Month: March 2022

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You can get reinfected with Covid-19 but may still have immunity. Let’s explain.

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

Researchers at the University of Nevada have reported that a 25-year-old man was reinfected in June with SARS-CoV-2, the virus the causes Covid-19. He joins a handful of other confirmed cases of reinfection in people without immune disorders — in Belgium, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Ecuador — where researchers have demonstrated that the genetic signature of the second infection did not match that of the first.

According to a new study on the Nevada case, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, the patient first tested positive in April, and then tested negative for the virus twice. In June, 48 days later, “the patient was hospitalized and tested positive for a second time,” according to the authors, and he experienced severe symptoms. There were major genetic differences between the two infections, suggesting that the patient got the virus twice. (Since then, the patient has recovered.)

The report is in line with what immunity experts have been telling us is possible with this virus: that reinfection is possible and, to some extent, expected, with a coronavirus. But it also shows us how much we still have to learn: about how much protection a single infection can confer, about what exactly a robust long-duration immune response looks like, and about what determines the severity of disease in a second infection.

“Does immunity protect an individual from disease on reinfection?” writes Yale immunobiology researcher Akiko Iwasaki in an accompanying editorial in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. “The answer is not necessarily, because patients from Nevada and Ecuador had worse disease outcomes at reinfection than at first infection.”

The Nevada case is an important finding, since in the two other confirmed cases of reinfection, the patients had mild disease or were asymptomatic. Scientists still don’t know how common reinfection is (it may well be very rare), nor can they determine an individual’s chances of getting infected again.

They do know there are many, many components of our immune system that work together to fight the coronavirus, and immunity doesn’t mean one single thing. And while we’re waiting for scientists to figure it all out, everyone, including those who’ve already had the virus, should still try to avoid getting infected at all.

The new study “strongly suggests that individuals who have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 should continue to take serious precautions when it comes to the virus, including social distancing, wearing face masks, and handwashing,” said Mark Pandori, of the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory at the University of Nevada Reno School of Medicine and lead author of the study, in a statement.

Let’s walk through the basics of immunity, and what we’re learning about reinfection.

There are no simple stories about immunity and Covid-19

The immune system is profoundly complicated, and “immunity” can mean many different things. A lot of this nuance gets lost in headlines about immunity.

For instance: Previous research has shown that neutralizing antibodies — immune system proteins that latch onto pathogens and prevent them from infecting cells — can wane in the months after a Covid-19 infection, particularly when the initial infection was mild. Some wondered if that meant the end of herd immunity hopes.

In the Nevada case, we know that “the patient had positive antibodies after the reinfection, but whether he had pre-existing antibody after the first infection is unknown,” writes Iwasaki.

But what’s often misunderstood is that antibodies are only one component of the immune system, and losing them does not leave a person completely vulnerable to the virus.

In fact, there are several parts of the immune system that may contribute to lasting protection against SARS-CoV-2.

One is killer T-cells. “Their names give you a good hint what they do,” Alessandro Sette, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told me in July. “They see and destroy and kill infected cells.”

Antibodies, he explained, can clear virus from bodily fluids. “But if the virus gets inside the cell, then it becomes invisible to the antibody.” That’s where killer T-cells come in: They find and destroy these hidden viruses.

While antibodies can prevent an infection, killer T-cells deal with an infection that’s already underway. So they play a huge role in long-term immunity, stopping infections before they have time to get a person very sick.

And it’s not just killer T-cells and antibodies. There are also helper T-cells, which facilitate a robust antibody cell response. “They are required for the antibody response to mature,” Sette says.

Some proportion of the population (perhaps 25 to 50 percent of people) seems to have some preexisting T-cells (of both varieties, but the helper kind have been more commonly observed) that respond to SARS-CoV-2, despite these people never having been exposed to SARS-CoV-2. The hypothesis is that these people may have acquired these T-cells from being infected with other strains in the coronavirus family of viruses. Researchers still don’t really understand what role these preexisting T-cells play in preventing or attenuating infection (if any).

But wait, there’s more! There’s another group of cells called memory B-cells. B-cells are the immune system cells that create antibodies. Certain types of B-cells become memory B-cells. These save the instructions for producing a particular antibody, but they aren’t active. Instead, they hide out — in your spleen, in your lymph nodes, perhaps at the original site of your infection — waiting for a signal to start producing antibodies again.

All the things “immunity” can mean

All these different components of the immune system mean “immunity” isn’t just one thing.

Immunity could mean a strong antibody response, which prevents the virus from establishing itself in cells. But it could also mean a good killer T-cell response, which could potentially stop an infection very quickly: before you feel sick and before you start spreading the virus to others.

“In many infections, the virus does reproduce a little bit, but then the immune response stops this infection in its tracks,” Sette explains. Also possible: “You do get infected, you do get sick, but your immune system does enough of a job curbing the infection, so you don’t get as sick.”

Immunity might also result from an awakening of memory B-cells. If an individual has memory B-cells and is exposed to the virus again, “that infection will stimulate a much faster antibody response to the virus, which would, theoretically lead to faster clearance of the virus and potentially less severe infection,” Elitza Theel, the director of the infectious diseases serology laboratory at the Mayo Clinic, said in a July interview.

In general, scientists believe, the stronger the infection (and immune response) that occurs during an initial infection, the longer immunity will last.

So reinfection may still be possible, but it may not mean severe illness. When a virus invades a body, generally, the body remembers.

Could asymptomatic infections spread the virus? Unclear.

It’s still not known what the latest reinfection study means for how long the pandemic will last. If reinfections happen regularly (and we have no idea how common they might be), then it might take longer to achieve herd immunity without a vaccination (which is an un-ideal, and cynical, goal to begin with). How long immunity lasts, on average, and how common reinfection is are key unknown variables in figuring out how long the pandemic may last in the absence of an effective vaccine or treatment.

“Reinfection cases tell us that we cannot rely on immunity acquired by natural infection to confer herd immunity; not only is this strategy lethal for many but also it is not effective,” Iwasaki wrote in the editorial. “Herd immunity requires safe and effective vaccines and robust vaccination implementation.”

We also have much more to learn about how often reinfections lead to more clusters of cases. Recently, I asked Shane Crotty, an immunologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, about this very scenario.

“Could there be an ‘immunity’ scenario,” I asked, “where, after having recovered from Covid, a person could get infected again but not feel sick at all, and also be able to spread it?”

“It is a good question, and the answer is that no one knows,” Crotty replied. “There are cases with other diseases where asymptomatic immune people can be infectious. There is definitely a lot to learn still about immunity to SARS-CoV-2.”

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Science has been in a “replication crisis” for a decade. Have we learned anything?

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

Much ink has been spilled over the “replication crisis” in the last decade and a half, including here at Vox. Researchers have discovered, over and over, that lots of findings in fields like psychology, sociology, medicine, and economics don’t hold up when other researchers try to replicate them.

This conversation was fueled in part by John Ioannidis’s 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” and by the controversy around a 2011 paper that used then-standard statistical methods to find that people have precognition. But since then, many researchers have explored the replication crisis from different angles. Why are research findings so often unreliable? Is the problem just that we test for “statistical significance” — the likelihood that similarly strong results could have occurred by chance — in a nuance-free way? Is it that null results (that is, when a study finds no detectable effects) are ignored while positive ones make it into journals?

A recent write-up by Alvaro de Menard, a participant in the Defense Advanced Research Project’s Agency’s (DARPA) replication markets project (more on this below), makes the case for a more depressing view: The processes that lead to unreliable research findings are routine, well understood, predictable, and in principle pretty easy to avoid. And yet, he argues, we’re still not improving the quality and rigor of social science research.

While other researchers I spoke with pushed back on parts of Menard’s pessimistic take, they do agree on something: a decade of talking about the replication crisis hasn’t translated into a scientific process that’s much less vulnerable to it. Bad science is still frequently published, including in top journals — and that needs to change.

Most papers fail to replicate for totally predictable reasons

Let’s take a step back and explain what people mean when they refer to the “replication crisis” in scientific research.

When research papers are published, they describe their methodology, so other researchers can copy it (or vary it) and build on the original research. When another research team tries to conduct a study based on the original to see if they find the same result, that’s an attempted replication. (Often the focus is not just on doing the exact same thing, but approaching the same question with a larger sample and preregistered design.) If they find the same result, that’s a successful replication, and evidence that the original researchers were on to something. But when the attempted replication finds different or no results, that often suggests that the original research finding was spurious.

In an attempt to test just how rigorous scientific research is, some researchers have undertaken the task of replicating research that’s been published in a whole range of fields. And as more and more of those attempted replications have come back, the results have been striking — it is not uncommon to find that many, many published studies cannot be replicated.

One 2015 attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies was able to replicate only 39 of them. A big international effort in 2018 to reproduce prominent studies found that 14 of the 28 replicated, and an attempt to replicate studies from top journals Nature and Science found that 13 of the 21 results looked at could be reproduced.

The replication crisis has led a few researchers to ask: Is there a way to guess if a paper will replicate? A growing body of research has found that guessing which papers will hold up and which won’t is often just a matter of looking at the same simple, straightforward factors.

A 2019 paper by Adam Altmejd, Anna Dreber, and others identifies some simple factors that are highly predictive: Did the study have a reasonable sample size? Did the researchers squeeze out a result barely below the significance threshold of p = 0.05? (A paper can often claim a “significant” result if this “p” threshold is met, and many use various statistical tricks to push their paper across that line.) Did the study find an effect across the whole study population, or an “interaction effect” (such as an effect only in a smaller segment of the population) that is much less likely to replicate?

Menard argues that the problem is not so complicated. “Predicting replication is easy,” he said. “There’s no need for a deep dive into the statistical methodology or a rigorous examination of the data, no need to scrutinize esoteric theories for subtle errors — these papers have obvious, surface-level problems.”

A 2018 study published in Nature had scientists place bets on which of a pool of social science studies would replicate. They found that the predictions by scientists in this betting market were highly accurate at estimating which papers would replicate.

“These results suggest something systematic about papers that fail to replicate,” study co-author Anna Dreber argued after the study was released.

Additional research has established that you don’t even need to poll experts in a field to guess which of its studies will hold up to scrutiny. A study published in August had participants read psychology papers and predict whether they would replicate. “Laypeople without a professional background in the social sciences are able to predict the replicability of social-science studies with above-chance accuracy,” the study concluded, “on the basis of nothing more than simple verbal study descriptions.”

The laypeople were not as accurate in their predictions as the scientists in the Nature study, but the fact they were still able to predict many failed replications suggests that many of them have flaws that even a layperson can notice.

Bad science can still be published in prestigious journals and be widely cited

Publication of a peer-reviewed paper is not the final step of the scientific process. After a paper is published, other research might cite it — spreading any misconceptions or errors in the original paper. But research has established that scientists have good instincts for whether a paper will replicate or not. So, do scientists avoid citing papers that are unlikely to replicate?

This striking chart from a 2020 study by Yang Yang, Wu Youyou, and Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University illustrates their finding that actually, there is no correlation at all between whether a study will replicate and how often it is cited. “Failed papers circulate through the literature as quickly as replicating papers,” they argue.

Looking at a sample of studies from 2009 to 2017 that have since been subject to attempted replications, the researchers find that studies have about the same number of citations regardless of whether they replicated.

If scientists are pretty good at predicting whether a paper replicates, how can it be the case that they are as likely to cite a bad paper as a good one? Menard theorizes that many scientists don’t thoroughly check — or even read — papers once published, expecting that if they’re peer-reviewed, they’re fine. Bad papers are published by a peer-review process that is not adequate to catch them — and once they’re published, they are not penalized for being bad papers.

The debate over whether we’re making any progress

Here at Vox, we’ve written about how the replication crisis can guide us to do better science. And yet blatantly shoddy work is still being published in peer-reviewed journals despite errors that a layperson can see.

In many cases, journals effectively aren’t held accountable for bad papers — many, like The Lancet, have retained their prestige even after a long string of embarrassing public incidents where they published research that turned out fraudulent or nonsensical. (The Lancet said recently that, after a study on Covid-19 and hydroxychloroquine this spring was retracted after questions were raised about the data source, the journal would change its data-sharing practices.)

Even outright frauds often take a very long time to be repudiated, with some universities and journals dragging their feet and declining to investigate widespread misconduct.

That’s discouraging and infuriating. It suggests that the replication crisis isn’t one specific methodological reevaluation, but a symptom of a scientific system that needs rethinking on many levels. We can’t just teach scientists how to write better papers. We also need to change the fact that those better papers aren’t cited more often than bad papers; that bad papers are almost never retracted even when their errors are visible to lay readers; and that there are no consequences for bad research.

In some ways, the culture of academia actively selects for bad research. Pressure to publish lots of papers favors those who can put them together quickly — and one way to be quick is to be willing to cut corners. “Over time, the most successful people will be those who can best exploit the system,” Paul Smaldino, a cognitive science professor at the University of California Merced, told my colleague Brian Resnick.

So we have a system whose incentives keep pushing bad research even as we understand more about what makes for good research.

Researchers working on the replication crisis are more divided, though, on the question of whether the last decade of work on the replication crisis has left us better equipped to fight these problems — or left us in the same place where we started.

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“The future is bright,” concludes Altmejd and Dreber’s 2019 paper about how to predict replications. “There will be rapid accumulation of more replication data, more outlets for publishing replications, new statistical techniques, and—most importantly—enthusiasm for improving replicability among funding agencies, scientists, and journals. An exciting replicability ‘upgrade’ in science, while perhaps overdue, is taking place.”

Menard, by contrast, argues that this optimism has not been borne out — none of our improved understanding of the replication crisis leads to more papers being published that actually replicate. The project that he’s a part of — an effort to design a better model to predict which papers replicate run by DARPA in the Defense Department — has not seen papers grow any more likely to replicate over time.

“I frequently encounter the notion that after the replication crisis hit there was some sort of great improvement in the social sciences, that people wouldn’t even dream of publishing studies based on 23 undergraduates any more … In reality there has been no discernible improvement,” he writes.

Researchers who are more optimistic point to other metrics of progress. It’s true that papers that fail replication are still extremely common, and that the peer-review process hasn’t improved in a way that catches these errors. But other elements of the error-correction process are getting better.

“Journals now retract about 1,500 articles annually — a nearly 40-fold increase over 2000, and a dramatic change even if you account for the roughly doubling or tripling of papers published per year,” Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch argues. “Journals have improved,” reporting more details on retracted papers and improving their process for retractions.

Other changes in common scientific practices seem to be helping too. For example, preregistrations — announcing how you’ll conduct your analysis before you do the study — lead to more null results being published.

“I don’t think the influence [of public conversations about the replication crisis on scientific practice] has been zero,” statistician Andrew Gelman at Columbia University told me. “This crisis has influenced my own research practices, and I assume it’s influenced many others as well. And it’s my general impression that journals such as Psychological Science and PNAS don’t publish as much junk as they used to.”

There’s some reassurance in that. But until those improvements translate to a higher percentage of papers replicating and a difference in citations for good papers versus bad papers, it’s a small victory. And it’s a small victory that has been hard-won. After tons of resources spent demonstrating the scope of the problem, fighting for more retractions, teaching better statistical methods, and trying to drag fraud into the open, papers still don’t replicate as much as researchers would hope, and bad papers are still widely cited — suggesting a big part of the problem still hasn’t been touched.

We need a more sophisticated understanding of the replication crisis, not as a moment of realization after which we were able to move forward with higher standards, but as an ongoing rot in the scientific process that a decade of work hasn’t quite fixed.

Our scientific institutions are valuable, as are the tools they’ve built to help us understand the world. There’s no cause for hopelessness here, even if some frustration is thoroughly justified. Science needs saving, sure — but science is very much worth saving.

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The absurd controversy over Joe Biden’s “transition away from the oil industry”

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

At the second and final 2020 presidential debate on Thursday, when asked by President Donald Trump if he would “close down the oil industry,” former Vice President Joe Biden said that he intends to “transition away from the oil industry, yes.” Republicans are working furiously to make this supposed admission into a scandal, hoping it will get Biden in hot water with oil-state Dems and swing voters and sow division in the party. The right sees energy as a key wedge issue as the election approaches.

Trump himself put it in the most dramatic terms:

After the last debate, Republicans hoped Biden’s refusal to ban fracking would get him in trouble with the climate left. That didn’t go anywhere, and my guess is that this gambit won’t either. So far, a few oil-state Dems have distanced themselves, oil companies have expressed “concern, not alarm,” and most everyone else seems distracted by a virus that is setting new case records and infecting White House staff.

However the politics play out in this instance, it’s important to consider the underlying dynamic of these recent energy disputes. It’s an extremely familiar dynamic that finally seems, in fits and starts, to be working in Democrats’ favor.

Let’s begin with a little armchair political science.

Americans want reform as long as it doesn’t negatively affect them

Social science suggests that most people, even most politically active people, don’t have particularly well-considered or coherent views on public policy issues. They vote based on identities and social affinities. Their opinions on issues are easily swayed by elite cues or the phrasing of poll questions.

In my experience, the one rule that reliably governs public issue polling is that the public likes things that sound good and doesn’t like things that sound bad.

If you poll a health care system that covers everything, with no copays and free choice of doctors, it does well. If you poll tax increases to pay for other people’s health care, it does poorly.

If you poll cleaner energy or less pollution, it does well. If you poll gasoline prices rising and fossil fuel workers losing jobs, it does poorly.

When polled on individual progressive policy goals, Americans tend to respond positively. Universal health care and clean energy sound good. When polled on ideological abstractions like “taxes” and “big government,” they tend to respond negatively. Giving up money to some distant bureaucracy sounds bad.

This is why there’s an unending argument over whether America is or isn’t a “center-right nation” — it depends on how you ask America. More or less everyone wants to improve the collective welfare, but not at their own expense. Depending on how they are phrased, these kinds of questions don’t so much uncover preexisting opinions as they guide and shape opinion formation. Trigger thoughts of things getting better, you’ll get good poll results; trigger thoughts of sacrifice, privation, or unfair burdens, you’ll get bad poll results.

Democratic politics isn’t much different. Reformers pushing for change guide attention to the collective good that will come of it. Reactionaries pushing against change guide attention to the risks and dangers.

These are not, unfortunately, parallel endeavors. Asking people to imagine an alternative future calls upon their thinking and imagination — their frontal cortex. Asking people to fear change calls upon something much deeper and older, their brainstem sense that it’s a dangerous world, they’re lucky to have what they have, and any disruption threatens it. The latter, when invoked, tends to drown out the former. That’s why progressive change is so difficult to muster and so easy to reverse.

But that’s the game in a democracy: changes that can improve collective circumstances versus the fear of personal loss.

Making the clean energy transition seem scary

This brings us back to Biden and energy. The core Republican approach, which they understand at a gut level even if there is no particular strategic intelligence at work in the Trump era, is to make change seem scary. They need to make Biden’s climate plan seem abrupt, alien, and threatening. That’s why they have resolutely ignored all the actual policies involved in the Green New Deal and instead made it a boogeyman, a repository for every conservative fear. They’re going to take your hamburgers and your SUV!

That’s why Republicans are so delighted to make a fracking ban — a policy that no president can pass and no Congress would pass — the center of discussion. And that’s why they are delighted when Biden says he will transition away from oil. These changes sound sudden and disruptive; they draw attention to what will be lost, not to what will take its place. They define a playing field favorable to Republicans.

There’s an element of play-acting to all this. For all the hue and cry about his gaffes, Biden’s climate policies are articulated quite clearly on his website. (No manned outpost on the moon, sadly.) He plans to ramp up clean energy and electrification while ensuring that affected communities, including fossil fuel communities, are taken care of through investments in infrastructure, clean energy projects, education, job transition, and other kinds of assistance.

Over time, clean energy will come to dominate the electricity sector (where Biden has targeted 100 percent net-zero by 2035) and from there it will expand to the rest of the economy (where Biden has targeted 100 percent net-zero by 2050). By 2035, coal will disappear, and by 2050, the US oil and gas sector will radically shrink. It’s just carbon math.

Some fossil fuels may survive at the margins to fill in the gaps in large electricity systems, attached to carbon capture and storage systems, or for some industrial applications or plastics. And it may be that some oil and gas companies are successful at pivoting away from their core products to clean energy (ahem, geothermal).

But the oil and gas industry as Americans know it, as a major source of jobs and profits, is going away in coming decades. It has to — it produces lots of carbon and carbon is frying the planet. Many oil and gas companies, especially in Europe, have acknowledged this inescapable reality and begun to transform themselves.

So when Biden says his plan will have the US “transition away from the oil industry,” he’s not saying something radical, unexpected, or mysterious. Any serious climate plan must do the same. It wouldn’t be a climate plan if it didn’t (no matter how many trees it planted).

But Biden was also being entirely accurate when he said to reporters later, “we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.” And he was being entirely accurate when he said that he will not ban fracking.

These are not contradictory comments. The latter are not “walking back” the former, despite what reporters (goosed on by Republicans) project onto them. It’s not that hard to understand: Biden’s plan will gradually transition the US economy to clean energy, and while it’s happening, ensure that those who are negatively impacted receive assistance and new employment opportunities. Justice — for fossil fuel workers and other vulnerable communities — is at the heart of the new Democratic consensus on climate policy.

Biden needs room to maneuver

When speaking to the left, Biden emphasizes the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy, and the environmental benefits; when speaking to audiences that contain persuadable voters in swing states (some of whom work in, or have family members who work in, fossil fuels), he emphasizes the gradual, carefully staged nature of the transition, and the economic/jobs benefits.

But in all cases, he’s referring to the same plan — which is, again, right there on his website.

As usual, the media is playing along with Republican efforts to sow confusion about this, playing on Biden’s penchant for garbling his messaging, as with this CNN “fact-check” that pretends Biden’s written plan carries no more weight than one infelicitous phrase in a debate.

Republicans will lie about Biden’s plan and the mainstream media will search for something they can ding Biden for, to “balance” all the negative coverage Trump attracts — but Democrats would be goofy to play along.

Instead of distancing themselves, oil-state Democrats could take the opportunity to defend the massive infrastructure and job investments contained in the plan, targeted at rural, poor, and fossil fuel communities. They could tell their constituents the truth about the long-term viability of fossil fuels, unlike Republicans in Appalachia and Wyoming, who have lied to their constituents about it until their economies have run headlong into disaster.

As for the left, as usual, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is taking the smart line:

She is positioning herself to the left of Biden on fracking, a signal to moderates that Biden has not been “captured by the left,” but she’s also emphasizing the need to get him elected, a signal to the left that it’s important to get on board.

AOC understands what are, to my mind, the two lessons progressive climate reformers can draw from this episode.

The broad lesson is that making change is often less about convincing people that good goals are good — Americans are already convinced that fighting climate change and expanding clean energy are good — than it is about convincing them that change won’t leave them behind, that they have a place and a stake in it.

In practical terms, that might mean less talk about the Earth and children and more about industrial policy and what it can do to foster specific industries that will employ specific people in specific regions of the country. It means talking about how a transition to clean energy will create well-paying jobs in every US zip code and save every US homeowner between $1,000 and $2,000 a year. It means less talk about things that will be banned or taken away and more about things that will be created or improved. The Green New Deal was conceived, in part, to push just such a shift in emphasis, to envision climate policy as a generative, not merely oppositional, project.

Climate reformers have the wind at their back. There’s never been a broader consensus that climate change is dangerous and action is needed. What remains is painting a richer picture of the world that action can help create.

In the meantime, the more specific lesson for climate advocates is that, in the home stretch of this election, Biden needs room to maneuver. His election depends on the whims of a few marginal voters in a few swing states, some of them living in places where fossil fuel production has unusually high salience. He needs votes from union households that do some of the very work he’s talking about phasing out.

He needs to reassure them that the clean energy transition will not be abrupt and destructive; nothing will be banned or shut down overnight. It will unfold gradually, and as it does, new investments will reach their communities and new industries will rise to make use of their skills.

The transition will not come at their expense or leave them behind. They have a place in it.

This inclusiveness is a foundational part of Biden’s plan and, more broadly, core to the spirit of the Green New Deal and the recent Democratic alignment on climate policy. It would immeasurably aid public understanding if more people explained that vision of a managed, inclusive transition and fewer nitpicked Biden’s latest attempt to articulate it.

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States need billions to prepare for Covid-19 vaccines. The federal government isn’t helping.

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

Early results from the two leading US Covid-19 vaccine trials are expected in November, in what will likely be a major milestone in the race to end the pandemic.

The final leg of the race, however, will be actually getting people vaccinated.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has offered guidance on jurisdictions’ plans, and has given them a deadline of November 1 to be ready to roll out a potential vaccine (a timeline administration officials assert is unrelated to the November 3 election).

Will health departments be ready to distribute a vaccine by then?

“Probably not, if you mean completely ready,” says William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who also serves as a consultant to the Tennessee Department of Health. “Are they working hard? Absolutely.”

No matter when it commences, a nationwide vaccine administration effort will require a massive workforce of health professionals (who are already in short supply and are often already working on other Covid-19 responses). It also may require costly medical-grade freezers to keep vaccine doses at supercold temperatures — or lots and lots of dry ice. And it needs a robust new data management system to track who gets which vaccine when and where, particularly if vaccines require multiple doses to be effective, and if there ends up being more than one approved vaccine.

The trouble is, states and local health departments have not received funding from Congress to make any of this happen. This “makes it nearly impossible to do what you need to be doing at this stage of the game if your go date is November 1,” says Adriane Casalotti, head of government affairs for the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO).

Like many things in the pandemic, it didn’t have to be this way, she says. “This is one of the few areas of Covid-19 where we can plan in advance, where we don’t have to build the plane while flying it.” She adds that although their group has been asking the federal government for support for distribution since early vaccine research began, “now it’s late.”

To be sure, there will not be enough vaccine to immunize 328 million people right away, which simplifies logistics somewhat. And many experts are expecting it will be the end of this year or the beginning of 2021 before the first doses are available. (Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar recently said there might be enough doses to vaccinate health care workers, first responders, and seniors by the end of January, with some doses arriving sooner.)

But even with a relatively modest beginning (and we’re still talking about tens of millions of people), public health workers want to make sure they have plans and systems in place, rather than rushing to meet a deadline, Schaffner points out. “The government is antsy about getting things started, but most health departments are saying, ‘Whether I start vaccination this week or next week doesn’t matter so much because this is going to be going on for eight months,’” he says.

Let’s take a closer look at the challenges facing the vaccine rollout and how the government could help things get on track sooner rather than later.

Health experts say they need billions of dollars to be ready; the federal government hasn’t promised any money

State health departments were asked in late September to submit their proposed vaccine rollout plans to the CDC by October 16. For this task, the federal government distributed $200 million, which was split among the states, major metropolitan areas, and US territories.

Not only did this mean relatively little funds for each of the 64 jurisdictions (states, territories, and major cities), Casalotti notes, but it also did not guarantee any funding would reach the thousands of smaller local health departments around the country, which is where much of the on-the-ground work of preparing to get people vaccinated will take place.

More importantly, the government has yet to promise any money to support actually building out these plans and helping the health organizations be ready when the vaccines are.

A well-coordinated, well-supported effort by health departments to vaccinate the US population will likely cost at least $8.4 billion, according to an October 1 letter NACCHO sent to Congress requesting that much be appropriated for the effort. And other public health groups, including the Association of State and Territorial Health Offices (ASTHO), agree.

CDC Director Robert Redfield put the number slightly lower, but still in the billions. In a congressional subcommittee meeting in mid-September, Redfield said the CDC would need $6 billion to help states and localities adequately prepare to distribute a potential vaccine.

But the federal government still has not said if it will fund the effort, or how much it will allocate to vaccine distribution and administration.

“That needs to change soon, or that’s going to be a limiting step,” says Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for ASTHO. “It’s great that we have an opportunity to plan for some element of the Covid-19 response, because so far we’ve just been reacting.”

Health officials are hoping a new, broad Covid-19 relief package, approved by Congress, will include funds earmarked specifically for vaccine distribution readiness. And soon. “That would mean we could finally be really prepared, and we could finally get a step ahead of things,” Plescia says.

If the federal government doesn’t step up, would states and localities be able to? Experts we spoke with agree that the funds need to come from the top. The first reason for this is logistical. With local and state budgets tapped out from pandemic response and lost revenue — and unable to run deficits — the federal government remains the only level of government that could bankroll this effort.

The second reason has to do with equity. “We’ve seen throughout the pandemic response when we’re not working as a nation, it’s really hard for us to make any ground,” Casalotti says. For a vaccine rollout to be most effective, it needs to be supported at a national level, she notes. “People travel, and what happens across state borders can directly impact your community. The virus doesn’t care about jurisdictional boundaries.”

If states and localities are left to somehow support vaccine deployment, the results are going to be uneven, and likely accentuate disparities the pandemic has already laid bare, she says.

“It really has to come from federal sources,” concludes Plescia.

Major unknowns remain, making preparations even more difficult

Planning a national vaccine rollout is a sizable ask, but it is also happening in the midst of major continued uncertainties — and not just about funding. This has left state and local health departments scrambling to prepare as best they can. “They’re not only planning, but they have to plan for several different contingencies,” Schaffner says.

One big unknown is which vaccine or vaccines will be approved and distributed first. This matters in part because many have different requirements, such as extreme cold chains. If health departments need to keep vaccine doses in storage way below zero, as some front-running candidates require, that will necessitate medical-grade freezers.

“You’re not going to find those freezers in pharmacies and doctors’ offices,” Schaffner says. Nor are they “something you can just run down to the hardware store and buy,” Casalotti adds.

So if thousands of vaccine locations around the country are ordering these freezers at the same time — on an expedited timeline — it is possible there could be a shortage.

Or if there is not a shortage, they could follow the path many other pandemic specialty supplies have: With such a sudden increase in demand, there could also be a drastic price increase. This would throw another wrench in even the best-laid plans. It’s quite possible, Casalotti says, for example, that health departments could already have established how many freezers they will need, and where they will procure them, but then encounter a new price, many times higher due to the surge in demand.

The federal government has the ability to step in and prevent this sort of price gouging. Although “we haven’t seen those tools deployed” in previous instances of this during the pandemic, Casalotti says.

Pfizer’s vaccine candidate, which is among those leading the race to approval, requires temperatures of about -94 degrees Fahrenheit (and even then is only stable there for about 10 days). To address this challenge in distribution, it has devised a freezer alternative, in which the vaccine vials can be stored in specially designed boxes filled with dry ice. Although these boxes will need to have their dry ice replenished during storage, which means that “all of our states have been spending a lot of time sorting out their dry ice supplies,” Plescia says.

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Even this workaround might not prove to be a solution for everyone. Dry ice isn’t readily available everywhere, such as in some US territories, notes Plescia. And a shortage in the carbon dioxide supply has made it hard for some dry ice makers to keep up with demand. So Plescia hopes that even if a vaccine requiring drastic cold storage is approved first, a less temperamental one will not be far behind.

Another big unknown is precisely who will get the vaccine first and when. The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Schaffner also helps advise, is working on finalizing this rubric for who will get the vaccine first. But they might not be able to complete their work until it’s known what vaccine or vaccines will be approved.

Many expect that health care workers and first responders will be first to receive an approved vaccine, which aligns with an assessment put out by the National Academy of Medicine in September and the CDC’s interim playbook for states. (President Trump, at an October 16 stop in Florida, claimed inaccurately that “seniors will be the first in line for the vaccine.” The CDC has listed those 65 and older — along with others at higher risk for severe Covid-19, and essential workers — in the second half of the first phase for vaccination, although this could change based on the results of the ongoing vaccine trials.)

Vaccinating health workers first would also give those working on vaccine distribution a slightly gentler start. As Plescia notes, this population would generally be easy to reach and follow up with through their employers, and tend to be in favor of vaccinations in general.

If this prioritization group does come first, he is optimistic about the possibility of health departments being equipped to provide these early doses when they become available. “I think being ready for that is not overly ambitious, and as we roll that out, we start to learn more and gives us a little more time to be ready to do it in community settings — those are the things that are going to require more capacity and more planning, and just more people,” he says.

What distribution might look like after that is fuzzier, making it hard for health departments to plan logistics, but also communication.

Local health departments are eager for the federal government to take on the job of clear messaging once these priority groups get established.

If local health departments are in charge of telling their communities who gets priority for the vaccine, “that’s just putting local health departments in a really hard position as people are looking at who is at the front of the line and who is at the back of the line,” Casalotti says. And animosity toward health departments has already been building, resulting in reluctance to participate in contact tracing efforts and even, in some cases, threats of violence, she notes.

So she asks for “clear messages from the top that we’re all in this together, and not everyone is in prioritization group 1 — and that’s okay because we, as a nation, are all going to get through this.”

Health departments will need time to get staff and systems up and running

One clear challenge in being ready to vaccinate millions of people as quickly as possible is having enough well-trained workers to give those shots. Hiring people to give shots in a public health setting is challenging even in the best of times, Casalotti says. The pay tends to not be that great and the hours can be hard. Not only that, but much of this available workforce has already been hired out to other much-needed positions, like those in hospitals, she notes.

There are also procedural considerations. “In most governmental structures, you can’t get a million dollars on Monday and hire people on Friday,” Schaffner says. “You have to go through a laborious administrative process to post openings, make sure they are available to everybody, interview applicants — and this all takes time.” And after they get hired, they still need to be trained before they can get to work.

Public health departments and other locations will also likely need to acquire additional ancillary supplies, such as PPE and other items that are already in high demand in the midst of the pandemic and flu season.

“We can be all ready to go and have planned perfectly and have our people in place and our capacity built, and then we run out of PPE,” Plescia says. He worries about that, he says, because “that supply still doesn’t seem to be secure.” And shortages, as we saw earlier in the pandemic, lead to unequal distribution, in which larger and wealthier states can procure more supplies.

There is also the little-discussed — but critical — issue of data infrastructure. As a country, we have a patchwork method for tracking vaccinations. For most adult vaccines, only the patient and office or clinic receive records about a given dose. (As Schaffner jokes, “When my father-in-law lived in New Hampshire, and spent time in Tennessee, then spent winters in Florida, I was his vaccine registry, I told his doctors. It worked fine for my father-in-law, but I can’t do that for everybody.”) Even pediatric vaccinations are usually logged just on a state-level basis. (And still the CDC encourages parents and caretakers to be in charge of tracking their child’s vaccines themselves.)

So the idea of states and localities tying into a robust national vaccine tracking program — and on short order — is daunting, but crucial. Especially with many leading candidate vaccines requiring multiple doses, and different time spans between doses.

And this information will have to flow easily among vaccine administration sites across the country in close to real-time. “We have to have a good ability to track people and know who got the initial dose, and we need to be able to do that across state lines,” Plescia says. “If someone got the first dose in Florida and moves to South Carolina, we need to see what they got.” Even beyond that sort of rapid record look-up, health workers will also need a way to get in touch with people to remind them to get their second dose in the right time frame, he says. One candidate vaccine has a 21-day space between doses; another is 28 days.

“It would be good to go ahead and have the funding so we can start building those systems,” Plescia says.

And not only that, Casalotti says, “we need time to make sure those systems are interoperable, and to train the users in how to employ them. And, frankly, we don’t have the time.”

“The marathon continues”

For many health departments, support from the federal government can’t come soon enough. Despite asking the federal government for vaccine distribution guidance and funding since this spring, Casalotti says they have still wound up behind the eight-ball. “We have ended up in a position where we no longer have the luxury of time. Now we’re behind.”

Additionally, many local health departments still hadn’t recovered from the budget cuts of the 2008 recession, and now a number of them have faced further budget reductions and have had to furlough staff. “That is certainly not what you want to be doing when you know you’re going to be in the middle of a pandemic,” she says.

In the meantime, the CDC has been directed to transfer $300 million from its budget to the public affairs office at its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, Redfield said in a September 16 Senate subcommittee hearing. At least $250 million of that has been allotted for a massive public relations campaign “to defeat despair and inspire hope,” with the bulk of the funds to be used before January.

Some of this could be used toward general vaccine safety education and information, but experts are dubious that will be the case. “I haven’t seen that this program would be addressing this issue,” Casalotti says.

She asks for support from the federal government in reminding people that even after the first round of vaccine doses is distributed, the pandemic lifestyle will be here to stay for most people for quite a while. “The marathon continues, and we’re all running it whether we want to or not.”

Other public health experts are also looking to the federal government for a unified message and response. “This is a pandemic; it’s a national issue,” Schaffner says. “We have not had a coherent, sustained response to Covid-19 from the beginning. Every public health person I know of thinks we need it. This has to be largely directed and funded from a federal level. This is akin to disaster assistance. Sure, the locals go to work, but you really have to deal with this from a federal level. This is a hurricane that’s hit all 50 states.”

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance science journalist and author of Cultured and Octopus! Find her on Twitter at @KHCourage.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Why the record low Arctic sea ice this October is so alarming

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

For the past five months, Melinda Webster has lived on an icebreaker ship frozen in an ice floe near the North Pole.

For Webster, a sea ice geophysicist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, it was an ideal observatory. She and a team of 14 other scientists set out, as part of the largest polar expedition ever, to study rapidly disappearing sea ice, which is often shrouded from the view of satellites by thick fog.

Protected from polar bears by armed guards, the researchers spent their days measuring every aspect of the sea ice including the snow and ice thickness, the depth of melt ponds on the surface, and the ice’s reflectivity. They wore red “survival suits” to insulate them during the occasional plunge through cracking ice into the Arctic Ocean.

“People did fall in, myself included,” Webster recounted with a laugh. “But that’s just part of it, you know.”

Braving the elements like this is part of essential research: Sea ice is a bellwether of the climate change in the Arctic. Due to our ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the Arctic surface air temperatures have been warming rapidly — at twice the rate of the global average.

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Historically, during the winter, sea ice has covered a vast swath of the Arctic Ocean, which fills much of the Arctic Circle. But as temperatures rise, it has been shrinking 12 percent every decade since measurements began in 1979.

Sea ice coverage fluctuates seasonally, hitting a low in September before forming again as temperatures drop in the fall — and expanding again by two to three times by the end of the winter in March. Webster and her team surveyed the summer conditions and the beginning of the “re-freeze.” But this year, that regrowth has been slower than ever. As October comes to a close, sea ice is at its lowest level for the month in recorded history.

Aboard the German icebreaker ship Polarstern, the changing ice conditions were palpable. Webster noticed in particular “just how easy it was to go across the Arctic, across the North Pole, like the ice is very thin,” she said. “It was easy to break through the ice pack, and the ship was only running on three engines rather than the full four.”

The shrinking and thinning out of Arctic sea ice is bad news for polar bears and indigenous people, who rely on the sea ice to hunt. The disappearance of the sea ice also further accelerates warming. When the white surface is replaced by a dark open ocean, more heat is absorbed and less light is reflected. According to a new study in Nature Communications, this feedback loop could add 0.19 degrees Celsius to the global temperature by mid-century, nearly wiping out the temperature effect of China going carbon neutral.

To understand what’s driving the dramatic transformation underway in the Arctic Ocean, let’s look at three compelling charts created by Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Zachary Labe.

Sea ice has hit a record low for October

The overall drop in sea ice is starkly evident in the chart below. It shows this year’s sea ice levels fall well below the median from 1981-2010. What this trend means is that the formerly snow-covered sea ice of the northernmost latitudes is increasingly turning into dark blue open ocean.

2020 produced frightening signs of the precariousness of Arctic sea ice. This month broke the record for the lowest sea ice extent in October, over 1.5 million square miles less than the 1980s average — an area larger than India, according to Labe.

This year’s sea ice minimum, which typically occurs in September after the summer melt, was also the second-lowest on record after 2012. The chart below shows how sea ice recovery in October has lagged behind the typical pattern of previous decades.

What has caused large parts of the Arctic to remain ice-free well into the fall? As Andres Flij of Severe Weather Europe points out, the Eastern Arctic Ocean (north of Siberia) has been several degrees Celsius warmer than the 1981 to 2010 average. These warm temperatures are making it difficult for ice to form.

The chart below shows that the Eastern Siberian, Laptev, and Kara seas (all part of the Eastern Arctic Ocean) have had particularly low sea ice formation compared to the recent past.

The consequences of an increasingly iceless Arctic Ocean

This October’s low sea ice extent might hold the record for a period, but climate scientists expect it will be surpassed in the years to come.

“We can expect to see substantial year-to-year variability, but overall the ice cover is becoming smaller and thinner during the fall months,” Labe said. “While 2020 is currently a record low, it may resemble a typical October in the not too distant future.” The Arctic Ocean is even projected to be ice-free in the summer as soon as 2050.

The decrease in ice has already affected indigenous people who use the sea ice to hunt for whales and seals. This has contributed to increasing food insecurity — in 2014, a Washington food bank supplied 10,000 pounds of halibut to indigenous communities in Alaska when the walrus hunt came up short, Ed Struzik reported for Yale Environment 360.

It also spells peril for polar bears, which also use the ice to hunt for food. A recent study in Nature Climate Change projects that polar bears will be nearly extinct by the end of the century due to the loss of habitat.

Changes in the ice are part of a larger “cascade effect,” as Webster describes it, in which delayed winter ice growth leads to thinner ice, which melts more easily in the summer months compared to older, thicker sea ice. This creates more open ocean.

This transformation contributes to both regional and global warming. Where a white sea ice surface would have reflected sunlight, the dark water absorbs heat, which further reduces ice growth. This change in albedo (or reflectivity) on sea and land in the Arctic is one of the main reasons the region is heating at twice the global average rate, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2019 Arctic Report Card. According to the recent Nature Communications study, it will also be a significant contributor to global warming.

Near Greenland — which holds a massive ice sheet — the warming loop set off by sea ice loss has a minor effect on its warming, but not a substantial effect on the ice sheet itself, researchers found in a 2019 study in Geophysical Research Letters.

The sea ice shift could also impact seasonal weather, potentially intensifying extreme weather. However, Labe says the issue requires further research. “Scientists are actively studying the connections between Arctic sea ice loss and wintertime weather patterns in North America, Europe, and Asia,” he said. “However, these relationships remain highly uncertain in the scientific literature and for seasonal weather forecasts.”

For now, the plummeting sea ice volumes are a startling reminder of just how rapidly the planet is changing, and how dire the consequences of delaying radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will be.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Big Oil’s hopes are pinned on plastics. It won’t end well.

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

The fossil fuel industry has not been doing well lately. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, growth in global demand had slowed to 1 percent annually. Now, lockdowns and distancing to stop the spread of the coronavirus have decimated the industry. The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently released projections of rapid short-term decline in global demand, to the tune of 9 percent for oil, 8 percent for coal, and 5 percent for gas.

Depending on how long and severe the economic crisis proves to be, it will take years for demand to recover. Indeed, with electric vehicles cutting into oil demand by the end of the decade, it may never fully recover. Industry analysts like Carbon Tracker’s Kingsmill Bond are speculating that 2019 may turn out to be the peak of fossil fuel demand, and historically, in other industries, a peak in demand “tends to mark the beginning of a period of low prices and poor returns,” says Bond.

But the industry has a response to this dire forecast, and it can be summarized in one word: plastics.

Overall, plastics represent a fairly small sliver of oil demand. Annually, the world consumes around 4,500 million tonnes (mt) of oil but only around 1,000mt of petrochemicals (oil and natural gas used to make chemical products), and of that 1,000mt, only about 350mt are plastics. (A tonne is a metric ton, about 1.1 US tons.)

Nonetheless, plastics are commonly projected to be the biggest source of new demand for oil over coming decades — in some projections, the only real source. It is these projections that the industry is using to justify billions in new projects, as oil companies across the world shift investment toward petrochemicals.

And Big Oil is working its hardest to make the projections come true: The New York Times recently ran an investigative piece revealing the industry’s plans to push more plastic, and plastic waste, into Kenya. Plastics are the thin reed upon which the industry is placing all its hopes.

But a new report released in September by Carbon Tracker throws a big bucket of cold water on these hopes. It argues that, far from a reliable source of growth, plastics are uniquely vulnerable to disruption. They are coming under increasing scrutiny and regulation across the world. Huge consumer product companies like Unilever are phasing them out. And the public is turning against them.

If existing solutions are fully implemented, growth in plastics could fall to zero. And if that happens, then there is no remaining source of net oil demand growth and 2019 will almost certainly prove to be the year of peak fossil fuels.

Let’s look at a few highlights from the report.

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Plastics are supposed to drive most oil demand growth

The report breaks down the projections of two widely respected sources of energy data and analysis, BP and the IEA.

From 2020 to 2040, BP expects plastics to represent 95 percent of the net growth in demand for oil.

In the IEA projections, plastics are the biggest single source of demand growth, representing 45 percent of the total. Both BP and IEA have the plastics industry growing at about 2 percent annually in the coming year.

Oil majors are more bullish. They claim the plastics industry will maintain the rate of growth it has shown since 2010, i.e., 4 percent. (For instance, Exxon touted 4 percent at its May 2020 investor day.) That kind of growth would mean a doubling of demand in 18 to 24 years, “and this appears to be what the industry is tooling up for,” says the report. “The petrochemical industry already faces huge overcapacity, but is planning to spend a further $400 billion on 80mt of new capacity.”

Global and national oil companies are shifting investment into petrochemicals, from Saudi Arabia to China. But the industry’s rosy growth projections may not come to pass.

“In order to reach global demand growth of 4 percent, you’ve got to have 2 percent growth across the OECD, 4 percent growth in China, and 6 percent growth in the rest of the world,” says Bond, a lead author of the report. “I would suggest that all three of those are a bit of a stretch.”

Four reasons plastics may not grow as forecasted

Industry projections of growth in plastics take place in a bit of a dreamworld, ignoring several recent trends and changes. The report identifies four.

1. Rising carbon emissions are not cool in the age of the Paris agreement

Calculating the carbon footprint of plastics is a complicated business — it produces CO2 at every stage of its lifecycle, including disposal — but the best research suggests that it averages out to about 5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of plastic (more if it’s burned, less if it’s landfilled). That’s roughly twice the CO2 produced by a tonne of oil.

If plastic demand were to grow as projected, annual emissions associated with plastic would double by mid-century, to around 3.5 gigatons. And if it did that, SYSTEMIQ (a company that researches and pushes for changes in materials use, which provided input to the report) calculates that it would use 19 percent of the entire remaining global carbon budget.

“To have one sector planning on doubling its carbon footprint while the rest of the world plans to phase out emissions,” says the report, “clearly makes no sense.” Policymakers aren’t going to let it happen.

2. Plastic produces external costs that are almost equal to its total market value

The plastics industry imposes all kinds of costs on society that it doesn’t have to pay (“externalities”): It emits carbon dioxide, it generates air pollution, it must be collected and sorted, and a great deal of it ends up in the ocean.

Adding up all those costs, drawing on the latest research, the report comes up with with a total externalities cost of between $800 and $1,400 per tonne, with “at least $1,000” used as a reasonable rule of thumb.

And this doesn’t include some of the costs the report couldn’t quantify, including microplastics (in seas, waters, and food) and “terrestrial leakage,” or plastic that ends up as rubbish on land.

With these costs in mind, the report looks at the subsidies and taxes facing the industry, to find out if any of these costs are incorporated. Long story short: they are not. The industry receives roughly $33 per tonne in subsidies ($12 billion cumulatively), which isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, but it turns out to be more than the industry pays in taxes ($2 billion cumulatively, with optimistic assumptions).

All told, then, a tonne of plastic imposes about $1,000 in unpaid external costs, which is about $1 per kilogram, or $350 billion a year. “The average cost of a tonne of plastic is $1,000 – $1,500,” the report says, “so the subsidy from the rest of society to the plastics industry is only a little less than the total sales value of the industry.”

Those “unpaid” external costs are being paid today, of course — they don’t vanish. It’s just that they are overwhelmingly being paid by poor people and people living in poor countries, the ones living next to toxic incinerators, gathering plastic waste, and living with the most concentrated air and water pollution.

Imposing costs on poor people so that wealthy plastics companies can profit is a human rights abuse.

3. The plastics industry is extraordinarily wasteful

The report summarizes four aspects of the industry’s wasteful ways.

First, the best research indicates that about 36 percent of all plastic produced is for single-use applications. Second, 40 percent of plastic waste is mismanaged — “5% ends up in ocean leakage, 22% in open burning, and 14% in terrestrial leakage,” the report says. Third, recycling rates in the industry are abysmally low; 20 percent of plastics are sent for recycling, but only about 5 percent actually end up substituting for virgin plastic. (Compare that to 60-80 percent recycling rates in steel, aluminum, and paper.)

And fourth, there have been virtually no guidelines or regulations on the design of plastic products, so just about anything goes. The result has been a tide of disposable, nonrecyclable plastic junk.

The industry has mostly responded to these kinds of criticisms with misdirection and propaganda rather than improving its products (which, to be fair, has traditionally worked pretty well for it).

“This is not an industry which has focused at all on efficiency or maximising utility,” the report says. “It is a bloated behemoth, ripe for disruption.”

And the public is ready to disrupt it.

4. The public is waking up to the enormous costs of plastic

Broadly speaking, the public and lawmakers are becoming more concerned and active on climate change, and “it is simply delusional for investors in the plastics sector to believe that the sector will be immune from attempts to resolve this issue,” the report says.

The public is also upset about plastic waste, especially in oceans. An IPSOS polls in 2019 found that between 70 and 80 percent of the public wants to reduce plastics and force industry to go along, including a ban on single-use plastics.

This kind of sentiment is driving regulators to crack down, as in the EU, which introduced a €800/ton tax on unrecycled plastic waste as part of its green stimulus package.

Evidence shows that demand for plastic is largely saturated in OECD countries, which means the bulk of the alleged demand growth is supposed to come from China and other emerging markets, but there, too, steps are being taken to curtail plastic use and disposal. China recently banned a range of single-use plastic items; many other countries are expected to follow suit.

New York state began enforcing its ban on plastic bags on October 19, a policy that took effect on March 1.

“You see plastic bags hanging in trees, blowing down the streets, in landfills and in our waterways, and there is no doubt they are doing tremendous damage,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said when he signed the legislation. “Twelve million barrels of oil are used to make the plastic bags we use every year and by 2050 there will be more plastic by weight in the oceans than fish.”

In summary, the plastics industry is bloated and wasteful, it imposes enormous social and ecological costs, and people are sick of it. That is not a recipe for robust growth.

There are solutions at hand for reducing growth in plastic

As policymakers get serious about plastics, there are a number of existing solutions ready to go, which are cheaper than the status quo. Those solutions were itemized and costed out by SYSTEMIQ in a report called “Breaking the Plastic Wave,” released earlier this year.

Overall, bending the plastics curve looks like this:

Maximizing the three most scalable and cost-effective solutions — reducing demand through design, reuse, and new delivery models; substituting other products like compostables or paper; and better recycling — together constitutes what SYSTEMIQ calls the System Change Scenario (SCS).

Under SCS, total global plastic demand plateaus in 2020 and peaks in 2030.

(These projections were done before Covid-19, so as in many other areas, it’s possible that the peak has been pulled forward. Wood Mackenzie projects a 4 percent drop in plastics demand in 2020, though it also says the virus “has paused the shift away from single-use plastics.”)

Notably, SCS is also cheaper for industry than business as usual. Investment in new technologies goes up, but investment in virgin production and conversion are sharply reduced.

SCS would also reduce the amount of money governments spend on plastics (mainly on waste) and create more jobs than business as usual.

If you are interested in the details — how to better design plastic products, make them last longer, make then more recyclable, and ensure they are properly disposed of — the SYSTEMIQ report goes deep in the weeds. Suffice it to say, solutions to the profusion of cheap plastic and plastic waste are available. They would save money relative to the status quo. They would reduce pollution and create jobs.

And together, they would ensure that global demand for plastics peaks and begins declining within a decade, which would in turn ensure that global demand for oil does the same.

Policymakers just have to step up.

The politics of plastics are not favorable for Big Oil

Pouring money into plastics is a desperate gamble for Big Oil. Social pressure, technological innovations, and economic trends are all closing in on its main product, so it’s trying to make a lateral move into another bloated, polluting industry.

The petrochemicals industry is already burdened with overcapacity, even as it pours billions into capacity expansions. If the anticipated 4 percent growth does not miraculously manifest out of the coronavirus-hobbled global economy in the next few years — and there are many reasons to believe it won’t — the cumulative overcapacity will be crippling, enough to suppress prices and investment returns for years.

By the time the industry crawls out of the hole, it will find a different world, with electric vehicles and heat pumps eating away at its core market.

“I’m not suggesting that we will lose the cyclicality of oil,” says Bond, “I’m sure we’ll have higher prices again at some stage in the future. But it is cyclicality around a falling mean.”

Plastics are probably not going to save the oil and gas industry. It is more likely that the peak point in humanity’s centuries-long, planet-shaping fossil fuel binge is already in the rearview mirror, and that “cyclicality around a falling mean” will be the core truth of fossil fuels for the remainder of the century.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Death toll from 7.0-magnitude earthquake near Greece and Turkey rises to over 80

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Aegean Sea on Friday, killing at least 80 people, and injuring nearly 1,000 in Turkey and Greece.

The earthquake caused the most damage in Izmir, Turkey’s third-largest city, with a population of nearly 3 million people. So far, there have been 79 deaths reported in Turkey and more than 100 people have been rescued alive from fallen debris, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Saturday.

Responding to the destruction from the quake, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay said 26 badly damaged buildings would be demolished in Izmir. “It’s not the earthquake that kills but buildings,” he said.

An elderly man was pulled alive from the rubble on Sunday. That same day, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said there was “no clear number on how many people are still under rubble. Hard to give a number. There is an estimation, but I cannot share.”

There were no reported injuries to the 100 US military personnel currently stationed in Izmir, a spokesperson for NATO Allied Land Command told the Military Times on Friday.

Videos posted to social media shortly after the earthquake ended showed residents in the streets assessing the damage.

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The extent of the wreckage is commensurate with the size of the earthquake. According to the US Geological Survey, an agency that monitors seismic activity around the world in real time, the quake started six miles below ground and triggered extensive flooding in Izmir.

In an interview with local media outlet NTV on Friday, Izmir Mayor Ismail Yetiskin said sea levels had risen following the quake: “There seems to be a small tsunami.” A video posted by the Daily Sabah, a Turkish news agency, shortly after the earthquake hit showed floodwaters in a town near Izmir washing away furniture and other debris.

Turkey wasn’t the only nation hit. The impact of the earthquake was also felt in nearby Greece, where two teenagers lost their lives on the Greek island of Samos after a wall fell in on them, bringing the combined death toll for the two countries to 81. Samos was also inundated with flooding. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like the island or the country has suffered any further deaths.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Friday to offer his condolences. “Whatever our differences” — a reference to Greece and Turkey’s decades-long history of conflict — “these are times when our people need to stand together,” he said.

France offered immediate aid to both countries. Pakistan, Italy, Germany, and Canada also offered words of support Friday.

Turkey and Greece are located on or near many active fault lines, so earthquakes are fairly common in the region. The area within 150 miles of where Friday’s quake struck has seen more than 29 earthquakes of a 6.0 or greater magnitude in the past 100 years.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan has explained, earthquakes can quickly arise on faults like these:

An earthquake occurs when massive blocks of the earth’s crust suddenly move past each other. These blocks, called tectonic plates, lie on top of the earth’s mantle, a layer that behaves like a very slow-moving liquid over millions of years.

That means tectonic plates jostle each other over time. They can also slide on top of each other, a phenomenon called subduction.

The places on the planet where one plate meets another are the most prone to earthquakes. The specific surfaces where parcels of earth slip past each other are called faults.

The most recent major earthquake to hit Turkey occurred in January in the country’s eastern province of Elzaig, killing more than 30 people. The last earthquake of a similar strength to Friday’s quake to hit Greece occurred in the Ionian Sea in October 2018, causing damage to buildings; no injuries were reported.

But while Turkey and Greece are unfortunately used to dealing with natural disasters, that doesn’t make Friday’s earthquake, or the ongoing recovery efforts, any easier.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine challenge, explained in 600 words

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

As President Biden settles into the Oval Office, his immediate challenge is fixing America’s botched vaccine rollout.

The current vaccine campaign is not going well. Former President Donald Trump and his administration promised to get 20 million Americans vaccinated and 40 million doses out by the end of 2020. Three weeks into the new year, the country hasn’t reached either goal, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

I’ve talked to a lot of experts over the past few weeks about what’s going wrong. They caution that a massive vaccine campaign was always going to be difficult, including in the US. But they point to one major thing Biden can do that Trump didn’t: bring the full powers of the federal government to bear on the issue.

While the Trump administration bought millions of vaccine doses and sent them to states, its efforts by and large stopped there. A Trump official characterized more support as an “invasion” of the states. State and local groups asked for $8 billion for vaccine efforts, but Trump’s White House gave a paltry $340 million. (Congress authorized $8 billion in the stimulus deal passed in late December.)

Based on my conversations with experts, Biden will need to do three key things to fill the leadership void:

1) Address “last mile” problems. The issues slowing down vaccination right now — equipment breaking down, long lines, and insufficient staffing at vaccination sites — come from what experts call the “last mile” of the supply chain, when vaccines go from storage to shots in arms.

The problems vary from place to place, so Biden will need to work closely with local and state officials and private organizations to solve them. One idea from Nada Sanders at Northeastern University is a “backward scheduling” system: Set a vaccination goal for each locale, then work backward to see what plans and resources are needed, and what potential bottlenecks must be addressed, to achieve that goal.

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2) Be vigilant about new supply problems. Especially as the vaccine rollout expands, new problems on the supply side, such as insufficient vaccine doses, are likely — that’s part of handling a complex supply chain. The Biden administration needs to work closely with local, state, and private organizations to make sure it catches these problems early.

3) Persuade more Americans to get vaccinated. Based on public opinion surveys, at least one-quarter of Americans are hesitant about getting a vaccine. And to reach herd immunity, 70-plus percent of Americans must get vaccinated. That’s cutting it pretty close. A federal awareness and education campaign could close the gap. If that doesn’t work, the government might need to push people to get vaccinated through financial incentives, or even a mandate.

All three steps require more communication. The Trump administration was wildly inconsistent and even contradictory in its messaging, and that’s a big reason the US has struggled so much with Covid-19 in general. A Biden administration can, at the very least, make its messaging and guidance more consistent.

A lot of this is simply what you’d expect from the federal government during a national crisis. But Trump didn’t do it.

Biden has already promised to do more: He’s announced a $400 billion Covid-19 plan and a vaccine plan, vowing to release and produce more vaccine doses, send more support to states, build mass vaccination centers, and use mobile units to reach undercovered areas. He wants 100 million shots in his first 100 days, enough for 50 million people — though some experts now say that’s not enough.

If he gets this right, Americans could be getting back to normal sooner. If not, the country’s Covid-19 crisis could drag on, with each day bringing thousands more preventable deaths.

For more on what Biden can do on vaccines, read my full explainer.

Sign up for the Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

GAA’s role in expenses row, GPA’s long-term vision and could strike action happen?

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

1. How likely is strike action?

Gaelic Players Association CEO Tom Parsons.

Source: Ben Whitley/INPHO

ON LAST NIGHT’S Allianz League Sunday programme, Tom Parsons issued the threat of “further action” but stopped short of uttering the word Joanne Cantwell was pushing for.

Strike. 

Given there is a full slate of football and hurling league games scheduled for this weekend, if a strike were to take place it would have major implications. Not least by providing a headache for fixture makers due to the short gap between the league and championship.

However, strike action doesn’t appear to be a realistic prospect. Even if the GPA cannot come to an agreement with the GAA, it’s difficult to see a refusal to play getting full support across county squads.

The issue of unpaid expenses relates to county boards rather than with Croke Park, who pay a percentage of the cost. Many county teams are well looked after, while the GPA do not have the support of all managers.

Galway boss Padraic Joyce, for instance, said he had no intention in backing the protest, remarking on Sunday: ”I’ve no interest in the GPA, never had, it’s beyond my pay grade talking about the GPA so to be honest I don’t know.”

Many county squads merely could be characterised has having a passive membership with the players’ body, so it’s difficult to see how much further the GPA can push this protest. 

An Allianz League promotional event takes place tomorrow with Cathal McShane and Conor Whelan slated to conduct interviews. It remains to be seen if that will go ahead.

The GPA may also consider lesser measures, such as delaying throw-in times for this weekend’s games. Further escalation beyond that could make this a very messy affair. 

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Galway’s Padraic Joyce opted not to join other managers in declining interviews.

Source: Bryan Keane/INPHO

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2. What is the GAA’s role in this? 

One thing is for certain, the Association do not want this issue dragging on for much longer. Over the weekend the top four football teams in the country faced off in Division 1, yet RTÉ’s highlights programme kicked off with a discussion around this impasse before those ties were shown.

From the GAA’s point of view, the pre-Covid mileage rate of 65c per mile has been restored as of Friday night and any outstanding money is in the process of being paid.

It should have been taken care of earlier and shows a lack of leadership on the GAA’s part, but at least they moved to clear it up eventually. From a promotional point of view, having TV coverage of games without interviews seriously diminishes the product.

You can be sure rights holders RTÉ and TG4, who pay significant money to broadcast games, will be putting pressure on the GAA this week to ensure this is cleared up by the weekend. 

The GAA also stated that the agreed mileage rate only applies for four collective gatherings in a week, with any further sessions to be negotiated directly with county boards.

However this only serves to create a divide between the wealthiest counties and those at the other end of the scale.

Also, if this is the GAA’s way of capping the number of times teams meet collectively in a given week, putting the players in the middle is the wrong way to go about it. 

A better way would be to bring it to Congress, putting it in rule and punishing teams with the loss of home league games or heavy fines.

Niall Scully and Cormac Costello arrive in Healy Park ahead of the clash with Tyrone.

Source: Evan Treacy/INPHO

3. What is the GPA’s long term vision?

There’s no denying that the GPA’s argument over unpaid expenses is a legitimate one. 

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However, after Parsons’ appearance on the Allianz League Sunday, much of the discourse centred around whether amateur squads should be meeting collectively more than four times per week.

The former Mayo midfielder argued that regardless of how many times a county team trains, players should not be out of pocket for attending. It’s a valid point and few would argue with it. 

Yet on the back of the 2018 ERSI report that highlighted how the GPA’s members are spending up to 31 hours per week on being an inter-county player, and the adverse toll that took on their professional careers, personal lives, sleep and overall mental health, perhaps he was arguing the wrong point. 

The GPA play a major role in creating a sustainable model for the inter-county game.

Their mission statement is to “balance the huge demands placed on players with the opportunities, support and investment required for them to be at their best, on and off the pitch.”

The players’ body can’t lose sight of that long-term vision in this expenses debate.

Arguing that county teams should be financially covered if they have six or seven sessions in a week goes against that ethos, even if it would see players receive expenses for these sessions. Any charter that makes it easier for managers to put more demands on players should be avoided. 

Implementing an NFL-style collective bargaining agreement where managers can only engage in a limited amount of contact hours and training sessions with squads is the way forward. 

Ireland internationals Devin Toner and Lindsay Peat were our guests for The Front Row’s special live event, in partnership with Guinness, this week. The panel chats through Ireland’s championship chances ahead of the final round of Guinness Six Nations matches, and members of the Emerald Warriors – Ireland’s first LGBT+ inclusive rugby team – also join us to talk about breaking down barriers in rugby. Click here to subscribe or listen below:

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine goal isn’t ambitious enough

March 26, 2022 | News | No Comments

President Joe Biden has promised a faster Covid-19 vaccine rollout, vowing to administer 100 million shots during his first 100 days in office — enough to fully vaccinate at least 50 million Americans.

But that goal is no longer as ambitious as it once appeared.

Over the past week, America has already averaged about 900,000 vaccinations a day, making Biden’s goal of 1 million a day barely a step up from what the country reached before he took office on Wednesday.

This rate of vaccination is much slower than many experts would like. Some have called for finishing the vaccination campaign by or in the summer. But the current rate — and Biden’s goal — would fall short of that.

By expert estimates, 70 to 80 percent of Americans, or more, need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity and sufficient population protection. Splitting the difference, that means at least 245 million Americans likely need to be vaccinated, with 15 million already getting at least first-time doses. Even with new vaccines hitting the market and supply ramping up, the current rate, or Biden’s goal, means it could take until fall at the earliest to reach herd immunity — or even as late as 2022.

Peter Hotez, an infectious disease and vaccine expert at Baylor College of Medicine, told me that America should aim for at least 2 million a day — and preferably 3 million. That’s what would get some of the most important parts of vaccination efforts done this summer or earlier.

Those extra months of a slow rollout really matter. With more than 3,000 people dying of Covid-19 a day in the US, a delay of months could potentially mean hundreds of thousands of additional deaths. While vaccination efforts, particularly those targeting the most vulnerable populations, will bring that death toll down, even a rate of hundreds of deaths a day would result in tens of thousands of extra deaths over months.

And a slower rollout means more time before life and the economy go back to normal.

A slow vaccination campaign could make the pandemic worse in other ways. Hotez pointed to new virus variants, some of which have already come out of the UK and South Africa, that could be more infectious or deadlier. With every day that the country, and the world, goes unvaccinated, the risk of a worse variant appearing remains. That creates even more pressure to go fast.

Biden’s goal would grow vaccination rates just 11 percent

So far, the Biden administration has given unpersuasive explanations for its limited goal.

The president himself responded to questions about his goal being too low on Thursday with frustration: “When I announced it, you all said it’s not possible. Come on. Give me a break, man. It’s a good start.”

It’s true some reporters questioned the goal when it came out. But circumstances change. It’s pretty clear now that 1 million a day is possible — and the US, in fact, was already almost there before Biden took office.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki provided a more detailed response at a briefing, arguing the Trump administration only managed to achieve half of Biden’s goal — about 500,000 shots a day — since the US’s vaccine rollout began in December. But that includes a period in which vaccinations were first getting started and going very slowly. The current average, over the past week, is more than 900,000 per day.

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Psaki, as well as chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci, continued to call the goal “ambitious.” But growing current vaccination rates by 11 percent over more than three months isn’t particularly ambitious. Based on the past week’s trends, that likely would have happened regardless of the person in the Oval Office.

Perhaps the Biden administration is scared to overpromise, especially after Trump’s team clearly did when they promised 20 million vaccinations and 40 million doses in 2020 — a goal that the country still hasn’t hit three weeks into 2021.

But that shouldn’t mean settling for a prolonged outbreak that kills potentially hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Covid-19 is America’s — and the world’s — most pressing crisis. Biden has promised to get us out of it. To really do that, he should go bolder.

Sign up for the Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Update: Clarified the timeline for herd immunity based on different vaccination rates.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES