HOW DID BIDEN'S STATE DO?
Negotiations, restraint, little intervention: How police responded to Wilmington protest, riot

Jeanne Kuang and Karl Baker, Delaware News Journal June 2, 2020

Several protest leaders in Wilmington said face-to-face negotiations with police on Saturday helped keep the situation from escalating into violence on either side until nightfall, when the peaceful protest eventually morphed into one punctuated by looting in the city's downtown.

Across the nation, protests in response to George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police have been followed by chaotic confrontations between protesters and police and in many cases, deployment of tear gas and rubber bullets.

In Wilmington, it didn't come to that. Police were largely restrained — day and night.

Protesters said police allowed them to control their own crowd for most of the day and negotiate an end to more heated confrontations.

Shaheed Banks, who said he's been treated poorly by police in the past, spoke at the initial rally at Rodney Square. Afterward, as he helped lead the crowd on a march to the Wilmington Police Department headquarters, he found police flexible.

"An officer told us, 'Sir, I'm taking your lead,'" Banks said. "And I respect that. They actually let us protest and let us police ourselves."

Banks, along with protesters Keith James and Hyland Henry, said they worked alongside police to de-escalate conflict when some threw rocks, argued with officers and smashed a police car.

Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy, right, speaks with protesters in front of the Wilmington Police Department Saturday, May 30, 2020. (Photo: Jerry Habraken, Delaware News Journal)

BACKGROUND: 'Not just a black thing anymore:' Wilmington protesters demand justice for George Floyd

When a handful of protesters were detained by police at the station, demonstrators negotiated for their release. When police were concerned about growing tension, they allowed Henry onto the station's roof to address the crowd.

"They said they don't want this to escalate and we need to move," he said. "I said, 'If you let me talk, I can move the people.'"

He then helped lead the crowd toward the Riverfront and I-95.

Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy did not make himself available for an interview about the police's handling of the day and night's protests, despite multiple requests made through Mayor Mike Purzycki's office.


Gov. John Carney in an interview with Delaware Online/The News Journal on Monday said Wilmington officers were asked to be restrained, "to not get sucked into" what he said were out-of-state activists' ploys to provoke police retaliation. Carney did not provide evidence for that claim, citing unspecified "police intelligence."

THE MYTH OF THE 
OUTSIDERS: Carney says Wilmington protesters inciting violence 'were not from here,' gives few detailsEdward Maguire, an Arizona State University criminologist who studies police responses to protests, said communication with influential protest figures is a sign of "a real success."

"There are always people who are perceived as influential by the crowd and those are the people who police should be having conversations with them, asking them what they want and approaching them from the perspective of facilitation rather than control," Maguire said.


Keep up with Wilmington news: Subscribe to Delaware Online for access to stories about life in Delaware's largest city.

The Wilmington crowd was next met on the highway by a row of Delaware State Police patrol cars and troopers holding long guns, which Hyland, a protester, criticized as inappropriate in front of peaceful protesters who kneeled on the highway.
Despite moments of tension during that impasse, James said he and others had peaceful exchanges with the troopers, asking police to denounce the Floyd killing and put the guns away in exchange for the crowd to leave.

Members of the Delaware State Police remove their guns and put them away after negotiating with protesters on I-95 Saturday, May 30, 2020, in Wilmington. (Photo: Jerry Habraken, Delaware News Journal)

James, who is running for state representative in the 10th District, and others led the crowd back to the police station, where they had a similar exchange with Tracy and Purzycki.

"Then we left from there, as we said we would," he said.

From there, some of those group leaders, including Henry, went home.

But crowds moved to downtown Wilmington's Market Street, where the demonstration took a turn. Some protesters began shattering windows. Others decried it.

Wilmington police showed up in riot gear, which some in the crowd said would inflame the situation.

Dover protesters peacefully march, rally downtown Monday afternoon

BLM BLACK LIVES MATTER IS NOW A MASS MOVEMENT, NO LONGER SO CALLED 'FRINGE RADICALS'

IN PART THANKS TO COVID-19, A LOCKDOWN AND A SMARTPHONE VIDEO

AND THE OUTRAGE NOT JUST OF THE BLACK COMMUNITIES BUT THE WHITE ALLIES AS WELL, WHITE LIBERALS RADICALIZED ONCE AGAIN AGAINST 

POLICE BRUTALITY

LIKE IN JOE BIDENS DELAWARE

32 PHOTOS June 2, 2020

A group of about 50 protesters held a peaceful protest in Dover Monday afternoon. The gathering began with the group lying down on Legislative Mall for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the reported time that a Minneapolis police officer held George Floyd to the ground while pressing a knee into his neck. At 1 p.m., the protesters began to march down Loockerman Street and continued to rally in the downtown area for the next couple hours.
EMILY LYTLE, DOVER POST

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Live Updates: US Lawmaker Questions Secret Service's Alleged Role in Tear Gassing Protesters Near WH

© Sputnik / Artur Gabdrahmanov
US 02.06.2020


Mass protests across the United States erupted against police brutality and racism on 25 May, after George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old African American man, died in police custody in the US city of Minneapolis. Some protests have turned into violent riots that include arson and widespread looting.

The US is preparing for another wave of anti-racism protests over Floyd's death as the states of California, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, and the District of Columbia have already mobilised National Guard troops to disperse protesters and help local law enforcement officers ensure security. Several Democratic governors, however, have pushed back against Trump's threat to deploy the military.

US President Donald Trump stated earlier he is taking presidential action to mobilise all available federal resources to respond to the ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd including the deployment of thousands of armed troops to quell riots in the nation's capital.

Speaking at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, Trump said the death of George Floyd was a grave tragedy but warned against surrendering to hostility. Trump stressed that every US citizen has the right to be safe in their workplace, home, and city streets.

On 25 May, the 46-year-old Floyd, an African American, died in Minneapolis police custody after a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for at least eight minutes. Video evidence surfaced the following day which has sparked nationwide protests many of which have led to violence and rioting.

THE WASHINGTON POLICE SHOULD BE DIRECTED BY THE MAYOR TO STAND BETWEEN PROTESTERS AND TRUMP'S MILITIAS TO SERVE AND PROTECT THE PEOPLE AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT 

HONG KONG OR WASHINGTON

Trump’s fossil fuel agenda gets pushback from federal judges

By MATTHEW BROWN May 28, 2020

This Dec. 22, 2018, file photo shows a pump jack over an oil well along Interstate 25 near Dacono, Colo. Federal courts have delivered a string of rebukes to the Trump administration over what they found were failures to protect the environment and address climate change as it promotes fossil fuel interests and the extraction of natural resources from public lands. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Federal courts have delivered a string of rebukes to the Trump administration over what they found were failures to protect the environment and address climate change as it promotes fossil fuel interests and the extraction of natural resources from public lands.

Judges have ruled administration officials ignored or downplayed potential environmental damage in lawsuits over oil and gas leases, coal mining and pipelines to transport fuels across the U.S., according to an Associated Press review of more than a dozen major environmental cases.

The latest ruling against the administration came Thursday when an appeals court refused to revive a permitting program for oil and gas pipelines that a lower court had canceled.

Actions taken by the courts have ranged from orders for more environmental analysis to the unprecedented cancellation of oil and gas leases across hundreds of thousands of acres in Western states.

In this April 13, 2020, photo provided by TC Energy, construction contractors for TC Energy are seen installing a section of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline at the U.S.-Canada border north of Glasgow, Mont. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris has struck down a nationwide permitting program for new oil and gas pipelines in a lawsuit against the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline from Canada. (TC Energy via AP)

“Many of the decisions the Trump administration has been making are arguably illegal and in some cases blatantly so,” said Mark Squillace, associate dean at the University of Colorado Law School and a specialist in natural resources law. “They’ve lost a lot of cases.”

Some of the most far-reaching rulings have come from U.S. District Judge Brian Morris, an appointee of former President Barack Obama posted in Montana.

This month alone Morris canceled energy leases on several hundred thousand acres in cases that centered on potential harm to water supplies and greater sage grouse, a declining species. He also struck down the nationwide permitting program for new oil and gas pipelines in a lawsuit against the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline from Canada.

The The rulings brought cheers from environmentalists who have looked to the judiciary to check Trump’s ambitions. But Morris was denounced by oil and gas industry representatives and allies in Congress as an “activist judge” inserting his own agenda into cases.


In this April 13, 2020, photo provided by TC Energy, a pipe storage yard with material for construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline is seen at a staging area along the U.S.-Canada border north of Glasgow, Mont. U.S. District Judge Brian Morris has struck down a nationwide permitting program for new oil and gas pipelines in a lawsuit against the controversial Keystone XL oil sands pipeline from Canada. (TC Energy via AP)

The ire directed at Morris, a former clerk for the late conservative U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist, appears to be politically driven, legal analysts said. Federal judges in other states — including appointees of both Democratic and Republican administrations — have also ruled against Trump.

— In California, Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, struck down the administration’s attempt to repeal a rule meant to ensure companies pay fair value for oil, coal and other natural resources from public lands.

—In Colorado, Judge Lewis Babcock, a Ronald Reagan appointee, sided with conservation groups and said the administration’s review of 171 proposed natural gas wells didn’t look closely enough at the cumulative effect of drilling on climate change and the area’s mule deer and elk populations.

—In Idaho, a magistrate judge canceled more than $125 million in oil and gas leases on public lands that are home to sage grouse, after determining the Trump administration illegally curtailed public comment.


In this April 4, 2013, file photo, a mining dumper truck hauls coal at Cloud Peak Energy's Spring Creek strip mine near Decker, Mont. Federal courts have delivered a string of rebukes to the Trump administration over what they found were failures to protect the environment and address climate change as it promotes fossil fuel interests and the extraction of natural resources from public lands. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)

Administration officials said the courtroom setbacks had not stopped them from paring back burdensome regulations to create jobs and save taxpayer money while still upholding environmental protections and public health.

“It is hardly surprising that these frequent-filer litigants can sometimes find forums to temporarily slow administrative actions,” Interior press secretary Ben Goldey said.

Kathleen Sgamma with the Western Energy Alliance, which lobbies for oil and gas companies, said a better measure of the administration’s success is the growth in U.S. energy production under Trump. The U.S. overtook Saudi Arabia in 2018 to become the world’s largest oil producer.

“The big picture is the administration’s ’energy dominance’ agenda has been hugely successful,” Sgamma said. Trump deserves praise for recognizing that regulations hampered the industry’s growth and needed to be eased, she said.

In the Keystone XL case, Morris ruled the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had never justified use of a blanket environmental permit for construction of oil and gas pipelines through wetlands, streams and other waters. The Army Corps suspended the permitting program, affecting thousands of projects.

U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, a Montana Republican, called the ruling “a massive overreach by an activist judge” that went beyond the court’s authority.

Government attorneys filed an emergency appeal to block Morris’ ruling, but the rejection of it Thursday by a two-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means the issue could drag out for months before a final decision.

A longtime colleague of Morris who served with him on Montana’s Supreme Court said his detractors should look more closely at his record.

“He follows the rule of law,” said retired Justice Mike Wheat.

Attorneys who sue on behalf of environmental groups have long sought out venues they believe favorable, but it hasn’t always worked out.

In March, an Obama-appointed judge in California upheld the Trump administration’s repeal of a 2015 rule regulating hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for oil and gas.

Last week, on the same day Morris canceled oil and gas leases on more than 300,000 acres of public lands in Montana and Wyoming, he ruled for the administration in a coal mining case brought by environmentalists and the Democratic attorneys general of California, New York, New Mexico and Washington.

The judge had initially ruled against the administration and said its lifting of an Obama-era moratorium on coal sales was flawed. But he accepted Interior’s subsequent justification that the move had a negligible impact on climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions.

That case illustrates a growing frustration among environmental activists: While judges have ruled against Trump on climate change and other issues, that hasn’t stopped the administration from issuing flawed or incomplete environmental analyses then pushing forward until challenged in court again.

“It’s like they are creating a whack-a-mole game that we have to play,” said Jeremy Nichols with Wildearth Guardians.

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Follow Matthew Brown on twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

Solar probe to pass through comet’s tail for ‘bonus science’

May 29, 2020

BERLIN (AP) — The European Space Agency said Friday that its Solar Orbiter probe will pass through the tail of a comet in the coming days and scientists plan to switch on its instruments early to conduct some “bonus science.”

Solar Orbiter was launched in February on a mission to capture the first pictures of the sun’s elusive poles and the chance encounter with comet ATLAS wasn’t planned.

After being alerted to the opportunity by Geraint Jones of Britain’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, mission scientists set about ensuring four of the probe’s instruments will be switched on to gather data about the trail of dust and charged particles left by the comet.

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ESA said similar chance flybys through a comet’s tail have only been recorded six times previously and only after the event had taken place.

The agency’s director of science, Guenther Hasinger, said the unexpected encounter “provides a mission with unique opportunities and challenges, but that’s good.”

“Chances like this are all part of the adventure of science,” he added.

Sundarbans devastated by cyclone, as virus halts migration

By ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL

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This May 22, 2020 photo shows the damage caused by Cyclone Amphan in Deulbari village, in South 24 Parganas district in the Sundarbans, West Bengal state, India. The cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the Sundarbans, devastating the islands that are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (Samrat Paul via AP)

This May 22, 2020 photo shows a woman inspect the damage caused by Cyclone Amphan in Deulbari village, in South 24 Parganas district in the Sundarbans, West Bengal state, India. The cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the Sundarbans, devastating the islands that are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (Samrat Paul via AP)
NEW DELHI (AP) — The powerful cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the vast mangrove forests of the Sundarban delta, a UNESCO world heritage site. The mangroves dissipated some of Cyclone Amphan’s energy, shielding densely populated cities like Kolkata.

But the storm’s impact was devastating for the millions who live in the Sundarbans. Mud homes were swept away, embankments were destroyed and farms were inundated by saline water that made them unfit for cultivation.

The impact of climate change, including increasingly furious storms and coastal erosion from rising oceans, has forced many to migrate to the cities in recent years. But now with the coronavirus pandemic shutting down businesses and limiting mobility, villagers don’t have the option of moving to other places in search of work.
“It is a recipe for disaster,” said Annu Jalais, a professor at the National University of Singapore who has been studying the Sundarbans for two decades.

This May 22, 2020 photo shows the damage caused by Cyclone Amphan in Deulbari village, in South 24 Parganas district in the Sundarbans, West Bengal state, India. The cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the Sundarbans, devastating the islands that are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (Samrat Paul via AP)

This May 22, 2020 photo shows villagers inspecting the damage caused by Cyclone Amphan in Deulbari village, in South 24 Parganas district in the Sundarbans, West Bengal state, India. The cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the Sundarbans, devastating the islands that are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (Samrat Paul via AP)

This May 22, 2020 photo shows the damage caused by Cyclone Amphan in Deulbari village, in South 24 Parganas district in the Sundarbans, West Bengal state, India. The cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the Sundarbans, devastating the islands that are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (Samrat Paul via AP)

Cyclone Amphan hit on May 20 with heavy rains, a massive storm surge and sustained winds of 170 kilometers (105 miles) per hour and gusts of up to 190 kph (118 mph). It passed directly through the Sundarbans, devastating it.

Jafar Iqbal, a village teacher, spent a night in a shelter while the cyclone raged outside. When he went home the next day, he found his house badly damaged.

“My home didn’t have a roof. It was lying crumpled on the floor,” he said by phone.

The Sundarban delta has 102 islands of which 54 are inhabited. The rest constitute the world’s largest mangrove forest. Most famous for its population of tigers, the mangroves — dense thickets of small trees with exposed supporting roots — act as a buffer during storms, slowing down tidal waves and dissipating a storm’s energy, said K.J. Ramesh, India’s former meteorological chief.

The lives of the estimated 4.5 million people in the region are tied to the fragile ecosystem. Farming, fishing, collecting honey and tourism are the few employment opportunities available. But climate change has been making their lives harder.

Cyclone Amphan also damaged almost the entire length of the 100-kilometer (62-mile) nylon fence that had been erected to prevent tigers from straying into human habitations, said Krishnendu Basak of the private Wildlife Trust of India. The fence is key in reducing the number of tiger attacks on people.

But it is the breaking of embankments, resulting in salt water pouring onto the land, which will have the most durable impact on livelihoods. Saline water kills freshwater fish in ponds in a day, most sources of drinking water disappear, and land can’t be used for cultivation for up to five years, Jalais said.

Amites Mukhopadhyay, a sociologist at Jadavpur University who has been researching the Sundarbans, said the ebb and flow of the tides makes it difficult to build new embankments. “The tides change every six hours. You need a very strong initiative from the government,” he said.

A cyclone in 2009 and another last year left similar devastation and triggered mass migration out of the islands. Even before Cyclone Amphan struck, many of those migrants had started returning home after losing their jobs in the cities due to the coronavirus lockdown.

Elema Bibi, a fisherwoman whose son returned home days before the cyclone, said, “We are left with nothing, with nowhere to go. There is no source of income. I just have a pile of rotting fish.”

This May 22, 2020 photo shows a boy looking at the damage caused by Cyclone Amphan in Deulbari village, in South 24 Parganas district in the Sundarbans, West Bengal state, India. The cyclone that struck India and Bangladesh last month passed through the Sundarbans, devastating the islands that are home to one of the world’s largest mangrove forests and is a UNESCO world heritage site. (Samrat Paul via AP)

The state has announced $827,000 in aid for rebuilding houses, helping farmers and repairing wells in the Sundarban, and the national government has announced a $130 million relief fund for the state.

The coronvirus is complicating relief work as well. During the cyclone, villagers huddled in crowded storm shelters, which authorities feared could spread the virus. Since the storm, the number of cases in the state has increased to over 5,500 with more than 300 deaths from 3,103 cases and 181 deaths on the day of the cyclone.

“Most families left the cyclone shelter as soon as they could,” Iqbal said. “No one wanted to risk getting infected by the virus.”

Some villages have blocked the entry of outsiders and asked for relief materials to be left on other islands for them to pick up, news reports say.

Mukhopadhyay said the region is no stranger to disasters, but the combination of the cyclone and the pandemic make the situation look “completely bleak.”

“People are resilient, but how much resilience can they have?” he said.

SpaceX captures the flag, beating Boeing in cosmic contest


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In this image taken from NASA video on Monday, June 1, 2020, NASA astronauts Robert L. Behnken, left, and Chris Cassidy right, listen as commander Douglas Hurley speaks about retrieving the American flag left behind at the International Space Station nearly a decade ago. (NASA via AP)

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The first astronauts launched by SpaceX declared victory Monday in NASA’s cosmic capture-the-flag game.

They quickly claimed the prize left behind at the International Space Station nearly a decade ago by the last crew to launch from the U.S.

“Congratulations, SpaceX, you got the flag,” NASA astronaut Doug Hurley said a day after arriving at the space station.

Hurley showed off the small U.S. flag during a news conference and again in a linkup with SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

“You can bet we will take it with us when we depart back to Earth,” said Hurley, floating alongside Dragon crewmate Bob Behnken.

– AP FACT CHECK: Trump claim of saving space program off base

The flag flew on the first space shuttle flight in 1981 and the final one in 2011. Hurley was on that last shuttle crew.

The flag was an added incentive for Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and Boeing, competing to be the first private company to launch a crew to the space station. Saturday’s liftoff of NASA astronauts was the first from the U.S. in nine years. Boeing’s first astronaut flight isn’t expected until next year. The crew will include Chris Ferguson, commander of the last shuttle flight who now works for Boeing.

“Proud to yield the title of “The last commander of an American launched spacecraft” to @Astro_Doug who, with @AstroBehnken, has returned US to space from KSC after 3,252 days. Well done,” Ferguson tweeted following the SpaceX liftoff.

An estimated 100,000 people — suppliers, vendors, engineers, etc. — were responsible for Saturday’s flawless launch of test pilots Hurley and Behnken aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center. The Dragon capsule, also built and owned by SpaceX, docked at the space station Sunday.

“It’s awe-inspiring for all of us,” SpaceX manager Benji Reed told the astronauts from Hawthorne.

Reed asked them about the Falcon ride. Hurley said he could feel when the rocket went transonic and broke the sound barrier. The final push to orbit, on the second stage, was full of vibrations and felt like “driving fast, very fast on a gravel road,” he said. The astronauts instantly went from pulling more than three G’s — more than three times the force of Earth’s gravity — to zero gravity as soon as they reached orbit.

“Sounds like the ultimate ride in a Batmobile with the jet engine turned on,” Reed said.

Behnken said one of the first things he did upon reaching the orbiting lab was call his 6-year-old son, Theo, to hear what is was like to watch his father blast into space “and share that a little bit with him while it was still fresh in his mind.”

Hurley and Behnken spent Monday making sure their docked Dragon is ready to make an emergency getaway, if necessary. The capsule will serve as their lifeboat during their space station visit. They joined three station residents — an American and two Russians.

Full Coverage: Space Launch

NASA will decide in the coming weeks how long to keep the pair there. Their mission could last anywhere from one to four months. The timing will depend on Dragon checkouts in orbit and launch preparations for the company’s next astronaut flight, currently targeted for the end of August.

With so much uncertainty and so many variables, Behnken said it was a little hard explaining to his son when he’d back.

“From his perspective, he’s just excited that we’re going to get a dog when I get home,” Behnken said with a smile.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

. Hurley was on that last shuttle flight.

CANADIAN STUDY EH
Monkeys, ferrets offer needed clues in COVID-19 vaccine race

ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION


By LAURAN NEERGAARD

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In this April 2014 photo provided by the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization-International Vaccine Centre at the University of Saskatchewan, a researcher holds a ferret at their facility in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. In 2020, the lab is working with 300 ferrets developing a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine candidate and testing other vaccine candidates and therapeutics. (VIDO-InterVac at the University of Saskatchewan via AP)

The global race for a COVID-19 vaccine boils down to some critical questions: How much must the shots rev up someone’s immune system to really work? And could revving it the wrong way cause harm?

Even as companies recruit tens of thousands of people for larger vaccine studies this summer, behind the scenes scientists still are testing ferrets, monkeys and other animals in hopes of clues to those basic questions — steps that in a pre-pandemic era would have been finished first.

“We are in essence doing a great experiment,” said Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose lab is testing several vaccine candidates in animals.

The speed-up is necessary to try to stop a virus that has triggered a pandemic, killing more than 360,000 worldwide and shuttering economies. But “there’s no question there is more risk in the current strategy than what has ever been done before,” Baric said.

The animal testing lets scientists see how the body reacts to vaccines in ways studies in people never can, said Kate Broderick, research chief at Inovio Pharmaceuticals.

With animals, “we’re able to perform autopsies and look specifically at their lung tissue and get a really deep dive in looking at how their lungs have reacted,” Broderick said.



She’s awaiting results from mice, ferrets and monkeys that are being exposed to the coronavirus after receiving Inovio’s vaccine. Since no species perfectly mimics human infection, testing a trio broadens the look at safety.

And there’s some good news on the safety front as the first animal data from various research teams starts to trickle out. So far, there are no signs of a worrisome side effect called disease enhancement, which Dr. Anthony Fauci of the U.S. National Institutes of Health calls reassuring.

Enhancement is just what the name implies: Very rarely, a vaccine doesn’t stimulate the immune system in quite the right way, producing antibodies that not only can’t fully block infection but that make any resulting disease worse.

That first happened in the 1960s with failure of a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, an infection dangerous to young children. More recently, it has complicated efforts at vaccines against mosquito-spread dengue fever.

And some attempted vaccines for SARS, a cousin of COVID-19, seemed to cause enhancement in animal testing.

Fast forward to the pandemic. Three recently reported studies in monkeys tested different COVID-19 vaccine approaches, including shots made by Oxford University and China’s Sinovac. The studies were small, but none of the monkeys showed evidence of immune-enhanced disease when scientists later dripped the coronavirus directly into the animals’ noses or windpipes.

Some of the best evidence so far that a vaccine might work also comes from those monkey studies. Oxford and Sinovac created very different types of COVID-19 vaccines, and in separate studies, each team recently reported that vaccinated monkeys were protected from pneumonia while monkeys given a dummy shot got sick.
Full Coverage: Racing for a Remedy

But protection against severe disease is just a first step. Could a vaccine also stop the virus’s spread? The Oxford study raises some doubt.

Those researchers found as much virus lingering in the vaccinated monkeys’ noses as in the unvaccinated. Even though the experiment exposed moneys to high levels of the coronavirus, it raised troubling questions.

The type of vaccine -- how it targets the “spike” protein that coats the coronavirus -- may make a difference. Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston designed six different vaccine prototypes. Some only partially protected monkeys -- but one fully protected eight monkeys from any sign of the virus, said Dr. Dan Barouch, who is working with Johnson & Johnson on yet another COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

 In this July 29, 2008, file photo, a rhesus macaque monkey grooms another on Cayo Santiago, known as Monkey Island, off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. Since 1938, the 37-acre island has served as a research colony where the monkeys, originally from India, are studied. Even as companies recruit tens of thousands of people for larger COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine studies in the summer of 2020, behind the scenes scientists still are testing ferrets, monkeys and other animals in hopes of clues to those basic questions — steps that in a pre-pandemic era would have been finished first. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

In monkeys, the new coronavirus lodges in the lungs but seldom makes them super sick. Ferrets — the preferred animal for flu vaccine development — may help tell if potential COVID-19 vaccines might stop the viral spread.

“Ferrets develop a fever. They also cough and sneeze,” infecting each other much like people do, said vaccine researcher Alyson Kelvin of Canada’s Dalhousie University.

And while COVID-19 is a huge risk to the elderly, vaccines often don’t rev up an older person’s immune system as well as a younger person’s. So Kelvin also is studying older ferrets.

Some vaccine makers are reporting promising immune reactions in the first people given the experimental shots, including production of “neutralizing” antibodies, a kind that latches onto the virus and blocks it from infecting cells. But there’s a hitch.

Said Inovio’s Broderick: “Let me be honest. We’re still not clear at all on what those correlates of protection are” — meaning what mix of immune reactions, and how much, are needed.

Some clues come from the blood of COVID-19 survivors, although “there’s a huge variation” in immune reactions between the severely and mildly ill, Broderick added.

Still, if vaccinated animals that produce the same neutralizing antibody levels as certain COVID-19 survivors are protected — and people given test doses likewise produce the same amount — “that is great comfort that your vaccine approach actually may work,” said Kathrin Jansen, head of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine research.

But ultimately the real proof won’t come before huge studies of whether vaccinated people get sick less often than the unvaccinated.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.