Meteorologists anticipate a 'strong' El Niño in winter 2023 — but what does that actually mean?

Hurricane Dorian image via Twitter Screengrab
Hurricane forecasts are about to get a whole lot worse

The Conversation

October 13, 2023

Winter is still weeks away, but meteorologists are already talking about a snowy winter ahead in the southern Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. They anticipate more storms in the U.S. South and Northeast, and warmer, drier conditions across the already dry Pacific Northwest and the upper Midwest.

One phrase comes up repeatedly with these projections: a strong El Niño is coming.

It sounds ominous. But what does that actually mean? We asked Aaron Levine, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington whose research focuses on El Niño.

NOAA explains in animations how El Niño forms.




What is a strong El Niño?

During a normal year, the warmest sea surface temperatures are in the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, in what’s known as the Indo-Western Pacific warm pool.

But every few years, the trade winds that blow from east to west weaken, allowing that warm water to slosh eastward and pile up along the equator. The warm water causes the air above it to warm and rise, fueling precipitation in the central Pacific and shifting atmospheric circulation patterns across the basin

This pattern is known as El Niño, and it can affect weather around the world.


The box shows the Niño 3.4 region as El Niño begins to develop in the tropical Pacific, from January to June 2023.

NOAA Climate.gov

A strong El Niño, in the most basic definition, occurs once the average sea surface temperature in the equatorial Pacific is at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. It’s measured in an imaginary box along the equator, roughly south of Hawaii, known as the Nino 3.4 Index.

But El Niño is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon, and the atmosphere also plays a crucial role.

What has been surprising about this year’s El Niño – and still is – is that the atmosphere hasn’t responded as much as we would have expected based on the rising sea surface temperatures.

Is that why El Niño didn’t affect the 2023 hurricane season the way forecasts expected?

The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season is a good example. Forecasters often use El Niño as a predictor of wind shear, which can tear apart Atlantic hurricanes. But with the atmosphere not responding to the warmer water right away, the impact on Atlantic hurricanes was lessened and it turned out to be a busy season.

The atmosphere is what transmits El Niño’s impact. Heat from the warm ocean water causes the air above it to warm and rise, which fuels precipitation. That air sinks again over cooler water.

The rising and sinking creates giant loops in the atmosphere called the Walker Circulation. When the warm pool’s water shifts eastward, that also shifts where the rising and sinking motions happen. The atmosphere reacts to this change like ripples in a pond when you throw a stone in. These ripples affect the jet stream, which steers weather patterns in the U.S.

This year, in comparison with other large El Niño events – such as 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 – we’re not seeing the same change in where the precipitation is happening. It’s taking much longer to develop, and it’s not as strong.

Part of that, presumably, is related to the whole tropics being very, very warm. But this is still an emerging field of research.

How El Niño will change with global warming is a big and open question. El Niño only happens every few years, and there’s a fair amount of variability between events, so just getting a baseline is tough.

What does a strong El Niño typically mean for US weather?

During a typical El Niño winter, the U.S. South and Southwest are cooler and wetter, and the Northwest is warmer and drier. The upper Midwest tends to be drier, while the Northeast tends to be a little wetter.

The likelihood and the intensity generally scale with the strength of the El Niño event.

El Niño has traditionally been good for the mountain snowpack in California, which the state relies for a large percentage of its water. But it is often not so good for the Pacific Northwest snowpack.


The jet stream takes a very different path in a typical El Niño vs. La Niña winter weather pattern. But these patterns have a great deal of variability. Not every El Niño or La Niña year is the same.  NOAA Climate.gov

The jet stream plays a role in that shift. When the polar jet stream is either displaced very far northward or southward, storms that would normally move through Washington or British Columbia are steered to California and Oregon instead.

What do the forecasts show for 2023?

Whether forecasters think a strong El Niño will develop depends on whose forecast model they trust.

This past spring, the dynamical forecast models were already very confident about the potential for a strong El Niño developing. These are big models that solve basic physics equations, starting with current oceanic and atmospheric conditions.

However, statistical models, which use statistical predictors of El Niño calculated from historical observations, were less certain.

Even in the most recent forecast model outlook, the dynamical forecast models were predicting a stronger El Niño than the statistical models were.

If you go by just a sea surface temperature-based El Niño index, the forecast is for a fairly strong El Niño.

But the indices that incorporate the atmosphere are not responding in the same way. We’ve seen atmospheric anomalies – as measured by cloud height monitored by satellites or sea-level pressure at monitoring stations – on and off in the Pacific since May and June, but not in a very robust fashion. Even in September, they were nowhere near as large as they were in 1982, in terms of overall magnitude.

We’ll see if the atmosphere catches up by wintertime, when El Niño peaks.
How long do El Niños last?

Often during El Niño events – particularly strong El Niño events – the sea surface temperature anomalies collapse really quickly during the Northern Hemisphere spring. Almost all end in April or May.

One reason is that El Niño sows the seeds of its own demise. When El Niño happens, it uses up that warm water and the warm water volume shrinks. Eventually, it has eroded its fuel.

The surface can stay warm for a while, but once the heat from the subsurface is gone and the trade winds return, the El Niño event collapses. At the end of past El Niño events, the sea surface anomaly dropped very fast and we saw conditions typically switch to La Niña – El Niño’s cooler opposite.

Aaron Levine, Atmospheric Research Scientist, CICOES, University of Washington

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rare ‘flesh-eating’ bacterium spreads north as oceans warm

Debbie King works out her arms while preparing to transition to using a walker with the help of her husband, Jim King, on Sept. 26 at their home in Homosassa, Florida. 

(Douglas R. Clifford/Tampa Bay Times)

Christopher O’Donnell, Tampa Bay Times

October 22, 2023

Debbie King barely gave it a second thought when she scraped her right shin climbing onto her friend’s pontoon for a day of boating in the Gulf of Mexico on Aug. 13.

Even though her friend immediately dressed the slight cut, her shin was red and sore when King awoke the next day. It must be a sunburn, she thought.

But three days later, the red and blistered area had grown. Her doctor took one look and sent King, 72, to the emergency room.

Doctors at HCA Florida Citrus Hospital in Inverness, Florida, rushed King into surgery after recognizing the infection as Vibrio vulnificus, a potentially fatal bacterium that kills healthy tissue around a wound. While King lay on the operating table, the surgeon told her husband she would likely die if they didn’t amputate.

Just four days after the scrape, Kinglost her leg then spent four days in intensive care.

“The flesh was gone; it was just bone,” she said of her leg.

Cases of V. vulnificus are rare. Between 150 and 200 are reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention every year, with about 20% resulting in death. Most are in states along the Gulf of Mexico, but, in 2019, 7% were on the Pacific Coast. Florida averages about 37 cases and 10 deaths a year.

But a rise in cases nationally and the spread of the disease to states farther north — into coastal communities in states such as Connecticut, New York, and North Carolina — have heightened concerns about the bacterium, which can result in amputations or extensive removal of tissue even in those who survive its infections. And warmer coastal waters caused by climate change, combined with a growing population of older adults, may result in infections doubling by 2060, a study in Scientific Reports warned earlier this year.

“Vibrio distributions are driven in large part by temperature,” said Tracy Mincer, an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. “The warmer waters are, the more favorable it is for them.”

The eastern United States has seen an eightfold increase in infections over a 30-year period through 2018 as the geographic range of infections shifted north by about 30 miles a year, according to the study, which was cited in a CDC health advisory last month.

The advisory was intended to make doctors more aware of the bacterium when treating infected wounds exposed to coastal waters. Infections can also arise from eating raw or undercooked seafood, particularly oysters, it warned. That can cause symptoms as common as diarrhea and as serious as bloodstream infections and severe blistered skin lesions.

New York and Connecticut this summer issued health warnings about the risk of infection as well. It’s not the first year either state has recorded cases.

“There’s very few cases but when they happen, they’re devastating,” said Paul A. Gulig, a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Florida College of Medicine.

‘An Accident of Nature’

Vibriohas more than 100 strains, including the bacterium that causes cholera, a disease that causes tens of thousands of deaths worldwide each year.

The V. vulnificus strain likes warm brackish waters close to shorelines where the salinity is not as high as in the open sea. Unlike some other Vibrio strains,it has no mechanism to spread between humans.

It’s found in oysters because the mollusks feed by filtering water, meaning the bacterium can become concentrated in oyster flesh. It can enter humans who swim in salty or brackish waters through the slightest cut in the skin. Infections are treated with antibiotics and, if needed, surgery.

“It’s almost an accident of nature,” Gulig said. “They have all these virulence factors that make them really destructive, but we’re not a part of this bug’s life cycle.”

Once inside the human body, the bacteria thrive.

Scientists don’t believe the bacteria eat flesh, despite how they’re often described. Rather, enzymes and toxins secreted by the bacterium as it multiplies break down the human tissue in the area below the skin, causing necrosis, or death of tissue cells.

The infection spreads like wildfire, Gulig said, making early detection critical.

“If you take a pen and mark where the edge of the redness is and then look at that two or four hours later, the redness would have moved,” Gulig said. “You can almost sit there and watch this spread.”

Researchers have conducted studies on the bacteria, but the small number of cases and deaths make it tough to secure funding, said Gulig. He said he switched his research focus to other areas because of the lack of money.

But growing interest in the bacteria has prompted talk about new research at his university’s Emerging Pathogens Institute.

Examining the bacteria’s genome sequence and comparing it with those of Vibrio strains that don’t attack human flesh could yield insights into potential drugs to interfere with that process, Gulig said.

Shock and Loss

Inside the operating room at HCA Florida Citrus, the only signs of King’s infection were on her shin. The surgeon opened that area and began cutting away a bright red mush of dead flesh.

Hoping to save as much of the leg as possible, the doctor first amputated below her knee.

But the bacteria had spread farther than doctors had hoped. A second amputation, this time 5 inches above the knee, had to be performed.

After surgery, King remained in critical care for four days with sepsis, a reaction to infection that can cause organs to fail.

Her son was there when she awakened. He was the one who told her she had lost her leg, but she was too woozy from medication to take it in.

It wasn’t until she was transferred to a rehab hospital in nearby Brooksville run by Encompass Health that the losssank in.

A former radiation protection technician, King had always been self-reliant. The idea of needing a wheelchair, of being dependent on others — it felt like she had lost part of her identity.

One morning, she could just not stop crying. “It hit me like a ton of bricks,” she said.

Six different rehab staffers told her she needed to meet with the hospital’s consulting psychologist. She thought she didn’t need help, but she eventually gave in and met with Gerald Todoroff.

In four sessions with King, he said, he worked to redirect her perception of what happened. Amputation is not who you are but what you will learn to deal with, he told her. Your life can be as full as you wish.

“They were magic words that made me feel like a new person,” King said. “They went through me like music.”

Physical therapy moved her forward, too. She learned how to stand longer on her remaining leg, to use her wheelchair, and tomaneuver in and out of a car.

Now, back in her Gulf Coast community of Homosassa, those skills have become routine. Her husband, Jim, a former oil company worker and carpenter, built an access ramp out of concrete and pressure-treated wood for their single-story home.

But she is determined to walk with the aid of a prosthetic leg. It’s the motivation for a one-hour regimen of physical therapy she does on her own every day in addition to twice-weekly sessions with a physical therapist.

Recovery still feels like a journey but one marked by progress. She has nicknamed her “stump” Peg. She’s now comfortable sharing before and after pictures of her leg.

And she’s made it her mission to talk about what happened so more people will learn about the danger.

“This is the most horrific thing that can happen to anybody,” she said. “But I’d sit back and think, ‘God put you here for a reason — you’ve got more things to do.’”

What to Know About ‘Flesh-Eating’ Bacterium Vibrio vulnificus

Infection Symptoms:Diarrhea, often accompanied by stomach cramping, nausea, vomiting, and fever.
Wound infections cause redness, pain, swelling, warmth, discoloration, and discharge. They may spread to the rest of the body and cause fever.
Bloodstream infections cause fever, chills, dangerously low blood pressure, and blistering skin lesions.

To Protect Against Vibrio Infections:Stay out of saltwater or brackish water if you have a wound or a recent surgery, piercing, or tattoo.
Cover wounds with a waterproof bandage if they could come into contact with seawater or raw or undercooked seafood and its juices.
Wash wounds and cuts thoroughly with soap and water after contact with saltwater, brackish water, raw seafood, or its juices.

Who Is Most at Risk:Anyone can get a wound infection. People with liver disease, cancer, or diabetes, and those over 40 or with weakened immune systems, are more likely to get an infection and have severe complications.

Sources:https://www.cdc.gov/vibrio/wounds.html
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24884-vibrio-vulnificus

This article was produced in partnership with the Tampa Bay Times.KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF

How a Big Pharma company stalled a potentially lifesaving vaccine in pursuit of bigger profits

Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash

LONG READ 

Pro Publica
October 21, 2023

Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.

So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.

The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.

Weeks passed. Then months.

More than five years after the call, he’s still waiting, because the company that owns the vaccine decided to prioritize far more lucrative business.

Pharmaceutical giant GSK pulled back on its global public health work and leaned into serving the world’s most-profitable market, the United States, which CEO Emma Walmsley recently called its “top priority.” As the London-based company turned away from its vaccine for TB, a disease that kills 1.6 million mostly poor people each year, it went all in on a vaccine against shingles, a viral infection that comes with a painful rash. It afflicts mostly older people who, in the U.S., are largely covered by government insurance.

Importantly, the shingles vaccine shared a key ingredient with the TB shot, a component that enhanced the effectiveness of both but was in limited supply.

From a business standpoint, GSK’s decision made sense. Shingrix would become what the company calls a “crown jewel,” raking in more than $14 billion since 2018.

But the ability of a corporation to allow a potentially lifesaving vaccine to languish lays bare the distressing reality of public health vaccine creation. With limited resources, governments have long seen no other option but to team with Big Pharma to develop vaccines for global scourges. But after the governments pump taxpayer money and resources into the efforts, the companies get control of the products, locking up ownership and prioritizing their own gain.

That’s what GSK did with the TB vaccine. Decades ago, the U.S. Army brought in GSK to work on a malaria vaccine and helped develop the ingredient that would prove game-changing for the company. It was an adjuvant, a substance that primed the body’s immune system to successfully respond to a vaccine for malaria — and, the company would come to learn, a variety of other ailments.

GSK patented the adjuvant and took control of the supply of the ingredients in it. It accepted government and nonprofit funding to develop a TB vaccine using the adjuvant. But even though it isn’t carrying the vaccine to the finish line, it isn’t letting go of it entirely either, keeping a tight grip on that valuable ingredient.

As TB continued to rage around the globe, it took nearly two years for GSK to finalize an agreement with the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute, or Gates MRI, to continue to develop the vaccine. While the Gates organization agreed to pay to keep up the research, GSK reserved the right to sell the shot in wealthy countries.

The trial that will determine whether the vaccine is approved won’t begin until 2024, and isn’t expected to end until at least 2028. “We just can’t operate like that for a disease that is this urgent,” said Thomas Scriba, a South African scientist and TB expert who also worked on the study.

GSK pushes back against the premise that the company delayed the development of the TB vaccine and says it remains dedicated to researching diseases that plague underserved communities. “Any suggestion that our commitment to continued investment in global health has reduced, is fundamentally untrue,” Dr. Thomas Breuer, the company’s chief global health officer, wrote in a statement.

The company told ProPublica that it cannot do everything, and it now sees its role in global health as doing early development of products and then handing off the final clinical trials and manufacturing to others. It also said that a vaccine for TB is radically different from the company’s other vaccines because it can’t be sold at scale in wealthy countries.

Though a good TB vaccine would be used by tens of millions of people, it has, in the parlance of industry, “no market,” because those who buy it are mostly nonprofits and countries that can’t afford to spend much. It’s not that a TB vaccine couldn’t be profitable. It’s that it would never be as profitable as a product like the shingles vaccine that can be sold in the U.S. or Western Europe.

Experts say the story of GSK’s TB vaccine, and its roller coaster of hope and disappointment, highlights a broken system, which has for too long prioritized the needs of corporations over those of the sick and poor.

“We don’t ask for a fair deal from our pharma partners,” said Mike Frick, a director of the tuberculosis program at Treatment Action Group and a global expert on the TB vaccine pipeline. “We let them set the terms, but we don’t ask them to pick up the check. And I just find it frankly a little humiliating.”

Steven Reed, a co-inventor of the TB vaccine, brought his idea to GSK decades ago, believing that working with a pharmaceutical giant was essential to getting the shots to people who desperately needed them. He’s disillusioned that this hasn’t happened and now says that Big Pharma is not the path to saving lives with vaccines in much of the world. “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit,” he said. “That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”
Gaining Control

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Army was desperate for a way to keep troops safe from the parasite that causes malaria. Military scientists had some promising ideas but wanted to find a company that could help them develop and manufacture the antigen, the piece of a vaccine that triggers an immune response. They called on SmithKline Beckman, now part of GSK, which had a plant outside of Philadelphia committed to the exact type of antigen technology they were researching.

For the company’s part, working with the Army gave it access to new science and, importantly, the ability to conduct specialized research. The Army had laboratories for animal testing and ran clinical trial sites around the world. It’s also generally easier to get experimental products through regulatory approval when working with the government, and Army scientists were willing to be infected with malaria and run the first tests of the vaccine on themselves.

Col. Carl Alving, then an investigator at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said he was the first person known to be injected with an ingredient called MPL, an adjuvant added to the vaccine. Today, we know that adjuvants are key to many modern vaccines. But at the time, only one adjuvant, alum, had ever been approved for use. Alving published promising results, showing that MPL boosted the shot’s success in the body.

Company scientists took note and began adding MPL to other ingredients. If one adjuvant was good, maybe two adjuvants together, stimulating different parts of the immune system, might be even better.

It was an exciting development, bringing the multiple adjuvants together, Alving said in an interview. But then he learned that the company scientists had filed a patent for the combinations in Europe, which put limits on what he and his colleagues could do with MPL. “The Army felt perhaps a little frustrated by that because we had introduced Glaxo to the field.”

Still, the Army wanted the malaria vaccine. Military personnel started comparing the adjuvant combinations on rhesus monkeys at an Army facility in Thailand and ran clinical trials that tested the most promising pairs in humans and devised dosing strategies.

The Army found that one of the combinations came out on top: MPL and an extract from the bark of a tree that grows in Chile. The bark extract was already used in veterinary vaccines, but a scientist at one of the world’s first biotech companies had recently discovered you could purify it into a material that makes it safe enough for use in humans.

Alving said that at the time, he didn’t patent the work he and his colleagues were doing or demand an exclusive license for MPL. “It’s a question of the Army being the Army, which is not a company,” Alving said. (This was actually the second time the government failed to secure its rights over MPL. Decades earlier, the ingredient was discovered and formulated by scientists working for the Department of Veterans Affairs and a National Institutes of Health lab in Montana. One of the scientists, frustrated that his bosses in Bethesda, Maryland, wouldn’t let him test the product in humans, quit and formed a company, taking the research with him. Though his company initially said it thought MPL was in the public domain and couldn’t be patented, he did manage to patent it.)

Experts say drug development in the U.S. is littered with such missed opportunities, which allow private companies to seize control of and profit off work done by publicly funded researchers. Governments, they say, need to be more aggressive about keeping such work in the public domain. Alving has since done just that, recently receiving his 30th patent owned by the military.

It’s an open secret in the pharmaceutical world that companies participate in global health research because it’s where they get to try out new technologies that can be applied to other, more lucrative diseases.

At an investor presentation in 2016, a GSK executive used the malaria vaccine example to explain the benefit of such work. “Of those of you who think this is just philanthropy, it is not,” Luc Debruyne, then president of vaccines at GSK, told the group. He explained that it was through the malaria work that the company invented the adjuvant that is now in its blockbuster shingles vaccine. And, he explained, vaccines are high-volume products that make a steady stream of money over time. “So doing good business, innovating and doing well for the world absolutely can get married.”

As the Army’s research on the combination of MPL and the bark extract evolved — and its market potential became clear — GSK moved to vacuum up the companies that owned the building blocks to the adjuvant.

In 2005, it bought the company that owned the rights to MPL for $300 million. In 2012, it struck a deal for the rights to a lion’s share of the supply of the Chilean tree bark extract.

The company was now in full control of the adjuvant.
Picking a Winner

GSK eagerly began to test its new adjuvant on a number of diseases — hepatitis, Lyme, HIV, influenza.

Steven Reed, a microbiologist and immunologist, had come to the company in 1994 with an idea for a tuberculosis vaccine. An estimated 2 billion people are infected with TB globally, but it’s mainly those with weakened immune systems who fall ill. A century-old vaccine called BCG protects young children, but immunity wanes over time, and that vaccine does little to shield people from the most common type of infection in the lungs.

Reed had just the background and resources to attempt a breakthrough: An adjunct professor at Cornell University’s medical school, he also ran a nonprofit research organization that worked on infectious diseases and had co-founded a biotech company to create and market products.

He and his colleagues were building a library of the proteins that make up the mycobacterium that causes TB. He also had access to a blood bank in Brazil, where TB was more prevalent, that he could screen the proteins against to determine which generated an immune response that prevented people from getting sick.

At the time Reed pitched the vaccine, the company’s decision over whether to take him up was made by researchers, said Michel De Wilde, a former vice president of research and development at the company that partnered with Reed and later became part of GSK. Today, across the industry, finance units play a much stronger role in deciding what a company works on, he said.

GSK signed on, asking Reed to add the company’s promising new adjuvant to his idea for a TB vaccine.

Reed and his colleagues used more than $2 million in federal money to conduct trials from 1995 to 2005. GSK also invested, but NIH money and resources were the key, Reed said. As the vaccine progressed into testing, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pitched in, as did the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia, among others.

Amid all that, in 2003, GSK started testing the adjuvant in its shingles vaccine, according to annual reports, but at a much faster speed. With TB, it performed a small proof-of-concept study to justify moving to a larger one. There’s no evidence it did so with shingles. By 2010, GSK’s shingles vaccine was in final trials; in 2017, the FDA approved it for use.

To employees and industry insiders, GSK was making its priorities clear. The company built a vaccine research facility in Rockville, Maryland, to be closer to the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration; at the same time, it was retreating from TB and other global public health projects, according to former employees of the vaccine division.

All the while, the adjuvant was limited. GSK struggled to ramp up production of MPL, according to former employees there; it relies on a cumbersome manufacturing process. And it wasn’t clear whether there was sufficient supply of the Chilean tree that is essential to both vaccines.

After researchers learned of the TB vaccine’s successful proof-of-concept results in 2018, GSK said nothing about what was next.

“You would have thought people would have said: ‘Oh shit, this is doable. Let’s double down, let’s quadruple down,’” said Dr. Tom Evans, former president and CEO of Aeras, a nonprofit that led and paid for half of the proof-of-concept study. “But that didn’t happen.”

Scriba, who was involved in the study in South Africa, said he never imagined that GSK wouldn’t continue the research. “To be honest it never occurred to us that they wouldn’t. The people we worked with at GSK were the TB team. They were passionate about TB,” Scriba said. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

But Reed said that when the shingles vaccine was approved, he had a gut feeling that GSK would abandon the tuberculosis work.

“The company that dropped it used similar technology to make billions of dollars on shingles, which doesn’t kill anyone,” Reed said.

Those in the field grew so concerned about the fate of the TB vaccine that the World Health Organization convened a series of meetings in 2019.

Breuer, then chief medical officer for GSK’s vaccine division, explained that the pharmaceutical giant was willing to hand off the vaccine to an organization or company that would cover the cost of future development, licensing, manufacturing and liability. If the next trial went well, they could sell the vaccine in the “developing world,” with GSK retaining the sales rights in wealthier countries.

GSK would, however, retain control of the adjuvant, Breuer said. And the company only had enough for its other vaccines, so whoever took over the TB vaccine’s development would need to pay GSK to ramp up production, which Breuer estimated would cost around $200 million.

Dr. Julio Croda was director of communicable diseases for Brazil at the time and attended the meeting. He said he was authorized to spend significant government funds on a tuberculosis vaccine trial but needed assurances that GSK would transfer technology and intellectual property if governments paid for its development. “But in the end of the meeting, we didn’t have an agreement,” he said.

Dr. Glenda Gray, a leading HIV vaccine expert who attended the meeting on behalf of South Africa, said she wasn’t able to get a straight answer about the availability of the adjuvant.

The year after the WHO meeting, after what a Gates representative described as “a lot of negotiation,” GSK licensed the vaccine to Gates MRI, a nonprofit created by the Gates Foundation to develop drugs and vaccines for global health issues that for-profit companies won’t tackle.

GSK told ProPublica that it did not receive upfront fees or royalties as part of the arrangement, but that Gates MRI paid it a small incentive to invest in the company’s global health endeavors. GSK and Gates MRI declined to comment on the amount.

Gates MRI tax documents show a payment designated as “royalties, license fees, and similar amounts that allow the organization to use intellectual property such as patents and copyrights” the year the agreement was finalized. Among available tax documents, that is the only year the organization has made a payment in that category.

The amount: $10 million.
An Uncertain Future

In June of this year, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust announced they were pledging $550 million to fund the phase 3 trial that will finally show whether the vaccine works. They’ve selected trial locations and are currently testing it on a smaller subset of patients, those with HIV.

Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at the WHO, said he’s more optimistic than he’s ever been in his career that we’ll have a new TB vaccine this decade.

Gates MRI and GSK declined to say who had the rights to sell the vaccine in which countries, but Gates MRI said it will “work with partners to ensure the vaccine is accessible for people living in high TB-burden lower- and middle-income countries,” and GSK acknowledged that its rights extend to South America and Eastern Europe, two regions with significant pockets of TB.

As expected, Gates MRI will be reliant on GSK to supply the adjuvant, which concerns vaccine hopefuls because of the lack of transparency surrounding its availability. One of the key ingredients, the bark extract, comes from a tree whose harvest and export has been controlled by the Chilean government since the 1970s because of overexploitation. A megadrought and forest fires continue to threaten native forests today. The main exporter of the bark says it has resolved previous bottlenecks, and GSK said it is working on a synthetic version as part of its long-term plan.

In response to questions about why it retained control of the adjuvant, GSK said it was complicated to make, would not be economical to produce in more than one place, and was a very important component in many of the company’s vaccines, so it wasn’t willing to share the know-how.

The adjuvant is only growing in value to the company, as it adds yet another lucrative vaccine to its portfolio that requires it. In May, the FDA approved a GSK vaccine for the respiratory virus known as RSV. Analysts project that the shot will bring in $4 billion annually at its peak. GSK continues to study the adjuvant in additional vaccines.

GSK strongly insists that it has enough of the adjuvant to fulfill its forecasted needs for the RSV, shingles, malaria and TB vaccines through 2035.

The company and Gates MRI said their agreement includes enough adjuvant for research and the initial supply of the TB vaccine, if it is approved. The organizations declined, however, to specify how many people could be vaccinated. GSK also said it was willing to supply more adjuvant after that, but further negotiations would be necessary and Gates MRI would likely need to pay to increase adjuvant manufacturing capacity. For its part, Gates MRI said it is evaluating several strategies to ensure longer term supply.

Several experts said that Gates MRI should test other adjuvants with the vaccine’s antigen. That includes Farrar, who said it would be “very wise” to start looking for a new adjuvant. He is one of the few people who has seen the agreement between Gates MRI and GSK as a result of his previous role as director of the Wellcome Trust. Farrar is now helping to lead a new TB Vaccine Accelerator Council at the WHO and said he believes one of the group’s roles would be to find solutions to any future problems with the adjuvant.

Gates MRI declined to answer when asked if it was considering testing other adjuvants with the vaccine’s antigen. GSK, along with several other scientists and regulators that ProPublica spoke with, expressed that using a new adjuvant would require redoing all of the long and expensive clinical trials.

U.S. government officials, meanwhile, are working to identify adjuvants that aren’t already tied up by major pharmaceutical companies.

For a corporation, the primary concern is “what is this adjuvant doing for my bottom line,” said Wolfgang Leitner, who began his career working at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research on the malaria vaccine as a consultant for GSK. Now the chief of the innate immunity section at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his job is to encourage the development of new adjuvants and to make sure that researchers have access to ones that aren’t tightly controlled by individual companies.

The WHO has also been helping to build a global network of vaccine manufacturers who can develop and supply vaccines to less wealthy countries outside of the shadow of Big Pharma; it is using a technology debuted during the COVID-19 pandemic called mRNA, which deploys snippets of genetic code to trigger an immune response. Reed, an inventor of GSK’s TB vaccine, co-founded the company at the center of that effort, Afrigen, after growing concerned about the fate of the vaccine he made for GSK.

Reed helped create a second TB vaccine, which Afrigen has the rights to manufacture for sale in Africa. But that vaccine has yet to start a proof-of-concept trial.

Over the past five years, an average of just $120 million a year has been spent on all TB vaccine research globally, including money from governments, pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic organizations, according to annual surveys conducted by the Treatment Action Group. For perspective, the U.S. alone spent more than $2 billion developing COVID-19 vaccines from 2020 to 2022. At a special UN meeting on tuberculosis in 2018, the nations of the world pledged to ensure $3 billion was spent on TB vaccine research and development over the next five years. Just 20% of that was handed out.

While that mRNA hub holds promise, it will be years before an mRNA TB vaccine enters a proof-of-concept trial, according to people involved. The pharmaceutical companies that made successful COVID-19 vaccines have refused to share the technology and manufacturing techniques that make mRNA vaccines work. One company, Moderna, has said it won’t enforce its patents on mRNA vaccines Afrigen creates for COVID-19, but it’s not clear what it’ll do if Afrigen applies those techniques to a disease like TB. (Paul Sagan, board chairman of ProPublica, is a member of Moderna’s board.)

To date, the GSK tuberculosis vaccine — which does not use mRNA technology — is the only one that meets a set of characteristics the WHO believes are necessary for a viable TB vaccine.

The phase 3 trial is set to begin early next year. In the time between the two trials, approximately 9 million people will have died from TB.

Does chicken soup really help when you’re sick? A nutrition specialist explains

Photo by Bluebird Provisions on Unsplash

white ceramic bowl with yellow liquid

The Conversation

October 21, 2023

Preparing a bowl of chicken soup for a loved one when they’re sick has been a common practice throughout the world for centuries. Today, generations from virtually every culture swear to the benefits of chicken soup. In the U.S., the dish is typically made with noodles, but different cultures prepare the soothing remedy their own way.

Chicken soup as a therapy can be traced back to 60 A.D. and Pedanius Dioscorides, an army surgeon who served under the Roman emperor Nero, and whose five-volume medical encyclopedia was consulted by early healers for more than a millennium. But the origins of chicken soup go back thousands of years earlier, to ancient China.

So, with cold and flu season in full swing, it’s worth asking: Is there any science to back the belief that it helps? Or does chicken soup serve as just a comforting placebo, that is, providing psychological benefit while we’re sick, without an actual therapeutic benefit?

As a registered dietitian and professor of dietetics and nutrition, I’m well aware of the appeal of chicken soup: the warmth of the broth and the rich, savory flavors of the chicken, vegetables and noodles. What gives the soup that distinctive taste is “umami” – the fifth category of taste sensations, along with sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It is often described as having a “meaty” taste.

The notion that chicken soup is an elixir goes back centuries.
Improved appetite, better digestion

All that makes sense, because amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and the amino acid glutamate is found in foods with the umami taste. Not all umami foods are meat or poultry, however; cheese, mushrooms, miso and soy sauce have it too.

Studies show that taste, it turns out, is critical to the healing properties of chicken soup. When I see patients with upper respiratory illnesses, I notice many of them are suddenly eating less or not eating at all. This is because acute illnesses ignite an inflammatory response that can decrease your appetite. Not feeling like eating means you’re unlikely to get the nutrition you need, which is hardly an optimal recipe for immune health and recovery from illness.

But evidence suggests that the umami taste in chicken soup may help spur a bigger appetite. Participants in one study said they felt hungrier after their first taste of a soup with umami flavor added in by researchers.

Other studies say umami may also improve nutrient digestion. Once our brains sense umami through the taste receptors on our tongues, our bodies prime our digestive tracts to absorb protein more easily.

This can reduce gastrointestinal symptoms, which many people experience when they’re under the weather. Although most people don’t associate upper respiratory infections with gastrointestinal symptoms, research in children has found that the flu virus increased abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea symptoms.

There are many ways to make chicken soup.

May reduce inflammation and stuffy nose

Inflammation is part of the body’s natural response to injury or illness; inflammation occurs when white blood cells migrate to inflamed tissue to assist with healing. When this inflammatory process occurs in the upper airway, it results in common cold and flu symptoms, such as a stuffy or runny nose, sneezing, coughing and thickened mucus.

Conversely, lower white blood cell activity in the nasal passages can reduce inflammation. And interestingly, research shows that chicken soup can in fact lower the number of white blood cells traveling to inflamed tissues. It does this by directly inhibiting the ability of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell, to travel to the inflamed tissue.
Key ingredients

To truly understand the soothing and healing effects of chicken soup, it’s important to consider the soup’s ingredients. Not all chicken soups are packed with nutritious healing properties. For instance, the ultraprocessed canned versions of chicken soup, both with and without noodles, lack many of the antioxidants found in homemade versions. Most canned versions of chicken soup are nearly devoid of hearty vegetables.

The core nutrients in homemade versions of the soup are what set these varieties apart from canned versions. Chicken provides the body with a complete source of protein to combat infection. Vegetables supply a wide array of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. If prepared the American way, noodles provide an easily digestible source of carbohydrate that your body uses for energy and recovery.

Even the warmth of chicken soup can help. Drinking the liquid and inhaling the vapors increase the temperature of nasal and respiratory passages, which loosens the thick mucus that often accompanies respiratory illnesses. Compared with hot water alone, studies show chicken soup is more effective at loosening mucus.

The herbs and spices sometimes used in chicken soup, such as pepper and garlic, also loosen mucus. The broth, which contains water and electrolytes, helps with rehydration.

So, to maximize the health benefits of chicken soup, I recommend a homemade variety, which can be prepared with carrots, celery, fresh garlic, herbs and spices, to name a few ingredients. But if you need a more convenient option, look at the ingredients and nutrition facts label, and choose soups with a variety of vegetables over an ultraprocessed, nutrient-depleted kind.

In short, the latest science suggests that chicken soup – though not an out-and-out cure for colds and flu – really helps with healing. Looks like Grandma was right again.

Colby Teeman, Assistant Professor of Dietetics and Nutrition, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Extreme weather could burn many investment portfolios by mid-century

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash
burning banknotes

The Conversation

October 21, 2023

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges facing humanity today, with potentially severe implications for infrastructure assets. Infrastructure investments such as roads, bridges, ports, airports, and power plants have long lifetimes, typically spanning several decades, and are designed to operate under specific climatic conditions. However, climate change is causing more frequent and intense extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and storms, which can damage or disrupt infrastructure assets. These physical risks can lead to direct losses, increased maintenance costs, and lower asset values.

At the same time, climate change induces changes in policy, technology, and consumer preferences that can impact the value of infrastructure assets. This is known as transition risks. For example, new regulations and carbon-pricing schemes could make carbon-intensive infrastructure assets less attractive or even “stranded”, leading to significant financial losses . Additionally, changes in consumer behaviour, such as a shift toward electric vehicles or renewable energy sources, could render certain infrastructure assets obsolete.

50% potential loss of value

If the energy transition has a cost for private investors (transition risks), so does climate change (physical risks). Extreme weather events, which experts predict will increase over the next few years, thus greatly increase the risk of losing value in portfolios.

In an August 2023 study, “It’s getting physical”, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute shows that some investors could see the value of their portfolio fall by more than 50% before 2050. The average investor’s portfolio, which generally holds around 10 assets, could drop by a quarter.

The reason is that over the past two decades, institutional investors – such as insurance companies, mutual and pension funds – have been allocating more and more capital to private infrastructure companies, which operate motorway toll roads, airports, power stations, bridges, pipelines, wind and photovoltaic farms, and so on. This represents a total value of 4.1 trillion dollars in the 25 most active markets. These markets include sectors like renewable energy projects, sustainable infrastructure development, clean technology ventures, electric vehicle manufacturing, carbon offset trading, and green real estate investment, among others. These infrastructures are particularly exposed to climate risks.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, public spending on physical infrastructure has persistently failed to keep up with economic growth; the United States spends only 2.3% of its GDP on infrastructure, compared to 5% for European countries and 8% for China. Still, private-investor exposure appears to be considerable.
27% loss of value on average

To measure the likely losses of infrastructure investors, we randomly constructed thousands of portfolios. To do this, we included hundreds of assets belonging to infrastructure investments across eight industrial superclasses, including transport (air, rail and road), power generation (gas- and coal-fired, nuclear, etc.), renewable energy (wind, solar, hydroelectric, etc.), network utilities (electricity, gas or water distribution), water resources (oil, gas or water pipelines, gas or liquid storage), etc. For all these assets, it is possible to obtain information on the associated climate risks in EDHEC’s InfraMetrics database.

Overall, we observed a high concentration of risk. Most infrastructure investors generally have few assets in their portfolios (between 5 and 20 on average). Their portfolios are poorly diversified, with a relatively limited number of assets held directly by each investor.

Furthermore, portfolios containing infrastructure assets are often concentrated in a single sector – for example, wind farms. In practical terms, an investor who started building a portfolio in 2018 and plans to hold the assets for another 30 years is exposed to losses solely due to physical risks ranging from -54% to -10%, depending on the number of assets held.

In addition, the loss in value of assets exposed to climate change is -27% on average [by 2050]. In a scenario where temperatures rise faster than expected, they could reach 54% for the most-concentrated portfolios. For instance, the “Hot House World” scenario predicts a rise in temperatures of about 3.2ºC above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Some sectors are also more exposed to climate risks than others. In the transport sector, for example, the loss in net asset value would be four times greater than in the renewable energies sector. Investors in developed countries – in particular the United States, Europe and Australia and others – are the most exposed to losses in value worldwide. Indeed, the more valuable assets are concentrated in a given location, the greater the risk of value destruction.

More inaction, even greater risk

This study shows the scale of the potential losses that investors will have to face. And that’s before the 2050 deadline, as long as climate change predictions remain unchanged. Without action from governments and other stakeholders, climate risks could have a major impact on the overall value of investments, and on the economy as a whole.

However, there is still a glimmer of hope: if the stakeholders manage to organise an effective transition to a low-carbon economy, the losses mentioned in the article could be halved for all investors. All that remains – and this is undoubtedly the most difficult part – is to take action.

Noël Amenc, Professeur de finance, EDHEC Business School; Abhishek Gupta, Associate Director at the EDHEC Infrastructure Institute, EDHEC Business School; Bertrand Jayles, Senior Sustainability Data Scientist, EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, EDHEC Business School; Darwin Marcelo, Project Director at the EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, EDHEC Business School; Frédéric Blanc-Brude, Directeur de l'EDHEC Infrastructure Institute, EDHEC Business School; Leonard Lum, Data analyst, EDHECinfra, EDHEC Business School; Nishtha Manocha, EDHECinfra Senior Research Engineer, EDHEC Business School, and Qinyu Goh, MSc Urban Science, Sustainability Data Scientist at the EDHEC Infrastructure & Private Assets Research Institute, EDHEC Business School

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SPILLAGE
Why self-checkout has been an inconvenient 'failure' for both shoppers and stores
A shopper using a self-checkout kiosk in Poland in 2020

(Creative Commons)

Alex Henderson
October 19, 2023

Self-checkout kiosks became increasingly common in stores in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and retailers hailed them as a major convenience for shoppers.

But journalist Amanda Mull, in a biting article published by The Atlantic on October 19, stresses that self-checkout has turned out be the polar opposite of "convenient." Self-checkout, according to Mull, has been a headache for consumers as well as stores.

Mull recalls that in the past, the argument for self-checkout was "scan your stuff, plunk it in a bag, and you're done. Long checkout lines would disappear."

But the journalist adds that the reality of self-checkout has been much different.

"You still have to wait in line," Mull laments. "The checkout kiosks bleat and flash when you fail to set a purchase down in the right spot. Scanning those items is sometimes a crapshoot — wave a barcode too vigorously in front of an uncooperative machine, and suddenly, you've scanned it two or three times. Then, you need to locate the usually lone employee charged with supervising all of the finicky kiosks, who will radiate exasperation at you while scanning her ID badge and tapping the kiosk's touch screen from pure muscle memory."

Mull adds, "If you want to buy something that even might carry some kind of arbitrary purchase restriction — not just obvious things such as alcohol, but also, products as seemingly innocuous as a generic antihistamine — well, maybe don't do that."

Self-checkout, according to Mull, has not only been a hassle for shoppers — it has been expensive for retailers, as "the average four-kiosk setup runs around $125,000." And when stores cut their staffs, she notes, theft became more common.

Some retailers, Mull reports, realize that self-checkout has problems and are cutting back on it — or at least making adjustments.

"Costco is stationing more staffers in its self-checkout areas," Mull reports. "ShopRite is adding cashiers back into stores where it had trialed a self-checkout-only model, citing customer backlash. None of this is an indication that self-checkout is over, exactly. But several decades in, the kiosks as Americans have long known them are beginning to look like a failure."

Amanda Mull's full report for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

Gangsters are the villains in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ — but the biggest thief of Native American wealth was the US government

An Osage delegation with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House on Jan. 20, 1924. Bettman via Getty Images

The Conversation

October 21, 2023

Director Martin Scorsese’s new movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” tells the true story of a string of murders on the Osage Nation’s land in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Based on David Grann’s meticulously researched 2017 book, the movie delves into racial and family dynamics that rocked Oklahoma to the core when oil was discovered on Osage lands.

White settlers targeted members of the Osage Nation to steal their land and the riches beneath it. But from a historical perspective, this crime is just the tip of the iceberg.

From the early 1800s through the 1930s, official U.S. policy displaced thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homes through the policy known as Indian removal. And throughout the 20th century, the federal government collected billions of dollars from sales or leases of natural resources like timber, oil and gas on Indian lands, which it was supposed to disburse to the land’s owners. But it failed to account for these trust funds for decades, let alone pay Indians what they were due.

I am the manager of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Governance Program and a law professor. My ancestry is Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee on my father’s side and Taos Pueblo on my mother’s side. From my perspective, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is just one chapter in a much larger story: The U.S. was built on stolen lands and wealth.


Members of the Osage Nation attend the premiere of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ on Sept. 27, 2023, in New York City.
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Westward expansion and land theft

In the standard telling, the American West was populated by industrious settlers who eked out livings from the ground, formed cities and, in time, created states. In fact, hundreds of Native nations already lived on those lands, each with their own unique forms of government, culture and language.

In the early 1800s, eastern cities were growing and dense urban centers were becoming unwieldy. Indian lands in the west were an alluring target – but westward expansion ran up against what would become known was “the Indian problem.” This widely used phrase reflected a belief that the U.S. had a God-given mandate to settle North America, and Indians stood in the way.

In the early 1800s, treaty-making between the U.S. and Indian nations shifted from a cooperative process into a tool for forcibly removing tribes from their lands.

Starting in the 1830s, Congress pressured Indian tribes in the east to sign treaties that required the tribes to move to reservations in the west. This took place over the objections of public figures such as Tennessee frontiersman and congressman Davy Crockett, humanitarian organizations and, of course, the tribes themselves.

Forced removal touched every tribe east of the Mississippi River and several tribes to the west of it. In total, about 100,000 American Indians were removed from their eastern homelands to western reservations.

But the most pernicious land grab was yet to come.


Eastern Native American tribes that were forced to move west starting in the 1830s.
Smithsonian, CC BY-ND

The General Allotment Act


Even after Indians were corralled on reservations, settlers pushed for more access to western lands. In 1871, Congress formally ended the policy of treaty-making with Indians. Then, in 1887, it passed the General Allotment Act, also known as the Dawes Act. With this law, U.S. policy toward Indians shifted from separation to assimilation – forcibly integrating Indians into the national population.

This required transitioning tribal structures of communal land ownership under a reservation system to a private property model that broke up reservations altogether. The General Allotment Act was designed to divvy up reservation lands into allotments for individual Indians and open any unallotted lands, which were deemed surplus, to non-Indian settlement. Lands could be allotted only to male heads of households.

Under the original statute, the U.S. government held Indian allotments, which measured roughly 160 acres per person, in trust for 25 years before each Indian allottee could receive clear title. During this period, Indian allottees were expected to embrace agriculture, convert to Christianity and assume U.S. citizenship.

In 1906, Congress amended the law to allow the secretary of the interior to issue land titles whenever an Indian allottee was deemed capable of managing his affairs. Once this happened, the allotment was subject to taxation and could immediately be sold.

A 2021 study estimated that Native people in the U.S. have lost almost 99% of the lands they occupied before 1800.

Legal cultural genocide

Indian allottees often had little concept of farming and even less ability to manage their newly acquired lands.

Even after being confined to western reservations, many tribes had maintained their traditional governance structures and tried to preserve their cultural and religious practices, including communal ownership of property. When the U.S. government imposed a foreign system of ownership and management on them, many Indian landowners simply sold their lands to non-Indian buyers, or found themselves subject to taxes that they were unable to pay.

In total, allotment removed 90 million acres of land from Indian control before the policy ended in the mid-1930s. This led to the destruction of Indian culture; loss of language as the federal government implemented its boarding school policy; and imposition of a myriad of regulations, as shown in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” that affected inheritance, ownership and title disputes when an allottee passed away.


A 1917 map of oil leases on the Osage Reservation.
HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

A measure of justice

Today, about 56 million acres remain under Indian control. The federal government owns title to the lands, but holds them in trust for Indian tribes and individuals.

These lands contain many valuable resources, including oil, gas, timber and minerals. But rather than acting as a steward of Indian interests in these resources, the U.S. government has repeatedly failed in its trust obligations.

As required under the General Allotment Act, money earned from oil and gas exploration, mining and other activities on allotted Indian lands was placed in individual accounts for the benefit of Indian allottees. But for over a century, rather than making payments to Indian landowners, the government routinely mismanaged those funds, failed to provide a court-ordered accounting of them and systematically destroyed disbursement records.

In 1996, Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, filed a class action lawsuit seeking to force the government to provide a historic accounting of these funds and fix its failed system for managing them. After 16 years of litigation, the suit was settled in 2009 for roughly US$3.4 billion.

The settlement provided $1.4 billion for direct payments of $1,000 to each member of the class, and $1.9 billion to consolidate complex ownership interests that had accrued as land was handed down through multiple generations, making it hard to track allottees and develop the land.

“We all know that the settlement is inadequate, but we must also find a way to heal the wounds and bring some measure of restitution,” said Jefferson Keel, president of the National Congress of American Indians, as the organization passed a resolution in 2010 endorsing the settlement.


Elouise Cobell shakes hands with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at a Senate hearing on the $3.4 billion Cobell v. Salazar settlement. Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, led the suit against the federal government for mismanaging revenues derived from land held in trust for Indian tribes and individuals.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Who are the wolves?

“Killers of the Flower Moon” offers a snapshot of American Indian land theft, but the full history is much broader. In one scene from the movie, Ernest Burkhart – an uneducated white man, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who married an Osage woman and participated in the Osage murders – reads haltingly from a child’s picture book.

“There are many, so many, hungry wolves,” he reads. “Can you find the wolves in this picture?” It’s clear from the movie that the town’s citizens are the wolves. But the biggest wolf of all is the federal government itself – and Uncle Sam is nowhere to be seen.

Torivio Fodder, Indigenous Governance Program Manager and Professor of Practice, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SEE

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/10/behind-concerns-and-complex-feelings.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/10/killers-of-flower-moon-and-hollywoods.html

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/05/killers-of-flower-moon-review-scorseses.html

Escape from the rabbit hole: the conspiracy theorist who abandoned his dangerous beliefs

For 15 years, Brent Lee spent hours each day consuming ‘truther’ content online. Then he logged off. Can he convince his former friends to question their worldview?

Amelia Gentleman
THE GUARDIAN

Brent Lee struggles to explain why he used to believe that a cabal of evil satanic paedophiles was working to establish a new world order. He pauses, looks sheepish, and says: “I cringe at all this now.”

For 15 years, Lee collected signs that so-called Illuminati overlords were controlling global events. He convinced himself that secret societies were running politics, banks, religious institutions and the entertainment industry, and that most terrorist attacks were actually government-organised ritual sacrifices.


He was also inclined to believe in UFOs, and that Stanley Kubrick staged and directed the filming of the moon landing. He saw satanic symbols in the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony and spent most of his time discussing these theories with an online community of fellow believers. But in 2018 something shifted, and he began to find the new wave of conspiracy theories increasingly implausible. “I was sick of it. I felt, I can’t deal with hearing this any more because it’s no longer what I believe, so I just logged off the internet,” he says.

Buzz Aldrin, lunar module pilot for Apollo 11, on the moon on 20 July 1969 … conspiracists claim the footage was faked by Stanley Kubrick. Photograph: NASA/Reuters

Now Lee is trying to help other conspiracy theorists to question their worldview. He will address a conference in Poland on disinformation in October, and has launched a podcast unpicking why he held these beliefs so fervently and why he was so deluded.

Amiable and articulate, Lee is disarmingly willing to admit that he got things spectacularly wrong, but it is still challenging to have a conversation with him about his abandoned belief system. Most of the theories seem so preposterous that the process of trying to understand them becomes exhausting. When I strain to follow the logic, he says: “Don’t try to get me to make it make sense because it doesn’t. This is why I get so embarrassed about what I believed. You just buy into this ideology and think that’s the way the world works.”


His reasons for abandoning the “truther” movement (truthers believe official accounts of big events are designed to conceal the truth from the public) are also hard to slot into a conventional worldview. Lee veers between feeling ashamed and amused by his own convictions while also pointing out that it would be a mistake to dismiss these ideas with an impatient eye roll, because they are very dangerous.
A 2020 poll found that 17% of Americans believed ‘a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media’

Versions of the same ideas have gained greater currency in the years since he stepped away from them. In the US, the influence of QAnon has shifted from the fringes to the mainstream, and social media has been flooded with the group’s misinformation. A 2020 Ipsos poll found that 17% of Americans believed that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media”.

In 2003, Lee was 24, a musician working behind the till in a garage in Peterborough, when he downloaded a series of videos from the internet that offered alternative perspectives on 9/11 and suggested the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 was self-inflicted by the US government, as a way of justifying military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. His starting point was a strong anti-war stance and a healthy scepticism about politicians’ motivations, but from there he came to believe that a network of secret societies and cults was running the world.

Supporters of Donald Trump, including QAnon member Jacob Chansley, AKA Yellowstone Wolf, centre, enter the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images


It is hard to summarise precisely why he made that step – and harder still to fathom his later preoccupation with paedophiles and ritual murders. He attempts to explain when we meet on a weekday afternoon in an empty Bristol wine bar (idle waiters keep glancing over, startled by fragments of conversations about satanic lizards), but I have to email him a few days later to ask him to try to explain again.

His answer remains confusing, but begins with George W Bush and Democrat John Kerry’s membership, when at Yale University, of the Skull and Bones club, a secretive student society that conducts bizarrely morbid rituals. This led him to believe that there were evil politicians interested in satanic rituals. “Once you’ve been swayed by these arguments, it’s easy to just keep going down the rabbit hole, finding more dots to connect,” he says. “Once you have such a skewed view of the world, you can be convinced of other stuff.”

The tone of his podcast is disconcertingly upbeat, chatty and jokey with other ex-truthers who join as guests. “If I’m laughing at conspiracy theorists, it’s because I’m laughing at myself,” he says. “It is funny – that you’re adults who believe in Santa Claus or something equally ridiculous.”

George W Bush as a student at Yale University, where he belonged to the Skull and Bones society. Photograph: AP

It feels peculiar to be jolly about something that soaked up his life for so many years so devastatingly – to the exclusion of forging a career or starting a family. It also seems a glib response to an environment that has a powerful streak of antisemitism and white supremacy running through it. Lee says he only fully understood the antisemitism when he stepped away.

What made him vulnerable? Partly, he blames his education. “I wasn’t taught how to assess information or how to do research,” he says. “I don’t think I lacked intelligence but I was very naive about politics and how the world actually works.”

He had a disrupted education: first, at a US high school on the Frankfurt military base where he spent much of his childhood with his English mother and American stepfather, who was serving in the US air force; later, at a college in England, from which he was expelled (for smoking weed) and started playing in a band. He spent hours on music production on his computer and developed sophisticated internet skills, at a time when most people were barely online. This gave him early access to sites run by conspiracy theorists such as David Icke; soon he was spending nine hours at a stretch consuming truther content online.


His friends, family and fellow band members were bored by his obsessions and he gradually withdrew to focus on online friendships with people who were also ready to believe that the Illuminati and Freemasons had infiltrated global governments.

When the 7/7 attacks took place in London in 2005, killing 52 people, Lee was online, searching with fellow truthers for evidence that the terror attack was orchestrated by the UK government. They examined footage of the attackers going to the train station in Luton and were made suspicious by the way railings appeared to slice through the leg of one of the attackers; they decided the image had been Photoshopped before being released by the police. Now he acknowledges that the glitches might simply have been the result of shaky CCTV technology rather than the work of cultist masterminds.

He spent months building an alternative explanation for the attacks and disseminating his theories through his blog. “I’m ashamed of putting so many lies out there. I didn’t mean to lie, I just had the wrong picture.” He maintains this came from a good place. “I wanted to find the real people who had organised the attacks; I wanted justice for the victims. But I was wrong and it took away guilt from the real perpetrators, people who did something atrocious.”


Naomi Klein examines the mushrooming of conspiracism in her new book Doppelganger, noting that people often come under its sway because they are searching for a practical solution to a sense of unfairness. Conspiracists have a “fantasy of justice”, hoping that the evil-doing elites can be arrested and stopped. “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right,” she writes. “The feeling that every human misery is someone else’s profit … the feeling that important truths are being hidden.” She quotes digital journalism scholar Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s conclusion that: “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”

A slice too far … police shut down the Washington DC ‘Pizzagate’ restaurant that became a focus for conspiracy theorists. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

Lee’s appetite for conspiracies started to wane when the “alt-right” US broadcaster Alex Jones began claiming that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, that no one died and the parents of the 20 children who died were “crisis actors” – hired to play disaster victims. Lee found this implausible and felt irritated by other wild theories swirling around the internet – that Justin Bieber and Eminem were Illuminati clones, that a paedophile ring, involving people at the highest level of the Democratic party, was operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant. “I looked at Pizzagate and thought, ‘Well that’s just stupid.’” (He spends six podcast episodes debunking the Pizzagate conspiracy; this seems a pithier summary.)

When Covid triggered a popularity surge for conspiracy theorists, Lee was already done with it, and simply noted that if there really was a global movement working to establish a new world order through the pandemic, they were going about it in a strikingly ill-coordinated and muddled manner. “The governments weren’t acting in lockstep with each other. There was no well-oiled machine; it was disorganised. No one was in charge.”


He understands why other people were attracted to the idea: “Just like 9/11 brought people into conspiracies, Covid was another moment when people were scared and wanted answers, and they found conspiracy influencers saying: ‘Don’t worry about it, it’s not real.’”

Lee was an early adopter of ideas that have surged in popularity as people spend more time online, and as trust in the mainstream media falters with the suggestion (much propagated by the former US president Donald Trump) that they are spreaders of fake news. The emergence of QAnon (which propagates the baseless theory that Trump was battling a cabal of sex-trafficking satanists, some of whom were Democrats) has attracted more people to this world. Lee’s interests preceded the arrival of powerful opinion-shaping algorithms pushing people into closed loops of fact-free narratives. Since leaving the fold he has developed a sharp clarity about the self-interested financial motivations of conspiracists who work to monetise their online presence with increasingly wild, clickbaity dispatches.
We’re no longer talking about minor fringe movements – radicalisation is spreading through a complex system of beliefs

“It’s a big problem that’s getting much worse. People are being manipulated with misinformation,” he says. He was disturbed by the death in 2021 of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer during the 6 January riots inside the US Capitol. Her Twitter feed was full of references to QAnon conspiracies. “That could have been me or my partner,” he says of Babbitt. “She believed what we believed. That’s what made me think I should speak out, tell my story to help bring other conspiracists out, so they don’t become the next Ashli.”

Lee now has a factory job (he has been asked by his employers not to mention the company name) but spends every lunch break and evening analysing new waves of misinformation. The process of detoxing has sucked him further into the world he rejected. “I want to combat them and challenge them. I am totally obsessed with explaining what they are.”

Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of EU DisinfoLab, a Brussels-based NGO, has invited Lee to speak to academics and regulators at a conference on tackling the spread of online misinformation. “Policy researchers sometimes forget the real impact on human lives. We’re no longer talking about minor fringe movements; radicalisation is spreading through a complex system of beliefs. It’s not something that should be taken lightly,” he says.

Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate, says that social media platforms have boosted engagement with extreme ideas. “Conspiracies can appear ridiculous to non-believers, whether it’s David Icke’s claims about a reptilian takeover or QAnon claims about a global cabal of paedophiles. But what makes this dangerous is that someone can start by sympathising with David Icke’s attacks on ‘the establishment’ and end up buying into his grotesque conspiracies about the Holocaust,” he says.

‘Perhaps it’s not actually what’s happening’ … Lee favours an empathetic approach to conspiracists. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Guardian


As a former conspiracist, Lee hopes he will be better equipped to help people still caught up in these beliefs. Rather than antagonising them, he is able to take a more empathetic approach. “These ideas aren’t alien to me – they are second nature. Most conspiracists want a better world. They think something bad has happened, and they want to expose it. I think if you can lean into that with them, and say: ‘Yes, I understand why that would worry you, but perhaps it’s not actually what’s happening.’ I think that’s a better way to approach it.”


It's only fake-believe: how to deal with a conspiracy theorist

He says it takes time and energy to help people dismantle the many layers of complex theories. Concerned about the implications for free speech, he is not certain that greater online regulation is part of the answer. “I usually tell friends and family members: ‘You are the best person to do it. They will trust and respect you more than any stranger who challenges them, so you are going to have to familiarise yourself with their beliefs. You also know how far you can push them before they get annoyed, don’t cross that line. Keep them close, be respectful and remind them that you value their concerns’.”

So far, Lee’s attempts to save others have had limited success. He has been ostracised by his former online community. “My first intention was just to bring my friends back out of the rabbit hole – that backfired on me. They have completely cut me off, treated me like a pariah.” Some have suggested that he has been paid off by “the elites”, but he is determined to persist. “There are friends and family of people caught up in this who contact me to say: ‘Thank you for sharing this: you really believed in all this craziness, you were super deep but you came out – and this gives us hope.’”