Amazon, Whole Foods can be sued by murderer EX CON rejected for delivery job

Thu, January 27, 2022, 8:50 AM

By Jonathan Stempel 

  NEW YORK, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A federal judge said Amazon.com Inc and its Whole Foods unit can be sued over the refusal to hire a convicted murderer who claimed to be rehabilitated after nearly 23 years in prison. 

  In a Wednesday night decision, U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said Henry Franklin could pursue a proposed class action after being turned down for a grocery delivery job at Cornucopia Logistics, which serves Amazon and Whole Foods. 

  Amazon determined after a background check that Franklin had lied on his April 2019 job application by answering "no" when asked if he had a criminal record. 

  New York law bars employers from rejecting job applicants based on their criminal histories unless the crimes relate directly to the jobs sought, or hirings would pose an unreasonable risk to the public. 

  Without ruling on the merits, Caproni said the defendants failed to show that either exception applied, adding that Franklin "has adequately alleged that he is rehabilitated and no longer poses a threat to the public." 

  She also said she was "sympathetic to defendants' likely position that they do not want a convicted murderer delivering groceries to their customers' homes." 

  The defendants and their lawyers did not immediately respond on Thursday to requests for comment. Franklin's lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests. 

  Amazon and Whole Foods had argued that Franklin's lie was reason enough turn him down, and he lacked standing to sue them because neither was his "prospective" employer. 

  Caproni called Franklin's pleading on the latter issue "barely" sufficient. 

  According to court papers, Franklin was convicted of second-degree murder in June 1995 and paroled in June 2018. 

  The lawsuit was brought on behalf of Amazon and Whole Foods job applicants in New York state and New York City with criminal records. 

  The case is Franklin v Whole Foods Market Group Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 20-04935. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Bill Berkrot) 

Ocugen signs letter of intent to buy Canadian pharmaceutical manufacturing plant


Ocugen Chairman and CEO Shankar Musunuri

By John George – Senior Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal

A Chester County company working to bring the Covid-19 vaccine Covaxin to the United States has entered into a deal to buy a dormant manufacturing plant in Canada.

Ocugen Inc. (NASDAQ: OCGN) of Malvern said Thursday it has signed a non-binding letter of intent with Liminal BioSciences Inc. to acquire its manufacturing site in Belleville, Ontario, for an undisclosed amount.

This site, Ocugen said, would enable it to expand manufacturing and research and development activities to support its pipeline — which includes making Covaxin, as well as gene therapy candidates targeting retinal diseases.

Covaxin was developed by Bharat Biotech of India and is already approved for use overseas. Ocugen and Bharat entered into a partnership last year to bring the vaccine to North America and share revenues. Ocugen, through its Canadian affiliate Vaccigen Ltd., has submitted an application for Covaxin with Health Canada for regulatory review.

Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration advised Ocugen it would need to pursue a biologics license application to obtain full approval for Covaxin in the United States. In November, Ocugen filed an application with the FDA for emergency use authorization of Covaxin in children.

More than 200 million doses of Covaxin have been administered to adults and children outside the United States. The vaccine is authorized for emergency use in more than 20 countries; emergency use authorization applications are under review in more than 60 other countries.

“We believe establishing a manufacturing and R&D hub for our biotechnology platform is the right investment and next evolution of our business," said Dr. Shankar Musunuri, CEO and co-founder of Ocugen. "This site, after transformation into a state-of-the-art hub, with the support of the regional talent pool can help bring our products – from vaccines to our modifier gene therapy assets – to the patients we will serve globally.”

Alek Krstajic, Liminal BioSciences' board chairman, said his company was introduced to Ocugen by Innovation Science Economic Development Canada, a government agency.

“We are excited to see Ocugen’s plans to repurpose our dormant vaccine manufacturing facility and create vaccine manufacturing capacity in Canada," Krstajic said in a statement.

The completion of the deal is subject to the finalization of due diligence investigations by both companies, the negotiation and execution of definitive transaction agreements, and other customary closing conditions including certain undisclosed funding requirements.

Covaxin will be the first product manufactured in the new upgraded facility if the deal closes and the vaccine receives regulatory approval in Canada.

Ocugen's stock was trading down 3% at $3.05 per share in early afternoon trading on Thursday.

Why even progressive companies like REI are wary of unions

REUTERS/DAVID MCNEW

By Sarah Todd
Senior reporter, Quartz and Quartz at Work
Published January 28, 2022

REI prides itself on its progressive politics.

The outdoor apparel and gear retailer operates as a consumer cooperative, a structure which, according to its website, allows it to “put purpose before profits.” The Seattle-based company touts the flexible schedules and healthcare benefits available to its hourly retail employees, and every year it shutters its roughly 170 US retail stores on Black Friday to give employees a paid day off.

But when employees at one of REI’s Manhattan stores filed for a union election late last week, the company was quick to make its anti-union stance known.

“We respect the rights of our employees to speak and act for what they believe — and that includes the rights of employees to choose or refuse union representation,” REI said in a statement. “However, we do not believe placing a union between the co-op and its employees is needed or beneficial.”

REI isn’t the only outwardly progressive employer to come out against unions in recent years. Starbucks, known for offering comparatively generous benefits and perks to retail workers, not only discouraged store employees in Buffalo, New York, from voting for a union late last year but mounted what some workers and organizers described as an “imposing” counteroffensive. The crowdfunding site Kickstarter, a certified B corps, opposed the union effort among its employees and eventually settled a complaint alleging that it had retaliated against a worker involved in its organizing efforts.

There seems to be a disconnect between companies’ commitment to do right by their employees and their disapproval when employees decide that unions are what’s right for them. But why?

Employers don’t want to give up control

One explanation could be that many employers—no matter how progressive they are or claim to be—simply don’t want to relinquish control.

“It’s about power,” Ruth Milkman, a professor at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, told Quartz last year. “It’s one thing to say, ‘We want to do the right thing for our employees… [But] who has the power to determine pay and working conditions? If the employer unilaterally decides to be ‘generous,’ that’s one thing; if they’re sort of forced into it by union negotiations, that’s another.”

Another explanation could be that companies are simply not as invested in employees’ wellbeing as they claim to be. In such cases, the disconnect lies in their declaring themselves to be progressive in the first place, rather than in the gap between their actual workplace practices and their attitudes toward unions.
Is the relationship between companies and unions always adversarial?

Some companies may also believe that the relationship between unions and management is inherently adversarial, prompting them to try and avoid unions at all costs.

But many employees opt to unionize in order to preserve the things that make their company a good place to work – not just to advocate for better working conditions. As long as an employer treats workers well, unionizing is “not something you should be afraid of,” as Beneficial State Bank CEO Randell Leach told Quartz last year. About 100 workers at Beneficial chose to unionize in 2020, and ratified their contract with management last year. ​

“Enlightened corporations that focus not just on profit maximization but doing the right thing… if you’re doing all that, then the union proposition is a different one,” Leach said. “It isn’t Hey, we’re getting in fights and arbitrating. It’s, okay, make sure there’s a structure for employees to have a voice and make sure we’ve got a process to go through.”

If companies can shift their perspective on unions and learn to see collective bargaining as a structured way to have a dialogue with employees about what they want, Leach says, that’s one way to ensure that the process doesn’t get hostile.

Ultimately, a company that engages with an employee union will likely have to give up some power and control. But at a time when employees increasingly expect to have a say in everything from remote-work policies to their company’s ethical practices, trying to resist employee activism in any form is a losing proposition. Far better to embrace it.

THIRD WORLD USA
'You're old. Go in a corner and die': Seniors left homeless with few shelter options

Jessica Boehm,

AZCentral | The Arizona Republic
Fri, January 28, 2022

Kasey Dungan, on Jan. 20, 2022, in Phoenix, Ariz., talks about how she and her dog Sandy ended up homeless on the street for the first time in their lives.

Corrections & Clarifications: ​​A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the amount of flexible funding over three years in Maricopa County's deal with the Human Services Campus. In the deal, the county would provide $3 million.

Kasey Dungan sat in her wheelchair on the corner of 12th Avenue and Madison Street, in the middle of the state's largest homeless encampment, her 10-year-old dachshund Sandy cowering underneath her.

Last Wednesday was the 73-year-old's second night homeless. She spent her first night at HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Sunnyslope with a kidney infection.


The hospital discharged her Wednesday morning, and a social worker offered to call her a ride to Central Arizona Shelter Services, the 500-bed homeless shelter near downtown Phoenix.

"She said that if I didn't go to CASS and stayed on the street that I would be beat up and that those people were terrible and they would steal everything," Dungan said.

Still, she refused. She'd been to the Human Services Campus, where CASS is located, once before to have a procedure at the low-cost dental provider on the campus.

She remembered the lines of tents outside the campus where hundreds of people sleep every night. The thought of staying there terrified her, she said.

She searched through Sunnyslope to see if there was anywhere else for her and Sandy to stay. But she quickly realized CASS was her only emergency option.

Dungan and Sandy took a bus to the Human Services Campus, just south of downtown Phoenix. But by the time they made it to the campus welcome center at 6:30 p.m., all of the women's beds were full.

The sun had set, and her only option was the street.

"I felt like there was nothing there for me. They just want to say, 'Well you're old. Go in a corner and die,'" Dungan said through tears.
Elderly, sick and homeless

Dungan's situation isn't unique.

Human Services Campus Executive Director Amy Schwabenlender said people arrive at the campus from hospitals at least once per day, if not more often.

"My thing would be, why do we let hospitals discharge people into homelessness?" Schwabenlender said.

The simple answer is, hospitals are full and they're not required to keep people if they don't have an emergency medical situation.

A spokesperson from HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center said the hospital works with its partners to provide care navigation for people who are homeless. The navigation team talks to the patient and arranges transportation to "respite care, shelter services or other types of lodging."

Dungan opted out of the hospital's offer to take her to CASS. If she hadn't, there may have been a bed available for her.

But by the time she arrived at the Human Services Campus at 6:30 p.m., after realizing there were no other shelter options, the shelter was full.

Every day, people are turned away from CASS and other shelters across metro Phoenix because there are no more beds.

Metro Phoenix has fewer than 2,000 emergency shelter beds and more than 7,400 people experiencing homelessness, according to the last point-in-time count in 2020.

Experts predict the true number of people experiencing homelessness is much higher now. Maricopa Association of Governments held its annual point-in-time count Tuesday and will release the updated numbers in February.

'We're not lazy': What people experiencing homelessness are saying in annual count

Increasingly, people arriving at CASS look like Dungan. They are older, experiencing homelessness for the first time and have medical conditions.

About a third of people who stayed at CASS in December were 55 or older, CASS CEO Lisa Glow said.

A recent CASS survey of clients 55 and older found that 86% of them have a medical condition and 63% have a mobility impairment.

During the first two years of the pandemic, Phoenix provided CASS with CARES Act funding to rent 65 rooms in a north Phoenix hotel, where it placed the most vulnerable older adults in private rooms with their own bathrooms. The organization later expanded the program with 20 additional rooms.

The temporary project ran out of funding late last year, but Phoenix and the Arizona Department of Housing provided funds for CASS to purchase and rehabilitate a hotel in northwest Phoenix for a permanent shelter for older adults.

The new shelter, dubbed "Project Haven" won't be open until the end of this year at the earliest.

"We are so eager to get the Project Haven hotel open. People are already asking to go there ... but we've got to figure out some interim solutions," Glow said.

She said she was disappointed to hear that Dungan was turned away from shelter last week and called on the homelessness service system as a whole to get more creative and find ways to not turn people out to the streets when shelters fill up.

"The safety net has to get stronger for people like this woman who is elderly and just released from the hospital," Glow said.

Kasey Dungan, on Jan. 20, 2022, in Phoenix, Ariz., cries as she talks about how she and her dog ended up homeless for the first time in their lives.
A lucky break

Dungan didn't end up staying on the street last week.

Community advocate Stacey Champion, who was visiting the encampment around the Human Services Campus to drop off supplies, saw Dungan crying in her wheelchair.

Champion, who frequently spends time in the encampment, said she didn't believe Dungan and Sandy were safe staying there. After unsuccessfully trying to get Dungan into the shelter, she paid for her to stay in a hotel in midtown Phoenix.

Champion started a crowdfunding link through her Twitter account and has been able to keep Dungan in the hotel while she tries to find her long-term housing.

"She is an angel from heaven. She told me, 'I'm not going to leave you here.' She just instantly made me feel like somebody cared about me," Dungan said.

Dungan became homeless last year after a falling out with her daughter. She stayed with a friend for a few months before ending up in a budget hotel in northwest Phoenix.

Last week, she ran out of money. A family member is rehabbing a trailer for her in Ashfork, but it's not finished, she said. Dungan was hoping to find a safe place where she could stay for a few weeks until she can move.

"There's need to be more help out there. There needs to be somebody who cares about us," she said.

Money galore, solutions sparse

Champion said she was relieved she found Dungan and could find a safe place for her to stay.

But sheltering homeless seniors shouldn't come down to chance meetings, she said.

She's pushing the city, county and homeless providers to offer hotel vouchers or other emergency overflow shelter for seniors and other vulnerable people who would not be safe sleeping on the street.

Jessica Spencer, who goes by Lefty, also does direct outreach to the homeless population. She said she's helped many people get into hotels for a few nights when they needed a safe place to stay. She also uses crowdfunding because the alternative — helping people go through the formal shelter assistance process — can take weeks.

More and more often, it's older adults that she finds needing assistance.

"Our disabled elders are just begin left out to dry," Spencer said. "I understand we can't house people forever, but we don't even have a temporary solution for people who are newly houseless."

Despite relying on crowdfunding, there's actually more money available to help people experiencing homelessness than ever because of federal COVID-19 stimulus packages.

Cumulatively, the city, county and state have allocated almost $100 million of federal relief funds to build new shelters. But those could take a year or more to get up and running.

Phoenix provided funds to purchase a sprung structure on the Human Services Campus that will add 100 beds to the campus. The heavy-duty tent-like building, which will have central air conditioning and heating, should be open this spring.

Maricopa County is currently inking a deal with the Human Services Campus to provide $3 million of flexible funding over three years that could be used to fund emergency hotel nights, Schwabenlender said.

It will also be used to fund other emergencies that can stand in the way of someone getting into shelter or long-term housing. For example, helping someone pay for car insurance so they can maintain a job and qualify for an apartment.

"We want to reduce barriers to housing," Schwabenlender said.

Coverage of housing insecurity on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.

Reach the reporter at jessica.boehm@gannett.com 

Follow her on Twitter @jboehm_NEWS.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Phoenix homelessness: Sick, elderly people have few shelter options

Omicron Could Be the Beginning of the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Alice Park

TIME
Wed, January 26, 2022

Sequencing laboratory for corona variants

Different variants and mutations of the corona virus are graphically displayed on a computer monitor in the sequencing laboratory for corona variants (CoMV gene) at Greifswald University Medical Center. Corona viruses are constantly changing and need to be monitored by elaborate genetic analyses. In Greifswald, researchers are working at full capacity and have sequenced more than 1,500 samples in recent weeks. Credit - Jens B'ttner–Picture Alliance/DPA/AP

When Jeremy Luban first looked over the genetic sequence of the Omicron variant on his phone one day last November, it was five o’clock in the morning. But even at that hour, the University of Massachusetts virus expert knew right away Omicron was a problem.

First, there was the sheer number of new mutations—by some counts, as many as 50, with 30 of them in the critical places that vaccines and drug treatments target. Second, this new version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus seemed to appear out of nowhere, unpredictably and with no immediately obvious connection to previous variants.


“It’s like when you look at the first page of a comic book and all of the Marvel villains have gotten together,” he says. “That was literally what it was like when I saw the sequence. How are we going to survive this? We can deal with one [mutation], but 10 or more of them all at once?”

Other public health officials shared Luban’s alarm, but, it turns out, Omicron, like all villains, has an Achilles’ heel. For people who are vaccinated or who have been exposed to its predecessors, this variant does not seem to cause severe disease. While it can still be dangerous for people who are unvaccinated, or who have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19’s effects, for the vaccinated, there was a glimmer of hope.

Whether justified or not, that glimmer has been flamed into a blazing beacon by some people, who interpret Omicron’s relatively mild effect on health if you’re vaccinated—a sore throat, some flu- or cold-like symptoms, or no noticeable symptoms at all—as a sign that SARS-CoV-2 may be reaching the end of its onslaught. If Omicron isn’t as virulent, then SARS-CoV-2 must be weakening, the thinking goes.

Even leading scientists have been tempted by the idea, admitting that of all the versions of SARS-CoV-2 that have hit humanity over the past two years, Omicron might be the preferable one to get infected with, since it doesn’t make the immunized that sick. And if more vaccinated people are infected with Omicron and develop immunity, that protection, combined with the protection that some people might have from being infected with previous variants, could reach the magical herd immunity threshold—which experts say could be anywhere between 70%-90% of people recovered from or vaccinated against COVID-19—that would finally make SARS-CoV-2 throw up its spike proteins in defeat.

Read more: No, You Should Not Try to Get Omicron

According to some models, by the time Omicron works its way through the population, up to half of people around the globe will have been infected, and presumably immune to the variant. With fewer unprotected hosts to infect, viruses generally begin to peter out—epidemic influenza viruses are a good example—and optimistic models show that after a peak of cases by the end of January and beginning of February, SARS-CoV-2 may follow that path. Under that assumption, COVID-19 would begin its shift from being a pandemic disease to an endemic one, confined to pockets of outbreaks that erupt among immunocompromised populations or the unvaccinated, such as the youngest kids—but are manageable and containable because most people would be protected from the worst effects of the virus.

But there’s also the possibility of a darker timeline, in which the unpredictable nature of SARS-CoV-2 to date drives the next year and beyond. If that occurs, it could mean the sobering possibility that Omicron is not the beginning of the end, but just the beginning of a more transmissible, more virulent virus that could do even more harm than it has already.
Scenario #1: The COVID-19 virus has achieved equilibrium with humans

Let’s start with the more sanguine prediction of what 2022 might hold for SARS-CoV-2.

There are several lines of scientific evidence that support this perspective, including some long-held truisms about how viruses behave as they find more hosts to infect.

Viruses mutate every time they make copies of themselves, becoming more or less infectious, or more or less harmful to their hosts. For a changing virus, it’s all about balance; finding the right mutations that allow it to become more efficient at spreading from one host to another in order to infect cells, while not causing so much disease that the host dies. A dying or dead host won’t help it to keep replicating.

Textbooks teach that viruses, being the relatively simple entities that they are, have limited resources to devote to their one goal: survival. A virus can’t even reproduce on its own, and needs to borrow the reproductive machinery of cells from those that it infects. So, when a genetic mutation makes a virus more adept at spreading from one host to another, with each new host a brand new virus-making factory, it’s a huge advantage. It also suggests that the virus is opting for transmissibility over virulence; it’s in its best interest to spread more quickly and replicate than in causing its host to die.

A resident registers their details at a vaccination point at Cape Flats Development Association (CAFDA) in the Egoli township of Cape Town, South Africa, on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 2021. South African scientists were last week the first to identify the new variant now known as omicron, and while symptoms have been described as mild, the exact risk from the new strain is still uncertain.

Dwayne Senior—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesMore

Omicron appears to be the perfect example of that strategy. What Luban saw in the virus’s genetic sequence last November was a series of changes that made the variant at least several-fold more transmissible than the previous one, Delta, which was already twice as transmissible as the original version of SARS-CoV-2. Such high transmissibility led to Omicron’s quick dominance across the globe—replacing the previous variant, Delta, in a mere two months. “The speed with which Omicron took over was really amazing,” says Shangxin Yang, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at University of California Los Angeles. “It’s almost magical. In two weeks, it went from accounting for 1% of COVID-19 cases around the world to 50% of cases, and in one month, to almost 100% of cases. That’s amazing speed; we could never have imagined any virus could do that.”

Yang points to other lines of evidence that suggests Omicron’s high transmissibility may herald SARS-CoV-2’s last hurrah. Whereas all previous variants of the virus preferentially infected cells deep in the human respiratory tract, nestling all the way into the lungs, Omicron tends to infect the cells in the upper respiratory tract. That makes it more like the common cold, and could explain why, at least among the immunized, Omicron tends to cause milder disease than previous variants.

Read more: What Actually Worries U.S. Doctors About Omicron

Those early versions of SARS-CoV-2 also tended to cause a phenomenon called cell fusion, in which a virus infects one cell, then co-opts other viruses that have infected other cells to fuse into a large viral mass to make a larger virus-making machine. That’s good for the virus, but bad for the patient, as it can trigger inflammation, which can in turn destroy cells and tissues; such inflammation is the hallmark of late-stage, severe COVID-19 disease. Omicron doesn’t lead to such cell fusion and therefore tends to cause less cell damage, which could in part explain, at least in immunized people, why those infected with Omicron tend not to get as sick. Recent data from the U.K. shows that vaccinated people infected with Omicron are two-thirds less likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated people infected with Delta.

“All of this comes together to make the perfect scenario to end the pandemic,” says Yang. “This is exactly how most other pandemics with respiratory pathogens had ended. They spread like fire and then eventually most people either became vaccinated or infected and when the population reached herd immunity, the pandemic ended.”

That doesn’t mean it’s the end of SARS-CoV-2, but it could signal the end of its pandemic phase. From there, COVID-19 should shift into being endemic, in which we learn to live with a virus that has already learned to live with us.

Read more: We Need to Start Thinking Differently About Breakthrough Infections

At this stage, says Yang, “the virus has already accomplished its goal of establishing a balance with its host—humans. It can spread easily among hosts, but not kill them, so it lives among its hosts. The virus has mutated to the point where it just chooses to live among us without causing too much trouble. And in return, we have to learn to live with the virus as if it is just another common cold.”

That’s not just wishful thinking, he says—there’s historical precedent. Already, there are four coronaviruses that have been circulating among us for decades causing mild symptoms similar to the common cold. At some point in history, these coronaviruses could, hypothetically, have burned through the world’s population like SARS-CoV-2 is currently, and then, as more people became infected and therefore protected, these viruses could have become endemic and happy to cause infection where it could, among vulnerable people with weakened immune systems.

“One of these now-common cold coronaviruses may have been responsible for an epidemic in the late 1800s that back then did not cause such mild disease,” says Nadia Roan, an associate investigator at the Gladstone Institutes. “But eventually as community immunity started to build, it became more endemic. It makes sense that—hopefully, potentially—Omicron could become one of the common coronaviruses when we as a community build up enough immunity against it.”
Scenario #2: The virus could keep changing in unpredictable and possibly deadly ways

But a different, troubling scenario might also be possible. There is good evidence that suggests SARS-CoV-2 is an especially unpredictable virus—Omicron, after all, was an entirely new variant that shocked experts with its sudden and efficient ability to spread so quickly. In the fall of 2020, most virologists would have made an educated guess that if a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 were to emerge, it would be a souped up version of Delta—there was even talk of a Delta Plus. But Omicron surprised them all.

“This isn’t a Delta-plus variant,” says Jeremy Farrar, president of the global health research foundation Wellcome Trust. “It’s from left field, and came out of a virus from 2020, which tells us something. We haven’t seen one lineage of this virus evolving into another lineage. We’ve seen things coming from a much broader spectrum. What that means is that we can’t expect the daughter or son of Omicron to then become the next thing we deal with. It could be something that comes from a different part of the virus’s evolutionary path.”

What that suggests is that if we want to be prepared for future, potentially dangerous variants, we need to more closely monitor the virus around the world so we can identify any possibly highly transmissible variants earlier, and hopefully control them better.

Read more: What We Learned About Genetic Sequencing During COVID-19 Could Revolutionize Public Health

And as surprising as it was, Omicron probably didn’t appear overnight. SARS-CoV-2 likely evolved in stages, and the increasing transmissibility of what would become the Omicron variant went largely unnoticed. For example, about a year ago, researchers reported what should have been alarming changes to SARS-CoV-2 in three air passengers flying from Tanzania who tested positive for the virus when they landed in Angola. Those changes helped the virus evade the immune system better, and transmit more efficiently. Looking back, while their viral sequences did not quite match that of the variant we now know as Omicron, they showed enough worrying signs of adaptation to human immune defenses that we should have taken stronger action to contain those cases.

Security stand in front of people as they line up for nucleic acid tests to detect COVID-19 at a mass testing site on January 24, 2022 in Beijing, China. While China has mostly contained the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic, and even though cases remain relatively low, recent outbreaks of the virus including the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant have prompted the government to lockdown people in various major cities and to reinforce stricter health measures. Mask mandates, mass testing, immunization boosters, quarantines, some travel restrictions and bans and lockdowns have become the norm as China continues to maintain its zero-COVID policy.

Kevin Frayer—Getty ImagesMore

“There is no reason to think that Omicron is the result of the virus mutating any faster,” says Luban. “It’s just that we never saw this version as it was developing, wherever that was.” That may have been in someone with a weakened immune system, who was only able to mount a partial defense against the virus, which was just enough selective pressure to push the virus to mutate, and continue mutating, until it hit upon the changes that helped it to become the efficiently spreading virus we now know as Omicron. Since the pandemic began, scientists have reported on cases of immunocompromised patients who have been able to harbor potentially mutating viruses for months or even a year.

In other words, the next Omicron could already be out there, and we wouldn’t know it.

Unless, that is, we dramatically improve our global surveillance efforts, and increase the amount of genetic sequencing of the virus that is done around the world. Laying bare the virus’s genome can provide the earliest hints of any changes, and clues as to which of these aberrations could be dangerous for human health.

If we’d been able to identify the genetic changes that led to the Delta variant early on, for example, we could have prioritized locking down the parts of the world where those mutations were common, says Pardis Sabeti, professor at the center for systems biology at Harvard and member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. “That’s what genomic sequencing can do—stay ahead of diagnoses [of new cases] so we can try to develop countermeasures against something, including developing new therapies. It’s about ‘know thy enemy.’ If your enemy moves, you have to move.” With real-time genetic information, we could better know how to prioritize vaccine and treatment efforts. “The more information you have, the more thoughtful we can be in expending what are necessarily finite resources,” says Sabeti.

Read more: Let’s Not Be Fatalistic About Omicron. We Know How to Fight It

The problem, as Sabeti and Luban note, is that we don’t have such genomic eyes on the virus throughout the globe. Even in the U.S., where sequencing is becoming a priority, the Centers for Disease Control’s National SARS-CoV-2 Strain Surveillance program is sequencing only a small percentage of positive cases—in the single digits—each week. Only about five countries have sequenced double digit percentages of their positive cases so far.

Experts’ best guesses at what comes next

How likely is it that Omicron is indeed SARS-CoV-2’s last hurrah? Farrar puts the odds at 40% to 50%.

One major reason the odds aren’t higher is that Omicron’s genetic changes make it more capable of evading capture by the antibodies the immune system makes, both after natural infection and vaccination. That helps the virus to spread more quickly—up to the tipping point at which if the virus is too good at spreading and causing disease, then it becomes self-defeating.

“The virus doesn’t want to kill its host,” says Dr. Warner Greene, former director of and current senior investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Virology. “That’s counterproductive.” That could explain why Omicron is so impressively transmissible, but, for those with some protection, especially from vaccines, not particularly dangerous—making it possible that this particular version of the virus is the one that will persist in the human population for years and years to come.

That’s the path public health experts hope SARS-CoV-2 will take, following the example of the other common coronaviruses. “The best scenario is for the virus to become so weakened it just becomes a vaccine itself,” says Greene. “It would spread but it wouldn’t cause severe disease. In that kind of setting, the virus would start to lose its foothold and become endemic in very small areas, replicating only when it finds people who are not previously infected or vaccinated.”

That’s assuming, of course, that most of the world’s population is vaccinated, or recovered from being naturally infected with Omicron. The fewer opportunities SARS-CoV-2 has to replicate and produce more copies of itself, the fewer people will become infected, and the fewer people will get sick. Every variant in the virus’s short two-year history is the direct result of unchecked viral replication, so the surest way to turn COVID-19 from a pandemic into an endemic disease is to shut down as many of those opportunities as possible. “If we have learned anything from the past year, it is that variants will continue to emerge,” says Ho. “What will be helpful is to establish growing immunity, either from vaccines or infections. That will help protect the population from the next one.”

Is the omicron variant Mother Nature’s way of vaccinating the masses and curbing the pandemic?

Prakash Nagarkatti, Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, University of South Carolina

Mitzi Nagarkatti, Professor of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, University of South Carolina
Thu, January 27, 2022, 

Preliminary research suggests that the omicron variant may

 potentially induce a robust immune response.

Olga Siletskaya/Moment via Getty Images

In the short time since the omicron variant was identified in South Africa in November 2021, researchers have quickly learned that it has three unique characteristics: It spreads efficiently and quickly, it generally causes milder disease than previous variants and it may confer strong protection against other variants such as delta.

This has many people wondering whether omicron could act as a vaccine of sorts, inoculating enough people to effectively bring about herd immunity – the threshold at which enough of the population is immune to the virus to stop its spread – and end the COVID-19 pandemic.

As immunology researchers at the University of South Carolina who are working on inflammatory and infectious diseases, including COVID-19, we find the characteristics of omicron in the pandemic setting particularly intriguing. And it is these characteristics that can help answer that question.

Some 4.73 billion people across the globe – about 61.6% of the world’s population – have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. In the United States, 63.4% of the population is fully vaccinated with two doses as of late January 2022, while only 39.9% of Americans have received the booster dose. Such low levels of vaccination resulting from vaccine hesitancy and the complexities of the global vaccine supply chain cast doubt on reaching herd immunity through vaccination anytime soon.
How does omicron mimic a vaccine?

All vaccines work on the principle of training the immune system to fight against an infectious agent. Each vaccine, regardless of how it is made, exposes the human or animal host to the critical molecules used by the infectious agent – in this case, the SARS-CoV-2 virus – to gain entry into the host’s cells.

Some vaccines expose the host only to select portions of the virus. For example, the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines use a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, to encode and produce a fragment of the “spike protein” – the knobby protrusion that is expressed on the outside of SARS-CoV-2 viruses – inside a person’s body. These spike proteins are the key way that the coronavirus invades cells, so the mRNA vaccines are designed to mimic that protein and trigger an immune response against it.

In contrast, some vaccines against other infections, such as chickenpox and measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), expose the host to a “live attenuated” form of the virus. These vaccines use small amounts of a weakened form of the live virus. They mimic a natural infection, trigger a strong immune response and afford lasting resistance to infection.

In some respects, omicron mimics these live attenuated vaccines because it causes milder infection and trains the body to trigger a strong immune response against the delta variant, as shown in a recent study that is not yet peer-reviewed from South Africa.

Deliberate infection with omicron is not the answer

While omicron may share certain characteristics with a vaccine, it should not be considered a viable alternative to the existing vaccines. For one, COVID-19 infection can result in severe illness, hospitalization or death, especially in vulnerable individuals with underlying conditions. It can also cause long-term health effects in some people, called long COVID. In contrast, vaccines currently available against COVID-19 have been tested for safety and efficacy.

The high transmission of omicron combined with ongoing vaccination efforts could help attain herd immunity soon and end the most acute phase of the pandemic. However, there is little chance of it eradicating COVID-19, since all signs point to the likelihood that the virus will become endemic – meaning SARS-CoV-2 will be in circulation but will likely not be as disruptive to society.

Thus far, smallpox is the only infectious disease that has been eradicated globally, which shows how difficult it is to fully eliminate a disease. However, it is easier to control an infection effectively. One example is polio, which has been reduced or eliminated in most countries through vaccination.
What happens when the body meets a virus or vaccine

Both viral infections or the mimicking of a virus through vaccination activate a critical component of the immune system, called B cells, in the body. These cells produce antibodies that bind to the virus, preventing it from infecting cells. These antibodies act much like anti-ballistic missiles that shoot down an incoming virus missile. However, once a virus manages to get inside the body’s cells, antibodies are less effective.

A 3-D illustration of antibody proteins attacking a coronavirus pathogen cell.

That’s where another key player in the immune system, called killer T cells, come in. These cells can recognize and destroy a cell as soon as it is infected, thereby preventing the virus from multiplying and spreading further. Think of this as an anti-ballistic missile that detects and destroys the factory where missiles are manufactured.

Immunologists believe that antibodies against COVID-19 prevent an individual from catching the infection, while the killer T cells are crucial in preventing severe disease. Despite its numerous mutations, omicron can trigger a strong killer T cell response. This may explain why the COVID-19 vaccines – by triggering the T cells – have provided strong enough immunity against omicron to, in most cases, prevent hospitalization and death.

But, critically, the first wave of antibodies and killer T cells produced during infection or vaccination last for only a few months. This is why recurrent infections of COVID-19 have occurred even in the vaccinated population, and it’s also why booster shots are needed. In contrast, some vaccines – like the one against smallpox – have been shown to trigger immunity that lasts for several years.
Memory immune response

So what exactly triggers strong and lasting immunity? The lifelong immunity seen in certain infections such as smallpox can be explained by a phenomenon called “immunological memory.”

After the B cells and killer T cells first encounter the virus, some of them get converted into what are called memory cells, which are known to live for several decades. As their name suggests, when memory cells “see” a virus again after initial exposure, they recognize it, divide rapidly and mount a robust antibody and killer T cell response, thereby preventing reinfection.

[Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

For this reason, memory cells are critical for establishing strong, long-lasting immunity. This is evidenced from studies with smallpox in which people that were infected or vaccinated were found to have the antibody response even after 88 years! Why some infections or vaccines trigger long-lasting memory and others do not is under active investigation. Because COVID-19 is only two years old, we researchers don’t know yet how long the memory B and T cells last. Based on recurrent infections, it looks like longer-term immunity does not last very long, but that could also in part be due to the evolution of new variants.

All of these considerations leave room for hope that when new variants of SARS-CoV-2 inevitably arise, omicron will have left the population better equipped to fight them. So the COVID-19 vaccines combined with the omicron variant could feasibly move the world to a new stage in the pandemic – one where the virus doesn’t dominate our lives and where hospitalization and death are far less common.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Prakash Nagarkatti, University of South Carolina and Mitzi Nagarkatti, University of South Carolina.

Read more:

Alpha then delta and now omicron – 6 questions answered as COVID-19 cases once again surge across the globe

What is herd immunity? A public health expert and a medical laboratory scientist explain

Prakash Nagarkatti receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Mitzi Nagarkatti receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

IT'S A CHUPACABRA

Wily 'coyote' -- or maybe dog -- on lam after clawing out of Mt. Pleasant Township shelter

Renatta Signorini, Tribune-Review, Greensburg, Pa.
Thu, January 27, 2022, 12:04 PM·2 min read

Jan. 27—An animal that was undergoing testing to determine if it is a dog or coyote escaped from the Mt. Pleasant Township wildlife rehabilitation center where it was being treated for mange.

Rescuers were searching for the creature Thursday, said wildlife rehabilitator Morgan Barron. Wildlife Works founder, director and senior rehabilitator Beth Shoaf discouraged anyone searching for the animal or trying to capture it.

"If they come across it, they should contact our office so we can have properly trained staff attempt to rescue and capture," Barron said. "They should not try to catch it themselves for the safety of them and the animal."

Barron operates the satellite location for Youngwood-based Wildlife Works. The nonprofit can be reached at 724-925-6862.

Barron found a destroyed empty cage and scratches on the walls Thursday morning when she went to check on the animal. It apparently chewed on a rubber seal around the window until it was able to push it open and tear through the screen.

"This was a concerted effort, the animal really wanted to get out of there," Shoaf said, adding that the organization's volunteers are devastated over the escape.

"We're sick. We're sick because so many people were invested in his well being, besides us," she said. "And then now he's out there again."

Rescuers encouraged residents to check their trail cameras and keep eye out near their homes.

The four-legged, 37-pound animal was being treated for mange after a Fairfield woman spotted it Jan. 17 outside her home. Rescuers weren't sure if it was a dog or coyote so TJ's Rescue Hideaway transported it to Barron, who was caring for it around the clock but limiting human exposure.

"Having been with us for a week, I think he started feeling better and actually doing what he did makes me really, really think it's a coyote as opposed to something else," Shoaf said.

Barron reported Tuesday that the animal was becoming more defensive as medicine kicked in. She said Thursday that its demeanor hadn't changed much.

"Still just laid there and tracked me with his eyes," Barron said.

DNA results are expected in the next couple weeks. Barron intended to release the animal back into the wild if it is a coyote. TJ's Rescue Hideaway was going to regain control if it is a dog.

The creature could return — Barron set up traps and it could seek out help on its own again. The mange condition will continue because the treatment did not last long enough.

Shoaf said she appreciates all of the support and donations the creature has brought to her organization, which rescues songbirds, raptors, raccoons, fawns, small mammals, waterfowl, reptiles and other wildlife. For details on how to donate, visit wildlifeworksinc.org.

Renatta Signorini is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Renatta at 724-837-5374, rsignorini@triblive.com or via Twitter .

Astronomers discovered a 'spooky' spinning object in our galactic backyard, emitting some of the strongest radio beams in the sky


Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Wed, January 26, 2022

An artist’s impression of what the object might look like if it’s a magnetar, with powerful magnetic fields.ICRAR

Astronomers found a spinning object emitting ultra-powerful radio waves in our "galactic backyard."


It's the latest in a series of mysterious radio signals that may point to new types of dead stars.


Astronomers are looking for more of these signals — and hoping ones they've discovered will reappear.

A spinning object in our neighborhood of the galaxy is beaming powerful radio waves at Earth — and astronomers don't know what it is.

The object is smaller than the sun and it must be spinning, because it only appears as an ultra-powerful radio signal for about one minute every 20 minutes, according to the Australian researchers studying it. The signal appeared and disappeared at this rhythm for several hours of telescope observations between January and March 2018. During its minute-long broadcasts, it was among the strongest radio signals in the sky.

"That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer, because there's nothing known in the sky that does that," Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, who discovered the object, said in a press release.

The Milky Way as viewed from Earth, with a star icon showing the position of the mysterious repeating transient.Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker (ICRAR/Curtin)


They haven't detected it since.

Whatever the object is, it's only 4,000 light-years away, which is in our "galactic backyard," Hurley-Walker said. The researchers' best guess is that the mysterious object is the collapsed core of a dead star with an unusually powerful magnetic field.

Tyrone O'Doherty, a PhD student at Curtin University, first discovered the object in archival data that the Murchison Widefield Array telescope collected in 2018. The finding was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

"It's exciting that the source I identified last year has turned out to be such a peculiar object," O'Doherty said in the release.
A handful of 'transient' signals are baffling astronomers

An artist's impression of the mysterious radio signal coming from the center of the Milky Way.Sebastian Zentilomo/University of Sydney

When astronomers detect a signal that appears and disappears, they know they have a dead or dying star on their hands. They call these fleeting signals "transients."

Some transients appear suddenly and radiate radio waves for a few months before fading away. Those are usually supernovas — massive stars collapsing and ejecting their outer layers in a dramatic death. Other transients persist in the sky, flashing on and off in mere seconds, or even milliseconds. Those are pulsars — highly magnetized cores of long-dead massive stars, spinning rapidly and emitting beams of radiation from their poles.

But no types of transient known to astronomers will appear for a full minute every 20 minutes, then suddenly disappear from the record.

The Crab Nebula — a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion — as imaged by Hubble.NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)

This is the latest in a series of mysterious objects astronomers have discovered using low-frequency radio telescopes. Four other disappearing signals have come from unknown objects near the center of the Milky Way. They don't behave like any known transients and don't have much in common with each other, so astronomers have lumped them into a loose catchall category: "galactic center radio transients," or GCRTs.

In their paper, the Australian researchers write that their nearby spinning object resembles one of these GCRTs, which emitted a radio signal every 10 minutes.

Another group of mysterious transients, called "fast radio bursts," comes from other galaxies.

"Usually, when you find one object it suggests that there are probably many more out there in the universe. We just need to look for them," Manisha Caleb, a researcher studying fast radio bursts at the University of Sydney, told Insider in an email. "If anything, this discovery shows us that there are still many unknown unknowns out there in the universe."
There could be more mysterious objects like this one

A segment of the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia.Pete Wheeler, ICRAR

Hurley-Walker and her colleagues think their mystery object could be an "ultra-long period magnetar" — the dead core of a massive star, highly magnetized, spinning very slowly.

Scientists have never detected an ultra-long period magnetar before, but research leads them to believe they exist.

"Nobody expected to directly detect one like this, because we didn't expect them to be so bright," Hurley-Walker said, adding, "Somehow it's converting magnetic energy to radio waves much more effectively than anything we've seen before."

The astronomers who discovered the 10-minute GCRT also speculated that their object could be the elusive long-period magnetar.

Astronomers studying fast radio bursts think those signals might also come from magnetars. Slower spinning could indicate ancient magnetars, explaining why some fast radio bursts come from clusters of stars that are far older than magnetars are known to be.

That makes this new object an exciting discovery, Kiyoshi Masui, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told NBC News: "There's all this stuff that's just waiting to be found."

Hurley-Walker is monitoring the area where the object appeared, using the Murchison Widefield Array, the same telescope that first detected it. The mystery object has not shown up in telescope data since 2018, but Hurley-Walker hopes it will switch back on again. She's also scouring the archives for other objects like it.

"More detections will tell astronomers whether this was a rare one-off event or a vast new population we'd never noticed before," she said.

HIS BITCH LOOKS LIKE HIM
Gov tells Bette Midler to kiss dog's 'heinie' - and shows it



State of the State-West VirginiaWest Virginia Gov. Jim Justice holds up his dog Babydog's rear end as a message to people who've doubted the state as he comes to the end of his State of the State speech in the House chambers, Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022, in Charleston, W.Va. (Chris Dorst/Charleston Gazette-Mail via AP)More

LEAH WILLINGHAM
Fri, January 28, 2022,

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Gov. Jim Justice has a message for singer and actress Bette Midler, who called West Virginians “poor, illiterate and strung out” in a tweet after Sen. Joe Manchin refused to support President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act.

The 70-year-old Republican governor ended his televised State of the State address Thursday night by lifting up his English bulldog and flashing its rear end to the cameras and crowd.

“Babydog tells Bette Midler and all those out there: Kiss her heinie," Justice said, grinning as people applauded and some gave him a standing ovation.


Justice had spent more than an hour touting the state's accomplishments, including two recently announced economic development projects.

“Absolutely too many people doubted us," he said. "They never believed in West Virginia. ... They told every bad joke in the world about us.”

The crowd in the House of Delegates gallery included lawmakers, state Supreme Court justices, agency heads and members of the high school girl's basketball team Justice coaches, who were sitting in the gallery.

Not everyone was amused. In a tweet, West Virginia Democratic Del. Shawn Fluharty took the governor to task.

“The @WVGovernor brought his Babydog and pony show to the State of the State and pulled this stunt as some bold statement. It was nothing short of embarrassing and beneath the office,” he said. “Jim Justice habitually lowers the bar of our state. They don’t laugh with us, but at us.”

Manchin, a Democrat, effectively tanked his party’s signature $2 trillion domestic policy initiative that would have poured billions of dollars into child care, health care and other services.

“What #JoeManchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible,” Midler tweeted. “He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.”

After receiving backlash, Midler apologized “to the good people of WVA” for her “outburst" in follow-up tweet later that day.

The Associated Press sent an email to Midler's publicist Friday requesting comment.

Some Kazakh protesters feel they were tricked into fuelling clan feud

FILE PHOTO: A view shows an artwork depicting Kazakhstan's First President Nazarbayev in Almaty

Olzhas Auyezov and Mariya Gordeyeva
Fri, January 28, 2022,
By Olzhas Auyezov and Mariya Gordeyeva

ALMATY (Reuters) - Some anti-government protesters in Kazakhstan, angry at a steep rise in car fuel prices, said their peaceful demonstrations this month were hijacked by mysterious masked men and that they feel they were tricked into fuelling a clan power struggle.

The protests erupted after a doubling in car fuel prices felt especially strongly in the west of the vast oil-rich Central Asian nation where most drivers use LPG rather than gasoline.

Discontent quickly escalated into the most serious unrest since Kazakhstan broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, with Russian-led peacekeepers drafted in to stabilise the situation.

The aftermath has seen President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev cement his authority, former president Nursultan Nazarbayev appear to lose influence and Nazarbayev's relatives squeezed out of power.

Gaziz Makhambetov, who took to the streets in the western town of Zhanaozen on Jan. 2, said he felt he had been used.

"Now I think that they did it (hike fuel prices) on purpose, to provoke the people," he told Reuters.

He said the protests, which swiftly prompted the authorities to cancel the price hike, look to have been engineered as part of what he and many other Kazakhs say looks like a power struggle between the Nazarbayev clan and the president's allies.

In Almaty, Kazakhstan's biggest city where protests turned violent, Alibek, a taxi driver, said he had taken part in a peaceful demonstration only to watch as highly organised armed men hijacked the event.

"They looked as if they were well-trained state security or military operatives. They moved around the square in small groups, constantly contacting someone by phone."

Tokayev has spoken of an attempted coup and blamed what he called foreign-trained terrorists. He has also criticised the actions of the police and security forces who he said had mishandled the situation. On Friday, he praised Nazarbayev as the founder of modern Kazakhstan.

Zhanbolat Mamai, an opposition politician, said people wearing black and camouflaged clothes and masks attacked him on Almaty's main square on Jan. 5.

"They looked trained and organised," he said.

'TOKAYEV HAS FULL POWERS'

A dissident in Aktau, a Caspian port city about 2,100 km (1,300 miles) west of Almaty, described a group of men dressed in black and wearing masks.

"They did not fear anyone," said the man, who asked not be identified.

Hundreds of masked men also took over Almaty airport on Jan. 5 and Reuters correspondents saw people dressed in black and camouflage and wearing balaclavas on Jan. 6 inside the presidential residence near Almaty mayor's office.

In Aktau, the dissident said the police at one point encouraged protesters to seize the local government building.

Almaty saw the heaviest fighting and destruction. Almaty province is home to the village of Shamalgan, Nazarbayev's birthplace, and is regarded as his clan's stronghold.

Shortly after security forces subdued the unrest, a grim-faced Nazarbayev appeared on state television saying Tokayev had full powers.

"I handed over my powers to President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in 2019 and have since been a pensioner, and I am now (living) in retirement in Kazakhstan's capital and have not gone anywhere," he said, addressing rumours that he was abroad. "President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has full powers."

Although he said there was "no conflict or confrontation within the elite", a number of Nazarbayev's relatives have since been removed or resigned from key positions in state security, government, state companies and lobby groups.

Tokayev said on Friday the authorities were still working to establish those responsible for the violence. He also dismissed "insinuations" about Nazarbayev and praised him as the founder of modern Kazakhstan.

"Let us give due credit to the historic achievements of the first president, focus on his undeniable successes and virtues, and regard the possible mistakes as lessons for the future rulers of our country," Tokayev's office quoted him as saying.

(Editing by Nick Macfie)