Waste audit names Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle as top plastic polluters


Children play in a large collection of plastic waste at Mahim Beach in Mumbai, India. The study released Monday cited hundreds of thousands of pieces of plastic waste, mostly in Southern Hemisphere nations. File Photo by Divyakant Solanki/EPA-EFE

Dec. 7 (UPI) -- A report published Monday by an international coalition of environmental activists identifies a number of companies that it says are the world's biggest plastic polluters -- and at the top of the list are the Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo and Nestle.

The 57-page report, titled "Demanding Corporate Accountability for Plastic Pollution," was produced by the Philippines-based group Break Free From Plastic, which analyzed data generated by waste pickers who audited nearly 350,000 pieces of plastic in 55 countries.

The audit was conducted mainly in countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

The analysis says waste pickers found about 14,000 pieces from Coca-Cola in 51 countries, 5,200 pieces from PepsiCo in 43 nations and 8,600 pieces from Nestle in 37.

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Other companies noted by the report include Unilever, Mondelez International, Mars, Procter & Gamble and Philip Morris International.

"It's not surprising to see the same big brands on the podium as the world's top plastic polluters for three years in a row," Abigail Aguilar, plastics campaign regional coordinator of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, said in a statement.

"These companies claim to be addressing the plastic crisis yet they continue to invest in false solutions while teaming up with oil companies to produce even more plastic. To stop this mess and combat climate change, multinationals like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle must end their addiction to single-use plastic packaging and move away from fossil fuels."

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The companies are signatories to the New Plastics Economy Global Commitment, led by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program.

The pact calls for the "elimination of problematic or unnecessary plastic packaging through redesign, innovation" and new delivery and reuse models.

All three companies told The Guardian Monday they are working to address packaging waste.

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"Globally, we have a commitment to get every bottle back by 2030, so that none of it ends up as litter or in the oceans, and the plastic can be recycled into new bottles," a Coca-Cola spokesperson said. "Bottles with 100% recycled plastic are now available in 18 markets around the world, and this is continually growing."

PepsiCo said it's moving to cut pollution through "partnership, innovation and investments" and said part of that is a goal to reduce virgin plastic in the beverage business by 35% by 2025.

Nestle said it's making "meaningful progress" in sustainable packaging, but acknowledged the need for more efforts.

"We are intensifying our actions to make 100% of our packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025 and to reduce our use of virgin plastics by one-third in the same period," a spokesperson said.

Coca-Cola, Pepsi, & Nestlé Named World’s Top Plastic Polluters — For 3rd Year In A Row

December 5th, 2020 by Johnna Crider

Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestlé are the world’s top plastic polluters for the third consecutive year. This news comes from Break Free From Plastic’s report that was released this week during a virtual press conference.

Break Free From Plastic’s brand audit, which is an annual citizen action initiative involving the counting and documentation of brands on plastic waste found in communities worldwide, collected 346,494 pieces of plastic from 55 countries. This year, the brand audit took a closer look at the essential work of informal waste pickers — especially in the Global South — and the impact that low-value single-use plastic has on their livelihoods.

Abigail Aguilar, the Plastics Campaign Regional Coordinator at Greenpeace Southeast Asia, noted that it wasn’t surprising that big brands are the world’s top plastic polluters. “It’s not surprising to see the same big brands on the podium as the world’s top plastic polluters for three years in a row. These companies claim to be addressing the plastic crisis yet they continue to invest in false solutions while teaming up with oil companies to produce even more plastic. To stop this mess and combat climate change, multinationals like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé must end their addiction to single-use plastic packaging and move away from fossil fuels,” she said.

The aim of BFFP is to challenge the industry narrative about who is responsible for the plastic crisis and how to solve it. Brand audits collectively help us to redirect the focus back onto the companies that create the problem — those who make the plastics — while empowering us to demand these companies to stop making unnecessary throwaway single-use plastics. Here’s looking at you, Coke, Pepsi, and Nestlé.

You may remember that back in 2015, the chairman of Nestlé stated that he didn’t believe water was a human right when using it to fill up swimming pools, wash cars, or water a golf course. Although it takes Nestle around 1.39 liters of water just to make one liter of bottled water, the company is known for its stance on water and the idea of water being a human right as being “extreme,” simply because water is overused.

“Water is, of course, the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there,” said Former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe.

I’m bringing that bit up due to the hypocrisy of the company that is one of the world’s top three plastic polluters — plastics that are made with water that is then being used to pollute the ocean. And adding into that mix, all three of these companies sell bottled water (the other two sell sodas as well).

Waste pickers and BFFP movements are demanding that these companies shift toward refill and reuse systems — replacing packaging that isn’t recyclable and that provides no economic benefit. Waste picker and National Coordinator of South African Waste Picker Association Simon Mbata said it best: “Whatever cannot be recycled, must not be produced.”
Top 2020 Global Polluters

Although many of these companies have clever marketing strategies centered around “lofty ‘sustainability goals'” it should be noted that these same companies are on the list of Top Global Polluters not just once, but year after year. This shows that many of these companies who are going “carbon neutral by such and such year,” or are doing (insert activity here) to be more “sustainable,” are not actually becoming sustainable.

The report shows that these corporations that pollute the most places globally with the greatest amount of plastic waste. The results below are ranked according to the number of countries where brand audits reported finding these companies.
The 10 Worst Polluters are:
Coca-Cola in 51 countries with 13,834 plastics.
PepsiCo in 43 countries with 5,155 plastics.
Nestlé in 37 countries with 8,633 plastics.
Unilever in 37 countries with 5,558 plastics.
Mondelēz International in 34 countries with 1,171 plastics.
Mars in 32 countries with 678 plastics.
P&G in 29 countries with 3,535 plastics.
Phillip Morris International in 28 countries with 2,593 plastics.
Colgate Palmolive in 24 countries with 5,991 plastics.
Perfetti in 24 countries with 465 plastics.
More From The Report



Image from BFFP Brand Audit Report

According to the figure above, most of the waste surveyed was not recyclable in many countries, including Brazil, Chile, Ghana, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and South Africa. Only Chile and the Philippines had more recyclable waste than non-recyclable waste. The figure below, from the report, demonstrates the values of the recyclables, ranging from bottles, gallon jugs, plastic bags, and plastic cups and plates.

Image from BFFP Brand Audit Report

Waste Pickers Share Their Thoughts

In a special section of the report where waste pickers could share their thoughts with these companies, a question and answer series is documented. Here are a few of those questions and answers taken directly from the report:

Companies say they have created small sachets for the urban poor. If you could meet one of these corporate CEOs, what would you say to them?

“This statement is of total disrespect, underestimating the intelligence of waste pickers. In our daily lives, we see thousands of packages go through the conveyor belt with no commercial value and that leave us distressed and afflicted, to know that the thought of large corporations is to treat waste pickers with indifference and not recognizing the works done by the category.” — Valquiria Candido da Silva Waste picker from Brazil

How do company decisions about plastic packaging directly impact the livelihoods of waste pickers?

“In my own experience, I work at a material recovery facility with waste pickers in VaalPark South Africa, and the majority of the plastic that we come across is not recyclable. This no value plastic impacts the livelihoods of waste pickers because it eats into the profits and surpluses of our projects. The reality is that companies who produce this type of plastic are not creating jobs for waste pickers, but are quickly destroying the planet. The only way that these companies can create jobs for waste pickers, is if they create recyclable materials that can go back into the economy. Whatever cannot be recycled, must not be produced. My hope is to see waste pickers in South Africa working in better environments and being an integral part of the waste management system.” — Simon Mbata, waste picker and National Coordinator of the South African Waste Picker Association (SAWPA)

More Thoughts From An Expert, Lakshmi Narayan:

“Around 15 million waste pickers retrieve paper, metal, glass, and plastics from municipal solid waste, and move it up the value chain through scrap traders to reprocessors. They form the base of a pyramid responsible for over 50% of global recycling that employs millions. Despite internalizing costs and subsidizing corporations whose waste materials they recycle, they are fragmented, marginalized, and often displaced by corporate investment in pilots that incentivizes superficial behavior change, encourages expensive, capital intensive, centralized technologies, or research small-scale efforts in obscure, expensive, inefficient recycling.

“FMCG manufacturers unhesitatingly claim sachets ensure the poor have access to their wonder products in bite-size, that littering and pollution are due in equal measure to weak municipal solid waste management systems and the ‘indisciplined’, illiterate poor, and that continued production of plastics ensures waste pickers access to a steady income. In fact, waste pickers neither want single-use plastics for recycling, nor the expensive commodities they package.” — Lakshmi Narayan, waste picker specialist.

You can access the full report here.

upi.com/7059508

12 Scams of Christmas: Mask mandates and growing demand lead to rise in PPE scams




By: Mallory Sofastaii
Posted Dec 07, 2020


BALTIMORE — The Better Business Bureau is seeing an increase in reports about scam websites claiming to sell face masks online but not delivering.

Angie Barnett with the Better Business serving Greater Maryland said there was a spike in scams in the spring as the pandemic spread throughout the country. Now, there's another wave of reports as state and local governments implement mask mandates and Americans prepare for guests over the holidays.

“We had a business here in Maryland that actually ordered PPE (personal protective equipment) online, thought it was a legitimate retailer, and lost thousands and thousands of dollars a small business couldn’t afford to lose,” said Barnett.

It’s not just businesses and consumers sending money to the wrong people, the FBI has received reports from state governments attempting to procure ventilators or PPE and wired money to fraudulent sellers. By the time they realized it, the money had been transferred outside the reach of U.S. law enforcement and was unrecoverable.

“We always say, and holidays are so important, slow down to investigate. Do your research as you’re looking because it’s so easy to get misdirected to a fake website,” said Barnett.

Only buy from sellers you know and trust. Be sure the online store has working contact information, and evaluate claims of any medical product before buying.

Angelica Gomez wishes she did more research after handing over $175 for N95 masks through the online seller EM General.

“My husband, his genes aren't great. He has high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, and he had quintuple bypass when he was 38 years old,” Gomez said. “I have two sons with asthma and I have another son who already has diabetes.”

Gomez waited for the masks to arrive, but they never did. When she reached out to the company by phone and email, no one responded.

“They’re creating false hope because it’s not real to begin with,” Gomez said.

Earlier this year, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California charged a Michigan man with wire fraud for allegedly scamming customers into paying for N95 masks that they never received. Rodney Stevenson II controlled EM General and purported to sell an available inventory of “Anti-Viral N95” respirator masks, according to the criminal complaint.

The Department of Justice continues to go after criminals attempting to exploit the pandemic. If you are the victim of a scam involving COVID-19, you can report it to the National Center for Disaster Fraud through their hotline at 1-866-720-5721 or online complaint form.
Copyright 2020 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

RENDER UNTO TRUMP 

DEC. 6, 2020

White Evangelicals Made a Deal With the Devil. Now What?
By Sarah Jones

The savior. Photo: AFP via Getty Images

In the end, white Christian America stood by its man. The exit polls present an imperfect but definitive picture. At least three-quarters of white Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in November, a figure largely unchanged from 2016. Evangelicals didn’t win Trump another four years in power, but not for lack of effort. While most of America tired of the president’s impieties, the born-again found in themselves a higher tolerance for sin.

And the sins are legion, lest we forget. He tear-gassed protesters so he could walk to a D.C. church and hold a Bible upside-down in front of it without interference. He lied and cheated, and smeared women who accused him of sexual assault. He separated migrant children from their parents and staffed his administration with white nationalists. Over a quarter of a million Americans died of the coronavirus, while he railed against doctors and scientists trying to save lives. Not even a plague turned Evangelicals from their earthly lord. For Trump, the consequences are political and legal. For Evangelicals, the fallout has a more spiritual quality. What does it profit a faith to gain a whole country and then lose it, along with its own soul?

Evangelicals had more to lose than Republicans, for reasons I learned in church as a child. You can’t evangelize anyone if your testimony is poor. If you disobey your parents, or wear a skirt that falls above your knees, how can anyone believe you’re saved? Another Sunday school lesson, conveniently forgotten? Be sure that your sin will find you out. Evangelicals bought power, and the bill is coming due. The price is their Christian witness, the credibility of their redemption by God. Evangelicalism won’t disappear after Trump, but its alliance with an unpopular and brutal president could alienate all but the most zealous.

To be Evangelical in the 1990s was to learn fear. The world was so dangerous, and our status in it so fragile. The fossil record was a lie, and scientists knew it. You could not watch the Teletubbies because Jerry Falwell thought the purple one was gay. No Disney, either, and not because Walt had been a fascist; Disneyworld allowed a gay-pride day, and in one scene of The Lion King, you could see the stars spell out “sex.” You were lucky to even be alive, to have escaped the abortion mill. The predominantly white Evangelical world in which I was raised had created its own shadow universe, a buffer between it and the hostile world. Our parents could put us in Christian schools or homeschool us; if they did risk public school, we could take shelter with groups like YoungLife and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which would tell us to make the most of this chance to save souls. We had alternatives for everything; our own pop music, our own kids’ shows, our own versions of biology and U.S. history, and an ecosystem of colleges and universities to train us up in the way we should go: toward the Republican Party, and away from the left, with no equivocation.

Whatever the cause, whatever the rumor, the fear was always the same. It was about power, and what would happen if we lost it. Certain facts, like the whiteness of our congregations and the maleness of our pulpits and the shortcomings of our leaders, were not worth mentioning. You were fighting for God, and God was not racist or sexist; He was only true. The unsaved hated this, it made them angry, and that was proof you were doing the right thing. If “owning the libs” has a discernible origin point, it’s here, in the white Evangelical church.

While I was in college and Trump was still a reality-show star, Evangelicals faced a crisis in the pews. Young people were leaving the church, and they weren’t coming back. The first signs arrived in 2007, in the last hopeful months before the Great Recession. A pair of Christian researchers released a study with troubling implications for the future of the church. Young people aged 16 to 29 were skeptical of Christianity and of Evangelicalism in particular, concluded Dave Kinnaman of the Barna Group and Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project. “Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political,” they wrote. Among the unchurched, attitudes were even more negative. A mere 3 percent said they had positive views of Evangelicalism, a precipitous decline from previous generations.

I interviewed Lyons about his research while I was a student journalist at Cedarville University, a conservative Baptist school in Ohio. By the time I graduated, I’d become one of his statistics, an atheist with a minor in Bible. Trump was not even a glimmer in Steve Bannon’s eye, but the Evangelical tradition had already asked me to tolerate many sins. There was George W. Bush and his catastrophic invasion of Iraq; welfare policies that starved the poor; the dehumanization of immigrants, of LGBT people, of women who do not wish to stay pregnant, and my own, non-negotiable submission to men. At some point I realized that I had traveled some distance in my mind, and I could not go back the way I came. I was over it, I was through.

The years after my personal exodus brought with them more proof that the church was in trouble. Partisanship did not entirely explain why. Membership declined fastest in mainline congregations, even though they tend to be more liberal than the independent churches of my youth. Social media has expanded the philosophical marketplace; all Christian traditions face competition from new ideologies for the hearts and minds of the young. But conservative denominations are suffering, too. The Southern Baptist Convention said this June it had experienced its 13th consecutive year of membership decline. By age 22, two-thirds of adults who attend Protestant services as teenagers have dropped out of church for at least a year, LifeWay Research found last year, and a quarter cited political disagreements as the reason. An alliance with a president the young largely hated might not lure new generations to the fold.

Years of attrition have taken a toll on white Evangelicals, said Robert Jones, the author of The End of White Christian America and the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. “If you go back a couple of election cycles ago, into Barack Obama’s first election, they were 21 percent of the population, and today they are 15 percent of the population,” he told me. The share of Black Evangelicals has remained relatively stable, he added, while the numbers of Latino Evangelicals has grown. And while these groups ostensibly share a religious label, politically they are far apart.

“If I take the religious landscape, and I sort religious groups by their support for one candidate or the other, what inevitably happens is that there are no two groups further away from each other in that sorting than white Evangelical Protestants and African-American Protestants,” Jones said, adding that Latino Evangelicals are “a little more divided.” (Indeed, Trump won significant support from this group in 2020.)

People pray together during the “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign event held at the King Jesus International Ministry as they await the arrival of President Donald Trump on January 3, 2020 in Miami, Florida. Photo: Getty Images

But white Evangelicals are still outliers overall: They’re more conservative than other Protestants, more conservative than Catholics, more conservative, in fact, than any other demographic in the country. The implicit claim of the Moral Majority — that it embodied mainstream opinion — always lacked evidence, but it’s become even less true over time. By the time Trump applied Richard Nixon’s label of a “silent majority” to his own coalition, it barely made sense at all. A bloc that can only take the White House through the Electoral College, and not the popular vote, only to lose it outright four years later, has no claim to majority status. They are a remnant within a remnant, a nation within a nation.

There are still dissenters. Last year, the outgoing editor of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, called for Trump’s removal from office. Galli wrote the typical approach for his magazine was to “stay above the fray,” and “allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible,” he wrote. But Trump had abused the power of his office and revealed a “grossly deficient moral character.” Galli has since converted to Catholicism, a decision he explained to Religion News Services as being more personal than political.

Others stay. But they can experience a painful friction between their spiritual convictions and political independence. My parents, both pro-life Evangelicals, have now voted against Trump twice. I spoke to another by Skype, not long before the election.

I know Marlena Proper Graves from my days at that Baptist university, when I was an upstart college feminist, and she was a resident director and the spouse of a professor. Now the author of two books on faith and a doctoral candidate at Bowling Green State University, Graves worries about the influence of Trump, and Trump’s party, on her beloved church. The word “Evangelical,” she noted, had always referred to a constellation of beliefs. “You have a relationship with God, God cares about you, God cares about all people, and Christ is central,” she said, ticking them off. “But now it seems to be something of a culture.” That culture is an exclusionary one. “I’ve been disinvited from events because of my views and activism for immigrants, because it’s controversial,” she said.

When Proper was young, she told me, she listened to Christian radio all the time, just like I did. Preachers and commentators like James Dobson, a famed radio personality and the founder of Focus on the Family, would opine on the issues of the day, on morality, and virtue. “All these people would talk about character,” she said. “How you can’t vote for Bill Clinton in particular because of Monica Lewinsky, because he had affairs.” Then came Trump. “People said, first, that they didn’t think he would win. Then it was all about abortion and judges. I felt like I was being punked,” she remembered. But many Evangelicals are in on the joke. Faced with popular rejection and the humiliation of Trump, they declare themselves persecuted, and identify numerous enemies. The mission remains the same: Purify the nation, and pacify the barbarians.

Beyond the usual celebrity-preacher scandals, the faith’s place in the broader Christian right required it to make moral compromises it never tolerated among the rank-and-file members of the flock. Our definition of morality narrowed the further up the pyramid you climbed. For the politicians we backed, it shrank to a pinprick point: Ronald Reagan was divorced. What mattered instead to the Moral Majority was his opposition to abortion, his hippie-bashing, his ability to trade in euphemisms about “states’ rights.” Two Bush presidents later, thrice-married Trump gave Evangelicals the conservative Supreme Court of their dreams.

As hypocritical as white Evangelical support for Trump may look from the outside, the president actually understood his base quite well. Eight years of a Black, liberal president threatened their hegemony. So had the Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist and the author of Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump, told me that Trump managed to tap into two key Evangelical tendencies. “Those two things were the racial grievances of the white base of the Republican Party, and how televangelism had changed Evangelicalism from the 1970s onward,” she said.

Galli, the former Christianity Today editor, believes Trump also appealed to an entrenched Evangelical sense of marginalization. By the time same-sex marriage was legalized, public opinion on LGBT rights had already liberalized; the gap between white Evangelicals, and everyone else, on matters of sexuality is now wider than it’s ever been. “Here comes Donald Trump, saying it’s okay to be Christian, it’s okay to have your values, it’s okay to practice your values in the public square. And he does this in a very authoritative manner,” Galli explained. Trump didn’t know his Scripture, but he knew there was a war on, and that was enough. The nation’s culture warriors had found their general.

Evangelicals, Galli added, “are deeply suspicious of human authority,” but only to a point. What they may fear, really, is authority they don’t control. “Paradoxically,” he continued, “they are a group that’s attracted to authoritarian leaders, whether that person be a pastor of a megachurch or a dictator.” Those tendencies existed before Trump. With the help of the far-right press, social media, and alternative institutions, they will survive Trump, too.

“I think that the thing that we have to keep our eye on is the ways in which the infrastructure that they built gives them an advantage beyond what their numbers would tell you,” Posner said. Conservative Evangelicals already know that they’re no longer the Moral Majority, and they’ve found a way to make it work for them. “They’ll recognize, for example, that they may be in the minority on LGBTQ rights, but in their view, that’s all the more reason that they should be protected by either the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or the First Amendment, in having the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.”

That infrastructure still churns out new acolytes, who embrace the worst elements of the tradition we all used to share. The same movement that produced me also spawned Madison Cawthorn, a Republican elected to Congress last month. He was born the year the Southern Baptist Convention first apologized for slavery, and he will be the youngest member of Congress when he takes office in January. He’ll also be one of furthest-right Republicans in office, with a personal life that once again tests the bounds of Evangelical toleration for sin. Women from his Christian homeschooling community in North Carolina and women who studied with him at the conservative Patrick Henry College have accused him repeatedly of sexual harassment and misconduct. A racist website linked to his campaign criticized a local journalist for leaving academia to “work for nonwhite males” like Senator Cory Booker, “who aims to ruin white males.” After he won, he celebrated with a tweet. “Cry more, lib,” he wrote.

There’s time for Cawthorn to self-immolate on a pyre of his own sins before he’s old enough to run for president. But there will be other Cawthorns, other white Evangelical candidates who will try to master Trumpism-without-Trump. They might not need an army to win, either. The GOP already knows it doesn’t have to be popular to stay in power. They need a radical remnant, and a lot of dirty tricks. Republicans can get what they want by suppressing the vote, or by undermining our confidence in elections. They can protect themselves through the subtle tyranny of inequality, which empowers the wealthy while alienating the most under-represented among us. A party out of step with most voters must either reform, or it must cheat. This, too, is something the modern GOP has in common with the Christian right. Democracy is the enemy. People can’t be trusted with their own souls. Leave them to their own devices, and they make the wrong choices, take the easy way out, threaten everything holy. They need a savior, whether they like it or not.

White Evangelicals Made a Deal With Trump. Now What? (nymag.com)

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time
By David Wallace-Wells

In August 1957, Dr. Joseph Ballinger gave a nurse at a New York hospital the first H2N2-vaccine shot to be administered in the city. Photo: AP Photo/AP2009

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it .

To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that Moderna should have been allowed to roll out its vaccine in February or even in May, when interim results from its Phase I trial demonstrated its basic safety. “That would be like saying we put a man on the moon and then asking the very same day, ‘What about going to Mars?’ ” says Nicholas Christakis, who directs Yale’s Human Nature Lab and whose new book, Apollo’s Arrow, sketches the way COVID-19 may shape our near-term future. Moderna’s speed was “astonishing,” Christakis says, though the design of other vaccines was nearly as fast: BioNTech with Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca.

Could things have moved faster from design to deployment? Given the grim prospects for winter, it is tempting to wonder. Perhaps, in the future, we will. But given existing vaccine infrastructure, probably not. Already, as Baylor’s Peter Hotez pointed out to me, “Operation Warp Speed” meant running clinical trials simultaneously rather than sequentially, manufacturing the vaccine at the same time, and authorizing the vaccine under “emergency use” in December based only on preliminary data that doesn’t track the long-term durability of protection or even measure the vaccine’s effect on transmission (only how much it protects against disease). And as Georgetown virologist Angela Rasmussen told me, the name itself may have needlessly risked the trust of Americans already concerned about the safety of this, or any, vaccine. Indeed, it would have been difficult in May to find a single credentialed epidemiologist, vaccine researcher, or public-health official recommending a rapid vaccine rollout — though, it’s worth noting, as early as July the MIT Technology Review reported that a group of 70 scientists in the orbit of Harvard and MIT, including “celebrity geneticist” George Church, were taking a totally DIY nasal-spray vaccine, never even intended to be tested, and developed by a personal genomics entrepreneur named Preston Estep (also the author of a self-help-slash-life-extension book called The Mindspan Diet). China began administering a vaccine to its military in June. Russia approved its version in August. And while most American scientists worried about the speed of those rollouts, and the risks they implied, our approach to the pandemic here raises questions, too, about the strange, complicated, often contradictory ways we approach matters of risk and uncertainty during a pandemic — and how, perhaps, we might think about doing things differently next time. That a vaccine was available for the entire brutal duration may be, to future generations trying to draw lessons from our death and suffering, the most tragic, and ironic, feature of this plague.

For all of modern medical history, Christakis writes in Apollo’s Arrow, vaccines and cures for infectious disease have typically arrived, if they arrive, only in the end stage of the disease, once most of the damage had already been done and the death rate had dramatically declined. For measles, for scarlet fever, for tuberculosis, for typhoid, the miracle drugs didn’t bring rampant disease to a sudden end — they shut the door for good on outbreaks that had largely died out already. This phenomenon is called the McKeown hypothesis — that medical interventions tend to play only a small role compared to public-health measures, socioeconomic advances, and the natural dynamics of the disease as it spreads through a population. The new coronavirus vaccines have arrived at what counts as warp speed, but not in time to prevent what CDC director Robert Redfield predicts will be “the most difficult time in the public-health history of this nation,” and do not necessarily represent a reversal of the McKeown hypothesis: The country may still reach herd immunity through natural disease spread, Christakis says, at roughly the same time as the rollout of vaccines is completed. Redfield believes there may be 200,000 more American deaths to come. This would mean what Christakis calls a “once-in-a-century calamity” had unfolded start-to-finish between the time the solution had been found and the time we felt comfortable administering it. A half a million American lives would have been lost in the interim. Around the world, considerably more.

In weighing other risks and uncertainties, Americans have been much less cautious, and not just in the case of marching maskless into Wal-Marts. On March 28, on what would normally be considered very thin evidentiary ground, the FDA issued an emergency-use authorization for the drug hydroxychloroquine. On May 1, it issued an EUA for remdesevir. On August 23, it issued another for convalescent plasma (the practice of injecting antibodies from the blood of recovered patients into those sick with the disease). These were all speculative authorizations — gambles, without concrete evidence, that existing treatments which scientists and doctors had some reason to suspect might help with the treatment of COVID-19 would be both safe and effective. All of these bets were lost. None of them, in the end, proved effective. Hydroxychloroquine, famously, proved dangerous, too, increasing risk of death in patients receiving it. Just one drug, the steroid dexamethasone, has proven to be a worthwhile treatment for COVID-19 in a randomized control trial — though given too early, it too can be dangerous. And at least some of the threefold decline in COVID-19 fatality rates observed over the spring and summer, the University College of London disease geneticist Francois Balloux told me recently, can be attributed to doctors no longer trying so many experimental treatments and focusing instead on the basic, old-fashioned job of simply keeping patients alive.

The treatment dilemmas facing physicians and patients in the early stages of a novel pandemic are, of course, not the same as the dilemma of rushing a new vaccine to a still-healthy population — we defer to the judgment of desperate patients, with physicians inclined to try to help them, but not to the desires of vaccine candidates, no matter how desperate. An unsafe vaccine, like the one for polio that killed ten and paralyzed 200 in 1955, could cause medical disaster and public-health backlash — though, as Balloux points out, since none of the new coronavirus vaccines use real viral material, that kind of accident, which affected one in a thousand recipients, would be impossible. (These days, one adverse impact in a million is the rule-of-thumb threshold of acceptability.) An ineffective vaccine could also give false security to those receiving it, thereby helping spread the disease by providing population-scale license to irresponsible behavior (indoor parties, say, or masklessness). But on other matters of population-level guidance, our messaging about risk has been erratic all year, too. In February and March, we were warned against the use of masks, in part on the grounds that a false sense of security would lead to irresponsible behavior — on balance, perhaps the most consequential public-health mistake in the whole horrid pandemic. In April, with schools already shut, we closed playgrounds. In May, beaches — unable or unwilling to live with even the very-close-to-zero risk of socializing outside (often shaming those who gathered there anyway). But in September, we opened bars and restaurants and gyms, inviting pandemic spread even as we knew the seasonality of the disease would make everything much riskier in the fall. The whole time, we also knew that the Moderna vaccine was essentially safe. We were just waiting to know for sure that it worked, too.

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.

“We do this every year for influenza,” Rasmussen says. “We don’t know which influenza viruses are going to be circulating, so we make our best guess. And then we formulate that into a vaccine using essentially the same technology platform that all the other influenza vaccines are based on.” The whole process takes a few months, and utilizes a “platform” that we already know is basically safe. With enough funding, you could do the same for viral pandemics, and indeed conduct Phase I trials for the entire set of possible future outbreaks before any of them made themselves known to the public. In the case of a pandemic produced by a new strain in these families, you might want to do some limited additional safety testing, but because the most consequential adverse effects take place in the days right after the vaccine is given, that additional diligence could be almost immediate.

We Had the COVID-19 Vaccine the Whole Time (nymag.com)

Why Some People Refuse to Wear COVID Masks

Consider seven reasons for resistance to public health measures.

Thomas Henricks Ph.D.
The Pathways of Experience
Posted Dec 06, 2020

All of us have tasks we don’t enjoy. We grumble about hauling the garbage to the street, cleaning the toilet, or taking the dog out at night. However, we also know that these jobs need doing and it is our responsibility to do them. They serve purposes we acknowledge. That ability, to command our lazier or more rebellious impulses, is what it means to be an adult. Or so we tell ourselves.

More difficult to accept are duties assigned to us by others, or even by society as a whole. Laws tell us to fasten seat belts, and observe speed limits, while driving. We are to wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle or bicycle. We need hunting and fishing licenses before pursuing those activities. We must submit to background checks before buying firearms. We cannot dump trash wherever we want. We have to pay taxes.

Some people see these basic responsibilities of citizenship as infringements on liberty. They view the United States as a country that grants individuals the right to do whatever they want when they want. And woe to anyone who interferes with that quest.

I describe these matters because of an article in the news a couple days ago about a bowling alley manager in Maryland who asked a group of his patrons to wear masks. That group of eight men beat him severely, with punches and kicks, before leaving the premises. They remain at large.

This is surely an extreme case. But most of us have seen unmasked individuals in stores, malls, sports arenas, airports, and other places of public congregation. In college towns, like the one I live in, it is easy to spot mask-less students partying.

Based on my own observations, I can report that most of the non-compliers are white. They are usually under the age of fifty. If clothing is an indicator, they seem to be working class or middle class. Most are men, but there are also many women. Tattoos are common; so are t-shirts with gun and motorcycle themes. Profoundly, they have a defiant look in their eyes as if daring someone to say something to them.

None of this would matter were the corona virus not raging in the nation. Record numbers are finding themselves infected, and dying. The health experts tell us the best course is to wear a mask, wash our hands, and maintain distance from others. We are to do this not just to protect ourselves but also to protect other people. So why do some people refuse? Below are seven reasons.

Denial. It is perhaps human nature to minimize the dangers we face and by that act to gain confidence for our daily affairs. In that spirit, we sometimes eat and drink excessively, speed in our cars, fudge on our taxes, cheat on our partners, and so forth. What’s the harm? Anyway, we won’t get caught.

Denial can feature a dismissal of circumstances (“I don’t see this as a problem”) and of consequence (“I don’t think this will affect me or the people I care about”). There is denial of involvement (“I’m not part of this situation”) and of responsibility (“I’m not to blame for what is happening”).

Those who refuse to wear masks during these virus times may tell themselves all these things. Refusers can say they don’t know anyone who has gotten the virus. They may claim the virus is concentrated in communities different from their own and far away from them. Most of the people who die from this pandemic are over 65 or have preexisting health problems, so this problem, or so the refuser thinks, is unlikely to affect “them.” Extremely, and some do say this, the whole matter is a “hoax.” At any rate, they are not responsible for other people’s problems.article continues after advertisement

Fatalism. I had a colleague-friend who served as a fighter pilot in three wars (World War II, Korea, and Viet Nam). He and his fellow pilots faced danger by believing that they would complete their missions until their “number was up.” As they saw it, there are many factors beyond one’s control. At some point, people bow to fate.

Religious people may rephrase this by affirming that their life is in God’s hands. If God decides that I ˗ or my loved ones ˗ must suffer, so be it.

Some people take that attitude toward the virus. “Let God’s will be done.” It is a curious combination of comfort and bravado, which is easier to maintain when other people are victims of the scourge. When family and friends start to fall, the bravado pales.

Fear of Change. Contemporary societies are replete with change. Populations grow. Urban settlements extend. There are new patterns of immigration, travel, and international commerce. The occupational structure shifts. Technology creates new possibilities of living. Nature itself strains under all this trafficking.

Most of us adjust to such changes and address them as we can. Our beliefs, manners, and activities are different from those of our parents and grandparents. But others do not change so easily. Particularly in rural areas and small towns, people hold to older models of living. Certain visions of family, faith, and fortitude prevail. There is resistance to rules established by distant and differently situated others, especially as enactments of federal government. There is some sense that people should “know their place” or “stay with their own kind.” The dominant members of the community defend these customs as “our ways of living.”article continues after advertisement

Oriented by beliefs like these, refusers may equate the current virus with these modern changes. The disease is presumably a foreign import (the “China Flu,” as the President called it). Initially, it spread fastest within urban areas and dense settlements like nursing homes and factories. Minority people suffered disproportionately. It has resulted in recommendations and mandates from state and national leaders. Those recommendations rely on the scientific knowledge of highly educated “experts.” Are these distant others the same people who would restrict gun rights, impose environmental regulations, promote same-sex marriages, support high levels of immigration, encourage advancements for women and minorities, facilitate abortions, and otherwise weaken local and family authority? Are “we” with “our” taxes to pay for “their” changes?

The cult of self-interest. Most of us would acknowledge that we have commitments to self-protection and self-satisfaction. Again, those tendencies are probably in our nature, drives that help us survive. However, few of us would defend rampant individualism as a style of life appropriate to a vast, complicated society like the United States.

That said, our country does encourage us to guard our rights for self-determination, to make “free” choices to go places and do things, and then to decorate ourselves with our possessions and accomplishments. We are, by most accounts, a status-oriented, acquisitive people. At least that is what we learn from the marketing division of our businesses. article continues after advertisement

Unfortunately, the deeper lesson of such acquisition is that people should armor themselves with private property and protect those domains strenuously from intruders. Guns, dogs, fences, and the like are part of the plan. In the same way, we may resist deep involvement with people beyond our immediate families. We learn to trust our own judgment, even when we know little about the issues at hand.

The virus has aggravated some of those tendencies. In part, that means limiting our contacts with people outside our households. Mask wearers do this to protect themselves – and to protect others. Mask refusers care little about the germs they spread to others. And if other people are wearing masks, that reduces the danger to them. In both instances, selfishness prevails.
The shame-anger conversion. All of us are sensitive to issues of social respect – and disrespect. If challenged on these matters, we push back. Those tendencies magnify in a country dominated by an individualist mythology, one where where most people consider themselves different from others or even “unique.”article continues after advertisement

Unfortunately, respect is unequally distributed. Some people experience diminished economic standing, difficult lives, and general social disregard. They – and people like them – are not the subjects of television shows and movies. Rarely do leaders consult them on matters of public policy. Although their work is extremely important for the running of the nation, they receive little recognition, or appropriate pay and benefits, for this service.

Higher placed people may demean that large swath of Americans as less educated, mean-spirited, and backward in their beliefs. Their commitment to family and local community may stand at odds with broad visions of societal transformation. Seemingly, so does their religious traditionalism.

For some then, mask refusal is an act of defiance against those who claim to “know better” than they do. Psychologist Helen Lewis explained how the sense of “unacknowledged shame” (based on longstanding threats to social reputability) sometimes spills as aggression. After all, anger feels good. Anger makes others feel bad. Angry displays may reset the balance of relationships, if only for the moment.

Group loyalty. Our individualist culture encourages us to make our own choices and live with the consequences. However, few of us operate that way. We have families and friends. We gather with community members, workmates, and church members. Although we present our attitudes as our own, they arise through these social filters.

It matters then that groups of people hold similar beliefs. The eight unmasked men at the bowling alley were there together. So are the unmasked kids at the campus parties. Commonly, one sees groups of working people, uniformly masked or oppositely, unmasked. Even mask refusers in stores and other places of public congregation can spot others of their ilk. All that lends a kind of courage, an affirmation that the refusers’ ways are reasonable.

It compounds the matter when vast numbers of the public, assembled as a political party, are sympathetic to these views. Or when the highest-ranking politicians minimize the danger of the situation. “Is the crisis overblown? People I trust seem to think so.”

Countervailing Information. Throughout American history, people have held opposing political beliefs and expressed these in their voting. Everyone anticipated that the banker and factory owner would vote one way and the laboring man another. For the most part, people kept their views to themselves. Placards and flags were not prominent on neighborhood lawns. After the election, people accepted the fact that their candidate had won or lost and moved ahead with their lives.

Nowadays, political beliefs are consolidated and maintained. A good portion of this is due to media sources, that is, certain television channels, radio stations, and websites that people can turn to for one-sided versions of current events. These outlets are extensive enough that one need not listen to broader-based, or public-minded, commentators for any their news. Indeed, there are publicly circulated extremist viewpoints that the virus is one part of a vast political conspiracy by a “deep state” bureaucracy to unseat a popular President and to replace him with someone more congenial to their progressive agenda.

In all these ways, mask refusers finds their rationales, leaders, and allies. Firmly stationed, they will not disappear soon. Nor is it likely that they will capitulate to the next stage of the battle, the quest for national vaccination.


About the Author


Thomas Henricks, Ph.D., is Danieley Professor of Sociology and Distinguished University Professor at Elon University.

DYLAN; COMMODITY FETISH*

The Dylan catalogue, a 60-year rock 'n' roll odyssey, is sold

 

© Provided by The Canadian Press

NEW YORK — Bob Dylan’s entire catalogue of songs dating back 60 years is being acquired by Universal Music Publishing Group.

The catalogue contains 600 song copyrights including “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” and “Tangled Up In Blue."

Dylan topped the Rolling Stone list of the 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time in 2015 and the song “Like A Rolling Stone” was named by the magazine as the best ever written.

Dylan was influenced and bluesman Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie, but added a lyrical depth to his music that eventually earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. He was the first songwriter to receive the award.

Financial terms were not disclosed Monday, but the catalogue may be the most prized in the music industry. Four years ago, when Michael Jackson’s estate sold the remaining half-share that it owned in the artist's catalogue, it fetched $750 million.

“Brilliant and moving, inspiring and beautiful, insightful and provocative, his songs are timeless—whether they were written more than half a century ago or yesterday," said Sir Lucian Grainge, CEO of Universal Music Group, in a prepared statement.

Dylan’s songs have been recorded more than 6,000 times, by various artists from dozens of countries, cultures and music genres, including the Jimi Hendrix version of “All Along The Watchtower."

Joan Baez, Bryan Ferry and the folk singer Odetta put out tribute albums, though his influence cannot be measured. Patti Smith, Adele and Sting contributed to an album honouring Dylan for his human rights work in 2012.

The sale of Dylan's musical catalogue comes a few weeks after the singer-songwriter’s musings about anti-Semitism and unpublished song lyrics sold at auction for a total of $495,000.

Dylan first entered the public consciousness with New York City’s Greenwich Village folk scene during the early 1960s. When he brought an electric guitar on stage in 1965, he split the music community in what was then considered a radical departure for an artist.

Dylan then produced three albums back to back in just over a year that changed the course of rock ‘n’ roll that decade, starting with “Bringing It All Back Home."

Dylan has sold more than 125 million records globally.

The Associated Press

*ACCORDING TO HIS CONTEMPORARY ADVERSARY; PHIL OCHS