18 September 21
A Notice on Fundraising: Please Read
September has been a challenging fundraising month. Every single donation will matter and there is no margin for failure. We accept the challenge and we will rise to it.
For some of you the pace of our fundraising efforts may prove stressful. We hope you stick with RSN. For those who depart, live long and prosper. For those who stay, you maintain an interest in the only entirely publicly-funded news agency, Reader Supported News.
This is the news source the community built. We will fight to sustain it.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
18 September 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Primary.
The three conservative Democratic millstones were Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Scott Peters of California, and Kathleen Rice of New York. In what I am sure was pure coincidence, both Schrader and Peters have received boatloads of campaign money from various Big Pharma sources. (Schrader’s personal fortune is derived from an inheritance from his grandfather, who was a top executive at…wait for it…Pfizer.) This is not true of Rice, who apparently believes that pharmaceutical companies may soon be holding bake sales to make ends meet.
(Also, note to Politico and all the ships at sea: Democrats who sabotage a policy position the party has held for eight years, when the policy is within an ace of winning, are in no way “centrists” or “moderates.” They are conservative Democrats. At best. It’s OK to call them that.)
This bill is estimated to save $120 billion for American consumers, which is probably why having the government negotiate drug prices has the support of 90 percent of American adults, most of whom do not get contributions from pharmaceutical companies. Schrader, of course, sought shelter on the electric Twitter machine in a fog of tattered conjuring words.
I am committed to lowering prescription drug costs by championing legislation that has the potential to gain enough bipartisan, bicameral support to become law. What we've seen so far in the House will not pass the Senate—Americans cannot afford for Congress to stall again.
Have pity on me, Your Honor. It’s true I fed my parents into the woodchipper but…but…I’m an orphan, don’t you know?
Relatives and neighbors survey the damage to vehicles. (photo: Jim Huylebroek/NYT)
The strike was meant to target the masterminds of an earlier attack on the Kabul airport, which was blamed on ISIS-K. And for weeks, the Pentagon maintained that despite the inadvertent deaths of civilians, the mission had been successful.
But on Friday, officials said an internal review revealed that no Islamic State members had been killed in the attack, only civilians.
"The strike was a tragic mistake," Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference.
"I am now convinced that as many as 10 civilians, including up to seven children, were tragically killed in that strike," McKenzie added. "Moreover, we now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K, or a direct threat to U.S. forces."
News reports began to unravel official narratives of the strike
The retaliatory strike came amid the massive evacuation effort in Afghanistan and three days after more than a 150 people were killed by a suicide bomber outside of one of the airport gates, including 13 U.S. troops.
At the time, a U.S. Central Command spokesman said officials believed the attack in Nangahar Province had killed the target and that there were no known civilian casualties.
But questions about the official narrative of the drone strike surfaced when reports, including from The New York Times and The Washington Post, identified the driver of the targeted car as an aid worker who was transporting water containers to his family.
The strike was hailed as a success that had blocked "multiple suicide bombers" from further attacks on the airport as people desperately sought to leave the country.
U.S. Central Command officials also said the Hellfire missile was fired as ISIS-K extremists loaded explosives into the vehicle.
"Significant secondary explosions from the vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material," U.S. Central Command officials said initial statement.
In a press conference Sept. 1, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley called it a "righteous strike" that correctly followed procedures.
Bad intelligence led to the killing of civilians
On Friday, McKenzie provided some insight into the intelligence leading to the drone strike.
As many as six U.S. Reaper drones had tracked a white Toyota Corolla for eight hours and deemed it an imminent threat, McKenzie explained.
In all, he said, U.S. forces had collected more than 60 pieces of intelligence indicating another attack was imminent.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett talks with Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. (photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
“I think the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference,” Thomas said, at Notre Dame University in Indiana.
“So if they think you are anti-abortion or something personally, they think that’s the way you always will come out. They think you’re for this or for that. They think you become like a politician.
“That’s a problem. You’re going to jeopardise any faith in the legal institutions.”
Earlier this month, Thomas was one of five conservatives who in an emergency “shadow docket” decision let stand an extreme anti-abortion law from Texas.
Supporters of abortion rights fear the move previews a formal overturning of Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which guarantees the right, through a case from Mississippi.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we’re really good at finding something that separates us,” Thomas said.
He also said: “It’s not about winning and losing at the court.”
Thomas is only the latest justice to insist members of a court on which liberals are outnumbered 6-3 do not rule according to political beliefs.
Last week, the conservative Amy Coney Barrett said “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties” and claimed the court was “not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”.
She was speaking at a Kentucky centre named for Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader who defied convention to block Barack Obama’s third pick to the court, oversaw two picks by Donald Trump including the hugely controversial Brett Kavanaugh, then ripped up his own precedent to rush Barrett’s confirmation in place of a liberal lion, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shortly before the last election.
McConnell looked on as Barrett spoke. The irony did not go unnoticed.
At 83, the liberal justice Stephen Breyer is the oldest member of the court, a target of calls to retire from progressives who see a narrowing window for his replacement by a Democratic White House and Senate.
Breyer has said he does not intend to die on the court, as Ginsburg did, but has not indicated when he might step down.
He has also written a book, The Authority of the Court and the Peril of Politics. Last weekend he told Fox News Sunday: “I’m there for everybody. I’m not just there for the Democrats. I’m not just there for the Republicans. And I’m not just there because a president was a Democrat who appointed me.”
Joe Biden has promised to put a Black woman on the court. In Peril, a new book out next week, the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa detail how that promise, a political act in itself, was the result of an endorsement from the South Carolina congressman James Clyburn which did much to propel Biden through the Democratic primary and into the Oval Office.
Thomas, the only African American on the court, has been a consistent presence on the hard right since his highly contentious confirmation in 1991, when he was accused of sexual harassment by a former colleague. At Notre Dame, protesters shouted “I still believe Anita Hill” before being removed.
Thomas said he “almost never” changed his mind as a result of oral arguments. Infamous for rarely speaking during such proceedings, in 2016 he made headlines by breaking a 10-year silence to ask questions in defence of gun rights.
At Notre Dame, he said lawyers sometimes performed so badly justices’ minds were changed. He also said some rulings “conflict very strongly with my personal opinion, my policy preferences”.
Many on the left want Biden to expand the court to redress its ideological balance, thereby playing the sort of hardball politics Republicans have used without compunction. The constitution does not limit the number of justices on the court.
Thomas did not directly address the issue. But he did say the US “should be really, really careful” about “destroying our institutions”.
“The court was thought to be the least dangerous branch [of government] and we may have become the most dangerous,” he said.
Haitian migrants use a dam to cross to and from the United States from Mexico, Friday, September 17, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. Thousands of Haitian migrants have assembled under and around a bridge in Del Rio. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
"We told our son we were camping so he wouldn't worry," said the 33-year-old migrant from Venezuela, who crossed the shallow waters of the Rio Grande with her partner and their four-year-old child.
"You're thinking, What will happen to us?" she said of the two days they spent in the teeming staging area shaded by the bridge between Texas and Ciudad Acuña in northeastern Mexico.
Thousands of migrants -- including families, pregnant women and babies -- were crowded in the makeshift camp under the Del Rio International Bridge on Friday. They sleep in the dirt, surrounded by growing piles of garbage, exposed to the elements and without much food and water in hopes of being processed by the overwhelmed US Border Patrol.
"These people are desperate ... and they're determined to get here," said Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez.
The number of migrants -- many of them Haitian -- assembled in the temporary site has swelled from roughly 400 one week ago to around 13,990 on Friday in a mounting immigration crisis for the Biden administration.
Haiti is reeling from a major earthquake that left more than 2,000 people dead and thousands more injured, as well as from the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in July.
Many Haitians are believed to have been living in South America after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti but the economic toll of the pandemic on the region fueled migration to the US southern border.
Under a public health order linked to the coronavirus pandemic, border agents have the authority to turn away adults and migrant families. But a federal judge ruled Thursday that the Biden administration will no longer be allowed to apply the order to migrant families with children.
A Homeland Security official said Thursday that expulsion and deportation flights to Haiti will continue.
Border crossings have reached the highest level in decades, with US Customs and Border Protection reporting more than 208,000 in August alone and a total this fiscal year of more than 1.5 million.
Del Rio Mayor Bruno Lozano, a Democrat, has asked the Biden administration for additional resources and manpower, saying that it could take weeks to process the migrants now amassed at the border.
"The Border Patrol is unfortunately strained to its limit, beyond limit," he said.
In a statement, the Border Patrol said it was boosting the number of agents in the area to "immediately address the current level of migrant encounters and to facilitate a safe, humane and orderly process."
The shaded area is being used as a temporary staging site to "prevent injuries from heat-related illness" while migrants wait to be taken into custody, according to the Border Patrol. More drinking water, food, towels and portable toilets were being delivered, the agency said.
On Friday, CBP said that the Office of Field Operations Del Rio Port of Entry will temporarily close and re-route traffic from Del Rio to Eagle Pass.
The temporary closure and shift "is necessary in order for CBP to respond to urgent safety and security needs presented by an influx of migrants into Del Rio and is effective immediately," they said.
Images from the area show crowds of migrants at the camp while others wade across the Rio Grande near the bridge. Some carried young children across the knee-length water; others hauled their belongings in plastic bags or gallons of water. Tents fashioned from blankets and pieces of wood were erected. Clothes were laid out on the ground to dry under a searing sun.
Lozano said at least one woman had given birth.
Most of the migrants will be expelled or placed in removal proceedings, according to federal officials.
Villasmil, who arrived by bus at a migrant center after being processed, said her family was fleeing political persecution in Venezuela.
At the staging area after crossing the Rio Grande, she said, her family was issued a ticket with a number. They waited two days to be processed. Now they were hoping to make it to San Antonio, about 150 miles away, where they plan to stay with a relative.
At the center run by the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, the migrants have access to phones, restrooms, clean clothing and food.
"It's sad," Villasmil said. "You leave the problems in your country and you come here."
Her four-year-old son wore a red shirt that said, "Good Vibes." The boy romped around three backpacks -- one with Paw Patrol cartoon characters -- stuffed with their belongings.
'To trivialize the injury of someone denying you the ability to decide how you have sex is a trivialization of all forms of sexual violence,' Alexandra Brodsky says. (photo: Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images)
The civil-rights attorney Alexandra Brodsky discusses how legislation banning so-called stealthing could expand understandings of sexual assault.
Garcia has credited her interest in addressing nonconsensual condom removal to a 2017 article written by the attorney Alexandra Brodsky, who was a third-year student at Yale Law School at the time. Brodsky’s paper, “ ‘Rape-Adjacent’: Imagining Legal Responses to Nonconsensual Condom Removal,” uses a combination of first-person interviews and legal analysis to make a case for stealthing as a transgression on par with other forms of sexual assault. It was published in the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law in the same year that Garcia introduced her first anti-stealthing bill. Uncommonly for a law-review article, it went modestly viral. “It will never stop surprising me that I wrote a term paper in law school, a bunch of people read it, and now there’s maybe going to be an actual law???” Brodsky tweeted last week.
I recently spoke to Brodsky, who is now a civil-rights attorney with the nonprofit Public Justice. Soon after graduating from college, she co-founded Know Your IX, an organization helping students navigate Title IX protections, and she is now the author of the recent book “Sexual Justice,” which turns an activist-cum-lawyer’s lens on ways that colleges, workplaces, and other institutions can fairly and humanely handle allegations of sexual misconduct. (An excerpt was published in The New Yorker last month.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed California’s groundbreaking bill, the implications of whether sexual misconduct is a civil or criminal violation, and the surprising range of opponents to anti-stealthing laws.
How did you come to the idea of exploring nonconsensual condom removal as a legal topic?
Before and during law school, I spent a lot of time working with college students and young alumni who were concerned about sexual violence. I met a lot of survivors, and I was exposed to stories about a lot of different kinds of sexual harm. Sexual violence takes many forms—very little of it looks like the cliché of rapists jumping out of the bushes—and, especially among young people, sexual violence often happens in the context of otherwise consensual sex. When I started law school, I had this question in my head of whether nonconsensual condom removal is cognizable under any of the laws that we have today that address sexual assault, and in my final semester of law school I decided to dig into the question in a more meaningful way.
The bulk of the paper is legal analysis, which I think is probably not interesting to anyone other than lawyers. But I also talked to people who had experienced [stealthing], and heard them describe the injuries that it had caused. Even among people who agree that sexual violence is bad—which I would like to think is most people, though certainly not all—we sometimes have thin understandings of how sexual violence hurts people. The survivors of this harm talked to me about a range of feelings: how it made them feel powerless, how it made them feel as though their partners just had no concern at all for their autonomy. It was also interesting to me that a lot of the people I talked to were deeply hurt by the experience but didn’t know if they were right to feel that way. They didn’t know if what they felt as bad was really bad. In my experience, part of the value of naming these things is to affirm for survivors that they have the right not to be treated this way.
There’s a strong feminist tradition of making harms legible by giving them names—like “sexual harassment.”
Yes, that’s exactly right. It will never stop being bizarre to me that people have read this paper who are not directly related to me, or who are [not] my academic adviser. Usually legal scholarship does not gain a broad audience. But, if I have any explanation for it, it’s the fact that it was one of the first times that this phenomenon had been given a name in a public forum.
There was a pretty forceful critique of your paper, shortly after it came out, from the writer and activist Judith Levine. She argued that criminalizing nonconsensual condom removal, or making it a civil violation, would be a grievous overreach—she used the phrase “the privatization of sexual safety.”
I read Levine’s critique to be a civil-libertarian critique—in effect, that basically any turn to the law to address sexual violence will inevitably serve illiberal ends. In many ways, I understand the root of this critique, but the answer just cannot be that victims of sexual violence are allowed no legal remedy whatsoever. I’m a lawyer, so I obviously think that the law is useful sometimes, but I am much more interested in a careful balancing of the benefits and risks of law, and coming to sensible solutions, than I am in just throwing up my hands and giving up on the possibility of legal recourse for victims just because it’s hard.
It’s interesting to me how often civil libertarians seem particularly eager to decry any kind of legal regime specifically when it comes to sexual harms. I fear this sometimes reflects an expectation that victims of this particular kind of harm, who are disproportionately going to be women, must suck it up for the greater good in ways that we don’t expect of people who experience other kinds of harm.
In your paper, you ultimately conclude that this violation demands not criminalization but a civil remedy—which is what California is pursuing now. Cristina Garcia, the assemblywoman behind the bill, put forward a similar bill in 2017 aiming to criminalize the act, but it didn’t pass. Do you think that shift from criminal to civil violation made the difference?
I haven’t been involved in the behind-the-scenes of this bill at all. I do think that, for good reasons, many people are worried about expanding the reach of criminal law in any way, even for the kinds of harm that we would all agree are bad. This goes back to my partial sympathy for a civil-libertarian critique. Whenever we’re making something illegal, we have to figure out what the costs are of making it illegal. There could be many good reasons why people would feel more comfortable with a civil bill than a criminal bill. I favor a civil remedy because I think it’s far more useful for survivors. I’m not speaking for my employer here, but in my day job I’m a civil-rights lawyer. Many of my clients are victims of sexual harassment, and the criminal law has almost universally been utterly useless to them. A civil remedy has the benefit of keeping decision-making in the survivor’s hand. In a criminal prosecution, the victims rely on police and prosecutors to decide whether a case moves forward, which can be a profoundly disempowering experience, coming on the heels of the initial violation, which was itself a supremely disempowering experience. In contrast, in a civil violation, the victim makes the decision about whether to file the lawsuit. There’s a real feminist tradition of innovative civil remedies. The Violence Against Women Act originally had a civil remedy, though it was eventually shut down by the Supreme Court. I’m hopeful that this California bill will be an invitation to return to that tradition.
One of the critiques that comes up in conversations of nonconsensual condom removal is the question of the actual harm. There’s legal precedent for somebody becoming impregnated when they didn’t think there was a risk of pregnancy, or being infected with an S.T.I. when they did not think there was a risk of receiving an S.T.I. But those are consequences of condom removal—a law like this makes removing the condom itself illegal, even if there are no physical consequences. Is a violation of trust a sufficient harm?
That seems like a critique of the very concept that sexual assault is bad. It’s true that some people are, at least in part, upset that they were sexually assaulted because of physical injuries or pregnancy that results. But the fundamental injury is a denial of autonomy, a denial of the victim’s personhood. The idea that all of us get to make decisions about whom we have sex with and when and how—I’m disturbed that this would be at all controversial. To trivialize the injury of someone denying you the ability to decide how you have sex is a trivialization of all forms of sexual violence.
California isn’t the first state to introduce legislation against nonconsensual condom removal—New York and Wisconsin introduced bills shortly after your 2017 paper was published, but they all kind of petered out. Garcia’s earlier California bill didn’t pass a vote. What’s changed between then and now?
I don’t know enough about the New York, Wisconsin, and California legislatures to make some kind of comparative analysis. I do think that legislative change often takes a really long time. It requires more than, you know, someone writing a paper. There are other sources of influence. The TV show “I May Destroy You” had a plotline about nonconsensual condom removal—that did a lot to introduce the issue into public consciousness.
I remember the dialogue in the show being incredibly direct: a character says something like “This isn’t almost-rape. He is a rapist.” It’s a little jarring to realize that’s a distinction which, in the U.S., is just beginning to be made.
When someone says something is rape, it may be a legal claim, but I hear it first and foremost as an ethical claim. I think that there are many survivors of nonconsensual condom removal who do feel it as a rape. And there are some who don’t—including some of the people who I talked to. It just goes to show the work that law does in shaping our ethical and political commitments. Sometimes I feel that it is deeply uncool to care about law. I don’t believe that law will ultimately be the best or most effective tool against sexual violence, but I do think it is a tool, both for providing remedy to individual victims and also for shaping what we think is bad, what we think is acceptable. We can see frustrating versions of this, where people feel very confident saying that if something’s not a crime, then it’s no big deal. Obviously there are many things that are bad but not illegal. I don’t think that the law should be the ultimate authority on how we should treat one another, but it does shape our commitments.
Direct support to survivors from their community is going to do more than courts can in nearly all cases. Organizing around ending violence as a political project is going to do more to stop sexual assault and create systemic change and set up structures of support—that’ll do more than law can. But law can be a backup. Law can be a helpful tool for some people. That’s the cornerstone of the movement in which I now work.
If this California bill becomes law, what changes?
That depends a lot on whether attorneys step up and take these cases. I’m a big believer in civil remedies, but the obvious drawback is that you have to be able to find a lawyer in order to bring one of these suits. Theoretically, you can bring a suit pro se, on your own, but that is much less likely to succeed. This isn’t a problem unique to nonconsensual condom removal, but it will likely rear its head here.
It is also definitely true that the bill itself, and discussion of the bill, contribute to a public understanding of the harm that both provides validation to survivors and hopefully makes it clearer to people who are thinking of doing this act that they shouldn’t. Either because they might get in trouble, or because—well, it’s sort of hard for me to imagine how someone could do this and not realize that it was bad, but presumably there might be people out there. Hopefully the law and public discussion can shape their view. I do think that there is a nontrivial number of people out there who work with a pretty binary conception of consent—this idea that once you have said yes to sex, you have said yes to every possible permutation of that sex—and perhaps this bill will be clarifying to them.
The notion of consent as something that is, in fact, quite nuanced does seem like it needs to be articulated over and over again.
I have some hope that that’s changing. If you talk to college students today, they not only have a much richer understanding of consent but also have a critique of consent as being insufficiently attuned to sexual autonomy—consent as a floor rather than as an aspiration.
But then I see some of the people in my social-media mentions and I get discouraged again. A guy found me on Instagram to tell me that I was “a basic bitch who was ruining things for everyone.” And, you know, that’s not the Judith Levine critique. This is more like “Nonconsensual condom removal is a really fun thing that I enjoy doing, and now maybe I’m not going to be able to do it anymore.”
He seems to have a pretty narrow definition of the word “everyone.”
Not to belabor the point, but that’s exactly the problem something like the California bill is trying to remedy. When it turns out that the person you’re sleeping with has a definition of “everyone” that excludes you, that’s a pretty alarming discovery. My hope would be that, for people for whom it is not intuitive why it is bad to remove a condom without your partner’s consent, they'll now have to ask themselves why that law exists.
A refugee receives his first dose of coronavirus vaccine in Kigali, Rwanda. (photo: Habimana Thierry/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
As the debate over booster vaccine shots heats up in the United States, global health leaders have issued an urgent call for global vaccine equity. The WHO reports vaccination rates on the African continent fall far below its target for 70% of the population of all countries to be vaccinated by mid-2022. “The science is not completely behind the need for booster shots yet,” says Zane Dangor, special adviser to the foreign minister of South Africa, who has called on the U.S. to come up with a proposal for allowing other countries to manufacture vaccines. “This is an emergency that affects all of us because variants are coming from areas where there are large numbers of unvaccinated people,” adds infectious disease specialist Dr. Joia Mukherjee.
This comes as health leaders have issued an urgent call for global cooperation on vaccine supply and access to end the worst pandemic in the last hundred years. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday vaccination rates on the African continent are far below the WHO’s target for 70% of the population of all countries to be vaccinated by mid-2022.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: So far, just two countries in Africa have reached the 40% target, the lowest of any region. As I said last week, that’s not because African countries don’t have the capacity or experience to roll out vaccines. It’s because they have been left behind by the rest of the world. More than 5.7 billion doses have been administered globally, but only 2% of those have been administered in Africa. This leaves people at high risk of disease and death exposed to a deadly virus against which many other people around the world enjoy protection.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as heads of state are set to attend the U.N. General Assembly next week. And on Wednesday, President Joe Biden will host a virtual global COVID-19 summit to, quote, “call on chiefs of state, heads of government and international organizations, business, philanthropic, and non-governmental leaders to come together to commit to ending the COVID-19 pandemic.”
For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Johannesburg, South Africa, Zane Dangor is with us, special adviser to South Africa’s foreign minister. During an event Tuesday hosted by Public Citizen, he called on the U.S. to come up with a proposal for allowing other countries to manufacture vaccines. Also with us, Dr. Joia Mukherjee, infectious disease specialist, associate professor of global health at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer for Partners in Health.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Zane Dangor, we want to start with you in Johannesburg. You have the big debate brewing in the United States. In fact, on the front page of The New York Times today, “U.S. Booster Policy Is in Flux as Dissent Mounts.” Apparently, top people at the FDA are quitting over the push for booster shots. We have that, while you have the rest of the world — some countries barely having access to a vaccine. South Africa and India have been on the forefront of demanding that the large vaccine companies, like Moderna and Pfizer, share their recipes and technology to allow other drug companies to be able to make these vaccines available to everyone. Explain what you’re proposing and your view of this debate over a third shot for U.S. residents.
ZANE DANGOR: So, on the first one, South Africa and India, in October of 2020, made a proposal at the World Trade Organization for certain provisions of the trade-related aspects of international — of property rights to be waived for the duration of the pandemic. So it’s a temporary call for a waiver on IP rights and exclusive use to allow for what is called idle capacity in other parts of the world to be given the technology and know-how — the recipe, as you called it — to manufacture more life-saving medications, including vaccines, so that a more efficient response to the pandemic is possible.
This proposal has been supported by over 150 countries and, since May of 2021, also supported by the U.S., through President Biden’s announcement and the administration’s support for the initiative in Geneva. This proposal does not change the international property rights regime. It basically just calls for changes to the manner in which companies can license it in —
AMY GOODMAN: We can hear you fine.
ZANE DANGOR: And companies can access the licenses and the know-how to ensure that we do reach the target of 10% by the end of September and 40% of the global population by the end of this year and 70% by the end of 2022. As of now, the major blocks to this process is the fact that the European Union is not supportive of it, and that is very significant in the context of the WTO as the European Union speaks on behalf of all European countries at the WTO. And we’re hoping that President Biden and others could use the summit this week to persuade more members to support it, the waiver, in particular the European Union.
With regards to the booster shots, I also coach the Vaccine Manufacturing Working Group, which is linked to the World Health Organization. And we’ve been discussing the movement in high-income countries towards booster shots and the impacts of that. There are two. The one is that it will continue the skewed distribution of vaccines, where you have most of the high-income countries almost completely fully vaccinated or have reached their targets towards population immunity, whereas countries in Africa, you know, their percentage is less than 3%.
There’s another component to this, is that as we — the pressure on the materials used to manufacture vaccines comes under pressure. So, the kind of glass vials that vaccines are packaged in will come under pressure with the calls for booster shots, because booster shots lend themselves to single use of these glass vials. So, there’s quite a bit of the — in terms of the value chain that comes under pressure.
Secondly, the WHO itself, the chief scientist of the WHO and others have actually expressed the view, based on evidence, that the science is not completely behind the need for booster shots yet. So, if the science is not behind the need for booster shots, then the risks associated in moving towards this, in terms of continued skewed access, the potential for new variants to emerge when you have large numbers of the global — the world’s population unvaccinated, needs to be evaluated by the U.S. and other countries that are thinking about moving towards the use of booster shots. Booster shots is a euphemism for third and fourth doses. So you’re moving towards third and fourth doses, in some cases, when, in many parts of the world, people haven’t had access to the first dose of a vaccine. Thanks.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Zane Dangor, also, just to be clear, it’s less than 1% of people in low-income countries who have been —
ZANE DANGOR: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: — fully vaccinated, and, as you said, 3% on the continent of Africa. Now, South Africa already has a technology transfer hub in place. Could you explain what’s happening there and what needs to be done to increase manufacturing capacity?
ZANE DANGOR: So, one of the first hubs — it’s the first global hub to be established for mRNA research. And this hub was established as part of the initiative from the WHO. And after a robust call for interest, South Africa was chosen as the first of these hubs. MRNA technology was the chosen technology in the first instance because it lends itself to rapid scaling up of manufacturing. And this is why it’s called an mRNA hub. But we might move towards other technologies, and the WHO can speak on that with a lot more eloquence.
But the challenge we have is that the late-stage technology holders — the rights holders for late-stage technology, which is the proven technology, which is, at this stage, your Pfizer and Modernas, have decided not to cooperate with the WHO in supporting the hubs through technology transfer. And this delays the process, which means that South Africa will either have to use unproven technology or invest in its own mRNA technology.
But, you know, the idea of this hub is that it will become a training hub. So, the companies involved, which are both located in Cape Town, the one who would be investing in training the first spoke, which is the first South African company that will distribute it, but will also be able to train other hubs and manufacturers across Africa. And as we heard yesterday from some of the leaders on this initiative, it may even be able to train manufacturers in other parts of the world, in the Global South, as well.
So, the hub is one of the key measures — and not just South African hub, but other hubs across the world — is that you’re not going to get security of supply, for this pandemic and following pandemics, if we don’t change the economics of life-saving medication. And that is where it’s produced and where it’s consumed. You know, so, Africa only produces 10% of the vaccines that they consume, and none of the vaccines related to COVID. There’s full and finished capacities across Africa, but none that can actually produce the vaccine using the active pharmaceutical ingredients. So, this is the idea of the hub. It’s really to change the asymmetrical nature of vaccine and other life-saving medication, the manner in which it’s produced and how it actually gets distributed, because the lessons from this pandemic is, only if you’ve got regional security of supply will everybody access these life-saving medications equally.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Joia Mukherjee, you’ve called the idea of third booster shots here a terrible idea morally. What do you think the U.S. needs to do to boost vaccine supply? And what would you like to see happen at Biden’s summit next week?
DR. JOIA MUKHERJEE: Yeah. So, thank you so much, Amy and Nermeen, for having us on. And it’s a pleasure again to speak with Mr. Dangor on the same show.
You know, we were very happy that the Biden administration was willing to waive the TRIPS, the intellectual property, in this limited way, yet that is a tiny step in the cascade that we are demanding. So, first is getting actual agreements written with the WTO, with the manufacturers, so that this can — the technology can be transferred and those patent waivers mean something. That’s really important. There is still no formal language, and we’re demanding that.
The second, though, is money. There is no way to massively scale up the manufacture of vaccines regionally, as Mr. Dangor has said, without a lot of money. And we need to think about this as a moment of global collaboration. To me, this is a test. Can we get two shots to the entire world? If we can’t do that, we don’t have a prayer at the collaboration needed for things like climate change. And this is an emergency that affects all of us, because variants are coming from areas where there are large numbers of unvaccinated people.
And so, we need the leaders of the world to sit down and follow the lead of the Global South, leaders like the President Ramaphosa and others, who have called for this now for months and months, since November and December. And we were told, “Well, it would take at least six months to do it.” Well, had we started to transfer technology, invest in the supplies, invest in the training in November, we would be manufacturing those vaccines now.
So we’re just livid at these small steps, because what we need is the patent waiver and the language, then we need the transfer of technology, that’s written down and is happening, and then we need the funding to make this real. And if we don’t do that, we are not going to get out of this. Right now we’re working on charity donations from this country or that country. It’s not going to solve this giant public health crisis that affects all of us.
AMY GOODMAN: And what about Public Citizen’s report —
DR. JOIA MUKHERJEE: So, we are — yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — that contends the Biden administration could unilaterally share the recipe for Moderna’s —
DR. JOIA MUKHERJEE: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: — COVID-19 vaccine with the world, because it funded much of the research?
DR. JOIA MUKHERJEE: Yeah, absolutely. So, the United States has — we have language in the law that says if the U.S. government has contributed monetarily to the development of a product, we can use it then in our national interest. And what we’re asking President Biden to say is that vaccinating the world is in our moral interest, our global interest, but it’s also in our national interest. The Delta variant that’s spreading came from another country, a very poorly vaccinated country, India. So, you know, we — this is all within the legal framework that’s within the WTO.
And what’s creating this idea of booster shots being bad for the Global South or impoverished countries is the scarcity that’s created by greed and profit, because if we had the money, we could make the vials. If we had the money, we could make the lipid nanoparticles. If we had the money, we could build the factories. So, this really needs to be financed, as war is financed, you know, out of whole cloth. We cannot do this without really significantly ramping up. And we heard this in the AIDS crisis, as well: “We can’t make the meds because the raw materials aren’t there.” It was all moot as soon as the money flowed.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Joia Mukherjee, we’re going to talk more about this next week, infectious disease specialist, associate professor of global health at Harvard Medical School, chief medical officer for Partners in Health. Thank you for joining us. And Zane Dangor, special adviser to South Africa’s foreign minister, speaking to us from Johannesburg.
A diver swims through bleached coral. (photo: AMCS)
“Over the last several decades, I have watched these ancient complex coral reef ecosystems around the world literally collapse,” said John Bruno, a co-author of the study published in One Earth. “Our new study shows that we have paid a heavy price for that.”
These oceanic forests, off tropical coasts, are home to about a quarter of all marine species. The number of species a habitat hosts depends on its size. Shrinking coral cover is linked to staggering losses: coral reefs support less than half the number of species they did less than a century ago.
Reef fisheries have also suffered; fishers are working harder for the same amount of catch.
“We all expected there to be declines in biodiversity and fisheries, but we didn’t expect them to be as big as they are,” said Tyler Eddy at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada and first author of the study. Eddy embarked on the project, which involved collating reef monitoring data from 87 countries, while at the University of British Columbia.
Coral reefs are of outsize importance for small island developing states and coastal states like Belize. Charles Darwin described the Caribbean country’s coral treasure “as the most remarkable reef in the West Indies” when he visited the region 180 years ago on board the HMS Beagle.
Bruno, a professor of marine ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been studying coral reef systems in Belize for more than two decades and has seen the damage firsthand. For him, mass die-offs in the early 2000s across the Caribbean signaled trouble. Even sturdier species like the Orbicella spp., which can live for a hundred or more years, were dying.
In five decades alone, Belize’s coral cover shrank from about 80% to 20%.
“The real value in this study is putting a number on key trends such as coral cover, catch, catch per unit effort, especially at a global scale,” Joshua E. Cinner at James Cook University in Australia told Mongabay in an email. Cinner was not involved with the study but is collaborating with Eddy on other research.
Catches of reef fish peaked in 2002 and have been in decline ever since. It could be because the targeted species are not as abundant, or their distributions have altered in sync with oceanic conditions. About 6 million fishers rely on coral reef fisheries, many of whom belong to Indigenous communities. The latter consume 15 times more seafood than non-Indigenous groups.
Even in large fishing nations that support commercial fisheries and where these activities have intensified over the years, the loss of coral cover is having an impact. “The study highlights how places like Indonesia, which showed high catch, but major drops in catch per unit effort may be on the precipice of coral reef fisheries collapse,” Cinner said.
Disease, pollution and overfishing all contributed to the destruction of Belize’s famed coral reef. But rising sea temperatures have left them more vulnerable to other threats and accelerated their decline.
“We attribute a majority of the decline that we have reported to warming waters,” Eddy said, “It is the biggest threat.”
Like all living beings, corals are sensitive to changes in their environment. Increases in water temperature stress corals, prompting them to expel their zooxanthellae, the symbiotic algae that live inside coral tissue and impart color to them. This expulsion can prove fatal but can also leave them more susceptible to disease.
Coral bleaching is occurring more frequently as the planet warms. The seas absorb most of the heat that is trapped by greenhouse gases. In Australia, the world’s largest coral colony, the Great Barrier Reef, suffered three bleaching events in the last five years. Some coral species can regenerate given time and the right conditions.
Depending on the region, other pressures can aggravate the problem or be the primary cause of coral damage. Overfishing can injure reef health. Marine life that seeks refuge in the reefs also provides essential services to their habitat. Parrotfish, for example, feed on algae that can be harmful to the reef if allowed to multiply unchecked.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for bringing back the coral wealth of countries. Jamaica in the Caribbean has also witnessed sharp declines in coral cover and coral reef fish catches. The island nation is now implementing a coral gardening program to revive these underwater treasures. These efforts appear to be succeeding.
But they may not be enough, given the global scale of the challenge.
“I think local communities are nearly powerless to slow or reverse coral decline,” Bruno said. “We’re seeing coral die-offs as or even more severe on the world’s most isolated reefs. Places where there are no local human impacts.”
Experts say one solution that will have to be a part of any coral recovery is decarbonization.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
