increase the cost of operating an abortion clinic and drive many clinics out of business.

  As the Court explained in Whole Woman’s Health, the burdens imposed by Texas’s law did little, if anything, to actually improve health outcomes. A major reason why it is difficult for abortion providers to obtain admitting privileges at hospitals, for example, is that hospitals often require doctors to actually admit a certain number of patients in order to maintain those privileges. But abortions are so safe that they rarely result in complications that could lead to hospitalization.

  As Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in Whole Woman’s Health, one clinic in Texas performed more than 17,000 abortions over a decade, and “not a single one of those patients had to be transferred to a hospital for emergency treatment, much less admitted to the hospital.”

  Similarly, the Texas law required all abortion clinics to house expensive surgical facilities. But many of Texas’s abortion clinics do not even perform surgeries — they exclusively offer medication abortions where abortion is induced by pills.

  It should be obvious why, if the Supreme Court had upheld the law at issue in Whole Woman’s Health, that could have been the death knell for abortion rights. If states can enact regulations whose sole purpose is to drive up the cost of performing abortions, they eventually would be able to drive all abortion clinics out of business. Perhaps Texas might have required all abortion clinics to be built out of solid gold.

  And yet, even in a world of 24-karat surgical centers, the Supreme Court could have claimed that Roe and Casey remain good law. States still would be forbidden from writing a law that states explicitly that “no one may perform an abortion.” But those states would still be free to ban abortion as long as they were sufficiently dishonest about what they were up to.

  It’s worth noting, moreover, that while Whole Woman’s Health was one of the most closely watched cases involving an attempt to restrict abortions through deceptive means, it was hardly a unique case. Abortion opponents both on and off the Court have proposed a raft of limits on abortion rights — ranging from limiting who is allowed to sue in order to challenge an abortion restriction to requiring each individual person who wants an abortion to file their own lawsuit in order to obtain one — that would nominally leave Roe and Casey in place while potentially rendering them unenforceable.

  Yet, with Kennedy gone and Republican appointees controlling a supermajority of the seats on the Court, it’s far from clear that abortion opponents still need to engage in such subterfuge.

  The Supreme Court could still decide to gut Roe in a dishonest way

  Although Mississippi’s lawyers are betting that they have five votes to explicitly overrule Roe and Casey, it’s possible that the Court will fall back on the strategy advanced by abortion opponents in cases like Whole Woman’s Health. Perhaps some members of the Court’s GOP-appointed majority will fear that a decision explicitly overruling Roe will inspire more Democrats to vote in future elections. Or maybe some members of the Court want to maintain the illusion of continuity within the law.

  I don’t know what the Court will do in Dobbs and neither does anyone else. But it’s important to note that, even if the Court does not take Mississippi up on its invitation to openly and honestly abolish the right to an abortion, that doesn’t mean that abortion rights are safe — or even that any vestige of them will still exist.

  Indeed, while Mississippi’s lawyers devote the bulk of their brief to their argument that Roe should be overruled, they do spend a few pages at the end creating a fallback argument — that the Court should “reject any rule barring a State from prohibiting elective abortions before viability.”

  Ever since Roe, the Court has held that the state may impose stricter restrictions on abortions later in pregnancy than it can early in the fetus’s development. Roe divided pregnancy up into trimesters, permitting greater regulation of abortion in the latter two-thirds of the pregnancy. Casey abandoned this framework to focus on “viability,” giving the government broader authority over abortion once a fetus can survive outside of the womb.

  If the Court permits states to impose the same kind of restrictions on pre- viability abortions that those states may currently impose on post-viability abortions, that would severely hobble abortion rights and allow states to forbid most abortions — even if the Court does not explicitly overrule Roe or Casey.

  The point, in other words, is that abortion rights are still in very grave danger, even if the Court pretends to keep Roe or Casey alive.

• Does Congress know what it would take to stop the next pandemic? -

  

Why America can’t allow pandemic preparedness funding to fall prey to short-term thinking.

In the US, pandemic preparedness has long been neglected among national security concerns.

One would think that the harrowing experience of the past year would change that. But in light of recent reports that the $30 billion in pandemic preparedness funding proposed in the American Jobs Plan might be cut to $5 billion in the bipartisan, negotiated compromise, it’s not clear whether Covid-19 has been enough to teach the US its lesson.

For decades, public health policy experts have tried to convince the US government to take real steps to prepare for a respiratory pandemic.

“It is the prospect of another such pandemic [like the Spanish flu] — not a nuclear war, or a terrorist attack, or a natural disaster — that poses the greatest risk of a massive casualty event in the United States,” Ron Klain, now the White House chief of staff, argued in Vox in 2018.

“All of this stuff was a no-brainer 30 years ago,” Amesh Adalja, at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “We’ve been briefing Congress, we’ve been doing this since 1997. We were ignored. All those glossy reports telling people what to do? Those gathered dust in someone’s desk drawer.”

In 2020, the world paid the price. What the pandemic experts had warned of came. It killed millions worldwide, devastated the global economy, and disrupted billions of lives. And not only is Covid-19 still circulating, there’s every reason to believe a worldwide catastrophe like it can and will happen again.

But in an op-ed published earlier this week, Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC, and former US Sen. Tom Daschle reported the potential cuts to pandemic preparedness in the American Jobs Act, President Joe Biden’s signature infrastructure plan.

If true, it underscores a depressing fact: that our policymakers haven’t quite grasped the scale of what’s required to fight the next pandemic.

The original $30 billion Biden asked for is already too small as it is. By the time all is said and done, it is estimated Covid-19 will have cost the world between $16 trillion and $35 trillion. The next pandemic could be even more devastating.

Facing risks of that magnitude, $30 billion is a pittance. Some experts suggest nothing less than an Apollo program for pandemic prevention, with $20 billion a year in spending for 10 years. If such a project made the next pandemic even moderately less bad, it would abundantly pay for itself. If it prevented it, it’d be one of the best investments in history.

Policy is often plagued by short-termism. It’s too easy to think ahead only to the next election cycle, and to think of anything whose benefits are long term and uncertain as “nonessential” and subject to budget cuts whenever convenient. But that short-termism is a betrayal of our future. If Covid-19 hasn’t taught us that, it’s not clear what will.

How we could prevent the next pandemic

The shortsightedness on pandemic prevention is especially galling because pandemics are absolutely preventable.

“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional,” Larry Brilliant, who worked on global smallpox eradication, famously said.

Given the human population worldwide, it’s inevitable that new diseases will emerge — jumping from animal hosts or evolving as particularly virulent strains of endemic diseases. But when that happens, if everything goes right, we can stop those diseases from becoming the next pandemic.

The first step is inventing potential vaccines and antiviral treatments, which we can do even before a virus hits us. “We know that there are certain families of virus that we know are more likely to produce a pandemic pathogen,” Adalja told me. Coronaviruses, for example, were on researchers’ radar even before SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) emerged because of SARS-1 and MERS, both of which have led to deadly outbreaks in Asia.

Despite the potential for a new coronavirus to emerge, the US did not make the massive investments in developing antivirals and vaccines against coronaviruses that would, in hindsight, have been useful to have. But even the smaller investments which the country did make into SARS-1 and MERS research paid dividends.

“The fact that we had vaccines within a year is testament to the work on SARS and MERS,” Adalja said. “The SARS and MERS work did produce information, such as the spike protein is important for immunity — so they knew right away, we need a vaccine against the spike protein. Even though we didn’t have any SARS vaccines or any MERS vaccines ready to go, that early work was useful.”

The government could fund such research into every class of virus that is considered likely to produce a potentially pandemic pathogen.

And the breakthroughs that would no doubt come from that research wouldn’t only protect humanity against pandemics. They might also lead to a vaccine for the common cold or for the flu, or to new antivirals that reduce the death toll of viral illnesses.

The next step is disease surveillance — observation of the spread of respiratory illnesses around the world — so that when a new disease emerges, we get an accurate picture of its spread right away.

By late December 2019, hospitals in China were already seeing an upswing in severe respiratory illness cases. Countries with effective disease surveillance, like Taiwan, jumped into action then, with public health officials getting on airplanes from Wuhan to screen passengers — weeks before China officially acknowledged that an outbreak was underway.

One promising part of that is what’s called pathogen-agnostic screening. When a person goes into the doctor’s office with a respiratory illness, they will get tested for Covid-19. If they don’t have Covid-19, they might get tested for the flu — or they might not. Many people are assumed to have the flu without screening.

The technology exists to change that. “The technology is now to the point where you don’t just go test for Covid, yes or no, test for flu, yes or no. We can test for hundreds of pathogens that cause respiratory diseases,” Andy Weber, the former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, who now works on biosecurity for the Council on Strategic Risks, told me.

That means we have the ability to develop a system where if someone comes in sick, they’ll get tested automatically. And if they’re sick with something unprecedented, their doctors will know right away.

“If the Chinese had had this in place, it would’ve been nipped in the bud,” Weber said.

That tactic needs to be combined with improved state and local public health infrastructure. During Covid-19, state and local contact tracing was quickly overwhelmed. States didn’t have testing or quarantine capacity.

“States could not hire contact tracers,” Adalja said. “They were using very primitive kinds of pen-and-paper contact tracing. They have poor communications with hospitals and health care facilities. They’re constrained with hiring people.”

As a result, the US ended up fighting the pandemic in the dark.

If the funding proposals now under consideration had passed two years ago, the US “would have had public health departments that are able to really rapidly respond, we would have had tests that are available earlier,” Frieden told me.

“We would have known a month earlier that Covid was spreading in New York City. We also would have been able to do much better contact tracing, so we would have understood more and earlier where Covid was spreading and how to reduce that,” he added. “We would have had better infection control, so doctors who are dead today wouldn’t be dead.”

A “cycle of panic and neglect”

Critical to changing all of that is more funding.

In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, someone mailed anthrax — a deadly bacterium — to the offices of several US senators and several media outlets. Five people died, and interest in biosecurity soared. For a few years, Congress spent lots more money on preparing America for identifying and combating infectious diseases. Biodefense funding spiked to $8 billion from $600 million.

But then health security saw year after year of cuts, and it was back down to about $1.5 billion by 2018.

That dynamic has been dubbed by experts the “cycle of panic and neglect.” When bioterrorism or a potential pandemic hits the headlines, readiness gets funded. When a few years have gone by, it stops.

And right now, if reports of the funding cuts are to be believed, we’re doing even worse than that: racing straight to “neglect” before the pandemic has even ended.

Ending the threat of pandemics in the United States means a change in approach. Weber’s proposal is a “10 + 10 Over 10” plan — that’s $10 billion to the Department of Defense for biological threat preparedness and $10 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services to prevent biological threats in the future, over 10 years. That would allow for building mRNA vaccine factories that crank out vaccines year-round; upgrading public health infrastructure, testing, and reporting systems; and researching the biggest threats ahead so America can be prepared for them.

That might sound like a lot of money. But it pales in comparison to the human and economic cost of normal infectious diseases, let alone Covid-19, let alone the diseases much worse than Covid-19 that have the potential to be around the corner. According to one study, the annual economic burden of influenza alone in the US is estimated at $11.2 billion. Covid-19’s toll worldwide has been estimated at perhaps $22 trillion. And future pandemics could be worse: As Frieden points out, “Covid kills one out of 200 people,” and has killed millions to date. “There are diseases that kill one out of two people,” he told me.

“We have to do everything we can to make sure that this is the last pandemic we have to deal with,” Weber argued. With that goal even potentially in reach, it seems unwise to try to scrimp on the science and health work that is needed to reach it.

What’s presently under discussion in Congress is considerably less ambitious than Weber’s proposal. The American Jobs Plan, at least in its original form, includes $30 billion in pandemic preparedness spending — but it’s a one-off allocation, not a permanent new commitment to fighting pandemics.

Still, there’s no disputing that it would make a huge difference. It would allow for foundational research like what led to mRNA vaccines — and it’d be a step toward meeting the administration’s goal to have the capacity to make enough vaccines for the whole population in a matter of weeks. It would revamp the systems that every American has witnessed failing to protect them during the pandemic.

“Every American has been touched by this, and it was completely and entirely a failure of government,” Adalja told me. “This would have been preventable with the correct government actions.”

And that $30 billion could, ideally, be a down payment on further commitments. A dozen senators have cosponsored the Public Health Infrastructure Saves Lives Act, which would commit $4.5 billion a year to pandemic prevention. With such commitments, Covid-19 could genuinely be a turning point for how we fight disease.

That’s why it’s so depressing to learn that the way negotiations are currently trending, a one-time boost of $30 billion — already inadequate — might be whittled down further.

It’s impossible to see that as anything but an utter failure of vision — an inability to believe that doing better than the country’s disastrous Covid-19 response is even possible. There should be broad, bipartisan agreement that what the nation has gone through over the last year must never happen again — and there should be broad awareness that, in many ways, the world got lucky with Covid-19: The next pandemic could be far deadlier or particularly dangerous to children or harder to vaccinate against.

A government focused not just on the present but on the risks its citizens face 10, 20, or 30 years down the line should be willing to make a down payment on a better future. But it’s also entirely possible that the country needs an even more expensive lesson before it learns anything.

• Did the Covid-19 Olympics have to be a mess? -

  

  This year’s Olympics were always going to be a challenge. Now they’re a showcase for broader failures.

  Members of the Ugandan boxing team tested positive for Covid-19 after landing in Tokyo back in June. In early July, a Serbian rower did too. The weekend before the Games began, the first people in the Tokyo Olympic Village tested positive for Covid-19; first, two South African soccer players, then a Czech volleyball player.

  American tennis player Coco Gauff had to drop out of her first Olympics because of a positive test, and an alternate gymnast for Team USA — though fully vaccinated — tested positive for Covid-19, and is now spending the Games in her hotel room, under quarantine. A US men’s beach volleyball player, testing positive, will likely be disqualified from a weekend match.

  Since July 1, more than 75 people associated with the Olympics have gotten back positive Covid-19 results.

  Then again, what do you expect when you host a mass sporting spectacle during a pandemic?

  The International Olympic Committee postponed the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games last year as the coronavirus spread around the globe, shutting down international travel and leaving countries on strict lockdowns.

  If the delay was intended to push the Olympics into a post-pandemic world, the opposite happened. The pandemic evolved, and is now in one of its most dangerous phases, fueled by variants — specifically delta — and global inequity around vaccinations.

  But the Olympics are still trying to be, well, the Olympics. Yes, there is a pandemic playbook, and safety protocols, like frequent testing. Yes, the stadiums will be largely empty of fans. Yes, there are vaccines, but the International Olympic Committee did not mandate them, though it worked to help teams access shots, saying about 80 to 85 percent of those in the Olympic Village would be vaccinated.

  The Olympics were always going to be extraordinarily difficult to pull off in a pandemic, but some of the mess was foreseeable, and maybe even avoidable — though it might have meant pulling off a different sort of Olympics than the one we’re used to.

  “It’s fingers crossed, hopeful, magical thinking — without really thinking about the risks, and what could they have done to lower those risks for everyone involved,” Lisa Brosseau, a public health expert and research consultant with the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, who has written, along with her colleagues, on how the Olympics could have mitigated some of these Covid-19 risks.

  So much of the debate focused on whether to cancel the Olympics altogether, something that was supposedly still a possibility in recent days. The course of the pandemic is beyond the control of the Olympic officials, of course, but the question is whether the planning or protocols around the Games should have changed, too. And now, with the Games already on, it is nearly impossible to change course.

  Covid-19 disruptions are likely to be a defining feature of this 2020 Olympiad. It will not be a moment, as some hoped, of a world showing solidarity amid the toll and tragedy of the pandemic. Instead, it will be a showcase for just how far the world still has to go to defeat Covid-19 — and the very real risks of not facing up to that reality.

  A 2020 Olympics for a 2021 pandemic

  The pandemic is worse now than when the 2020 Games were first postponed. More than 191 million Covid-19 cases have been detected as of July 2021, and more than 4 million people have died, according to the World Health Organization. Japan, the Olympic host, is seeing another surge of Covid-19 cases, low compared to US levels but almost double the caseload around this time in 2020. Tokyo recorded more than 1,900 new cases on July 22 — a 155 percent increase from the previous week’s average.

  The burden of the pandemic is now largely on unvaccinated people, split into two groups. The first is people who are reluctant to or refuse to get a shot, though it’s generally easily available to them, as in the United States. Then there’s the much larger group: the rest of the world, the majority of whom live in places were vaccines aren’t readily available. About 26 percent of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, but just a little more than 1 percent of them are in low-income countries.

  Still, even countries that sought to vaccinate their way out of the pandemic — Israel and the United States, for example — are seeing a troublesome uptick in cases. The delta variant is driving up cases everywhere; daily global coronavirus infections are up more than 40 percent compared to a month ago, according to the New York Times.

  Though the vaccines largely protect against severe illness and death, the high numbers of still-unvaccinated people make it an imperfect firewall — one that could grow weaker if the virus continues to spread and continues to change.

  Olympic officials, back in 2020, couldn’t have predicted these exact circumstances. Yet experts said that it became clear months ago that the existing protocols were going to be insufficient to fully prevent the spread of Covid-19 at the Olympics. And while the Olympic organizers made changes to their pandemic playbook on the margins, the commitment to a “safe and secure” Olympics wasn’t as agile or flexible as it might have been.

  “This isn’t a pandemic of 2020, and so the Olympics can’t be, either,” said Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at the University of California San Francisco. “The old rules don’t count anymore.”

  For one, there’s a lot of “hygiene theater,” as Chin-Hong called it. These are things like temperature checks for athletes returning to the Olympic Village, though these have serious limitations, and things like restricted seating and plexiglass barriers in the dining room, which aren’t going to do much and may even give people a false sense of security.

  Chin-Hong even suggested handing out N95 masks, or something more protective, for athletes as they interact with people, rather than just surgical or cloth masks. Experts have also raised concerns about the ventilation systems in the hotels, venues, and the Olympic Village. Updating those could do a lot more to protect athletes than, say, spacing those cardboard beds.

  And then there’s the so-called Olympic bubble. Only athletes are permitted to stay in the Olympic Village, and they’re supposed to follow Covid-19 protocols, like wearing masks and social distancing. They’re not supposed to leave for a reason other than attending a competition, and they can face penalties if they break those rules.

  But athletes aren’t required to stay in the Olympic Village; they could stay at hotels, for example. Also staying at hotels are media and coaches and support staff. All those people will be traveling to — and interacting with each other and with volunteers and staff — at events. In other words, the bubble very quickly bursts.

  Daily saliva tests will help catch infections, but once someone has a positive Covid-19 test, it’s already too late — the call is coming from inside the house, so to speak.

  “The issue with surveillance systems like that is that you are detecting exposure that already happened. And from there, you try to [pick] out whoever got exposed, potentially, and isolate those folks,” said Tomoko Udo, assistant professor in the department of health policy, management, and behavior at the School of Public Health at University at Albany. “But once it’s in, and it starts to spread really fast, you can’t really do much. It’s catch-up.”

  Tracking down close contacts could also get complicated. Tokyo organizers are having Olympic participants download a contract tracing app for mobile devices, except athletes probably don’t have their cellphones on them when they compete. And how those contacts are treated varies on a case-by-case basis, which is exactly the kind of thing that always goes well when you’re trying to maintain fair standards of competition.

  With the Olympics starting now, officials can’t entirely change course. Olympic officials could try to tighten the bubble a little bit, they could hand out more effective masks, but these are improvements on the edges. As Chin-Hong said: “You can’t take the elephant out of the room.”

  The Olympics are really all of us right now

  The cracks in some of the Olympic Covid-19 protocols seem easy to spot now. The Games’ organizers, like everyone else, were betting on vaccines. That, as Brosseau said, is more Olympic “magical thinking.”

  “It has always it’s been about ‘we’re going to get everybody vaccinated, it’s going to be fine,’” Brosseau said. “And we don’t need to really worry about these other things — all these other things are more for show really, the Plexiglas barriers and people bringing their face masks.”

  It’s not just the Olympics. Entire countries engaged in this magical thinking, hoping to rely on herd immunity brought about by vaccines. But that strategy wasn’t ever really practical for the Olympics, either.

  Most obviously, the IOC did not mandate vaccination to participate in the Olympics. The IOC made a deal with Pfizer/BioNTech to help countries get vaccines, and many countries prioritized the vaccination of athletes.

  But experts said that even though the overall figure of 85 percent — provided by the IOC — seems quite high, it’s more complicated on closer inspection. Different countries might have different vaccines, which have different levels of effectiveness, and also have different guidelines on who can get the vaccine (say, people under 16, who can compete in the Olympics). The level of vaccination may vary for specific delegations or teams, and they may be coming from a place where, even if they’re vaccinated, Covid-19 cases are high. Some athletes were always going to refuse vaccination if it wasn’t required.

  And so far that seems to be the case. According to the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee medical chief, about 100 out of America’s 613 athletes are unvaccinated — and there is no question that shots were available to them. On top of that, Japan’s rate of vaccination is only about 23 percent, and most of those shots have gone to elderly people and health care workers. Japan planned to vaccinate its Olympic volunteers, but what of taxi drivers or hotel workers or others whom Olympic participants may come in contact with? Among those who have tested positive in recent days (though their vaccination status is unclear) were a volunteer, six contractors, and one Games staffer, according to Reuters.

  Vaccines seemed like a safety net in pulling off the Olympics, but it’s clear that safety net was not enough if the goal was to stop any spread of the virus. In a way, the Olympics are a reflection of a broader dilemma at this stage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccinations are astonishingly effective at preventing severe illness and death, and they are helping places get back to a version of normal. People are also tired and fatigued of additional restrictions, even as the virus is roaring back, or surging in places it never left. “You see this pressure and conflict and tension arise,” Udo said.

  That same tension exists in the Olympics. Tokyo faces restrictions on business and restaurants, but athletes are coming from all around the world to the city. Covid-19 is sidelining athletes, and the leaderboards and gold medal tallies will have a permanent caveat.

  Then again, it’s the Olympics, we’re doing it! We’ll watch world records being broken, and witness these incredible feats of human speed and agility, and it will look and feel to many of us watching from afar like the Olympics we’ve always known.

  But it maybe shouldn’t have been the Olympics we’ve always known.

  The protocols and vaccinations are important, and they will help create a barrier against Covid-19. But maybe the most effective way to minimize the risks at the Olympics might have turned the spectacle into something entirely different. Brosseau and her colleagues, for example, suggested potentially spacing out the Olympics over many weeks, with different sports competing at different times, to eliminate the number of people in Tokyo all at once.

  Maybe different athletes or sports should have followed different protocols — whether they play indoors or outdoors, whether people play on teams or compete solo — rather than a one- size-fits-all approach.

  “It’s not that perfect ‘everyone-is-together-enjoying-this-amazing-event,’” Brosseau said. “But it’s a pandemic, for goodness sake. It’s still the Olympics. But no — they really wanted to have the Olympics be as much as possible like it is.”

  And maybe Olympic fans do, too. Except, a year and change into the pandemic, the one constant of the pandemic has been that no amount of magical thinking can will it away.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Paralympic-bound shuttler Pramod Bhagat named Differently Abled Sportsman of the Year - Bhagat won two gold medals and a bronze at the Dubai Para Badminton Tournament this year

• Tokyo Olympics | Mirabai Chanu caps eventful journey with heroic performance - She has overcome injury setbacks, economic hurdles to become Olympic medallist

• Mirabai Chanu: ‘I have been dreaming of this for the past five years’ - This is India’s first silver in weightlifting. India’s only previous medal in weightlifting was a bronze by Karnam Malleswari.

• President, PM congratulate Mirabai Chanu for India’s first medal at Tokyo 2020 - Chanu ended India’s 21-year wait for a weightlifting medal at the Olympics.

• India’s Mirabai Chanu wins silver at Tokyo Olympics - The 26-year-old ended the country’s wait for a weightlifting medal at the Olympics

From The Hindu: National News

• Parambikulam Tiger Reserve to conduct online video competition to observe Global Tiger Day on July 29 - Entries to be accepted from July 29 on Instagram and Facebook pages of Parambikulam Tiger Reserve

• Track restored for rail traffic - Landslips were reported near Dudhsagar on the Karnataka-Goa border

• Experts raise alarm over increasing incidence of hypertension - Project PrACHI- Prioritizing Advocacy for Control of Hypertension in India, was launched by the Family Planning Association of India, with support from Global Health Advocacy Incubator, a press release said

• ‘No’ to RTI plea for copy of warrant of appointment of Haryana Governor - It’s communication between two constitutional functionaries in a fiduciary relationship, says President’s secretariat

• I am not lobbying for CM’s post, says Nirani - Mines and Geology Minister Murugesh Nirani, whose name was doing the rounds in political circles as a replacement of B.S. Yediyurappa, denied that he

From BBC: Europe

• Covid: Moderna jab approved for teenagers in EU - Vaccination with Moderna’s jab can now be extended to adolescents, the EU medicines watchdog says.

• German TV apologises for smearing mud on clothes at flood site - A video showed Susanna Ohlen rubbing herself with dirt before broadcasting from a flood-hit town.

• Tips from the Netherlands on how to build a nation of cyclists - Some tips from the Dutch Cycling Embassy on how to make bikes the easiest and safest way to travel.

• Daily Covid cases down for third day in UK - New infections are down but it is too soon to say if cases have peaked, say experts.

• Tokyo Olympics: Russian archer faints in heat & rowing schedule changed due to weather - A Russian archer faints in intense heat during Olympic qualifying and the rowing schedule is changed with the Tokyo weather in the spotlight as the Games officially open.

From Ars Technica

• Apple and Roku have newly upgraded streaming remotes—are they worth buying? - New remotes bring sensible upgrades, but only if you’re tied to these streamers. - link

• The Tokyo Olympics could be a COVID-19 “super evolutionary event” - The Games could provide a place for variants to spread and return home with athletes. - link

• An explosive spyware report shows limits of iOS, Android security - Amnesty International sheds alarming light on an NSO Group surveillance tool. - link

• Star Trek: Lower Decks S2 trailer promises more scrappy underdog adventures - Also debuting at ComicCon@home: The first teaser for animated series Star Trek: Prodigy. - link

• SpaceX to launch the Europa Clipper mission for a bargain price - Decision comes after shaking issue with SLS rocket made it untenable. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Keepers at a zoo realized that a lone female gorilla that was recently brought in for habitation was badly in heat. -

  Because of this the gorilla was acting very amorous with the keepers every time they tried to feed her. So they figured if she just had sex that she might calm down.

  It was then they approached a rather dumb janitor and asked him if he’d like to have sex with the gorilla for $500.

  The janitor laid down three ground rules.

  1: He didn’t wanna have to kiss her.

  2: He’d like her to be freshly washed.

  And 3: He’d need another week to come up with the $500.

  submitted by /u/DaFoxtrot86
  [link] [comments]

• What’s better than enchiladas? -

  n+1 chiladas.

  (sharing this joke I came up with tonight while making enchiladas, because my family didn’t find it funny).

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

• Fox News actually saved my life. -

  I was in a coma for 7 years, but one day one of the nurses changed the channel on my TV to Fox and I had to get up to turn it off.

  submitted by /u/Chainsmoker88
  [link] [comments]

• What do you give to someone who hasn’t moved a muscle in over a year? -

  A trophy

  submitted by /u/Acgs27
  [link] [comments]

• I used to make jokes at work during meetings, and I could really get people laughing. Then COVID hit, and all our meetings were online. I’d still make jokes, but no one would laugh… -

  Not one. At first, I thought it was just because everyone was muted. It turns out, they didn’t find me remotely funny.

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