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Ed Yong | How the Pandemic Now Ends
Ed Yong, The Atlantic
Yong writes: "Cases of COVID-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day - but the way there is different now." Yong writes: "Cases of COVID-19 are rising fast. Vaccine uptake has plateaued. The pandemic will be over one day - but the way there is different now."
n September 2020, just before COVID-19 began its wintry surge through the United States, I wrote that the country was trapped in a pandemic spiral, seemingly destined to repeat the same mistakes. But after vaccines arrived in midwinter, cases in the U.S. declined and, by summer’s edge, had reached their lowest levels since the pandemic’s start. Many Americans began to hope that the country had enough escape velocity to exit its cycle of missteps and sickness. And though experts looked anxiously to the fall, few predicted that the Delta variant would begin its ascent at the start of July. Now the fourth surge is under way and the U.S. is once again looping through the pandemic spiral. Arguably, it never stopped.
This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded it off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. It stumbled into the normality trap, craving a return to the carefree days of 2019; in May, after the CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, President Joe Biden gave a speech that felt like a declaration of victory. Three months later, cases and hospitalizations are rising, indoor masking is back, and schools and universities are opening uneasily—again. “It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.
But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.” In part, he says, people underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean. The original SARS-CoV-2 virus had a basic reproduction number, or R0, of 2 to 3, meaning that each infected person spreads it to two or three people. Those are average figures: In practice, the virus spread in uneven bursts, with relatively few people infecting large clusters in super-spreading events. But the CDC estimates that Delta’s R0 lies between 5 and 9, which “is shockingly high,” Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, told me. At that level, “its reliance on super-spreading events basically goes away,” Scarpino said.
In simple terms, many people who caught the original virus didn’t pass it to anyone, but most people who catch Delta create clusters of infection. That partly explains why cases have risen so explosively. It also means that the virus will almost certainly be a permanent part of our lives, even as vaccines blunt its ability to cause death and severe disease.
The U.S. now faces a dispiriting dilemma. Last year, many people were content to buy time for vaccines to be developed and deployed. But vaccines are now here, uptake has plateaued, and the first surge of the vaccine era is ongoing. What, now, is the point of masking, distancing, and other precautions?
The answer, as before, is to buy time—for protecting hospitals, keeping schools open, reaching unvaccinated people, and more. Most people will meet the virus eventually; we want to ensure that as many people as possible do so with two doses of vaccine in them, and that everyone else does so over as much time as possible. The pandemic isn’t over, but it will be: The goal is still to reach the endgame with as little damage, death, and disability as possible. COVID-19 sent the world into freefall, and although vaccines have slowed our descent, we’d still be wise to steer around the trees standing between us and solid ground. “Everyone’s got pandemic fatigue—I get it,” Rivera told me. “But victory is not you as an individual getting a vaccine. It’s making sure that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t bring us to our knees again.”
1. Now
The U.S. is not back to square one. The measures that stymied the original coronavirus still work against its souped-up variant; vaccines, in particular, mean that half of Americans are heavily protected in a way they weren’t nine months ago. Full vaccination (with the mRNA vaccines, at least) is about 88 percent effective at preventing symptomatic disease caused by Delta. Breakthrough infections are possible but affect only 0.01 to 0.29 percent of fully vaccinated people, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Breakthroughs might seem common—0.29 percent of 166 million fully vaccinated Americans still means almost 500,000 breakthroughs—but they are relatively rare. And though they might feel miserable, they are much milder than equivalent infections in unvaccinated people: Full vaccination is 96 percent effective at preventing hospitalizations from Delta, and unvaccinated people make up more than 95 percent of COVID-19 patients in American hospital beds. The vaccines are working, and working well. Vaccinated people are indisputably safer than unvaccinated people.
But although vaccinated individuals are well protected, highly vaccinated communities can still be vulnerable, for three reasons. First, unvaccinated people aren’t randomly distributed. Instead, they tend to be geographically clustered and socially connected, creating vulnerable pockets that Delta can assault. Even in places with high vaccination rates, such as Vermont and Iceland, the variant is still spreading.
Second, Delta could potentially spread from vaccinated people too—a point of recent confusion. The CDC has estimated that Delta-infected people build up similar levels of virus in their nose regardless of vaccination status. But another study from Singapore showed that although viral loads are initially comparable, they fall more quickly in vaccinated people. That makes sense: The immune defenses induced by the vaccines circulate around the body and need time to recognize a virus intruding into the nose. Once that happens, “they can control it very quickly,” Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington, told me. “The same amount of virus might be there at the beginning, but it can’t replicate in the airways and lungs.” And because vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected in the first place, they are also much less likely to transmit Delta than unvaccinated people, contrary to what some media outlets have claimed.
Still, several lines of evidence, including formal outbreak descriptions and more anecdotal reports, suggest that vaccinated people can transmit Delta onward, even if to a lesser degree than unvaccinated people. That’s why the CDC’s return to universal indoor masking made sense, and why vaccinated people can’t tap out of the pandemic’s collective problem. Their actions still influence Delta’s ability to reach their unvaccinated neighbors, including immunocompromised people and children. “If you’re vaccinated, you did the best thing you can do, and there’s no reason to feel pessimistic,” Inci Yildirim, a vaccinologist and pediatric infectious-disease expert at Yale, told me. “You’re safer. But you will need to think about how safe you want people around you to be.”
Third, Delta’s extreme transmissibility negates some of the community-level protection that vaccines offer. If no other precautions are taken, Delta can spread through a half-vaccinated country more quickly than the original virus could in a completely unvaccinated country. It can even cause outbreaks in places with 90 percent vaccination rates but no other defenses. Delta has “really rewound the clock,” Shweta Bansal, an infectious-disease ecologist at Georgetown University, told me. “Communities that had reached safety are in danger again.” Vaccines can still reduce the size and impact of its surges, turning catastrophic boils into gentler simmers. But the math means that “there’s not really a way to solve the Delta problem through vaccination alone,” Murray said.
Here, then, is the current pandemic dilemma: Vaccines remain the best way for individuals to protect themselves, but societies cannot treat vaccines as their only defense. And for now, unvaccinated pockets are still large enough to sustain Delta surges, which can overwhelm hospitals, shut down schools, and create more chances for even worse variants to emerge. To prevent those outcomes, “we need to take advantage of every single tool we have at our disposal,” Bansal said. These should include better ventilation to reduce the spread of the virus, rapid tests to catch early infections, and forms of social support such as paid sick leave, eviction moratoriums, and free isolation sites that allow infected people to stay away from others. In states where cases are lower, such as Maine or Massachusetts, masks—the simplest, cheapest, and least disruptive of all the anti-COVID measures—might be enough.
States such as Louisiana and Florida, where Delta is spreading rapidly, “really need to be talking about a powerful response like closing indoor dining and limiting capacity at events,” Murray said. Louisiana has now reinstituted an indoor mask policy, as have several counties and cities in other states. But several Republican governors, including Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, have preemptively blocked local governments or schools from imposing such mandates, even as Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas now seeks to reverse a similar law that he regrets passing.
There are better ways to do this. On a federal level, Congress could make funding contingent on local leaders being able to make their own choices, Lindsay Wiley of American University, an expert in public-health law, told me. On a state level, leaders could pass mask mandates like Nevada’s, which is “ideal,” Julia Raifman, a health-policy expert at Boston University, told me. It automatically turns on in counties that surpass the CDC’s definition of high transmission and shuts down in counties that fall below it. An off-ramp is always in sight, the public can see why decisions have been made, and “policy makers don’t have to constantly navigate the changing science,” Raifman said.
Vaccine mandates can help too. Emily Brunson, an anthropologist at Texas State, has studied vaccine attitudes and thinks that broad, top-down orders “wouldn’t play well, and the pushback could do more harm than good.” But strong mandates that tie employment to vaccination are easily justified in hospitals, long-term-care facilities, and prisons—“high-risk settings where vulnerable people don’t have a choice about being exposed,” Wiley told me. Mandates are also likely for university students, government employees, and the military, who already have to meet medical conditions for attendance or employment.
The calculus around safety has shifted in another important way. In the first three surges, older people were among the most vulnerable to COVID-19; now 80 percent of Americans over 65 are fully vaccinated. But kids under 12 remain ineligible for vaccines—and the timeline for an emergency-use approval stretches months into the future. Children are less likely to become seriously ill with COVID-19, but more than 400 have already died in the U.S., while many others have developed long COVID or the inflammatory condition called MIS-C. Rare, severe events are more poignant when they affect children, and they can accumulate quickly in the Delta era. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu reports, pediatric COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing and hospitalizations have reached a pandemic high.
Virtual learning took a huge toll on both children and parents, and every expert I asked agreed that kids should be back in classrooms—with protections. That means vaccinating adults to create a shield around children, masks for students and staff, better ventilation, and regular testing. “Schools must continue mitigation measures—I feel very strongly about this,” Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Otherwise, Delta outbreaks are likely. Such outbreaks have already forced nine Mississippi schools to go remote and put 800 people from a single Arkansas district in quarantine. And other respiratory illnesses, including respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), are already showing up alongside COVID-19. “Schools have no choice but to close once there’s a large outbreak,” Brunson said. “A whole generation of children’s education and well-being hangs in the balance.”
The coming weeks will mark yet another pivotal moment in a crisis that has felt like one exhausting string of them. “I think people are right to be hurting, confused, and angry—things didn’t have to turn out this way,” Eleanor Murray, the epidemiologist, told me. But “piecemeal, half-assed responses” allowed for the uncontrolled spread that fostered the evolution of Delta and other variants. “People should be demanding that we don’t repeat those same mistakes from last year.”
“I feel dispirited too, but when the virus moves, we have to move—and sometimes, that means going backwards,” Rivers told me. Daily caseloads are now 36 per 100,000 people; once they fall below 10, “and preferably below five, I’ll feel like we’re in a better place.”
2. Next
But then what? Delta is transmissible enough that once precautions are lifted, most countries “will have a big exit wave,” Adam Kucharski, an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told me. As vaccination rates rise, those waves will become smaller and more manageable. But herd immunity—the point where enough people are immune that outbreaks automatically fizzle out—likely cannot be reached through vaccination alone. Even at the low end of the CDC’s estimated range for Delta’s R0, achieving herd immunity would require vaccinating more than 90 percent of people, which is highly implausible. At the high end, herd immunity is mathematically impossible with the vaccines we have now.
This means that the “zero COVID” dream of fully stamping out the virus is a fantasy. Instead, the pandemic ends when almost everyone has immunity, preferably because they were vaccinated or alternatively because they were infected and survived. When that happens, the cycle of surges will stop and the pandemic will peter out. The new coronavirus will become endemic—a recurring part of our lives like its four cousins that cause common colds. It will be less of a problem, not because it has changed but because it is no longer novel and people are no longer immunologically vulnerable. Endemicity was always the likely outcome—I wrote as much in March 2020. But likely is now unavoidable. “Before, it still felt possible that a really concerted effort could get us to a place where COVID-19 almost didn’t exist anymore,” Murray told me. “But Delta has changed the game.”
If SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay, then most people will encounter it at some point in their life, as my colleague James Hamblin predicted last February. That can be hard to accept, because many people spent the past year trying very hard to avoid the virus entirely. But “it’s not really the virus on its own that is terrifying,” Jennie Lavine, an infectious-disease researcher at Emory University, told me. “It’s the combination of the virus and a naive immune system. Once you don’t have the latter, the virus doesn’t have to be so scary.”
Think of it this way: SARS-CoV-2, the virus, causes COVID-19, the disease—and it doesn’t have to. Vaccination can disconnect the two. Vaccinated people will eventually inhale the virus but need not become severely ill as a result. Some will have nasty symptoms but recover. Many will be blissfully unaware of their encounters. “There will be a time in the future when life is like it was two years ago: You run up to someone, give them a hug, get an infection, go through half a box of tissues, and move on with your life,” Lavine said. “That’s where we’re headed, but we’re not there yet.”
None of the experts I talked with would predict when we would reach that point, especially because many feel humbled by Delta’s summer rise. Some think it’s plausible that the variant will reach most unvaccinated Americans quickly, making future surges unlikely. “When we come through, I think we’ll be pretty well protected against another wave, but I hesitate to say that, because I was wrong last time,” Rivers said. It’s also possible that there will still be plenty of unvaccinated people for Delta to infect in the fall, and that endemicity only kicks in next year. As my colleague Sarah Zhang wrote, the U.K. will provide clues about what to expect.
If endemicity is the future, then masks, distancing, and other precautions merely delay exposure to the virus—and to what end? “There’s still so much for us to buy time for,” Bansal told me. Suppressing the virus gives schools the best chance of staying open. It reduces the risk that even worse variants will evolve. It gives researchers time to better understand the long-term consequences of breakthrough infections. And much like last year, it protects the health-care system. Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri all show that Delta is easily capable of inundating hospitals, especially in largely unvaccinated communities. This cannot keep happening, especially because health-care workers are already burning out and facing a mammoth backlog of sick patients whose care was deferred during previous surges. These workers need time to recover, as does the U.S. more generally. Its mental-health systems are already insufficient to address the coming waves of trauma and grief. COVID-19 long-haulers are already struggling to access medical support and disability benefits. The pandemic’s toll is cumulative, and the U.S. can ill-afford to accumulate more. Punting new infections as far into the future as possible will offer a chance to regroup.
Curbing the coronavirus’s spread also protects millions of immunocompromised Americans, including organ-transplant recipients and people with autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and lupus. Because they have to take drugs that suppress their immune system, they won’t benefit from vaccines and have no choice in the matter. Even before the pandemic, they had to carefully manage their risk of infection, and “we’re not helping them by making surges longer,” Inci Yildirim, the Yale vaccinologist, said. She and others are testing ways of boosting their vaccine responses, including giving third doses, timing their doses around other medications, or using adjuvant substances that trigger stronger immune responses. But for any of that to work, “you need the luxury of some level of COVID-19 control,” Yildirim said.
Finally, the U.S. simply needs more time to reach unvaccinated people. This group is often wrongly portrayed as a monolithic bunch of stubborn anti-vaxxers who have made their choice. But in addition to young children, it includes people with food insecurity, eviction risk, and low incomes. It includes people who still have concerns about safety and are waiting on the FDA’s full approval, people who come from marginalized communities and have reasonable skepticism about the medical establishment, and people who have neither the time to get their shots nor the leave to recover from side effects. Some holdouts are finally getting vaccinated because of the current Delta surge. Others are responding to efforts to bring vaccines into community settings like churches. It now takes more effort to raise vaccination rates, but “it’s not undoable,” Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public-health advocate, told me last month. Measures such as indoor masking will “give us the time to do the work.”
3. Eventually
Pandemics end. But this one is not yet over, and especially not globally. Just 16 percent of the world’s population is fully vaccinated. Many countries, where barely 1 percent of people have received a single dose, are “in for a tough year of either lockdowns or catastrophic epidemics,” Adam Kucharski, the infectious-disease modeler, told me. The U.S. and the U.K. are further along the path to endemicity, “but they’re not there yet, and that last slog is often the toughest,” he added. “I have limited sympathy for people who are arguing over small measures in rich countries when we have uncontrolled epidemics in large parts of the world.”
Eventually, humanity will enter into a tenuous peace with the coronavirus. COVID-19 outbreaks will be rarer and smaller, but could still occur once enough immunologically naive babies are born. Adults might need boosters once immunity wanes substantially, but based on current data, that won’t happen for at least two years. And even then, “I have a lot of faith in the immune system,” Marion Pepper, the immunologist, said. “People may get colds, but we’ll have enough redundancies that we’ll still be largely protected against severe disease.” The bigger concern is that new variants might evolve that can escape our current immune defenses—an event that becomes more likely the more the coronavirus is allowed to spread. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” Georgetown’s Shweta Bansal told me.
To guard against that possibility, the world needs to stay alert. Regular testing of healthy people can tell us where the virus might be surging back. Sequencing its genes will reveal the presence of worrying mutations and new variants. Counterintuitively, these measures become more important nearer the pandemic endgame because a virus’s movements become harder to predict when transmission slows. Unfortunately, that’s exactly when “public-health systems tend to take their foot off the gas when it comes to surveillance,” Bansal told me.
As of May, the CDC stopped monitoring all breakthrough infections and focused only on those that led to hospitalization and death. It also recommended that vaccinated people who were exposed to the virus didn’t need to get tested unless they were symptomatic. That policy has since been reversed, but it “allowed people to get lax,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, who was also a volunteer for the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. “We’ve never tested enough, and we’re still not testing enough.” With Floridians once again facing hours-long lines for tests, “it’s a recap of spring 2020,” Samuel Scarpino, the infectious-disease expert, told me. “We continue to operate in an information vacuum, which gives us a biased and arguably unusable understanding of COVID-19 in many parts of the U.S. That makes us susceptible to this kind of thing happening again.”
What we need, Scarpino argues, is a nimble, comprehensive system that might include regular testing, wastewater monitoring, genetic sequencing, Google-search analyses, and more. It could track outbreaks and epidemics in the same way that weather forecasts offer warnings about storms and hurricanes. Such a system could also monitor other respiratory illnesses, including whatever the next pandemic virus turns out to be. “My phone can tell me if I need to carry an umbrella, and I want it to tell me if I should put a mask on,” Scarpino said. “I’d like to have that for the rest of my life.”
Since last January, commentators have dismissed the threat of COVID-19 by comparing it to the flu or common colds. The latter two illnesses are still benchmarks against which our response is judged—well, we don’t do that for the flu. But “a bad flu year is pretty bad!” Lindsay Wiley, at American University, told me, and it doesn’t have to be. Last year, the flu practically vanished. Asthma attacks plummeted. Respiratory infections are among the top-10 causes of death in the U.S. and around the world, but they can often be prevented—and without lockdowns or permanent mask mandates.
The ventilation in our buildings can be improved. Scientists should be able to create vaccines against the existing coronaviruses. Western people can wear masks when they’re sick, as many Asian societies already do. Workplaces can offer paid-sick-leave policies and schools can ditch attendance records “so that they’re not encouraging people to show up sick,” Wiley said. All of these measures could be as regular a part of our lives as seat belts, condoms, sunscreen, toothpaste, and all the other tools that we use to protect our health. The current pandemic surge and the inevitability of endemicity feel like defeats. They could, instead, be opportunities to rethink our attitudes about the viruses we allow ourselves to inhale.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Facebook Is Obstructing Our Work on Disinformation. Other Researchers Could Be Next
Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Last week, Facebook disabled our personal accounts, obstructing the research we lead at New York University to study the spread of disinformation on the company's platform."
The company’s hostility to academic scrutiny limits our ability to understand how the platform amplifies political falsehoods
ast week, Facebook disabled our personal accounts, obstructing the research we lead at New York University to study the spread of disinformation on the company’s platform. The move has already compromised our work – forcing us to suspend our investigations into Facebook’s role in amplifying vaccine misinformation, sowing distrust in our elections and fomenting the violent riots at the US Capitol on 6 January.
But even more important than the effect on our work is what Facebook’s hostility toward outside scrutiny means for the many other researchers and journalists trying to study Facebook’s effects on society. We’ve already heard from other researchers planning similar projects who are now pulling back. If Facebook has its way, there will be no independent research of its platform.
Our dispute with Facebook centers on a research tool called Ad Observer. Ad Observer is a web browser extension that Facebook users can choose to install to share with us limited and anonymous information about the ads that Facebook shows them. The data they share with us includes the categories advertisers chose when targeting them. Examples might be “married women” or “interested in dating” or “lives in Florida”.
Using data collected through Ad Observer, and also data collected using the transparency tools Facebook makes available to researchers, we’ve been able to help the public understand how the platform fails to live up to its promises, and shed light on how it sells the attention of its users to advertisers.
In a forthcoming paper, we show that Facebook has failed to include more than 100,000 ads that meet its own criteria as political, social and issue ads in its public archive. For example, it failed to include ads supporting Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 elections; Amazon ads about the minimum wage; and an anti-mask ad targeted to conservatives run by a group called Reopen USA, whose Facebook page posts anti-vaccine and anti-mask memes.
We have also shown how highly partisan and misleading news sources get far more engagement on Facebook than reliable news sources do, and we will be publishing an expanded version of this analysis in another forthcoming paper.
But we’re not the only researchers who use Ad Observer’s data. For the past three years, we’ve been making information we collect through Ad Observer and through Facebook’s tools available to other researchers and journalists, so they can conduct their own investigations.
The Markup has used our data to report on how ads with QAnon content and merchandise from extremist militia groups have slipped through Facebook’s filters, despite bans. The Markup also used the data to demonstrate how corporate advertisers such as ExxonMobil and Comcast promote seemingly contradictory messages about hot button issues to different audiences. Reporters from Florida to Kentucky to New Mexico used it to report on trends in political advertising in their states ahead of the 2020 elections.
In disabling our accounts last week, Facebook claimed that we were violating its terms of service, that we were compromising user privacy, and that it had no choice but to shut us down because of an agreement it has with the Federal Trade Commission. All of these claims are wrong. Ad Observer collects information only about advertisers, not about our volunteers or their friends, and the FTC has stated that our research does not violate its consent decree with Facebook.
Unfortunately, Facebook’s campaign against us is part of a larger pattern of hostility toward outside scrutiny. Just last month the New York Times reported that Facebook, after internal controversy, was dismantling a team working on CrowdTangle, its marquee transparency tool for researchers who want to see how unpaid Facebook posts spread and gain engagement on the platform. The paper reported this week that the White House itself was having so much trouble getting a straight answer from Facebook on vaccine misinformation that officials asked to speak directly to the platform’s data scientists, rather than its lobbyists.
Social Science One, launched in 2018 to great fanfare, was supposed to provide researchers with access to Facebook user data in a safe way. But the data offered proved to be much less useful than anticipated, to the point that the funders of the project dropped out. In our work we’ve shown how Facebook’s transparency tools fall short of promises.
We can’t let Facebook decide unilaterally who gets to study the company and what tools they can use. The stakes are too high. What happens on Facebook affects public trust in our elections, the course of the pandemic and the nature of social movements. We need the greater understanding that researchers, journalists and public scrutiny provide. If Facebook won’t allow this access voluntarily, then it’s time for lawmakers to require it.
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Afghanistan's president Ashraf Ghani photographed at the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, in May 2021. (photo: Lorenzo Tugnoli/WP)
Afghan President Flees Country After Taliban Enters Kabul, a Sign the Government Has Collapsed
Susannah George, Bryan Pietsch, Claire Parker and John Hudson, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Taliban forces entered Kabul through the city's four main gates Sunday morning, according to two Afghan security officials and civilian eyewitness accounts. The Islamist group is poised for a full return to power, two decades after a U.S.-led coalition invaded Afghanistan."
In a sign that the government had collapsed, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan High Council for National Reconciliation, confirmed in a video shared online.
Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said in a statement that the group’s fighters had been instructed not to push further into the city with force. The militants had made recent gains after negotiating with local leaders. “We want to enter Kabul with peace, and talks are underway” with the government, he said.
Negotiators representing the national government were headed to Doha, Qatar, on Sunday to discuss an agreement with the Taliban’s political leadership, a senior official close to Ghani said. Members of the militant group were also at the presidential palace for talks on Sunday afternoon, according to two Afghan officials.
“There is an agreement that there will be a transitional administration for orderly transfer of power,” said the acting interior minister, Abdul Satar Mirzakwal, on Sunday. He added that security forces were being deployed across Kabul to ensure order.
The Taliban’s lightning-quick advance to the Afghan capital came as helicopters landed at the U.S. Embassy early Sunday and armored diplomatic vehicles were seen leaving the area around the compound, the Associated Press reported. Diplomats scrambled to destroy sensitive documents, sending smoke from the embassy’s roof, the AP said, citing anonymous U.S. military officials.
U.S. personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan were being relocated to the airport to “ensure they can operate safely and securely” as the Taliban encircled Kabul, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ABC News on Sunday.
Several hours later, the U.S. Embassy released a security alert warning of reports that the airport was taking fire and instructing U.S. citizens to shelter in place.
NGO officials have received queries from military officials about conditions at the airport, suggesting the U.S. government is struggling to get real-time information.
Mere hours before, the Taliban had captured the city of Jalalabad, adding the eastern provincial capital to the large swaths of the country the militants control. The fall came just hours after the Taliban seized Mazar-e Sharif — a northern city long seen as an anti-Taliban stronghold.
The Taliban’s recent takeovers have significantly pushed forward Washington’s forecast for how quickly the Afghan government could collapse. As of last week, the U.S. military had estimated a collapse within 90 days. In June, American officials had forecast that a collapse would take six to 12 months.
Blinken took to the Sunday shows to defend the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban’s current offensive would have happened even if U.S. forces remained in Afghanistan.
“If the president had decided to stay, all gloves would’ve been off, we would’ve been back at war with the Taliban, attacking our forces, the offensive you’ve seen throughout the country almost certainly would’ve proceeded,” Blinken told NBC.
The Taliban’s capture of Jalalabad, close to Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, came with minimal resistance after militants and local elders negotiated the fall of the city’s government. Leaders in Jalalabad were given safe passage from the city, according to Reuters.
The Taliban is retaking Afghanistan. Here’s how the Islamist group rebuilt and what it wants.
Both Bagram and Sorobi districts in Kabul province also surrendered without shots being fired, according to an official, who added that the militants had made “political deals” with local leaders.
Afghan forces on Sunday handed over Bagram air base — once the U.S. military’s most important airfield in the country — to the Taliban, a district chief told the AP. The air base holds a prison containing 5,000 inmates.
The Taliban also took control of Afghanistan’s largest prison, known as Pul-e-Charkhi, CNN reported, citing two unnamed Taliban sources. Up to 5,000 inmates may have been housed at the infamous prison east of Kabul, according to CNN.
Footage from an Afghan news agency on Sunday appeared to show Taliban militants letting inmates out of the prison, the BBC reported.
Several other countries that had retained a diplomatic presence in Kabul even as Taliban gains accelerated began withdrawing staff. The British ambassador will be airlifted from Afghanistan by Monday evening, the Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported. Iranian officials said its embassy in Kabul would be evacuated by Monday, according to Reuters.
Germany closed its embassy on Sunday, Reuters reported. Canada has suspended its diplomatic operations in Kabul and Canadian personnel “are now safely on their way back to Canada,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement Sunday.
The Danish and Norwegian embassies also recently said they would suspend operations and move staff out of the country.
President Biden on Saturday had announced that more troops would be sent to the capital to assist the departure of Americans there, expanding the number of troops sent to Kabul to 5,000. That includes an additional 1,000 troops that had been held at the ready in Kuwait, and at least 650 who had stayed behind in Afghanistan with the mission of protecting the U.S. Embassy and airport after the United States began withdrawing its military.
The Pentagon has declined to call the deployment a combat mission. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said troops have been deployed with machine guns, mortars and other heavy weapons with authorization to defend themselves if attacked.
Blinken was pressed by multiple television hosts Sunday about why the U.S. withdrawal appeared haphazard — particularly given the decision to withdraw forces, then send them back in. Blinken denied being caught flat-footed.
“The president was prepared for every contingency as this moved forward,” he said. “We had those forces on hand and they were able to deploy very quickly again to make sure that we could move out safely.”
Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will brief U.S. lawmakers about developments in Afghanistan on Sunday.
British lawmakers will also be recalled from recess next week to discuss the “deteriorating situation in Afghanistan,” Sky News reported.
Biden has warned that any moves by the Taliban that threaten American personnel or interests in the country would face a “swift and strong” response by the U.S. military.
The fall of Mazar-e Sharif on Saturday came as the Taliban appeared to have gained control of the province of Logar, an important gateway to the capital. Militants on Saturday also captured the capital of Paktika, an eastern province bordering Pakistan, where local leaders fled for Kabul after surrendering.
As the Taliban advanced and Kabul was the last major city in Afghanistan still in government control, the capital was overrun by Afghans fleeing oppressive militant rule amid fears of a humanitarian disaster. Families who had flocked to Kabul were selling their possessions in an attempt to raise money as reports spread that ATMs had stopped dispensing cash.
At the airport, people who had provided help to Western governments were seen on television news footage swarming visa processing centers, seeking a way out of the country. “We served for the American forces,” one person at the airport told ABC News. “They have to take care [of] us. It is our turn to be helped.”
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A sign calling for ending gerrymandering at a Fair Maps rally in Washington, DC, 2019. (photo: Sarah L. Voisin/WP/Getty Images)
Republicans Are Poised to Gerrymander Their Way Into Long-Term Power
Walker Bragman, Jacobin
Bragman writes: "Democrats missed a critical deadline to stop GOP gerrymandering. Now it will be full steam ahead on the Right's undemocratic agenda."
emocrats just missed a crucial deadline in the fight against gerrymandering — and experts say very soon we will be witnessing the consequences.
On Wednesday, just before the Senate adjourned for its August recess, Republicans blocked an effort by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, to get the chamber to consider pared-down versions of the party’s voting rights and democracy reform legislation. Schumer’s ploy was largely symbolic: It was doomed to failure, given the lack of any GOP support, because Senate Democrats have so far refused to eliminate the filibuster and therefore need ten Republican votes to pass most legislation.
Schumer remained positive as he prepared to leave for vacation, declaring that Democrats were “making great progress” on a voting rights bill and promising that it ”will be the first matter of legislative business” when the Senate returns on September 13. In truth, though, Schumer and his caucus were knowingly giving up on their best chance to block state-level Republicans from gaming the redistricting process and relegating Democrats to the minority in the US House of Representatives.
That’s because on Thursday, the US Census Bureau released its 2020 census data, enabling states to begin the once-a-decade process of redrawing their statehouse and congressional districts. Advocates have long been warning of the need to pass electoral reforms before map drawing begins. Since that has now failed to happen, experts say there will be dire consequences, including an effective end to majority rule in the United States and a failure to address climate change in a meaningful way.
“These have been eight squandered months,” says journalist and gerrymandering expert David Daley, “The train is barrelling down the tracks and the light of the train is [now] upon us when it comes to these maps.”
“A 21st Century Jim Crow Assault”
Every ten years, after the census, states redraw their statehouse and congressional districts. In thirty-seven states, elected officials are in charge of that process. Twenty of those thirty-seven legislatures are completely controlled by Republicans, while eight are controlled by Democrats.
In 2011, thanks to a dark money–funded GOP campaign to capture hundreds of legislative seats during the 2010 midterms, Republicans dominated the redistricting process, designing the maps for more than 200 of the 340 congressional districts that were redrawn by state legislatures.
The GOP-drawn district maps heavily favored Republicans majorities at the state level and in the House. A 2017 study from the Brennan Center for Justice found: “In the 26 states that account for 85 percent of congressional districts, Republicans derive a net benefit of at least 16-17 congressional seats in the current Congress from partisan bias.”
The GOP’s control of Congress kneecapped the Obama presidency and was only overcome by Democrats after courts struck down gerrymandered congressional maps in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Last year, after scoring narrow majorities in both the House and Senate, Democrats at first appeared determined to prevent a repeat of the post-2010 debacle. On the campaign trail, President Joe Biden declared that “a first priority” would be electoral reforms like those in the For the People Act, also known as HR 1, a voting rights and election infrastructure bill that would ban partisan gerrymandering.
As president, Biden continued to rail against GOP voter suppression laws, calling them a “21st Century Jim Crow assault,” and declaring that the fight for voting rights is “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
Efforts to protect voting rights have broad support. Last month, more than a hundred fifty civil rights groups urged the president to pass voting rights reform “by whatever means necessary.” Meanwhile, a poll released earlier this week from Data for Progress and the nonprofit Equal Citizens revealed that 60 percent of Americans support banning partisan gerrymandering and creating independent redistricting commissions, including 74 percent of Democrats, 53 percent of Independents, and even half of Republicans.
But a vote to debate the For the People Act failed in late June, thanks to unified Republican opposition and Democrats’ refusal to abolish the filibuster. And last month, White House officials appeared to signal they were giving up on the bill, reportedly suggesting in private calls with voting rights activists that it might be possible to “out-organize” voter suppression, rather than combat it through legislation.
Now that a senate vote on the act has failed a second time and the new census data has been released, experts say we will see the results of that Jim Crow assault in the 2021 redistricting process.
“A GOP Takeover That Could Last a Decade”
Since the last redistricting, the Supreme Court has cleared the path for even more extreme gerrymandering thanks to two rulings: one from 2013, which struck down the formula for requiring jurisdictions to seek federal preclearance under the Voting Rights Act for changes to their election laws; and the other from 2019, which held that partisan gerrymandering is a political issue left up to the legislature to resolve.
Republicans are already planning on pressing their advantage. Recently, Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-TX, told a conference of religious conservatives that redistricting “alone should get us the majority back” in the House.
It is a situation that Daley, author of several books on GOP gerrymandering, including Ratfucked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, finds deeply concerning.
“The idea that Congress goes on recess and says we’ll deal with this in September is crazy-making,” Daley tells the Daily Poster. “There are states that could have maps enacted this fall, over the course of the next couple of months. This isn’t something that can be dealt with effectively after vacation. This is something that needed concerted effort and focus since day one.”
Daley predicts that Republicans will work to ensure a 2022 congressional majority by aggressive gerrymandering campaigns in key states like Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and New Hampshire. He says that while Democrats can pick up seats in Illinois, Maryland, and maybe New York, it won’t be enough to prevent a GOP takeover that could last a decade.
Texas in particular will likely be heavily gerrymandered, Daley says. The state is gaining two congressional seats because of population growth recorded by the 2020 census, and he expects both to go red. He says overall, the state could yield a total of two or three additional seats for Republicans through gerrymandering.
North Carolina, which is likewise gaining a congressional seat following the 2020 census, is also likely to be subject to heavy gerrymandering, says Daley. The state’s congressional split is currently 8-to-5 in favor of Republicans, but Daley expects the map to change to 11-to-3 or 10-to-4, with a net GOP gain of two or three seats. The North Carolina GOP already tried to rig the state’s maps in the past, but the efforts were blocked by federal and state courts in 2018 and 2019.
Daley furthermore expects Republicans to pick up four seats between Georgia and Florida, especially since the latter is gaining a seat thanks to the census. In New Hampshire, meanwhile, Daley says Republicans have made it clear they intend to draw an additional seat for themselves.
The redistricting could end up costing several Democratic lawmakers their seats.
In Kansas, for example, Daley says he fully expects Sharice Davids, the first openly LGBT Native American woman elected to Congress, to be gerrymandered out of her elected position. Daley also says if he were Rep. John Yarmuth, D-KY, he would be “a little jittery,” because “you could pretty easily crack Louisville in half and create an all-Republican delegation there.”
Other states to watch for GOP gains, he says, are Tennessee and Missouri. Daley thinks it might be difficult for Missouri Republicans to split Kansas City because doing so might invite a racial gerrymandering lawsuit. Still, he says it is feasible for the state’s 6-2 map to become a 7-1 map.
On the other hand, Daley says Democrats could pick up one or two seats in Illinois and one in Maryland. He notes, however, that while Maryland currently has a 7-1 congressional map in favor of Democrats that could potentially become 8-0, Democratic Reps. John Sarbanes and Jamie Raskin are both vocal opponents of gerrymandering. Should the state Democrats pull the trigger, Daley says, it “could be awkward.”
Daley calls New York a “wild card” because the state, which is losing a seat, has had an independent commission in charge of redistricting since 2014. But he adds that the commission could be overridden by the state’s Democratic legislature for “maybe a couple” of seats.
Another state to watch, according to Daley, is Wisconsin, since it has a Democratic governor, Tony Evers, who could veto the most egregious maps put forward by the state’s GOP legislature.
All in all, concludes Daley, Republicans could be looking at a net gain of twelve-plus congressional seats, thanks to gerrymandering.
“You can look at the map and you can say here’s at least 12 to 15 seats Republicans can pick up, and you can look at the map and say it’s hard for Democrats to squeeze out 4 or 5,” he explains. “And that’s before you redraw Ohio and Pennsylvania. Do Democrats lose seats there as a result of those new maps?”
The end result, Daley fears, will be the effective end of majority rule in the United States at the state and federal level, and a total failure to address urgent problems like climate change.
“I don’t know how you get climate [legislation] past the filibuster let alone a gerrymandered House,” Daley says. “But in many ways, the stark danger is what could happen to state legislatures. If the gerrymandering of this last cycle are effective and enduring as the ones about to be drawn, that’s another decade gone.”
“The Window Is Still Open”
Michael Li, who serves as senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, is concerned about Democrats missing this key deadline — but he says that hope is not entirely lost yet.
“The window [for reform] is still open, but the clock is ticking,” he says. “Things get more complicated the more time goes on.”
Li believes Congress could pass meaningful reforms after Labor Day, but once gerrymandered district maps are in place in the states, he explains, undoing them will require litigation and additional legislative maneuvers.
“That might require an additional legislative session to draw maps and it might mean having to move primaries or other election-related deadlines,” Li says. “[That] makes the process a lot messier than it would be if the rules were in place before maps are drawn.”
Reforms passed after the maps are drawn are also likely to be less robust than they otherwise could have been. Some of the redistricting provisions in the For the People Act cannot be made retroactive — like requirements that the map-drawing process be conducted transparently. Privileged communications cannot be made public after the fact, Li says.
Anti-gerrymandering provisions that are passed after maps are drawn could also be at a greater threat of successful court challenges.
Li says that, even though Democrats have already missed their key deadline, they should still do everything in their power to still pass redistricting reform.
“The reforms do get weaker the longer Congress takes to pass them, but the critical piece of the reform — which are new national rules including a ban on partisan gerrymandering — you could still impose even if maps have been passed,” Li says. “It just is a lot messier of a process then.”
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Oncology nurse Laura Griffith, who is immunocompromised, poses outside of UCSF Medical Center, where she works in San Francisco, CA. (photo: Sarahbeth Maney/The San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images)
CDC Approval of COVID-19 Booster Shot Offers Help for Some Americans
Natasha Ishak, Vox
Ishak writes: "U.S. health agencies gave the go-ahead for immunocompromised people to receive a third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine late Thursday night, a high note amidst increasingly alarming news about the delta variant."
However, fears are raised that a third shot may become the new marker of the pandemic’s inequality.
.S. health agencies gave the go-ahead for immunocompromised people to receive a third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine late Thursday night, a high note amidst increasingly alarming news about the delta variant. The decision is a big deal since those who have weakened immune systems are still vulnerable to becoming severely ill from the coronavirus, even if they are fully vaccinated. However, there is still one hitch: immunocompromised people who received their previous shot from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will not be eligible for a booster shot.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) both approved third booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines for people with weakened immune systems. The CDC’s green light came within 24 hours of the FDA’s recommendation.
“The FDA is especially cognizant that immunocompromised people are particularly at risk for severe disease,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting FDA commissioner, in a statement related to the announcement. “After a thorough review of the available data, the FDA determined that this small, vulnerable group may benefit from a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Vaccines.”
The decision was applauded by health officials and healthcare workers. “We are immediately pulling in those people, getting them the doses,” Dr. Marc Boom, who runs Houston Methodist Hospital which includes a large organ transplant program, told NPR. Even those on the right, where skepticism over the severity of the pandemic and dissenting voices against vaccinations have thrived, have softened their tune in light of the development regarding booster shots.
“This move is a big step in the right direction especially given the increasing number of vaccine breakthrough infections from the delta variant,” wrote Dr. Marc Siegel, a frequent Fox News guest who has been criticized for spreading misinformation about the pandemic. Siegel applauded the booster shot approval but argued the policy should be expanded to other groups like essential workers and the elderly.
The Covid-19 booster shot approved by U.S. health agencies is not a new vaccine. It is simply a third dose of the vaccine that is given to a person who has already been fully vaccinated. As NPR reported, the CDC recommends that a person get the same vaccine they received for their first two doses. So, for example, if you received the Pfizer vaccine for your first two shots, then you should also get the Pfizer vaccine for your booster shot. If it is not possible to get the same vaccine for your booster shot, an additional dose of the other mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna) is allowed.
Covid-19 booster shots work in conjunction with how our bodies build protection against threats. Biologically, our bodies contain helper T-cells that stimulate other cells called B-cells, which are crucial in producing antibodies. Certain types of B-cells act as memory cells that store the instructions needed for our bodies to produce a particular antibody. However, these memory cells aren’t activated; they’re waiting for a signal that triggers them to produce antibodies. As Sigal Samuel previously explained for Vox:
When you get a booster shot, it gives your memory B-cells that crucial signal to reengage. This can be useful whether the booster contains the original vaccine recipe or something different. If it contains the original recipe, it’ll amplify the signal, increasing the number of antibodies produced. If it contains a tweaked recipe, it’ll retrain the cells to recognize new features of the virus and produce antibodies, should you be exposed to the variant.
Studies have shown the initial two-dose regimen for the Covid-19 vaccination has lower efficacy in those with weakened immune systems, so another “boost” of the vaccine will likely help immunocompromised people build better protection against the coronavirus.
Currently, the Covid-19 booster shot is only recommended for “moderately to severely immunocompromised people.” While there are many kinds of people who may consider themselves at higher risk of serious illness from Covid-19, such as those having a pre-existing health condition, it is important to note that they are not necessarily the same as those who are immunocompromised.
According to the CDC, this category of people includes organ transplant recipients who are taking medicine to suppress the immune system, those undergoing cancer treatment, and people who are HIV positive, among other criteria. The New York Times reported that about 3 percent of Americans are estimated to have weakened immune systems and studies show initial vaccine doses have been less effective for immunocompromised people. The vaccine efficacy rate for people with weakened immune systems is somewhere between 59% to 72%, which is much lower compared to those with a stronger immune system showing 90% to 94% efficacy. Further studies revealed people who are immunocompromised benefitted immensely from receiving a third dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, which is why it’s so important for them to receive a booster shot.
Despite the good news, the FDA also said they were unable to extend the authorization for a booster shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to insufficient data. It is unclear whether immunocompromised people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be eligible in the near future.
Does this mean we are closer to booster shots for everyone?
In her statement last week, Dr. Woodcock reiterated that people who are not immunocompromised and are fully vaccinated are considered “adequately protected” and, as such, will not need a booster shot at this time. However, she emphasized that her team was continuing to work with agency partners to determine whether an additional dose for the general public is needed in the future.
But FDA and CDC approval on booster shots for immunocompromised people has reasonably spurred questions over whether we will soon get the go-ahead for booster shots to the general public, especially as Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations surge nationwide due to the much more contagious delta variant.
Most concerning are reports that the delta variant may be more successful against the Covid-19 vaccines, causing “breakthrough infections” or infections in people who are fully vaccinated. For these people, getting infected after being vaccinated can be overwhelmingly emotional.
“I was pretty shocked to learn I’d tested positive,” Daniele Selby, a writer based in New York City, told Vox. “I am fully vaccinated and have continued to wear masks … so to do all that and still get Covid-19 and feel ill has been pretty upsetting.” Others who have suffered breakthrough infections have had their circumstance politicized, like André Gonzales, who traveled between states for a funeral in early June after being fully vaccinated, and tested positive. “There have definitely been some that have tried to use [my] experience to discount the efficacy of the vaccines or to push unfounded cures on social media,” Gonzales said.
There is still much to be learned about Covid-19 breakthrough infections but preliminary studies suggest there may be varying levels of risk to re-infection based on different vaccines. A recent study by Mayo Clinic suggests people who received the Moderna vaccine may be at a much lower risk of contracting a breakthrough Covid-19 infection than those who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The study, however, has yet to go through a full review. It’s important to remember that breakthrough cases among people who are fully vaccinated are still uncommon, and even when they are infected data shows that these infections are at low risk of resulting in severe illness and/or hospitalization, underlining the benefits of getting vaccinated in spite of risks of re-infection.
With upticks in Covid-19 cases across the globe due to the more aggressive delta variant, experts say we may have to learn to live with the virus. The closest comparison is the flu disease, which continues to cause tens of thousands of deaths each year in the U.S. alone. But, over time, our society has largely managed to adapt to a world with the flu, thanks to the existence of an effective flu vaccine.
As German Lopez wrote for Vox:
While we still have to get more people vaccinated, at a certain point we’ll have to acknowledge we’ve done what we can. It might not be ideal, but we can learn to live with a vaccine-weakened version of Covid-19 — hopefully not too unlike how we’ve long dealt with the flu.
Booster shot policies have exposed the world’s ongoing vaccine inequities
Globally, the United States is the latest country to allow booster shots for people with weakened immune systems, following countries like France, Germany, and Hungary. Some countries have already begun announcing plans to expand their booster shot policies beyond those with weakened immune systems. The U.K., France, and Germany have announced they will begin administering third Covid-19 doses to the elderly as soon as next month. Israel, which has also approved booster shots for those above 60 years old, has gone a step further, reportedly making plans to offer it to younger people, too. Israel was among the first to open up after lockdowns thanks to a strong vaccination program early on, but it is now experiencing another wave of Covid-19 infections, despite the country’s high vaccination rates.
The move to expand additional Covid-19 shots to the wider public in some countries has sparked criticism from World Health Organization officials since the vast majority of poorer countries are still struggling to get residents vaccinated, even with first shots.
“I understand the concern of all governments to protect their people from the Delta variant. But we cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He urged governments to hold off on expanding booster shot programs until the end of September.
Officials from countries preparing to administer additional Covid-19 shots to the wider public have pushed back at the WHO’s criticism. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett argued that the results of the country’s distribution of booster doses among the elderly could be useful data for future booster programs across the world.
In any case, many countries are still lagging in vaccinations, partly due to a lack of access to vaccine supplies and because of poor infrastructure to distribute them quickly. According to Reuters’s world Covid-19 vaccination tracker, which uses data only from countries that report their vaccination figures, about 40% of people who have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine were from high-income countries. Moreover, at least 34% of these vaccine recipients were from Europe and North America.
As some wealthier countries begin moving toward distributing additional Covid-19 vaccine doses to their populations while other poorer nations still lag behind, and governments struggle to determine the best health protocols to keep people safe, the likelihood of disparities will continue.
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Azucena Uresti. (photo: Instagram)
Press Freedom Under Attack in Mexico as TV Anchor Gets Death Threat From Cartel Over Reporting
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexico is the most dangerous country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. Some 120 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, with at least four murdered this year alone."
arlier this week, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel posted a video online in which they directly threatened Uresti, an anchor for the outlet Milenio TV and a radio broadcast for Radio Fórmula, who regularly reports on cartel violence and organized crime in Mexico. In the video, a man told Uresti, quote, “I assure you that wherever you are, I will find you and I will make you eat your words even if they accuse me of femicide.” The blurry video, which was posted on Twitter by an anonymous user, shows masked men carrying automatic rifles and other firearms.
Uresti addressed the threats during her broadcast Monday night.
AZUCENA URESTI: [translated] I have joined the federal system of protection from the government. I repeat: Our work will continue to be based on the truth and with the intention of providing information on the reality of a country like ours. And also, as has happened on other occasions, I express my solidarity and support to hundreds of colleagues who are still threatened or who have had to leave their areas, but who keep on showing the value of information and their love for this profession.
AMY GOODMAN: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador vowed to protect Uresti.
PRESIDENT ANDRÉS MANUEL LÓPEZ OBRADOR: [translated] I completely reject these threats. We don’t accept this sort of behavior. We are going to protect Azucena, and we’re going to protect all Mexicans. It is our responsibility.
AMY GOODMAN: According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Mexico is the most dangerous country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. Some 120 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, with at least four murdered this year alone.
Well, for more, we go to Mexico City, where we’re joined by Jan-Albert Hootsen, Dutch journalist and Mexico correspondent at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Jan, thanks — Jan-Albert, thanks so much for joining us. Why don’t you start off by talking about this situation of Uresti? Remarkably brave, after this death threat comes in, for her to go on the air and challenge the cartel, not only in her name, but in the name of all Mexican journalists trying to do their work on the ground.
JAN-ALBERT HOOTSEN: Absolutely. We believe the threat actually originated in an interview that she did on Radio Fórmula with a member of a citizen militia in the state of Michoacán, where the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cártel is currently embroiled in sort of gang-level warfare over territory in a traditionally very violent area in Mexico.
And I think it’s been a very clear message from the cartel that they want to manipulate and influence public opinion. I mean, it’s sort of a low-intensity civil conflict. It’s war for them. It’s a war against other criminal groups and against the state in Mexico. And with that comes a kind of information warfare. So, they were very clearly not happy with the way certain news outlets, certain national news outlets, were extensively covering the conflict, as Azucena had been doing for over the past few months, and they’re trying to manipulate that. They’re trying to change it.
They’re trying to strike terror in the hearts of Mexican reporters. And that’s sort of the goal of the video. They obviously knew that it was going to go viral. They obviously knew that Mexican outlets were going to reproduce the video and make the message spread across the country like wildfire. And that’s what happened, ultimately.
AMY GOODMAN: So, she has said, in her statement on the air, that she’s under federal protection. What does that mean? And what about the significance of AMLO, of the Mexican president, speaking out?
JAN-ALBERT HOOTSEN: So, when she says she is under federal protection, it essentially means that she has been incorporated into an agency of the federal government called the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists. And it’s an agency that coordinates protective measures, organized by the federal government, anywhere in the country, and it might range from getting a panic button or getting a bulletproof vest, a camera installation at her home, etc. So, there’s a whole catalog of protective measures that the government is able to provide. Some of them are a little bit more effective; some of them are a little bit less.
And it means that she will probably has some — she’ll have to limit her movements a little bit. She’ll have to check in with the federal authorities every once in a while. And it also means that the federal government will need to see what they can do further to investigate this threat, because, ultimately, the threat stems from Jalisco or from Michoacán. These are states in the center of Mexico. They’ll have to investigate and see what they can do about that, because, obviously, protective measures can only go so far.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you tell us what Azucena Uresti was actually investigating as this threat came in, and then put it in the context, overall? In June, one of the murderers of Mexican journalist Javier Valdez was sentenced to 32 years in prison. He was murdered in 2017. His colleague, Miroslava Breach, was assassinated just two months before him. I want to play a clip of Valdez speaking at the International Press Freedom Award from your organization, the Committee to Protect Journalists, in 2011, New York. And then you can tell us each of their stories.
JAVIER VALDEZ CÁRDENAS: [translated] I have been a journalist these past 21 years, and never before have I suffered or enjoyed it this intensely, nor with so many dangers. In Culiacán, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, it is dangerous to be alive. And to do journalism is to tread an invisible line drawn by the bad guys, who are in drug trafficking and in the government, in a field strewn with explosives. …
This is a war, yes, but one for control by the narcos. But we, the citizens, are providing the deaths, and the Mexican and U.S. governments, the guns. And they, the eminent, invisible and hidden ones, within and outside of the governments, they take the profits.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Mexican journalist Javier Valdez, before he was murdered. Now one of the murderers was sentenced to 32 years in prison. But how rare is that even to find someone who has killed a journalist? And give us all the numbers.
JAN-ALBERT HOOTSEN Sure thing. Circling back to your first question, broadly speaking, Azucena Uresti and Milenio Televisión and her radio show on Radio Fórmula were covering a conflict in a specific area of Michoacán in the center of Mexico, where a number of organized crime groups have united to fight back against an incursion of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cártel. And particularly what may have set this threat off was an interview that she did with a member of one of those self-declared self-defense groups in the area where the person who she was speaking with was using relatively strong language in reference to the leader of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cártel. There might have been a little bit of ego involved there, but it appears to be the one issue that set this all off.
And, you know, in a broader context, as you mentioned, Mexico is the most dangerous country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. It has been so for a very long time. More than 120 journalists have been murdered since CPJ started taking numbers, started gathering statistics on violence against the press in 1992. More than 95% of these murders linger in impunity. It’s very rare, actually, for Mexican authorities to even arrest someone in crimes against the press, let alone sentence them.
So what happened in the cases of Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach was relatively rare, and it really only happened because the Mexican state invested a relatively large number of resources and a lot of time in investigating these murders, because it was a PR problem for them, really. They couldn’t really stand back and not do anything.
And both Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach were correspondents for the newspaper of La Jornada, which is a newspaper, a progressive one, based in Mexico City. Javier Valdez was also the co-founder of a weekly magazine called Ríodoce in the city of Culiacán in the northern state of Sinaloa. He was well known for writing columns about organized crime, and especially about human rights and about how it’s really like for people in Sinaloa to live in the shadow of drug trafficking groups. In the case of Miroslava Breach, she was a correspondent for La Jornada in the northern state of Chihuahua, and she was widely known in Mexico for investigating the ties between local criminal groups in Chihuahua and political parties.
So, both of them were, in reality, killed because they angered specific criminal groups. In the case of Javier Valdez, it was a group belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel. In the case of Miroslava Breach, it was another group belonging to the Sinaloa Cartel that was active in Chihuahua. So they were both killed because of that.
And to give you another idea of what the situation is like in Mexico, after their murders in 2017, four years ago, between 30 and 40 reporters were killed in Mexico. Most of them have never been — most of those murders have never actually been solved.
AMY GOODMAN: How can they best be protected, Jan-Albert?
JAN-ALBERT HOOTSEN That’s a very good question. And the best way for them to protect them, it’s sort of like a two-pronged solution. One of them is the Mexican government should actually vastly expand the existing protective mechanisms that they have. They should better train the people focused on human rights in their government and coordinating these protective measures. That, in itself, is quite a task, because the Mexican government has actually never done so adequately.
But the other one — and it’s incredibly important — is they should fight impunity, because, ultimately, the best way to protect journalists is by preventing these things from ever happening. And the best way for preventing these things from ever happening is by fighting back, by arresting people, by letting these criminals know that if they actually do kill a journalist, they’re going to get caught, and they’re going to go to jail, because impunity is what keeps incentivizing this. But, unfortunately, neither of those things is done sufficiently by the Mexican government.
AMY GOODMAN: Jan-Albert Hootsen, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Dutch journalist, Mexico correspondent at the Committee to Protect Journalists, speaking to us from Mexico City.
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Bay front home in Ocean City. (photo: NYT)
The Long, Slow Drowning of the New Jersey Shore
Andrew S. Lewis, The New York Times
Lewis writes: "Billions have been spent to protect the beachfront. But inch by inch, water is winning the war."
rom a satellite’s point of view, New Jersey’s barrier islands barely register, like fine white bones pulled from a body of green, separated by a vascular tissue of wetlands and shallow bays. Twenty thousand years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet covered much of Canada and the northern United States, the coast of what would be New Jersey reached to the edge of the continental shelf, nearly 100 miles east of the present shoreline. For the next 10,000 years, as the last ice age came to an end and the sea level rose by more than 300 feet, the New Jersey coastline moved steadily west.
This alluvial coastal plain is stratified with quartz and glauconite sands, silt, clay and at least eight different aquifers going down beyond 6,000 feet before there is any semblance of solid earth — a slab of bedrock formed between 550 million and 300 million years ago. Geologists like to say that New Jersey’s coastal plain sits “unconformably” atop this Paleozoic base. Most unstable are the handful of delicate barrier islands at its edge, which shift naturally with the push of waves and tides, currents and winds. Henry Hudson passed these ribbons of land in August 1609, days before meeting the river that would bear his name. Johannes de Laet, who chronicled Hudson’s voyage several years later, dismissed the coast as “white sandy beach and drowned land within.” Walt Whitman, a frequent visitor to New Jersey’s coast, was awed by the way shorelines breathe. He called them a “curious, lurking something.”
For millenniums before being driven out by the Dutch and English, the Jersey Shore’s original human inhabitants, known today as the Delaware, ventured from the mainland in the spring, along the creeks and thoroughfares of the back bays and onto spots like what is now called Seven Mile Island, in New Jersey’s southernmost county, Cape May. They set up their summer camps within dunes blanketed with beach grass and sand pea, amid thickets of bayberry, oak and red cedar. They spent their days harvesting fish and oysters, some of which they smoked to preserve for the winter months. The Delaware knew better than to permanently settle on such terrain. When fall arrived, they broke down their camps and retreated, traveling a north-south trail that some historians have suggested is the rough footprint of U.S. 9, now a designated coastal-evacuation route.
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