ISRAEL WAR ON GAZA REDUX

Hamas: Gaza City commander killed by Israeli airstrike

24 PALESTINIAN DEATHS PER EVERY ISRAELI'S

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Militant group Hamas confirms that its Gaza City commander was killed in an Israeli airstrike, the highest-ranking militant killed since the 2014 war in the Palestinian territory

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© Provided by The Canadian Press

Earlier, Israel’s internal security agency said that a series of airstrikes had killed Bassem Issa and several other senior Hamas militants.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Rockets streamed out of Gaza and Israel pounded the territory with airstrikes Wednesday as the most severe outbreak of violence since a 2014 war took on many hallmarks of that devastating 50-day conflict, with dozens killed and no resolution in sight.

Palls of gray smoke rose in Gaza, as Israeli airstrikes levelled two apartment towers and hammered the militant group’s multiple security installations, destroying the central police compound.

In Israel, barrages of hundreds of rockets fired by Gaza’s Hamas rulers and other militants at times overwhelmed missile defenses and brought air raid sirens and explosions echoing across Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest metropolitan area, and other cities.

The death toll in Gaza rose to 48 Palestinians, including 14 children and three women, according to the Health Ministry. More than 300 people have been wounded, including 86 children and 39 women. Six Israelis, including three women and a child, were killed by rocket fire, and dozens of people were wounded.

While the rapidly escalating conflict has brought images familiar from 2014 Israel-Hamas war, the past day has also seen a startling new factor: A burst of fury from Israel’s Palestinian citizens in support of those living in the territories and against Israel’s recent response to unrest in Jerusalem and its current operations in Gaza.

Amid those protests, communal violence erupted in several mixed Jewish-Arab Israeli cities, including the burning of a Jewish-owned restaurant and a synagogue, the fatal shooting of an Arab man and attacks on Arab-owned cars. In a rare move that highlighted the tensions, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz on Wednesday ordered units of border guards deployed to help police keep order.

There was no sign that either side is willing to back down. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to expand the offensive, saying “this will take time.” Hamas has called for a full-scale intifada, or uprising. The last such uprising began in 2000 and lasted more than five years.

The latest eruption of violence began a month ago in Jerusalem, where heavy-handed police tactics during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and the threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families by Jewish settlers ignited protests and clashes with police. A focal point was the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a site sacred to Jews and Muslims.

Late Monday, Hamas, claiming to be “defending Jerusalem,” launched a barrage of rockets at the city in a major escalation.

The Israeli military said militants have fired more 1,050 rockets since the conflict began, with 200 of them falling short and landing inside Gaza. Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a military spokesman, said two infantry brigades were sent to the area, indicating preparations for a possible ground invasion.

Israel has struck hundreds of targets in the Gaza Strip, where 2 million Palestinians have lived under a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade since Hamas took power in 2007.

The fiercest attack was a set of airstrikes that brought down an entire 12-story building. The building housed important Hamas offices, as well as some businesses. Israel fired a series of warning shots before demolishing the building, allowing people to flee and there were no casualties.

Israeli aircraft heavily damaged another Gaza City building early Wednesday. Israel said the nine-story building housed Hamas intelligence offices and the group’s command responsible for planning attacks in the occupied West Bank; it also had residential apartments, medical companies and a dental clinic. A drone fired five warning rockets before the bombing.

Fighter jets struck the building again after journalists and rescuers had gathered around. There was no immediate word on casualties. The high-rise stood 200 meters (650 feet) away from the AP bureau in Gaza City, and smoke and debris reached the office.

Soon after, Hamas fired 100 rockets at the Israeli desert town of Beersheba in what it said was retaliation.

Samah Haboub, a mother of four in Gaza, said she was thrown across her bedroom in a “moment of horror” by an airstrike on an apartment tower next door. She and her children, aged 3 to 14, ran down the stairway of their apartment block along with other residents, many of them screaming and crying.

“There is almost no safe place in Gaza,” she said.

One strike hit a taxi in Gaza City, killing a man, woman and driver insider, and a second strike killed two men nearby on the street, witnesses who brought the bodies told the AP at the hospital. Several other bystanders, including a woman, were wounded.

In the Israeli city of Lod, a 52-year-old man and his 16-year-old daughter, reportedly Arab citizens of Israel, were killed early Wednesday when a rocket from Gaza hit the courtyard of their home.

The Jerusalem turmoil and the ensuing battle come at a time when the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process is virtually non-existent.

It has been seven years since the two sides held formal negotiations. Israel’s political scene pays little attention, and the peace process was hardly an issue in the country’s string of recent elections. Arab nations, including several that recently reached normalization deals with Israel, rarely push for any resolution.

The result has left the nearly 5 million Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem living in a limbo — caught among Israeli occupation, accelerated Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, a weak Palestinian Authority that recently canceled elections, and Hamas rule and the blockade that are impoverishing Gaza.

With the protests in Arab communities, the unrest in Jerusalem has also spread across Israel.

“An intifada erupted in Lod, you have to bring in the army,” the central Israeli city’s mayor, Yair Revivo, said. Lod saw heavy clashes after thousands of mourners joined a funeral for an Arab man killed the previous night, the suspect a Jewish gunman.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since the Islamic militant group seized power in Gaza from rival Palestinian forces. The conflicts ended after regional and international powers convinced both sides to accept an informal truce.

Once again, diplomats are seeking to intervene, with Qatar, Egypt and the United Nations working to deliver a cease-fire.

The U.N. Security Council also planned to hold its second closed emergency meeting in three days Wednesday on the escalating violence.

Israel faced heavy criticism over the bombing of residential buildings in Gaza during the 2014 war, one of several tactics that are now the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes. Israel is not a member of the court and has rejected the probe.

In a brief statement, ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said she had noted “with great concern” the escalation of violence and “the possible commission of crimes under the Rome Statute” that established the court.

Conricus, the military spokesman, said Israeli forces have strict rules of engagement, follow international laws on armed conflict and are trying to minimize civilian casualties.

But Israel has said it has no choice because Hamas fires rockets from residential areas. Hamas has also come under international criticism over its indiscriminate rocket fire at Israeli population centers.

___

Krauss reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Karin Laub in the West Bank contributed.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UGLY WAR
Tigray: Eritrean troops disguised as Ethiopian military are blocking critical aid

By Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis and Eliza Mackintosh 

Video by Alex Platt and Mark Baron, CNN 

Axum, Ethiopia — Eritrean troops are operating with total impunity in Ethiopia's war-torn northern Tigray region, killing, raping and blocking humanitarian aid to starving populations more than a month after the country's Nobel Peace Prize winning leader pledged to the international community that they would leave.

© Alex Platt/CNN Eritrean soldiers are captured on a hidden camera at a checkpoint in the hills above Adigrat, as they block access to the road to Axum.

© Alex Platt/CNN USAID distributes supplies in Hawzen, central Tigray, where residents hadn't received aid for two months.

A CNN team traveling through Tigray's central zone witnessed Eritrean soldiers, some disguising themselves in old Ethiopian military uniforms, manning checkpoints, obstructing and occupying critical aid routes, roaming the halls of one of the region's few operating hospitals and threatening medical staff.

© Nima Elbagir/CNN Seven-year-old Latebrahan lies on a gurney at Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital, where she's being treated for malnourishment.

Despite pressure from the Biden administration, there is no sign that Eritrean forces plan to exit the border region anytime soon.

On April 21, a CNN team reporting in Tigray with the permission of Ethiopian authorities traveled from the regional capital Mekelle to the besieged city of Axum, two weeks after it had been sealed off by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. An aid convoy also made the seven-hour journey.

Ethiopia's government has severely restricted access to the media until recently, and a state-enforced communications blackout concealed events in the region, making it challenging to gauge the extent of the crisis or verify survivors' accounts.

But CNN's interviews with humanitarian workers, doctors, soldiers and displaced people in Axum and across central Tigray -- where up to 800,000 displaced people are sheltering -- indicate the situation is even worse than was feared. Eritrean troops aren't just working hand in glove with the Ethiopian government, assisting in a merciless campaign against the Tigrayan people, in some pockets they're fully in control and waging a reign of terror.

The testimonies, shared at great personal risk, present a horrifying picture of the situation in Tigray, where a clash between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the region's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), in November has deteriorated into a protracted conflict that, by many accounts, bears the hallmarks of genocide and has the potential to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region.

Ethiopian security officials working with Tigray's interim administration told CNN that the Ethiopian government has no control over Eritrean soldiers operating in Ethiopia, and that Eritrean forces had blocked roads into central Tigray for over two weeks and in the northwestern part of the region for nearly one month.

As the war and its impact on civilians deepens, world leaders have voiced their concern about the role of Eritrean forces in exacerbating what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to spokesperson Ned Price, has described as a "growing humanitarian disaster." In a phone call with Abiy on April 26, Blinken pressed Ethiopia and Eritrea to make good on commitments to withdraw Eritrean troops "in full, and in a verifiable manner."

© Alex Platt/CNN A sign at Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital reads: "Blood Campaign, for mothers, for children, for all those that need it."

CNN's efforts to reach Axum were thwarted by both Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers multiple times over several days.

On one of the first attempts, the CNN team encountered what it later learned was the aftermath of a grenade attack, where a group of local residents were flagging down cars, warning passersby not to go any further. But before we reached the scene, a large army truck drove up and parked sideways, blocking the road. Our cameraman got out of the car and started filming only to be confronted by Ethiopian soldiers, who threatened the team with detention, demanding that we hand over the camera and delete the footage. But we refused and were able to conceal the footage until we were eventually released.

© Alex Platt/CNN Hannibal, 7, is treated at Axum Teaching and Referral Hospital for a gunshot wound to the leg, which he received from soldiers' gunfire as he was sitting on his mother's lap.

On another occasion, CNN was turned back by an Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) Command operating out of a former USAID distribution center in the outskirts of the city of Adigrat, where several trucks laden with sacks of desperately needed food sat languishing in the hot sun. The aid, bound for communities in Tigray's starved central zone, had been stopped from going any further despite daily phone calls from humanitarian workers pleading for access.

Even after being granted entry to Axum by the Ethiopian military, CNN's path was obstructed by Eritrean troops controlling a checkpoint on a desolate mountain top overlooking Adigrat. The forces were wearing a mixture of their official light-colored Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) fatigues and a woodland camouflage with a green beret, which military experts verified as tallying with old Ethiopian army uniforms.

It is one of the first visual confirmations of reports -- relayed in recent weeks by the UN's top humanitarian official Mark Lowcock and US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield -- that Eritrean soldiers are disguising their identities by re-uniforming as Ethiopian military, in what Thomas-Greenfield described as a move to "remain in Tigray indefinitely."

CNN was informed by aid agencies that they had also been turned back by Eritrean soldiers manning the same checkpoint. Ethiopian military sources in the region confirmed to CNN that Eritrean soldiers were in control of key checkpoints along the route to Axum. The military sources said they had requested multiple times for the Eritreans to allow cars and convoys through, but had been refused.

CNN has reached out to the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments for comment.

After repeated phone calls to Ethiopian central government and senior military officials, CNN was finally allowed into Axum on its fourth try. On the same day, international medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres demanded that the 12-day blockade of the road into Axum be lifted.

Many aid agencies are still being barred from the besieged city, where one of the few hospitals operating for miles is running out of essential supplies, including oxygen and blood, humanitarian workers working in the region told CNN.

On arrival at the Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital, patients are greeted by a sign asking for blood.

The medical staff we spoke to asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, but requested that CNN identify their hospital -- they say that they want people to know that they are still here.

Inside one of the under-resourced examination rooms, a malnourished 7-year-old was lying on a gurney, wrapped in a blanket to cushion her fragile skin. Latebrahan's emaciated legs could no longer hold her weight and she lay wide-eyed, staring up at the crowd of doctors gathered around her bed.

The medical team were doing their best to keep her alive, but they had run out of a therapeutic feeding agent due to the blockade, the only way to help her gain weight without disturbing her delicate system.

Latebrahan's father, Girmay, who asked to be identified only by his first name, told CNN the journey from their home in Chila, around 60 miles north of Axum, near the border with Eritrea, had been dangerous and costly.

"There is no help, no food, nothing. I didn't have a choice though -- look at her," Girmay said.

Like many other rural border towns, Chila has been blocked off from receiving aid since the conflict began six months ago. Humanitarian workers say famine could have already arrived there and they would have no way of knowing.

"Based on guesswork there is a sense that in these areas that we are not able to access, out in the countryside for instance, places are falling into pockets of famine. But we're not able to verify that and that's part of the problem," Thomas Thompson, the UN World Food Programme's emergency coordinator, told CNN.

The fighting erupted during the autumn harvest season following the worst invasion of desert locusts in Ethiopia in decades. The conflict has plunged Tigray even further into severe food insecurity, and the deliberate blockade of food risks mass starvation, a recent report by the World Peace Foundation warned. The Ethiopian government itself estimates that at least 5.2 million people out of 5.7 million in the region are in need of emergency food assistance.

Eritrean soldiers have been blocking and looting food relief in multiple parts of Tigray, including in Samre and Gijet, southwest of Mekele, according to a leaked document from the Emergency Coordination Centre of Tigray's Abiy-appointed interim government obtained by CNN. In a PowerPoint presentation dated April 23, the center states that Eritrean soldiers have also started showing up at food distribution points in Tigray, looting supplies after "our beneficiaries became frightened and [ran] away."

That report was corroborated by humanitarian workers in Tigray, who said they had "protection" issues around distributing aid in some areas as civilians were later robbed of the aid by Eritrean soldiers. Emily Dakin, who leads the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team in Tigray, also told CNN that she had received reports of health centers being looted, which was "contributing to some of the dysfunctionality of the hospitals."

Eritrea's Minister of Information Yemane Meskel has rejected these claims.

Eritrea's power in the region feels absolute even in the Axum Teaching Hospital, where Eritrean soldiers are among the gun-toting troops roaming the corridors, dropping off wounded soldiers and threatening medical staff. It is a terrifying scene for patients, many of whom say they were injured either directly or indirectly by soldiers.

One doctor, who asked not to be named, told CNN that the siege had prompted a surge in patients. In addition to cases of malnutrition like Latebrahan, doctors and nurses are treating a grim array of trauma from shrapnel, bullets, stabbings and rapes. In a desperate attempt to keep pace with demand, medical workers have also begun donating blood.

But despite this, there wasn't enough blood on hand to save one young woman, who had been attacked by soldiers who tried to rape her.

The doctor treating the woman told CNN that the hospital had seen a spike in sexual assault cases over recent weeks, but that the rise was just "the tip of the iceberg," as many were too scared to seek medical services.

An alarming number of women are being gang-raped, drugged and held hostage in the conflict, in which sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war and its use linked to genocide. According to one agency's estimate, almost one-third of all attacks on civilians involve sexual violence, the majority committed by men in uniform.

An autopsy photo of the young woman seen by CNN showed her internal organs spilling out from a wound in her lower abdomen.

"She came to our emergency department and she had a sign of life initially. [But] if you find blood for a patient, it's only one or two units and one or two units could not save this woman. She bled [out] and she died," the doctor said haltingly, overcome with emotion.

He took a deep breath, then added, "I see this woman in my dreams."

This reporting would not have been possible without the support of dozens of Tigrayans, who shared their stories at great personal risk. CNN is not naming them to protect their safety. It also builds on a series of investigations into massacres and sexual violence in Tigray by CNN's Bethlehem Feleke, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase. Read CNN's full Tigray coverage here.

VIDEO

Canada's worst outbreak at Alberta oil sands site still getting worse

KENNEY SAYS TARSANDS ESSENTIAL 

WON'T SHUT THEM DOWN

Duration: 02:27 

Calls from labour leaders are growing for Alberta to shut down oilsands operations, as COVID-19 outbreaks within them continue worsen. Heather Yourex-West looks at how the biggest outbreak at CNRL Horizon managed to grow out of control.

 Global News 11/5/2021

Future of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in question in Canada over blood clots, supply issues

 Evan Mitsui/CBC Ontario and Alberta will no longer give the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine as a first dose and future supply would instead be reserved for optional second shots.

The future use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine in Canada is now in question due to concerns over the increased risk of rare but severe blood clots connected to the shot, an unpredictable future supply and a significant amount of other vaccines.

Alberta was the first province to confirm it would stop administering first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, citing a scarcity of supply. The province will instead prioritize mRNA vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna while reserving existing AstraZeneca for second doses.

Ontario's Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Williams announced in an impromptu news conference late Tuesday afternoon the vaccine would also no longer be offered to Ontarians as a first dose and future supply would instead be reserved for optional second shots.

But unlike Alberta, Ontario's decision was made largely due to the rising rate of the rare but serious blood-clotting condition connected to the shot known as vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).

Williams said that in the past several days there have been a growing number of reports of VITT in Ontario. Out of more than 850,000 AstraZeneca doses given, there are now eight cases in the province as of Saturday at a rate of about one in 60,000 shots administered.

Other provinces have yet to follow suit, but there are growing signs the vaccine will not be prioritized in provincial and territorial rollouts across the country.

Quebec's Ministry of Health and Social Services said in a statement to CBC News that while the AstraZeneca vaccine is still technically available to people over 45, the remaining doses have almost all expired and mRNA vaccines will be offered if a second dose is unavailable.

Manitoba's Chief Provincial Public Health Officer Dr. Brent Roussin said Sunday that the possibility of stopping the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine was being discussed "at many levels."

British Columbia Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said Tuesday that while second doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine will be available to those who already had a shot in the province, mRNA vaccines will also be an option.

New international research is expected in the coming days and weeks on the safety and efficacy of mixing and matching COVID-19 vaccines and Canadians who have received an initial dose of AstraZeneca will likely have the option of combining it with an mRNA shot.

"I cannot emphasize enough how important AstraZeneca has been, in particularly March and April when we had limited amounts of the mRNA vaccine and we had high case rates and it's a very good vaccine and very protective," she told CBC's The Early Edition.

"But as we have case rates coming down thankfully and hopefully staying down, and we have a lot more other vaccines available, we'll be looking at using the Pfizer and Moderna that's coming in."

VITT data 'evolving' in real time

The abrupt change in vaccine rollout strategy comes after growing concerns from health experts over the risk of VITT, which they say calls its continued use in Canada into question.

Dr. Andrew Morris, an infectious diseases specialist at the University of Toronto, says the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Canada is no longer justifiable, particularly in younger people.

"For the people who are in their 30s and 40s, it just doesn't make sense," he said. "They're at really low risk of dying from COVID and they're assuming a risk of dying from this."

Video: B.C. records first case of rare blood clot related to vaccine (The Canadian Press)

Health Canada approved the AstraZeneca vaccine for all Canadians over 18 in February, but provinces and territories have largely restricted its use in those over 40 due to the increased risk of VITT in younger age groups compared with the risk of death from COVID-19.

Though extremely rare, VITT is much more severe than a typical blood clot because it can cause cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), where veins that drain blood from the brain are obstructed and can potentially cause fatal bleeding.

© Evan Mitsui/CBC Pharmacist Kyro Maseh administers a dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to Matthew Stone, 46, at a pharmacy in Toronto on Apr. 20, 2021. Ontario announced Tuesday the vaccine will no longer be offered to Ontarians as a first dose.

Dr. Menaka Pai, a clinical hematologist at McMaster University and a member of Ontario's COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, says that the risk of VITT is changing almost daily and that different guidelines are to be expected.

"The reality is this is what evolving science looks like," she said. "We're asking people to make decisions in real time with the info that we have and then the info evolves a week later and we can be regretful about the decision from a week ago but hindsight is 20/20."

Pai says each region of the country needs to look at its specific epidemiological situation in the pandemic and determine whether the risk of VITT outweighs the risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19.

"What works in a hotspot where you don't have enough mRNA vaccines to quickly cover everyone [may not work] in parts of the Maritimes where you actually have a lot of places with low prevalence," she said.

"If you don't have the privilege of choice because your pandemic is out of control, I think that changes the math a lot and it changes the decision-making."
VITT risk 'increasing' as cases identified

Canada has reported 12 confirmed cases of VITT as of Monday out of more than 2.3 million AstraZeneca doses administered, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. Quebec, Alberta and New Brunswick have each reported one death; New Brunswick has only 40 COVID-19 deaths overall.

"In a province with low COVID-19 risk like New Brunswick, the risk of death from VITT outweighs the risk of death from COVID-19 at any age," said Dr. David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

The Ontario Science Table now estimates the frequency of VITT in Canadians who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine at 1 in 55,000, but that number is a moving target with new data being released from countries around the world daily.

"Risk estimates have been increasing as people have started looking for the complication," said Fisman. "It doesn't make sense to use a vaccine where short term harms outweigh short term benefits, when people can stay safe until they get mRNA vaccine."

The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) came under fire last week for its messaging around its recommendations to provinces and territories that mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which don't have a risk of VITT, were "preferred."

PHAC said in a statement to CBC News that as the supply of mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna increase this month, it is "expected" that provinces and territories will "continue to review and adjust their vaccination programs."

Morris says he believes more cases and deaths from VITT will occur in Canada in the future if we continue to use the AstraZeneca vaccine as a significant part of our vaccine rollout.

"You have to be pretty certain that the people who you're giving it to have a really, really, really high risk of death from COVID," he said. "So that the risk of death that you're exposing them to is exceeded by the risk of death that you're preventing."
AstraZeneca use in other countries

Denmark has completely halted the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine due to the risk of VITT, in addition to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which uses a similar adenoviral vector method. The move that is expected to set the country back weeks in its vaccine rollout.

The United Kingdom has used the AstraZeneca vaccine as a significant part of its vaccination campaign to successfully control its pandemic and is now able to relax public health restrictions due in large part to the use of the shot.

But VITT was not yet identified when that rollout was in full swing at the beginning of the year and the U.K. restricted the vaccine to those over 40 last week and retroactively reported 242 cases of VITT and 49 deaths out of 28.5 million doses given up to April 28.

The Ontario Science Table says that VITT can present anywhere from four to 28 days after vaccination and Canadians should seek medical attention if they have any of the symptoms listed on its website.

Pai says Canadians who are concerned about having taken an initial dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine despite not having VITT symptoms should rest assured that they made a smart choice at a critical point in the pandemic.

"You guys made an amazing, amazing decision based on the information in front of you," she said. "And now doctors, like me are trying to educate you if there is a very rare risk."

'Very little excuse' to continue to use AstraZeneca in Canada: infectious diseases specialist

It’s time to halt AstraZeneca shots in Canada, except for people 40 or older in hotspots, says Andrew Morris, a doctor on Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory table

Author of the article:Sharon Kirkey

Publishing date:May 11, 2021 • 

  

Empty vials of Oxford/AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine are pictured amid a vaccination campaign in Bierset, Belgium, on March 17, 2021. PHOTO BY YVES HERMAN /Reuters

The peculiar blood clotting disorder linked with Oxford-AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, a vaccine now temporarily paused in Ontario and Alberta, doesn’t cause the regular kind of blood clots. These clots require more extensive care, they can’t be predicted and, most importantly, are “really kinda bad,” says a Toronto infectious diseases specialist. The case fatality rate ranges between 20 and 40 per cent.

For those reasons and more, Dr. Andrew Morris believes it’s time to halt AstraZeneca’s shots across the country, except where COVID-19 is burning and people at very high risk of COVID cannot wait for a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot — mRNA vaccines that haven’t been associated with the same blood clot “safety signal.”

There is “essentially no scenario” outside of the hardest-hit regions where it is beneficial to give AstraZeneca rather than wait for an alternative, Morris, a member of Ontario’s COVID-19 science advisory table, said in an interview. While stressing that he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the table, “there is very little excuse for us to be continuing to give AstraZeneca to Canadians” because the estimated risk of the unusual clotting disorder is higher than earlier, overly optimistic estimates, Morris said.

At a hastily called news conference Tuesday, Ontario health officials announced the province is pausing first doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine out of an “abundance of caution” because of the risk of thrombosis and an abundance of mRNA vaccine supply. Alberta is also moving to stop using AstraZeneca for first doses.

There is very little excuse for us to be continuing to give AstraZeneca to Canadians

The risk of VITT — vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia — now sits at one in 60,000 doses, based on Ontario data. “That’s a significant safety signal that we don’t want to ignore,” said Dr. Jessica Hopkins of Public Health Ontario. The province has about 50,000 remaining doses of AstraZeneca. “Given that we are seeing the overall case numbers of COVID going down and an increase in the safety signal, at a population level, it makes sense to pause AstraZeneca because the risk of severe outcomes with VITT shouldn’t be underestimated.”

Other provincial medical officers of health across the country are reviewing their use of the controversy-plagued vaccine. The European Union, meanwhile, has opted not to renew its AstraZeneca contracts, which expire in June. In Norway, an expert panel is urging both AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines be ditched over the blood clot scare.

According to Health Canada, the current estimated rate of VITT in Canada is approximately one case per 100,000 persons vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Ontario’s COVID science table, in a brief published Friday, said the risk, based on published estimates, could be as much as one in 26,000.

Morris’ best estimate is that one in 40,000 doses will lead to VITT, a condition that frequently results in complications, with about one in five leading to death and many more cases of severe illness. Given the risk, AstraZeneca only makes sense for those at very high risk of COVID, he said. “But why give them AZ, when we can give them an mRNA vax?”

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Twelve cases of VITT have been reported in Canada, including three deaths. “To me, the most important issue is, we were aware of this a month ago — we probably didn’t appreciate the frequency as much a month ago, although we suspected it,” Morris said.

With two million combined doses of Pfizer and Moderna arriving weekly through May, and 2.4 million combined doses per week scheduled for June, Canada will soon be “swimming in vaccine,” Morris said. “I think that the regulators should say very clearly that, if there are no options for an mRNA vaccine and the incidence of cases is X number, then only in that situation should AstraZeneca be used.”

Some worry this messaging will only make people more confused and concerned. But others agree with Morris. “I’ve done the numbers, too,” University of Toronto epidemiologist David Fisman said on Twitter. “AZ was a useful tool, but our knowledge and understanding, and our supply of other vaccines, has changed. VITT is devastating. We need to move on.”

Just over two million of the 2.3 million doses of AstraZeneca doses delivered to the provinces had been administered as of Monday. The remaining vials won’t “make or break the pandemic” and the shots are likely going to people who are at relatively low risk of COVID, Morris said, meaning “we’re introducing unnecessary risk into people who have relatively low COVID risk.” The 20 million doses on order from an American plant should be donated to India and other countries, he said.

“If we could get a billion doses of AstraZeneca to India, I would do it in a heartbeat, because so many people are dying. And yes, some of those people will die (from vaccine-induced blood clotting) but you’re going to be saving millions and millions of lives,” said Morris, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and infectious diseases doctor at Sinai Health and University Health Network.

This shouldn’t be construed as buyer’s remorse, he said. People should not feel as if they were somehow “hoodwinked” into getting AstraZeneca. Every authorized COVID vaccine in Canada has been “absolutely life-saving.” A new analysis just out from Public Health England suggests a single dose of either the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is 80 per cent effective at preventing death from COVID. That rises to 97 per cent after two doses of Pfizer.

If we could get a billion doses of AstraZeneca to India, I would do it in a heartbeat

When COVID is raging, “it’s a total no-brainer (to use AstraZeneca) because, even if you are adding that small risk of harm, it’s outweighed by the benefit,” Morris said.

But outside of hard-hit Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Peel, Halifax and other pockets, the third wave is cresting or receding in most parts of the country.

Ontario is offering AstraZeneca to 40 and older. Of the 24,655 COVID-related deaths reported in Canada as of Monday, only 1.6 per cent, or 390, are in people under age 50, and three per cent (749) in people in their 50s.

The blood-clotting syndrome linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine happens four to 28 days after being vaccinated. The mechanism isn’t entirely clear, but it’s thought the body produces antibodies that attack platelets, tiny blood cells that form clots to stop or prevent bleeding. Serious clots have been reported in the brain and other critical organs. The clots can cause strokes, heart attacks and loss of blood supply to a limb.

Canada’s panel of independent vaccination advisors last week reiterated that Pfizer and Moderna remain the “preferred” recommended jabs for all Canadians, and that people at low risk of COVID should consider holding out for an mRNA vaccine, unless they choose to get vaccinated sooner.

However, the second dose question remains — what happens to those who received a single dose of AstraZeneca? Should they get AZ for dose two? According to U.K. data, the risk of VITT after a second dose of the vaccine is one in a million.

Officials are now awaiting the results of a large study in the U.K. that’s tested alternating doses of AstraZeneca and Pfizer in hundreds of volunteers.

The chances that there will be an issue with mixing vaccines are slim to none

“The chances that there will be an issue with mixing vaccines are slim to none,” said Dr. Allison McGeer, a medical microbiologist and infectious diseases specialist at Toronto’s Sinai Health System. “There are a lot of things keeping me awake at night. This is not one of them.”

“The rules have always been that we don’t ask people to be vaccinated if the vaccine is not a direct benefit to them,” McGeer said. “And the calculus of direct benefit to a person for the AstraZeneca vaccine at the moment is really difficult. It depends on community rates around the person, the individual involved, how well they can protect themselves, how sick they’re going to get if they happen to get COVID, what the probability of VITT is and how long people are going to have to wait for Pfizer or Moderna if they don’t choose to get AstraZeneca.”

With COVID rates dropping in most parts of the country, “that changes the calculations of risk in a non-trivial way,” McGeer said.

“If you got your AstraZeneca vaccine more than a month ago, that’s a good decision with a good outcome,” she said. “I know all sorts of people — my husband, my sister, lots of people — who got the AstraZeneca vaccine and it was a good decision at the time.

“This is the thing about pandemics. New diseases. Things change. The right thing to do changes over time.”

National Post

Trust in Canadian political leaders has cratered during the pandemic, poll finds — except in Quebec

AB ELECTION 2023 CAN KENNEY LAST THAT LONG
The survey suggests that incumbent governments — at least from Ontario westward — may run into trouble when the next election comes around

Author of the article:Brian Platt
Publishing date:May 12, 2021 • 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Ontario Premier Doug Ford have seen the sharpest decline in trust among voters, while Quebec Premier François Legault, bottom right, has seen a large increase in trust. PHOTO BY THE CANADIAN PRESS AND REUTERS, FILES

OTTAWA — A new poll suggests that most Canadians have less trust in their current political leadership because of how the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, with Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau taking the worst hits.

But the poll also found one province to be a notable outlier: Quebec, where respondents reported a substantial increase in trust in Premier François Legault’s leadership. The only other place where respondents reported an increase in trust was in Atlantic Canada, though the gains were much less than in Quebec.

The survey suggests that incumbent governments — at least from Ontario westward — may run into trouble when the next election comes around.

The poll surveyed 1,500 Canadians from April 30 to May 4, and was conducted by public strategy firm Navigator’s research division, called Discover by Navigator.

The political leaders of Ontario and Alberta fared the worst in how the public’s trust has changed during the pandemic, the poll found. Both provinces have seen massive third waves this spring that have resulted in strict lockdowns to ease the pressure on hospitals.

Fifty-four per cent of Albertans said they have less trust in Kenney now because of the pandemic, with just 13 per cent saying they have more. In Ontario, 51 per cent said they have less trust in Ford, while 20 per cent said their trust has increased.

The poll uses the difference between the two trust numbers to create a “pandemic trust progression score,” which puts Kenney at -41 and Ford at -31.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, also suffered a hit in his trust score with the public. The poll found 44 per cent have less trust in Trudeau, while 19 per cent have more, giving him a -25 trust score.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Alberta saw the steepest drop in trust for Trudeau, with a trust score of -43. But his second worst numbers were found in B.C., where half of respondents said their trust in him has decreased and only 15 per cent said it increased. Trudeau fared relatively poorly in the other regions as well, except for Atlantic Canada, where his trust score was +3.

B.C. Premier John Horgan had slightly better numbers but still negative overall, with 35 per cent of British Columbians saying they trust him less now and 22 per cent saying they trust him more.

One exception to the public’s eroding trust is in Atlantic Canada, where the poll found slightly more trust overall for the premiers.

The much greater exception is Quebec, however, where trust in Legault has soared. The poll found 43 per cent of Quebeckers saying they trust Legault more now, while 20 per cent said they trust him less. This lines up with other recent public polling that has found Legault performing well in public support.

Navigator principal André Pratte, a former Canadian senator and editorial writer with Quebec newspaper La Presse, said Legault’s numbers are a bit surprising given Quebec’s rocky pandemic performance in the early months, when its case count and death rate were the highest in the country.

But Quebec has seen a milder third wave than other provinces, and Pratte said there might be other reasons that have also helped Legault.

“When (the pandemic) happened in long-term care homes, people knew that Legault had been there for a year, you can’t put all the problems on him,” Pratte said. “So that’s number one. And he was transparent. He did take part of the blame, he did not avoid the tough questions. So I think that’s part of it. And in Quebec, at least, the opposition parties were already weak from the beginning.”



Pratte said trying to map out the political consequences of this isn’t as simple as it might seem.

“This is not voting intentions,” he said. “Trust is part of it. It’s an important part of it. But it doesn’t mean that anything is definitive.”

Still, he said Legault’s strong public support could spell trouble for Trudeau in the province, which is always influential in federal elections given it has a quarter of all seats. The poll found 37 per cent of Quebec respondents had less trust in Trudeau now, compared to 23 per cent who had more.

“If I was a Liberal organizer, I’d be worried by the numbers in Quebec,” Pratte said. “Many races will be very, very tight in Quebec. The Bloc Québécois is doing quite well, the Conservatives have high hopes also. So anything is possible.”

The poll also asked respondents about other institutions and organizations during the pandemic. It found large businesses had a trust score of -18, small and medium businesses had a trust score of +22, and doctors and healthcare workers had the highest overall trust score at +38.

This is why Vancouver has become North America's anti-Asian hate crime capital

Bloomberg News 

© Provided by National Post British Columbia is facing an undercurrent of racism that began when the first Asians landed on its shores to search for gold, and to help build the railway.

It’s said to be the most Asian city outside Asia. Where a quarter of residents speak a Chinese language and the char siu rivals what’s served in Hong Kong barbecue shops. Where a Sikh gurdwara, a Tibetan monastery and a Chinese evangelical church coexist in harmony along a three-kilometre stretch of road dubbed the Highway to Heaven. The kind of place that should be immune to a rise in pandemic-fuelled racism.

Vancouver has been anything but.

Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined. With almost one out of every two residents of Asian descent in British Columbia experiencing a hate incident in the past year, the region is confronting an undercurrent of racism that runs as long and deep as the historical links stretching across the Pacific.

COVID-19 was the trigger. But the resentment had been building for decades. Few areas have been so visibly transformed by Asian immigration — and money — as the Lower Mainland. Vancouver itself has become a glittering cosmopolis of luxury condos and designer boutiques. The disproportionate rash of incidents has raised an unsettling question: Maybe Vancouver isn’t the bastion of progressive multiculturalism it thinks it is.

“COVID has just revealed what’s always been there,” says Trixie Ling, 38, a Taiwan-born immigrant who three years ago founded a nonprofit called Flavours of Hope to assist refugee women. She was accosted in May 2020 by a man who spewed a stream of racist and sexist insults before spitting in her face. “There is so much anti-Asian racism in our past that carries through.”

The recent backlash against the broader Asian community started almost as soon as COVID-19 began spreading beyond China in early 2020, with Vancouver seemingly poised to become an epicentre. The city had more direct flights with mainland China than any other in the Americas or Europe. A local businessman flying home from Wuhan became B.C.’s Case 1 on Jan. 26, among the first detected outside Asia at the time .

Months later, it would become clear that route wasn’t, in fact, the principal cause of the virus’s spread in the area: Epidemiological studies showed that the primary source of infections was strains from Europe, Eastern Canada and Washington state.

But in the early weeks of the pandemic, simply looking Asian and wearing a mask in Vancouver triggered verbal assaults such as “Virus spreaders,” “Go back to China” and “Stop stealing masks from frontline workers.” The attacks quickly escalated: One 92-year-old was hurled out of a convenience store to the sidewalk; a woman was punched in the head at a downtown bus stop in broad daylight. Vandals repeatedly defaced statues and buildings in Chinatown with racist graffiti.

© Postmedia file photo Retail signage in Richmond has a mixture of English and Chinese signs as well as Chinese-only signs.

In 2020, Vancouver police documented 98 anti-Asian hate crimes, an eightfold increase from the prior year. That was triple the number recorded in New York, which logged the most of any U.S. city, according to police data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.

Of course, most incidents go unreported. An April 9 survey by Vancouver-based pollster Insights West revealed that 43 per cent of B.C. residents of Asian descent say they experienced a racist incident in the past year, ranging from racial slurs to property damage to physical assault. And almost half say they believe the racism will get worse. A report by the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice in September found that Canada, per capita, had a higher incidence of anti-Asian racism than the U.S., with B.C. topping the list of provinces reporting incidents.

For those living in Richmond, just south of Vancouver proper, where ethnic Chinese constitute 54 per cent of the population, it’s been a particularly bitter irony. Richmond residents began practicing social distancing and donning face masks even before the province’s first case was detected. Months later, public-health officials and researchers would commend the local Chinese community for playing a key role in containing the virus’s early spread. More than a year into the pandemic, Richmond’s total infection rate remains dramatically low, closer to that of Nunavut than to the Vancouver metropolitan area.

Pandemic and ‘more aggressive’ China contributing to rise in anti-Asian racism, Trudeau says

‘Wuhan pneumonia’: Ontario MPPs urge Chinese-Canadian doctor to remove ‘divisive’ sign

Vancouver came to exist as the Pacific Coast terminus of Canada’s first transcontinental railway — Chinese labourers were able to lay more than six miles of track in a single day, but at a terrible price. Two Chinese workers died for every mile laid on the final treacherous stretch through the Rockies in the late 1800s, according to records at the University of British Columbia. Three decades earlier, during the gold rush, Chinese men worked only abandoned mines in order not to incur the anger of white miners.

Historically, Canada’s worst excesses against Asian communities trace their roots to the Lower Mainland — from the hefty “head tax” Ottawa began levying in 1885 on every Chinese person entering the country, to a decades-long ban on Chinese immigration, to the forced internment of some 22,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War that, unlike in the U.S., also stripped families of their assets. Covenants barring the sale of properties to those of “African or Asiatic descent” survive in land titles in some of Vancouver’s toniest neighbourhoods, even though the restrictions were nullified in 1978.

© Vancouver Public Library A man walks with his baby to the Hastings Park internment camp, with the PNE in the background.

Many still recall how quickly the hate flared, including Kayoko Nomura, 85, who as a child was taken from her home in the coastal town of Ocean Falls and corralled into a livestock pen with her mother and siblings at a Japanese detention camp 1,000 km south in Vancouver.

Twice in recent months she’s been the target of racist tirades. First, a driver in a Home Depot parking lot yelled at her to go back to her country, then a woman at Costco unleashed a hateful rant after Nomura picked up a magazine with gloves on. Community groups report Asian elders saying they haven’t felt such intense levels of hate since the war.

After a lifetime of slights and insults, Nomura thought she was inured to most. “People my age tend to grin and bear it,” says the octogenarian, who didn’t report the incidents to the police. “I guess it is time that all of us should be speaking out.”

The latest spike in hate crimes also draws from a more recent chapter in Vancouver’s history, one in which Asians, once stigmatized as an immigrant underclass, have been increasingly perceived as elites with rancor-inducing wealth. By the 1980s, close to half of all immigrants being admitted into Canada were from Asia; most weren’t rich, but increasingly the country was tweaking its policies to attract the wealthy.

© Vancouver Public Library A Chinese railroad track gang, circa 1900. Chinese migrant workers were brought to Canada to build the Canadian Pacific Railway. They were paid less than others and worked the more dangerous jobs. THEY WERE USED BY WHITE BOSSES TO BE THE DYNAMITER'S THROUGH THE ROCKIES

In Vancouver, a conspicuous group of well-heeled newcomers emerged, none more visible than Li Ka-shing . The legendary Hong Kong tycoon in 1988 acquired one-sixth of downtown properties and redrew the skyline with a cluster of tall, glassy condominiums. (To be sure, his group fostered little goodwill by pre-selling an entire tower exclusively to Hong Kong buyers without offering a single unit locally.) Over the next decade, some Hong Kong immigrants moved to Canada in the lead-up to the British colony’s return to Chinese rule in 1997.

“Is Vancouver Becoming a Suburb of Hong Kong?” screamed the March 1988 cover of Equity , a Vancouver business magazine. In the 1990s a furor raged in public hearings on zoning rules over the newcomers’ so-called monster homes destroying the esthetics of traditionally wealthy, white neighbourhoods (the ones with the voided covenants). Yet by 2010, Americans would come to own four times as many Vancouver properties as Hong Kongers at the time — to scant outrage.

Like some chronic condition, the xenophobia would subside for a time only to flare up again later, triggered by anxieties over access to housing or education.

Around 2014 a particularly dizzying surge in home prices began. With cheap money inflating asset prices worldwide, Vancouver found itself at the centre of a global property boom. Double-digit gains in home prices outpaced those in New York and London

.

© Postmedia file photo In the 2019-2020 academic year, 28 per cent of UBC students at the Vancouver campus were from outside Canada, and about half of those were from China.

A more visible phenomenon in Vancouver’s small, shallow economy was an influx of Chinese money fleeing Beijing’s tightening capital controls. Signs included buses emblazoned with wraparound realtor ads in Chinese, as well as Asian college students parading in Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. The University of British Columbia has often colloquially been referred to as the University of Beautiful Cars — or the University of a Billion Chinese.

The ostentatious displays of wealth by the fuerdai — the label the Chinese apply to children of the nouveau riche — rankled in a city gripped by a housing affordability crisis. Newspapers were filled with tales of cash-rich Asian buyers besting locals in bidding wars and upscale neighbourhoods turned desolate as absentee owners left properties empty and condominium towers dark at night.

A controversial 2015 study sought to determine the level of foreign ownership — in the absence of data at the time — by screening for non-Anglicized Chinese names in three wealthy neighbourhoods. The study — based on just 172 sales out of more than 42,000 transactions that year — was facilitated by David Eby, then an opposition politician. It became fodder for dozens of news stories over the next few years as definitive evidence of Chinese buyers driving the market, avoiding taxes, flipping properties and receiving unfair access to bank financing.

Eby, now the province’s attorney general and minister responsible for housing, last month apologized for his role in the study, acknowledging his comments at the time had helped perpetuate a harmful narrative against Chinese money.

© Postmedia file photo A more detailed study of the Vancouver real estate market unearthed the fact that buyers — not primarily Chinese buyers — were enticed by low interest rates and low property taxes.

Starting in 2016, Vancouver and the rest of British Columbia became a laboratory for policies designed to deter rich foreigners from investing in real estate. A series of measures rolled in: first a foreign-buyer tax, then an empty-homes tax, followed by a so-called speculation tax targeting nonresidents and “satellite families” — a term associated with households where the breadwinner stays in Asia, while the spouse and children live in Vancouver.

Economists and statisticians, as well as the federal housing agency, took a more nuanced view that wealthy buyers from abroad played only a supporting role in the runup in prices. There were a host of factors fuelling the market: Vancouver’s rock-bottom property tax rate, the lack of a capital-gains tax on primary residences, a byzantine zoning and permitting regime that strangles the housing supply, and a local economy that from its early days has attracted speculators, be they gold prospectors, stock promoters or real estate opportunists.

But the real villains were a decade-plus stretch of historically low interest rates, a legacy of the 2008 financial crisis, and a Canadian propensity to borrow that had elevated property speculation to a national sport.

“It makes for a tempting narrative: them, not us,” Evan Siddall , then head of the CMHC, cautioned in a 2016 speech in Vancouver, pointing to evidence that Canadians were more likely to buy investment properties than foreigners. “The scapegoat is obvious: blame foreigners.”

The Chinese-style urban gate is a landmark in the city’s Chinatown.

Local and provincial policymakers parried accusations that they were discriminating against Asians, claiming they were being even-handed. “Targeting foreign owners and the one per cent who are driving up housing costs,” is how B.C.’s finance ministry justified the barrage of new taxes in 2018.

Those policies have ensured that people purchasing houses as an investment “are paying their fair share of taxes,” the provincial government said in a response to questions last month, saying the measures didn’t target people by country of origin. “The important difference is not by citizenship, but between people who work and pay taxes here and the people who do not.”

Yet perplexingly, the province exempted nonresident buyers in places such as Whistler, which has an even more acute affordability problem. In 2016 foreign buyers accounted for some 10 per cent of property transactions, according to local real estate agents. But in Whistler the foreigners are mostly Americans — not Chinese.

© file photo The four-season resort town of Whistler has long had a housing affordability problem.

Particularly corrosive was the provincial government’s anti-money-laundering campaign which — dubiously but indelibly — linked the housing runup to dirty money. Asian wealth became synonymous with illicit wealth as shocking images emerged of Chinese gamblers hauling bags of cash into Vancouver casinos. Amid public outrage, the government initiated a public inquiry into money laundering and its impact on housing prices that’s still ongoing.

“It was sort of like a syndicated TV series,” Henry Yu, a University of British Columbia historian, told the public inquiry in February, testifying on patterns of racism in the province’s housing discourse. “I think I’ve seen this episode.”

It took a pandemic to expose the trope.

Foreign buyers accounted for less than one per cent of $15 billion in residential transactions in the city last year, according to government data, a byproduct of closed borders and a steep drop in immigration.

Yet with homes ever more out of reach, few are publicly acknowledging that perhaps the focus on Asian buyers was disproportionate. Asked about the role interest rates have played in the surge, a spokesman for the provincial government responded with an emailed statement that noted “the factors driving up house prices today are different” and that its policies had successfully reduced the presence of foreigners in property transactions since 2018.

For Ling, the Taiwan-born immigrant, it seems deeply unfair that a small group of wealthy individuals were used to stereotype the entire Asian community. But the shock of being abused and spat on last May galvanized her decision to report the incident and to continue to raise her voice.

“Saying that we’re so multicultural dismisses the problem — in Canada, we don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “Well, that’s privilege — the privilege of not paying attention to what’s been happening.”

— with additional reporting by Sandrine Rastello

Fantastical Jurassic Fossil Shows Crustacean Eaten by Squid Eaten by Shark


The remains of a belemnite and a crustacean. (Klug et al., Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, 2021)


CARLY CASSELLA

SCIENCE ALERT
11 MAY 2021

Sometime in the early Jurassic, an ancient squid-like creature speared a yummy lobster-like crustacean with its many hooked tentacles. Just as it began to dig into its meal, the eater became the eaten.

A much larger predator swooped in, tore a chunk out of the squid's soft middle and dashed off, leaving the leftovers of this three-way feeding fest sinking slowly to the bottom.

Roughly 180 million years later, the fossilized scene has been discovered in a quarry in Germany, and after close analysis, paleontologists now think they've figured out who was at the top of the food chain.

According to experts, the extinct squid-like cephalopod, known as a belemnite, was most probably killed by an ancient crocodile, shark, or other large predatory fish.

Whatever it was, the predator didn't stick around to finish its meal, likely because cephalopods have tough rostra - beaks that are hard, pointed and difficult to digest.

This means the hunter probably wasn't an ichthyosaur, even though fossils of these extinct marine reptiles suggest they were particularly skilled at picking around the hard areas of belemnites. Their stomach contents only show the mega-hooks found on belemnite tentacles and no other hard structures.

Fossilized stomachs of marine crocodiles and predatory fish, on the other hand, suggest these creatures gobbled everything down, swallowing both the mega-hooks and the hard beaks of squid.

Yet eating the whole squid isn't necessarily a good thing. A fossilized shark, also found in Germany from the Jurassic, was found with a whole pile of belemnite beaks in its stomach, and experts say these hard structures likely caused the shark's death. The diagram below shows the extreme blockage they created in the creature's stomach.

The Early Jurassic shark, Hybodus haufanus, with its stomach clogged by belemnite rostra. (Klug et al., Swiss J Palaeontol., 2021)

After some uncomfortable experiences, the authors suggest ancient sharks and crocs in the Jurassic learned to go after only the soft parts of their squid prey, choosing to drop the fins, rostrum, and mantle.

In the current fossil, for example, the belemnite has retained its rostrum and arms, but everything soft in between is gone.

Preserved arm crown of belemnite and remains of its prey. (Klug et al., Swiss J Palaeontol., 2021)

"Remarkably, most of the belemnite soft parts between the arm crown and the calcitic rostrum are missing," the authors note.

"We suggest that this represents remains of a meal of a vertebrate predator, possibly of the Early Jurassic shark Hybodus hauffianus. This is remarkable, because it informs about the behavior of a cephalopod and a vertebrate predator."

A possible scenario explaining the fossilized remains has been illustrated below, showing a squid-like creature chewing on a crustacean while, in turn, a shark chews on it.

(Klug et al., Swiss J Palaeontol., 2021)

The team have classified their discovery as a 'leftover fall', which is sort of like a whale fall, except this one is caused by an ocean predator dropping all or part of its meal.

Once the uneaten prey sinks to the bottom, fewer scavengers and weaker currents make fossilization more likely.

The result is a 'pabulite', a term which the authors of the new study have coined to describe a fossilized leftover fall. It's a combination of the Latin word for food, pabulum, and the Greek word for stone, lithos.

Pabulites have been discovered numerous times over the years, and while solitary heads, fins and tails of ancient creatures might seem less valuable then a complete fossil, these incomplete remains can help us form a unique picture of the Jurassic food web.

The study was published in Swiss Journal of Palaeontology

'Living Fossil' Thought Extinct For 273 Million Years Found Thriving on Ocean Floor

Michelle Starr 

SCIENCE ALERT

MAY 10, 2021

A symbiotic relationship between two marine lifeforms has just been discovered thriving at the bottom of the ocean, after disappearing from the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years.© Zapalski et al., Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol., 2021

Scientists have found non-skeletal corals growing from the stalks of marine animals known as crinoids, or sea lilies, on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, off the coasts of Honshu and Shikoku in Japan.

"These specimens represent the first detailed records and examinations of a recent syn vivo association of a crinoid (host) and a hexacoral (epibiont)," the researchers wrote in their paper, "and therefore analyses of these associations can shed new light on our understanding of these common Paleozoic associations."

During the Paleozoic era, crinoids and corals seem to have gotten along very well indeed. The seafloor fossil record is full of it, yielding countless examples of corals overgrowing crinoid stems to climb above the seafloor into the water column, to stronger ocean currents for filter-feeding.

Yet these benthic besties disappeared from the fossil record around 273 million years ago, after the specific crinoids and corals in question went extinct. Other species of crinoids and corals emerged in the Mesozoic, following the Permian-Triassic extinction - but never again have we seen them together in a symbiotic relationship.


a close up of a flower: symbiosis
1/1 SLIDES © Provided by ScienceAlert
symbiosis(Zapalski et al., Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol., 2021)

Well, until now. At depths exceeding 100 meters (330 feet) below the ocean's surface, scientists have found two different species of coral - hexacorals of the genera Abyssoanthus, which is very rare, and Metridioidea, a type of sea anemone - growing from the stems of living Japanese sea lilies (Metacrinus rotundus).

The joint Polish-Japanese research team, led by paleontologist Mikołaj Zapalski of the University of Warsaw in Poland, first used stereoscopic microscopy to observe and photograph the specimens.

Then, they used non-destructive microtomography to scan the specimens to reveal their interior structures, and DNA barcoding to identify the species.

They found that the corals, which attached below the feeding fans of the crinoids, likely didn't compete with their hosts for food; and, being non-skeletal, likely didn't affect the flexibility of the crinoid stalks, although the anemone may have hindered movement of the host's cirri - thin strands that line the stalk.

It's also unclear what benefit the crinoids gain from a relationship with coral, but one interesting thing did emerge: unlike the Paleozoic corals, the new specimens did not modify the structure of the crinoids' skeleton.

This, the researchers said, can help explain the gap in the fossil record. The Paleozoic fossils of symbiotic corals and crinoids involve corals that have a calcite skeleton, such as Rugosa and Tabulata.

Fossils of soft-bodied organisms - such as non-skeletal corals - are rare. Zoantharia such as Abyssoanthus have no confirmed fossil record, and actiniaria such as Metridioidea (seen as a dry specimen in the image below) also are extremely limited.


symbiosis 2
1/1 SLIDES © Provided by ScienceAlert
symbiosis 2(Zapalski et al., Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol., 2021)


If these corals don't modify the host, and leave no fossil record, perhaps they have had a long relationship with crinoids that has simply not been recorded.

This means the modern relationship between coral and crinoid could contain some clues as to Paleozoic interactions between coral and crinoid. There's evidence to suggest that zoantharians and rugose corals share a common ancestor, for instance.

The number of specimens recovered to date is small, but now that we know they are there, perhaps more work can be done to discover the history of this fascinating friendship.

"As both Actiniaria and Zoantharia have their phylogenetic roots deep in the Palaeozoic, and coral-crinoid associations were common among Palaeozoic Tabulate and Rugose corals, we can speculate that also Palaeozoic non-skeletal corals might have developed this strategy of settling on crinoids," the researchers wrote in their paper.

"The coral-crinoid associations, characteristic of Palaeozoic benthic communities, disappeared by the end of Permian, and this current work represents the first detailed examination of their rediscovery in modern seas."

The research has been published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Shrunken head artifact used as prop in John Huston film revealed to be human

Tom Metcalfe

A grim artifact that had been on display for decades in a Georgia university has been authenticated as a human head taken from a slain enemy by an Amazonian warrior almost a century ago — and it is now on its way back to where it came from.

© Provided by NBC News

Researchers at Mercer University in Macon say their tests show that the shrunken head — called a tsantsa in Amazonian languages — is a genuine shrunken head made in a laborious ceremony of removing its skull and flesh, stitching shut its eyes and mouth, boiling it and then filling it with hot sand and stones.

In 2019, Mercer University repatriated the verified tsantsa to the Ecuadorian Consulate in Atlanta. It's not clear whether it has yet been returned to Ecuador, but the researchers said they hope it will ultimately be part of a collection, perhaps at a museum, where it will be treated properly.

"We wanted it to be viewed by people who could appreciate it in an appropriate context," said Mercer University chemist Adam Kiefer, a co-author of a study of the shrunken head published Monday in the journal Heritage Science.

© Adam Kiefer Mercer University biologist and anthropologist Craig Byron examines the tsantsa to verify its authenticity before it was repatriated to Ecuador. (Adam Kiefer)

"This is not an oddity — this is somebody's body, this is somebody's culture, and it's not ours," he said. "So from our perspective, repatriation was essential, and we were very lucky that our university supported this endeavor."

Shrunken heads were popular curios and keepsakes in some parts of the Western world in the 19th century, and many fakes were made to meet the demand — some of which were illicitly created from bodies taken from cemeteries and morgues. That led to justifiable concerns that the tsantsa at Mercer University may have also been fake.

Kiefer and his colleagues at Mercer, biologist Craig Byron and biomedical engineer Joanna Thomas, were tasked with verifying that the shrunken head was genuine after academics decided it could be of cultural importance and Ecuador's government asked whether it could be authenticated.

  

© Byron et al. After several scientific tests, researchers established that the object was a human head, probably from a slain enemy. (Byron et al. / Heritage Science)

The researchers studied it using a variety of techniques, including computerized tomography, or CT, scans, which allowed them to reconstruct a three-dimensional model of the tsantsa both with and without its long hair. Thomas said the CT scans verified that the head underneath the hair had been cut open to remove the skull and then stitched up again as part of the ceremonial process that created it. The CT scans were also used to create a three-dimensional model to take its place in the university's collection.

Their tests showed that the shrunken head met 30 of the 32 criteria scientifically accepted for verifying authentic tsantsas, including the tiny hairs visible on its skin and in its nostrils, as well as its distinctive three-tiered hairstyle, which was characteristic of the peoples who then lived in the Ecuadorian Amazon region where it was from, Kiefer said.

The tsantsa at Mercer became part of the university's collection after the death in 2016 of a member of the faculty, biologist Jim Harrison, who acquired it during a trip into Ecuador's remote Amazon region in 1942 while serving in the military during World War II

Adam Kiefer Image: The tsantsa was stuffed with a local newspaper to protect it during its transport from Ecuador to the United States in 1942. 

Harrison wrote in a memoir that he had traded with local people for the tsantsa. "It was Indiana Jones," Kiefer said. "When this was collected, science was different, everything was new ... but almost 80 years later, we recognize its cultural importance, along with the science."

It's thought the ceremonial process of making tsantsas may have originated as a way to overcome a tradition of blood feuds among some peoples of the Amazon jungle; it seems to have been intended to trap the spirit of the slain warrior within the shrunken head so its supernatural power could be transferred to the community of the victor.

Curiously, Harrison's tsantsa also appeared as a movie prop in the 1979 John Huston film "Wise Blood," a version of a novel by the writer Flannery O'Connor, who had lived near Macon. It was glued onto a prop body for the movie, and the damage that was caused could be seen by the researchers.

Universities and museums now often try to repatriate many of the human remains that were once on display in archaeological and anthropological collections.

In the U.S., the Smithsonian Institution has been repatriating human remains and other culturally important objects since the 1980s, particularly to Native American communities. It has repatriated more than 6,000 objects, including several tsantsas that were sent in 1999 to representatives of the indigenous Shuar people in Ecuador and Peru.

Last year, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom removed a display of tsantsas that had been morbidly popular for decades.

"Visitors often referred to them as gruesome or disgusting or a freak show or gory," said Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum's director. "People were not understanding the more cultural meaning of the tsantsas ... so we were not doing a very good job of how we were curating the display."

The museum has been negotiating for four years with South American universities and indigenous groups to repatriate the tsantsas; any human remains and cultural objects acquired in the future will be dealt with under strict regulations the university has adopted, she said.

"We have to take things case by case," she said. "It's often a long process."