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or months, institutions and companies have been drafting plans to aggressively promote vaccination or require it outright, and last week the FDA gave them license to click the “send” button. The same day the agency granted full approval to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, New York City’s public school system announced that its teachers and other employees will be required to get shots. The next day, Louisiana State University made a similar demand of its students and faculty. Within about 24 hours of the FDA move, other major employers, such as Chevron and Goldman Sachs, rolled out new vaccine mandates. In a novel twist, Delta Air Lines announced that it would impose a $200-a-month health-insurance surcharge on unvaccinated employees. Regardless of the reasons for their hesitancy, unvaccinated employees will literally have to pay for it.
What all of these decisions show is that the adults running major institutions in our society want to move forward, and they are done waiting around for vaccine refusers to change their mind. Outside of executive suites and human-resources offices, plenty of other Americans are also craving more certainty. Bars and restaurants that want to stay open are beginning to check vaccination cards—at least in states where supposedly freedom-loving lawmakers haven’t forbidden private businesses from keeping their own customers and employees safe. Couples throwing weddings are demanding that their guests upload proof of vaccination. These people disinviting their anti-vaxxer relatives are saying something important: Getting a shot to protect yourself and others from COVID-19 is both a social responsibility and the best way to hasten the end of the pandemic, and if you don’t believe that, we’re not waiting around for you to step up.
More than 70 percent of eligible Americans have now received at least one dose. Since January, public-health researchers, news reporters, and pollsters have all tried to unearth the reasons that a significant fraction of American adults have not yet gotten a shot. Some are broadly misinformed; others are afraid of needles or potential side effects; still others are deeply suspicious of the medical system; some have had COVID-19 already and believe that the level of natural immunity they have developed is enough. Some refusers say they definitely won’t get vaccinated; others say they haven’t yet gotten to it. But the specific feelings and concerns of vaccine refusers should be largely irrelevant to vaccinated people who are eager to move on with their lives. Americans are entitled to make their own decisions, but their employers, health insurers, and fellow citizens are not required to accommodate them.
The vaccinated have for too long carried the burden of the pandemic. In theory, unvaccinated people should be taking greater precautions. A recent poll conducted for the Associated Press found that vaccinated adults have been more likely than unvaccinated ones to wear masks in public settings, refrain from unnecessary travel, and avoid large group settings.
Public-health officials can keep trying to figure out ways to persuade the unvaccinated to get shots, and maybe at this late point they can still discover some new message that succeeds where all others have failed. If so, that would be fantastic. But begging is not a strategy. It is not a coincidence that many of the entities pushing hardest for mandatory vaccination are in industries—higher education, travel, entertainment—that have been badly disrupted by unpredictable waves of infection and are existentially threatened by a pandemic that goes on without end.
People in the crisis-management field have made peace with blanket one-size-fits-all policies that some individuals don’t like. When a ship is going down, passengers aren’t given the luxury of quibbling with the color or design of the life vest, and they can’t dither forever about whether to put one on or not. Emergencies invariably force people to make some choices that they might not consider ideal, but asking everyone to get vaccinated against a potentially lethal virus is not a big imposition. Ironically, by talking as if everyone, given enough time, will eventually choose the shot, public-health agencies may have understated the urgency of the matter and invited the vaccine-hesitant to dwell on the decision indefinitely.
Sorry. Time’s up.
The Biden administration could do even more to assist the communities and businesses that are trying to nudge unvaccinated people along. In 2021, paper cards that can easily be lost, damaged, or falsified are an outmoded way to keep track of who has gotten a shot. Even establishments that check their patrons’ vaccination status are doing so in makeshift ways—for instance, by asking patrons to show a driver’s license alongside a picture of their vaccination card on their phone. Some states are moving forward with their own vaccination-verification apps, but the failure to plan a national system will be viewed, in time, as a costly concession to a vocal minority.
Employers are being creative with some of their requirements, creating so-called leaky mandates. Rather than fire noncompliant employees, for example, Delta Air Lines opted for a financial penalty. This approach may make particular sense in industries where a rapid round of terminations will hurt a business’s ability to function. It also acknowledges the free will of vaccine refusers: They can keep rejecting the shot, as long as they accept the consequences.
Up to this point, many employers and medical providers—wary of offending anyone—have been careful to describe vaccination as a deeply personal decision. Vaccination mandates are essentially a recognition that vaccinated people have feelings too, and that the burden of fighting the pandemic shouldn’t be on them alone.
I know, I know: I should try harder to understand the feelings of unvaccinated Americans. Being more patient and empathetic would make me sound nicer. But do you know what’s really nice? Going back to school safely. Traveling without feeling vulnerable. Seeing a nation come back to life.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking before the House Appropriations Committee in 2020. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/NYT)
ith nearly 100,000 Americans hospitalized with Covid-19 and infections surging among the unvaccinated population, it's possible another 100,000 people could die from the virus by December, according to a recent University of Washington model.
"What is going on now is both entirely predictable, but entirely preventable," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN's Jake Tapper Sunday, saying the outcome of the model is possible. "We know we have the wherewithal with vaccines to turn this around."
Around 80 million eligible Americans are still not vaccinated -- the very group that could help turn the pandemic around, Fauci said.
"We could do it efficiently and quickly if we just get those people vaccinated. That's why it's so important now, in this crisis that we're in that people put aside any ideologic, political or other differences, and just get vaccinated," he said.
But with a daily average of 155,000 newly reported infections, many hospitals are buckling under the weight of another surge.
Across the south last week, many hospitals were reporting oxygen shortages amid a rise in hospitalizations from the virus.
Among those hospitalizations were pediatric patients, which have also been increasing since students returned to classrooms in some areas.
Thousands of children were in quarantine over the past week due to Covid-19 exposure, creating an uncertain start to the school year as officials, teachers and parents weigh safety precautions.
Vaccines a possibility for children under 12 in coming months
While vaccines are currently the best defense against the spread of the virus, they have not yet been approved for those under the age of 12.
For these children, masking and vaccination of the adults and teens around them are their only protection. But that could change in the coming months.
Pfizer is working to file data that would help authorize its vaccine for those ages 5 to 11, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday on CBS.
Gottlieb, who is on the board of Pfizer, said the drug maker could be in a position to file the data for authorization "at some point in September."
He went on to say that Pfizer could then file the application for Emergency Use Authorization for this age group "potentially as early as October."
Gottlieb told CBS's Ed O'Keefe Sunday that "we have to throw everything we can" at minimizing cases among school children.
"I don't think that we should be going into the school year lifting the mitigation that may have worked and probably did work last year to control outbreaks in the school setting, until we have firm evidence on what works and what doesn't," he explained, adding measures such as frequent testing and putting students in social pods "are probably the two most effective steps schools can be taking."
Schools that have been successful in mitigating spread include those that frequently test, contact trace, and set quarantine protocols when a positive case is detected.
"Using masks and improving ventilation is also going to be very important. And finally, getting kids vaccinated. About 50% of kids who are eligible to be vaccinated, have been vaccinated. So there's still a lot of work we can do there, getting parents more information trying to encourage parents to vaccinate their children," Gottlieb added.
Fauci echoed those sentiments when he told CNN Sunday he would support a mandate for school children to be vaccinated should the FDA approve use of the vaccine in those under 12.
"I believe that mandating vaccines for children to appear in school is a good idea," Fauci said.
He pointed out that this wouldn't be out of the question, saying that schools already have many vaccine mandates in place.
"This is not something new. We have mandates in many places in schools, particularly public schools that if in fact you want a child to come in -- we've done this for decades and decades requiring (vaccines for) polio, measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis. So this would not be something new, requiring vaccinations for children to come to school," he explained.
Boosters and treatments
Those who are already vaccinated will still likely need a booster shot to fight the spread of new variants.
Starting the week of September 20, those who received their second shot eight months ago should be eligible for their third, according to Fauci, who noted there is flexibility in the plan based on the data that is available.
On Wednesday, Pfizer began submitting data to the FDA for approval of a third dose of its Covid-19 vaccine.
"There is no doubt in my mind that we need to give individuals who received the two doses of mRNA, a third boost. There's no doubt based on the data we've seen," Fauci explained
The possibility of a third dose comes as many hospitals face an uptick in hospitalizations and a decrease in supplies, with cases in the south increasing as available oxygen -- a key component in treating those with the virus -- has decreased.
"We've had some very challenging situations over the last couple of weeks, where hospitals have had their oxygen deliveries disrupted with hours delay, putting them in a situation where they've had very low oxygen supplies," Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association, told CNN. "Hospitals are using 3-4 times the amount of oxygen they would normally use," she added.
Another ongoing challenge in the fight against Covid has been misinformation, the latest example of which has people taking anti-parasitic medicine in an attempt to fight the virus.
Fauci urged those considering taking the drug Invermectin -- which is used to treat parasites such as worms and lice in humans and is used by veterinarians to de-worm large animals -- to avoid it.
"Don't do it," he said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday. "There's no evidence whatsoever that that works and it could potentially have toxicity ... with people who have gone to poison control centers because they've taken the drug at a ridiculous dose and wind up getting sick, there's no clinical evidence that indicates that this works."
The CDC already sent out a warning about the drug, saying it has seen an increase in reports of severe illness caused by the drug to poison centers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Sun Valley Conference, July 2021. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
pple, under fire from developers and regulators about the way it runs its powerful App Store, is changing some of its rules, via a proposed lawsuit settlement.
Is that a big deal or a nothingburger?
Depends on who you ask. Apple says it’s giving companies like Spotify and Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, something they have always asked for. Those companies and other tech critics say it’s not nearly enough.
And some of the early press coverage of the news is all over the place. “Apple will let developers accept payment outside App Store, in major concession amid antitrust pressure,” the Washington Post incorrectly reported last night. New headline today: “Apple loosens rules for developers in major concession amid antitrust pressure.”
And the real answer is ... this is somewhere in between a big deal and a nothingburger.
But the real story is that scrutiny over the way Apple runs its store, and whether it is preventing companies from offering real competition to both the App Store and Apple-owned services like Apple Music, isn’t going away. If you’re an Apple user who only cares about how much you have to pay for something like Spotify, this might be of interest to you.
And if you’re someone who cares about the power of Big Tech companies to set rules that affect millions of people around the world, it’s also worth watching.
Here’s a quick version of the news: Late Thursday night, Apple announced an agreement with attorneys in a class action lawsuit filed by software developers, promising to “make the App Store an even better business opportunity for developers, while maintaining the safe and trusted marketplace users love.”
There are several elements to the proposed deal — which still needs to be approved by a federal judge — but the most important one is that Apple is giving developers the ability to email customers who use their apps on Apple’s iOS devices, and tell them that they can save money by paying for stuff somewhere other than Apple apps.
The reason that’s meaningful is that up until now Apple, which takes a cut of up to 30 percent of any money developers generate when they sell something via an Apple app, hasn’t allowed developers to tell customers about cheaper alternatives. Now they can.
So Spotify, for instance, could sell a monthly subscription to its streaming service for $13 via an Apple app — but could then immediately email someone who signed up for that service to tell them they could get the same thing for $10 a month if they signed up on Spotify.com.
So now Spotify, which has lodged an antitrust complaint against Apple with the European Union, and Epic, which has sued Apple for antitrust violations in the US, are getting some of what they want: the ability to tell their own customers they can go somewhere else.
But this settlement doesn’t mollify either company. They are pressing forward with their legal campaigns, for multiple reasons: Both of them, for instance, want to be much more direct about how they tell customers they can go somewhere else, by telling them in the app.
Right now, for instance, if you’re an iPhone user who wants to upgrade your free Spotify service to a paid one, Spotify simply tells you that you can’t do that on your app, without any other instructions about how to actually accomplish it. “We know. It’s not ideal,” the service shrugs.
But Spotify’s beef with Apple goes beyond how it can advertise. A major portion of the music service’s complaint is that it has to compete at a significant disadvantage with Apple’s own streaming music service because Apple doesn’t have to pay an App Store tax on its own services.
Epic, meanwhile, wants much more than the ability to steer customers to its own site. It says it wants to run its own app store within Apple’s App Store - and then, eventually, to run its own, competing app store. And Apple wants no part of that.
Meanwhile, other critics argue that even Apple’s email concession may not be that meaningful since it requires developers and users to take a lot of extra steps. Just getting someone to open up a promotional email requires a lot of effort these days; think of your inbox and how much clutter you routinely ignore.
If you’re an Apple advocate, meanwhile, you can argue that developers should be happy with any concession Apple offers because it’s Apple’s store and Apple’s devices and Apple should be able to do what it wants on its own property. If you go to a Walmart, for instance, you won’t find signs saying you can buy Tide for less at Target or Amazon.
Or, more charitably: You can argue that Apple’s App Store has provided developers with a huge market of iPhone and iPad users — “an economic miracle,” as Apple executive Phil Schiller puts it in the Apple press release — and letting Apple set up rules around its own store seems like a reasonable trade.
All of this debate underscores just how much pressure Apple is now under from both developers and regulators, which is quite new. Apple’s App Store was a literal afterthought — it didn’t show up until a year after the iPhone’s 2007 debut — but has evolved over the years into a major distribution funnel for developers, and a real profit center for Apple, likely generating $15 billion in revenue last year. And developers have complained about App store rules for at least a decade.
But Apple didn’t feel any pressure to move on any of this until very recently. Now, though, as regulators and politicians talk about reining in Big Tech in general, they’ve spent some of their time focused on Apple and its store, and whether the company’s rules are too rigid and anticompetitive.
EU regulators have already said they think Apple is violating antitrust rules, though they haven’t made a final ruling. Sen. Amy Klobuchar has made Apple a prime target in her antitrust arguments — she’s co-sponsored a bill that would limit the way both Apple and Google run their app stores. Via her press office, she says last night’s changes won’t be enough:
“As mobile technologies have become essential to our daily lives, it has become clear that Apple, along with another few gatekeepers, have immense control over the app marketplace. This power raises serious competition concerns and impacts consumers and app developers alike. This new action by Apple is a small first step towards addressing some of these competition concerns, but more must be done to ensure an open, competitive mobile app marketplace, including commonsense legislation to set rules of the road for dominant app stores.”
State lawmakers, meanwhile, are ramping up their own challenges to Apple’s rules, and the Biden White House seems very interested in pushing back on Big Tech’s power in general.
Which means this is unlikely to be the last App Store concession Apple has to make. Whether it continues to make incremental changes or makes big sweeping ones will tell us a lot about how motivated and effective Big Tech critics are going to be.
Winston Wallace, 9, raises his hand on the first day of school at iPrep Academy in Miami, on Aug. 23. In Miami-Dade County, Fla., masks are mandatory for everyone. (photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)
he Marin County, Calif., elementary school had been conscientious about following covid-19 protocols. Masks were required indoors, desks were spaced six feet apart, and the students kept socially distant. But the delta variant found an opening anyway.
On May 19, one teacher, who was not vaccinated against the coronavirus, began feeling fatigued and had some nasal congestion. She dismissed it as allergies and powered through. While she was usually masked, she made an exception for story time so she could read to the class.
By the time she learned she was positive for the coronavirus two days later, half her class of 24 had been infected — nearly all of them in the two rows closest to her desk — and the outbreak had spread to other classes, siblings and parents, including some who were fully vaccinated.
“The mask was off only momentarily, not an entire day or hours. We want to make the point that this is not the teacher’s fault — everyone lets their guard down — but the thing is delta takes advantage of slippage from any kind of protective measures,” Tracy Lam-Hine, an epidemiologist for the county, said in an interview.
The case study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and highlighted by CDC director Rochelle Walensky during a briefing on Friday, highlights the potential danger for children under the age of 12 — the only group in the United States ineligible for coronavirus vaccines as a hyper-infectious variant tears across the country.
Just this month in Brevard County, Fla., 1,623 children were infected and more than 8,000 students were quarantined. And in the Atlanta area, thousands of positive cases were confirmed in schools with 23,000 students and staff have been quarantined. The situation has turned the nation’s schools into ideological battlegrounds — with one angry parent ripping off a mask from a teacher’s face in a Texas school this month, and parents both for and against masks filing lawsuits against their children’s school districts.
Without concerted efforts to curb delta’s transmission, things are likely to get worse in coming months. A simulation posted this month by a CDC-funded lab predicted that in elementary schools without either masks or regular testing, more than 75 percent of children might be infected with the coronavirus in the first three months.
The delta variant-fueled surge has put new pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to authorize the vaccine for younger children as soon as possible. It has thrown school reopening plans into disarray, with some officials scrambling to impose vaccine mandates for staff, as well as universal mask mandates. And it has frightened and bewildered many parents, unsure how to protect their kids.
“It’s hard to put our heads around this,” said Julie Swann, an expert in mathematical modeling at North Carolina State University who leads the team that published the school transmission study and a mother to a 10-year-old. “As parents, we are having to wrestle with these really hard notions of expected risk.”
Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 had been widely expected to be available in the early fall, but to the surprise of many, federal regulators asked vaccine companies in late July to double the number of trial participants to include several thousand more children. The FDA is seeking to better understand the vaccines’ link to a rare but potentially serious inflammation of the heart muscle known as myocarditis and pericarditis that has predominantly affected younger males, and to learn whether it might affect younger children as well.
National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins and vaccine makers have indicated that the expansion of the pediatric testing means a vaccine for younger children is unlikely before the end of the year, or perhaps even early 2022.
That forecast has spurred alarm among some public officials and health providers, with more than 180,000 new child covid-19 cases confirmed in the week ended Aug. 19 — an up to 20-fold increase over weeks in June when summer breaks began.
This past week, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) called on regulators to expedite approval for 5- to 11-year-olds. “Getting our children vaccinated is critical to giving parents greater peace of mind, but we are being told approval is still months away,” he said.
The American Academy of Family Physicians warned that “the risk for severe and long-lasting impacts on health outcomes in unvaccinated children is increasing.”
And the American Academy of Pediatrics has urged the FDA to use a two-month follow-up time frame for safety studies rather than six months, which would “significantly hinder the ability to reduce the spread of the hyper infectious covid-19 delta variant among this age group.”
“In our view, the rise of the delta variant changes the risk-benefit analysis for authorizing vaccines in children,” AAP President Lee Savio Beers wrote in a letter, urging the agency to make the shots available for younger children “as swiftly as possible.”
The FDA said it could not comment on its discussions with manufacturers but stressed that it is working to “ensure the number of participants in clinical trials are of adequate size to evaluate a product’s safety and effectiveness in the intended population.”
Knowns and unknowns
The fourth wave of the coronavirus is hitting children and families faster and harder than before, raising new questions for doctors and researchers.
In Southern states, pediatric ICUs are at or near capacity with record numbers of severely ill children. They include newborns just weeks or months old and previously healthy children — almost unheard of in previous waves — reinforcing the idea that this is a virus that can strike anyone.
“Is it that we have more cases overall and this is a more transmissible virus? Or is it something about delta? It’s too early to tell, and if anyone is making assumptions, they are not basing it on rigorous data, as there are not rigorous data,” said Adrienne Randolph, a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital who is leading a nationwide study on covid-19 in children. “However my colleagues in ICUs have reported many more severe cases.”
Doctors are also speculating about anecdotal reports of unvaccinated young parents getting seriously ill, and what that might say about transmission in families. In Arkansas just outside Little Rock, Tate Ezzi, 44, and his pregnant wife, Christine, 39, parents to five young children, have been urging the vaccine-wary to revaluate their stance since both were hospitalized and she lost the pregnancy after attending a birthday party at a skating rink. In Texas, Lydia Rodriguez, 42, died this month of covid-19, two weeks after her husband Lawrence’s death from the same disease, orphaning their four children.
A recent technical paper out of Britain suggested the delta variant does not cause more serious illness than its predecessors, but the analysis did not specifically break out children. David Rubin, a researcher at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who has been studying U.S. hospitalization data, said that in recent weeks, 1,200 to 1,400 children were inpatients at the peak, and while those numbers may be large, the rate of hospitalization remains the same as in the past at 0.8 to 0.9 percent.
“What you are seeing is many more kids are getting covid now because our country is open, and they are being exposed,” he said.
What is indisputable is that the virus can spread like wildfire in settings where children are unmasked and unvaccinated, such as schools and homes. And there are fresh worries about the impact the initial dose of exposure may play in disease severity for parents and caregivers, who may be more vulnerable to severe illness.
One early paper, published in August 2020 in the Journal of Pediatrics, found that the viral load of some children in the first two days of symptoms could be higher than in severely ill adults, implying a high degree of potential infectiousness. Another found that the virus was detectable for a mean of 6.7 days in infected children — regardless of whether they had symptoms. More recently, researchers found that people are testing positive for the delta variant at a peak of 3.71 days after exposure, as compared with five to six days for previous variants — showing the illness can hit very quickly.
An important new study published in JAMA Pediatrics on Aug. 16 found that infants and young children appeared to spread the coronavirus more aggressively than those in their early teens — likely because of how they and their caretakers interact.
Researchers note that babies cannot cover coughs or wash their hands themselves, and they require more touching. Preschoolers and early elementary children may be more likely to be in close contact with each other, whether it’s whispering during circle time, holding hands in the hallways or wrestling at recess.
“Our interactions with young children are physically very different than [with] others, even in the same family,” Randolph said. “You hold them and cuddle them, and they are usually not masked.”
‘Parents in California are freaking out’
Swann, the North Carolina mom and scientist, set out to try to simulate what could happen with so many children mixing in one building breathing the same air. As part of one of six CDC-funded simulation groups that are designed to help local school officials make decisions, she teamed up with Pinar Keskinocak, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and others to look at transmission over time.
Many of the assumptions they made were conservative based on the extent of spread in many parts of the United States today. They assumed that when school began, there were already a few kids and teachers with asymptomatic infections, that masking might drop the infections by 50 percent, and that in elementary schools, most of the children were vulnerable to the virus. Each week, they imported one new case, which they imagined might come from a sibling, or perhaps from a student who had been at soccer practice, church or with another community group.
They used a transmission rate of four — which means that each infected person would spread it to four others, a number that is lower than the six to seven some studies have estimated for the delta variant, but which they felt was reasonable given that children are only in school for part of the day.
The models showed that more than 75 percent of susceptible students — meaning those who were not vaccinated and did not have previous immunity from natural infection — would become infected within three months. With masking, the infection rate would decrease to 50 percent for elementary schools, 35 percent for middle schools and 24 percent for high schools, based on average vaccination rates. Testing further drops infections to 22 percent, 16 percent, and 13 percent.
“Parents in California are freaking out that my model shows that, even with masks, there would be a lot of infections,” Swann said.
But she also emphasizes that “we have an incomplete picture of what’s happening,” and different communities have widely different levels of susceptibility based on vaccination rates and levels of natural immunity. She also said she has had to remind herself that the relative risk of coronavirus complications in children is low.
Pressure on the FDA
With about 73 million children and adolescents in the United States, public health officials and researchers believe the pandemic will not end until coronavirus vaccines are approved for all ages.
The FDA’s rollout of the vaccines for adults occurred in record time, but there are additional steps involved for children, and for good reason. Younger children’s immune systems tend to be more robust and vary greatly in size — think of a 5-year old vs. a 15-year-old.
Medical historians point to cautionary tales about rushed approvals: In the 1960s, thousands of children in the United States who got a vaccine developed atypical measles, which resulted in lung inflammation that often sent them to the hospital. That vaccine was later recalled. Several years ago in the Philippines, a school-based vaccination program for dengue fever had to be stopped after the drugmaker discovered it could lead to more severe illness in some children.
Clinical trials typically involve looking separately at children in various age groups, moving from oldest to youngest — ages 16 and up, 12 to 15, 5 to 11, and under 5. Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine is currently available for those 12 and above, and Moderna’s vaccine is open for those 18 and older.
Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics and population health at Stanford University who heads the AAP committee on infectious diseases, said one big challenge for the 5- to 11-year-old group has to do with titrating down, or reducing, the dose. This isn’t necessary for all vaccines, she said, but it is something that is being studied for the messenger-RNA shots.
The cardiac complication in some adolescents and young adults after receiving the second shot has been well publicized. But Maldonado, an investigator on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine trials for children, said the issue is so rare that adding a few thousand more children to the studies is unlikely to provide insight, and that the study would probably need to add millions to be able to identify those patients with the reaction. She said researchers have not seen signals of other concerning side effects, and she and her colleagues were not informed the FDA’s authorization might be delayed — until they heard it from the media.
“If there had been a valid reason to slow down the authorization, we want to understand that,” she said. “But based on what we’ve seen and heard there’s no specific other issue.”
Julie Morita, a vaccine expert who was on the Biden transition team on covid-19 and a former member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the CDC, said that as the delta variant has surged, the calculus for public health officials should change.
“If delta wasn’t making children sick and hospitalizing them, it might make sense to take more time to look at the safety profile,” said Morita, executive vice president for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “But when you have a virus that is surging, expediency may become more important.”
Marin County, Calif.
The outbreak at the school in Marin County is the first delta case in young children published by the CDC in the United States. Epidemiologist Lam-Hine remembers that as the cases mounted, he and his colleagues commented how “this strain is really different” — even before they had confirmed it was delta.
Among the most puzzling aspects, he said, is how the virus jumped from the initial class to a second class three grades apart, where six children also tested positive. The school, which has 205 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, had taken multiple measures to combat viral spread. All the classrooms contained portable air filters, and doors and windows were kept open. The two rooms in question were separated by a large courtyard, which had been blocked by lunch tables with yellow tape on them.
The students in the two classes did not seem to share siblings, carpools, sports teams or other extracurricular activities, he said. Yet sequencing showed their virus was genetically indistinguishable. Perhaps, Lam-Hine speculated, the kids had passed each other in the hallway or had some other close contact.
The contact tracing team also found five additional people in the community who had infections with the same virus, but they were unable to find a link with the school cases.
The findings included some good news: While more than 80 percent of the infected children, or 22 out of 27, had symptoms such as fevers, coughs, headaches and sore throats, none were hospitalized. And the county saw no obvious further spread. Lam-Hine speculated the county’s mask compliance and vaccination rate — the highest in the state — made the difference.
“This is not a story about a teacher and her class,” he said. “It’s about the need for all of us to be super vigilant.”
Afghan men take pictures of a vehicle from which rockets were fired, as Taliban forces stand guard, in Kabul, Afghanistan August 30, 2021. (photo: Stringer/Reuters)
.S. anti-missile defences intercepted rockets fired at Kabul's airport early on Monday, as the United States flew its core diplomats out of Afghanistan in the final hours of its chaotic withdrawal.
U.S. troops are due to pull out of Kabul by Tuesday, after they and their allies mounted the biggest air evacuation in history, bringing 114,000 of their own citizens and Afghans who helped them over 20 years of war.
Two U.S. officials said the "core" diplomatic staff had withdrawn on Monday morning. They did not say whether this included top envoy Ross Wilson, expected to be among the last to leave before the final troops themselves.
A U.S. official said initial reports did not indicate any U.S. casualties from as many as five missiles fired on the airport. Islamic State - enemies of both the West and the Taliban - claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks.
The rockets followed a massive Islamic State suicide bombing outside the teeming airport gates on Thursday, which killed scores of Afghans and 13 U.S. troops.
In recent days Washington has warned of more attacks, while carrying out two air strikes against Islamic State targets, including one on Sunday it said thwarted an attempted suicide bombing by blowing up a car packed with explosives.
Tuesday's deadline for all troops to leave was ordered by President Joe Biden, fulfilling an agreement reached with the Taliban by his predecessor Donald Trump to end Washington's longest war.
But having failed to anticipate that the Taliban would so quickly conquer the country, Washington and its NATO allies were forced into a hasty evacuation. They will leave behind thousands of Afghans who helped Western countries and might have qualified for evacuation but did not make it out in time.
The Taliban, who opressed women and governed violently when last in power 20 years ago, have said they will safeguard rights and not pursue vendettas. They say that once the Americans leave, the country will at last be at peace for the first time in more than 40 years.
But countless Afghans, especially in the cities, fear the militants will again prove as ruthless as before. And the United Nations said the entire country now faces a dire humanitarian crisis, cut off from foreign aid amid a drought, mass displacement and COVID-19.
"The evacuation effort has undoubtedly saved tens of thousands of lives, and these efforts are praiseworthy," said UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi.
"But when the airlift and the media frenzy are over, the overwhelming majority of Afghans, some 39 million, will remain inside Afghanistan. They need us – governments, humanitarians, ordinary citizens – to stay with them and stay the course."
Outside the airport, people described themselves as foresaken by the departing foreign troops.
"We are in danger," said one woman. "They must show us a way to be saved. We must leave Afghanistan or they must provide a safe place for us."
TERRIFIED
Afghan media said Monday's rocket attack was launched from the back of a vehicle. The Pajhwok news agency said several rockets struck different parts of the Afghan capital.
"People are terrified and worried about the future, worried that the rocket launching might continue," said Farogh Danish, a Kabul resident near the wreckage of the car from which the rockets were launched.
On Sunday, Pentagon officials said a U.S. drone strike killed an Islamic State suicide car bomber preparing to attack the airport. The Taliban said seven people died in the blast. U.S. Central Command said it was investigating reports that civilians were killed.
"We know there were substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle, indicating a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties," it said.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters evacuations would continue on Monday, prioritising people deemed at extreme risk. Other countries have also put in last-minute requests to bring out people in that category, the officials said.
The Taliban will take full control of Kabul airport after the American withdrawal on Tuesday, Qatar's Al Jazeera television network cited an unidentified Taliban source as saying.
PRESIDENT MOURNS U.S. DEAD
Biden attended a ceremony on Sunday at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to honour members of the U.S. military killed in Thursday's suicide bombing, the deadliest incident for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in more than a decade.
As the flag-draped transfer caskets carrying the remains emerged from a military plane, the president, who has vowed to avenge the Islamic State attack, shut his eyes and tilted his head back.
Five of the fallen service members were just 20, as old as the war itself.
The departure of the last troops will end the U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan that began in late 2001, after the al Qaeda Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
U.S.-backed forces ousted a Taliban government that had provided safe haven for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and have engaged in a counter-insurgency war against the Islamist militants for the past two decades.
The Russian opposition activists Aleksei A. Navalny, Lyubov Sobol and Ivan Zhdanov taking part in a rally last year in Moscow. (photo: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)
voking the dark era of Soviet repression, Russian politicians and journalists are being driven into exile in growing numbers.
The steady stream of politically motivated emigration that had accompanied President Vladimir V. Putin’s two-decade rule turned into a torrent this year. Opposition figures, their aides, rights activists and even independent journalists are increasingly being given a simple choice: flee or face prison.
A top ally of the imprisoned opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny left Russia this month, state media said, adding her to a list of dozens of dissidents and journalists believed to have departed this year. Taken together, experts say, it is the biggest wave of political emigration in Russia’s post-Soviet history.
Kudzu grows over a grave marker at Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday September 14, 2020. (photo: Reuters)
ew plants evoke the landscapes of the Deep South more powerfully than kudzu. A tangled mass of a weed, kudzu (Pueraria lobata), the “Vine That Ate the South,” effortlessly scales telephone poles, junkyards, and untended fields. According to one frequently cited estimate, kudzu covers 7.4 million acres in the United States. County-level maps created by University of Georgia scientists document kudzu’s voracious appetite: a keen driver will spy it hugging misty hillsides in Appalachia or creeping along flood plains in the Mississippi Delta. It thrives in Alabama piedmont, Louisiana bayous, the Carolina coastal plain, and the suburban sprawls of Atlanta, Nashville, Raleigh, and Birmingham.
Despite its fecundity, kudzu’s reach fades at the edges of South Florida, Texas, and the Midwest Rust Belt—preserving those regions for their own mythologies. With such tidy borders, the vine serves as a useful emblem for the particularities of Southern culture. Today, there are boutiques that sell kudzu jellies in Dahlonega, Georgia, a Kudzu Review at Florida State University, a Camp Kudzu, and at least 30 roads in the South with “kudzu” in their name. Originally a loan word from the Japanese “クズ” or “葛” (kuzu), the plant’s name has thoroughly naturalized in the Southern vocabulary, akin to bayou, or Cherokee, or the Gullah and Irish-Scot vernacular y’all. By 1979, Johnny Cash could sing about “them ol’ kudzu vines” that were “coverin’ the door.” After him, Florida Georgia Line would invoke the “honeysuckle lips” of their beloved “tangled up tighter than a kudzu vine.” Georgia’s own R.E.M. put kudzu on the cover of their 1983 album Murmur.
But kudzu is both a regional icon and a highly invasive species with few natural predators. It’s so pugnacious that by 1971 the U.S. Department of Agriculture listed kudzu among the “common weeds of the United States.” Kansas, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania strictly prohibit kudzu seeds from being sold. State agencies spend millions of dollars on eradication efforts annually. Power companies, homeowners, and timber plantations find it a particular nuisance. James Miller, a specialist in kudzu, once estimated total productivity losses from kudzu are $500 million per year. For some, kudzu is a “green plague” or “alien invasion”—a “thug plant” that “pukes carbon” into the atmosphere. In 1999, Time magazine ranked the introduction of kudzu to the United States as one of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century, next to the Treaty of Versailles and cold nuclear fusion. In part because of its conspicuous growth along roads, kudzu remains an enduring poster child for a dubious folk tradition of invasion biology. Prevailing narratives focus on kudzu as a threat to biodiversity, a pollutant of the ozone layer, and a herald of climate change, even at the expense of confronting more subtle weeds.
But this image also obscures larger, more direct causes of habitat loss in the Southeast, such as suburban sprawl and farming. In fact, far from a hapless Asian import, kudzu began as a centralized, large-scale intervention in the Southern landscape. Kudzu’s lineage traces a Pacific Rim exchange from Meiji-era Japan to the Deep South, from European acclimatizers in the Belle Époque to New Deal planners in the 1930s to talk radio preachers in the 1950s. As the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets slowly collapse into the ocean, the story of kudzu’s rise and fall in the 20th century serves as a cautionary tale for the climate-salvage projects of the 21st.
Kudzu also illustrates the fluidity with which people define their cultural relationship with exotic species. Today’s miracle vine is tomorrow’s weed. This thematic tension animates kudzu’s many metaphors in the South—apocalypse, racism, decay, love, determination, and faded glory. To entangle oneself in kudzu, then, is to entangle oneself in the South itself, and with the global forces that have created its landscapes, peoples, and myths.
Kudzu’s weedy image in the U.S. South contrasts starkly with the veneration it received historically in East Asia. In Japan, classical texts like the Kojiki (711 A.D.) and Nihon Shoki (720 A.D.) describe an indigenous group of hunter-gatherers called the Kuzu who lived along the Yoshino River. Their diet consisted of chestnuts, mushrooms, and trout, but they evidently traded the ground root of kudzu as a cooking starch and jelling agent. Some speculate that pilgrims to Mount Yoshino—a kind of Olympus in the early Shinto faith—christened the plant after this ancient people.
In any event, East Asian peoples cultivated kudzu for a long time. Shreds of cloth woven from kudzu fiber were recovered from a 6,000-year-old archaeological site in Mount Cao Xie in China. Confucius describes the cloth in The Analects as “light and cool to wear in summer.” Agricultural manuals in 17th century Korea advise rice farmers to plant kudzu as a hedge against famine. Japanese poetry, including the Man’yōshū (600 A.D.), celebrates the leaves as a wild vegetable. There are also texts in the canon of tradition Chinese medicine, such as Shénnóng Běncǎo Jīng (250 A.D.) and Shānghán Lùn (200 A.D.), where the sages proscribe kudzu root as a remedy for colds and alcoholism.
Kudzu continued to be widely used by East Asian societies into the early modern period, even after the introduction of Western medicine and novel starches such as potatoes and corn. Consider for example the Japanese agricultural innovator Ōkura Nagatsune (1768–circa 1860) who wrote a treatise on kudzu, beautifully illustrated by a pupil of the printer Hokusai (known for his iconic painting The Wave). According to scholar Yota Batsaki, the treatise celebrates kudzu as a “ ‘useful thing … in useless places,’ able to flourish in depleted soils and steep mountain sides.” The samurai weaved kudzu in the weft of their elegant garments.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1863, the samurai as a class were destroyed and aristocratic fashion shifted to Western styles. Still, kudzu prevailed. One Japanese business history tells of a partnership with a Los Angeles firm to provide Asian wallpapers made from kudzu to Jackie Kennedy, who liked the designs and had them installed in the White House. Folk weavers make baskets, fishing lines, and cloth out of the material, even though silk, hemp, cotton, and jute textiles—easier to scale commercially—eclipsed kudzu long ago. Kudzu tea and powders appear in Japanese cuisine like kaiseki-ryōri and shojin ryori. The renowned author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki could deploy this gustatory valence to excite the reader’s appetite for his erotic 1931 novella Yoshino Kuzu.
During the Belle Époque of 1876–1914, Europeans and Americans had little use for kudzu’s culinary or textile qualities, but they valued it as an exotic ornament for their gardens. As historian Kim Todd demonstrates in her book Tinkering With Eden, acclimatization societies in Paris, London, and New York at the time saw the purposeful introduction of foreign species as a righteous mission. Aristocrats opened their game parks for experiments. Hundreds of nonnative species were introduced to the Australian, American, and African colonies, with the aim to “improve their breed,” as Brit Frank Buckland wrote in 1880. To remind the nostalgic settler of the old country, to delight and wonder at the exotic, and to enrich the local flora and fauna of a region were objectives very much in the vogue for 19th century botanists.
Avid horticulturalist Thomas Hogg facilitated kudzu’s formal introduction to America on his frequent trans-Pacific journeys as U.S. consul and adviser to Japan from 1862–74. An appointee of Abraham Lincoln and a disciple of the larger acclimatization movement sweeping the U.S. during Reconstruction, he sent several kudzu specimens to his brother’s nursery business in New York City. Japanese envoys planted kudzu in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, on the 100-year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. About 10 million people attended this Centennial Exposition in 1876. Kudzu showcased again at the 1884–85 World Cotton Centennial in New Orleans and the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1900. Such venues were important not only to educate Americans about the world but to project U.S. power in the affairs of other nations, particularly nonwhite ones.
Until 1910, the vine percolated among gardener circles delighted by its ability to shade the arbors and verandas of the home. An advertisement in a 1909 issue of Good Housekeeping praised kudzu’s flowers: “a shade of purple and deliciously fragrant” that “flourishes where nothing else will grow” and “requires little or no care.” In this capacity, kudzu appears as a quiet porch shade in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. But the seeds of kudzu’s explosive growth potential had already become apparent. In the early 1900s, U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist David Fairchild scattered kudzu seeds in his D.C. backyard only to write in his memoirs, The World Was My Garden, that they “all took root with a vengeance,” smothering the bushes and pines in “an awful, tangled nuisance.”
Despite these warnings, kudzu reached its golden age in the U.S. not as a garden ornament but as a source for livestock fodder and aid in erosion control. As historian Derek Alderman carefully documents, kudzu’s status as a “miracle vine” was intimately tied to the radio charisma of the Atlanta-based Channing Cope, who touted kudzu’s marvelous abilities “to clothe the naked land” in a “garment of green.” Almost 90 years after the Dust Bowl, it’s difficult to express how deeply anxiety about the soil gripped the country. When the Russian Revolution and World War I dramatically increased wheat prices, decades of overgrazing and unsustainable plowing of the Great Plains’ virgin topsoil reaped their consequences. Drought struck. The rugged individualism of Little House on the Prairie gave way to what the Marxists call “a crisis of overproduction,” compounded by the Great Depression. Unanchored soils turned to dust. Not only for the millions of Okie migrants immortalized in John Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath but also for the Southern farmer, the barren, washed-out gullies were symptoms of a deeper social malaise. As Channing Cope suggested:
It isn’t just topsoil that is rushing along here under the bridge; it’s children’s shoes and clothes and school books; it’s the washing machine and the refrigerator that the family was planning to buy. … Erosion is not merely topsoil being moved off the land. It is school erosion, church erosion, and family erosion.
If peaches were touted as a cure for Georgia’s “sorry, washed-out anemic gullied hillsides” at the fin de siècle, than kudzu was seen as the panacea after the Great Depression. Kudzu showed a unique ability to fix nitrogen in the soil. It grew quickly on any ground, wonderfully resisted pests, and provided healthy fodder for livestock. Cope equated kudzu as a form of transcendence from cotton monoculture: “Cotton isn’t king here anymore. Kudzu is king.” With a preacher’s flair, Cope reminded his brethren in the 1949 book, Front Porch Farmer, that hundreds of thousands of acres awaited “the healing touch of the Miracle vine.” His allusions to nakedness, decay, demons, and miracles illustrate two insights articulated by scholars such as Derek Alderman. First, that farms and wastelands must be “created semiotically before they can be transformed materially.” Second, that such interventions require the charisma of individuals to “to translate claims based on scientific evidence into a popular discourse.”
A generation of Southern farmers and advocates were impressed. Already by 1907, kudzu hay was on exhibit in Jamestown, Virginia. In Chipley, Florida, a thrilled Mr. C. E. Pleas discovered his farm animals liked it. He grew 35 acres as fodder and sold root cuttings via the U.S. Postal Service throughout the 1920s. By the 1930s and 1940s, the newly created Soil Conservation Service, or SCS, propagated kudzu at state nurseries to stabilize the deforested landscapes of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Several experiments by New Deal planners indicated that kudzu’s protein content matched alfalfa hay. Dairy cattle fed kudzu showed weight gain and increased milk production compared with a control group fed native grasses. The SCS paid farmers up to $8 per acre (a hefty sum at the time) to plant the vine. Extension agents recommended a crop rotation that included kudzu. Highway developers and railroads, desperate for a cheap, low-maintenance cover crop, turned to kudzu.
In total, SCS nurseries grew and distributed more than 73 million seedlings between 1935 and 1941, according to scholars John J. Winberry and David M. Jones. By around 1945, kudzu covered about 500,000 acres in the South. In Georgia, a Kudzu Club boasted 20,000 members and worked toward the goal of planting 8 million acres of the vine by 1950. Front Porch Farmer sold more than 80,000 copies. There were kudzu queens. Articles touting the virtues of kudzu in outlets such as the Atlanta Constitution, Reader’s Digest, Progressive Farmer, and Business Week. “Kudzu isn’t a vine, merely” wrote Channing Cope. “Kudzu is the Lord’s indulgent gift to Georgians.” Healthy fodder for cows and goats, nitrate fixer for the soil, a grape-scented shade for the veranda—what wasn’t to like about the South’s own jack in the beanstalk?
The kudzu craze proved ephemeral. By 1953, the USDA quietly removed kudzu from the list of acceptable cover crops. New growth declined, with farmers plowing much of the existing acreage over when the subsidies stopped. By the late 1950s, highway departments decided to no longer use kudzu in road bank stabilization except in areas where no other plant would grow. Railroads eradicated kudzu from right of ways. In the ’60s, the federal government’s only recorded experiments on kudzu involved its destruction. In 1962, the SCS limited its advice about planting kudzu to areas far removed from homes, fences, or orchards that could be overrun by the vine. In 1970, the USDA classified kudzu as a common weed. According to Winberry and Jones, kudzu’s aggregate farm acreage declined from 500,000 in 1950 to 85,000 in 1970.
What explains kudzu’s fall from grace? As a soil stabilizer, the vine performed a little too well. Without the insect controls and winter die-offs that kudzu encountered in Japan, the plant flourished in the Deep South. The vine’s resource allocation strategy gives it a competitive edge since the plant devotes little energy to structural support, achieves a high rate of net photosynthesis, and sports a diurnal leaf movement that maximizes exposure of the lower canopy leaves and reduces overheating at the crown. It doesn’t require pollinators to spread. In time, civil engineers discovered fescue, new lespedezas, and Bahia grass to be more manageable stabilizers. As hay, kudzu also proved difficult to bale. The leaves are nutritious, but the woody stems (over half kudzu’s weight) are not easily digestible and remain difficult to rake. Planting the crowns of kudzu is labor-intensive compared with planting grains, which can be seed-spread mechanically.
These developments reflected the shifting demands of agrarian life. For the homestead, Depression-era farmer, kudzu had value. It thrived in poor soil and required little attention. With the advent of industrial fertilizer, sector consolidation, and the innovation of new, hardy varieties of hay such as coastal Bermuda and triticale, kudzu became obsolete. The history echoes kudzu’s Japanese history as a folkloric textile eclipsed by the silk, cotton, and jute industry. The miracle vine’s legacy reminds us that a weed is not defined by some intrinsic characteristic such as its foreign origins, aesthetic features, or virility. Rather, weed is our term for the now-useless plant, a shifting social construct defined by the historic circumstances.
Second, kudzu’s carefully planned, profit-driven introduction parallels the trans-Pacific voyage of other nonnative species that are now firmly rooted in the South. According to the U.S. Forest Service’s 2011 Forest Futures Project, Chinese tallow covers twice as many acres in Southeastern forests as kudzu. Planting tallow began as federally sponsored effort to prop up a failed seed oil industry along the Gulf Coast in the early 1900s. Authorities introduced melaleuca to drain the Everglades. The flammable cogon grass, a catalyst for wildfires, began as a packaging material and forage crop to herders. Our Southern gardens and pastures, then, are not oases of harmony but leaky vessels teeming with invasive species waiting to wreak havoc.
The story of kudzu can thus be read as a cautionary tale about the hubris of large-scale interventions into complex ecosystems. Public worry about soil health has faded in the face of a broader climate anxiety. Today, political leaders and philanthropists eye new plant saviors on which to bet the future of the planet. In 2012, the head of Planktos Inc., Russ George, dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean, hoping to trigger an algae bloom so big that enough carbon dioxide would be captured to sell as carbon credits. The Salk Institute and its donors are using CRISPR to engineer novel cork trees, which they hope can trap carbon dioxide in the wood’s suberin, a waxy, water-resistant molecule. (If you’ve ever tried fruitlessly to compost wine corks, you may understand the intuition.)
At the international level, China and the African Sahel states are planting vast monoculture forests of acacia and eucalyptus to hold back the Gobi and Sahara deserts. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is still deciding what to do about Trump’s pledge to the Trillion Trees Act. Doubts about the efficacy of such campaigns remain. The enthusiasm surrounding these interventions parallel the deus ex machina qualities of the kudzu craze 80 years ago. Will our climate interventions be more cautious, or will fighting one menace just create another?
The legend of kudzu overshadows the vine itself. Figures that kudzu covers 2 million, or even 7.4 million acres, are frequently regurgitated in news articles, blogs, museums, and encyclopedia sites, as well as on .edu and .gov domains. Dubious interpretations of kudzu’s role in ozone pollution are picked up in outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor, BBC, and the Los Angeles Times. As conservationist Bill Finch noted a few years ago, these claims rest on flimsy evidence—numbers “plucked from a small garden club publication” and “how-to books.” A careful survey by the U.S. Forest Service in 2011 estimated current kudzu in Southern forests to be 227,000 acres—less than .02 percent of Southern forests. By 2060, the Forest Futures Project forecasts, kudzu, if left unattended, would not even double its current coverage. So much for the vine growing a “mile a minute.” Japanese honeysuckle and Asian privet, for context, cover 10.3 million and 3.2 million acres, respectively.
Even in urban and suburban areas, Jim Miller estimated, kudzu only reaches 500,000 acres. Meanwhile, the kudzu bug, first identified near Atlanta’s international airport in 2009, has been slowly eating its way through the leafy biomass. The hyperbole surrounding the “Vine that Ate the South” thus distracts attention from more subtle pests, such as privet, cogon, tallow, bamboo, and English ivy. Calling kudzu the “root of all evil,” ironically or not, also projects blame away from real forces of climate change and biodiversity loss, such as carbon emissions and suburban sprawl.
Another reason kudzu endures so vividly in our imagination is the automobile, an axiomatic fixture for the young cities of the South since 1914. Viewed from the car, roadside habitats take on an enlarged significance. When kudzu vines drape the tree canopy, their vague silhouettes come resemble ghosts, deformed monsters, or waterfalls of jade and emerald. I remember those haunted daydreams flashing past the car windows of my childhood. It was a distinctive, Southern form of cloud gazing. The shapes lend easily themselves to fantasy and metaphor: “In Georgia,” wrote poet James Dickey in 1964, “the legend says/ That you must close your windows/ At night to keep it out of the house./ The glass is tinged with green, even so/ As the tendrils crawl over the fields.”
The obsession with kudzu also reveals the long shadow of the Southern Gothic. William Faulkner describes the Mason-Dixie in Absalom, Absalom! as “dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts.” Compared with the European variety, our Gothic is earthy. While Emily Brontë has her lovers pace anxiously through the gloomy manor of Wuthering Heights, Flannery O’Connor just drowns people in the river during their attempt at baptism. The allure of the grotesque, violent, derelict, racist, and unholy animates the stories of Deliverance, True Blood, Get Out, and The Walking Dead, where zombies eat through post-apocalyptic Georgia as surely as the kudzu vines that animate its set.
Kudzu’s link to decay and apocalypse is a curious cultural export. For the globe-trotting travel writer Paul Theroux, “Dystopia Dixie” provides a lurid set of props to compare the “hunger and squalor” of Mississippi with his poverty porn in India and Africa. “I found what I had been looking for,” he declares in his 2015 book Deep South. The destination? A grocery store where a 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, was lynched for being Black in 1955. “The whole wreck of it [was] overgrown with dying plants and tangled vines.” The scene reminds him of Angkor Wat. In the 1996 novel Fight Club, kudzu has shed its Southern identity and reached Chicago. The ultramasculine Tyler asks his group of misfits to imagine a post-apocalyptic revel of physicality and lawlessness:
“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers … you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy.”
In the Southern Ontario Gothic tradition, Margaret Atwood makes use of kudzu to dystopian effect. Her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood imagines a religious sect called God’s Gardeners, who actively desire the end to humanity through the “Waterless Flood,” after which “the Kudzu and other vines will climb, and the Birds and Animals will nest in them.” The eschatology is both lush and disquieting.
So just as Japanese kudzu set roots in the South, so too has the Southern Gothic set roots globally—and not just in Canada. “There is a lot Moroccans can identify with in Southern literature,” admits Leïla Slimani, a French Moroccan author of the recent novel In the Country of Others, “from the relationship to nature—at once hostile and sensual—to racial tensions, even if they’re not the same as in the United States. I want to build my own Alabama.” Swedish photographer Helene Schmitz captured kudzu’s cinematic intensity on camera, intrigued by the way the poor man’s ivy “transforms the landscape into something resembling an apocalyptic film set.”
For others, Jim Crow and the patriarchy undermine any potential for kudzu to speak to Southern myths of faded glory or civilization lost. The South was never glorious. Rather, kudzu’s everlasting creep across the landscape invites a near-Sisyphean struggle against the social and institutional forces of prejudice. “In Mississippi (as in the rest of America) racism is like that local creeping kudzu vine that swallows whole forests and abandoned houses,” wrote Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, in 1973. “If you don’t keep pulling up the roots it will grow back faster than you can destroy it.” Beth Ann Fennelly, the poet laureate of Mississippi, opens her poem “The Kudzu Chronicles” with a nod to intrusive men: “Kudzu sallies into the gully/ like a man pulling up a chair to a table/ where a woman was happily dining alone.”
But where kudzu signals loss, decay, and oppression, it can also signal the South’s hospitality, zest, and indomitable spirit. Fennelly in her poem remarks that her own capacity to set roots in Mississippi parallels kudzu, which “grows best so far from the land of its birth.” Boston ivy may decorate the hallowed halls of Harvard and Yale, but kudzu marks Southerners uniquely for its own.
Kudzu has a place in our love ballads, too. A keen eye will spot kudzu, not soybeans or cotton, as the lush bucolics for many scenes in the 2016 civil rights film Loving. The story chronicles the journey of one couple as plaintiffs to the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 case that struck down Southern bans on interracial marriage. In the love song “Pressing Flowers,” the folk duo Civil Wars invite us, in their lilting, stretched timbre, to “meet me on the back porch where ivy climbs/ Where they sat on the swing/ Soak up the colors of the midday sun/ while the ocean sings.” I too remember standing on the shores of a seemingly endless kudzu ocean, in the arms of a dearly beloved. We were, in the words of the Alabama Shakes in their song “Gemini,” “honeysuckle tangled up in kudzu vine.”
Ross Gay, a great poet of mirth, reminds us of the aromatic joys of honeysuckles, which only “the sad call a weed.” Is this also true of kudzu? Starches, baskets, herbal remedies, cloth—kudzu’s traditional uses in East Asia are often overlooked in the South. A number of artists, foragers, and educators, particularly in Asheville, North Carolina, are working to transmit that knowledge and redefine kudzu as one of nature’s many gifts. Exciting studies on the plant and its extracts investigate whether it can reduce alcoholism, heal alcohol damage in the liver, inhibit HIV-1 entry into cell lining, restore soil at chemical waste sites, and create biohybrid circuits for solar power.
Kudzu’s many lives, then, tell us as much about ourselves as they do about nature. Miracle vine, overgrown weed, romantic mistletoe, herbal remedy, invasive alien, old friend—kudzu is a mirror of our own predilections. For so many, kudzu represents the South’s decay, its knotted moral legacy, and torn landscape. It also represents the South’s virility, abundance, and distinctive flair—our pride for a gothic, fertile, rooted, cosmopolitan, decaying, fecund, entangled, and beloved land. We best take care of it.
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