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comrade-meow · 3 years ago

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‘Sex work’ advocates and the Nazi propaganda playbook

Last month Nordic Model Now! was asked to participate in a University of Exeter student debate on the proposition that “This house believes that sex work is real work.” As a group, we are ambivalent about taking part in such debates. On the one hand, they are seldom a conducive forum for understanding nuanced and complex issues – but on the other hand, if we don’t participate there is a risk that the audience won’t hear the feminist analysis of prostitution. No one else in the group was able to take part that night, so reluctantly I agreed.

From the comments on social media during the debate, it appears that most of the students were won over by the arguments of the two proponents of the proposition – even though it was clear to me that they both had powerful vested interests in a booming sex industry, that much of what they said was palpably false and much of their argument relied on ad hominem attacks on myself and the other speaker against the proposition.

I was awake much of that night wondering why the students at one of the top universities in the UK appeared to be so unable to see beyond the self-satisfied veneer of the two speakers for the proposition. By the morning I’d resolved to analyse the arguments for the proposition and place them in context, with the aim of providing some help to those coming to similar debates in the future. This article is the result.

The Nazi Manual of Propaganda

Yale professor and expert in the history of fascism, Timothy Snyder, talks of the 1924 Nazi manual of propaganda that advised finding simple slogans and repeating them over and over and framing opposition as disloyalty or worse. Many people, he says, have taken up these tactics in recent years, leading not only to an erosion of the understanding that politics should be about reasoned debate leading towards constructive and informed policy, but also to politics being viewed as a battleground between ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’.

You would need to be blind to not recognise that these tactics have become increasingly common in the UK and US in recent years, and how they have been used to manipulate the public into support for policies that are not in their best interests and that might have catastrophic consequences. Depending on the arena, dissent is framed as hatred, ‘anti-science,’ or not ‘evidence-based,’ and this acts as a powerful silencing force that shuts down critical thinking and coerces acceptance of what is often little more than hot air.

These tactics obscure who are the real beneficiaries of the propaganda – usually people who gain power or who benefit in financial or other ways from whatever is being promoted. Bizarrely, we can observe these practices on both the right and left of the political spectrum.

These tactics were on display in the University of Exeter Debating Society debate. It was by no means the first or only such debate I have taken part in or observed, and nor was it the first time that I saw those promoting the idea that ‘sex work is real work’ consciously or unconsciously using tactics from the Nazi propaganda playbook.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can read the transcript of the debate and I’ll illustrate my claims through an analysis of the key arguments used by the two speakers for the proposition.

Jerry Barnett

The first speaker for the proposition was Jerry Barnett, who’s the author of the book, Porn Panic. He regularly writes on sex and the ‘economics of sex,’ and runs a YouTube channel called ‘Sex and Censorship.’ In other words, the sex industry indirectly provides his daily bread and butter.

After introducing himself, he defined work as: “A voluntary exchange of time or labour for money or some other payment.” He didn’t mention that this definition deviates significantly from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, which is based on mental or physical activity, and he didn’t explain how you can exchange time for money.

One of the key arguments against prostitution being considered normal work is that although it involves some mental and physical activity (pretending the punter’s a great guy, cleaning up afterwards, etc.) the core feature of prostitution is that he uses her body – he gropes and penetrates her. This is not about her being actively engaged in mental or physical activity but someone doing something to her.

What other work involves someone doing something to you while you lie back and endure it? The only thing that I can think of is participating in medical trials – but that’s not considered work – even though you might be paid for taking part.

So, he sneakily expanded the definition to make it easier to argue that a man penetrating your orifices is a normal form of work – although of course he didn’t mention penetration because, like most sex trade lobbyists, he buries such fundamental realities in euphemism and obfuscation.

Interestingly, he did admit that it is invariably men who are the customers (or punters as we call them) and nine or more times out of ten it is women who are being penetrated – or earning an income from ‘sex work’ as he euphemistically described it.

His arguments hinged around two key contentions: First, that ‘sex work’ is well-paid, enjoyable work that has short hours and is particularly suitable for anyone who needs flexibility. I will leave aside the questionable ethics of promoting such a skewed reality to an audience of impressionable young women and men.

Second, that opposition to ‘sex work’ is based on false statistics, the conflation of trafficking and consensual ‘sex work,’ and moralistic values from people who are anti-sex and who attack women’s rights, and refuse to “listen to sex workers who say it’s empowering.”

Most of the time, he expounded on one or other of these claims, all presented with utter conviction, while implicitly framing anyone who disagreed with him as the enemy – the enemy of women’s rights, of rational debate, of men, of more or less everything that he considers good in life.

He dismissed my arguments as “anecdotes” even though most of his were based on wishful thinking rather than hard evidence – while at the same time claiming they were “evidence-based.”

For example, I mentioned that the murder rate of women involved in prostitution is the highest of any group, including in the UK, and that where prostitution is legalised, the murder rate of women in prostitution usually remains high.

His immediate response?

“Anna is good with anecdotes but when she tries to use statistics, they don’t seem to add up at all. I think the last time I looked, the professions with the highest [murder rate] were police and fast-food delivery people who are overwhelmingly men. But yeah, the anecdotes stack up, the statistics don’t.”

I didn’t manage to respond to this until much later in the debate, when I quoted a senior police officer who, when giving evidence at a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry in early 2016, said:

“We have had 153 murders of prostitutes since 1990, which is probably the highest group of murders in any one category, so that gives the police cause for concern.”

I didn’t have the stats for police murders at my fingertips but I looked them up later and found data that suggested there had been about 28 murders of police officers in the UK during the same period (1990-2015). So, there were more than five times as many murders of women involved in prostitution as police officers. I couldn’t find any data on fast food delivery drivers other than a few isolated press reports.

So much for his grasp on statistics. But the damage had been done.

Charlotte Rose, the other speaker for the proposition, compounded the damage by asserting more than once that there had been no murders recorded of women involved in prostitution in New Zealand, where the sex industry is fully decriminalised.

But again, this is untrue. The German women who run the Sex Industry Kills project have documented 10 murders of prostituted women in New Zealand since the sex trade was decriminalised in 2003 along with a number of attempted murders. That is a significant number given New Zealand’s small population (currently less than 5 million).

One of my key arguments was that the sex industry normalises and eroticises male dominance and one-sided sex, and feeds men’s entitlement and reduces their empathy – which are the very attitudes that underpin the current epidemic of rape, child sexual abuse, and other forms of male violence against women and children.

Jerry’s response? That there was not an epidemic of male violence against women. He based this assertion on another made-up definition centred on “a steep sustained increase” – unlike the Oxford Dictionary, which centres the definition merely on a disease being widespread.

He said that not only was there not an epidemic of male violence but that the prevalence of such violence has been on a steep decline for 50 years.

But this is not true. Research has shown that male violence against women has risen significantly in the UK since 2010 and that new forms of gender-based abuse are increasingly prevalent. Even the UN describes male violence against women as a pandemic – which is an epidemic that has spread to cover multiple countries.

I mentioned that the judge in a judicial review about Sheffield Council’s relicensing of Spearmint Rhino (a lap dancing club) had castigated the council for rejecting a large number of objections from women and community members who said that the club had made the streets less safe on the basis that these objections were nothing more than “moral values.” The judge was clear that the objections were not about morality but were issues of equality.

Jerry responded as follows:

“There was briefly the anecdote about Spearmint Rhino and that women didn’t feel safe in the area. The fact is I’ve been involved, I’ve got stripper friends who’ve been involved in these campaigns to keep the venues open and these claims are false. They come up over and over again – that the presence of a strip club in an area makes women less safe. This has been de-proved, debunked, using evidence over and over and over again. So, the idea that women don’t feel safe in the area is a different thing.

Unfortunately, if women don’t feel safe, that’s sad but then they should acquaint themselves with the facts that actually the presence of a strip club in an area does not lead to an increase in sexual violence. And yet these kinds of things are continuously claimed to make it look like this is a woman’s rights movement rather than a morality movement, which it is.”

As for his claim that the increased violence in the vicinity of lap dancing clubs and similar has been “debunked” many times, well I couldn’t find any clear evidence that supported that. Rather I found much to the contrary. The Women and Equalities Select Parliamentary Committee in its report on its inquiry into Sexual Harassment of Women and Girls in Public Places, accepted the considerable evidence that sexual entertainment venues, such as lap dancing clubs, “promote the idea that sexual objectification of women and sexual harassment commonly in those environments is lawful and acceptable.”

But that is not good enough for Jerry. He sticks to what he knows is effective, and repeats sound bites that are simply not true while dismissing solid evidence and presenting any opposition as irrational and the work of moralistic enemies.

As to a man telling women they are being irrational to fear male violence, what can I say? I am not sure anything I would like to say is publishable.

Charlotte Rose

The second speaker for the proposition was Charlotte Rose, who was wearing a t-shirt advertising Fan Baits, a new commercial sex industry advertising platform. She introduced herself as, “a former multi-award-winning escort, current radio presenter and advocate for decriminalisation of sex work.”

She went on to say:

“I just want to discuss something that may affect your moral judgement. How do you all feel when I mention people who work in abortion clinics, abattoirs, factory farmers, nuclear power station workers? To name just a few. For me I do not like it. But just because we do not like what these people do, it doesn’t give us the right to state that their work is not legitimate.”

Since when have people campaigned against factory farming or nuclear power because they didn’t approve of the people who work in those industries? Eccentrics aside, the arguments are always around the impact of those industries on the environment, human and animal health and welfare, and other wider issues – and any personal disapproval is reserved for those who, knowing the damage caused, profit from those industries.

The inclusion of abortion clinics in this list is a sneaky attempt to associate our opposition to the commercial sex industry with extreme anti-woman protestors against abortion. This is a classic example of suggesting guilt by association. For an audience of students whose average age is likely to coincide with the peak age for abortions, this is particularly reprehensible.

Charlotte then said that “until you’ve worked as a sex worker, you’ve got no right whatsoever to dictate anything against [sex work].” This is an argument that we hear repeated over and over in true propaganda playbook style, making people lose their critical faculties and the ability to say, hang on a minute, I’m entitled to have an opinion on factory farming and nuclear power and other industries that have a wide impact, why on earth can’t I have an opinion on the sex industry?

And the truth is, of course you can have such an opinion, and indeed as a concerned citizen, you should – but they don’t want you to. Because once you really look at the sex industry, it’s hard to ignore the rampant abuses and negative impacts on us all, particularly young people.

Like Jerry, Charlotte expounded on how “consensual sex work” has nothing to do with sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. But of course, it does. There is no separate market for trafficked women – they are on the same street corners and in the same brothels and so-called massage parlours as women who may have made some kind of choice to be there. From the outside you can’t tell what led a woman to that place – nor what is holding her there.

As we have written elsewhere, most pimping meets the international definition of human trafficking and most women involved in prostitution have one or more third party (i.e. pimp) feeding off their prostitution. And the evidence of the violence inherent in prostitution is overwhelming.

Charlotte may not be a male chauvinist pig as all the evidence suggests that Jerry is, but she was equally happy to misrepresent our arguments and frame us as hateful and dangerous. She claimed several times that we want to “delegitimise” her work. (What work? Didn’t she say she was a former sex worker?)

In an attempt to convince everyone that her work really is real work, she went into a long explanation of what it entails: dealing with emails (80 a day), text messages (120/day), phone calls (50), notifications, advertising, website SEO, updating her photos, social media and special offers, booking hotels, etc.

She then asked whether that sounded like work – which of course it does. But that was missing the whole point of the debate because she didn’t mention the core aspects of prostitution – sexual intimacy with a stranger who pays you to have his every whim and fetish met with a smile.

She claimed that “delegitimising sex work” damages her credibility and means men won’t see it as legitimate work and means she “can’t get a mortgage by writing down that I’m a sex worker.” But later when she was asked why she was against legalisation of the sex trade (she favours full decriminalisation), she said:

“Legalisation is what happens in Amsterdam, but women, or sex workers […] have to pay for a licence. So, first of all, they’ve got to give a large amount of money to be able to get a licence to give them the ability to work and be in a legitimate premise.

Number one, they cost a lot of money. Number two, their details are known so there’s no anonymity. If someone wants their business not to be known to the government, then unfortunately they won’t be able to work. So, these two massive factors are why we don’t want it to be legalised.”

But hang on a minute… Isn’t she arguing for ‘sex work’ to be considered ‘real work’?

And isn’t one of the things that distinguishes ‘real’ – or legitimate – work from scams, drug dealing and other illegal activity, that when you earn money from ‘real work,’ you fill out a tax return and inform the government about where your income comes from.

So actually it sounds like she doesn’t want it to be regular ‘real work’ after all.

She made other arguments that were equally dodgy. She claimed several times that by expressing our views, we are causing actual harm to sex workers:

“One of my morals is not to cause harm to other people. I would never use my morals to cause harm to anybody. Your moralistic view is causing harm to sex workers.”

She is talking about an industry in which women involved in it have an extremely high murder rate – almost invariably by male punters and pimps – and yet she suggests that the problem is naming and describing this reality.

I explained that our position is that nothing can make prostitution safe and so we need to reduce the amount that happens. Anything that normalizes it means it will increase – it will increase men’s demand for it and more women will be sucked in and be hurt. As her position is that prostitution should be legitimised and become a normal job, you could therefore argue that her position will cause harm – like she claims about us. However, we prefer to argue on the facts and actual evidence.

Conclusion

Judging by the comments on social media, the young audience were swept along by Charlotte’s glamorous and suave act – in the face of which our attempts to focus the debate on the depressing realities of prostitution appeared about as alluring as a school assembly address by Miss Trunchbull on a bad day.

But reality is what we must deal with. Basing public policy on wishful thinking and propaganda invented by those with powerful vested interests is a recipe for disaster. You only need to consider Brexit to understand that.

The Brexit debate was dominated by sound bites and hot air underwritten by hedge fundies and other capitalists salivating at the prospect of looser and weaker regulation of business and commerce. But large sections of the British population were swept along by the propaganda and were blind to the likely dangers. It is only now, four years later, as the actual reality of Brexit is becoming impossible to ignore that opinion polls are showing the majority turning against it and realising it is almost certainly a terrible mistake.

You can’t help wondering in this context why schools and universities are not educating students about the dangers of propaganda and how to recognise and resist it. All of us, but especially young people, need to understand how to identify vested interests, easy answers and soundbites that oversimplify complex subjects, attacks on opponents and unevidenced assertions that they are motivated by hate or worse, and to see these as red flags.

Much of life is complex and messy and inequality and abuse of power is rife. There are no easy answers. Real solutions require hard work and challenging powerful vested interests – not following them like sheep.

#Anglo.txt

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theculturedmarxist · 4 years ago

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Since the pandemic began, there has been a lot of talk about the supposed lack of scientific information available at the outset, a void which led to our failures to contain the virus. The science has evolved, this line of thinking goes, allowing us to pursue the proper mitigation strategies.

On the one hand, of course, that is true for any event like this. Especially one so dramatic, involving a global pandemic with a novel pathogen. We learn more as events proceed.

On the other hand, that’s not a completely accurate reflection of what happened. A lot of what was known from very early on took months, if not more, to make its way into our public health guidelines. Some are still being debated, to great frustration.

Perhaps one the most striking examples of all this is what happened with what we learned, and refused to learn, from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in February of 2020, a tragic natural experiment if there ever was one. Thousands of people were trapped inside a cruise ship as the disease spread. Besides the tragedy, it allowed us to observe what happened with the coronavirus inside a closed environment, revealing many things that could be harder to discern in a large, open city.

I recently watched the HBO documentary on the cursed cruise ship, which was one of the first big outbreaks with global attention. It was, of course, a tragedy: what started with single reported infection ended with 712 known infections and 14 deaths. When it was ongoing, in early February, it was the biggest outbreak outside of China, accounting for half the known cases.

It all started on February 1st, when the first passenger who had disembarked six days earlier was confirmed to have been infected. By February 10, at least 135 people were confirmed to have been infected in a rapidly growing outbreak despite all the passengers being entirely quarantined in their rooms. Despite the quarantine, 567 of the total 2,666 passengers on the ship eventually tested positive.

The first crucial piece of information needed to contain this disease has been the fact that it transmits from people without symptoms. In the HBO documentary, the ship’s doctor reiterates that by February 9th, he was sure that people without symptoms were infecting others. That fact had already been reported in scientific papers, urgently proclaimed by China’s minister of Health in January of 2020, apparent from multiple epidemiological reports already in the record. But many experts in the Western world found that difficult to believe (a topic I covered before for this newsletter), and we did not act upon this crucial piece of information until much later in the pandemic (I wrote about transmission from people who were not sick, and thus could not know they were infected, in March of 2020 in my first op-ed calling for masks—it was so clear even then that I had no problem convincing the fact-checkers at the New York Times).

Watching the documentary, it also becomes very clear that the disease is airborne. There really is no other reasonable explanation for how 567 passengers confined to their rooms, served food by heavily masked people, would get infected at that scale that quickly. In fact, this airborne transmission was quickly discerned by scientists around the world. One of the architects of Japan’s mitigation strategies, Dr. Oshitani, had told me that this was the case that convinced him that the pathogen was airborne (I had interviewed him for this article on aerosol transmission and ventilation for an article I wrote last July).

But it wasn’t evident just to a select few. Here’s an interview with a BuzzFeed science journalist explaining it in a pretty straightforward way on February 23, 2020:

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Cruise ships, as you wrote, are notorious for spreading illnesses. I have to start by asking, are epidemiologists really surprised that after two weeks, more than 600 people have been infected on one ship alone?

VERGANO: The people we spoke to who've studied this sort of thing in the past aren't surprised at all. And it sort of keyed on the question of, how does this virus behave? And now it's becoming apparent - or it seems apparent - we have to be very careful...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Right.

VERGANO: ...That it's more like the flu, like influenza A, where airborne transmission earlier in an infection - during the sneezing rather than coughing stage - seems to be a factor here. And that brings into play the question of how this ship was ventilated and, you know, airborne transmission in general.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, let's talk about the ventilation system.

VERGANO: So the people who've studied this - and one of the surprises here was that there actually has been a lot of research looking into this question - say that ventilation systems on cruise ships aren't any good at stopping airborne diseases from spreading, that there've been studies of flu where you have, in a week's time, you know, one patient infecting 40 people. And likewise, the air filters simply aren't designed to screen viruses. After a while, the whole system gets gunked up with it. And just speaking, sneezing, coughing in your ward room - that gets picked up by the air system, you know, and...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And it doesn't get filtered out and maybe gets passed on.

VERGANO: In the past, that's what's happened. And unless this cruise ship had some kind of impossible-to-have ventilation system, that was going on.

For reference, here’s the contact tracing data on the ship from Japan from February of 2020 which clearly shows that non-close contacts are playing a significant role:

[graph]

The third crucial piece of the puzzle of transmission was determining whether this pathogen behaves like flu (like the H1N1 in 2009), which spreads in a fairly uniform way, or if it was overdispersed, meaning that a few people infect many in clusters. (Here’s an article on that topic I wrote later in 2020).

The overdispersion was harder to discern from Diamond Princess alone. But on that puzzle, too, the early contact-tracing from multiple countries was already clear, that clusters were playing a big role. So clear that here’s the graphic on the role of clusters Japan was already including, in February of 2020, in its documents for contact-tracers:

[img]

And here’s a paper that was published officially by June 30th, but had been available since February of 2020 describing the approach:

[img]

Put all three together: airborne transmission, clusters driving the epidemic, and presymptomatic transmission. Not only do we get a clear and consistent picture of many things that have happened since, we also get the mitigation strategy. Further, all three dimensions support each other: transmission from people not (yet) coughing or sneezing very much argues in favor of aerosol transmission, which explains how large clusters can be driving the epidemic and how transmission in a situation like that ship can occur. And the mitigation and other strategies become clear: pay attention to clusters and ventilation, universal masks, different policies for indoors and outdoors, etc.

But all that happened far away, you might be thinking. We didn’t have examples like that to study here, and there might have been language differences and other barriers. That’s not even really true, as a lot of these papers got published in English as well, but let’s put that aside for a moment. Take a look at the Skagit Valley Choir case in Washington state. Careful, pandemic-aware people showed up at a huge space—distanced, no hugs, hand-sanitizers everywhere—and 53 of them got infected in one evening. They had even propped the door open to avoid knob touching. And yet, this event was not seen as definite evidence of aerosol transmission. It was not even seen as a definite evidence of rare aerosol transmission—a position that would still be wrong, but at least plausible, essentially arguing that happened but it was a one-time thing.

I am not linking to all those who argued against the facts, because focusing on individuals is not correct. But multiple experts insisted for a long time that the infections might have resulted from close contact or fomite transmission during break, or been the result of snack sharing. The CDC report on the Skagit case mentions aerosols as a possibility, but just that: a possibility and emphasizes how fomites and contact were possible as well.

However, as a recent Times article on choir case notes, aerosol scientists had immediately noticed what had happened, and what was actually likely, and what was really a stretch:

If, as the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization were then insisting, the virus was passed mostly through contaminated surfaces, known as fomites, or droplets exhaled from an infected person that would fall within six feet, how and why did so many members of the Skagit Valley Chorale get sick? Could all 53 of them really have touched the same door handle, or orange, or folding chair? Had all of them stood face to face, talking to one another, less than two yards apart? Intuitively, the choristers knew what must have happened: The virus had drifted throughout the room and lingered in the air they breathed.

Eager to make sure others could learn from their experience, Burdick and the chorale leadership readily agreed to interviews. On March 29, an article appeared in The Los Angeles Times that described their rehearsal. One of the millions of readers who saw the story was Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He and nearly 40 of his colleagues were trying to get the W.H.O. to acknowledge that the virus was being transmitted through aerosols — particles that can stay aloft and float considerable distances. (U.S. officials had been playing down this prospect. In late February, the C.D.C. director, Robert Redfield, said the widespread wearing of masks was unnecessary; in early March, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, Anthony Fauci, said much the same.) Jimenez dashed off a note to the reporter, Richard Read, and described the case as “the clearest example of that potential mode of transmission.” He wanted to investigate. Read connected him with Carolynn Comstock, who provided answers to a long list of questions about where everyone sat and what they touched.

Dr. Jimenez did indeed do the necessary investigation and publish a very good paper, tracing what had happened. I’ve since interviewed, and later collaborated with Dr. Jimenez (on an upcoming paper in The Lancet—it will be out soon) and he’s certainly outspoken (as he should be!) but my experience is that he’s been very open to debate and consideration of all evidence. Here’s how he describes it to the New York Times:

The outbreak also provided crucial evidence for scientists seeking to understand how the virus was being transmitted. In the months that followed, Hamner and Jimenez, along with their respective colleagues, published separate studies of the Skagit Valley case. Hamner’s, which appeared in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report last May, noted that “the 2.5-hour singing practice provided several opportunities for droplet and fomite transmission, including members sitting close to one another, sharing snacks and stacking chairs at the end of the practice.” But the notion that those activities caused so many infections, as Jimenez characterized it to me, is “absurd.” He says that that emphasis helped enable the W.H.O. and the C.D.C. to maintain and defend their guidelines. They have since revised them to acknowledge that the virus is transmitted by aerosols — the W.H.O. on July 9, the C.D.C. on Oct. 5. But many scientists, Jimenez included, argue that they still haven’t stressed enough that inhaling aerosols is the dominant mode of infection, which has led entities like schools and public-transportation agencies to put time and money into cleaning regimens that would be better spent on masks and ventilation. “We proved how you get this thing,” Comstock told me. “And it’s so damn frustrating to watch the news and see that they’re ignoring it.”

As I said on Twitter upon reading this article, to imagine fomites playing a major role in such a case—transmission to 90% of the careful, distanced people present in a large space in a single evening—requires contortionist thinking, to put it politely.

[tweet]

And although this may seem hard to believe, contortionist thinking is exactly what we encountered for a long time. Alternative explanations were tossed out: What if the people shared snacks? What if it was the folding chairs? What if, what if, what if? Unlikely, if not downright impossible scenarios kept being raised as reasons for doubt, rather than accepting the evidence that had been screaming at us, not just from one case either but from multiple streams of evidence, all over the world.

Dr. Jimenez had a recent thread on his experiences. Something he said in the thread really struck me:

[tweets]

It’s not a good moment when a prominent scientist—who was, along with others, evidence-based, correct and prescient on a topic of great importance within his expertise—feels the need to look up “gaslighting” because he is lacking the word to otherwise describe his experience.

I realize that there is a lot of focus on misinformation that we recognize: the claims of 5G spreading via vaccines, of many deaths following vaccination, claims that vaccines don’t work at all, or even the idea that vaccines might have caused the death of a 99-year old, already visibly infirm, prominent member of the royal family in the United Kingdom. I understand all that and the role of such misinformation. But as I close the misinformation trifecta series about problems beyond the ones that are “over there,” committed by others, I’d like us not to forget what actually happened in more mainstream and arguably more important circles, and is still influencing how we have been responding—and failing to respond—to this pandemic.

#substack #covid-19 #tufecki zeynep #science #epidemiology #gaslighting

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/coronavirus-live-news-and-updates-7/

Coronavirus Live News and Updates

The White House pushes to eliminate billions from a relief proposal drafted by Senate Republicans.

The Trump administration has balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and shore up federal health agencies as the virus surges across the country, complicating efforts to reach agreement on the next round of pandemic aid.

Senate Republicans had drafted a proposal that would allocate $25 billion in grants to states for conducting testing and contact tracing, as well as about $10 billion for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and about $15 billion for the National Institutes of Health, according to a person familiar with the tentative plans, who cautioned that the final dollar figures remained in flux. They had also proposed providing $5.5 billion to the State Department and $20 billion to the Pentagon to help counter the virus outbreak and potentially distribute a vaccine at home and abroad.

But in talks over the weekend, administration officials instead pushed to zero out the funding for testing and for the nation’s top health agencies, and to cut the Pentagon funding to $5 billion, according to another person familiar with the discussions. The people asked for anonymity to disclose private details of the talks, which were first reported by The Washington Post.

The suggestions from the administration infuriated several Republicans on Capitol Hill, who saw them as tone deaf, given that more than 3.5 million people in the United States have been infected with the coronavirus and many states are experiencing spikes in cases.

With unemployment benefits and a number of other aid measures included in the stimulus package set to expire at the end of the month, Congress is rushing to pull together the measure within the next two weeks.

The administration’s position presents an added complication to negotiations between Democrats, who are pressing for a more expansive aid bill, and Republicans, who hope to unveil a narrower opening offer for virus relief as early as this week.

On Friday, for the second time, more than 70,000 coronavirus cases were announced in the United States, according to a New York Times database. A day earlier, the country set a record with 75,600 new cases, the 11th time in the past month that the daily record had been broken.

The F.D.A. signs off on pooled testing, which significantly expands diagnostic capacity.

As the United States struggles to contain surging caseloads and an increasing death toll from the virus, the Food and Drug Administration on Saturday issued its first emergency approval for a testing approach that allows samples from multiple people to be combined for much faster tracking of new infections.

The agency gave so-called emergency use authorization to Quest Diagnostics to test combined samples from up to four people — a method known as pooled testing. If the pooled test is negative, then all four are in the clear. If it is positive, then each sample would be individually tested to determine who was infected.

The decades-old method has been used to test for the virus in China, Germany, Israel and Thailand. In Nebraska, a state scientist found a loophole that allowed him to circumvent federal prohibitions on the method.

The U.S. military has used the technique for diseases at its bases worldwide since it first tested for syphilis in the 1940s.

This approach expands the number of people who can be tested without requiring the use of additional crucial materials and staffing.

“Sample pooling becomes especially important as infection rates decline and we begin testing larger portions of the population,” the F.D.A. chief, Stephen Hahn, said in a statement.

The number of weekly tests reported nationwide has increased to more than five million in early July from about one million in early April, according to data collected by the Covid Tracking Project. At the same time, the rate of positive tests, which had steady declined from late April to early June, has been increasing in recent weeks, the data show.

The federal action to speed testing came as at least two states, Arizona and North Carolina, announced single-day records on Saturday. Arizona reported more than 130 new deaths, and North Carolina said it had more than 2,360 new cases.

As school districts around the United States debate when and how to reopen schools, a large new study from South Korea offers a note of caution. It found that children between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do, suggesting that middle and high schools in particular may seed new clusters of infection.

Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often, the study found, although the risk is not zero. That is consistent with what many other studies have reported.

Several experts said that the study was carefully done and that the results suggested schools should have concrete plans in place for dealing with outbreaks before reopening.

“I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

“There will be transmission,” Dr. Osterholm said. “What we have to do is accept that now and include that in our plans.”

The South Korean researchers identified 5,706 people who were the first to report Covid-19 symptoms in their households from Jan. 20 to March 27, when schools were closed. They then traced the 59,073 contacts of these “index cases.” They tested all of the household contacts of each patient, regardless of symptoms, but only tested symptomatic contacts outside the household.

President Trump and his top aides decided to shift responsibility for the coronavirus response to the states during a critical period of weeks in mid-April, focusing on overly optimistic data signals and rushing to reopen the economy, a Times investigation found.

Interviews with more than two dozen senior administration officials, state and local health officials and a review of documents revealed a haphazard response during the initial surge in cases in the United States, characterized by offloading authority and, at times, undercutting public health experts.

A team in the White House led by Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, met daily on the crisis, but the ultimate goal was shifting responsibility. “They referred to this as ‘state authority handoff,’ and it was at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations,” write Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman and David E. Sanger.

Mayors and governors said that the White House approach was guided by an overarching strategy of reviving the economy, which failed to address how cities and states should respond if cases surged again.

Key elements of the Trump administration’s strategy were drafted privately with comment from aides who for the most part had no experience with public health emergencies. And the president quickly came to feel trapped by the administration’s reopening guidelines, which hinge on declining case counts, leading him to repeatedly rail against increasing testing in the United States.

The investigation found that White House officials failed to acknowledge the scale of the pandemic until early June, and that even now internal divisions remain over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the fallout of the pandemic.

Dozens of fiercely loyal members of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front party — mayors, judges, police officials, council members and government bureaucrats — have died over the past two months.

All are thought to be victims of the coronavirus, though few have been acknowledged as such, as is the case with most virus fatalities in Nicaragua. Many are officially attributed to “atypical pneumonia.”

The string of fatalities has highlighted the fact that the disease is much more widespread than the government has publicly acknowledged.

And to critics of the government, the deaths underscore the consequences of President Daniel Ortega’s haphazard and politicized response to the pandemic — with no encouragement of wearing masks or social distancing measures, and little testing and no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns. The government held mass gatherings, including a March rally in support of other stricken countries called “Love in the Time of Covid-19.”

Several young epidemiologists, virologists and related specialists said in the medical journal Lancet that Nicaragua’s response “has been perhaps the most erratic of any country in the world to date.”

Officially, the government reports that just 99 people have died from the virus, although the Citizens Covid-19 Observatory, an anonymous group of doctors and activists in Nicaragua, have registered 2,397 probable deaths.

The government is now taking measures to combat the virus, creating Covid-only hospital units and using the military to organize mass disinfection campaigns. On Sunday, its annual extravaganza celebrating the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, which toppled the Somoza family dictatorship in 1979, will take place virtually for the first time.

But the toll is already high. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of Confidencial, a leading news outlet, said his team has counted some 100 deaths of Sandinistas, including about 10 well-known figures.

“The problem is that here, nobody officially dies of Covid-19,” he said.

António Guterres, the secretary general of the United Nations, raised alarms on Saturday about the economic fallout from the pandemic and the ripple effects it could have on poverty and wealth inequality.

“Covid-19 is shining a spotlight on this injustice,” Mr. Guterres said. “Entire regions that were making progress on eradicating poverty and narrowing inequality have been set back years in a matter of months.”

Striking a sober tone in a speech honoring Nelson Mandela’s legacy, Mr. Guterres stressed that the pandemic was pushing developing countries to the brink of disaster, and that women, migrants and racial minorities were all likely to suffer disproportionately.

“We face the deepest global recession since World War II, and the broadest collapse in incomes since 1870,” he said. “One hundred million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty and we could see famines of historic proportions.”

His comments came as the president of the World Bank urged the Group of 20 major economies to take steps to help the world’s poorest countries by extending a freeze in their official debt payments through the end of 2021, Reuters reported. Speaking to G20 finance ministers meeting virtually, Mr. Malpass also recommended talks on reducing the debt of some countries.

Mr. Guterres said the United Nations would continue its mission to assist countries in need, but that the pandemic had demonstrated a severe erosion of social safety nets in countries worldwide.

Reflecting on Mr. Mandela’s work to fight racism, Mr. Guterres also said the recent anti-racism movement born out of the killing of George Floyd had caused rising awareness of racial inequality, and that the pandemic had shed light on systemic racism globally.

“Covid-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built,” he said.

In other news around the world:

Face coverings will be required in Melbourne, Australia’s second-largest city, whenever people leave home, officials there said Sunday, citing a recent increase in cases. The requirement will take effect on Wednesday. Violations could result in a fine of 200 Australian dollars, or roughly $140. Exemptions will be given to some people, including children under 12 and workers for whom wearing a mask is not practical, such as teachers in school.

Iran started enforcing new restrictions in Tehran on Saturday, banning large gatherings and closing cafes, gyms and some other facilities, as coronavirus cases surge in what health officials say is even worse than the first wave that hit the capital in March. The country has reported more than 270,000 confirmed cases, the 10th highest in the world, but President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday that 30 million to 35 million people are “likely to be exposed to the disease in the coming months,” the semiofficial ISNA news agency reported.

Chinese officials are battling a growing outbreak in the far western Xinjiang region, the center of the country’s broad crackdown on predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities. Forty cases have been reported in its capital, Urumqi, since Thursday, 23 of them on Saturday. The government flew in 21 lab technicians and their testing equipment from three hospitals in Wuhan, where the virus emerged late last year, and residential compounds were under lockdown.

Thailand, a rare success story in fighting the virus, has recorded fewer than 3,240 cases and 58 deaths. But its tourism-dependent economy has been ravaged. Some migrant workers from neighboring Myanmar and Cambodia are stuck with no wages from their jobs as hotel cleaners, kitchen hands and food stall operators, and the Thai tourism and sports ministry estimates that 60 percent of hospitality businesses could close by the end of the year.

The authorities in Britain have temporarily suspended the release of the daily toll of deaths attributed to the coronavirus, in response to a request from the government after it raised concerns about accuracy. The authorities in England had been including all people who tested positive for the virus in their daily count, regardless of the cause of death — one analysis noted that the current standards would have included someone who tested positive for the virus three months ago and then “had a heart attack or were run over by a bus.”

European Union leaders agreed to go back to the negotiating table Sunday after two long, difficult days of talks during which they have been trying to bridge differences over how to distribute and oversee a radical stimulus plan that would send 750 billion euros, about $840 billion, into the bloc’s economies to push them out of the recession the pandemic has sunk them in.

Major League Baseball’s plan to use all 30 of its teams’ ballparks for an abbreviated, 60-game season met an immovable obstacle on Saturday: the Canadian government. The Toronto Blue Jays, the only M.L.B. team based outside the United States, will not be allowed to stage home games during the pandemic.

Marco Mendicino, Canada’s immigration minister, announced that the government had turned down the Blue Jays’ request to play at Rogers Centre, where their first game had been scheduled for July 29 against the Washington Nationals.

The Blue Jays have been training at home this month, and they had received permission from the city of Toronto and the province of Ontario to play games there. But the federal government ruled that hosting 10 series involving eight visiting teams was not worth the risk.

“Unlike preseason training, regular-season games would require repeated cross-border travel of Blue Jays players and staff, as well as opponent teams into and out of Canada,” Mr. Mendicino said in a statement. “Of particular concern, the Toronto Blue Jays would be required to play in locations where the risk of virus transmission remains high.”

The Blue Jays said in a statement that they were searching for an alternative park, and an official with knowledge of the Blue Jays’ plans said the most likely destination would be Buffalo, which is nearly a two-hour drive south and is the home of the Blue Jays’ Class AAA team.

As Texas reported single-day records for cases and deaths this week, more than 1,000 of the 1,798 inmates at the Federal Correctional Institute at Seagoville in Texas had tested positive as of Saturday.

In Nueces County, where beach-seeking tourists caused a spike in cases by flocking to Corpus Christi, 85 infants 1 or younger have tested positive since the first case appeared there in March, the county’s public health director said in an interview on Saturday.

And in an apparent acknowledgment of the public health risks of holding a large-scale gathering during a pandemic, a federal judge blocked the Texas Republican Party from hosting an in-person convention in Houston, the mayor said on Twitter early Saturday.

Many of the babies who tested positive in Nueces County seem to have been infected from close family members who had the virus, said Annette Rodriguez, the health director, and a majority of the babies have had influenza-like symptoms and recovered on their own.

The number of infections among babies in the county reflects a rate similar to the one health officials are seeing among adults, Ms. Rodriguez said. And children are generally less likely than adults to become sick from the virus.

Ms. Rodriguez said she had released the figure on infants because she hoped that it might prompt more residents to wear masks and follow strict social distancing measures.

“To me, if it was my baby and it’s a novel virus that we don’t know a lot about, I would be concerned,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

Nueces County has the fastest seven-day-average new case growth of all metropolitan counties in Texas, officials said at a news conference on Friday.

As cases in Texas have surged over recent weeks, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has faced mounting criticism for the state’s reopening strategy. On Thursday, the state reached a single-day record in new infections with 15,038 cases.

Early this month, Mr. Abbott announced an executive order requiring masks in public after demurring for months. But in recent days, he has said the state would not consider a second lockdown, even as hospitalizations have surged and deaths from Covid-19 surpassed 100 per day on average over the past seven days.

Harris County, which includes Houston, had 700 people in I.C.U.s fighting the coronavirus, a local news affiliate, citing city health officials, reported on Friday.

Retailers are taking the lead on masks as some states have stalled.

Some of the largest brick-and-mortar retail stores in the United States announced this week that they would enact policies requiring patrons to wear masks while shopping inside their stores.

Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart and Best Buy were among those that joined retailers like Costco and Starbucks in embracing mask requirements. C.V.S. said it would require face coverings in its stores beginning on Monday, and Target will do the same beginning on Aug. 1.

The corporate decisions to establish these rules comes as many states have issued orders requiring masks in public. But several states seeing a heightened spread of the virus have yet to follow.

Utah, Iowa and Nebraska are among the handful of states that have yet to issue statewide policies for masks in public, even as each have seen case counts climbing over recent weeks.

The companies have said the new policies would apply across all of their locations. But many businesses requiring masks have previously run into problems enforcing the rules, as employees have faced violence while confronting customers refusing to comply.

Throughout the pandemic, videos circulated online have shown retail workers forced to address angry customers that entered without masks or refused to observe social-distancing requirements.

Almost daily, President Trump and leaders worldwide say they are racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine. But the repeated assurances of near-miraculous speed are exacerbating a problem that has largely been overlooked and one that public health experts say must be addressed now: persuading people to actually get the shot once it’s available.

A growing number of polls finds so many people saying they would not get a coronavirus vaccine that its potential to shut down the pandemic could be in jeopardy. Mistrust of vaccines has been on the rise in the United States in recent years, but the rapid push to develop a coronavirus vaccine has generated a different strain of wariness.

“The bottom line is I have absolutely no faith in the F.D.A. and in the Trump administration,” said Joanne Barnes, a retired fourth-grade teacher from Fairbanks, Alaska, who said she was otherwise scrupulously up-to-date on getting her shots. “I just feel like there’s a rush to get a vaccine out, so I’m very hesitant.”

How to plan a vacation in the midst of a pandemic.

Traveling these days requires lots of research, precision planning and a willingness to play by new and very stringent rules.

Reporting was contributed by Rachel Abrams, Hannah Beech, Ginia Bellafante, Keith Bradsher, Emily Cochrane, Farnaz Fassihi, Maggie Haberman, Jan Hoffman, Virginia Hughes, Jodi Kantor, Tyler Kepner, Michael Levenson, Eric Lipton, Apoorva Mandavilli, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Raphael Minder, Zach Montague, Elian Peltier, Alan Rappeport, Frances Robles, Katie Rogers, Carol Rosenberg and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, David E. Sanger, Michael D. Shear, Mitch Smith, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Muktita Suhartono, Noah Weiland and Michael Wolgelenter.

#World

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xtruss · 4 years ago

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The U.S., Like Israel, Is Wielding The Violence of An Occupying Power

The killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests bear striking parallels to similar events in Israel-Palestine. Despite their differences, the mechanisms of repression operate in the same way.

— By Mairav Zonszein | June 1, 2020 | 972Mag.Com

— Dr. Norman Gary Finkelstein

George Floyd protests in Washington DC. Lafayette Square. May 30, 2020. (Rosa Pineda/Wikimedia Commons)

Another white cop murdered a Black man in the United States. After over two months in which public spaces were emptied by the coronavirus pandemic – a disease which itself has been disproportionately killing Black and brown people in the country – the streets are now filled with people risking their lives and safety to demand justice for George Floyd and all Black lives.

Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis one week ago is painfully familiar. It comes just two months after the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville. Just a few weeks after footage surfaced of the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. After Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castille, and Tamir Rice. The list goes on.

And yet, this time, it feels like a moment of reckoning. Mass protests, sirens, fires, fireworks, riot gear, tear gas, and curfews fill the streets of cities like Minneapolis, New York, Oakland, Atlanta, Portland, Louisville, and Washington D.C. Police have arrested at least 1,400 people in 17 cities and authorities have ordered curfews in 39 cities across 21 states. It looks and feels like an American Intifada.

As I watch everything unfold, I cannot help but notice the striking parallels between George Floyd’s murder and the countless Palestinians killed at the hands of Israeli forces. I write this as someone who is neither Palestinian nor Black, but as a journalist and activist in solidarity with both communities, who has witnessed such events both in the United States and Israel-Palestine.

While there are substantial differences between the two countries and their circumstances, the mechanisms of state violence and repression ultimately operate in the same way. There is a clear “us” and “them.” A sense that there is the occupier and the occupied. If you are Palestinian under Israeli control, you are a target. If you are Black in America, you are a target. And when you take a stand, you are beaten or shot down.

Israeli police arrest a Palestinian protester outside the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. May 14, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

In both countries, like many others, the state wields brutal violence to preserve the structural inequalities on which it stands. Those defending the sanctity of Black lives in the United States, like those standing with Palestinians against Israeli authorities, are finding themselves face-to-face with armed forces that are fulfilling the role of a hostile occupying power.

The parallels grew even more resonant last week when, just a few days after Floyd’s murder, a 32-year-old Palestinian with autism, Iyad Hallak, was killed by Israeli Border Police in Jerusalem’s Old City. The officers claimed they believed he was holding a gun, yet there was none. When they ordered him to freeze, Hallak, out of fear, ran and hid behind a dumpster. One of the officers shot him multiple times, reportedly even after his commander told him to stop.

Last week’s killings, along with many others, illustrate how the two countries mirror each other’s experiences of discrimination and brutality. Here are just some of those commonalities.

The Power of Cameras

George Floyd’s murder was caught on video from multiple angles. It is the primary reason why news spread so fast, and why those who tried to explain away the incident failed. Palestinians, too, have been documenting Israeli human rights abuses for years, with footage of violence often being one of the only tools they can use to demand justice and draw attention to their plight.

Floyd’s murder particularly reminded me of when Israeli soldier Elor Azaria murdered Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian resident of occupied Hebron, in March 2016. Although the circumstances were different – Al-Sharif had tried to stab a soldier – like Floyd, Al-Sharif lay incapacitated on the ground, posing no threat, when Azaria fatally shot him in an extrajudicial killing.

IDF Sgt. Elor Azaria, the Israeli soldier, who shot dead a disarmed and injured Palestinian attacker in Hebron a few months ago, with family and friends in a courtroom at the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, on January 4, 2017. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

Azaria was deemed a bad apple by some in Israel, but was defended by others on the right. After serving nine months in prison, Azaria was released and welcomed by many Israelis as a hero. Despite the massive uproar, the IDF has not changed anything about their conduct in the West Bank any more than American police have changed theirs.

Nonetheless, if such footage had not been captured, many investigations of police officers and soldiers (no matter how futile) would not have been opened and brought to public scrutiny. It is why Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid bird watcher, instinctively took out his camera in New York’s Central Park last week when Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the police on him after he asked her to put her dog on a leash, claiming he was threatening her life. It is why many Palestinians in the West Bank similarly start filming when they face Israeli officers or Jewish settlers, either through their personal phones or professional cameras distributed by human rights groups.

The Narrative Around Violence

Were it not for the protests that erupted in Minneapolis, which saw the city’s 3rd Precinct police station gutted by flames, David Chauvin, the police officer who killed Floyd, would likely not be in custody at this moment and charged with third-degree murder.

Still, as places are being looted and vandalized, the mainstream media narrative has been turning against the protesters, claiming that they are “thugs” undermining their own cause. A New York Times op-ed by Ross Douthat, for example, discouraged the riots arguing that “what nonviolent protest gains, violent protest unravels.”

A destroyed car with graffiti in Minneapolis during demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd. May 28, 2020. (Hungryogrephotos/Wikimedia Commons)

Tamika Mallory, a prominent Black activist who has also been deeply engaged in the Black-Palestine solidarity movement, gave a poignant response to these narratives: “Don’t talk to us about looting. Y’all are the looters… America has looted Black people. America looted the Native Americans when they first came here. So looting is what you do, we learned it from you. We learned violence from you… So if you want us to do better, then dammit, you do better.”

This same media dynamic exists in Israel-Palestine. For decades Israel has looted Palestinian lives and properties, depriving them of their rights, incarcerating them, raiding their towns, demolishing their homes – an entire infrastructure of state violence and plunder. But when Palestinians protest and fight back, they are blamed as the violent ones; they are the “terrorists.” Suddenly, state violence becomes invisible.

All the while, the vast majority of Palestinians have continued to demonstrate nonviolently, including through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. The same kinds of demonstrations have been led by groups like Black Lives Matter since Ferguson in 2014, while Black athletes like Colin Kaepernick have knelt during the national anthem against racism and police brutality – a simple gesture which was still met with punishment and backlash. No form of protest is ever good enough.

Double Standard Toward Protests

The double standard in how white and Black protests are treated by U.S. police is striking. When white, far-right, anti-lockdown demonstrations were held this past month – such as when hundreds of armed protesters in Michigan stormed the state house – police did not shoot tear gas or make arrests; they did not even bring out their batons.

Police in St.Paul and Minneapolis during protests following the killing of George Floyd, May 28, 2020. (Hungryogrephotos/Wikimedia)

In contrast, in the wake of last week’s protests, mayors have imposed curfews, and governors in several states have called in the National Guard. While tanks roam neighborhoods, police have been shooting stun grenades, tear gas, and rubber bullets in Minneapolis and other cities. Journalists also reported at least 60 incidents since Friday of being targeted by the police, even though they were identifiable by their press helmet, vest, and pass; a female photographer, Linda Tirado, was blinded in her left eye by a rubber bullet in Minneapolis.

All of these practices are a mainstay of Israeli occupation, tactics taken right out of the Israeli playbook. The Los Angeles curfew order reads like an IDF closed military zone order. The arrests and attacks on journalists for doing their job, which rarely happens in the United States, is a frequently occurrence in Palestine.

The state’s contradictory response is also blatant in Israel-Palestine. When Palestinians protest, they are often beaten, arrested, or shot at, and those caught throwing stones can be sent to jail for years. Israeli Jews, meanwhile, can usually protest relatively freely, rarely having to fear arrest or repression – the major exception being Ethiopian Jews, who have been repeatedly brutalized by the police for protesting state discrimination and violence.

The U.S. certainly did not learn all its repressive methods from Israel, but there are many direct connections. In recent years, American law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels have held trainings in Israel on exchange programs sponsored by groups like the Anti-Defamation League, many of them centered around counterterrorism tactics used by the Israeli military. Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace have campaigned to end these exchange programs precisely because they bolster the methods and mentality of an occupying force.

JVP Philly protesting outside the International Association of Chiefs of Police annual conference in Philadelphia, calling on the Anti-Defamation League to stop running exchange programs between U.S. police and Israeli military. October 22, 2017. (Joe Piette/Flickr)

The hypocrisy of the groups sponsoring these police exchanges is also startling. The ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, for example, issued a statement of solidarity with the Black community following Floyd’s murder, acknowledging that they are subject to a “racist and unjust system.” Greenblatt, who frequently comments on Israeli affairs, has yet to condemn the killing of Hallak or make a similar remark about Israel’s own “racist and unjust system.”

Police and Military Impunity

The Minneapolis police is notorious for refusing to remove bad officers or to adopt reforms; the officer who killed Floyd, David Chauvin, had 18 previous complaints filed against him. In New York City – where cops have assaulted Black people over social distancing during the pandemic – about 2,500 complaints of bias were lodged over the past four years against NYPD officers; the police deemed every case invalid.

Similarly, Israeli soldiers and police are rarely brought to justice for killing or harming Palestinian protesters. For example, during Gaza’s Great March of Return that began in March 2018, only one Israeli soldier was tried for shooting and killing a plainly unarmed Palestinian child during the mass protests, and was sentenced to only a month in prison.

Other soldiers who have shot tear gas and rubber and live bullets at protests in the West Bank rarely get tried. The soldier who killed Palestinian activist Bassem Abu Rahmeh, by shooting a tear gas canister at his chest during a protest in Bil’in in 2009, was never charged. Over a decade later, no one has been held accountable for his death.

For now, George Floyd seems to have avoided Abu Rahmeh’s fate, as his killer Chauvin appears set to face trial for his crime. But there is still nothing to guarantee that Chauvin will face meaningful justice, nor to ensure that other violent police officers will face the same consequences. Until then, America will continue to see many similar uprisings.

Mairav Zonszein is a journalist and editor who writes about Israel-Palestine and its role in U.S. politics. Her publications include The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Intercept, VICE News, Foreign Policy and many more.

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/self-propagating-amyloid-and-tau-prions-found-in-post-mortem-brain-samples-with-highest-levels-in-patients-who-died-young-sciencedaily/

Self-propagating amyloid and tau prions found in post-mortem brain samples, with highest levels in patients who died young -- ScienceDaily

Two proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions — misshapen proteins that spread through tissue like an infection by forcing normal proteins to adopt the same misfolded shape — according to new UC San Francisco research.

Using novel laboratory tests, the researchers were able to detect and measure specific, self-propagating prion forms of the proteins amyloid beta (A-β) and tau in postmortem brain tissue of 75 Alzheimer’s patients. In a striking finding, higher levels of these prions in human brain samples were strongly associated with early-onset forms of the disease and younger age at death.

Alzheimer’s disease is currently defined based on the presence of toxic protein aggregations in the brain known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles, accompanied by cognitive decline and dementia. But attempts to treat the disease by clearing out these inert proteins have been unsuccessful. The new evidence that active A-β and tau prions could be driving the disease — published May 1, 2019 in Science Translational Medicine — could lead researchers to explore new therapies that focus on prions directly.

“I believe this shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that amyloid beta and tau are both prions, and that Alzheimer’s disease is a double-prion disorder in which these two rogue proteins together destroy the brain,” said Stanley Prusiner, MD, the study’s senior author and director of the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, part of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “The fact that prion levels also appear linked to patient longevity should change how we think about the way forward for developing treatments for the disease. We need a sea change in Alzheimer’s disease research, and that is what this paper does. This paper might catalyze a major change in AD research.”

What are Prions?

Prions are misfolded versions of a protein that can spread like an infection by forcing normal copies of that protein into the same self-propagating, misfolded shape. The original prion protein, PrP, was identified by Prusiner in the 1980s as the cause of Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD) and spongiform bovine encephalopathy, also known as Mad Cow Disease, which spread through consumption of meat and bone meal tainted with PrP prions. This was the first time a disease had been shown to infect people not by an infestation of an organism such as a bacterium or a virus, but through an infectious protein, and Prusiner received a Nobel Prize for that discovery in 1997.

Prusiner and colleagues have long suspected that PrP was not the only protein capable of acting as a self-propagating prion, and that distinct types of prion could be responsible for other neurodegenerative diseases caused by the progressive toxic buildup of misfolded proteins. For example, Alzheimer’s disease is defined by A-β plaques and tau tangles that gradually spread destruction through the brain. Over the past decade, laboratory studies at UCSF and elsewhere have begun to show that amyloid plaques and tau tangles from diseased brains can infect healthy brain tissue much like PrP, but considerably more slowly.

Many scientists have been reluctant to accept that A-β and tau are self-propagating prions — instead referring to their spread as “prion-like” — because unlike PrP prions, they were not thought to be infectious except in highly controlled laboratory studies. However, recent reports have documented rare cases of patients treated with growth hormone derived from human brain tissue, or given transplants of the brain’s protective dura mater, who went on to develop A-β plaques in middle age, long before they should be seen in anyone without a genetic disorder. Prusiner contends that these findings argue that both Aß and tau are prions even though they propagate more slowly than highly aggressive PrP prions.

In response to these debates, Prusiner likes to quote from a 1969 lecture by neuroscientist Bernard Katz: “There is a type of scientist who, if given the choice, would rather use his colleague’s toothbrush than his terminology!”

Laboratory Bioassays Reveal Aß and Tau Prions in Human Postmortem Brain Samples

In the new study, the researchers combined two recently developed laboratory tests to rapidly measure prions in human tissue samples: a new A-β detection system developed in the Prusiner lab and a tau prion assay previously developed by Marc Diamond, PhD, a former UCSF faculty member who is now director of the Center for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

Unlike earlier animal models that could take months to reveal the slow spread of A-β and/or tau prions, these cell-based assays measure infectious prion levels in just three days, enabling the researchers to effectively quantify for the first time the levels of both tau and A-β prions in processed extracts from post-mortem brain samples. In the new study, they applied the technique to autopsied brain tissue from over 100 individuals who had died of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of neurodegeneration, which was collected from repositories in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

In assays comparing the samples from Alzheimer’s patients with those who died of other diseases, prion activity corresponded exactly with the distinctive protein pathology that has been established in each disease: in 75 Alzheimer’s disease brains, both A-β and tau prion activity was elevated; in 11 samples from patients with cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), only A-β prions were seen; and in 10 tau-linked frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) samples, only tau prions were detected. Another recently developed bioassay for alpha-synuclein prions only found these infectious particles in the seven samples from patients with the synuclein-linked degenerative disorder multiple system atrophy (MSA).

“These assays are a game-changer,” said co-author and protein chemist William DeGrado, PhD, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry and member of the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute, who contributed to the design and analysis of the current study. “Previously Alzheimer’s research has been stuck looking at collateral damage in the form of misfolded, dead proteins that form plaques and tangles. Now it turns out that it is prion activity that correlates with disease, rather than the amount of plaques and tangles at the time of autopsy. So if we are going to succeed in developing effective therapies and diagnostics, we need to target the active prion forms, rather than the large amount of protein in plaques and tangles.”

A-β and Tau Prion Activity Linked to Alzheimer’s Patients’ Longevity

The most remarkable finding of the new study may be the discovery that the self-propagating prion forms of tau and A-β are most infectious in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients who died at a young age from inherited, genetically driven forms of the disease, but much less prevalent in patients who died at a more advanced age.

In particular, when compared to measurements of overall tau buildup — which is known to increase with age in Alzheimer’s brains — the researchers found a remarkable exponential decline in the relative abundance of the prion forms of tau with age. When the researchers plotted their data, they saw an extremely strong correlation between tau prions and patients’ age at death: relative to overall tau levels, the quantity of tau prions in the brain of a patient who died at age 40 were on average 32 times higher than in a patient who died at 90.

“I still remember where I was sitting and what time of day it was when I first saw this data over a year ago,” said co-author and leading neurodegeneration researcher William Seeley, MD, a professor of neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center who directs the UCSF Neurodegenerative Disease Brain Bank, which provided tissue used in the study. “I’ve very rarely, if ever, seen this kind of correlation in human biological data. Now the job is to find out what the correlation means.”

The research raises a number of questions that will need to be addressed by future studies, including whether differences in prion infectivity could explain the long-standing mystery of why Alzheimer’s progresses at such different rates in different patients. Other open questions resulting from the research include whether higher prion levels in brain samples from younger patients are linked to the early onset of the disease or how quickly it progressed, and whether lower prion levels in older brains reflect less “infective” prion variants or instead some ability of these patients’ brains to dispose of misfolded proteins.

The evidence that prion forms of A-β and tau play a specific role in Alzheimer’s disease — one that cannot be captured by simply counting amyloid plaques and tau tangles in patient brains — also raises questions on current approaches to Alzheimer’s diagnosis, clinical trial design, and drug discovery, say the authors, who hope their novel assays will spur renewed interest in developing therapies to target the now-measurable prion proteins.

“We have recently seen many seemingly promising Alzheimer’s therapies fail in clinical trials, leading some to speculate that we have been targeting the wrong proteins,” said Carlo Condello, PhD, one of the study’s lead authors. “But what if we just haven’t been designing drugs against the distinctive prion forms of these proteins that actually cause disease? Now that we can effectively measure the prion forms of A-β and tau, there’s hope that we can develop drugs that either prevent them from forming or spreading, or help the brain clear them before they cause damage.”

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day0one · 4 years ago

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How Trump Killed Tens of Thousands of Americans 3 hrs ago

On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong.”

Trump’s account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.

The phone call, the talking points Trump picked up from it, and his subsequent attempts to cover up his alliance with Xi are part of deep betrayal. The story the president now tells—that he “built the greatest economy in history,” that China blindsided him by unleashing the virus, and that Trump saved millions of lives by mobilizing America to defeat it—is a lie. Trump collaborated with Xi, concealed the threat, impeded the U.S. government’s response, silenced those who sought to warn the public, and pushed states to take risks that escalated the tragedy. He’s personally responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.

This isn’t speculation. All the evidence is in the public record. But the truth, unlike Trump’s false narrative, is scattered in different places. It’s in emails, leaks, interviews, hearings, scientific reports, and the president’s stray remarks. This article puts those fragments together. It documents Trump’s interference or negligence in every stage of the government’s failure: preparation, mobilization, public communication, testing, mitigation, and reopening.

Trump has always been malignant and incompetent. As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore. But in the pandemic, his vices—venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness—turned deadly. They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage. The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency. It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

Trump never prepared for a pandemic. For years, he had multiple warnings—briefings, reports, simulations, intelligence assessments—that a crisis such as this one was likely and that the government wasn’t ready for it. In April, he admitted that he was informed of the risks: “I always knew that pandemics are one of the worst things that could happen.” But when the virus arrived, the federal government was still ill-equipped to deal with it. According to Trump, “We had no ventilators. We had no testing. We had nothing.”

That’s an exaggeration. But it’s true that the stockpile of pandemic supplies was depleted and that the government’s system for producing virus tests wasn’t designed for such heavy demand. So why, for the first three years of his presidency, did Trump do nothing about it? He often brags that he spent $2 trillion to beef up the military. But he squeezed the budget for pandemics, disbanded the federal team in charge of protecting the country from biological threats, and stripped down the Beijing office of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trump has been asked several times to explain these decisions. He has given two answers. One is that he wanted to save money. “Some of the people we cut, they haven’t been used for many, many years,” he said in February. “If we have a need, we can get them very quickly. … I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them.”

His second answer is that he had other priorities. In March, at a Fox News town hall, Bret Baier asked Trump why he hadn’t updated the test production system. “I’m thinking about a lot of other things, too, like trade,” Trump replied. “I’m not thinking about this.” In May, ABC’s David Muir asked him, “What did you do when you became president to restock those cupboards that you say were bare?” Trump gave the same answer: “I have a lot of things going on.”

Trump prepared for war, not for a virus. He wagered that if a pandemic broke out, he could pull together the resources to contain it quickly. He was wrong. But that was just the first of many mistakes.

In early January, Trump was warned about a deadly new virus in China. He was also told that the Chinese government was understating the outbreak. (See this timeline for a detailed chronology of what Trump knew and when he knew it.) This was inconvenient because Trump was about to sign a lucrative trade deal with Beijing. “We have a great relationship with China right now, so I don’t want to speak badly of anyone,” Trump told Laura Ingraham in a Fox News interview on Jan. 10. He added that he was looking forward to a second deal with Xi. When Ingraham asked about China’s violations of human rights, Trump begged off. “I’m riding a fine line because we’re making … great trade deals,” he pleaded.

Trump signed the deal on Jan. 15. He lauded Xi and said previous American presidents, not Xi, were at fault for past troubles between the two countries. Three days later, Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, phoned him with an update on the spread of the novel coronavirus. On Jan. 21, the CDC announced the first infection in the United States. Two of the government’s top health officials—Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases—said the virus was beginning to circulate around the world.

Trump would later claim that he saw from the outset how grim the situation was. That was clear, he recalled, in the “initial numbers coming out from China.” But at the time, he told Americans everything was fine. “We’re in great shape,” he assured Maria Bartiromo in a Fox Business interview on Jan. 22. “China’s in good shape, too.” He preferred to talk about trade instead. “The China deal is amazing, and we’ll be starting Phase Two very soon,” he said. On CNBC, Joe Kernen asked Trump whether there were any “worries about a pandemic.” “No, not at all,” the president replied. “We have it totally under control.” When Kernen asked whether the Chinese were telling the whole truth about the virus, Trump said they were. “I have a great relationship with President Xi,” he boasted. “We just signed probably the biggest deal ever made.”

The crisis in China grew. In late January, Trump’s medical advisers agreed with his national security team that he should suspend travel from China to the United States. But Trump resisted. He had spent months cultivating a relationship with Xi and securing the trade deal. He was counting on China to buy American goods and boost the U.S. economy, thereby helping him win reelection. He had said this to Xi explicitly, in a conversation witnessed by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton. Trump also worried that a travel ban would scare the stock market. But by the end of the month, airlines were halting flights to China anyway. On Jan. 31, Trump gave in.

His advisers knew the ban would only buy time. They wanted to use that time to fortify America. But Trump had no such plans. On Feb. 1, he recorded a Super Bowl interview with Sean Hannity. Hannity pointed out that the number of known infections in the United States had risen to eight, and he asked Trump whether he was worried. The president brushed him off. “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China,” said Trump. That was false: Thanks to loopholes in the ban, the coronavirus strain that would engulf Washington state arrived from China about two weeks later. But at the time of the interview, the ban hadn’t even taken effect. The important thing, to Trump, was that he had announced the ban. He was less interested in solving the problem than in looking as though he had solved it. And in the weeks to come, he would argue that the ban had made other protective measures unnecessary.

There were three logical steps to consider after suspending travel from China. The first was suspending travel from Europe. By Jan. 21, Trump’s advisers knew the virus was in France. By Jan. 31, they knew it had reached Italy, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom. From conversations with European governments, they also knew that these governments, apart from Italy, weren’t going to block travel from China. And they were directly informed that the flow of passengers from Europe to the United States far exceeded the normal flow of passengers from China to the United States. Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, pleaded for a ban on travel from Europe, but other advisers said this would hurt the economy in an election year. Trump, persuaded by Pottinger’s opponents, refused to go along.

Not until March 11, six weeks after blocking travel from China, did Trump take similar action against Europe. In a televised address, he acknowledged that travelers from Europe had brought the disease to America. Two months later, based on genetic and epidemiological analyses, the CDC would confirm that Trump’s action had come too late because people arriving from Europe—nearly 2 million of them in February, hundreds of whom were infected—had already accelerated the spread of the virus in the United States.

The second step was to gear up production of masks, ventilators, and other medical supplies. In early February, trade adviser Peter Navarro, biomedical research director Rick Bright, and other officials warned of impending shortages of these supplies. Azar would later claim that during this time, everyone in the administration was pleading for more equipment. But when Azar requested $4 billion to stock up, the White House refused. Trump dismissed the outcry for masks and ridiculed Democrats for “forcing money” on him to buy supplies. “They say, ‘Oh, he should do more,’ ” the president scoffed in an interview on Feb. 28. “There’s nothing more you can do.”

The third and most important step was to test the population to see whether the virus was spreading domestically. That was the policy of South Korea, the global leader in case detection. Like the United States, South Korea had identified its first case on Jan. 20. But from there, the two countries diverged. By Feb. 3 South Korea had expanded its testing program, and by Feb. 27 it was checking samples from more than 10,000 people a day. The U.S. program, hampered by malfunctions and bureaucratic conflict, was nowhere near that. By mid-February, it was testing only about 100 samples a day. As a result, few infections were being detected.

Fauci saw this as a grave vulnerability. From Feb. 14 to March 11, he warned in a dozen hearings, forums, and interviews that the virus might be spreading “under the radar.” But Trump wasn’t interested. He liked having a low infection count—he bragged about it at rallies—and he understood that the official count would stay low if people weren’t tested. Trump had been briefed on the testing situation since late January and knew test production was delayed. But he insisted that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” and that “the tests are all perfect.” Later, he brushed off the delay in test production and said it had been “quickly remedied.” He complained that additional tests, by exposing additional cases, made him “look bad.”

To keep the numbers low, Trump was willing to risk lives. He figured that infections didn’t count if they were offshore, so he tried to prevent infected Americans from setting foot on American soil. In mid-February, even as he refused to bar Europeans from entering the United States, he exploded in anger when more than a dozen infected Americans were allowed to return from Japan. “I hated to do it, statistically,” he told Hannity. “You know, is it going to look bad?” In March, he opposed a decision to let passengers off a cruise ship in California. “I’d rather have the people stay” offshore, he explained, “because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”

When the spread of the virus in the United States could no longer be denied, Trump called it the “invisible enemy.” But Trump had kept it invisible. The CDC would later acknowledge that due to woefully insufficient testing, the overwhelming majority of infections had gone undiagnosed. Models would show that by mid-February, there were hundreds of undetected infections in the United States for every known case. By the end of the month, there were thousands.

Trump didn’t just ignore warnings. He suppressed them. When Azar briefed him about the virus in January, Trump called him an “alarmist” and told him to stop panicking. When Navarro submitted a memo about the oncoming pandemic, Trump said he shouldn’t have put his words in writing. As the stock market rose in February, Trump discouraged aides from saying anything about the virus that might scare investors.

The president now casts himself as a victim of Chinese deception. In reality, he collaborated with Xi to deceive both the Chinese public and the American public. For weeks after he was briefed on the situation in China, including the fact that Beijing was downplaying the crisis, Trump continued to deny that the Chinese government was hiding anything. He implied that American experts had been welcomed in China and could vouch for Beijing’s information, which—as he would acknowledge months later—wasn’t true. On Twitter, Trump wrote tributes worthy of Chinese state propaganda. “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation,” he proclaimed.

On Feb. 10, just before a rally in New Hampshire, Trump told Fox News host Trish Regan that the Chinese “have everything under control. … We’re working with them. You know, we just sent some of our best people over there.” Then Trump walked onstage and exploited the political payoff of his deal with Xi. “Last month, we signed a groundbreaking trade agreement with China that will defeat so many of our opponents,” he boasted. He told the crowd that he had spoken with Xi and that the virus situation would “work out fine.” “By April,” he explained, “in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”

Trump didn’t tell the crowd that he had heard this theory from Xi. But that’s what the record indicates. There’s no evidence of Trump peddling the warm-weather theory prior to Feb. 7, when he had an overnight phone call with Xi. Immediately after that call, Trump began to promote the idea. Later, he mentioned that Xi had said it. When Fauci, Messonnier, Azar, and Redfield were asked about the theory, they all said it was an unwise assumption, since the virus was new. The American president, against the judgment of his public health officials, was feeding American citizens a false assurance passed to him by the Chinese president.

Three days after the rally in New Hampshire, Trump defended China’s censorship of information about the virus. In a radio interview, Geraldo Rivera asked him, “Did the Chinese tell the truth about this?” Trump, in reply, suggested that he would have done what Xi had done. “I think they want to put the best face on it,” he said. “If you were running it … you wouldn’t want to run out to the world and go crazy and start saying whatever it is, ’cause you don’t want to create a panic.” Weeks later, Trump would also excuse Chinese disinformation about the virus, telling Fox News viewers that “every country does it.”

Trump envied Xi. He wished he could control what Americans heard and thought, the way Xi could control China’s government and media. But Trump didn’t have authoritarian powers, and some of his subordinates wouldn’t shut up. As the virus moved from country to country, Fauci, Redfield, and Azar began to acknowledge that it would soon overtake the United States. On Feb. 25, when Messonnier said Americans should prepare for school and workplace closures, the stock market plunged. Trump, in a rage, called Azar and threatened to fire Messonnier. The next day, the president seized control of the administration’s press briefings on the virus.

On Feb. 26, shortly before Trump held his first briefing, aides gave him bad news: The CDC had just confirmed the first U.S. infection that couldn’t be traced to foreign travel. That meant the virus was spreading undetected. But when Trump took the podium, he didn’t mention what he had just been told. Instead, he assured the public that infections in the United States were “going down, not up” and that the case count “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” He predicted that America wouldn’t “ever be anywhere near” having to close schools or distribute more masks, since “our borders are very controlled.” When a reporter pointed out that the United States had tested fewer than 500 people, while South Korea had tested tens of thousands, Trump shot back, “We’re testing everybody that we need to test. And we’re finding very little problem.”

Trump’s eruption brought his subordinates into line. Shortly after the president’s angry call to Azar, Redfield told Congress that “our containment strategy has been quite successful.” At her next briefing, for the first time, Messonnier praised Trump by name. She parroted his talking points: that the United States had “acted incredibly quickly, before most other countries” and had “aggressively controlled our borders.” Azar, in testimony before the House, went further. When he was asked to explain the discord between Trump and his medical advisers, the health secretary argued that Americans, like citizens of China, needed to be soothed. The president, Azar explained, was “trying to calm” the populace because, as “we see in China, panic can be as big of an enemy as [the] virus.”

Having cowed his health officials, Trump next went after the press. He told Americans to ignore news reports about the virus. On Feb. 26 and Feb. 27, Trump denounced CNN and MSNBC for “panicking markets” by making the crisis “look as bad as possible.” He dismissed their reports as “fake” and tweeted, “USA in great shape!” At a rally in South Carolina on Feb. 28, he accused the press of “hysteria,” called criticism of his virus policies a “hoax,” and insisted that only 15 Americans were infected. Weeks later, he would tell the public not to believe U.S. media reports about Chinese propaganda, either.

In the three weeks after his Feb. 26 crackdown on his subordinates, Trump opposed or obstructed every response to the crisis. Doctors were pleading for virus tests and other equipment. Without enough tests to sample the population or screen people with symptoms, the virus was spreading invisibly. Fauci was desperate to accelerate the production and distribution of tests, but Trump said it wasn’t necessary. On a March 6 visit to the CDC, the president argued that instead of “going out and proactively looking to see where there’s a problem,” it was better to “find out those areas just by sitting back and waiting.” A proactive CDC testing program, lacking presidential support, never got off the ground. Nor did a separate national testing plan—organized by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—which was supposed to be presented for Trump’s approval but, for unknown reasons, was never announced.

Trump also refused to invoke the Defense Production Act, which could have accelerated the manufacture of masks, gloves, ventilators, and other emergency equipment. In January, HHS had begun to plan for use of the DPA, and in early February, some members of Congress suggested it might be needed. But Trump declined to use it until the end of March. When he was asked why, he said that governors, not the president, were responsible for emergency supplies and that telling “companies what to do” might upset the “business community.”

The president’s most decisive contribution to the death toll was his resistance to public health measures known as “mitigation”: social distancing, school and workplace closures, and cancellations of large gatherings. Messonnier and others had warned since early February that Americans needed to prepare for such measures. On Feb. 24, Trump’s health advisers decided it was time to act. But they couldn’t get a meeting with Trump, because he was off to India to discuss another trade deal. When he returned, he blew up at Messonnier for talking about closing schools and offices. The meeting to discuss mitigation was canceled.

Mitigation required leadership. The president needed to tell Americans that the crisis was urgent and that life had to change. Instead, he told them everything was fine. On March 2, he held another rally, this time in North Carolina. Before the rally, a TV interviewer asked him whether he was taking more precautions because of the virus. “Probably not so much,” Trump replied. “I just shook hands with a whole lot of people back there.” The next day, he said it was safe to travel across the country, since “there’s only one hot spot.” On March 5, at a Fox News town hall, he repeated, “I shake anybody’s hand now. I’m proud of it.” On March 6, visiting the CDC, he was asked about the risks of packing people together at rallies. “It doesn’t bother me at all,” he said.

As schools and businesses began to close, Trump pushed back. On March 4, he dismissed a question about further closures, insisting that only “a very small number” of Americans were infected. On March 9, he tweeted that the virus had hardly killed anyone and that even in bad flu seasons, “nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on.” Italy locked down its population, the NBA suspended its season, and states began to postpone elections. But through the middle of March, as advisers urged the president to endorse mitigation, he stood his ground. Finally, as the stock market continued to fall, Trump’s business friends agreed that it was time to yield. On March 16, he announced mitigation guidelines.

By then, the number of confirmed infections in the United States had surged past 4,000. But that was a fraction of the real number. The CDC would later calculate that in the three weeks from “late February to early March, the number of U.S. COVID-19 cases increased more than 1,000-fold.” And researchers at Columbia University would find that the final two-week delay in mitigation, from March 1 to March 15, had multiplied the U.S. death toll by a factor of six. By May 3, the price of that delay was more than 50,000 lives.

On March 23, a week after he announced the mitigation guidelines, Trump began pushing to rescind them. “We have to open our country,” he demanded. He batted away questions about the opinions of his medical advisers. “If it were up to the doctors, they may say, ‘Let’s keep it shut down,’ ” he shrugged. But “you can’t do that with a country, especially the No. 1 economy.” The next day, the stock market soared, and Trump took credit. Investors “see that we want to get our country open as soon as possible,” he crowed.

Trump fixated on the market and the election. In more than a dozen tweets, briefings, and interviews, he explicitly connected his chances of reelection to the speed at which schools and businesses reopened. (Trump focused on schools only after he was told that they were crucial to resuming commerce.) The longer it took, he warned, the better Democrats would do in the election. In April, he applauded states that opened early and hectored states that kept businesses closed. In June, he told workers in Maine, “You’re missing a lot of money.” “Why isn’t your governor opening up your state?” he asked them.

Trump pushed states to reopen businesses even where, under criteria laid out by his health officials, it wasn’t safe to do so. He called for “pressure” and endorsed lawsuits against governors who resisted. He issued an executive order to keep meat-processing plants open, despite thousands of infections among plant employees. He ordered the CDC to publish rules allowing churches to reopen, and he vowed to “override any governor” who kept them closed. In April, he made the CDC withdraw an indefinite ban on cruises, which had spread the virus. In July, he pressed the agency to loosen its guidelines for reopening schools.

He continued to suppress warnings. In April, he claimed that doctors who reported shortages of supplies were faking it. When an acting inspector general released a report that showed supplies were inadequate, Trump dismissed the report and replaced her. When a Navy captain wrote a letter seeking help for his infected crew, Trump endorsed the captain’s demotion. The letter “shows weakness,” he said. “We don’t want to have letter-writing campaigns where the fake news finds a letter or gets a leak.”

Having argued in March against testing, Trump now complained that doctors were testing too many people. He said tests, by revealing infections, made him “look bad.” When Fauci and Deborah Birx, the response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said more tests were needed, Trump openly contradicted them. In July, he claimed that 99 percent of coronavirus infections were “totally harmless”—which wasn’t true—and that the testing system, by detecting these infections, was “working too well.”

Fauci, Birx, Redfield, and other health officials pointed out that mitigation was working. They argued against premature resumption of in-person social activities, noting that the virus wasn’t under control and might roar back. Trump publicly overruled them, tried to discredit them, and pressured them to disavow their words. To block Fauci from disputing Trump’s assurances that the virus was “going away,” the White House barred him from doing most TV interviews. In June, when Fauci said resuming professional football would be risky, Trump rebuked him. “Informed Dr. Fauci this morning that he has nothing to do with NFL Football,” the president tweeted.

Trump interfered with every part of the government’s response. He told governors that testing for the virus was their job, not his. When they asked for help in getting supplies, he told them to “get ’em yourself.” He refused, out of pique, to speak to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or to some governors whose states were overrun by the virus. He told Vice President Mike Pence not to speak to them, either. He refused to consult former presidents, calling them failures and saying he had nothing to learn from them.

Trump didn’t just get in the way. He made things worse. He demanded that Wisconsin hold elections in early April, which coincided with dozens of infections among voters and poll workers. (Some researchers later found correlations between infections and voting in that election; others didn’t.) He forced West Point to summon cadets, 15 of whom were infected, back to campus to attend his commencement speech in June. He suggested that the virus could be killed by injecting disinfectants. He persistently urged Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, despite research that found it was ineffective against the coronavirus and in some cases could be dangerous. Trump dismissed the research as “phony.”

The simplest way to control the virus was to wear face coverings. But instead of encouraging this precaution, Trump ridiculed masks. He said they could cause infections, and he applauded people who spurned them. Polls taken in late May, as the virus began to spread across the Sun Belt, indicated that Trump’s scorn was suppressing mask use. A Morning Consult survey found that the top predictor of non-use of masks, among dozens of factors tested, was support for Trump. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that people who seldom or never wore masks were 12 times more likely to support Trump than to support his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. Some scientific models imply that Trump’s suppression of mask use may have contributed to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.

On June 10, Trump announced that he would resume holding political rallies. He targeted four states: Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma. The point of the rallies, he explained, wasn’t just to boost his campaign but to signal that it was time to “open up our country” and “get back to business.” When reporters raised the possibility that he might spread the virus by drawing crowds indoors, he accused them of “trying to Covid Shame us on our big Rallies.”

Despite being warned that infections in Oklahoma were surging, Trump proceeds with a rally at a Tulsa arena on June 20. To encourage social distance, the arena’s managers put “Do Not Sit Here” stickers on alternate seats. The Trump campaign removed the stickers. Trump also refused to wear a mask at the rally—few people in the crowd did, either—and in his speech, he bragged about continuing to shake children’s hands. Two weeks later, Tulsa broke its record for daily infections, and the city’s health director said the rally was partly to blame. Former presidential candidate Herman Cain attended the rally, tested positive for the virus days afterward, and died at the end of July.

At the rally, Trump complained that health care workers were finding too many infections by testing people for the virus. He said he had told “my people” to “slow the testing down, please.” Aides insisted that the president was joking. But on June 22, in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, he said he was only half-joking. He affirmed, this time seriously, that he had told “my people” that testing was largely frivolous and bad for America’s image. Weeks later, officials involved in negotiations on Capitol Hill disclosed that the administration, against the wishes of Senate Republicans, was trying to block funding for virus tests.

Two days after the Tulsa rally, an interviewer asked Trump whether he was putting lives at risk “by continuing to hold these indoor events.” Trump brushed off the question: “I’m not worried about it. No, not at all.” The next day, June 23, the president staged another largely mask-free rally, this time in a church in Arizona, where a statewide outbreak was underway. Days later, Secret Service agents and a speaker at the Arizona rally tested positive for the virus. On June 28, Trump urged people to attend another rally, this time featuring Pence, at a Dallas church where five choir and orchestra members had tested positive.

In his interview with Wallace, which aired July 19, Trump conceded nothing. He called Fauci an alarmist and repeated that the virus would “disappear.” He excoriated governors for “not allowing me to have rallies” and accused them of keeping businesses closed to hurt him in the election. He claimed that “masks cause problems” and said people should feel free not to wear them. He threatened to defund schools unless they resumed in-class instruction. As to the rising number of infections, Trump scoffed that “many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases,” since they would “heal automatically.” By testing so many people, he groused, health care workers were “creating trouble for the fake news to come along and say, ‘Oh, we have more cases.’ ”

Since that interview, Trump has attacked and belittled his medical advisers. He lashed out at Birx for acknowledging the ongoing spread of the virus. He retweeted a false claim that Fauci was suppressing hydroxychloroquine “to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump.” When Fauci told Congress that infections had increased due to insufficient mitigation, Trump rebuked him and blamed the surge on increased testing. And when Dave Portnoy, a wealthy Trump supporter, complained that his stocks tanked every time Fauci called for mitigation, Trump assured Portnoy that the doctor’s pleas would go nowhere. “He’d like to see [the economy] closed up for a couple of years,” Trump said of Fauci. “But that’s OK because I’m president. So I say, ‘I appreciate your opinion. Now somebody give me another opinion.’ ”

It’s hard to believe a president could be this callous and corrupt. It’s hard to believe one person could get so many things wrong or do so much damage. But that’s what happened. Trump knew we weren’t ready for a pandemic, but he didn’t prepare. He knew China was hiding the extent of the crisis, but he joined in the cover-up. He knew the virus was spreading in the United States, but he said it was vanishing. He knew we wouldn’t find it without more tests, but he said we didn’t need them. He delayed mitigation. He derided masks. He tried to silence anyone who told the truth. And in the face of multiple warnings, he pushed the country back open, reigniting the spread of the disease.

Now Trump asks us to reelect him. “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he told Fox News on Wednesday. “Then we got hit with the plague from China.” But now, he promised, “We’re building it again.” In Trump’s story, the virus is a foreign intrusion, an unpleasant interlude, a stroke of bad luck. But when you stand back and look at the full extent of his role in the catastrophe, it’s amazing how lucky we were. For three years, we survived the most ruthless, reckless, dishonest president in American history. Then our luck ran out.

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dinafbrownil · 4 years ago

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Is A Second Wave Of Coronavirus Coming?

As Americans continue to grapple with the novel coronavirus, one question is on a lot of people’s minds: Are we already seeing, or will we eventually see, a second wave of the virus?

On June 16, Vice President Mike Pence penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal headlined, “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” where he said the country was better off than media reports suggested.

Yet the same day, in an interview with the same newspaper, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top federal infectious disease expert, threw cold water on Pence’s assertion by warning of a possible resurgence. “People keep talking about a second wave,” he said. “We’re still in a first wave.”

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Defining a coronavirus “wave” is somewhat more art than science, but other scientists looking at the number of new daily infections echo Fauci’s caution.

The number of new daily infections (as seen in this chart) declined by only about one-third between its peak in early March and its most recent low point in early June. And since early June, the data shows an upward spike, approaching where it stood at that peak.

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We checked with experts to better understand what wave we’re currently in, what the outlook is for a possible new wave, and what, if anything, we can learn from the history of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was the last major pandemic in the United States. Here’s what we found.

Are We Out Of The First Wave Yet?

There’s no official definition of when a “wave” begins or ends but, generally speaking, it requires a peak in infections followed by a substantial reduction. A new rise and peak would signal the start of another wave.

“It is probably not realistic for the number of new cases to drop to zero, but ideally one would like to see sustained decreases in the number of new cases over time or stability in the number of new cases over time,” said Nicole Gatto, an associate professor in the School of Community and Global Health at Claremont Graduate University in California.

The chart above, showing the national picture, suggests there was an easing in the number of new cases, but not a large drop prior to the current spike, scientists say. And certain states have not come close to finishing their first wave.

“Some places, such as New York and Boston, have what appears to be a clear first peak or wave,” said Brooke Nichols, an assistant professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health. “Some places are still in the first wave.”

The following chart shows states that have experienced a first wave and substantially brought down their new infections.

Meanwhile, other states haven’t yet turned the corner on the first wave:

If you’re in a state that is still seeing an increase in cases, “it would not be accurate to talk about a second wave,” Gatto said. “What causes those peaks, and whether or not there will be more than one peak, as opposed to one continuous wave, will be human behavior and how humans react to what is going on around them.”

Were There Multiple Waves During The 1918 Influenza Epidemic?

There were at least three distinct waves of influenza in 1918 and 1919, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. The pandemic was simultaneous with World War I, and the war is believed to have spread the virus around the globe more quickly than it otherwise would have.

The first wave began in March 1918 and eased by the summer. The second wave came in the fall, followed by a third wave during the winter and spring of 1919. Here’s a rough graphic from an academic paper showing the waves in deaths:

The first wave “was not very deadly,” said J. Alexander Navarro, assistant director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. “It was about as bad as ordinary strains of seasonal influenza that had been circulating up until that point.”

The second wave was the deadliest, and that may have been due to mutations that increased the virus’s lethality, although scientists say this is speculative and that such mutations more typically take much longer to develop and spread.

The second wave “slowed towards the end of November, in part because more stringent social distancing measures were put in place,” said Kenneth Davis, author of “More Deadly Than War: The Hidden History of the Spanish Flu and the First World War.” “When those were relaxed, a third wave commenced in the winter and spring of 1919.”

The third wave lasted into early March, and some suggest there was a fourth wave during the winter of 1920. Each was less deadly than the one before it, Navarro said, although there were regional differences in severity.

The decline in lethality after the second wave was probably shaped in part by the declining number of people who hadn’t already been infected, Navarro said. When infections in a population become sufficiently widespread, that can slow the further spread due to “herd immunity.”

How Much Can The 1918 Pandemic Tell Us About What To Expect Now?

While both pandemics involved an easily transmissible respiratory disease, there are some important differences that make the 1918 pandemic less helpful in predicting the course of the novel coronavirus.

One is that the 1918 outbreak involved influenza, which is caused by a different family of viruses than the coronavirus. This brings both good and bad news.

On the positive side, the coronavirus appears to be much more stable than the influenza virus, and thus less likely to mutate into a more deadly variant, said Ravina Kullar, an infectious disease specialist and adjunct faculty member at UCLA. The coronavirus’s “spike protein,” which enables it to attach to human cells and attack them, appears to be especially resistant to mutation.

On the downside, the coronavirus doesn’t seem to have a significant seasonal aspect. Influenza worsens as the weather gets colder but eases up during the warmer months. While we may have seen a reduction in coronavirus infections in recent weeks because more human interactions are moving outdoors, scientists don’t expect the same scale of seasonal drop-off for the coronavirus.

“What we’re seeing right now is that it’s not impacted by the climate,” Kullar said. “Warm and humid places like Mumbai and Indonesia have struggled with the virus, and in the United States, cases are rising in hot states like Arizona and Florida.”

The patterns in mutations and seasonality suggest that the coronavirus may not follow the wave patterns of the 1918 flu. Instead, the spread of the coronavirus may follow something more like a plateau, with spikes possible if social distancing isn’t adhered to fully.

There are other differences between now and 1918.

On the upside, we now know much more about viruses and public health, and science is able to devise targeted treatments and vaccines.

On the other hand, the world’s population is bigger and more densely packed. In 1918, the world’s population was smaller than 2 billion, while today it’s about 7.6 billion. Today, we also have commercial aviation, which can carry infected people around the world far faster than trains and ships could in 1918.

A bigger, denser, more mobile population means a greater chance for a virus to continue spreading.

In 1918, some cities saw an easing of the pandemic once they neared herd immunity, but that’s not going to be as helpful with the coronavirus. Because the coronavirus is more infectious than the 1918 virus, the percentage of the population needed to reach herd immunity has to be about 65% today, compared with about 35% in 1918.

“In 1918, they could get through the pandemic more quickly because of that, and even so, they did it with a staggering death toll,” Navarro said. “Today, the coronavirus will be with us for a lot longer.”

What Factors Could Cause A New Wave?

The biggest risk, scientists say, is a loosening of social distancing measures. A much larger portion of the economy today is engaged in consumer-driven commerce such as the restaurant and entertainment sector. This heightens the economic pressure to relax social distancing standards. But doing so could worsen the pandemic.

“In 1918, once measures were lifted, the population very quickly went back to life as normal, flocking to movies, shops and stores, dance halls and saloons,” Navarro said. “That led to another spike of cases in many cities.”

Nichols said a community’s past experience with the virus can make a difference. In Boston, where Nichols is based, “the first wave was relatively severe, and many people know someone who was personally affected by COVID or had a COVID-related death in the family,” she said. “That affects people’s behavior. In areas where epidemic growth has been slow, the urgency of changing one’s behavior is less.”

Nichols added that experiencing the summer, when people have the freedom to interact outdoors, could make it harder to practice social distancing in the colder months.

“I fear that people will continue their summer socializing patterns into the fall and winter, turning very low-risk interactions into relatively high-risk interactions,” she said.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/fact-check-is-a-second-wave-of-coronavirus-coming/

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gordonwilliamsweb · 4 years ago

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Is A Second Wave Of Coronavirus Coming?

As Americans continue to grapple with the novel coronavirus, one question is on a lot of people’s minds: Are we already seeing, or will we eventually see, a second wave of the virus?

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Please confirm your email address below:

Defining a coronavirus “wave” is somewhat more art than science, but other scientists looking at the number of new daily infections echo Fauci’s caution.

Are We Out Of The First Wave Yet?

The following chart shows states that have experienced a first wave and substantially brought down their new infections.

Meanwhile, other states haven’t yet turned the corner on the first wave:

Were There Multiple Waves During The 1918 Influenza Epidemic?

How Much Can The 1918 Pandemic Tell Us About What To Expect Now?

One is that the 1918 outbreak involved influenza, which is caused by a different family of viruses than the coronavirus. This brings both good and bad news.

There are other differences between now and 1918.

On the upside, we now know much more about viruses and public health, and science is able to devise targeted treatments and vaccines.

A bigger, denser, more mobile population means a greater chance for a virus to continue spreading.

What Factors Could Cause A New Wave?

Nichols added that experiencing the summer, when people have the freedom to interact outdoors, could make it harder to practice social distancing in the colder months.

“I fear that people will continue their summer socializing patterns into the fall and winter, turning very low-risk interactions into relatively high-risk interactions,” she said.

Is A Second Wave Of Coronavirus Coming? published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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stephenmccull · 4 years ago

Text

Is A Second Wave Of Coronavirus Coming?

As Americans continue to grapple with the novel coronavirus, one question is on a lot of people’s minds: Are we already seeing, or will we eventually see, a second wave of the virus?

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Please confirm your email address below:

Defining a coronavirus “wave” is somewhat more art than science, but other scientists looking at the number of new daily infections echo Fauci’s caution.

Are We Out Of The First Wave Yet?

The following chart shows states that have experienced a first wave and substantially brought down their new infections.

Meanwhile, other states haven’t yet turned the corner on the first wave:

Were There Multiple Waves During The 1918 Influenza Epidemic?

How Much Can The 1918 Pandemic Tell Us About What To Expect Now?

One is that the 1918 outbreak involved influenza, which is caused by a different family of viruses than the coronavirus. This brings both good and bad news.

There are other differences between now and 1918.

On the upside, we now know much more about viruses and public health, and science is able to devise targeted treatments and vaccines.

A bigger, denser, more mobile population means a greater chance for a virus to continue spreading.

What Factors Could Cause A New Wave?

Nichols added that experiencing the summer, when people have the freedom to interact outdoors, could make it harder to practice social distancing in the colder months.

“I fear that people will continue their summer socializing patterns into the fall and winter, turning very low-risk interactions into relatively high-risk interactions,” she said.

Is A Second Wave Of Coronavirus Coming? published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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garp19-zoescott-blog · 6 years ago

Text

Are we displaying visual items effectively to a wide audience?

By Zoe Scott

Originally, in selecting a field of interest, I had thought collecting and collections would be a vast topic filled with meaning and select interest. Collecting is largely defined as seeking, and acquiring items of a similar kind over a period of time (Dictionary, unknown). After researching into the areas associated with collecting that, include: different types of items; ways of collecting; the purpose in collecting and how they are presented. The final point of these four is the most appealing to myself as an illustrator. The way I render a piece will affect its ability to convey the meaning I have applied. By learning how we present collections and understand information, I would like to find out how we best approach visual items that allow for human understanding and connection.

The focus of this research will be in Museums with reflection on other Cultural Institutions. Museums themselves, must be defined for their purpose as ‘complex and multi-layered, acting as a sign for domination and liberation, learning and leisure. As sites for exposition, through their collections, displays and building, museums mediate many of society’s basic values (Kreps, 2003). The Museum Association goes further to say museums are, “an environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.” Moving to understand the operation of museums, the objects can be books, artifacts, buildings and documents which creates a diversity among objects, which are differentiated by how the item is documented in this environment (Pearce, 1992:2). By focusing on museums, I can look at diverse range of items in a collection and how this reflects the way they are being exhibited.

It would be interesting to find out if diversifying the approach to displaying could change the way different people engage with things unknown to them. The inviting nature of children’s displays in cultural institutions, should probably be of a reminder the most interesting ways we can approach presenting information and engaging with collections is through gaining our interests. To start with, it is important to underpin the method of museums, museology and the people involved with them. With this understanding, I can look further into how people react with information, whether they can actively intermingle with it or are undeterred by it. In order to find out this information I need to understand the theory behind how people learn and the application of this to museums.

Museum history

To start answering some of these questions I have researched the history of Museums, in particular the European understanding of them. It is thought to be a modern institution that began in the middle of the 15th century in the Renaissance cities. This period saw a ‘rebirth’ in European cultural, artistic, political and economic factors, following the middle ages and prompted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art (Pearce, 1992). The advances of this modern period were seen in as an economic, scientific, ethical and historical discourse contributing to production and consumption. This cycle of producing and consuming allowed in part for capitalism and pivotally to the ownership of goods.

This is key to my understanding of how we relate to objects. A quote featured in the book Cultures of Collecting (Elsner, 1994:50) reads “man’s fatal attraction to the object is the primary determinant of the human condition”, - original from R. H. Tawney (1921). In agreement to that quote, my understanding of objects and collections is that they can strongly reflect an individual and a group. It is museums that have the responsibility to categorise and explain all the different areas of the human existence. Whilst doing this they rely on how the people who produced the pieces saw the objects and then how we interpret those behaviours. Beyond the museum definition, it is accepted that a museums framework includes: a collection big or small; exist as a building, or part of one; has staff (not necessarily paid); visitors and a cultural perspective underpinning the entirety.

Museums and Education

From the private ownership of goods in the 18th and 19th centuries saw the major expansion of museums into significant public institutions. Public museums grew as knowledge spread beyond a very limited class (Hein, 1998:3). This shift attributed to “18th century spirit of enthusiasm for quality of opportunity of learning (Hudson, 1975:6). For the latter half of the 19th century Industrialisation put the opportunities, work and people into cities and the government increased their responsibility of education and social services.

Museums were an agency for people to better themselves and exhibitions allowed for a new form of understanding. Exhibitions could be used by the government to support public campaigns for health education (Hein, 1998:4).

Exhibiting Good Health: Public Health Exhibitions in London (Mold, 2018) is a journal that discussed the changing nature of public health services in post-war Britain 1948-71. The Exhibitions were made by the Medical Officers of Health (MOsH) in London with a purpose to focus public understanding from infectious disease to chronic conditions associated with lifestyle. Showing the danger to health as something that can be changed it was hoped people could adapt their behaviours. The public and MOsH had direct contact through these exhibitions opening the opportunity for a new relationship and ultimately positive health changes. One of the examples of an exhibition was in 1949 in Ealing, where they tackled ‘dirty food’ by creating a model of a grocers’ shop with a waxwork female assistant. The assistant wore ‘grimy overalls’ and had a finger wrapped in a dirty bandage. In the shop, the foods were uncovered and there was a large stuffed rat sat among it all. Then to contextualise where the rat had previously been, there was a glass case showing a section of sewer with a real rat inside.

The journalist reporting on the exhibition and its many features believed it showed how and by what agent’s food can become poisoned. Ultimately, by exhibiting multiple examples of ways the standards could be raised without cost, it showed how poor food hygiene is avoidable without the previous wartime difficulties. Figures 1a. 1b. & 1c. show later versions used by MOsH and 1c. shows active engagement with the information through a question and answer device.

In terms of the correlation between education and museums, schools and museums were developing a system of public expenditure for the masses. However, the difference between them was their accountability system. Schools started using standard curriculums, tests, and inspectors and gained a function of questioning how they were running and if they were achieving the functions, they set out. This reflection process allowed the education system to see the impact of their roll on its students (Bolton, 2012). This standardisation allows us to see figures of students in full-time education beyond the leaving age (Figure 2a) and the percentages of passes at different academic levels (Figure 2b). Generally speaking, the figures show the correlation between government acts like the minimum school leaving age in 1972 and the introduction of the GCSE system. It is a societal change of focus on education that leads to these changes and advancements.

By comparison, whilst museums shifted to their role in wider society through a more open to all status, they did not evaluate the impact to its visitors. Hein 1998 explains how it was assumed people would be entertained and enlightened by their visits, without the museums having a study of visitor experience. The public educational function of museums by the end of the 19th century was eclipsed and that meant schools did not necessarily see museums as a support in their work. (Hooper-Greenhill, 1988) believed the ideal museum in the 19th century had the prime function to educate and be the advanced school of self-instruction. However, many museums and galleries were unable to achieve this ideal; this was a firmly held view. The conviction of thinkers in many areas of intellectual and political life by the 1920s were under attack. The curators were less concerned with public use and function of museums and more inclined by the accumulation of the collections. Therefore not working in line with the museum to reach greater populations and achieve its aims.

Learning Theory and museum association.

The field of museology allows for the science of organisation and management to occur and promotes the educational role of museums since the 1950s. To form a system of accountability for the future outlook of museums.

(Mariesse, 2010:54) quotes Reviere, 1981 saying, “Museology: an applied science, the science of the museum. Museology studies its history, its role in society, the specific forms of research and physical conservation, activities and dissemination, organisation and functioning, new or musealised architecture, sites that have been received or chosen, its typology and its deontology.” Museology as a study is incredibly vast and continues to adapt its meaning with added connotations (new museology) that sees the discourse of museums by adding to their role in social and political regard. With the changing nature of museums it is expected of them to encourage new communications and styles of expression to advance from collection centred museum archetypes (Mariesse, 2010:55).

There are different approaches that try to determine the way we learn. It is important that cultural institutions find out how we learn in order to engage the visitor with something that is likely to be new to them. To understand the relationship between the learning process’ and the way materials and information is displayed, is a vital tool at a museums disposal for study, education and enjoyment.

The behaviourist conceptual framework has assumptions that learners come to a learning situation with none or very little knowledge. And that by after a suitable educational intervention, exit knowing something that the instructor chose for them to understand. Learners from a behaviourist point of view are a blank slate to the new learning. By contrast constructivists believe learning is a relative and constructive process (Faulk, 2000). A learning process is continual and a highly personal experience built upon prior knowledge, interests, experience and motivations. Learning is highly situated and the contextual model of leaning (figure 3a) identifies three contexts that are continually shifting across an individual’s life time. These interactions are seen as driven efforts to contextualise and make meaning and ultimately make sense of unfamiliar territory. They are personal, socio-cultural and physical contexts.

Personal and genetic history are carried to each learning situation. New learning should be scaled to the realities of an individual’s motivations and expectations. Learning is highly personal and strongly influenced by past knowledge, interests and beliefs. An individual desires to both select and control their learning. A leaning method that focuses in on these factors is the Montessori method that works to expand a child’s natural desire to learn through self-motivation.

The Maria Montessori Argentina Foundation (FAMM, 2018) explain, the Montessori method exists to help the development of the child through a prepared environment, with scientifically designed materials, and adults that observe and guide. The child has opportunities to learn in a free manor, to bring out long periods of concentration. A sense of responsibility and ownership for their learning is encouraged by the child through exploring with concrete materials that develop basic cognitive abilities. Key to the method is the child’s independence to explore a learning process that respond to their needs. The children establish meaning in the world around them and then constructs themselves in relation to this world.

The Socio-cultural aspect relates to how we, are sociable beings that are products of culture and social relationships. These socio-cultural relationships are influenced at micro and macro levels. On a large scale we are impacted by our upbringing and culture. (Macdonald, 1991:10) defined culture as a “consortium of communication (or a bundle of messages) that a given people have in common: their shared experience, shared perceptions and values, shared consciousness.” The meaning and authority our communities and cultures place on an institution like a museum forms our relationship to the institution. On a micro level, the interactions that take place amongst visitors within their social groups. Alternatively, among people outside of the social group including: guides, demonstrators or performers who could strongly influence visitor experience.

Physical environments that the learning takes place in, is also a consideration for the potential of learning. The orientation and organization of exhibitions allow for a sequence, design factors, lighting, presentation, context, quantity and quality of information presented; all advance or delay the potential for displaying and hopefully learning.

From these factor’s coming into the museum and occurring during the visit there is also the subsequent time after the visit. Not only is the constructs put forward by the museum education a factor but the cumulation process of learning thereafter. The learning that occurs will be seen in the cumulative process of acquisition and consolidation. (Oakes, 1990) believed there are delays between an experience and genuine understanding-, which is difficult for educators. If these delays are part of the natural process of learning, the immediate findings could be seen as fruitless and that learning did not occur. Ultimately, a rich learning experience could be revealed at a much later date after talking with the visitor.

If learning is seen to not be occurring, it is a disadvantage to the understanding of the transfer and true learning. It is not a linear process and each individual comes with varying factors, and have different attitudes to museums. The constructivist learning principles are: individual meaning; taking ownership of learning; being involved in a social activity.

Interactive learning, fulfilling purpose?

Paper Generators: Harvesting Energy from Touching, Rubbing and sliding is a paper written by the Disney Research program (Karagozler, 2013). It documents energy harvesting through gestures that create electrical energy through paper electronics. The researchers made various devices through interactive applications that required touching, tapping and rubbing gestures for LED’s, e-paper displays to be powered (seen figure 4a). The user actively generates energy for the device to work, which could be put into books to increase simple interactivity and enhance reader experience. With minimal instructions for using the devices, they are easily engaged with but constrained enough by the framework designers made. The constructivist learning principles of it being a social activity and taking ownership of learning are present here. By taking ownership of learning, completing the actions a participant could reveal hidden words as seen in figure 4b. Furthermore, different generators require energy for longer periods so people could work together to see who can achieve that activation the fastest. The paper generators could educate people to see how wasted energy can be harnessed into function through circuits.

An example of an exhibition benefiting from an appropriate display is the Denver Art Museums Side Trip, which saw 37,000 people participate in making a rock poster with 90,000 in overall attendance (Simon, 2010:55). They created a framework of constraints that visitors would start off their project with to feel comfortable to contribute. By having pre-made cut outs people were able to arrange them under transparent sheets and use markers as desired. Once a staff member had colour photocopied them they were presented and the average time spent on a piece was 20 minutes. These constraints allowed an ease of engagement, which connects the audience to the space and fulfils some of the organisations mission. Although the strong figures of participation prove the approach to getting people to engage was successful. There is however, a difficulty in such institutions as it is difficult to equate whether people have gained understanding once they have visited. Is high visitor numbers or numbers reflecting participation how we understand successful learning from museum to individual visitor?

Action Plan

In this essay, I have looked at museums and approaches through a Eurocentric understanding. It would be important to recognize and understand the context of displays in relation to their original environment. Researching the impact of museums in different areas outside of a particularly western scope to find out more educational functions. Understanding the display of illustration based collections is limited in particular if only looking into UK examples. The house of Illustration is the UK’s only public gallery dedicated solely to illustration and graphics.

In terms of gaps in my knowledge, there are still numerous areas to discover that would allow for my comprehension of displaying. Illustration borrows from other disciplines approaches with media, and it would be interesting to find out about the historic development from analogue to digital – The Fundamentals of Illustration Book. In exhibitions of artists, earlier illustrations and designs are displayed to support their final works. Sometimes it is in these earliest works that actually best convey what the illustrator wants to get across. I want to find out if there are examples of interactive or participation based illustration work. Can illustration achieve the functions put forward by constructivism?

It would be helpful to draw on other people’s experiences with exhibitions to see what meanings they have made, positively or negatively. Over the summer period, I want to find out the educational function of illustration. Essentially, reading, visiting and being aware of the museological field and illustration at this time is going to help me comprehend what potential illustration has as a communicator. Find more qualitative studies that reflect actual cognition in visitors of exhibits or experiences. Essentially, be able to compile knowledge about the efforts of illustration in relation to forming meaning.

References

BOLTON, P. 2012. Education: Historical Statistics [Online]. UK Parliament. Available: https://dera.ioe.ac.uk/22771/ [Accessed 12 April 2019].

DICTIONARY, O. unknown. collect [Online]. online: Oxford Living Dictionaries. Available: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/collect [Accessed 14 April].

ELSNER, J., AND ROGER CARDINAL 1994. The Cultures of Collecting, London, Reaktion Books.

FAMM. 2018. The Montessori Method [Online]. online. Available: https://www.fundacionmontessori.org/the-montessori-method.htm [Accessed April 15 2019].

FAULK, D. 2000. Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning, Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press.

HEIN, G. E. A. N. S. F. 1998. Learning in the Museum, Abingdon, Routledge.

HOOPER-GREENHILL, E. 1988. Counting Visitors or Visitors Who Count, London, Routledge.

HUDSON, K. 1975. A Social History of Museum: What the Visitors Thought, London, Macmillan.

KARAGOZLER, E. 2013. Paper Generators: Harvesting Energy from

Touching, Rubbing and Sliding.

KREPS, C. 2003. Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation. London: Routledge.

MACDONALD, G. F. 1991. What is Culture. The Journal of Museum Education, 16, 10.

MARIESSE, F. A. A. D. 2010. Key Concepts of Museology, Armand Colin.

MOLD, A. 2018. Exhibiting Good Health: Public Health Exhibitions in London, 1948-71. Medical history, 62, 1-26.

OAKES, J. A. L., P 1990. Making the Best of Schools: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers New Haven CT, Yale University Press.

PEARCE, S. M. 1992. Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study. Great Britain: Leicester University Press.

SIMON, N. 2010. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0.

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britishdeepstate · 7 years ago

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The British Deliberately Blinded Turkish Prisoners of War in Egypt's Sidi Bashir Prisoner Camp

The Ottoman Empire fought on multiple fronts during WWI and the British took many Turkish soldiers as prisoners in these regions. One prisoner camp where the British kept Turkish prisoners of war was Sidi Bashir, situated 15 km northeast of Alexandria, Egypt.

Captain Gillespie

The commander of the camp was the British Lt. Col. Coates. Under the supervision of the military doctor Captain Gillespie, an Armenian physician, one British corporal and 5 British nurses were in charge of the prisoners’ health.

This camp held the Ottoman troops of the 48th regiment of the 16th division that were taken as prisoners in Palestine in 1918. For two years until June 12, 1920, these soldiers were subjected to constant torture, mistreatment, insults and humiliation. One source reveals how the captive Turkish soldiers were martyred due to the inhumane treatment of the British:

Beginning from August 1, 1919, the British started to give horse and donkey meat to all Ottoman prisoners. Forced to eat rotten horse and donkey meat in the scorching heat of Egypt in the middle of August, many couldn’t escape catching dysentery, while some others got a horrible disease resembling mange, which the British doctors called Pellagra, before they died.(Eyüb Sabri Akgöl and Nejat Sefercioğlu, Esaret Hatıraları: Bir Esirin Hatıraları ve Matbuat Ve Istihbarat Müdüriyet-i Umumiyesi: Yunan İllerinde Zavallı Esirlerimiz [Memoirs of Captivity], Istanbul: Tercüman, 1978 )

However, this wasn’t the only appalling treatment that the Turkish prisoners encountered at the camp. Historical sources report that British deliberately blinded around 15,000 Turkish soldiers in the camp. This shocking violence caused great outrage during the time and was widely debated at the Turkish Parliament and in the Turkish media throughout 1919, 1920 and 1921. These claims were based on two significant documents. The first is the Turkish Parliament’s decision of June 28, 1921, which was signed by Mustafa Kemal, the Chairman of the Turkish Parliament, and eleven ministers. The decision reads as follows:

Edirne MPs Şeref and Faik Bey presented their notice of motion regarding the troops held captive in Malta, as well as about the British doctors, garrison commander and officers in Egypt who deliberately disabled fifteen thousand prisoners of war, to the Cabinet of Ministers, which submitted the same to the Turkish Parliament on 29.5.337 with number 354/706. The message was read during the meeting of the Cabinet on 28.6.337 and it was decided that scientific investigation is required and the findings shall be presented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs along with the copy of the notice of motion. June 28, 1337. (SOURCE)

This document is the Turkish parliament’s decision to initiate a criminal investigation into the actions of the British doctors, garrison commander and officers that deliberately disabled 15 thousand prisoners of war in Egypt. Another document is the motion presented by Edirne MPs Faik and Şeref Bey during the 37th session of the Turkish Parliament on May 28, 1921. The last part of the motion refers to the Turkish prisoners of war who were deliberately blinded in Egyptian camps:

In Egypt, the British has deliberately blinded the 15,000 sons of our nation by making them enter baths, which contained cresol more than necessary, with the pretense of disinfecting them. We hereby ask the premeditators of this murderous crime, who are the British physicians, the garrison commander and officers, be declared as criminals…(Cemalettin Taşkıran, Ana Ben Ölmedim / 1. Dünya Savaşı’nda Türk Esirleri [Mother I Did Not Die / Turkish Prisoners of War in WWI], Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2001, pp. 143-147)

After the motion was read at the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Mehmet Şeref Bey took the stage and explained the horrible events:

… When the British took prisoners the sons of our nation from Anatolia and Rumelia, who fought for the dignity and honor of this country, they were directly transferred to Egypt. They were forced to enter baths that had a specially formulated, smelly solution up to their necks… When the Turkish soldiers didn’t want to immerse their heads, British soldiers would come by and force them in with their bayonets. When the helpless dear ones put their heads in the solution, both eyes would go blind. This is how the British blinded 15,000 Turks…(Cemalettin Taşkıran, Ana Ben Ölmedim, pp. 143-147)

At the onset of the Turkish War of Independence, the news that the British deliberately blinded Turkish prisoners of war had been widely covered by Istanbul and Anatolian media. People of Konya especially reacted very strongly and a newspaper of Konya, Öğüt covered the news with bold headlines.

General Milne

As a result, a serious anti-British sentiment spread across Anatolia. It was not long until, upon the orders of the British General Milne, one of the Allied Powers commanders in Istanbul, Öğüt was forced to stop its news about the blinded prisoners of war. Not only did they stop this news; the newspaper was shut down permanently.

This incident drew the attention of Mustafa Kemal, who went to Ankara to organize the War of Independence. As soon as he found out why Öğüt was shut down, he sent a telegram to the Konya Governor on behalf of the Representative Committee, where he condemned the British pressure and attacks on the Turkish media and said that the development should be strongly protested by a rally.(Cemalettin Taşkıran, Ana Ben Ölmedim, pp. 143-147)

Another source that details the events is Eyüp Sabri Bey’s book entitled Bir Esirin Hatıraları (Memoirs of a Prisoner of War) written in 1922. Eyüp Sabri Bey was a Gaziantep resident who had previously worked in the Defter-i Hakanı (Directorate for Title Deeds). In his book, he gave a detailed account of how the Turkish prisoners of war were tortured and mistreated under British supervision. Eyüp Sabri Bey recalls his personal experiences when he was in British-controlled Heliopolis prison camp in Egypt and explains the ‘deliberate blinding procedure’ that the Turkish prisoners of war were subjected to:

However, since they [the doctors at the hospital] were given extensive powers, these horrid people felt free to act as they wished and gouged the eyes of our helpless, innocent sons that were prisoners of war there, amidst painful screams. Who is responsible for these murders? I think every conscientious person will agree that in addition to the actual perpetrators, the entire British government is to be held responsible for being the cause of these crimes. In Abbasiye hospital… the doctors, with metal bars in their hands, sleeves rolled up to elbows, continuously operated on the Turkish soldiers and gouged their eyes out. According to the accounts of many Egyptian brothers and local prisoners, these eye surgeries took place in the past as well, but it intensified especially after the armistice, as the British felt proud with their victory. When we went there, I personally saw that it was going on at full speed.(Eyüb Sabri Akgöl and Nejat Sefercioğlu, Esaret Hatıraları)

These examples of violence and brutality directed at the Turks once again show that the British deep state is the center of the dajjali system. Although this violence caused outrage among both the Turkish public and government, all their time and energy had to be used for the survival of the state and the nation. Therefore, it wasn’t possible to take real action about these outrageous crimes.

Regrettably, this oppression and violence were later denied and swept under the rug, just like countless other crimes of the British deep state throughout history.

Although there were talks about exchanging prisoners of war during the Conference of Lausanne, there is no indication that the situation of the 15,000 Turkish soldiers deliberately made blind was ever discussed. This shows the skill of the British deep state to hide its crimes and its true face and how it employs various threats, intimidation and pressure tactics to achieve its goals.

The British Deliberately Blinded Turkish Prisoners of War in Egypt's Sidi Bashir Prisoner Camp BritishDeepState.net

#sidi bashir egypt #sidi bashir minar

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Vampire bats could soon swarm to the United States

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/vampire-bats-could-soon-swarm-to-the-united-states/

Vampire bats could soon swarm to the United States

Thousands of years ago, the United States was home to vampires. Fossils of multiple vampire bat species have been found in California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and other states, dating from 5,000 to 30,000 years ago. Since then, winters in the southern United States have become cooler. But vampire bats still roam Mexico, Central America, and South America. And now, they are on the move. The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is pushing into new territory in both North and South America, and bringing new variants of rabies along for the ride.

New research indicates that the bats’ population is on the rise at the northern edge of their range, and they may even return to the United States as climate change renders parts of Texas and Florida hospitable once more. “They’re very social and gregarious animals that have coexisted with humans for a really long time,” says coauthor Antoinette Piaggio, a molecular ecologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We’re not trying to portray these animals as something we should all be scared of.”

It could be that an infusion of blood-sucking bats will not even lead to a noticeable rise in rabies in the United States. Still, scientists must prepare for a possible vampire bat invasion. They are trying to predict where the bats will arrive, what the consequences will be, and how to prevent vampire bat-borne rabies from spreading into new places.

Returning stateside

As the only mammals to feed solely on blood, vampire bats are well suited for their special meals. They can detect where blood is flowing closest to the surface of an animal’s skin, recognize an individual animal’s breathing so they can prey upon it night after night, and escape if the animal stirs by springing from all fours right into flight.

Vampire bats are not, however, well adapted to the cold. The 2-ounce bats, which are found from southern Argentina to northern Mexico, are kept in check by chilly winters. Vampire bats are thought to be limited to areas where the average coldest temperatures don’t dip below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet in recent years, people have started reporting vampire bats at higher elevations and farther north than before, Piaggio says.

Within the past 5 years, vampire bats have been documented within about 30 miles of Texas. The bats are multiplying in areas where they were once uncommon, Piaggio and her colleagues suspect. They’ve taken wing tissue samples from hundreds of bats, and found evidence in the animals’ DNA that the population had grown rapidly and recently in the northeastern edge of their range in Mexico.

But speed is relative. The bats could have started increasing in the past decade—or hundreds of years or more in the past. “It could have been as far back as when Europeans first arrived,” Piaggio says. The livestock that the colonists brought with them in the 15th and 16th centuries could have provided the bats with more prey, allowing them to increase their numbers. In future, examining more of the bats’ genomes could help the team pinpoint the their rise more precisely, says Piaggio, who published the findings in the journal Ecology and Evolution in June.

If the bats are marching north, they might find appealing real estate in the southernmost United States. Piaggio and her colleagues are investigating where vampire bats could cross the border using current and worst-case future climate conditions through about 2070.

“A very small part of the southern tip of Texas could currently be representing suitable habitat for vampire bats, and so it’s possible that vampire bats could currently be spreading north,” says team member Mark Hayes, senior bat ecologist at Normandeau Associates, an environmental consulting firm headquartered in Bedford, New Hampshire.

In the next few decades, other parts of southernmost Texas and the southern half of Florida could become warm enough to host vampire bats. Hurricanes could blow the bats from Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula into Cuba and then Florida, Piaggio says.

While vampire bats could perhaps settle in a sliver of southern Texas, there’s no way to know if or how soon they might arrive. It’s possible that incursions into the southern parts of Texas would be a seasonal affair. “They’re very social animals, and even if males disperse they might not stay because they couldn’t set up a harem of females and reproduce,” Piaggio says.

The vampire bats would likely only colonize a pretty small area. What’s more, rabies doesn’t affect a large portion of the population, although the wounds the bats leave behind can still harm an animal’s health if they become infected. “It might even be that we end up with vampire bats and no or very little rabies transmission,” Piaggio says. “Maybe they would feed on feral swine and deer and we wouldn’t ever really pick it up.”

If the climate in southern Texas and Florida shifts and winters become warmer, the bats would have a fair shot of surviving up north, says Daniel Streicker, a disease ecologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. “I think it’s going to be a pretty slow invasion,” he says. But, “I don’t see why they couldn’t move up into the U.S.”

Ready to mingle

Understanding where vampire bats from different areas meet up could help scientists predict how rabies will spread. For now, Streicker says, rabies is not found in vampire bats along the western coast of South America. But that may change within a few years.

To estimate how quickly the virus could travel, Streicker and his colleagues pored over records of past rabies outbreaks, noting which version of the virus was responsible for each. They also captured vampire bats from around the country, and examined variants of the virus that had shown up in different areas. The team found genetic evidence that male vampire bats are responsible for bringing rabies to new territory, likely when they leave their families to seek out a harem of females to breed with.

The team also found genetic similarities in bats on the eastern and western slopes of the Andes. Vampire bats, it seems, are not blocked by the mountains, and could bring rabies with them over this route. Already, farmers and vets are reporting vampire bat bites on livestock at higher and higher elevations in the Andes. The researchers have calculated that vampire bat-borne rabies could reach the Pacific coast of South America around 2020.

Streicker has also documented “waves” of genetically related versions of rabies moving through livestock in Peruvian valleys. This indicates that variants of the virus carried by vampire bats hadn’t existed in these regions previously, and are only just arriving. Local farmers told Streicker that they were used to dealing with vampire bats, but the rabies was only a recent problem. He then examined strains of the virus from around the country and saw a similar pattern, implying that rabies is on the move in many places.

It’s not clear why this is happening now. It could be that vampire bats are moving into new areas, and the virus takes a few years to catch up. Climate change could be making mountains less impassible, allowing bats from previously isolated colonies to meet.

Humans might also be unwittingly bringing vampire bats together. As farmers bring livestock into new areas, the bats could feast over broader terrain and encounter bats from neighboring colonies. And when people build tunnels and mines, they create new housing for bats in areas that might have otherwise lacked tempting roosts.

Another possibility is that rabies has only been circulating in the vampire bat population for a couple centuries, and hasn’t had a chance to spread to every corner of the bats’ range.

Streicker is now studying the economic problems vampire bats cause by spreading rabies to livestock. Many of the communities where bat-borne rabies is now invading rely on small-scale subsidence farming. When a single cow sickens and dies, it can represent the loss of a month’s income. “It can be totally devastating,” Streicker says. “When they sell a cow, it’s going towards childhood education or towards repairing their houses.”

He’s heard that many people are giving up on raising animals altogether. “They’re either moving to cities or they’re switching to raising things like oranges or avocados, because it’s just so unsustainable to raise cattle in areas where there is rabies,” he says.

Bracing for impact

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Rabies Management Program has begun to prepare for the possible arrival of vampire bats and any new strains of rabies they might bring to the United States. They are surveying cattle at cattle sales barns, feedlots, and on dairy farms for vampire bat bite wounds in Texas, Arizona, and Florida. In 2017, they examined more than 95,000 cattle, and did not find any vampire bite wounds. They are also educating farmers and wildlife biologists in the borderlands to recognize vampire bat bites.

Their goal is to minimize any risk to people, pets, and livestock without demonizing the bats. “While the mention of the word rabies strikes fear [into] people there are very straightforward ways to minimize the risk of being exposed,” Richard Chipman, the rabies management coordinator, said in an email. “Vaccinating pets and livestock and avoiding strange or sick acting wildlife remains the best first line of defense.”

These steps, however, will not halt the spread of rabies within the bat population.

“We can vaccinate humans and livestock all day long, but at the end of the day those species don’t contribute anything to the onward transmission,” Streicker says. Yet culling the bats hasn’t reliably worked to stop the spread of rabies, either, he says. In fact, this tactic can actually spread diseases even farther.

People sometimes try to kill vampire bats by lighting their caves on fire or attacking them with large sticks. This can drive the bats out to seek new homes, bringing rabies into new areas. “The bat has no reason to stay inside this cave [where] it’s being lit on fire and persecuted all the time,” Streicker says.

Another technique for killing vampire bats is to spread a poisonous paste on one bat’s back, then release it. When the bat rejoins its fellows, they will begin to groom it and lick the poison from its fur. “Some of the ones that might be incubating rabies but aren’t sick yet might realize, ‘there’s something strange going on here, all of my friends are dying,’ and so they might fly farther away to try to escape,” Streicker says.

There might be a more effective way to slow the virus’s spread: swapping the poison out for vaccines. So far, oral vaccines seem to work well in captive vampire bats, including when the bats swallow it while grooming each other. For now, though, these vaccines are still in development and need additional safety testing; it will probably be a few years before they can be tested in the field.

Vampire bats do pose a substantial risk in terms of their ability to spread rabies, and they are more abundant now than ever before, Streicker says. In Latin America, they are the main cause of rabies outbreaks in people. But on the whole, it’s rare for people to be bitten by vampire bats in agricultural areas; if there are livestock around, the bats tend to feed on them rather than people. People can get rabies from infected livestock, but in practice this doesn’t happen much, Streicker says.

Vampire bats have the potential to do a lot of damage; in some parts of Mexico, rabies kills up to 20 percent of unvaccinated cattle. But in the United States, their impact is likely to be more limited.

“The arrival of this unique and interesting species and eventually a novel (at least in the U.S.) rabies virus variant is not a catastrophic event or cause for significant alarm,” Chipman says. Even if it sounds a little bit spooky.

Written By Kate Baggaley

#Animals

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