Here's what the FDA and CDC wrote in a letter to Florida's surgeon general about his COVID vaccine claims

The agencies said Joseph Ladapo's claims about COVID vaccines are harmful.
ByMary Kekatos
March 13, 2023

Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks with reporters after the Florida Senate confirmed his appointment as the state's surgeon general on Feb. 23, 2022, in Tallahassee, Fla.
Brendan Farrington/AP, FILE

The U.S.Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently sent a letter to Florida's surgeon general debunking his claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

Last month, Dr. Joseph Ladapo had written his own letter to the federal health agencies, saying he was concerned about adverse effects from mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. He claimed there had been an increase in reports made to the CDC's database, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

In the system, anyone -- be it a healthcare professional or the average citizen -- can report an event they think might have been related to a vaccine they received. It serves as an early warning system for federal health officials to sift through the unverified reports to confirm if an investigation or further action is necessary.

In response, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said their agencies are constantly monitoring data to see if there are any potential risks -- but added that Ladapo focusing on a rare, minor events can cause misinformation to spread and can undermine public health efforts.

MORE: Scientists pan analysis Florida's surgeon general posted on COVID-19 vaccines

"It is the job of public health officials around the country to protect the lives of the populations they serve, particularly the vulnerable," the FDA and CDC wrote in their letter. "Fueling vaccine hesitancy undermines this effort."

Here is what's in the letter and why an expert says it can be dangerous to fuel vaccine hesitancy:

"The claim that the increase of VAERS reports of life-threatening conditions reported from Florida and elsewhere represents an increase of risk caused by the COVID-19 vaccines is incorrect, misleading and could be harmful to the American public," the letter states. "Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination do not mean that a vaccine caused the event."

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told ABC News the insistence that a report made to VAERS means the vaccines are not safe is a perfect example of correlation without causation.

"The reporting system is the beginning of a series of investigations that then try to assess whether there might be a causal relationship as opposed to a coincidental relationship," he said. "And that's one of the most misunderstood aspects. Just because there's a report in VAERS does not mean that the vaccine caused the event that's reported."

Schaffner explained someone may have a medical event after receiving the vaccine, but that doesn't mean it was triggered by the vaccine at all, rather it just happened to follow. He likened it to a rooster crowing before the sun rises.


"We all know that the rooster crows before the dawn, but we don't think that the rooster made the sun come up," he said. "So that was coincidence. How do we distinguish coincidence from causality? Because we know if we silence the rooster, the sun will come up anyway."

MORE: DeSantis calls for permanent ban on COVID mask and vaccine mandates. Here's what that means

Schaffner said that the fact VAERS exist, and people can make those reports is evidence that federal officials are being transparent, not that there is anything to hide.

He added that people can tune into meetings of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice to hear the data "presented very carefully, with the proviso that we're going to present the various data and then show you how we have further analyzed the data and done further investigations to address various issues of vaccine safety."

In October 2022, Ladapo recommended against men between ages 18 and 30 receiving the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines due to a "modestly increased" risk of cardiac-related deaths in an analysis posted online. The study was widely criticized by the medical and scientific community due to its poor methodology and never having to go through the rigorous standards of peer-review.

The agencies wrote in their letter that cardiovascular experts found the risk of strokes and heart attacks was lower in people who were vaccinated against COVID-19, not higher.

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Last year, Ladapo also formally recommended against COVID-19 vaccinations for healthy children.

However, multiple peer-reviewed studies, listed in the letter, show that the risk of death, serious illness and hospitalization is higher for unvaccinated people in all age groups.

According to the agencies' most recent estimates, also shared in the letter, those with the updated, bivalent booster had a 9.8-fold lower risk of dying from COVID-19 than unvaccinated people.

Additionally, they were estimated to be 2.4 times less likely to die from COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated but have not received the updated shot.

MORE: Florida's decision not to preorder vaccines for young children will create access issues: White House

"COVID continues to be one of the 10 leading causes of death," Schaffner said. "We can keep two thoughts in our mind at the same time. Yes, it is true that children are less seriously affected than, for example, senior citizens."

He continued, "However, although they are less affected, it doesn't mean they're unaffected. Indeed, they are infected severely enough."

Schaffner advised parents who are concerned to directly speak to their children's pediatricians about the COVID-19 vaccines.

"Speak to the physician in whom you do have confidence and trust the person who has been there for you and your children in the past and is there for them now, and will be in the future," he said.

Sign is seen outside of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) headquarters in White Oak, Md., Aug. 29, 2020.
Andrew Kelly/Reuters, FILE

In a statement to ABC News, the Florida Department of Health blasted back against the federal agencies and claimed the letter is not truthful.

"The response from the federal government is just another redundant display of the same apathetic talking point of 'safe and effective,'" a spokesperson said in a statement. "Googling their fact sheets would have achieved the same result. While the Feds gaslight the American public, Florida pushes for the truth."

The statement continued, "Three inquiries remain unanswered: 1. Access to raw patient-level data to allow for unbiased research. 2. Adequate attention surrounding the risks detected by numerous researchers around the world. 3. Public transparency from the CDC, FDA, and Big Pharma."

Confirmed: Global floods, droughts worsening with warming

 People travel by boat in a flooded street in Trizidela do Vale, state of Maranhao, Brazil, May 9, 2009. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water. 

ISABELLA O'MALLEY
Mon, March 13, 2023 

The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Water. These aren’t merely tough weather events, they are leading to extremes such as crop failure, infrastructure damage, even humanitarian crises and conflict.

The big picture on water comes from data from a pair of satellites known as GRACE, or Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, that were used to measure changes in Earth’s water storage — the sum of all the water on and in the land, including groundwater, surface water, ice, and snow.

“It’s incredible that we can now monitor the pulse of continental water from outer space,” said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved with the study.

“I have a feeling when future generations look back and try to determine when humanity really began understanding the planet as a whole, this will be one of the studies highlighted," he said.

The researchers say the data confirms that both frequency and intensity of rainfall and droughts are increasing due to burning fossil fuels and other human activity that releases greenhouse gases.

“I was surprised to see how well correlated the global intensity was with global mean temperatures,” said Matthew Rodell, study author and deputy director of Earth sciences for hydrosphere, biosphere, and geophysics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The strong link between these climate extremes and rising global average temperatures means continued global warming will mean more drought and rainstorms that are worse by many measures — more frequent, more severe, longer and larger.

Researchers looked at 1,056 events from 2002-2021 using a novel algorithm that identifies where the land is much wetter or drier than normal.

That showed the most extreme rains keep happening in sub-Saharan Africa, at least through December 2021, the end of the data. The rainfall extremes also took place in central and eastern North America from 2018-2021, and Australia during 2011-2012.

The most intense droughts were a record-breaking one in northeastern South America from 2015-2016; an event in the Cerrado region of Brazil that began in 2019 and continues; and the ongoing drought in the American Southwest that has caused dangerously low water levels in two of the biggest U.S. reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Those remain low despite heavy rains this year.

Drought events outnumbered heavy rain events by 10%. Their geographic extents and how long they lasted were similar.

A warmer atmosphere increases the rate at which water evaporates during dry periods. It also holds more water vapor, which fuels heavy rainfall events.

The study noted that infrastructure like airports and sewage treatment plants that were designed to withstand once-in-a-100-year events are becoming more challenged as these extremes happen more often and with more intensity.

“Looking forward into the future, in terms of managing water resources and flood control, we should be anticipating that the wetter extremes will be wetter and the dry extremes will get drier,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, who was not involved with the study.

Seager said it's a mistake to assume that future wet and dry extremes can be managed the same as in the past because “everything’s going to get amplified on both ends of the dry-wet spectrum.”

According to the U.S. National Integrated Drought Information System, 20% of the annual economic losses from extreme weather events in the U.S. are from floods and droughts.

A drastic swing between extreme drought and unprecedented flooding, dubbed “weather whiplash,” is becoming common in some regions.

Water stress is expected to significantly affect poor, disenfranchised communities as well as ecosystems that have been underfunded and exploited.

For example, the United Nations has said that Somalia is experiencing its longest and most severe drought, an event that has caused the deaths of millions of livestock and widespread hunger. Venezuela, a country that has faced years of political and economic crises, resorted to nationwide power cuts during April 2016 as a result of the drought conditions affecting water levels of the Guri Dam.

As for solutions, using floodwaters to replenish depleted aquifers and improving the health of agricultural soil so it can absorb water better and store more carbon are just a few methods that could improve water resiliency in a warming world, the study says.

——

The remains of dead livestock and a donkey are scattered at a camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Dollow, Somalia, Sept. 21, 2022. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water. 

(AP Photo/Jerome Delay, File)


People wade through flood waters in the town of Moree, Northern New South Wales, Australia, Feb. 3, 2012. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water. (AP Photo/Brad Hunter, Pool, File)


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A bridge's columns are marked by the previous water line over the Atibainha reservoir, part of the Cantareira System that provides water to the Sao Paulo metropolitan area, in Nazare Paulista, Brazil, on Jan. 29, 2015. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water. (AP Photo/Andre Penner, File)


 People walk by cracked earth in an area once under the water of Lake Mead at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Jan. 27, 2023, near Boulder City, Nev. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water. 

(AP Photo/John Locher, File)



A Philadelphia police officer rushes to help a stranded motorist during Tropical Storm Isaias, Aug. 4, 2020, in Philadelphia. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum, File)



People enjoy the sunny weather on dry river banks of Germany's most important river Rhine in Cologne, Germany, after a long time of drought, April 27, 2020. The intensity of extreme drought and rainfall has “sharply” increased over the past 20 years, according to a study published Monday, March 13, 2023, in the journal Nature Water.

 (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

A warmer world causes extreme drought and rain. ‘Indisputable’ new research proves it.

Intense drought and heavy rainfall events have occurred more often in the last eight years than the previous decade, a new study finds.

By Kasha Patel
Updated March 13, 2023 

Intense drought and heavy rainfall events occurred more often in the last eight years — the hottest years on record — than in the previous decade, according to a new study released in Nature Water on Monday. Warmer global temperatures are increasing the extent, duration, and severity of these extremes, the authors found, and are having more of an effect than natural climate patterns.

“As the world warms, we’re having more intense and more frequent wet and dry events around the world, which gives us a little insight into what’s going to happen in the future,” said Matthew Rodell, a hydrologist at NASA and co-author of the study. “This is an observation. It’s actual data.”

Rodell said researchers have expected to see more droughts and floods in a warmer world based on climate model predictions, but “it’s been really hard to prove.” This new analysis, which uses direct NASA satellite observations, provides “indisputable” evidence that warmer global temperatures are increasing such extreme events, Rodell said.

The team analyzed 1,056 extreme events from 2002 to 2021, using observations from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) satellites. The satellites detect subtle variations in Earth’s gravity field, which are used to measure water storage — including groundwater, soil moisture, snow, ice and surface waters — on land. Comparing current data to a longer-term average, the researchers can map anomalies and determine where water storage on land has increased or decreased. In this study, Rodell and NASA hydrologist Bailing Li used an algorithm that identified areas above or below average for a period of time by at least 16 percent.



While natural and recurring climate patterns, such as El Niño or La Niña, may have exacerbated some of these events, the team found that warmer global temperatures had a greater influence than other factors. Rodell said a correlation analysis of the extreme events found that no other factors were as “high as the correlation with the global mean temperature.”

The team found extreme dry and wet events have been increasing since 2002, but the most intense events have been occurring more frequently since 2015 — when Earth began its run of record-breaking warm years. An average of four extreme events occurred each year since 2015, compared to only three annual events over the previous 13 years.

The study adds to existing research, using rain gauge data, climate models and tree rings, on how a warmer atmosphere is affecting extreme wet and dry events, said climate scientist Daniel Swain, who was not involved in the study. Given the accumulation of evidence, he said it’s “probably not coincidental that the most extreme hydrologic events that you could observe in this record occurred during the warmest years of the record.”

“I think if this were just coming out of the blue and this is the only evidence we had that hydroclimate extremes were becoming greater in a warming climate, it wouldn’t be super strong evidence unto itself,” said Swain, a researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But because it exists in the context of other research, I actually think it’s more interesting and more important.”

On average, the team found a wet or dry extreme event lasted about five to six months. About 70 percent lasted six months or less, and another 10 percent lasted a year or more. Globally, there were 10 percent more dry events than wet events. Wetter events tended to occur near the equator, while drier conditions occurred at the mid-latitudes.

Swain said the analysis provides almost direct measures of the amount of water on Earth’s surface at a given time and location, which is helpful because there is a “really incomplete rain observation network globally,” especially outside of wealthy nations.

The most intense event overall over the past two decades — dry or wet — was a wet event that engulfed all of central Africa, which began in 2019. Water levels at Lake Victoria rose by one meter and caused flooding in the surrounding region. It was three times as big as any other wet or dry event in their observations, Rodell said. “It’s just amazing how huge it was in terms of intensity,” he said.

The second most intense wet event occurred from 2018 to 2021 over much of central and eastern North America. During this time period, Rodell said parts of the United States were receiving a lot more rain and snow than normal. Aquifers, lakes and rivers were full and soil was generally moist. Some flooding occurred in the Midwest.

The most intense dry event observed was a short-lived but record-breaking drought in northeastern South America from 2015 to 2016, the study said. Three of the other most intense droughts have occurred in recent years as well, including drought in Brazil and the southwestern United States and recent drought across Europe.

Many of these extreme dry and wet events, including the flood in central Africa, drought in Brazil and the southwestern United States, are still ongoing in 2023.

The team did exclude some areas, such as central California and northern India, where people have pumped groundwater and depleted aquifers. Rodell said these depletions were caused more from direct human water management rather than meteorological drought.

“These findings not only verify model predictions, but also the ‘dry gets drier, wet gets wetter,’ hypothesis,” groundwater scientist Melissa Rohde wrote in a separate review article that appeared in Nature on Monday.

Seeing an increase in both dry and wet events may sound counterintuitive, but the physics are two sides of the same coin. During a dry event, the air is warmer and can drive more evaporation from the surface. During a wet event, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture (about 4 percent more for every degree Fahrenheit the atmosphere warms) and transport more moisture into an area.

Swain said that such projected increases in intense dry and wet events was largely a prediction but had not been confirmed in observations. Today, the evidence is strong.

“As the world warms, it’s fair to say that we may expect to see more frequent, more intense droughts and wet events,” said Rodell. “Here, we have the evidence that’s already happening.”



By Kasha Patel edits and reports on the weather, climate and environment for the Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post. Before joining The Post, she covered Earth sciences and satellite research for NASA. Twitter

 The aftermath of the Syrian earthquake and the UN's failure

Inadequate aid to northwest Syria in a complicated political climate

Written byمجلة بيننا Baynana

Translated byHoney Hashem

Translation posted 13 March 2023 23:51 GMT 

Read this post in عربي

Rescuing team in Aleppo in the aftermath of the Earthquake. Photo by Salem Mohammadi for Tasnim News Agency, Wikimedia Commons CC BY 4.0. Fair use

This piece was published by Baynana Magazine on February 12, 2023. An edited version is republished here, under a content-sharing agreement.

The dangers of earthquakes continue in Syria and Turkey, as a new aftershock measuring 4.6 magnitude struck Hatay in southern Turkey on February 12. The aftershock was felt by residents in northwestern regions of Syria at 1:30 a.m. 

In the three weeks following the earthquake on February 6, more than 10,000 aftershocks of light to medium intensity were felt in the northwestern regions of Syria.

The Syrian civil defense force, commonly referred to as The White Helmets, has issued a warning to civilians, urging them to remain vigilant and cautious, especially in areas where buildings are in a state of disrepair, as well as in the vicinity of collapsed buildings and ramshackle walls. Civilians have been advised to immediately move to open spaces as soon as they feel any tremors, in order to ensure their safety.

As of February 11, the civil defense teams had recorded more than 2,167 deaths and over 2,950 injuries as a result of the recent earthquake in northwestern Syria. More than 55,700 deaths had been confirmed as of 10 March 2023.

Despite harsh conditions, including the need to work amidst the rubble of collapsed buildings, search operations kept going to recover the bodies of the deceased in many areas of the countryside of Idlib and Aleppo.

Bab Al-Hawa crossing on the Syrian-Turkish border announced on February 11 through its social media accounts that approximately 1,100 bodies had been transported through the crossing:

As of the publication date, it has been reported that about 1,100 bodies of our people who died in the earthquake that struck southern #Turkey and northern #Syria have been transported to the Babal-Hawa crossing. The staff at the crossing are still working 24/7 to deliver the remaining bodies of our people, which are arriving successively to their families.

According to the Ministry of Health of the Bashar al-Assad regime, the number of deaths in the regions of Halab, Latakia, and Aleppo, which are under the control of the regime, has reached 1,408, with 2,341 individuals injured. As a result, the total number of casualties across Syria, as of the date of this publication, has exceeded 4,175 deaths and thousands injured. However, the number has reached more than 48,400 dead in Turkey and more than 7,200 dead in Syria as of March 10.

According to the Bashar al-Assad regime‘s Ministry of Health, he number of deaths in the regime-controlled regions of Halab, Latakia, and Aleppo has reached 1,408, with 2,341 people injured. As of March 10, the figure had risen to more than 48,400 dead in Turkey and more than 7,200 dead in Syria.

Inadequate aid to northwest Syria

The aid that was delivered to Syria after nearly a week after the earthquake was not sufficient to cope with the scale of the disaster.

On February 9, the first United Nations aid convoy reached northwest Syria via the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, an area outside the Syrian regime's control. The region has suffered greatly from the earthquake and is one of the hardest hit areas. The convoy consisted of six trucks loaded with essential food supplies and hygiene kits, which were urgently needed to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in the area.

Mazen Alloush, the media officer at the Bab al-Hawa border crossing, informed AFP that the first UN aid convoy “arrived today after four days from the earthquake.” However, the White Helmets rescue group said they were disappointed by the aid, “This is certainly not special aid and equipment for search and rescue teams.”

The second aid convoy reached Jenderes city in northern Aleppo following the earthquake on February 11 was from Saudi Arabia. The city has been deemed the most heavily impacted, with over 580 reported fatalities by the civil defense.

On February 12 a delegation from the Qatari Red Crescent arrived in Idlib to assist with search and rescue operations and provide aid to those affected by the earthquake. The team comprised two specialized teams that had been dispatched to northern Syria. The first team consisted of five Egyptian doctors, while the second was a three-member Spanish rescue team.

Aid to regions controlled by the al-Assad regime and Turkey

Despite the complicated political relations between Bashar al-Assad's regime and the rest of the world, some countries have set politics aside to provide assistance without directly engaging with the Assad regime.

In a statement to Baynana magazine, Franz Gillen, the International Communications Coordinator at CESAL, a Spanish humanitarian organization that runs refugee programs, confirmed that they had deployed serval teams to both Syria and Turkey in response to the earthquake. 

Franz Gillen confirmed that on February 9, CESAL sent a team of volunteer cooks to the disaster areas as part of the emergency hospital team that was dispatched. He also noted that the Spanish government decided to send aid to Turkey following their request for assistance. He added: 

Along with the Spanish Agency for International Development (AECID), is part of the emergency response team called START, which can establish a field hospital within 72 hours anywhere in the world. In this instance, the field hospital was sent to Hatay, Turkey.

Gillen clarified that the CESAL team dispatched to Syria will be working in the cities of Aleppo and Latakia, which are under the control of Bashar al-Assad's regime.

Meanwhile, according to a source at the King Salman Center for Relief and Humanitarian Aid who spoke to the Agence France-Presse (AFP), Saudi Arabia has pledged to provide aid to areas affected by the Syrian conflict, including those under the control of the al-Assad regime. The source confirmed that the aid will be sent directly to Aleppo International Airport and the Syrian Red Crescent in Damascus. However, the source also stated that there are no direct communication channels with the Syrian government.

Several Arab countries have announced that they are sending search teams and planes loaded with aid to areas under Assad's control in Syria, including Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates.

The aid received was nowhere near what was needed in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Criticism of the UN's performance

Activists placed the United Nations flag upside down on collapsed buildings in northwest Syria that were affected by an earthquake, condemning the lack of assistance provided to those trapped under the rubble. 

Raed Al Saleh, the director of the civil defense organization in Syria, has criticized the United Nations for the delayed arrival of aid to the northwest region of Syria. He has called for an investigation into the reasons for the UN's failure to deliver aid to the region.

As a result, Martin Griffiths, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, has acknowledged that the United Nations has not been successful in assisting Syrians in the northwest region of the country, and apologized for it

Commission of Inquiry Blames Regime, UN 

for Delayed Aid Delivery to Syrians

Tuesday March 14th, 2023 by SYRIA TV (Opposition website)        

On February 9th, the first UN aid convoy, consisting of six trucks carrying food and cleaning materials, entered northern Idleb, according to Syria TV.

On Monday, a commission of inquiry appointed by the United Nations attributed the delays in delivering emergency aid to Syrians after February’s earthquake to the international organization, the Syrian regime, and other parties.

According to Reuters, there is mounting criticism of the United Nations for its handling of the aftermath of last month’s earthquake, which claimed the lives of approximately six thousand Syrians, predominantly in areas near the Syrian-Turkish border in northwestern Syria. This criticism coincides with the recent findings from the UN-appointed commission of inquiry.

Asma al-Assad Calls Sham: Another Political Exploitation of Syria’s Disasters

In a statement, Committee Chairman Paulo Pinheiro expressed that despite some heroic efforts amidst immense suffering, there has been a significant failure on the part of the Syrian regime government and the international community, including the United Nations, to promptly provide essential aid to Syrians in critical need.

Syrians felt let down 

The statement further noted that the involved parties could not come to an agreement to cease hostilities and facilitate the passage of life-saving aid through any feasible means, leaving Syrians feeling “abandoned and neglected by those responsible for safeguarding them during their most trying moments.”  

On February 9th, the first UN aid convoy, consisting of six trucks carrying food and cleaning materials, entered northern Idleb through the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey. 

According to AFP, Mazen Alloush, the media officer at the Bab al-Hawa crossing, stated that the initial UN aid convoy arrived “four days after the earthquake,” despite being anticipated to arrive before the disaster occurred.

 

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.

Syria On The Brink: After 12 Years Of Conflict, Earthquakes Impact Signals A Country Pushed Beyond Limits

Tuesday, 14 March 2023
Press Release: Save The Children

As Syria enters its 13th year of conflict on March 15, the recent earthquakes that have hit the country have compounded the already dire humanitarian crisis after years of suffering, pushing the country to the brink, Save the Children said.

The conflict has led to multiple displacements, widespread poverty, and millions of Syrian children suffering repeated shocks only exacerbated by the earthquakes that have displaced over 50,000 children from their homes.

Diaa-, 51, his wife and two sons lost their home in Aleppo after the earthquakes hit the country on the 6 February. They had already been displaced multiple times over the course of Syria’s conflict. He said:

" I lost count of how many times I was displaced. We went through a lot. We have been under siege twice and we almost died. Eventually, we were displaced to the north. We fled and were displaced multiple times to many places, to square zero every time."

Entire neighbourhoods in Northern Syria have been rendered uninhabitable, and collective shelters have become more overcrowded than ever. The area worst affected by the earthquakes, that impacted at least 8.8 million people in Syria, is home to some of the country’s most vulnerable people, who had already been forced to flee their homes multiple times due to the conflict and a crippling economic crisis.

Thousands of families in Syria are living in unfinished buildings, informal settlements, and makeshift tents. Diaa- added:

"We found a house to live in. In reality, it was not inhabitable. No doors, no windows, absolutely nothing. Even the walls were not insulated. We suffered a lot. When it rained, water would get inside the house."

"We live in a huge trauma, and we never imagined having this life. Even these tents, they are made of thin plastic. When wind got stronger for a couple of nights, we had to keep fixing the tent to the ground from all sides using rocks. The earthquake came on top of all this."

Keeping warm has become even more challenging due to fuel and electricity shortages. Displaced families in Syria are increasingly resorting to desperate measures, with multiple reports of children being injured by explosive remnants of war while collecting firewood.

Fadel- is 10 years old and has lived in tents most of his life. He helps his family of nine by collecting firewood after school six days a week, to keep warm and be able to cook. He said:

"We came to the tents eight years ago. I have a three-year-old brother with a disability. I remember at least three times when we had no food and I slept out of hunger. I collect firewood daily, except Fridays. The road is difficult because it is slippery, and there are holes on it."

In 2023, Syria remains one of the world’s largest displacement crises. According to the latest Humanitarian Needs Overview for Syria, more than 15 million people across the country were already dependent on humanitarian aid to meet their basic needs. It’s estimated there were 1.9 million displaced people in opposition-held areas of North West Syria alone before the earthquakes, most of whom were women and children. Following the earthquakes, at least 86,000 people were reportedly newly displaced, more than half of whom are children.

Kathryn Achilles, Advocacy, Media and Communications Director for Save the Children’s Syria Response, said:

"For millions of Syrians, this week marks the beginning of the 13 th year of living under the shadow of conflict and displacement , a fate they never chose for themselves. Now the earthquakes have made children afraid of the very ground they walk on, and the fragile walls they used to call home. How much more can Syrian children be expected to endure?

"They have shown remarkable resilience over the past 12 years, but enough is enough. We cannot be content with merely helping children to survive, living in tents, reliant on humanitarian assistance.

"After the earthquakes, we must act to help children recover. To ensure they have safe schools to attend, and their parents have decent jobs to provide for them. Above all, Syrian children must be able to build the bright futures that they see for themselves."

Save the Children has been providing assistance to the children in need in Syria since 2012. Save the Children programming combines emergency and life-saving interventions with early recovery activities that support the restoration of basic services and aims to reach every last child in need.

As part of the earthquake response, Save the Children is delivering aid through partners, responding in Idlib, Aleppo and Raqqa governorates, and providing emergency food rations, blankets, tents and warm clothing. Save the Children is also making sure children and their families can keep clean, healthy and protected from illness and diseases by providing safe drinking water, and essential hygiene and sanitation items.

© Scoop Media

 

In Defense Of Taxing Stock Buybacks – OpEd

 March 14, 2023 

By Dean Baker

The Biden administration is getting a lot of grief over its proposal to tax share buybacks at a 4.0 percent rate. They are being denounced as economic illiterates, and worse. I’m going to side with the economic illiterates, and say Biden is very much on the mark with this proposal.

To be clear, I have written before that I don’t agree with most of the complaints directed against buybacks. It makes little difference as a practical matter whether companies pay out money to shareholders as buybacks or dividends.

The one area where there is a clear difference is the tax treatment, but even here the case is overstated. Most people who hold stock have it in 401(k)s or other retirement accounts. For those of us in this group, it doesn’t make an iota of difference whether money is paid out as dividends or buybacks.

When we withdraw money after retiring, it will be taxed as ordinary income, regardless of whether the accumulation was due to rising share prices or dividends. (The same story applies to Roth IRAs, where the payout is tax free in both cases, since the money was taxed going in.)

This point is actually worth emphasizing for a moment, since politicians (mostly Republican politicians) often lie about it. When they claim to be helping middle class stockholders by reducing the capital gains tax, this is largely a lie. Few middle-class people own much stock outside of their retirement accounts. Since lowering the capital gains tax has no impact on the tax paid on retirement accounts, cuts in the capital gains tax will affect few middle-income people.

There is the issue of taxes on stock held outside of retirement account. Share buybacks have the advantage to these shareholders that they can defer the taxes on their gains to when they choose to sell their stock, whereas the tax on dividends is paid in the year the year dividend is paid.

But even here the impact can be overstated. Most people cannot afford to hold stock forever. Maybe they will sell it a year or two down the road, and at that point they will pay the tax. (Those of us who want financial transactions taxes, in part to reduce the rate at which stocks turn over, can’t also complain about stock being held forever.)

Of course, we do have some very rich families, the Waltons have volunteered to be the poster children, who have tens of billions in stock that they literally can hold forever. For these families, having companies pay out profits as buybacks rather than dividends does make a difference.

Insofar as the Biden tax proposal encourages companies to shift more of their payouts to dividends, this is a good thing. We will effectively be raising the tax rate on the very rich.

FWIW, I don’t accept the idea that companies are foregoing good investment opportunities by buying back shares. I’m generally inclined to think that companies invest where they see profitable opportunities. I really don’t want to encourage them to throw money away on silly projects. Do we want Elon Musk to have more money to spend on his Boring Company, which has mostly dug lots of holes to nowhere?

To my view, the great virtue of Biden’s proposed tax on share buybacks is that it is a way to raise the corporate income tax, taking back part of the cut that Trump gave the corporations in 2017. For whatever reason, Biden was able to get people like senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who would not go along with raising the corporate income tax, to sign on to a tax on share buybacks. I won’t try to explain their thinking, but if this is how we get to raise the corporate income tax, do it. And, if we can make it 4.0 percent rather than the current 1.0 percent, that’s even better.

I’m going to confess to an ulterior motive here. I have argued for switching the basis for the corporate income tax from profits to returns to shareholders (capital gains and dividends). The logic is that we don’t see corporate profits directly, corporate accountants tell us what their companies’ profits were. This provides enormous opportunity and incentive for tax gaming. Enormous resources are wasted in this process and we collect far less in taxes from corporations as a result.

By contrast, returns to shareholders are completely transparent. We can get the data on the increase market capitalization and annual dividend payouts from dozens of financial websites. This would make it possible to calculate the tax liability of all publicly traded companies on a single spreadsheet (that is all companies’ taxes could be calculated on the same spreadsheet). (Privately traded companies pose a problem, but we can worry about that later.)

Anyhow, I have long been a big fan of establishing facts on the ground. We can spend forever arguing over what is best in theory, but when we see something in practice, it is harder to argue over.

I am quite confident that the tax on share buybacks will be just about the most efficient tax in history, in the sense that the amount of money spent to enforce it will be trivial compared to the revenue collected. After all, if Apple spent $25 billion on share buybacks last year, it owes the government $250 million at the 1.0 percent tax rate. What is there to argue over? Is Apple going to say that all those press reports of share buybacks were lies?

This will be true for every company. They have to publicly disclose their share buybacks. Once this is done, we know how much tax they owe: full stop.

If the public sees this, then maybe we can get policy types to get a little bit interested in designing a corporate income tax that we can actually collect. And, in the process, we can put the tax gaming business out of business.

Let’s hear it for Dark Brandon!

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy.