You’re invited to a plant-based party on the Island of Explained.
Today, Explained to Kids is back for a second season. In each episode of this Vox podcast, a group of friends takes a journey to the Island of Explained. Kids (and adults) come along to explore the magical island and meet its whimsical inhabitants, all while tackling some of the biggest questions in the world. This summer, we’ll answer questions about how to make the future better through the way we eat, care for our environment, listen to each other, and more.
In Today, Explained to Kids: Plant-based party, an invitation to a vegan party sends producers Kiarra and Izii to the Island, where a giant who once ate people explains why he switched to a plant-based diet — and why that diet might be beneficial for humans, too.
Listen to the episode with the young people in your life — or just because — and then come back here to download our educational activities that build on what we learned in the episode. Thanks to early childhood education specialist Rachel Giannini for developing our learning materials!
You can also read the full transcript of this episode below:
And listen to more Today, Explained to Kids episodes:
For season two, Today, Explained to Kids is teaming up with KiwiCo to bring four new episodes to life with fun and enriching home-based activities to create a seamless listening and hands-on experience.
Election deniers Kari Lake and Mark Finchem could soon be one election away from running Arizona.
There seem to be an endless number of Republican primary races in Arizona that all hinge on two things: The legitimacy of the 2020 election, which was challenged more dramatically in Arizona than any other state, and fealty to Donald Trump.
State House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who testified to the January 6 committee about pressure he faced from Trump associates to unwind the 2020 election, has a serious primary challenge. The race to challenge Sen. Mark Kelly (D) features five Republicans — including state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, whom Trump supporters are still hounding to challenge election matters, and the Trump-backed election denier Blake Masters.
And Kari Lake and Mark Finchem have made Trump’s election lies a centerpiece of their campaigns for governor and secretary of state, respectively, the two offices that have the most direct influence on elections. They’ve formed something like an unofficial ticket, which has gotten a hearty boost from Trump himself.
Lake’s chief GOP primary opponent, Karrin Taylor Robson, has used an influx of her own money and endorsements from more establishment GOP figures like Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and former Vice President Mike Pence to make the race competitive in the home stretch. Finchem has three challengers, including some who aren’t election deniers, but he remains the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. The winners will face Democratic nominees for open seats in the competitive purple state.
To understand how those races are shaping up — and what’s at stake in them — I spoke to two Arizona Republic reporters: Mary Jo Pitzl is a senior reporter covering the secretary of state’s race, and Stacey Barchenger is a state politics reporter focused on the gubernatorial election. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Natalie Jennings
Looking from the outside, it seems like what happened in Arizona in 2020 and the aftermath of it — particularly the Maricopa County ballot review sanctioned by the state Senate — is still at the heart of these races. Am I missing anything?
Mary Jo Pitzl
2022 is about three-quarters about 2020. We are still relitigating the 2020 election in the campaigns and we’ve got some legal actions moving. Candidates Lake and Finchem are in federal court trying to ban the use of any kind of electronic machines in election tabulation. It’s all carryover from 2020.
Natalie Jennings
Could you two give me an overview of the primaries? Let’s start with the GOP governor’s race.
Stacey Barchenger
So there are four candidates still in the race, and there are two tiers. Lake’s a former television news anchor for the Fox affiliate here in Phoenix. She was there for 22 years. Early last year, she renounced journalism. She said she didn’t believe in it anymore. A couple of months later, [she] announced she was running for governor. I think Trump and Lake have a chemistry unlike what I’ve seen between him and other candidates in other states. She has the sort of populist appeal that I think he had, and really used to speak to voters.
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
Also in the top tier, you have Taylor Robson, who comes from a political family. She has not run for statewide office before. Her career is in law and development and the real estate world. She was on the board of regents, which oversees our three public universities in Arizona. She recently has been gathering endorsements and support from traditional Republicans. Mike Pence and Donald Trump held rallies last Friday in Arizona — dueling rallies that were very much seen as competing for the future of Arizona and the future of the state Republican Party.
When I first got here last year, political analysts said that this was Lake’s race to lose. She was so far ahead. But that is not the case anymore. Taylor Robson has narrowed the gap. I think it’s within reach for either of them, which has made the last couple of weeks so contentious.
Natalie Jennings
What about the secretary of state race?
Mary Jo Pitzl
On the Republican side, for secretary of state we’ve got four candidates. The most prominent is Finchem. He’s currently a state lawmaker. He was the first Trump-endorsed candidate in Arizona this cycle. He was present near the Capitol on January 6. He was out there to give a speech, he said, at one of the rallies. That didn’t happen because of scheduling problems, but he did join the crowd that marched to the Capitol. He says he did not go inside. He has been subpoenaed for some of his records involving that.
He has been a very loud and consistent election denier, maintaining that Trump lost the election, that he was cheated out of it. He helped host two different forums in Arizona, supposedly bringing forward evidence of problems with the 2020 election. He has made it very clear that if he sees a scintilla of impropriety in the upcoming elections, he will demand a hand recount. He is a big proponent of no machines, and thinks that all votes should be cast on a ballot in person on Election Day, and hand-tabulated.
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Steve Helber/AP
Also running is state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, who sponsored [an election reform bill after 2020] widening the margin that was needed to demand a recount to 0.5 percent. [State Rep. Shawnna] Bolick, another state lawmaker and candidate, also introduced election-related bills that would allow the legislature to reject the electors chosen by the voters and have the legislature replace them with electors of their own choosing. That legislation didn’t even get a hearing, but it got a lot of attention.
Lastly, we have the outsider candidate, advertising executive Beau Lane. He has drawn the support of the Republican establishment. Ducey endorsed him late in the cycle. He’s pulled in lots of money — almost as much as Finchem. We’re talking above the $1 million mark, which is unheard of for secretary of state races. He is seen as the biggest threat to Finchem for the Republican nomination.
Natalie Jennings
Can you tell me exactly what the state secretary of state’s role is in Arizona’s elections?
Mary Jo Pitzl
The thing that’s most relevant is that the secretary of state is charged with certifying the election results, which [current secretary of state and Democratic gubernatorial candidate] Katie Hobbs did in late 2020. I might add that she did it in an undisclosed location because of all the threats that were out there.
Finchem, the leading Republican candidate, has indicated that he would not automatically certify the results. … Bolick has also said she would not immediately rush to certify the results, even though the law says you’ve got to do it.
Elections are run by the 16 county recorders. The secretary of state has a coordinating role, and can certainly have a lot to do with certifying the accuracy of the machines that are used to tabulate votes, and set out the procedures by which elections are conducted through the elections procedure manual, which has been another big fight that is extending into the courts.
Natalie Jennings
And what is the governor’s role in the election process?
Stacey Barchenger
The governor is involved in the certification process and signs off on the results.
If you recall back to 2020, Gov. Doug Ducey was in a ceremony to certify Joe Biden’s win in Arizona when his cellphone goes off and it’s “Hail to the Chief.” That was his ringtone for Donald Trump. He silenced the call, forever putting himself in Trump’s bad graces.
Mary Jo Pitzl
I would add that especially the governor, but also the secretary of state — they have big bully pulpits to talk about these things. Some of our candidates, I have no doubt, would use that bully pulpit to maximum effectiveness.
Natalie Jennings
What is the market in Arizona for a less extreme Republican candidate? Is there enough of one that any of these candidates who aren’t Trump-aligned could win in a Republican primary?
Mary Jo Pitzl
You do have your conservative, traditional Republicans, many of whom are women, who aren’t going to go for the real far-right candidates. In the secretary of state’s race, where there are four candidates, it could split the votes. Finchem is probably going to have that very strong Trump base, and that’s basically all he needs to win.
Stacey Barchenger
I think this race is one of the first clear tests we’ll have of which faction of the Republican Party dominates in Arizona. It comes after 2020, and after our ballot review, which was expensive and kept Arizona in the national headlines for so long. There is a segment of the Republican Party that is tired of that. With Taylor Robson being very willing to campaign hard and spend so much of her own money, it puts within reach and gives us a chance to see if a more traditional Republican can win.
Natalie Jennings
Ducey has weighed in and endorsed Lane and Taylor Robson. But does he maintain much influence with the Republicans who are going to be voting next week?
Stacey Barchenger
Ducey is complicated. His endorsement risks alienating any Trump supporters since the former president has taken multiple shots at Ducey. They’re not friends anymore. Then again, Lake has locked down the Trump base in Arizona, so I’m not so sure that Ducey really had much room to alienate anybody.
He certainly is still very powerful, nationally, through his chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association. He’s very well liked in the business community, so his endorsement certainly tells that community where they should land.
Natalie Jennings
So the election issue is going to certainly animate part of the Republican base. How do you feel like that is going to play in a general election? Are Arizona voters going to be really put off by a candidate who won on election denialism, or are other things going to be front of mind?
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Ross D. Franklin/AP
Stacey Barchenger
One of the unique things about Arizona is about a third of our registered voters are independents. They are who you need in the general to win. And they have handed victories to Doug Ducey, and they’ve handed victories to Mark Kelly, Kyrsten Sinema, and Joe Biden.
The general election is going to involve some references to 2020, but it’s to be determined how much. People are really worried about inflation. Phoenix has crazy-high housing prices, and inflation is worse here than in a lot of other places. I suspect we’ll see candidates in the general talk more about that than 2020. This answer comes with a huge caveat that it depends who the nominee on the Republican side is.
Mary Jo Pitzl
When it comes to the general, we’re likely to have a couple of initiatives on the ballot that could draw out more centrist and left-leaning voters, such as a ban on dark money and a whole raft of election reform measures.
For the secretary of state’s race, it’s all going to be played up as a fight to preserve democracy. Do you want to have the election denier and Mark Finchem assuming he wins? On the Democratic side, they will be fierce advocates for protecting the way we have been running elections.
Natalie Jennings
I see Democrats are now weighing in as they have in other races, spending with ads meant to boost Lake, pointing out her extremism. They’d rather run against her than Taylor Robson.
Stacey Barchenger
They think Lake might be easier to beat because she has so closely adhered to the false claims of election fraud. If Lake is the nominee and Hobbs, the current secretary of state, is the Democratic nominee, our general is probably going to focus pretty heavily on 2020 because you have the chief defender and the chief denier in Arizona going head-to-head.
Natalie Jennings
What about in the Senate primary? Are the dynamics any different than in these races?
Stacey Barchenger
I mean, there’s no Democratic challenger to Mark Kelly. He’s raising a ton and spending a ton already. The GOP side is more interesting. Our current attorney general, Brnovich, also has some bad blood with Donald Trump, but he was at one point seen as a frontrunner. But recently, the talk has really focused on Blake Masters. He got Trump’s endorsement and has basked in that glow. With Trump weighing in on so many of our races here in the primary, that’s really the storyline that we are watching on Election Day: How powerful is his grip on Arizona Republican voters, still?
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
Mary Jo Pitzl
There are five Republicans in that race. So it doesn’t take a big percentage of the vote to win.
Natalie Jennings
What else should we be focused on as we watch next Tuesday?
Mary Jo Pitzl
There’s a really tight race for secretary of state on the Democratic side; there’s more happening publicly on that than on the Republican side.
Democrats have a former Maricopa County recorder, Adrian Fontes, who is in charge of elections there, running against a state lawmaker, Reginald Bolding, who is the leader of the Democrats in the House. The race has recently gotten a lot more attention because Bolding is associated with a number of nonprofits, one of which is putting a lot of money, like close to $1 million, into his campaign. That raises questions about conflict of interest and violations of some campaign election laws because it involves dark money.
Bolding says, look, I’ve put up a firewall, I’m not involved with the decisions that my PAC makes. But all of their money is flowing into his campaign, and the Fontes campaign is trying to capitalize off of that. The few polls that I’ve seen are mixed. Some internal polling shows that the two candidates are pretty close.
Natalie Jennings
Does baggage like that present an opportunity for the Republican nominee, even if it’s Finchem?
Mary Jo Pitzl
If the Democratic secretary of state nominee has a cloud of suspicion surrounding him — there were complaints filed with state offices, the FEC, and the IRS — it would certainly give Finchem a lot to attack with. That said, if Adrian Fontes wins, he has a less-than-pristine record, but it doesn’t involve ongoing administrative complaints.
I don’t know that a wounded Democratic nominee would drive voters to Finchem’s column. More likely, it could dampen enthusiasm and voters might take a pass on the secretary of state race.
Public health leaders are weighing significant trade-offs to ACAM2000, including the vaccine’s side effects.
Monkeypox, a viral disease transmitted through close skin contact that causes flu-like illness and painful rashes, has already infected nearly 19,000 people worldwide, most of them gay and bisexual men. Last week, it was declared a global public health emergency.
As anxiety about the virus mounts, Americans are increasingly frustrated that they don’t yet have widespread access to a vaccine called Jynneos that’s been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for preventing monkeypox transmission and disease. And some are asking why public health authorities aren’t also offering them a different vaccine it has in greater supply, one created to prevent smallpox but that also has a protective effect against monkeypox: ACAM2000.
It’s not that simple, though. Public health leaders are weighing significant trade-offs: While using the US’s stockpiles of smallpox vaccines might seem like an easy fix to this scary situation, the decision is much thornier than it appears. ACAM2000’s potentially concerning side effects, the complex way it has to be administered, and limits on who can safely receive the vaccine seriously complicate the risk-benefit calculation around using it.
Health officials aren’t likely to make ACAM2000 widely available unless something big about the monkeypox outbreak changes. Here’s why.
ACAM2000’s pro and cons
ACAM2000’s best feature right now is its availability: 100 million-odd doses of the vaccine are currently sitting on the shelves at the US Strategic National Stockpile, largely untouched.
But it comes with a long list of contingencies, among them its unwieldy administration. Although vaccinators give most routine immunizations using a simple in-and-out injection technique, ACAM2000 is inoculated into the skin with a two-pronged needle through a series of tiny jabs at the skin — enough to draw a droplet of blood. “You have to train people how to do it,” said Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease specialist at Emory University in Atlanta. “It is not a simple procedure.”
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Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images
Also, immunizers can’t just assume ACAM2000 has worked in a person who’s received it: They need to check for proof — and that proof comes in the form of a single, kind of gnarly pustule that shows up at the inoculation site about a week after getting immunized. In a small percentage of people, the vaccine doesn’t “take” on the first try, and they require another shot.
There are also major limitations on who can safely receive ACAM2000. The vaccine contains live, weakened vaccinia virus — a relative of smallpox and monkeypox that’s not harmful to healthy people but can cause serious illness in people who are severely immunocompromised (including people with advanced or untreated HIV), pregnant people, people with eczema, and infants. That means people in these categories should not receive ACAM2000.
Furthermore, because people who get ACAM2000 shed live vaccinia virus from their inoculation-site pustule until it crusts over (usually about two weeks after vaccination), they have to keep the site carefully covered to avoid infecting someone in one of these risk groups. That means vaccinators should ask recipients about their high-risk close contacts, including pregnant people and those living with eczema or in immunocompromised states, said Amesh Adalja, a health security and emerging infectious diseases expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Delivering ACAM2000 vaccines is not impossible, Adalja added: “The military does it all the time,” he said. “It’s just cumbersome, and it requires medical attention. It can’t just be done in an assembly-line manner.”
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CDC/Getty Images
Critically, although ACAM2000 offered safety upgrades over its predecessor (Dryvax, which was instrumental in eliminating smallpox), it has important side effects. In a study involving about 3,000 people who were given the ACAM2000 vaccine, about one in every 175 people developed myocarditis, a condition in which the heart muscle becomes inflamed. The condition was so mild that it didn’t cause symptoms in most of the people who had it, and researchers only noticed it because they were monitoring patients so carefully for vaccine side effects. However, the finding raised concerns that if ACAM2000 were used in larger groups of people, it might lead to symptomatic or perhaps more severe cases of myocarditis.
All of this creates extraordinary challenges for giving lots of people ACAM2000 vaccines quickly: Before offering this vaccine, the person administering it needs to screen each patient for immunocompromised states and other disqualifiers, informing each one about the vaccine’s risks. “A doctor can do that with a patient — but it’s very hard for a public health agency to make that judgment,” said Adalja.
So while Jynneos can be given in public venues, like festivals and even bathhouses, ACAM2000 would be much better administered in a health care provider’s office. But for now, most vaccines are being given at public health clinics and are not being distributed through many doctor’s offices, said Adalja.
ACAM2000’s shortcomings would matter less if we were dealing with a smallpox outbreak — but we’re not
Despite ACAM2000’s shortcomings, its pros would still clearly outweigh its cons if it were being deployed to protect a large group of people from a credible threat of far-more-deadly smallpox infections, said Adalja. “If this was a smallpox biological weapons attack,” he said, “the risk-benefit ratio would be so different, and nobody would be having this discussion. People would be lining up to get it,” he said.
And whatever the operational challenges of vaccinating people with ACAM2000 at a large scale, they could be overcome, said Nirav Shah, Maine’s public health chief and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers. “If we had a smallpox situation,” he said, “overnight, I would make [my team] experts in ACAM2000 administration. So it’s not insurmountable.”
But the balance of risk and benefit is not as clear when the goal is to prevent monkeypox infections, which are much less likely to be lethal, said Adalja. “Monkeypox is not likely to kill anybody in the United States. It’s hospitalized some percentage; it’s painful; you want to avoid getting it — but it’s not the same societal threat or individual threat that smallpox is,” he said. In the past, 30 percent of smallpox infections led to death.
As of July 20, according to the World Health Organization, five deaths had been reported as part of the current monkeypox outbreak, all of them in Africa. On July 29, Brazil reported a sixth death due to monkeypox in a man with lymphoma and a weakened immune system, and Spain reported a seventh, the first known in Europe, without providing further details.
The Food and Drug Administration, which considers this kind of risk-benefit balance when approving drugs and vaccines for use in the US, has approved ACAM2000 to prevent smallpox but not to prevent monkeypox. And while the CDC has made the vaccine available for monkeypox prevention under an investigational protocol, few states have expressed interest in using it during the current outbreak, said Shah.
Jynneos and other STI prevention tools are what this monkeypox outbreak really needs
If no other vaccine options were available, ACAM2000 might look like a decent way to respond to this monkeypox outbreak. Even Dryvax, ACAM2000’s less safe predecessor, was an option when a cluster of monkeypox infections erupted in the American Midwest in 2003. As part of the response, health authorities vaccinated 30 people with the older vaccine to help stop the outbreak from spreading, with no serious adverse events reported.
The argument to offer ACAM2000 more widely right now would also be stronger if monkeypox threatened to spread rapidly to the entire US population. That’s not a likely scenario: For monkeypox to spread quickly in a group of people, infected people need to have a lot of close skin-to-skin contact with others who also have lots of skin-to-skin contact with others.
That characteristic — what in public health parlance is called “concurrency” — does describe the sexual networks of some people, including some men who have sex with other men. It also describes the network of nonsexual contacts that people in certain professions have, like day care workers or health care providers. But it doesn’t describe the general population, which means that, for most people, the risk of catching monkeypox is generally pretty low.
While the risk to the general population could increase if viral mutations turn out to confer different traits on newer versions of the virus, there is no evidence to prove that’s happened yet.
Meanwhile, many people are rightfully frustrated at Jynneos’s very limited supply. The fact that delays in finishing and shipping Jynneos vaccines occurred, in part, as a result of poor planning by the Food and Drug Administration — and that they’re happening in the wake of so many other institutional failures during the Covid-19 pandemic — only amplifies the collective frustration. It’s also a reminder of the many ways the US government failed members of the LGBTQ community, and gay men in particular, in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Shah said that to seriously consider broader use of ACAM2000 to prevent monkeypox, he’d need to see something unexpected or unusual in either the pathogen or the vaccine. “Evidence that monkeypox was becoming virulent in ways that have yet to be described” would be one reason, he said, or a major problem with Jynneos’s quality or supply might motivate more public health jurisdictions to offer ACAM2000 to selected people as an alternative to waiting for Jynneos.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced plans on Wednesday to send another 786,000 doses of Jynneos to states “as soon as possible,” and has said millions more will be delivered by mid-2023 — but that’s a long time away.
For now, public health authorities seem to have determined that this outbreak doesn’t justify the use of ACAM2000, said Adalja. “That might be an okay choice, but I think it just needs to be something that’s discussed.”
As the public waits for Jynneos availability to be scaled up, one of the things people seem to need most is clear, transparent information about monkeypox infection and the public health response to it. Out of a desire to avoid stigmatizing gay sex — as so much messaging during the HIV/AIDS outbreak did — some health communicators have been overly inclusive about describing who’s at risk. That’s led to confusion about how best to protect the people most likely to need protection — and least likely to know how to access it.
“What we need is information that’s accessible where people are,” said Sebastian Köhn, a Brooklyn resident who recently recovered from a monkeypox infection that resulted in six days of a 103°Fahrenheit fever and two weeks of agonizing pain.
“We don’t need to be hysterical about it. But we do need to get accurate information out there about what this experience can be like,” he said, “because I really think that will help people make decisions that are right for them.”
Update, July 29, 2:50 pm: This story has been updated to reflect additional deaths reported from monkeypox in Spain and Brazil.