Category Archives: News to use

Useful news for all to advance knowledge of the world and how it works

Trump Official Arrested in Storming of Capitol Left Little Mark Before Riot

Federico Klein was an outspoken religious conservative with a “perfectly suburban” background before the F.B.I. arrested him for assaulting Capitol Police. Federico Klein was an outspoken religious conservative with a “perfectly suburban” background before the F.B.I. arrested him for assaulting Capitol Police.

Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests – Scientific American

Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Now a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred.

Source: Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests – Scientific American

Burmese Union Federations Call for International Support Against Coup

As the Burmese military coup leaders escalated repression against the democracy uprising in the country this week, two Burmese union federations this week called for international pressure on their government. The Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM) is asking for international sanctions against the regime.

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As the Burmese military coup leaders escalated repression against the democracy uprising in the country this week, two Burmese union federations this week called for international pressure on their government. The Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM) is asking for international sanctions against the regime.

Denying Junta Access to Myanmar’s Foreign Reserves Seen as Key Anti-Coup Goal

U.S. President Biden’s executive order freezing U.S. $1 billion of Central Bank of Myanmar foreign currency reserves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Feb. 10 was a first step to keep cash out of the hands of the military that requires other countries to follow up, activists said.

With further reserves estimated at U.S. $5.7 billion stored in other countries, activists campaigning for justice and accountability for the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar say other countries should follow the Fed and stop the junta from using state funds to blunt the impact of economic sanctions.

U.S. President Biden’s executive order freezing U.S. $1 billion of Central Bank of Myanmar foreign currency reserves at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Feb. 10 was a first step to keep cash out of the hands of the military that requires other countries to follow up, activists said.

With further reserves estimated at U.S. $5.7 billion stored in other countries, activists campaigning for justice and accountability for the Feb. 1 coup in Myanmar say other countries should follow the Fed and stop the junta from using state funds to blunt the impact of economic sanctions.

“The military now has control over the Central Bank and the Treasury, and they can repurpose the legitimate revenues of the government for their own use,” said Paul Donowitz, Global Witness’s campaign leader for Myanmar. He noted that soon after the coup, the army detained the Central Bank governor and replaced the bank leadership with their own people.

“The question for the international banks and banking regulators is how they can ensure that Myanmar’s state revenues held in the account of the State cannot be misappropriated by the military,” he added.

A Washington-based trade and commerce expert told RFA that Biden’s executive order cleared the way to target the bank following an attempt to access the $1 billion on Feb. 4 that was blocked by Fed safeguards after triggering a red flag. 

“They made it a point to clarify that entities within the government of Myanmar after the coup d’etat include the Central Bank. That was a very deliberate addition,” the source added, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Reuters news agency cited two sources familiar with the transaction in a report on Thursday that said Biden’s executive order was designed to grant the New York Fed the legal authority to hold the $1 billion of Myanmar reserves indefinitely.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the country’s gross reserves at $6.7 billion in January.

The Washington banking expert said three Singaporean banks hold the Central Bank of Myanmar’s remaining foreign reserves.

“The Central Bank of Myanmar manages its foreign reserves through its reserve accounts in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the three main commercial banks of Singapore, namely DBS [Development Bank of Singapore], UOB [United Overseas Bank], and OCBC [Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation],” said the expert.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in a Feb. 23 statement said that its “regular surveillance of the banking system has not found significant funds from Myanmar companies and individuals in banks in Singapore.”

“MAS expects financial institutions to remain vigilant to any transactions that could pose risks to the institution, including dealings with companies and individuals subject to financial sanctions by foreign jurisdictions,” MAS said.

RFA sought further comment from the MAS on the three banks, but received no reply.

RFA’s expert called the statement by MAS “evasive” – saying it covers only “Myanmar companies and individuals” and not Myanmar government funds or the Central Bank, which is a government entity whose independence and integrity were compromised by the coup and military appointments.

“If Singapore’s monetary authorities and banks are seeing suspicious transactions, they should definitely take action to prevent the looting of the State resources from Myanmar. They should respond to these suspicious transactions by flagging them, freezing the account, and investigating them,” said Donowitz.

Yadanar Maung—a spokesperson for the rights group Justice For Myanmar—said “Without an immediate response now, the military will continue to commit atrocities against the people and transfer assets into their private hands.”

“The international community and the banking industry must support the people’s struggle by taking immediate action,” she said.

Attempts to contact the newly appointed officials of Central Bank of Myanmar for comment were unsuccessful.

Reported and translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung for RFA’s Myanmar Service. Written in English by Richard Finney.

Why comparing Covid-19 vaccine efficacy numbers can be misleading

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan this week turned down 6,200 Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses for his city. “Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine. Moderna and Pfizer are the best,” Duggan said in a news conference. “And I am going to do everything I can to make sure that residents of the city of Detroit get the best.”

Scientists say that this is the wrong way to think about Covid-19 vaccines, and that judging the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as inferior based on its lower reported efficacy is misleading.

Such actions are especially worrying at the current stage of the pandemic. Covid-19 has killed more than 500,000 Americans, and while cases seem to be declining, the virus is still spreading, new variants are gaining ground, and some parts of the country are already relaxing precautions (which health officials warn could end up prolonging the pandemic).

Turning down vaccine doses while supplies of all Covid-19 vaccines are still stretched thin undermines the campaign to curb the pandemic.


A shipment of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine arrives at a hospital in Bay Shore, New York, on March 3. | Johnny Milano/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The best Covid-19 vaccine for you is most likely still the first one you can get.

Three different Covid-19 vaccines are now being distributed across the United States, and all three are highly effective at the most important thing: preventing hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. But some people remain worried that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is less effective at preventing disease to begin with.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan this week turned down 6,200 Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses for his city. “Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine. Moderna and Pfizer are the best,” Duggan said in a news conference. “And I am going to do everything I can to make sure that residents of the city of Detroit get the best.”

Scientists say that this is the wrong way to think about Covid-19 vaccines, and that judging the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as inferior based on its lower reported efficacy is misleading.

Such actions are especially worrying at the current stage of the pandemic. Covid-19 has killed more than 500,000 Americans, and while cases seem to be declining, the virus is still spreading, new variants are gaining ground, and some parts of the country are already relaxing precautions (which health officials warn could end up prolonging the pandemic).

Turning down vaccine doses while supplies of all Covid-19 vaccines are still stretched thin undermines the campaign to curb the pandemic.

In clinical trials, the vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, by Moderna, and by Johnson & Johnson reduced the fatality rate of Covid-19 by 100 percent compared to their placebo groups. They also kept all recipients out of the hospital. That means they can potentially downgrade Covid-19 from a public health crisis to a manageable problem.

“The goal of a vaccine was really to defang or tame this virus, to make it more like other respiratory viruses that we deal with, so when you look at the three approved vaccines in the US, all of them are extremely good at that metric,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.

The vaccines do have some important differences. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is one dose, while the others require two. It also can be stored at refrigerator temperatures, while the others require freezer temperatures. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is also less expensive, about $10 per dose, roughly half as much as the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. The Moderna vaccine costs between $25 and $37 per dose.

These factors give Johnson & Johnson an edge in logistics and could help the shots get to people in harder-to-reach places. Saad Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, told Vox last month that it’s a vaccine that “can increase equity.”

But when Johnson & Johnson filed for an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its Covid-19 vaccine in early February, it reported that its overall efficacy in preventing Covid-19 cases that produced symptoms was 66.1 percent. The Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines reported efficacy levels around 95 percent.

That gap in efficacy numbers is fueling some people’s perception that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine isn’t as good. However, scientists say that these numbers can’t be fairly compared to one another. The efficacy levels of the Covid-19 vaccines are specific to the clinical trials that produced them, and those trials were not conducted in the same ways.

In addition, health officials have been emphasizing that the most important numbers — how well the vaccines prevent hospitalizations and deaths — are consistent across the board and are arguably more comparable. Even after these vaccines have begun distribution, researchers are finding that Covid-19 vaccines are doing a remarkable job of keeping people alive.

That’s why the recommendation remains that the best Covid-19 vaccine for the vast majority of people is the first one they can get. “That’s how I think of these vaccines, as basically interchangeable,” said Adalja.

Why it’s hard to make direct comparisons between the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and the one from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech

To gauge how well vaccines work, companies test them in several stages, looking to ensure they are safe, to find the correct dose, and to figure out how much protection they provide. These trials are designed to test vaccines individually, not to pit them against each other. So direct comparisons don’t always make sense and one has to be careful to understand the nuances of how each result was obtained.

But health officials have acknowledged that the earlier results of the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines shifted expectations of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“If this had occurred in the absence of a prior announcement and implementation of a 94, 95 percent efficacy [vaccine], one would have said this is an absolutely spectacular result,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine during the press conference in January.

In phase 3 clinical trials, Covid-19 vaccines were tested against the virus in the real world, in actual people against the actual virus. This involves testing tens of thousands of participants to see who ends up showing symptoms, randomly dividing them into groups that receive the actual vaccine and groups that receive a placebo (without revealing who got what).

Testing in the real world means dealing with all the confounding factors of the real world. Depending on which volunteers are selected and where they are, they face different infection rates of the virus. They have varying access to health care. Some places had more strict lockdowns than others, or started them at varying times, so participants experienced different public health measures. Michigan issued a mask mandate in March 2020 while California issued one in June 2020, for example.

Timing is critical too. The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech finished enrolling participants in their phase 3 trials in October and reported their results in late November. The Johnson & Johnson phase 3 trial only finished enrolling participants in December 2020 and reported their results in January.

That means the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was tested during one of the most severe stages of the pandemic, when transmission, cases, and hospitalizations were at their worst in many places around the world, including the US. The trial also captured efficacy against the new variants of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) which began circulating at this point in some parts of the world. Several of these variants have shown themselves to be more contagious, deadlier, and more likely to evade protection from vaccines and prior immunity.

And Johnson & Johnson’s efficacy results included trials in other countries, whereas the results from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech were mainly from US-based participants.

Johnson & Johnson found that vaccine efficacy shifted depending on the country in which it was studied. The vaccine was found to have a 72 percent overall efficacy after four weeks in preventing Covid-19 symptoms in the US. Under the same benchmarks in South Africa, where a coronavirus variant with worrisome mutations that help it escape vaccines has been spreading widely, the company found a 64 percent efficacy.

When it came to preventing severe and critical cases of Covid-19, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 85.9 percent efficacious in the US while in South Africa, efficacy against severe and critical disease was reduced to 81.7 percent.

The fact that these vaccines were tested in different ways at different times is why it’s so hard to make apples-to-apples comparisons. “I don’t even look at those efficacy numbers and compare them head-to-head like that,” Adalja said. “Biostats 101: You cannot compare trial results like that unless they were done in a head-to-head fashion.”

Researchers still need more information about Covid-19 vaccines, especially as new variants spread

The huge emphasis on the fact that vaccines prevent hospitalizations and death doesn’t mean that preventing the symptoms of Covid-19 is not important. Millions of people in the US have preexisting health conditions and could suffer from the disease even if they don’t end up in the hospital. About 10 percent of Covid-19 survivors have reported persistent symptoms even after the virus has faded away, the so-called long haulers. It hints that the disease can cause long-term damage.

And while vaccines can protect an individual, it’s less clear how well they prevent transmission from person to person (although evidence is mounting that the available Covid-19 vaccines reduce the virus’ spread). That’s why vaccinated people are encouraged to continue wearing masks until vaccinations are widespread.

An ideal Covid-19 vaccine would reduce deaths, hospitalizations, symptoms, and transmission, and right now, all of the three Covid-19 vaccines available in the US check these boxes, even for people with risk factors for severe disease or long-term illness.

“I wouldn’t be picky if I’m a high-risk person, because being picky may leave you out in the cold of not being vaccinated,” Lawrence Corey, a professor studying virology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. “We have still an incredible epidemic going on here.”

There are some people with a history of severe allergic reactions or certain immunological conditions who will have to be careful about selecting a vaccine, and some may not be able to receive one at all. But that makes it all the more important to vaccinate everyone around a vulnerable person, which helps build herd immunity.

The looming concern, though, is how well Covid-19 vaccines will hold up as the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate and new variants arise. Already, vaccine manufacturers are investigating booster doses and modifications of their shots to better counter the newer versions of the virus.

Researchers will also have to figure out how well existing vaccines are holding up against the variants in the real world. While vaccine clinical trials were conducted independently of each other, it would behoove scientists to coordinate from here on out, sharing protocols and pooling data to draw more useful conclusions.

“Imagine what will happen when these studies generate results, each with their own populations, eligibility criteria, validation procedures and clinical endpoints,” wrote Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida, in Nature. “If we don’t want our final answers to be a jumble, we must act now to consider how data can be compared and combined.”

In the meantime, it’s important to keep in mind that vaccines are one part of a comprehensive public health response to Covid-19. Social distancing, hand washing, mask wearing, testing, tracing, and isolation remain critical to speeding up progress toward the end of the pandemic.

The Mayor of Detroit Turned Down Thousands of J&J Vaccines. Public Health Experts Say That’s a Bad Idea.

Dr. Anthony Fauci explained at a White House press briefing earlier this week that despite their different mechanisms, the mRNA and the J&J vaccines share the same “ultimate end game.” “Both the vaccines ultimately result in a spike protein in the right conformation that gives the body the opportunity to feel that this is the actual virus that it’s seeing when it’s not—it’s the protein,” he said.

So, now is not the time to base public health decisions on which vaccine politicians think is “best.”

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Local governments are doing what public health officials had feared: turning down the Johnson & Johnson vaccine under the false assumption that the single-dose, relatively shelf-stable shot isn’t the “best.”

Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit declined 6,200 J&J shots that would have added to the city’s arsenal of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, according to the Detroit Free Press and Crain’s Detroit. “Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine,” Duggan said at a Thursday briefing. “Moderna and Pfizer are the best. And I am going to do everything I can to make sure the residents of the city of Detroit get the best.”

This isn’t a good way of thinking about the coronavirus vaccines. Public health officials are purposely shying away from describing one vaccine as any better or worse than another, because they are all highly effective at preventing severe illness and death. As former FDA chief scientists Dr. Jesse Goodman told me earlier this week, all the vaccines work.

“All three vaccines that are currently available under emergency use in the US are very effective in preventing against severe disease, and that’s the main thing individuals need to worry about,” Goodman told me. “What we really want to do is prevent people from getting really sick, and getting hospitalized or dying, and the J&J vaccine appears to do a perfectly fine job with that.”

Plus, the vaccines can’t be compared head to head because each was tested in its own clinical trial. And, as public health officials have pointed out, the J&J vaccine was tested in countries where more contagious variants of the virus were spreading—variants against which the mRNA vaccines may also be somewhat less effective.

Re: J&J 72% vs Pfizer/Moderna 95% – it’s sorta like comparing scores of golfers who teed off during a calm morning to those who teed off at 1pm when winds were howling. While it’s hard to make precise adjustment, it’s clear that equally good play will result in different scores.

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) March 5, 2021

Dr. Anthony Fauci explained at a White House press briefing earlier this week that despite their different mechanisms, the mRNA and the J&J vaccines share the same “ultimate end game.” “Both the vaccines ultimately result in a spike protein in the right conformation that gives the body the opportunity to feel that this is the actual virus that it’s seeing when it’s not—it’s the protein,” he said.

So, now is not the time to base public health decisions on which vaccine politicians think is “best.”

Bill That Would Make It a Crime to Insult and Taunt Police Officers Advances Through Kentucky State Senate

Just toss that 1st Amendment – hell no! A new bill advanced out of a Kentucky state Senate committee Thursday, and if it passes into law, it would serve as the state’s (and possibly the nation’s) first blue fragility bill. What’s “blue fragility,” you ask? Well, it’s like white fragility, only you add a gun, badge and a massive ego that can’t take an insult…” j2zgjd0acx1m2rhjidil.jpg

A new bill advanced out of a Kentucky state Senate committee Thursday, and if it passes into law, it would serve as the state’s (and possibly the nation’s) first blue fragility bill. What’s “blue fragility,” you ask? Well, it’s like white fragility, only you add a gun, badge and a massive ego that can’t take an insult…

Read more…

DeVos’s student aid chief resigns from Education Department | TheHill

“I accepted the resignation of Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Gen. Mark Brown and thanked him for his service to the U.S. Department of Education. As the nation continues grappling with economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to deliver relief and fortify pathways to the middle class is more urgent than ever,” Cardona said in a statement. Robin Minor, the deputy chief operating officer, was named as the acting head of Federal Student Aid as the administration searches for a permanent replacement for Brown.

Source: DeVos’s student aid chief resigns from Education Department | TheHill