UK
The latest racist attack from The Times is truly chilling


Fréa Lockley
28th July 2020

On 27 July, the Times published a vile racist attack on UK minority groups who already face daily “pervasive prejudice and discrimination”. And this comes as the Conservative government is pushing forwards with draconian legislation that will have a devastating impact for members of the UK’s Gypsy, Roma, Traveller (GRT) communities, as well as protesters and activists.




Many Travellers face difficulties accessing basic medical treatment. Meanwhile, tabloid papers perpetuate dangerous racist attacks on GRT groups. Now, a former Tory speechwriter has added further fuel to the fire.

“The last acceptable form of racism?”

In 2017, a report from the Traveller Movement identified GRT discrimination as “the last acceptable form of racism”. An article by David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges has highlighted just how disturbing and prevalent this is in the establishment media.

n 24 July, three teenagers were convicted of manslaughter for the abhorrent killing of PC Andrew Harper. Many, including Harper’s family, feel that the three should have been charged with murder. Subsequently, many media outlets drew attention to the killers’ Traveller status.

Foges’ Times column took this to the next level. According to Foges, it’s wrong “to completely ignore the cultural context of this crime”. She says the killers’ “education was in petty crime” and calls to “end the squeamishness that prevents open talk about Travellers”. She continues:




Since the Equality Act 2010 recognised Gypsy, Roma and Travellers as ethnic minorities, race has been used to shield this culture from due scrutiny. Sensible questions about why those within these groups are more likely to be in prison, more likely to be illiterate or more likely to suffer domestic violence prompt cries of racism.

People pointed out quite how racist this attack really is:


Some ‘high brow’ racism from @ClareFoges at the @thetimes

Apparently we are using the Equality Act to shield us from scrunity and not as a defence again systematic racism.

She is shamelessly using the tragic murder of PC Harper to be prejudice against the GRT community. https://t.co/9sNO02Gfxr
— Gypsy, Roma & Traveller Activist (@GRTactivist) July 27, 2020


Not least, because Foges has form on this topic:


This is just grand – didn’t realise the Times had its own Racism against Travellers correspondent https://t.co/uf082gCz44
— Fisun Guner (@FisunGuner) July 27, 2020


Twisted

What’s so disturbing about Foges’ column is the way she twists inequalities faced by GRT communities:

Travellers die about ten years earlier than the rest of us. They have higher rates of chronic illness. Their suicide rates are six times higher. …

As long as the culturally sensitive force-field exists around Travellers, [their] children are abandoned to a fate that should not be tolerated in 21st-century Britain.

This is part-based in tragic fact. But Foges uses this as evidence against people when it’s actually an indictment of the systemic racism and inequality GRT communities face.

Although Foges bemoans the convicted killers’ lack of formal education, people on social media also pointed out the huge inequalities and discrimination GRT children face. Conservative-led cuts have made this even more difficult:

In 2011 councils across the UK slashed their dedicated Traveller education teams in response to the Conservative Governments austerity policies. This may have some relevance 'to not being able to read or write': https://t.co/SjFf4ZyR8O
— Travellers' Times (@TravellersTimes) July 27, 2020

Minority groups

In the 2011 census, an estimated 63,000 people identified as GRT – although this figure is likely to to be an underestimation.

Gypsy, Traveller and Irish Traveller communities are recognised as ethnic minority groups. As such, they have – in principle – the same protections as other ethnic minorities in the UK under the Equality Act. But as a 2017 report found, GRT “experiences of prejudice are seemingly so common that they have almost become normalised”.

There is also another community of so-called “New Travellers”. This includes van, truck, and boat dwellers recognised as ‘cultural’ rather than ‘ethnic’ Travellers. All groups suffer from racism and discrimination. As support group Friends Families and Travellers explains:

Mcrimination on a daily basis as a result of negative stereotypes and deeply ingrained cultural prejudices.

The statistics are shocking. In 2017, 91% of GRT people reported facing “discrimination because of their ethnicity”. Meanwhile, 77% had “experienced hate speech or a hate crime”.

As people on embers of the Gypsy and Traveller communities can often face harassment and dissocial media pointed out, Foges’ article epitomises and perpetuates this prejudice:

Just today, the Times actually published this. Just imagine it being published about Jewish culture, or black culture, or any other. Gypsy Travellers say prejudice against them is the last acceptable racism… pic.twitter.com/6mAs3Mp1Ns
— The SKWAWKBOX (@skwawkbox) July 27, 2020

Prime example of how the media feeds anti Traveller hate and racism leading to our suicide rates being seven times higher than the settled community. Shame on you @ClareFoges https://t.co/2kGCFjm947
— Rosemarie Maughan (@Minceirbeoir) July 27, 2020

Persecution of GRT communities isn’t new. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) estimates around 20,000 “Roma and Sinti men, women and children” were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. According to HMDT:

[This persecution] has parallels with that of the Jewish people. Both populations were targeted on the grounds of their race and had previously suffered centuries of discrimination.
\
Travellers, Gypsies, & Roma experienced vicious & murderous persecution and genocide alongside Jews during the Shoah

As a Jewish person, I stand in solidarity with them against this vile bigotry – which is being increasingly mainstreamed in the media and in government policy pic.twitter.com/GiHvqjoqKr
— Nadine Batchelor-Hunt (@nadinebh_) July 27, 2020

Others, meanwhile, pointed out how dangerous and damaging these attacks are:

1/4 It's been a difficult day today seeing a number of articles, comments, and posts that openly attack Gypsy and Traveller communities and perpetuate racism and hate speech.
We know that seeing this kind of hatred can be painful to deal with.
— FFT (@GypsyTravellers) July 27, 2020

Individuals commit crimes, not communities. Stop blaming an entire race, ethnicity or religion for the actions of one person.
— mags (@magshutchinson_) July 27, 2020

Exactly this. People need to realise it's not a whole community who conspire to commit crime, it's a select few making their own choices. Justice has been served. RIP to PC Harper and I hope his family stay strong through this traumatic time. Our thoughts are with them 🙏🏻 https://t.co/EB5dRvwrqS
— TravellersAgainstRacism (@TravellerRacism) July 27, 2020


Establishment-backed racism

On 13 July, home secretary Priti Patel announced that the government will push forward legislation that discriminates against GRT communities even further.

The Travellers’ Times reported that lawyers are set to challenge these “new ‘hostile’ anti-Traveller laws”. It also noted:

the criminalisation of trespass and the other threatened laws could also criminalise homeless camps and protest camps and is an attack on the civil liberties of everyone – not just Gypsies and Travellers.

Awareness of racial inequality has reached new prominence through the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Calls have gone out from GRT communities to show solidarity with BLM activists. The government has now been accused of “dragging its feet” on tackling racism. Attacks on GRT communities from Murdoch’s racist media empire and Patel’s intention to criminalise more people highlight the challenges we face. Wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head, racism can and must be challenged in all its forms.

Featured image via The Times (modified)

Sexual dinosaurs
The charge of ‘feminist bias’ is used to besmirch anyone who questions sexist assumptions at work in neuroscience

Malibu, California, 1957. Photo by Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

Cordelia Fine
is a psychologist, writer and professor in the history and philosophy of science programme at the University of Melbourne. Her latest book is Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (2017). She lives in Melbourne.

A few years ago, a friend heard a speaker at an academic conference make a disparaging reference to a new book that, supposedly, denied that there were any sex differences between men’s and women’s brains and behaviour. The author of the dreadful tome – ‘this woman from Melbourne’ – turned out to be me. Afterwards, my friend asked the speaker if he’d actually read my book. He hadn’t.

Sadly, this is the type of anecdote for which my colleagues and I can provide many examples. It draws on a powerful narrative in which anyone who criticises accounts of evolved sex differences is seen as refusing to face up to the role of biology. Yet the question I tackled in the offending book, Testosterone Rex (2017), is an important and active one in evolutionary science and neuroscience. How is it that the genetic and hormonal components of sex can create two distinctly different reproductive systems – and yet human male and female behaviour shows itself to be flexible, diverse and often surprisingly similar?

In trying to understand that puzzle, I’ve used the work of the many scientists whose research has revealed the distorting effects of entrenched assumptions about sex differences. Some of this research is informed by a feminist awareness of how science has embedded cultural biases and stereotypes into its theories, hypotheses, methods and interpretations. But this kind of work also comes with an occupational hazard: accusations of being a politically motivated ‘sex-difference denier’. According to psychologists and neuroscientists whose positions I’ve criticised, I put politics before science, confuse equality with similarity, and wish to abolish femininity entirely. This ungrounded ad feminam commentary has even extended to suggestions that my use of the acronym ‘T’ for ‘testosterone’, when discussing its effects on the brain, indicates that I am ‘conflicted about how to incorporate this experimental evidence into [my] world view’, and that my work is a misguided reaction to experiences at dinner parties listening to chauvinists invoke the ‘caveman’ defence of bad male behaviour.

The claim here is that progressive politics lead to the rejection of particular findings or theories – not on intellectual grounds, but because they’re politically unpalatable or inconvenient. The evolutionary psychologists David Buss and William von Hippel recently laid this charge against the field of social psychology, my own work presented as an exhibit for the prosecution. They argued that Left-leaning political ideology has led to the adoption of a ‘blank slate’ view of human nature and group differences.

So, we seem to be at an impasse over what poses the greater risk to the study of the human mind: gender bias or feminist bias. These two perspectives might seem poles apart, but they have something fundamental in common. They’re both concerned about threats to scientific objectivity – the principle that, as much as possible, science should remain untarnished by politics, cultural bias, interests or preferences. This commonality is good news. It means that those who take opposing sides in these debates don’t necessarily need to be adversaries by default. As scientists, we should all be able to get behind correctives that support scientific objectivity. Unfortunately, those in the thick of the controversy often overlook this important overlap of interests.


Sign up to our newsletter
Updates on everything new at Aeon.



Daily

Weekly

See our newsletter privacy policy here

Something that’s particularly unhelpful in debates about objectivity is a model of science where researchers simply dig facts out of nature, like a farmer harvesting turnips. This is not how science works. Facts about the world don’t passively lie in wait for scientists to uncover them. It’s impossible to do science without background theories and assumptions that influence the many decisions scientists must make: which hypotheses to test; what methods are appropriate; which populations to sample (and what size of sample); how to characterise and analyse data; how to interpret results; which findings to emphasise.

The feminist psychologist Sandra Bem coined the phrase ‘the lenses of gender’ to capture the particularly pervasive and pernicious assumptions people sometimes harbour about men and women. One such hidden assumption, ‘gender polarisation’, relies on the idea that there are ‘mutually exclusive scripts for being male and female’. Since scientists, too, are people, this lens can sharpen the focus on sex differences even in scientific research – and blur sex similarities. Take the popular view of sexual selection based on what are known as ‘Bateman’s principles’, named in honour of the 20th-century biologist Angus Bateman. His important and inventive research was inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which held that males are under greater selection pressure to be chosen as a mate. Hence the evolution of male characteristics such as big antlers (for beating off the competition) or elaborate plumage (to draw in crowds of admiring females). If so, Bateman reasoned, there should be greater variation in reproductive success in males than in females – that is, a wider spread between the least and most successful individuals. (This is because, like natural selection, sexual selection needs variations in reproductive success to work.)

Bateman’s research with fruit flies, published in 1948, reported that males did indeed show more variation in reproductive success, and that there was a stronger link between promiscuity and reproductive success in males than in females. Bateman’s principles are the foundation of the familiar idea that, because dispensing sperm is cheap, but harbouring and nurturing an egg is costly, females tend to be sexually choosy and inclined to reserve their favours for the best male on offer. Meanwhile, males – who, unlike females, have much to gain from winning multiple mates – are ardent and competitive by near-universal evolutionary design.

But consider an unexpected observation made in the 1970s by the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: female langur monkeys in South Asia tended to have multiple sexual partners. This flew in the face of received wisdom; theoretically, as Hrdy drolly observed, female promiscuity ‘should not have existed’. But by paying attention to females, she produced unexpected data that challenged existing scientific models.

To my critics, my account is distorted by feminist bias. Pointing out bias becomes, in itself, evidence of bias

Hrdy’s observations with langurs also resonate with more recent critical scrutiny of Bateman’s work with fruit flies. As the evolutionary biologists Zuleyma Tang-Martinez and Brandt Ryder note, Bateman’s conclusion that only males benefit from promiscuity applied to just two of his six series of experiments. The other four series showed the same beneficial pattern for females, albeit to a weaker extent. Yet Bateman focused on the results that fit the polarised notion of competitive males and choosy females. This selective emphasis was then perpetuated by others, meaning that the unexpected benefits to females of multiple mates gained no traction in the literature. Analysing the last two series separately was a decision, part of the construction of a scientific finding, made for reasons that remain unclear. A subsequent re-analysis of all of Bateman’s data, pooled together, led to a finding of sex similarity in the effects of multiple mates on reproductive success. The researchers Patricia Gowaty and Brian Snyder, concluded that:

[T]here is no serious statistical basis in Bateman’s data for his conclusion that the reproductive success of females does not increase with the numbers of mates females have.

There have been many more challenges to bedrock assumptions, as I describe in Testosterone Rex. These include a proper accounting of reproductive costs for males, which go well beyond the single sperm required for conception. There are also species in which sex roles change in response to social and ecological conditions, such as the hedge sparrows that can wind up in a variety of different sexual arrangements. And, of course, we mustn’t forget humans’ own spectacularly inefficient means of reproduction. More than any other species, we have sex in ways and at times that won’t lead to conception; we should therefore be especially careful not to overestimate the reproductive advantages of promiscuous sexual behaviour for men. Look at mean sex differences in interest in casual sex, and you do indeed see a decisive male/female gap. An alternative characterisation of the data, however, yields a no less important conclusion – that for men and women alike, the vast majority prefer to be in a sexually exclusive relationship.

Yet in the eyes of my critics, my account is distorted by feminist bias. In line with the narrative of sex difference denialism, the act of simply pointing out bias becomes, in itself, evidence of bias. So according to Buss, von Hippel and co-author George Richardson, my work poses ‘a fundamental threat to the integrity of the scientific enterprise’. As a supposed demonstration of just how badly I misrepresent the evidence, they referred their readers to an article led by the evolutionary biologist Tim Janicke titled ‘Darwinian Sex Roles Confirmed Across the Animal Kingdom’ (2016). Yet their findings and conclusions, based on a meta-analysis of 66 animal species, are remarkably resonant with the case made in Testosterone Rex. I note that ‘contemporary research has identified many species to which Bateman’s principles do appear to apply’; that greater reproductive variance in men is seen in some human populations, but not all; and that ‘Bateman’s principles aren’t obsolete, but nor are they omnipotent and omnipresent’, due to the many additional factors that ‘enter the mix’.

Meanwhile, the meta-analysis reveals diversity in sex roles (as well as a significant proportion of species in which no sex differences in sexual selection pressure were found), and the researchers acknowledge that the ‘exceptions to the rule highlight the importance of incorporating environmental conditions when interpreting animal mating systems’ and that there ‘is increasing evidence that sexual selection varies not only between but also within species as a function of demographic and ecological factors’. Indeed, the studies of sexual selection in humans included in their analysis illustrate this very point. It seems that, even if we are trading in scientific turnips, they take on a quite different appearance depending on who is dishing them up.

Asecond ‘lens of gender’ is biological essentialism, the default attribution of sex differences to immutable biological causes. This hidden assumption has plenty to answer for in the scientific understanding of how creatures inherit evolved sex differences in brain and behaviour.

More than 30 years ago, the psychobiologist Celia Moore set herself the empirical mission of opening up the developmental black box connecting early hormonal differences between the sexes on the one hand, and later sex differences in brain and sexual behaviour on the other. The longstanding assumption held that there was only a direct link – testosterone turned on genes that masculinised the brains of males. But Moore was trained in a tradition that took an organism’s particular life trajectory and its role in evolution seriously. She had documented that rat mothers (dams) treat male and female pups differently, spending more time licking the anogenital region of the males (an activity that, for rats, is a form of care). She discovered that this was because the dams are attracted to the higher concentration of testosterone in the urine of males (a sex difference). Remarkably, it transpired that this difference in maternal care contributes to sexual differentiation of specific brain regions, and the efficiency and effectiveness of males’ later sexual behaviour.

Moore rightly considered these findings ‘exciting’. They showed that this feature of maternal care, an experience a baby rat could take for granted in the normal course of events, can contribute to the development of the neural basis of evolved masculine sexual behaviour. As Moore later put it, following many other illustrative (non-reproductive) examples, such experiences are ‘a completely reliable part of [a developing organism’s] environment’ that are ‘inherited as surely as its genome’.

Moore refers to her scientific standpoint as that of ‘development from’, in which the aim is ‘to unravel the developmental process, following threads to find out how the behaving organism was put together’. She contrasts this with the ‘development toward’ approach, which starts with the endpoint, then tries to ‘search backward for the “difference that made a difference”’. Moore’s work, by taking the unusual step of asking a development-from question about sex differences in brain and behaviour, revealed an additional indirect route by which sex can get its developmental work done. The tangible effects of sex on a developing individual – from the effect on urine odour in rats, to the relentless gender socialisation that follows identification of a human baby’s sex – shape the experiences that further shape brain and behaviour. They help co-construct the organism’s developmental pathway.

Yet development-toward thinking remains common in sex differences research. Take, for example, a much-discussed study from Simon Baron-Cohen’s lab at the University of Cambridge, published in 2000. In this study, babies just a few hours to days old were offered, in turn, a real face to look at (that of the first author, a masters student), and an odd-looking mobile made up of a composite of her facial features. The researchers measured how long each baby looked at the real face and, in a separate trial, how long at the mobile. This allowed them to make statistical comparisons between the behaviour of the male and female babies. The researchers’ primary analysis involved calculating the difference in proportion of time spent looking at the face and the mobile. They then used this ‘difference score’ to categorise babies as showing either a ‘face preference’, ‘mobile preference’ or ‘no preference’. Statistical testing found that more boys than girls fell into the ‘mobile preference’ category. Other analyses found that girls spent, on average, longer looking at the face than at the mobile, while boys spent a similar time looking at both. No analysis found a sex difference in time spent looking at the face. Nonetheless, the authors conclude that their observations ‘demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt’ that female superiority in sociability is ‘in part, biological in origin’.

The experimenter’s behaviour might have introduced bias, unintentionally, by influencing the babies’ responses

Their claim to have found a ‘biological origin’ for male/female differences in sociability falls firmly in the backward-looking development-to approach. As the Australian philosopher Neil Levy observes of this claim:
Socialisation is not a pattern of interferences, which obscures the underlying design of the infant: it is an essential part of the process whereby the phenotype is completed.

But note, also, the confidence with which Baron-Cohen’s team draw their conclusion. By implying the discovery of a fact as indisputable as a turnip pulled from the ground, it seems to follow that disagreement can only be politically motivated. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins Tweeted in 2019:
How is it still possible for social scientists to deny scientific evidence for genetic sex differences in interests? M[ales] statistically more interested in things & how they work, F[emales] statistically more in people. Baron-Cohen on newborns especially convincing.

But, as with any scientific conclusion, this claim is constructed out of layers of assumptions. How did the researchers get from an absence of any sex difference in time spent looking at the face, to a definitive claim about sex difference in social perception? Bem’s lens of gender polarisation, which implicitly frames the sexes as the ‘opposites’ of each other, offers insight. Through this lens, more interest in the mobile must imply less interest in faces – even if this is not, in fact, the case. This same implicit assumption underlies Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis that brains can be aligned along a continuum of ‘types’ that pass through ‘empathising’ (or ‘the female brain’) to ‘systemising’ (‘the male brain’), via the ‘balanced’ brain type. But in adults, at least, higher self-reported interest and skill in understanding systems doesn’t imply lower self-reported interest and skill in empathising, or vice versa. Translated to the current context, a baby with a clear mobile preference might have spent five seconds looking at the face, or 50.

Background assumptions are also involved in interpreting the meaning of babies’ interest in the two kinds of stimuli. The development of social cognition is a lengthy, complex process and newborns have some interesting quirks when it comes to face processing. These include an apparent indifference to whether the features are in the right place or not, so long as the arrangement is top-heavy, as well as to whether the face belongs to a human or a monkey. As for the assumption that neonatal interest portends later developmental superiority, it’s perhaps humbling to consider that two-day-old chimpanzees’ orientation to social stimuli – including human speech – is superior to that shown by human babies of the same age. The inference that the amount of time spent looking at a face foretells future sociability is ‘essentially unargued for’ and ‘questionable at best’, as Levy said of this study. The same caution also applies to relations between visual interest in the mobile, and future mechanical perception.

Each of these background assumptions could be put to an empirical test. In the meantime, all we can say is that any that are incorrect might introduce error into the final claim. So, too, could all the more familiar contributors to error – confounding factors and measurement error, among others – of which the newborn study had its share. The most noteworthy issue was that the first author – whose face served as one stimulus, and who held up the mobile – was not always blind to the babies’ sex. This raises the concern that the experimenter’s behaviour might have systematically introduced bias, however unintentionally, by influencing the babies’ responses. (Although those rating the babies’ behaviour from a video recording were blind to sex, this shuts the stable door after the horse has bolted.) It’s for this reason that a later study of sex differences in newborn looking preferences went to great efforts to make sure that the people interacting with the babies didn’t know their sex.

It’s also worth pointing out that another study – by Baron-Cohen’s research team, and apparently with the same group of newborns – tested the hypothesis that the babies would prefer looking at a face displaying eye gaze, compared with a face with closed eyes. Baron-Cohen has hypothesised that this orientation to eye gaze is an important foundation for the development of social cognition. According to the theory that females tend to be predisposed to be social-cognition specialists, one might expect a stronger preference for eye gaze in baby girls. However, no such difference was found.

Baron-Cohen has said that criticism of his sex differences work is really about prioritising politics over science. But clearly, to raise such questions isn’t to put politics before evidence. These questions are all about the evidence and its interpretation.

There’s an irony to all this rather tedious talk about how ‘my’ camp treats the relationship between science, evidence and politics. Those with whom I disagree would be rightly outraged if I suggested that the way they interpreted evidence could be chalked up to a political preference for patriarchy, or because they have spent too much time at dinner parties listening to woke progressives talking about social constructions. I suppose I should find it flattering that my mental states are the subject of such fascination, but I don’t reciprocate the interest.

Those who go on ad hominem attacks might genuinely believe that they’re helping to defend scientific objectivity. In fact, they undermine it. Many philosophers of science consider openness to critical debate to be the foundation of scientific objectivity, perhaps most notably Helen Longino. She considers objectivity to be something that emerges from the collective endeavours of an intellectual community. This idea hails from the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill’s arguments for freedom of speech. Our opponents – regardless of whether they hold all the truth, some of the truth or are indeed mistaken – challenge us to better understand our own case, said Mill. As the philosopher Heather Douglas writes in relation to science:
The hope is that by keeping scientific discourse open to scrutiny, the most idiosyncratic biases and blinders can be eliminated. In this way, other people help to make sure you are not seeing something just because you want to.

‘Biases and blinders’ aren’t psychological phenomena that exclusively afflict female academics taking aim at research claiming to show the biological origins of occupational gender gaps. Being the progenitor or disciple of a particular theory, holding intellectual capital built off the back of a particular set of background assumptions, being steeped within a school of thought in which certain assumptions are so axiomatic that they’re all but invisible – these can all incline a scientist to interpret findings in a certain way. Whether for reasons self-serving or benign, everyone comes laden with prior knowledge, background assumptions and frameworks. That’s why it takes a diverse village, so to speak, to nurture scientific objectivity.

It doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of individual scientists to maintain objectivity

This nurturing isn’t necessarily gentle. Longino calls it ‘transformative criticism’: a term for the back-and-forth of critical argument, the unearthing of where disagreements lie, and the subsequent adjustments or counterarguments. In her account, scientific objectivity depends not simply on scientists being coolly detached with respect to their data, but ‘upon the depth and scope of the transformative interrogation that occurs in any given scientific community’.

The important philosophical idea here is that it doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of individual scientists to maintain objectivity. It’s also the job of the collective to hold itself, and its members, to account. This makes clear why dismissing experts who disagree with our scientific conclusions – she puts politics before science; they think women and men can’t be equal if they aren’t the same – is best avoided. As the historian Naomi Oreskes recently put it in her book Why Trust Science? (2019):
Diversity does not heal all epistemic ills, but ceteris paribus a diverse community that embraces criticism is more likely to detect and correct error than a homogeneous and self-satisfied one.

Embracing criticism means engaging, seriously and in good faith, with arguments and evidence that challenge us. Documenting sexist, racist, cis-sexist or ‘blank-slatist’ biases in science is fine – as is disagreeing with the merit of such arguments, if you interrogate them and the evidence behind them in turn. But if you’re not a fan of seeing scientists’ views attributed to personal racism, transphobia or misogyny, then nor should you tolerate commentary about scientists supposedly being biased by their feminist motives.

It’s quite possible to distinguish transformative criticism from the kinds of commentary and condemnation that doesn’t further scientific objectivity. This latter category is marked by persistent unresponsiveness to counterarguments or new evidence, stubborn misrepresentation of opposing views, and a failure to genuinely engage with them. It also includes behaviour that effectively prevents or dissuades others from engaging with opposing viewpoints – such as various forms of deplatforming, or branding work untrustworthy by accusing it of being politically motivated. As Oreskes argued, the more diverse and open we are in our support of free debate, the more objectivity we should be able to achieve – ‘as individual biases and background assumptions are “outed”, as it were, by the community’.

When it comes to politically loaded scientific debates, the Australian philosopher Russell Blackford got it right: ‘We need to focus on evidence and arguments, and on ordinary fairness and compassion to others, even when we disagree.’ Admittedly it’s not always easy to meet these norms. They demand of us fairness and charity toward those whose ideas we might consider idiotic and harmful, or who might have shown themselves unwilling to extend the same generosity to ourselves and our academic tribe.

But if there’s one thing we can be sure of when it comes to human sex differences in the brain and behaviour, it’s that nobody has got it completely right. Whether we are most concerned about bias in scientific investigations of marginalised groups, or worried about the undermining of science by political values, the remedy is the same. As academic authors, editors, reviewers and colleagues, we should support norms and practices that help to create a scientific community that’s diverse, open and free – and insist that those same norms and standards be applied not just to those whose views we oppose, but also to those with whom we agree.

A simple first step? Don’t shoot down books you haven’t read.

Canada OKs remdesivir for use against coronavirus

Issued on: 28/07/2020 -

A vial of the drug remdesivir, which Canada has now joined other countries in approving for use against COVID-19 Ulrich Perrey POOL/AFP
Montreal (AFP)

Canada on Tuesday gave the green light for people with severe symptoms of COVID-19 to be treated with the anti-viral drug remdesivir.

"Remdesivir is the first drug that Health Canada has authorized for the treatment of COVID-19," said the health ministry.

At least two major US studies have shown that remdesivir can reduce the duration of hospital stays for COVID-19 patients.


Washington authorized the emergency use of the medicine -- which was originally intended as a treatment for Ebola -- on May 1, followed by several Asian nations including Japan and South Korea.

Canada said Tuesday it can be used on COVID-19 patients who have pneumonia and need extra oxygen to help them breathe.

The doses used in Canada will be made by a unit of Gilead Sciences, the US pharmaceutical company that developed the drug.

In early July, the European Commission also authorized use of remdesivir to treat the coronavirus.

As of Tuesday, Canada was reporting 114,800 cases of the virus and more than 8,900 fatalities.

© 2020 AFP

UPDATED
 Trump ditches 'new tone' for old, false coronavirus theories

Issued on: 28/07/2020 -

US President Donald Trump is back to promoting conspiracy theories about the coronavirus crisis JIM WATSON AFP/File
Washington (AFP)

Only days after proclaiming a sober new tone on the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump reverted to spreading misleading medical information, criticizing his top expert and promoting conspiracy theories.

Twitter took the rare step of removing clips tweeted by Trump from a video earlier deleted by Facebook in which a group of doctors tells Americans that masks are unnecessary and that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, can cure the COVID-19 virus.

Twitter said Tuesday that tweeting the video was "in violation of our COVID-19 misinformation policy."

Twitter also blocked Trump's son Don Jr -- a major player in the president's struggling reelection campaign -- from tweeting for 12 hours after he uploaded a version of the video.

At the center of the group speaking on the video is a doctor named Stella Immanuel, who doubles as a right-wing preacher who believes in witches.

The physician, who calls herself "God's battle axe," claims in the video that "the virus has a cure" in hydroxychloroquine.

This is false. There is currently no cure for the coronavirus, which has spread around the world and already killed nearly 150,000 Americans, wreaking havoc in the world's largest economy.

A majority of medical authorities now have also decided, after some initial debate, that hydroxychloroquine in particular has no proven benefit for coronavirus patients and can be harmful. The US Food and Drug Administration revoked emergency authorization for its use in June.

Trump, however, has persistently pushed the notion of hydroxychloroquine as an answer to the crisis and says he took the drug for two weeks as a precaution.

- Anti-Fauci rants -

In his Twitter spree late Monday, the president also retweeted a growing right-wing conspiracy theory that the nation's top expert on infectious diseases, Doctor Anthony Fauci, helped push coronavirus to hurt Trump's reelection in November.

The tweet, shared by Trump to his 84 million followers, claimed that Immanuel is highlighting "what should be the biggest scandal in modern American history."

This was "the suppression of #Hydroxychloroquine by Fauci & the Democrats to perpetuate Covid deaths to hurt Trump," the tweet reads.

Trump also attacked Fauci by retweeting a comment on a podcast hosted by his former advisor Steve Bannon that Fauci "misled the American public on many issues."

Fauci responded early Tuesday on ABC News saying he ignores Twitter. "I don’t tweet, I don’t even read them," he said.

"I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances," said Fauci, whose decades of experience include pioneering the fight against AIDS from the 1980s onward.

"We’re in the middle of a crisis with regard to a pandemic," he said. "This is what I’ve been trained for my entire professional life."

- New tone? -

Trump's Twitter activity was made more remarkable by the fact that just a week ago he embarked on a distinctly more serious tone when discussing the out-of-control health crisis.

Earlier Monday, he'd made a trip to North Carolina for a visit to a laboratory taking part in the race for a coronavirus vaccine.

Trump used the photo-op, where he was shown inspecting high-tech lab equipment at Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies in Morrisville, to underline his support for the scientific response to the pandemic.

"We will achieve a victory over the virus by unleashing American scientific genius," he told reporters.

The facility has been awarded a contract to mass produce an experimental vaccine developed by Novavax, as part of a multi-billion dollar government initiative dubbed Operation Warp Speed.

However, Trump has repeatedly wavered between between trust in the country's scientists and sympathy for claims on the right that the dangers of the illness have been exaggerated to weaken his presidency.

The United States is by far the worst-hit country in the world, with more than 4.2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Trump's support in pre-election polls has plummeted, with a large majority of voter saying they distrust the president on his handling of the coronavirus crisis.

© 2020 AFP

Trump again pushes unproven drug as COVID-19 treatment


President Donald Trump wears a face mask as he participates in a tour of Bioprocess Innovation Center at Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, Monday, July 27, 2020, in Morrisville, N.C. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

SECOND TIME LUCKY, HE HAS NOW WORN A MASK AT PUBLIC EVENTS TWICE IN TWO WEEKS....

WASHINGTON (AP) — A week after appearing to project a more serious tone about the coronaviru s, President Donald Trump is back to spreading misinformation about how to combat the virus and the credibility of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert.

Fauci pushed back Tuesday, saying he will keep doing his job.

Trump pushed unproven claims that an anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, is an effective treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. But numerous studies have shown that hydroxychloroquine is not effective and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently withdrew an order that allowed the drug’s use as a emergency treatment for COVID-19.

Trump returned to his earlier advocacy for hydroxychloroquine after returning from a trip to North Carolina Monday where he promoted efforts to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. Trump retweeted a series of tweets advocating for hydroxychloroquine, including a video of a doctor claiming to have successfully used the drug on hundreds of patients.

The president also shared a post from the Twitter account for a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, a former top White House adviser to Trump, accusing Fauci of misleading the public over hydroxychloroquine.

Fauci, a leading member of the White House coronavirus task force, responded to Trump’s tweets during an appearance Tuesday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”



“I go along with the FDA,” said Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “The overwhelming prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in coronavirus disease.”

It’s not the first time Fauci has come under attack from Trump and those close to him.

The president’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who has clashed with Fauci over hydroxychloroquine, recently penned a scathing attack on the doctor that was published by USA Today. The newspaper later said the opinion piece did not meet its standards.

In recent nationally televised interviews, Trump himself has described Fauci as “a bit of an alarmist” and accused him of making “mistakes” in his coronavirus guidance to the American people.

Asked if he can do his job when Trump continues to publicly question his credibility, Fauci said Tuesday he’ll press ahead “no matter what” because of the stakes involved.

“I don’t tweet. I don’t even read them, so I don’t really want to go there,” Fauci said. “I just will continue to do my job no matter what comes out because I think it’s very important. We’re in the middle of a crisis with regard to an epidemic, a pandemic. This is what I do. This is what I’ve been trained for my entire professional life and I’ll continue to do it.”

Asked about claims he’s been misleading the public, Fauci said: “I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances.”

Trump retweeted a video that is circulating on social media pushing misleading claims about hydroxychloroquine. Earlier in the pandemic, Trump advocated vigorously for hydroxychloroquine to be used as a treatment, or even a preventative, telling people, “What have you got to lose?”

 NOW 150,000 DEAD AMERICANS

   

Trump also said he took a 14-day course of hydroxychloroquine.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube began scrubbing their sites of the video Monday because it includes misleading claims about hydroxychloroquine, and glosses over the dangers of taking it. But dozens of versions of the video remain live on their platforms, with conservative news outlets, groups and internet personalities sharing it on their pages, where users have viewed them millions of times.

One version of the video had more than 17 million views before Facebook took it down.

Facebook is trying to remove the video because it is “sharing false information about cures and treatments for COVID-19,” according to Andy Stone, a spokesman for the platform.

Twitter also said it is working to remove the video. A tweet from the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., describing one version of the video as a “must watch!!!” Monday night was also taken down by the platform.

In the video, Dr. Stella Immanuel, a physician from Houston, Texas, promotes hydroxychloroquine as a sure-fire cure for the coronavirus,. She claims to have successfully treated 350 people “and counting,” including some with underlying medical conditions.

“You don’t need masks, there is a cure,” Immanuel says in the video. “You don’t need people to be locked down.” She was among physicians in a group called “America’s Frontline Doctors” who made misleading claims about the virus at a news conference Monday in Washington.

Several Trump allies, groups and conservative news outlets shared the video of the event on Facebook and Twitter.

In another video shared widely on Twitter by a pro-Trump nonprofit, Immanuel claims Fauci and CNN anchors are secretly taking hydroxychloroquine and challenges them to give her a urine sample.

Trump initially flouted guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on wearing face masks, saying he wouldn’t wear one himself and refusing to don one in public.

After multiple polls showed the public disapproves of his handling of the coronavirus, Trump recently began encouraging people to wear face coverings as he tried to project a more serious tone about the virus, which has surged in Arizona, California, Florida, Texas and other states.

Trump wore a face mask in public on Monday in North Carolina, just the second time he has done so during the pandemic.

Last week, Trump said the situation would probably worsen before it gets better. He also canceled GOP convention events scheduled for August in Jacksonville, Florida, citing the virus.

In the U.S., more than 4 million people have been infected by the coronavirus and the death toll is nearing 150,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.


___

Seitz reported from Chicago. Associated Press writer David Klepper in Providence, R.I., contributed to this report.

Migratory river fish populations down 76% since 1970: study
Issued on: 28/07/2020 -

River fish like sturgeon, pictured here, are threatened by disruptions to their migration routes as well as overfishing NIKOLAY DOYCHINOV AFP/File

Paris (AFP)

Populations of migratory river fish collapsed by 76 percent on average in the last 50 years, according to a report by conservation groups Tuesday, warning the "catastrophic" declines could impact people and ecosystems around the world.

Overfishing and loss of habitat have had a devastating impact on migratory fish, according to the research by groups including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, WWF, World Fish Migration Foundation and the Zoological Society of London.

Almost one in three of all freshwater species are threatened with extinction, the report said, with migratory fish "disproportionately threatened".

The study looked at 247 species of fish from around the world and found that their populations had declined on average 3 percent per year between 1970 and 2016.

Europe saw the sharpest falls of the regions studied, with a drop of 93 percent, while populations had shrunk an average of 84 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"Catastrophic losses in migratory fish populations show we cannot continue destroying our rivers," said Arjan Berkhuysen, managing director of the World Fish Migration Foundation.

"This will have immense consequences for people and nature across the globe. We can and need to act now before these keystone species are lost for good."

- Dams hamper fish migration -

Migratory fish such as salmon, trout and Amazonian catfish support the livelihoods of millions of people around the world, researchers said.

The study found a lower decline of 28 percent in North America, where there has been a movement to remove dams and protect habitats, and argued that this indicated the potential effectiveness of fishery management.

Large fish such as the beluga, a sturgeon, or the giant Mekong catfish, are particularly vulnerable, it said, adding that dams and other obstacles blocked migrations that are crucial to their life cycles.

"Habitat degradation, alteration, and loss accounted for around a half of threats to migratory fish, while over-exploitation accounted for around one third," the report said.

The main threats to fish species in Europe were dams and other waterway blockages, counting 1.2 million obstacles across the continent, said the report.

But it said that the tide was turning, with a European Union plan to restore 25,000 kilometres of free-flowing rivers by 2030.

The report stressed that it could not provide a full global picture because of a lack of data for Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America.

© 2020 AFP

‘We want to breathe’: Campaigns for racial, climate justice find common ground in Paris suburbs


Issued on: 21/07/2020 -

Climate activists take part in a rally in the Paris suburb of Beaumont-sur-Oise, on July 18, 2020, marking four years since the death in police custody of black youth Adama Traoré. © Bertrand Guay, AFP

Text by:Benjamin DODMAN

Seeking to expand their support base, anti-racism campaigners from the French banlieues are embracing the fight against human activities that poison the air, wreck ecosystems and spawn deadly pandemics – hurting vulnerable communities most.

Under a scorching sun, thousands of protesters marched through the Paris suburb of Beaumont-sur-Oise at the weekend, their banners, T-shirts and face masks calling for justice, equality and the freedom to simply breathe.

Both solemn and festive, the gathering marked the fourth anniversary of the death in police custody of black youth Adama Traoré, whose case has mobilised broad anger against police brutality and racial injustice in France. Demonstrators paid tribute to Traoré, who died of asphyxia on his 24th birthday in circumstances that remain unclear.

The march was also about broader grievances, and climate activists co-organised this year’s event. Among them was Elodie Nace, a spokeswoman for environmental advocacy group Alternatiba, which bussed dozens of its members from the French capital to the distant northern suburb.

“Ours is not merely an addition of groups,” she told FRANCE 24. “It’s an alliance around a common message: we want to breathe.”

‘I can’t breathe’

Seldom has such an elementary plea felt quite so urgent as in recent months. From Beaumont-sur-Oise to Minneapolis, a perfect storm of crises has focused attention on the most basic of human needs: the oxygen-filled air that sustains life, keeps coronavirus patients breathing, and which George Floyd was fatally denied.

In France, the chilling video footage of Floyd’s killing on May 25 by a police officer in Minneapolis promptly evoked comparisons with the unresolved case of Traoré, whose last words were also, “I can’t breathe”.

Two autopsies and four separate medical examinations have offered conflicting reasons for Traoré’s death in police custody, with his family maintaining that he suffocated under the weight of the three officers who used a controversial technique to restrain him. None of the officers has been charged, and the seething sense of injustice has fuelled the family’s struggle against racism and police violence in France’s deprived banlieues.

"No man, no person should die like that, at that age," said Traoré’s sister Assa, who has led the family’s long legal fight.

Leftists and Yellow Vests

Saturday’s broad-based march was the result of years of community organising by the Traoré family, backed by veteran anti-racism campaigners who joined their advocacy group, Truth For Adama, commonly referred to as the Comité Adama.

Galvanised by the global protest movement that followed Floyd’s killing in the US, the Comité Adama drew tens of thousands of protesters to the streets of Paris last month in France’s biggest – and most diverse – such rallies in decades. Its protests have dwarved those staged by older anti-racism groups, whose radical edge has been eroded by years of association with mainstream political parties.

The group has “succeeded in carrying countless feelings of injustice that were yet to find an outlet", says Julien Talpin, a sociologist at the National Centre for Scientific Research. “In doing so, it has mobilised well beyond the circle of everyday activists.”

Since her brother’s death, Assa Traoré has roamed the country to meet with bereaved families, address rallies, reach out to other advocacy groups, and challenge political parties to take an interest in the banlieues. Last year, she invited representatives of the Yellow Vests, a largely white anti-government protest movement, to the annual gathering in Beaumont-sur-Oise.

While some groups, including the leftist “antifa” (anti-fascists), have made for natural bedfellows, other tentative allies, like the Yellow Vests, have raised more than a few eyebrows in a country where rural folk and banlieue residents seldom cross paths.

Even as they reach out for partners, members of the Comité Adama have fiercely defended their autonomy, speaking of “alliances” rather than “convergence”. They have been especially wary of involvement with political parties, careful to distinguish themselves from older anti-racism organisations, established in the 1980s and largely controlled by the Socialist and Communist parties that once dominated left-wing activism.

“The Comité Adama is willing to engage with political parties on the left, to challenge and provoke them, but it is careful to keep its distance,” said Talpin, noting that many left-wing parties in the French Republican tradition are reluctant to acknowledge the “systemic, institutionalised racism” denounced by the Comité Adama.

Ecology for all

So far, Alternatiba has proved a good match. Both movements are young, radical, independent and driven by women. In the words of Nace, Alternatiba’s spokeswoman, they also share a “systemic approach, aimed at overcoming a system of racial and gender-based domination that oppresses the most vulnerable".

“There’s a common strategy and, to some extent, a shared ideological bedrock,” Talpin agrees.

“On the one hand, they agree to support one another in their respective, autonomous fights,” he explains. “And on the other, they share the assessment that the principal victims of racism, pollution and climate change are the underprivileged.”

Furthermore, Talpin adds, “they also believe that the mainstream left has abandoned those segments of the population and ignored the discriminations they endure.”

In March 2019, when hundreds of thousands of climate campaigners marched in towns and cities across France to denounce government inaction, in the country’s largest ever climate protests, Assa Traoré chose to march separately, under the Truth For Adama banner. But she accepted Alternatiba’s invitation to address the crowd, and later returned the invitation with Saturday’s gathering in Beaumont-sur-Oise.

For Alternatiba, a key aim of the rally was to dispel the widely-held belief that environmentalism is solely a preoccupation of white middle classes from the city-centres.

“Ecology should not only be for the wealthy, organic-eating urbanites. It is also about solidarity and reclaiming one’s territory,” says Nace, noting that France’s poor suburbs, home to large immigrant and non-white populations living in cramped, neglected housing projects, are the most impacted by climate change, by polluted air and water.

“The Adama Generation and the Climate Generation have come together to denounce a same system that plunders resources and pushes the most vulnerable further down the ladder,” she says. “We want a different type of society based on justice and equality, and none of this will be possible without bringing poor, working-class districts on board.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci: A lifeline for Americans through pandemics and presidencies

Issued on: 26/07/2020 -

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases prepares to testify ahead of a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, DC, on June 30, 2020. © Kevin Dietsch, pool via ReutersText by:Tamar SHILOH VIDON

He inspires trust and confidence in most Americans, but drives others to violent anger – and wild conspiracy theories – over his assertiveness on issues of public health. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ leading expert on infectious diseases and White House coronavirus advisor, is standing firm in the eye of the storm.

For weeks at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Fauci stood alongside President Donald Trump and the White House coronavirus task force in daily press briefings. Calmly he set the scientific record straight about the Covid-19 situation in the country, even when claims by the Trump administration were called out for being recklessly inaccurate.

Trump abruptly stopped appearing in the public briefings for two months after April 24, and Fauci, painted as alarmist by administration officials, was barred by the White House from making most television appearances.

But he remained in his position as the administration's coronavirus advisor and continued to warn the president and the public of the dangers posed by the virus, which has claimed more than 145,000 lives in the US as of Saturday, according to Johns Hopkins university.

At a sprightly 79, Fauci has been a medical researcher for over five decades. He spent 36 years as the director of the American National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), where he led research through a string of epidemics, including HIV, SARS, Avian flu, Swine flu, Zika and Ebola.

A known workaholic, Fauci, who was the captain of his high school basketball team and an avid marathon runner, stayed fit and beat stress throughout his career by running daily at lunchtime. Now, with the coronavirus crisis filling his days, he has been forced to change that habit and power walk several miles on weekends instead.

“I think the benefit for me is a stress reliever – because I have a pretty high-stress job," Fauci said in a 2016 interview. “Getting outside in the day and hearing the birds and smelling the grass is kind of a very pleasing thing for me.”

Conspiracy theories and threats

His calm insistence on providing the facts, even when they contradict the Trump administration's line, has angered Trump supporters and placed Fauci at the centre of far-right and anti-science conspiracy theories.

On Saturday, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates nearly 200 local TV stations around the United States, announced that it was pulling Sunday’s “America This Week” talk show, which was to feature an interview with an anti-vaccine activist, Judy Mikovits, who says she believes Fauci manufactured the coronavirus and sent it to China.

During the segment, first revealed by Media Matters for America, a banner on the bottom of the screen read “Did Dr. Fauci create coronavirus?"

Before announcing that it would delay the airing of the episode to bring “together other viewpoints and provide additional context”, Sinclair had tweeted that it did not endorse Mikovits’s theory.

After further review, we have decided to delay this episode's airing. We will spend the coming days bringing together other viewpoints and provide additional context. All stations have been notified not to air this and will instead be re-airing last week’s episode in its place.— Sinclair Broadcast Group (@WeAreSinclair) July 25, 2020

Fauci, however, has reacted to criticism with bemused understatement.

When Peter Navarro, a top Trump aide, published an op-ed in USA Today claiming that Fauci was "wrong about everything", Fauci just responded, "You know, it is a bit bizarre. I don't really fully understand it.”

When a security detail was assigned to him after serious threats were made against him and his family he simply described the situation as “not good” and “a little bit disturbing".

“There are people who get really angry at thinking I’m interfering with their life because I’m pushing a public health agenda,” he said Friday in a CNN podcast interview. “The kind of not only hate mail but actual serious threats against me are not good.”

He had come under attack before, over his work with HIV/AIDS. But he said that this time, the threat level was different. “It’s really a magnitude different now because [of] the amount of anger,” he told CNN.

“I’ve seen a side of society that I guess is understandable, but it’s a little bit disturbing,” he said in the interview.

An illustrious career

Fauci has served as adviser to every US president since Ronald Reagan.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, he was born to New York-born parents of Italian origin. After graduating at the top of his class from Cornell University’s medical school, during the Vietnam War, he was called to serve at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with a group of doctors informally known as the “Yellow Berets”.

He began work there in 1968 as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation at the NIAID and served in different roles at the institute before being named its director in 1984.

A pioneer and recognised world leader in the research of HIV/AIDS since the early 1980s, Fauci played a central role in creating the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the initiative launched in 2003 by George W. Bush’s administration to address the global epidemic and help save those suffering from the disease.

Following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade center in 2001, he was a driving force in the development of biodefence drugs and vaccines. In 2014, he advised the Obama administration when cases of Ebola were detected in the United States.

‘America’s doctor’

In a New Yorker article titled “How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor”, he is quoted on how, during his many years of advising the White House, he has dealt with leaders in times of crisis. “I go to my favorite book of philosophy, ‘The Godfather,’ and say, ‘It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business,’” he said.

“You just have a job to do. Even when somebody’s acting ridiculous, you can’t chide them for it. You’ve got to deal with them. Because if you don’t deal with them, then you’re out of the picture.”

When asked about his relationship with Trump, Fauci insists it is very good.

And despite the criticism, Fauci’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has also won him huge popularity. A poll released on July 15 by Quinnipiac University showed that 65 percent of voters trust what Fauci says about Covid-19, against 26 percent who do not (compared to Trump, whose information about the coronavirus is not trusted by 67 percent of those polled).

A Change.org petition calling to support Fauci in case Trump considers removing him from the pandemic response team had garnered 332,000 signatures by Sunday, two weeks after it was launched.

If Fauci is concerned about the prospect of being removed, he doesn’t show it.

“I see myself in that role as long as I feel that I’m being useful, and I’m valued in it, and the White House wants me," he told InStyle magazine recently. "If any of the above change, then I would step down.”

Three-quarters of adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after recovery

By Brian P. Dunleavy

Even fairly young, healthy adults can experience heart damage from COVID-19, which can be fatal in older people, research suggests. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo

July 27 (UPI) -- Seventy-eight percent of people diagnosed with COVID-19 showed evidence of heart damage caused by the disease weeks after they have recovered, according to a study published Monday by JAMA Cardiology.

Of 100 participants in the study, 78 had evidence of heart damage on magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, according to the researchers.

None of the 100 patients included in the analysis had experienced heart symptoms related to the new coronavirus and "were mostly healthy ... prior to their illness," the researchers said.
"The patients and ourselves were both surprised by the intensity and prevalence of these findings, and that they were still very pronounced even though the original illness had been by then already a few weeks away," study co-author Dr. Valentina Puntmann told UPI.

"We found evidence of ongoing inflammation within the heart muscle, as well as of the heart's lining in a considerable majority of patients," said Puntmann, a consultant physician, cardiologist and clinical pharmacologist at University Hospital Frankfurt in Germany.

The researchers said the MRI findings were consistent with two potentially serious heart conditions: myocarditis and pericarditis, according to the researchers.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, and it can reduce the heart's ability to pump, potentially causing irregular heartbeats, Puntmann said.

RELATED Two-thirds in U.S. have underlying conditions, at risk for severe COVID-19

Pericarditis causes inflammation of the protective tissues surrounding the heart and can cause pain, she said.

The 100 study participants, 45 to 53 years old, had recovered from COVID-19. Participants' underwent MRI evaluation two to three months after being diagnosed with the virus, researchers said.

Sixty percent of the participants had evidence of ongoing heart inflammation on their MRIs that was independent of preexisting conditions or the course of their COVID-19 infection, according to the researchers.

RELATED COVID-19 increases death risk for cancer patients 16-fold, study says

Two-thirds of the participants recovered from COVID-19 at home, and 18% never had symptoms of the virus, the researchers said. Roughly half had mild to moderate symptoms of the coronavirus, they said.

"While we do not yet have the direct evidence for [long-term] consequences yet, such as the development of heart failure, which can be directly attributed to COVID-19, it is quite possible that in a few years this burden will be enormous based on what we know from other viral conditions," Puntmann said.

Although the participants in Puntmann's study recovered from the virus, a separate analysis, also published Monday by JAMA Cardiology found evidence of infection in the hearts of 16 of 39 -- or 41% -- patients who died from the disease.

The findings were made after autopsies of the patients, who were between 78 and 89 years old.

"[COVID-19] can infect the heart and, in severe cases, the virus seems to replicate within it," study co-author Dirk Westermann, a cardiologist at University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, also in Germany, told UPI.

"We need long-term follow-up studies of COVID-19 survivors to see whether [the virus] impacts cardiac function over the long-term," he said.

Experts: Rush to publish makes some COVID-19 research unreliable

Dennis Thompson, HealthDay News

Only about three in 10 COVID-19 studies have been designed with enough rigor to produce valuable evidence about the coronavirus, according to the author of a new study. Photo by jarmoluk/Pixabay

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a massive scientific response to the crisis, with more than 1,500 coronavirus studies kicking off between March and mid-May of this year, a new study reports.

Unfortunately, much of this research has sown only confusion, producing precious little scientific evidence of sufficient quality to dramatically improve any understanding of COVID-19, researchers argue.

Only about three in 10 COVID-19 studies have been designed with enough rigor to produce valuable evidence about the coronavirus, said lead researcher Dr. Mintu Turakhia, director of the Center for Digital Health at Stanford University in California.

"There's been an extraordinary activation of clinical research around COVID, and that's great," Turakhia said. "The problem is, the majority of these studies are not likely to yield really strong evidence."

RELATED Lab-created virus may aid COVID-19 research, scientists say

Only 75 out of 664 clinical trials for COVID-19 -- about 11% -- have all the hallmarks of a scientific study that could be expected to produce solid results, according to the study published online July 27 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Those hallmarks include random assignment of patients to either the COVID-19 treatment being tested or a placebo "blinding" that prevents everyone, including the researchers, from knowing who received which treatment during the trial and the involvement of multiple hospitals with at least more than 100 patients enrolled in the trial.

"If you take this all in totality, what it really tells you is that most of the evidence that's going to be generated is not going to be very strong and move the needle in terms of the science for COVID," Turakhia said.

RELATED Three-quarters of adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after recovery

Clinical trials are the gold standard for research, but observational studies also can provide results that inform knowledge and treatment. Those studies involve researchers tracking health trends among people out in the real world, rather than testing treatments in a lab setting.

Unfortunately, the 640 observational studies that Turakhia's team found regarding COVID-19 also have had weak designs. Only two in five involved more than one hospital, and just 13.6% could be expected to yield strong scientific evidence, the researchers said.

"If you look at the quality of the research that was published in the early days, and this article does a good job of that, you see that it's really hard to actually come up with something that is actionable from a lot of these early studies," said Dr. Tracy Wang, director of health services & outcome research for the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C.

RELATED Moderna begins 3rd stage of trial for potential COVID-19 vaccine

As the COVID-19 crisis grew in the late winter and early spring, scientists across the world sprang into action and started hundreds of studies, Wang and Turakhia said.

But they did so without any real coordination or large-scale organization, and as a result their individual efforts have produced weak evidence that can't even be pooled to create broader analysis, said Wang, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying Turakhia's study.

To pool data from different studies, you need results that come from a series of randomized clinical trials, Wang said. That way, any interpretation of the pooled data will be based on information from the strongest sources possible.

"So far, an overwhelming majority -- 80% to 90% of our studies so far -- are not randomized trials," Wang said, which renders their data "pretty useless" for any larger-scale analysis.

These poorly designed studies tend to frustrate both average citizens as well as health care professionals, because of the conflicting evidence that continues to surface without any way of determining the correct answer, Turakhia said.

"Sometimes these have the potential to influence public opinion, policy, and it confuses the average person and clinician about what to believe," Turakhia said. "The more noise you have, the harder it is to really convey institutional or societal trust in the really well-done studies."

Wang recommends that people become "connoisseurs" of medical research, only taking stock in studies that randomly assign treatment to people and that look at health outcomes that actually matter.

For example, only about one-third of the studies in Turakhia's paper placed an emphasis on tracking mortality, "an endpoint that is really of most importance to a patient and to their caregiver -- did it help my family member live longer?" Wang said.

"Mortality or death rate is something we've been prioritizing," Wang said. "This is one of the key points of this article, is that very, very few of these studies used mortality as an end point."

Turakhia and his colleagues only looked at studies registered with the federal government through May 19. Wang believes that researchers have since dramatically improved their game.

"I can tell you that we've now gotten a lot more organized about this," Wang said. "A lot of these trials are now being designed together in networks in a very collaborative fashion."

We've got funding agencies standing behind these trials to say, hey, let's play together so we can get these trials together faster and more efficiently, and do it in a way where if something doesn't work, we don't toss the baby out with the bathwater," Wang said. "We can still keep what's working and proceed to the next idea."

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught many valuable lessons about how the scientific response to the next major health crisis should unfold, Turakhia said.

"We really have to be better prepared to have a clinical trial network and infrastructure we can activate to do multicenter trials more rapidly in the U.S.," Turakhia said. "The scientific response is going to have to be part of our pandemic response if we go through this again," he added.

"You can't sacrifice well-designed trials just because you're in a public health crisis. You have to do studies with rigor. That's really the take-home point," Turakhia concluded.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about COVID-19.

Copyright 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
upi.com/7024610