THIS DAY @ LAW

US Congress passed "starve or sell" bill pressuring Sioux to give up Black Hills

On August 15, 1876, two months after the Battle of Little Big Horn, the US Congress passed a "starve or sell" bill providing that no further appropriations would be made for the subsistence of the Sioux Indian nation unless they gave up the Black Hills, where General George C. Custer had found gold in 1874.
Learn more about the US seizure of the Black Hills and Sioux legal efforts to have the land returned.

Liberia and South Korea established

On August 15, 1824, a group of freed slaves from the United States founded Liberia. South Korea was also established on August 15 in 1948.
Read the constitutions of South Korea and Liberia.

More This Day @ Law... ▸

US State Department did not evaluate civilian risk in Saudi Arabia arms transfers: report

AUGUST 13, 2020 10:53:50 AM

Muskan Yadav                                        

The US State Department did not evaluate risks of civilian casualties and implement measures to reduce them when it approved $8.1 billion arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in May 2019, according to an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report released Tuesday.

The unredacted version obtained by Politico raises doubts over Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assertions that an emergency situation existed to bypass congressional review even as it objected to the sales over human rights abuses including the state-sanctioned killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the Saudi-led war in Yemen that has led to a massive civilian death toll. The timeline of events related to the emergency certification as well as the fact that only four out of the 22 arms transfer cases were taken delivery of at the time of the review of the certification indicates that no such emergency existed.

This report came after lawmakers asked the OIG to investigate the transfer of military equipment to the Middle Eastern countries through the use of emergency authority conferred by the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). The inspector general’s office found that the exercise of emergency authorities was in compliance with AECA requirements.

Steve Linick, the inspector general under whom the investigation had begun, was dismissed recently, making him the fourth official in the post to be terminated since April. The report was released by Diana Shaw, who is now the acting Inspector General.

Congress had sought to block the transfers by passing three joint resolutions. It was feared that the military equipment could be used to target civilians, but President Donald Trump had vetoed those efforts. The Conventional Arms Transfer (CAT) Policy prohibits the US from approving arms transfers having the knowledge that they would be used to target civilians.

In a statement, Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, showed concern over State Department’s press briefing and redactions before the report was released. He said, “The lengths to which the State Department has gone in the last day to spin and obscure the facts show how desperate they are to hide the truth.”

ter-American Dialogue)

US government report: acting DHS secretary improperly appointed

AUGUST 14, 2020 02:18:41 PM

Thomas DeLorenzo

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the results of an investigation into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Friday, determining that Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf and Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli were improperly appointed to their positions.

After the departure of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in April 2019, Kevin McAleenan assumed the leadership position of the agency. One of McAleenan’s first actions as Acting Secretary of DHS was to amend the order of succession, delegating positions to individuals like Wolf and Cuccinelli. After McAleenan’s resignation in November 2019, he was succeeded by Wolf as part of the amended succession plan.

The GAO determined that President Donald Trump improperly appointed McAleenan as Acting Secretary of DHS, invalidating the amended order of succession and therefore invalidating Wolf’s appointment as the current acting head of DHS and Cuccinelli’s appointment as Acting Deputy Secretary. The GAO said that the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which established the DHS, laid out clear instructions for establishing and amending the order of succession. According to GAO, upon Nielsen’s resignation, the succession plan called for the Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Christopher Krebs, to succeed her. Since this procedure was not followed and McAleenan, then the Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, was appointed to the position, his appointment was invalid. As a result, McAleenan’s actions, such as amending the order of succession to install Wolf, were also invalid.

Although the report has no legal weight, the GAO referred its findings to the DHS inspector general for further review. In addition, the report will likely be used by groups seeking to challenge the actions of DHS under McAleenan and Wolf as evidence that the agency’s actions were unlawful.

DHS has not yet responded to the report.

Federal judge orders Trump campaign to provide evidence of voter fraud

AUGUST 14, 2020

A US federal judge Thursday ordered the Trump campaign to provide evidence of voter fraud in Pennsylvania’s vote-by-mail election system.

Thursday’s order requires the campaign to submit evidence to the court by Friday. Judge Nicholas Ranjan of the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania stated that the “Court finds that instances of voter fraud are relevant to the claims and defenses in this case. … [I]f they have none, state as much.”

The order is part of the ongoing court legal battle between President Donald Trump’s 2020 election campaign and Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar. The campaign alleges that Pennsylvania mail-in voting will undermine the integrity of the election by allowing for invalid votes to be cast.

“[Boockvar’s] hazardous, hurried, and illegal implementation of unmonitored mail-in voting which provides fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting, manipulate or destroy ballots, manufacture duplicitous votes, and sow chaos,” the campaign asserted in its June complaint.

Fact-checkers, researchers and journalists have repeatedly denied claims of widespread voter fraud in mail systems as meritless. Pennsylvania Democrats claim that the lawsuit is merely an attempt by the president to raise an inaccurate and false alarm about the validity of mail-in voting.

Earlier this week, Trump said in an interview that he is refusing additional funding to the post office because such appropriations would enable the agency to conduct universal mail-in voting. Former President Barack Obama criticized Trump’s position as an attempt to suppress the vote and urged citizens to cast ballots early in this year’s election.

A hearing about evidence of voter fraud will be held in September.

Obama Says Trump Made 'Terrible' COVID Decisions and Now Pandemic Is 'Raging Out of Control'

BY MATTHEW IMPELLI ON 8/14/20 AT 1:55 PM EDT


Former President Barack Obama criticized President Donald Trump's response to the novel coronavirus pandemic Friday, calling the decisions made by the current administration "terrible."

While speaking on the Campaign HQ podcast hosted by his former campaign manager David Plouffe, Obama was asked about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's decision to choose California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate and how he felt Biden's decision-making was different than Trump's.

"She [Harris] is somebody who I think will be able to share the stage with Mike Pence or whoever else, and dissect some of the terrible decisions that have been made over the last four years that have helped create worse problems than were necessary in the midst of this pandemic," Obama said during the podcast.


He also touched on why he feels that Biden, his former vice president, will be able make better decisions than Trump, saying "he wanted and encouraged me to access experts. It's one of the reasons why I'm confident that he's gonna be able to put us in a much better footing when it comes to COVID-19."

Obama added "it's a sharp contrast to the current administration that seems to purposely try to ignore or cntraict experts."

Obama went on to talk about the ongoing pandemic in the U.S. and how it is compared to other countries across the globe.

"We've got a pandemic that's raging out of control and that would have been difficult under any circumstances, for any president, but we actually have a comparison between what's happening in the United States and what's happening in every other wealthy, industrialized country in the world, and we are dead last in how we have effectively responded," Obama said during the podcast. "If you don't have more proof...of the need for change, it's hard to come up with what the arguments would be."

Obama's comments come as the novel coronavirus, which causes the respiratory disease COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the U.S. According to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University, there are currently over 5.2 million confirmed cases and at least 167,369 deaths in the country.

Former President Barack Obama gives the eulogy at the funeral service for the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) at Ebenezer Baptist Church on July 30, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia.POOL/GETTY

In contrast to Obama's comments on how the U.S. handled the pandemic, Trump recently said: "When you look at the job we've done, compared to others, we've done a great job."


"We've done a great job and on top of that, when you look at the numbers, how we were impacted less than these other countries," the president added during a recent press conference.

This is not the first time Obama has criticized Trump's response to the ongoing pandemic, as he made similar comments in a previous conversation with Biden, which was posted as a video on Twitter.

During their conversation, Biden asked Obama "can you imagine standing up when you were president, saying, 'It's not my responsibility?'", alluding to Trump saying he didn't take responsibility for the U.S.'s lagging rate of coronavirus testing.


"Those words didn't come out of our mouths when we were in office," Obama said in response.

Newsweek reached out to representatives of Trump and Obama for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Mars from above: NASA shares photos of the Red Planet captured by its Reconnaissance Orbiter to mark the spacecraft's 15th anniversary since launch - including a spectacular shot of an avalanche

The NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched for the Red Planet to study its geology on August 12, 2005

Over the 15 years the orbiter has been studying the Red Planet it has made some major scientific discoveries

This includes signs of briny water, avalanches and active seasonal changes such as dust storms and dunes 

To mark 15 years of operation a team from NASA JPL shared a selection of photos taken by the spaceship

By RYAN MORRISON FOR MAILONLINE  PUBLISHED: 14 August 2020

A spectacular shot of a Martian avalanche, an image of a dust devil and a long-distance portrait of planet Earth are among a selection of photos shared by NASA to mark 15 years of the agencies Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The images were all taken of the Red Planet and its surroundings from space using equipment onboard the orbiter - which is the oldest spacecraft currently active around Mars.

Since leaving Earth 15 years ago, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet including discovering information on dust storms, temperatures and subsurface minerals.

However, while the scientific discoveries have been remarkable, the orbiter has become best know for its stunning images showing remarkable features on the surface of the alien world.

HiRISE captured avalanches in action. As seasonal ice vaporised in the spring, these 1,640-foot-tall (500-meter-tall) cliffs at Mars' north pole began to crumble


As HiRISE pans over large swaths of Mars' surface, it occasionally discovers surprises like this towering dust devil, which was captured from 185 miles (297 kilometers) above the ground

Among its instruments, MRO carries three cameras: A fisheye lens, one for 19-mile-wide black and white terrain shots and the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) which provides the most striking photos.

Able to zoom in on surface features at the highest resolution, the detailed, colour images from HiRISE have captured dramatic scenes of nature on the Red Planet that have captivated audiences back on Earth.

These scenes include tumbling avalanches, sky scraping dust devils, and other features of a changing landscape that show Mars is more than just a red rock.

The camera has also provided images of other NASA spacecraft at Mars, like the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers, the Martian moon Phobos and even a picture of Earth.

As of early August 2020, the HiRISE camera alone had taken 6,882,204 images, generating 194 terabytes of data sent from Mars since 2006.


This 'false colour' image shows sand ripples from February 2009. The 'false colour' has been added to this image to accentuate certain details, like the tops of dunes and ripples. Many of these landforms are migrating, as they do on Earth


A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by HiRISE. The crater spans approximately 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and the team that run the spacecraft selected a number of images they deem 'among the most striking' of the planet.

One of those images shared by the JPL team shows a red dusty avalanche plunging down a 1,640 foot tall cliff in May 2019 - caused by seasonal ice vaporising in the Spring.

Every Spring the Sun shines on the sides of the stack of layers at the North Pole of the Red Planet and the warmth destabilised the ice - with blocks of it and dust breaking loose.

As this happened the cliffs at Mars' north pole began to crumble and this exposed the many layers of ice and dust that have settled along its face during the different Martian eras.

Like the rings of a tree, each layer has a story to tell scientists about how the environment was changing.

When the rocks reach the bottom of the cliff face, the blocks kick up a cloud of dust that appears as an avalanche in the photos shared by the NASA JPL team.

Dust was a major factor in a few of the images shared by the team as dust storms are routine on Mars.

Most are limited to small regions and are not as dramatic as what's portrayed in movies but once or twice a decade a series of regional storms create 'domino effect' that result in the dust covering the whole planet.

The MRO captured one of these events in 2018 and it darkened the region above the Opportunity rover, depriving its solar panels of sunlight and ultimately leading to the end of the mission.

NASA rovers are featured in some of the other images shared from the MRO by the JPL team - they show the final traverse map of Opportunity and the tracks made by Curiosity in the Martian soil.

The pictures shared in the NASA photo essay show a changing and active landscape including seasonal dark marks on the Martian equatorial slope and ripples in sand dunes on the surface of the Red Planet.

Land changes over time, so having a spacecraft at Mars for more than 15 years offers a unique perspective, according to Leslie Tamppari, deputy project scientist at JPL, who said 'the more we look, the more we discover'.

'Before MRO, it wasn't clear what on Mars really changed, if anything. We thought the atmosphere was so thin that there was almost no sand motion and most dune movement happened in the ancient past.'


This composite image shows how the appearance of dark markings on Martian slope changes with the seasons. These dark streaks appear in the same places at around the same times of year



This is the final traverse map for Opportunity, showing where the rover was on June 10, 2018, the last date it made contact with its team before it was lost in a dust storm

Other images include a dramatic impact crater spanning 100ft across from a large meteorite than wouldn't have been able to penetrate Earth's atmosphere.

Mars has a thin atmosphere – just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. As a result, there's less of a protective barrier to burn up space debris. That means larger meteors make it through the Red Planet's atmosphere than Earth's.

NASA also shared an image showing dark marks on an equatorial Martian slope that appear in the same place and at around the same times every year.

It takes sharp eyes to find unique features on Mars, like recurring slope lineae. It was initially proposed they were caused by brine, since salt could allow water to remain liquid in the thin Martian atmosphere.

The consensus now, however, is that they're actually caused by dark sand sliding down inclines.

The streaks were discovered by Lujendra Ojha, who was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, which operates the HiRISE camera, and now is a professor at Rutgers University.

'Sometimes you're just looking at the right place at the right time,' Ojha said. 'I was completely baffled when I first spotted this, because I was just a student at the time – I wasn't even in a planetary program.'


On the left is a picture of Mars taken by MRO showing the planet before the 2018 dust storm enveloped the whole planet - as seen by the nearly featureless world shown in the right hand image

It wasn't just the planet itself that MRO focused on, during its mission it turned its sights back to Earth to get a view of our world and captured a detailed image of the Martian moon Phobos.

Named for the Greek god of fear, Phobos is one of Mars' two moons - the other is called Deimos, named for the god of terror.

Phobos is only about 13 miles (21 kilometers) across but despite its small size, Phobos is of great interest to scientists as nobody is sure how it came to be within the orbit of Mars.

A Japanese mission is scheduled to launch to Phobos in the near future, and the moon has been proposed as a staging ground for astronauts before they go to Mars.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter left Earth for the Red Planet on August 12, 2005 and cost $720 million - its purpose is the study the geology and climate of the planet and provide reconnaissance for future landing sites.

In 2021 the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and the NASA Ingenuity helicopter will land in the Jezero Crater to search for signs of ancient Martian life.

The rover is equipped with a number of cameras and will be able to send back new pictures of the surface of the Red Planet to show one of our nearest stellar neighbours in greater detail than has been seen so far.

HiRISE took two images of the larger of Mars' two moons, on March 23, 2008. Called Phobos, the moon is only 13 miles across


A composite image of Earth and the Moon. During its mission HiRISE has been turned towards the Earth to capture images of our home world and our natural satellite

The helicopter is a technology demonstration to test the first powered flight on Mars and is currently on board the Mars 2020 spacecraft attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover.

NASA recently marked a milestone in the development of Ingenuity - which will operate a number of test flights over 30 Martian days in the spring of next year.

The space agency recharged the batteries of the helicopter up to 35 per cent to make sure it was able to 'speak' to the device and test its instruments.

'This was a big milestone, as it was our first opportunity to turn on Ingenuity and give its electronics a 'test drive' since we launched on July 30,' said Tim Canham, the operations lead.

'Since everything went by the book, we'll perform the same activity about every two weeks to maintain an acceptable state of charge.'

Even after Perseverance has landed and Ingenuity has made its tests flights, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will continue its mission to study the Martian atmosphere and share more sensational images of its surface.
NASA plans for helicopter 'Ingenuity' to land on Mars in 2021

NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARCH FOR LIFE

NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth.

Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover will explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.

It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.


Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) will search for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet

The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 with the rover and helicopter inside - and will land on February 18, 2021.

Perseverance is designed to land inside the crater and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.

A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.


This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system

It’s lyfe, Jym

BY PHILIP BALL 14 AUGUST 2020

Do we need a broader definition of life, and a new word to go with it?

‘Is there lyfe on Mars?’ That might sound like a Chaucerian remix of David Bowie’s song, but astrobiologists Stuart Bartlett and Michael Wong have suggested it might be the proper way to pose the question.1 They propose that we broaden the notion of ‘life’ into a more all-encompassing category called ‘lyfe’, to include anything that satisfies ‘all four processes of the living state, namely: dissipation, autocatalysis, homeostasis, and learning.’

But are these really the necessary and sufficient properties of living systems – and if so, do we really need a new word to describe them?
Source: © CBS/Getty Images
Commander Spock never actually said ’It’s life, Jim. But not as we know it’. Though if he had, perhaps he would have opted for ‘lyfe’ instead. 

The meaning of lyfe

Some of the initial responses to Bartlett and Wong’s article have grumbled that the answer to the second question is ‘no’. But you can see the logic of their position. The search for life (including intelligent kinds) on other worlds has long struggled to escape parochialism. For example, Nasa’s watchword in looking for habitable worlds was for many years ‘follow the water’. Yet while we know of no terrestrial life that can do without liquid water, and there are subtle reasons why it would be a hard solvent to equal for making life possible, there’s no reason to make it a sine qua non for life.2 And as far as Seti (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) is concerned, astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol has accused it of ‘searching for other versions of ourselves’. 3 By coining ‘lyfe’, Bartlett and Wang hope to free our minds from terracentric preconceptions.

Nasa defines life as ‘a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution’. Even though that makes no reference to any specific chemical basis, evidently it insists that the mechanism by which life elsewhere evolves will be the same as that on Earth. Assuming natural selection will apply to aliens too is not as presumptuous as it might seem – as biologist Arik Kershenbaum has pointed out, we know of ‘no serious alternative contenders’ for how complex life might arise from scratch.4

On Titan, for example, the partitioning made possible by extreme cold might permit “lyving” systems without membranes

All the same, Bartlett and Wong refuse to be tied to even that assumption. They say that ‘life as we know it’ can be considered a subset of a more general category of chemical systems that warrants astrobiological attention. One vital shared attribute is autocatalysis: an ability to assist in making more of itself, which presumably becomes replication when the systems are discretely compartmentalised. Equally essential is the maintenance of an ordered, low-entropy configuration, which typically involves tapping some energy source and using it to maintain a non-equilibrium steady state: what is called a dissipative system. (Some such systems can clearly be non-living in themselves: for example the patterns seen in convecting fluids.) Origin-of-life theories that invoke disequilibria at hydrothermal vents, for example, suggest that this dissipation might tap redox or chemiosmotic gradients. Lyfe too has to be a non-equilibrium phenomenon, but could be more diverse in the disequilibria it exploits.

Two other features are needed. Homeostatic regulation preserves the system in the face of external perturbations, while information about the environment is harnessed and processed via memory and learning. Filtering and remembering environmental information that is predictively useful seems to be a universal requirement for complex physical systems that function with high thermodynamic efficiency.5 Natural selection can be considered a special kind of learning in which a memory of salient environmental information is passed in encoded form between generations.

Choose lyfe

Bartlett and Wong say that their view of lyfe doesn’t reside at any particular scale – it isn’t some intrinsic property of, say, a group of molecules, or a cell-like structure, or a discrete organism. Harking back to James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, they say that ‘the living state may best be assessed at an ecosystem or planetary scale’ – echoing Lovelock’s view that life cannot persist precariously on a planet.

One attraction of this list of criteria is that it allows for a clear distinction between systems that share some lifelike features – chemical reaction–diffusion patterns or viruses, say – and those that truly constitute lyfe. The two researchers also hope that their scheme might resolve some of the disputes and ambiguities in origin-of-life studies, which they feel are sometimes talking at cross-purposes. Between a top-down approach that seeks to identify the features of ‘Luca’ (the last universal common ancestor) from phylogenetic analysis, and bottom-up approaches that try to plot a route from abiotic geochemistry to protocells, there remains a potentially unbridgeable gulf because neither direction imposes constraints that can converge on a unique trajectory.

The duo suggest that this view of what we might call ‘lyfe’s grandeur’ could help others be clearer about the questions they are addressing. And they sketch out a few scenarios that their scheme suggests for the existence of lyfe-like entities in decidedly non-terrestrial settings. On Saturn’s organic-rich moon Titan, for example, the partitioning made possible by the extreme cold might permit “lyving” systems that are not compartmentalised by membranes.

So whether or not the notion of lyfe is needed, it raises interesting questions. Perhaps one obstacle to adopting the term is that, to distinguish it verbally, the researchers propose the pronunciation ‘loif’. Much as it would be fun to hear astrobiologists talk like Hollywood movie pirates, I can’t see it catching on.

References

1 S Bartlett and M L Wong, Life, 2020, 10, 42 (DOI: 10.3390/life10040042)

2 S A Benner, A Ricardo and M A Carrigan, Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol., 2004, 8, 672 (DOI: 10.106/j.cbpa.2004.10.003)

3 N Cabrol, Astrobiology, 2016, 16, 661 (DOI: 10.1089/ast.2016.1536)

4 A Kershenbaum, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, Viking, 2020

5 S Still et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 2019, 109, 120604 (DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.109.120604)

EPA settles Gold King mine disaster five years later

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reached a $220 million (£169 million) settlement with Utah over the agency’s botched investigation of the abandoned Gold King mine in Colorado. The settlement comes exactly five years to the day since a dam was accidentally breached at the mine, releasing 11 million litres of contaminated water into major US waterways in Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. The leaked wastewater contained lead, cadmium, manganese, iron, zinc, copper and arsenic, as well as mercury, and it turned downstream waters orange.

BY REBECCA TRAGER 12 AUGUST 2020 CHEMISTRYWORLD.COM

Source: © Theo Stroomer/Getty Images
The spill started in Cement Creek in Colorado’s San Juan mountains and flowed downstream into the Animus River and the San Juan River, turning their waters orange.

Under the agreement, the EPA will fund efforts to address contamination at the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund Site, which includes the Gold King mine and other abandoned mines in Utah. This could involve monitoring and cleaning mining areas located in other states. In addition, the EPA will initiate assessments at multiple sites across Utah to determine if further remediation is necessary, and the agency will bear the cost, which may exceed $200,000 per site.

‘After years of intense litigation and negotiations, we are very pleased that millions of dollars can now be spent towards mitigation, remediation and assuring water quality in Utah rather than years of more litigation, trial and appeals,’ said Utah’s attorney general, Sean Reyes. ‘We are highly encouraged the EPA has stepped up and committed hundreds of millions of dollars toward cleaning up several dangerous mining districts containing billions of gallons of potentially harmful substances that threaten Utah if they are released.’

Reyes, who referred to the agreement as a ‘landmark settlement’, said Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality has been monitoring the San Juan River and Lake Powell since the 2015 incident, and there is no evidence that the metals from the release are impacting public health or the environment.

Native American tribes and the state of New Mexico have also taken legal actions against the agency to recover damages sustained as a result of the incident. The San Juan River is a key water source for the Navajo and Southern Ute Indian Nations, and the wastewater spill began in the Animas River that flows into New Mexico where it joins the San Juan River. New Mexico’s case is expected to go to trial in 2021. Colorado state has decided not to sue the EPA over the spill.

PODCAST
Book club – Three books on pandemics 

BY KATRINA KRÄMER, JAMIE DURRANI, MONSERRAT GARDUÑO-CASTRO

8 JULY 2020

In this episode we’re tackling the coronavirus information overload by comparing three books on pandemics past and present: Outbreaks and Epidemics by Meera Senthilingam, Adam Kucharski’s The Rules of Contagion, and The Pandemic Century by Mark Honigsbaum (the only one written well before the current pandemic hit).

Find out what we thought about each of these titles, what readers might get out of them, and hear from Outbreaks and Epidemics author Meera Senthilingam about what it was like to write about pandemics while being in the middle of one.

You can also read Monserrat’s full review of The Rules of Contagion here.

What are the risks of fast-tracking a Covid-19 vaccine?

The global rush is on to find a safe and effective vaccine against Covid-19. Experts and companies claim one could be on the market in 12–18 months. The US president wants one by the end of the year. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 17 candidates are in clinical trials, with one already in Phase 3 and two others likely to enter in July.

BY KATRINA MEGGET 13 JULY 2020 CHEMISTRYWORLD.COM


Source: © John Holcroft/Ikon Images

The multitude of vaccines in development give us many shots at a potentially useful vaccine. But rushed development could mean missing information about long-term safety and protection

The accelerated speed of development has public health experts concerned that vaccines might be approved with incomplete data and analysis. At least one candidate has skipped animal testing, for example. Meanwhile, in China, CanSino Biologic’s experimental Covid-19 vaccine has been approved for the country’s military before Phase 3 trials have finished.

The concern intensifies when no vaccine against a coronavirus has ever been approved before, while many of the vaccine platforms in development against Covid-19 are unproven new technologies. ‘Developing a vaccine in about a year is unprecedented,’ says Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, who has received Covid-focused funding to develop a new vaccine platform. ‘As a scientist with expertise in the field I am personally concerned that conducting science too fast could risk compromising the rigour needed to properly assess vaccines. A vaccine that is ineffective and/or unsafe will not be useful.’

Among the top concerns is the potential that a fast-tracked vaccine will have unintended side-effects. No vaccine is 100% safe, but if a billion people are vaccinated, a one in 10,000 serious adverse event will affect 100,000 of those people. In May, it was revealed that four out of 45 people in Moderna’s Phase 1 vaccine trial experienced ‘medically significant’ adverse events.


The most important thing is that fast tracking does not mean a compromise on safety or efficacy

KATHERINE O’BRIEN, WHO

In the upcoming Phase 3 trials, there will be up to 30,000 participants. But reliably identifying a one in 10,000 adverse event requires testing 38,500 people. Rarer events need even larger trials, explains Gregory Poland, director of vaccines research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, US. ‘We won’t know about rare events until after the vaccine is licensed.’

One potential adverse event is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE), a type of immune reaction where vaccination makes subsequent exposure to the virus more dangerous. The condition – which has been observed with vaccines for measles, respiratory syncytial virus and dengue virus, as well as in animal models for the original Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) virus – occurs when the body, primed by a vaccine, generates antibodies that don’t sufficiently neutralise the virus when later exposed to it and instead encourage the virus into cells to replicate, exacerbating the disease.

According to Bridle: ‘There is definitely a risk of ADE; how much of a risk cannot be stated with any certainty though.’ Yet the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ (NIAID) Vaccine Research Centre, which is collaborating on Moderna’s vaccine, has downplayed the possibility of ADE in a Covid-19 vaccine. Barney Graham, deputy director of the unit, told Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that because the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus is structurally different to the cases where ADE has been seen, he doubts similar activity would apply.


How long would it take to determine if a vaccine can confer immunological memory for one year? Of course, it would take at least one year

BYRAM BRIDLE, UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH, CANADA

Regardless, Bridle says developers need to carefully assess the type of immune response their vaccines induce and test the response in vaccinated animal models exposed to the virus to ensure ADE does not occur. Poland has expressed concern that animal studies may not be completed before moving to human testing, which transfers extra risk to humans. However, he says that vaccine developers can’t really mitigate for side effects, apart from making sure the vaccine doesn’t contain amino acid sequences similar to human proteins and that the vaccine induces a balanced immune response.

To allay safety fears, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released guidance at the end of June stating that nonclinical safety studies are necessary for novel vaccines and drug companies will be required to monitor their vaccines after approval. The WHO’s director of immunisation and vaccines, Katherine O’Brien, says fears of cutting corners are unfounded: ‘The most important thing is that fast tracking does not mean a compromise on safety or efficacy.’
Making memory

However, there is still a lot we don’t know about coronaviruses, which is another concern with speedy vaccine development. For example, the question mark over immunity – are antibodies protective and how long does immunity last?

Bridle says fast tracking vaccines risks compromising assessments of immunological memory. ‘Arguably, a vaccine against Covid-19 should confer immunity for more than one year to reduce the risk of future recurrences. But how long would it take to determine if a vaccine can confer immunological memory for one year? Of course, it would take at least one year. So how does that fit into the goal of getting a vaccine into broad public use in under a year? A prophylactic vaccine is useless if it does not confer long-term immunological memory’ to respond when exposed to the virus.

In addition, a fast-tracked vaccine may not be particularly effective. Bridle notes that the goalposts for success have already shifted from the search for a vaccine that protects against disease to one that merely reduces disease severity. The risk, says Bridle, is that poor-quality vaccines could potentially turn people into asymptomatic carriers that spread the virus.

At the end of June, Anthony Fauci, the White House health advisor and NIAID director, said the US was unlikely to develop herd immunity as a vaccine would potentially be only partially effective, adding he would be happy if a first vaccine was only 70%­–75% effective. A day later the FDA released its vaccine guidance saying a vaccine would only need to be 50% effective in a placebo-controlled trial: an efficacy similar to the annual flu jab. Response has been mixed, with some experts saying the 50% figure is too low and others saying it is too high.

O’Brien says the WHO hasn’t specified the minimum effectiveness of a Covid vaccine, calling the determination complex ‘but there are certainly arguments for an efficacy lower than 50%’. She says as long as trials can enrol participants quickly and take place in areas where the disease is circulating then efficacy can be established in less than 12 months.
Maintaining confidence

Ensuring a vaccine is safe and effective will be essential in keeping the public’s trust in vaccines. There is a risk a fast-tracked vaccine could dent this and compromise vaccination programmes. Already in the US, around 30% of the public say they would reject a covid vaccine, according to various surveys. Poland says policies have to be driven by the science and effectively communicated to the public.

But with economies flagging from the health crisis, will society accept more risk in a vaccine? Bridle acknowledges this could be the case with Covid-19. Poland says the risk­–benefit ratio of all vaccines will be carefully reviewed by authorities but notes risk boundaries are subjective.

O’Brien notes that trials will be halted either when a safety event is flagged or when the vaccine is found to be effective but ‘we can’t hold back an effective vaccine and forgo the benefit of it in the short-term in a pandemic situation just to wait for long-term safety evaluations’. Safety monitoring will continue after approval anyway, she adds.

But safety and efficacy concerns aside, there is more at stake here. Covid-19 won’t be the only coronavirus pandemic in the future, Bridle explains. The risk is we don’t build on the scientific gains once this pandemic recedes and we fail to use the data and technology to be ready to develop a safe and effective vaccine for the next coronavirus. Without funding, he says, this could be a real possibility.