Month: March 2022

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The fate of the planet will be negotiated in Glasgow, Scotland

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

Almost every country in the world signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a monumental accord that aimed to limit global warming. But it was forged on a contradiction: Every signatory agreed that everyone must do something to address the urgent threat of climate change, but no one at the time pledged to do enough.

In the years since the agreement, the emissions that trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere have continued to rise. Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by humans, reached a record high of 419 parts per million in the atmosphere this year.

The Paris agreement aimed to limit global warming this century to less than 2 degrees Celsius, compared to temperatures before the Industrial Revolution, with a more optimistic goal of staying below 1.5°C. Both of these goals would require rapid and radical shifts away from fossil fuels — and eventually, zeroing out emissions of greenhouse gases entirely.

Signatories did agree that they would set more ambitious targets for themselves over time and eventually get on track to meet global climate goals. Whether they will actually do so is about to be tested over the next two weeks at COP26, the most important international climate conference in years.

“This is definitely the biggest [climate meeting] since Paris, and it has to be a turning point if we’re going to be successful,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute.

The COP26 meeting will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, between October 31 and November 12. More than 100 world leaders, including US President Joe Biden, are expected to attend a portion of the conference.

The world has already failed to meet many earlier targets, drawing the ire of climate activists. “Build back better. Blah, blah, blah. Green economy. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg said in September. “Words that sound great but so far have not led to action.”

Some thorny issues that derailed past meetings, such as payments for developing countries that are living through climate disasters, remain unresolved. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed COP26 from its original dates in November 2020, is still claiming thousands of lives per day, leading to national lockdowns and disrupting trade. Even after a year of devastating hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires, climate change may not be every country’s top priority.

But there’s no time to lose: The window for meeting the goals of the Paris agreement is closing. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2018 that staying below 1.5°C of warming required the world to roughly halve emissions from current levels by 2030. This year, the IPCC reported that the world is poised to miss this target even in the most optimistic scenarios they studied.

“Scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade,” Biden said in April. “This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis.”

Some countries, seeing the brightening spotlight of COP26, have begun to announce more aggressive climate goals in the runup to the meeting. This week, the UK put out its road map for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century. But the most scrutiny will fall on the world’s largest emitters — China, the US, and India — and whether they will take tangible steps to curb their pollution. Biden and the US delegation are now counting on Congress to pass a suite of climate policies to strengthen their hand at the negotiating table.

What’s on the agenda for COP26?

The Paris climate agreement aims to solve a global crisis, but its bureaucratic constraints have frustrated the process.

Joining the accord is voluntary, which means any signatory can leave if they want to, as the US did briefly last year. And even the countries that stay in have the freedom to set their own goals for cutting greenhouse gases. If they miss their targets, there is no penalty.

It may seem odd that an agreement to save the world from itself would have so few firm rules. However, the Paris agreement was the culmination of two decades of stalled diplomacy, and many countries shot down stronger language around binding greenhouse emissions targets, oversight, and punishments.

The Paris agreement is thus a delicate balancing act, accomplishing its goals mainly with nudges and incentives. It aims to steer everyone — developing countries, oil economies, regional rivals, island states threatened by sea level rise — toward a common objective, and that’s a very tall order.

Here are some of the key items on the agenda for COP26 (officially known as the 26th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).

Getting countries to do more: Under the Paris agreement, every country is required to publish a climate change target and a route for getting there, or what’s called a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). The first round of NDCs put forward in 2015 were clearly inadequate, putting the world on course for roughly 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century.

Climate leaders hoped that in the runup to COP26, countries would roll out new commitments for the coming decade, as well as long-term strategies for eliminating emissions by the middle of the century. As of October 21, 114 countries and the European Union have submitted new NDCs. Some major emitters like the US, United Kingdom, and China have proposed or submitted stronger targets. But others, like Russia, Brazil, and Australia, did not meaningfully ramp up their goals. Still others like India have yet to submit a new NDC.

The leaders at COP26 will try to create carrots and sticks to motivate the laggards and holdouts to take more aggressive action. Many countries are now adamant that the limit for warming this century should be 1.5°C, now that many countries have already suffered the tolls of disasters worsened by climate change — a sign that 2°C of warming would be far worse.

According to the IPCC, the difference between 1.5°C and 2°C includes 2 extra inches of sea level rise, putting an extra 10 million people at risk of coastal flooding and related problems. Two degrees of warming would double the number of people exposed to extreme heat at least once every five years. This extra warming would also lead to greater declines in fisheries, crop production, and habitats for vital species like insect pollinators.

“Because of that new science, I think certainly in the climate community, 1.5°C de facto is now what everyone is talking about,” Mountford said.

Technology for cutting carbon out of the economy, like renewable energy, has also improved since the Paris agreement was signed. Some countries and many activists argue that a tougher target is essential to taking advantage of these improvements and that mitigation needs to begin right away.

This conference has to signal a “shift from making commitments to actually taking action,” said Marcene Mitchell, senior vice president of climate change at the World Wildlife Fund. Countries not only need to make bigger promises, Mitchell added, they need to match them with actual policies.

International carbon markets: One of the ways countries are aiming to meet their climate change goals is by pricing carbon dioxide emissions and creating accounting mechanisms for reducing them. That can take the form of credits or offsets that are traded with other countries. Under Article 6 of the Paris agreement, wealthier countries can compensate for their higher emissions by financing clean energy in developing countries or helping restore carbon-absorbing ecosystems like rainforests.

The trouble is that if these markets are not designed well, they may simply end up as a way for wealthier countries to buy their way out of reducing their own emissions. Without proper verification, the credits may not deliver the carbon reductions they promised. In past climate meetings, countries like the US, Australia, and Brazil pushed for language in these rules that would grant them more flexibility. However, most other countries found these provisions unacceptable because they would weaken the program. This issue forced several previous meetings to go over their allotted times. It remains unresolved and may not be settled at COP26.

Loss and damage: The core injustice of climate change is that the people who contributed least to the problem stand to suffer the most. Though not strictly part of the Paris agreement, a key part of the discussion at COP26 will be around how to compensate countries facing the impacts of climate change today, from rising sea levels eroding shores to more devastating extreme weather.

Securing this funding is a huge priority for many countries, particularly island countries and those with small economies. However, wealthier countries that have historically emitted the most greenhouse gases have resisted language that would force them to chip in and instead advocated softer language that would make these wealth transfers voluntary. And so far, countries have not made much progress in closing the gap. “It’s a contentious issue, it’s a big issue, it’s a complicated issue,” said Mitchell. “This is my own personal view: I don’t think that will get resolved here at this COP.”

Climate finance: It’s expensive to build resilience to climate change and shift from fossil fuels toward clean energy, particularly for developing countries. The UNFCCC created the Green Climate Fund in 2010 to finance these projects around the world with grants and loans. It includes programs like developing sustainable agriculture in Thailand and building cooling facilities for residents in countries like Bangladesh facing extreme heat.

Governments meeting at COP26 set a target of deploying $100 billion a year in international climate financing through programs like the Green Climate Fund by 2020. But so far, countries haven’t contributed enough to meet the target, falling short by $20 billion in 2018, the most recent estimate available.

More international climate financing would help drive down greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries and motivate them to set more ambitious goals. However, some countries now say that even $100 billion isn’t enough. A negotiator representing African countries, for example, told Reuters that international climate financing should be scaled up to $1.3 trillion by 2030.

All eyes are on the United States

The US has the dubious distinction of being the only country to complete a 360-degree turn on the Paris agreement. It helped convene the accord in 2015, yet former President Trump withdrew the US in 2020. President Biden signed an executive order in January to rejoin and the US was formally back in the Paris accord in February.

Since the US is the wealthiest country in the world and the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, it plays a prominent role in climate negotiations and has an even greater obligation to act on the crisis. At COP26, the US not only has to make up for lost time, it also has to rebuild trust with other countries and show that it’s willing to be more ambitious.

“There is this sense of exhaustion about how long is it going to take for one of the biggest emitters in the world to do its fair share,” Rachel Cleetus, the clean energy policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Vox’s Rebecca Leber earlier this month.

In April, Biden announced that the US was adopting a new climate goal: cutting emissions within the decade by 50 to 52 percent, compared to the US emissions peak in 2005. That’s a big step up from the previous target, which aimed for 26 to 28 percent reductions by 2025. US emissions have been declining since 2005, with a precipitous drop in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, greenhouse gases are already starting to rebound.

President Biden has already used some of his executive power to drive actions on climate change, like setting targets for electric vehicle production, limiting new oil and gas production on public lands, and pushing financial institutions to incorporate climate risk into their assessments.

But the fate of the largest parts of Biden’s climate agenda is in the hands of Congress, not the White House.

Democrats in Congress have been hurrying to put these plans into action with the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better Act. These bills, as originally written, could reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent over the next decade. With midterm elections looming next year, Democrats may not get another chance for years to advance major climate change legislation.

But the US delegation is arriving in Glasgow with a weaker hand than they had hoped for because the legislation is already being whittled down as Democrats are forced to compromise in the Senate.

The latest version of the budget resolution has been eroded from the $3.5 trillion initial scope to $1.75 trillion. It includes $555 billion in measures to address climate change, like tax breaks for clean energy and electric vehicles. However, it was stripped of programs like a fee on emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The Clean Electricity Payment Program, which would have paid power providers to meet clean energy standards, was removed as well.

The negotiations are still ongoing, so even these climate change measures are not guaranteed to go through. So while the US has enhanced its commitment to curb emissions, it has yet to match it with enough concrete action.

“For [the US] to have credibility and leadership, we need to not just come with a statement and commitment, but actually the money to pay for it,” Mitchell said.

What happens now, first in Congress and then in Glasgow, will help shape the ambitions of countries around the world as they meet the challenge of climate change. It’s not a stretch to say that the future of our planet as we know it is at stake.

Update October 29, 11 am: Updated to include the latest figures on measures addressing climate change in Democrats’ budget bill.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Biden’s $27 billion bet on forests

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

As the White House revealed Thursday, President Joe Biden has stripped a lot from his Build Back Better framework to placate moderate Democrats. Free community college is out, as is Medicare coverage of dental and vision services, among several other priorities.

But there is one surprising area that’s so far survived the congressional gauntlet as part of a big climate spending proposal: forest management and conservation. The bill — which Democrats are trying to pass with a simple Senate majority using the reconciliation process — allocates roughly $27 billion for spending related to federal, state, and tribal forests.

While that’s just a sliver of the roughly $1.75 trillion spending package, it’s an enormous and historic number, said Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s the most significant investment ever in our national forests,” O’Mara told Vox. “It’s an astonishingly big deal.”

A large chunk of those funds would go toward preventing wildfires — which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and have devastated Western towns — and toward more equitable access to green spaces. The bill would also set aside billions of dollars for ecosystem restoration and more environmentally friendly farming practices.

Biden’s framework reveals that conserving forests and biodiversity is a core component of the nation’s plan to tackle climate change, as many scientists say it should be: Trees and soil are a natural sink for carbon dioxide, making forests a key solution for cutting climate pollution. Yet for decades, biodiversity conservation and climate change have largely been considered separate issues. The bill also shows that the US government has recognized the growing threat of climate-fueled wildfires and is willing to fund the Forest Service to do something about it.

But a few big questions remain, including whether the bill will pass. And some forest advocates fear that the boost in spending could actually increase commercial logging — which, in turn, fuels climate change.

The bulk of the money would go toward preventing wildfires

More than half of the $27 billion for forests would go toward reducing the risk of wildfires, such as through prescribed burns, largely within the wildland-urban interface. That’s where forests meet human developments and wildfires tend to do the most damage.

Putting billions into fire prevention isn’t a huge surprise. Climate change is making forest fires worse, and they spew a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the air. This summer, for example, fires in the American West belched 130 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere — that’s equivalent to the annual emissions of more than 28 million passenger cars.

The past decade — and especially this past year — has made the risk of wildfires hard for Congress to ignore, O’Mara said. “There are so many members of the Senate that have been affected by these massive fires,” he said. “The lack of care and restoration [of forests] has had devastating consequences.”

In the past, the US Forest Service’s wildfire budget hasn’t matched the challenges posed by climate change. Biden’s framework would dramatically boost spending, according to Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy organization. “It’s a huge investment,” he said.

It also allocates $2.5 billion for urban forestry projects that seek to provide more equal access to forests and parks — roughly six times more than the government spends on those projects today, according to Joel Pannell, the vice president of urban forest policy at the nonprofit American Forests. “We’ve never seen this sort of investment in urban and community forestry,” Pannell said.

But while many conservation groups have responded positively, key questions remain about whether the Forest Service will spend the money for fire prevention effectively, Hartl said. The growing threat of wildfires is linked to both climate change and years of mismanagement of the nation’s forests, he said. Historically, the Forest Service has tried to manage forests and reduce wildlife risk partly through commercial logging, he added, which environmental advocates say increases carbon emissions.

According to Dominick DellaSala, the chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a forest advocacy organization, the Forest Service often uses fire prevention as an excuse to sell timber. “By putting more logging on the landscape, you are not going to reduce fire intensity,” he said.

The Forest Service told Vox it does not comment on pending legislation. A spokesperson for the agency said it “is committed to the thoughtful stewardship of our national forests and their carbon storage potential.” The spokesperson continued, “Our nation faces a forest health crisis due, in part, to the effects of a changing climate, including drought, unprecedented wildfires, and other stresses and disturbances.”

If the bill passes, the agency should instead direct that money toward hiring and training a new generation of forest stewards who will focus on restoring public land with ecological and climate goals in mind, Hartl said. (The bill does include funding for the Civilian Climate Corps, which would hire young workers for restoration, among other conservation activities.)

“It’s promising, but I think Congress has to have a laser-like focus on the implementation of this money in the years to come,” Hartl said. “It’s an enormous investment in these public lands. One would hope that there are no more excuses for doing a bad job.”

A lifeline for threatened plants and animals

President Biden’s framework would also provide billions of dollars for conserving biodiversity. The bill allocates $50 million for protecting old-growth trees and another $50 million for conserving and restoring habitats for threatened species in public forests. It would put another $50 million toward reducing human-wildlife conflict on these lands, such as between ranchers and wolves.

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Remarkably, the framework also includes a huge and historic sum for conservation activities on US farmland, O’Mara said — another $27 billion or so. “We think it’s the biggest investment in climate-smart agricultural practices ever,” O’Mara said (meaning, farming practices that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions or make crops more resilient to climate change).

It includes $9 billion for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which helps farmers make their land more sustainable, such as by improving soil health, and $4 billion for the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), the largest conservation program in the US, according to the government. The CSP helps farmers make habitats for wildlife, reduce the need for synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, and make their crops more resilient to extreme weather.

“This support can increase a farm’s adaptive capacity in the face of extreme weather events and other climate-related impacts,” the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition said in a statement Thursday.

Efforts like these to make working lands including farms more sustainable are part of Biden’s push to conserve at least 30 percent of US land by 2030. The administration will have a hard time hitting that figure without including sustainably run farms and ranches.

The bill also includes several provisions that directly target the conservation of wildlife. It would allocate roughly $200 million for the Endangered Species Act — largely considered the most important law for wildlife in the US — and another $250 million for wildlife refuges and state wildlife management areas, according to the US nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife. It even provides some money for conserving and managing wildlife corridors.

“We were worried that a diminished bill might cut imperative funding for endangered species recovery, but we are thrilled to see these provisions and many more have made it through,” Robert Dewey, vice president of government relations at Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement on Thursday. “This bill, as it stands now, would be a historic investment.”

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Covid-19 vaccines for young kids are a big step toward a new normal

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

More than 28 million children across the US are now eligible to receive Covid-19 vaccinations, a step that could relieve anxiety for families, bring more kids back to schools, and slow the spread of the disease.

On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention endorsed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for kids between the ages of 5 and 11 after an advisory committee voted 14-0 to recommend the shots. The move comes after the Food and Drug Administration last week granted an emergency use authorization to the vaccine, concluding that its benefits outweigh the risks in young kids.

Distribution of these vaccines has already begun, and the CDC expects to reach “full capacity” for pediatric vaccines by the week of November 8.

Immunizing young children against Covid-19 would make it more difficult for the coronavirus to spread and protect kids from falling ill. It’s big news for parents and kids, in part because the vaccine could ease the return to in-person schooling. “Vaccinating younger children against Covid-19 will bring us closer to returning to a sense of normalcy,” said acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, in a statement.

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine currently has full FDA approval for people ages 16 and older and a separate emergency use authorization for adolescents between 12 and 16. The emergency-use designation allows health workers to administer new vaccines during a public health emergency based on data from clinical trials. Full approval requires more clinical data and allows manufacturers to market vaccines and continue selling them after the public health emergency ends.

While children are generally at much lower risk of severe illness from Covid-19 than older adults, at least 690 children from birth to the age of 18 have died from the disease in the US so far. About 8,300 5- to 11-year-olds have been hospitalized for Covid-19, and at least 146 have died. Vaccines will drastically lower the chances of that happening, while also whittling down the risk that children will pass on the virus to others.

Although vaccines are the most effective tool for containing Covid-19, the experiences of older adults show that they’re not always enough. Infections after vaccination, known as breakthrough infections, are usually mild, but they have sickened and killed some people. The protection offered by vaccines can also wane over time. Changes in the virus itself have created variants like delta, which spreads more readily and can evade immune protection. That’s why health officials have recommended that vaccinated people continue to wear masks and maintain social distance in high-risk situations, like crowded indoor environments.

It’s not clear yet how much longer such measures will remain in place in schools, but as more kids get their shots, the odds rise that students can go to class without masks.

Why Covid-19 vaccines for kids took so long to be approved

In the early days of the pandemic, doctors reported that adults were most vulnerable to severe illness from Covid-19, particularly older adults and those with preexisting health conditions like high blood pressure and other heart conditions. That trend has continued, and unvaccinated adults continue to experience the largest number of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease.

By contrast, children appeared to be at far lower risk of contracting the disease and seemed to have less severe outcomes, so young people became a lower priority for vaccinations than adults. However, as the vaccines rolled out and more adults gained immune protection, the relatively small number of infections in children started making up a larger proportion of Covid-19 cases.

“The focus was to get a vaccine for adults first,” said Kawsar Talaat, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who led a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine trial in children. “Once the trial in adults was finished, then it started going down in age.”

The initial clinical trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, also known by the brand name Comirnaty, included participants aged 16 and up. Then the companies conducted further trials with the same vaccine formulation in kids as young as 12, which led experimenters to reconsider what dose of the vaccine was needed in young children.

“The incredibly robust immune response in the 12 to 15-year-olds made them think that maybe they didn’t need that high of a dose,” Talaat said. “There was a new study that started to look at the vaccine specifically in kids under 12, and we decided to test different doses.”

Researchers repeated the clinical trials in 5- to 11-year-olds, but with about one-third of the dose of vaccine that’s used in adults. The lower dose aims to minimize side effects and account for the fact that young children are both physically smaller and tend to have more robust immune systems than adults.

“Kids are not just little adults,” said Jennifer Nayak, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Their size is different, but their immune systems are also different.”

Children who received the low-dose Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine, 10 micrograms, experienced an immune response comparable to adults who got the higher dose, according to the Pfizer/BioNTech trial. After the second injection, the trial showed, the vaccine was 90.7 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19.

The trials, however, included just 4,600 children, compared to the trial in adults that included 44,000 participants. The pool of children in the trial was smaller because the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has already been administered to hundreds of millions of people around the world with a strong safety record.

However, some complications did emerge. For instance, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is not recommended for people who are severely allergic to any vaccine ingredient, or who had an allergic reaction to the first dose. Researchers have also found that some recipients of mRNA vaccines, like the one from Pfizer/BioNTech, may be linked to rare cases of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.

The trials in children showed no serious side effects, but some reported symptoms like pain at the injection site, redness, swelling, chills, and fever, with more side effects reported after the second dose.

While the wait for Covid-19 vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds has been agonizing for kids and adults alike, this is still a record-breaking pace for vaccine approval. The previous record for a pediatric vaccine was held by the mumps shot, which took four years to develop.

Only 18 months have passed since the World Health Organization declared the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and 11 months have passed since the FDA granted its first emergency use authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine.

What vaccinating children means for the US epidemic

It’s clear that children have suffered greatly from the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the kids who have been sickened and killed by the disease, millions more have lost caregivers and family members or struggled to keep up with their education as schools shifted to remote learning. The pandemic has also taken an enormous toll on mental health.

And though almost all children survive coronavirus infections, they can still infect others who are more vulnerable to some degree. That not only threatens to make other people sick, but also increases the chances that the virus will acquire dangerous mutations. So vaccinating children is likely important not just to protect them individually, but to limit the further spread of Covid-19.

Yet the current stage of the US epidemic is different from when Covid-19 vaccines began distribution to adults in December 2020. At that time, there were critical limitations on US supplies of the vaccine, so health officials debated exactly who should be at the front of the line.

Now, the US has stockpiled lots of Covid-19 vaccines, and some adults have become eligible for booster doses. Young children do remain at a lower risk of severe Covid-19 than adults, so health officials recommend that children receive their first injections at doctor’s offices rather than mass-vaccination sites.

“As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated,” said CDC director Rochelle Walensky in a statement.

One concern, however, is that families will decide whether to vaccinate their children, likely along the same fault lines that have defined Covid-19 vaccinations for adults. Age, income, ethnicity, and political beliefs are key variables shaping whether Americans get vaccinated, and some families seem especially hesitant about vaccinating young kids. (Having only an emergency-use vaccine authorization for young kids may contribute to hesitancy, despite safety data backing it.) School districts around the US will also come to different conclusions about whether to mandate, encourage, or remain indifferent about children getting their shots.

“I imagine there is going to be a huge amount of geographic variability on this,” said Nayak.

So far, vaccination rates are highest in older people and lowest in younger people, and if the pattern holds, it’s likely that 5- to 11-year-old children will have some of the lowest rates of vaccine uptake. Getting those numbers up will take time.

Another hurdle is that not every child has good access to medical professionals and can easily get to a doctor to receive a shot. Misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, like the myth that they cause reproductive harm, could interfere with the rollout as well, according to Nayak.

Still, the more people who are vaccinated against Covid-19, the harder it is for the virus to spread. As more children head back to schools in person and more people gather indoors, having 5- to 11-year-olds vaccinated could blunt another winter spike in infections across the whole population. “We’re seeing that in places with high vaccination rates, transmission is lower than in places with low vaccination rates,” Talaat said. “I’m really excited about vaccinating my 10-year-old.”

Researchers are still planning to keep an eye on the children who participated in clinical trials for more than two years, to keep track of their level of protection and to monitor for any potential long-term complications. Some fraction of vaccinated children are also likely to experience breakthrough infections, and over time, protection from the vaccine may wane.

There are also Covid-19 vaccine clinical trials underway in children as young as 6 months old, so even more kids in the future may be eligible to get these shots. But again, even if they gain approval, the vaccines will only make a big difference if kids actually get them.

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The curious case of the ancient whale bones

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

Every year, thousands of whales strand — meaning that they wind up trapped on beaches or in shallow waters — and it’s really hard to figure out why.

It’s not for lack of trying. Teams of forensic researchers investigate stranded whales, studying organs, analyzing body parts with CT scanners, digging through stomach contents, and checking skin for scarring. But these meticulous whale detectives still often don’t find any answers.

“We can only about 50 percent of the time, if that much, give you a solid answer of why that animal died and why it’s stranded,” says Darlene Ketten, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who refers to her work as “CSI: The Beach.”

One reason it’s hard to figure out how whales die is that scientists don’t know that much about how they live, Ketten explains on the latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about mysteries in science. They range widely across the planet and dive deeply. There are many things about their complicated bodies we don’t yet understand. And these researchers are often working with whale carcasses that have been decaying for days, which can distort the evidence left behind.

Some beached whales are even more difficult to study because they’re really, really old. In 2011, Nick Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, took on a cold case that had gone unsolved for a long time — seven to nine million years, to be precise.

Pyenson, who is also the author of Spying on Whales, was on a research trip in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a beautiful expanse of rock and sand that’s flecked with orange, beige, and purple because of the presence of iron and other minerals. He was there to research the origins of a nearby ocean current — but along the way, he got distracted.

“There’s all these whale skeletons by the side of this hill,” Pyenson says one of his colleagues, Mario Suarez, told him one day. “You need to check it out! It’s amazing!”

The hill was known locally as “Cerro Ballena,” or “Whale Hill,” because fossilized whale bones had been found there in the past. Bulldozers had just come through to cut a path for a new highway, and they exposed more skeletons. When Pyenson went to look, he was completely overwhelmed.

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“It was whale skeleton after whale skeleton after whale skeleton, complete from nose to tail. Some of them stretched out almost like snow angels the kids make,” Pyenson recalls. “It’s as if they had died and their skeletons were not disturbed.”

This was almost unheard of: full, beautifully preserved skeletons, stretching out for 40 feet in every direction. “In the field, you spend a lot of time searching, and often times you just find a boulder with a few bits of bone — and that is a good day,” Pyenson says. “A really good day is finding more than just a few bits of bone, or a partial skeleton. If you find a head with that skeleton, that’s a home run.”

Once he’d processed what he was seeing, Pyenson realized that he was going to have to start a whole new research project to figure out what exactly had happened to these whales. It seemed like an ancient stranding — possibly one of the best-preserved ones — but it wasn’t going to be easy to solve. There were no tissues to study, so he couldn’t analyze organs or skin, as Ketten and her fellow researchers do with modern whales. Fossilization also changes the minerals in the bones, and rock layers compress them into new shapes, so the bones were somewhat unreliable witnesses.

Pyenson and his colleagues used 3D-scanning technology to make models of the whale skeletons to study them back home. They carefully analyzed the soil and layout of the surrounding area, and finally landed on three big clues.

First, the skeletons were entangled in each other and almost entirely unscavenged, which suggested that these animals had died suddenly. Second, there were many species at this ancient graveyard — whales, but also other adult and juvenile animals, which told Pyenson that the die-off was not limited to whales.

The third big clue came from a close study of the local geology, which suggested these creatures had died in four separate events over the course of around 10,000 years. So whatever was killing the whales had happened several times. That essentially ruled out an infrequent natural disaster like a volcanic eruption.

Pyenson began thinking about cyclical changes to the ocean that could kill off lots of different animals, and fast. “I started moving towards the idea of harmful algal blooms being a cause,” he says. Algal blooms, or red tides, are troublesome to this day. They occur when populations of microorganisms explode in a body of water — sometimes when agricultural runoff floods a lake or ocean with nutrients like nitrogen. These tiny organisms can produce toxins that can prove very deadly, very quickly.

Pyenson theorized that runoff from mineral-rich surrounding areas — minerals that still lend the sands of the Atacama their vibrant colors — could have periodically caused algal blooms in the ocean that once covered this area. But he wanted evidence that would hold up in the court of scientific opinion.

If this were a fresh crime scene, he could have rooted around in the whale’s guts, found a bunch of toxins, and caught the red tide red-handed. But because his crime scene was millions of years old, he could only study his photographic models instead. Those kept showing that the whale skeletons were surrounded by rings of orange sediment — mats of iron oxide, which Pyenson interprets as possible algae in the fossil record. “I kept on wondering, is this the algae of death?” Pyenson says with a laugh.

His team brought samples of this orange sediment back to the US and examined them under an electron microscope. The images included tiny spheres that were the right size to be an algae of death, Pyenson says, but all their distinguishing features had been wiped away by millions of years.

“We are so close to a smoking gun,” he says. “It’s tantalizing. But that’s how a lot of historical science goes. You struggle with it and you want to get at the answer. But sometimes the evidence you’re able to find to answer your questions is not entirely satisfying.”

Jeremy Goldbogen, a marine biologist at Stanford University, read Pyenson’s paper in 2014 and told the journal Science that the positions of the various skeletons seemed consistent with a stranding.

David Caron, who has researched algal blooms at the University of Southern California, was also asked about Pyenson’s research in 2014 and told National Geographic that present-day algal blooms also wipe out a wide range of marine animals. “There’s certainly thousands of sea lion deaths, dozens to hundreds of dolphins, untold hundreds of pelicans that all have been wiped out with the same toxic event,” he told the magazine.

According to Pyenson, these parallels between the past and the present flow in both directions. “I find studying past worlds to be a kind of time travel,” he says. “You get to go these past worlds that almost seem like alien worlds.”

Even if he’s never able to definitively pinpoint what happened at Cerro Ballena, Pyenson says the site suggests that whale strandings were occurring millions of years before modern humans evolved. That’s helpful context for researchers who are trying to prevent strandings in the present day.

For example, a large proportion of the fossils come from baleen whales, even though baleen whales make up only a small fraction of whale strandings today. So what’s changed between then and now? For one thing, centuries of whaling have decimated populations of baleen whales, Pyenson says.

These strandings have been happening “ever since there were whales,” says Ketten. But humans are now contributing to the problem, whether through whaling, plastic pollution, or climate change. “What we have to be responsible for is actions that we take in the ocean that may be … causing animals to become less fit, to be less healthy, to be less able to reproduce, to mate, to find food.”

Whale fossils like the ones Pyenson studied in the Atacama Desert can serve as a sort of snapshot or baseline, revealing how whale strandings looked before humans ever came along. And more researchers can establish about the distant past, the more they may know about the effects that humans are having on these majestic mammals.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Streaming space tourism is the new reality TV

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

When SpaceX launches its first all-civilian crew into space later this fall and takes a multi-day trip circling the Earth, humanity can follow along online thanks to an exclusive documentary deal Netflix sealed with Elon Musk’s private space company.

The first two installments of the five-episode miniseries, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, will debut on the streaming platform September 6 and will be the closest Netflix has come yet to covering an event in “near-real time,” the company said on Tuesday. Over the course of September, a team of videographers will follow the civilian astronauts, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, who will be piloting the spacecraft, as they prepare for the journey and eventually launch into space. If all goes as planned, Netflix will release two more episodes September 13; it will film the actual launch on September 15 and then stream it as a “feature-length finale” at the end of the month.

Netflix is making it clear that it wants us to think the mission, which will also raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, is really for everyone. One promotional poster for the show declares, “This September, we’re all going to space.” The streaming platform is even releasing a live-action/animated show to explain the mission to kids and their families.

But SpaceX and Netflix are hardly the only companies hoping to capitalize on the historic shift to commercial space travel. The Inspiration4 mission and its streaming special mark a new era of live broadcasting from space. The rise of space tourism also seems ripe for the streaming age, a time when people can watch these events almost anywhere, and the entertainment industry has already started turning billionaires’ joyrides in zero gravity into massive media events.

“Shooting something into space, that’s something that’s going to bring in subscribers globally,” Julia Alexander, a senior strategy analyst at Parrot Analytics, told Recode. Alexander added that growing demand and “the fact that they’re relatively cheap to produce compared to the high-profile prestigious dramas with the big Hollywood talent” means we’ll see many more space-bound reality shows in the future.

The space-focused science series Nova was the eighth-most popular documentary series in the United States between June 2020 and July 2021; last year, the Cosmos: Possible Worlds featuring Neil deGrasse-Tyson saw 18 times the average demand for science and nature documentary content, according to Alexander. And let’s not forget that the data-driven nature of platforms can steer viewers to specific types of shows.

“Netflix and other streaming platforms are able to create niche content like this because they are able to use their customer data to match the content to the interests of their consumers,” Michael Smith, an information technology and marketing professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told Recode in an email.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are also acutely aware that their launches can act as advertising for their brands, affiliated companies, and commercial space tourism in general. Accordingly, they’ve invested heavily into incorporating expert commentators, live updates, and streaming coverage of launches. Virgin Galactic has even recruited a TikTok influencer for an upcoming flight.

Millions tuned into Blue Origin’s YouTube channel for the July 20 launch that carried Jeff Bezos on a suborbital flight along with the oldest and youngest person to ever visit space, pilot Wally Funk and Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen.

“We also wanted to show this is a true rocket ride experience. There are fewer than 600 people who have ever been to space,” Linda Mills, Blue Origin’s vice president of communications, told PR Week of the event. “To demonstrate that specialness and uniqueness of the flight was something we were trying to get across to future customers.”

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Bezos’s flight was also the first — and for now, the only — rocket launch that Amazon customers could watch live on Prime Video.

More reality shows filmed from space are planned for the near future. An American production company called Space Hero is working on a contest-based show that will have average people train and compete for the chance to win a very expensive trip to the International Space Station. Like Netflix, the company says it’s focusing on “opening space up to everyone” while offering the first-ever truly off-planet experience.” Space Hero even signed a contractor agreement with NASA in April.

Of course, rocket launches as blockbuster media events predate the streaming era. From the early days of the space program, NASA missions were live demonstrations of national achievement, and humanity’s journey to the final frontier was the stuff of national news broadcasts. An estimated 600 million people watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. While enthusiasm for broadcasting space events in real time dwindled after the Challenger explosion in 1986, private space companies are once again trying to market launches as something everyone on Earth can watch live.

That messaging has the convenient effect of distracting viewers from the fact that commercial space tourism, at least for now, is an environmentally questionable hobby for the ultrarich that won’t immediately accomplish much in terms of advancing our scientific understanding of space. But while criticism of billionaires’ space dreams surged following Bezos’s launch, that same narrative may not pop up with Netflix’s latest SpaceX show, says Alexander from Parrot Analytics.

“I imagine SpaceX has some form of say in what is going on,” she told Recode. “Netflix just wants to carry it and make the best docu-series possible.”

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

The case against the concept of biodiversity

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

In 2017, an evolutionary biologist named R. Alexander Pyron ignited controversy with a Washington Post commentary titled “We don’t need to save endangered species. Extinction is part of evolution.” He wrote: “Conserving a species we have helped to kill off, but on which we are not directly dependent, serves to discharge our own guilt, but little else.”

Pyron’s take challenged the decades-old idea that biodiversity is a good thing — that humans should strive to preserve all forms of life on Earth and their interconnectedness across ecosystems. It prompted scientist and writer Carl Safina to mount a passionate defense of biodiversity, calling Pyron’s stance “conceptually confused” and containing “jarring assertions.” Safina’s most cutting rebuke was that belittling biodiversity derails environmental conversations. “It’s like answering ‘Black lives matter’ with ‘All lives matter,’” he wrote. “It’s a way of intentionally missing the point.”

Nobel Prize winners co-signed more rebuttals. Professors blogged long meditations on why endangered species need to be saved. There were scientists who had previously questioned a hyperfocus on saving species, to be sure, though none had done so in such a public and broad-sweeping manner as Pyron. Josh Schimel, an ecologist at UC Santa Barbara, wrote: “Remember, you are a scientist — it is not your job to be right. It is your job to be thoughtful, careful, and analytical.” Pyron declined a request for comment for this story.

Ginger Allington, a landscape ecologist and professor at George Washington University who tracks the scientific debate around “biodiversity,” says this scientific back-and-forth reflects increasing conflict about the importance of biodiversity and species loss.

The most common way to measure biodiversity is to count the number of species in a certain place, also known as “species richness.” But critics question the usefulness of this number and argue that the concept has always been fuzzy, even to scientists, akin to a “new linguistic bottle for the wine of old ideas.”

A handful of scientists want to do away with the term biodiversity altogether — and have been trying to do so since the late 1990s. The concept, they say, is hard to quantify, hard to track globally over time, and actually isn’t an indication of what people commonly picture as a “healthy” ecosystem. (Scientists are generally reluctant to describe ecosystems in terms of “healthy” or “unhealthy,” which are value judgments.)

Last year, the United Nations reported that the world has failed to reach even one of the major biodiversity conservation targets it had set for itself in 2010. In the face of accelerating species and habitat loss, countries are now committing to protecting 30 percent of land and water by 2030. This fall, 193 nations are set to attend the virtual Convention on Biological Diversity to hash out a plan to stop biodiversity loss. (A draft of that plan was published last month.) In the US, the Biden administration has proposed its own game-changing approach to nature conservation. Meanwhile, a coronavirus pandemic that may have begun in animals reminds us that we are fundamentally linked to the animals in these critical habitats.

Against this backdrop, a new generation of scientists is taking up the debate about what to do about “biodiversity” itself — the scientific concept, its popular understanding, and indeed the very word. As Allington told Vox: “There’s just a lot of drama.”

The backstory of biodiversity

Before there was biodiversity, there was BioDiversity. A key moment in the evolution of the word came at the National Forum on BioDiversity, held at the Smithsonian Institution and National Academy of Sciences, in 1986. Speakers included Jared Diamond, who later authored Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the biologist E.O. Wilson, who most recently popularized the idea of protecting half the planet.

Diamond and Wilson — along with seven other white male scientists in attendance — dubbed themselves the “Club of Earth” and held a press conference, telling reporters that biodiversity loss was the second-biggest “threat to civilization.” The first? Thermonuclear war.

Few women scientists or non-Western experts were featured. And not everyone felt comfortable crowning biodiversity as a scientific silver bullet, for that matter. One news report from the time quoted biologist Dan Janzen, who said at the forum that “one shouldn’t use the number of species as the only criterion for earmarking an area for conservation.” Janzen would later call the forum “an explicit political event” and said that the word biodiversity got “punched into that system at that point [in time] deliberately.”

Still, the forum drew 14,000 in-person attendees. Another 10,000 watched a live “teleconference” of key panelists beamed around the world. “BioDiversity: The Videotape,” a campy VHS recording of the teleconference spliced with wildlife footage, sold out. The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Time all covered the event, marking “the first time that biological diversity … had received such a broad public airing,” a December 1986 article in the journal BioScience noted. The forum not only streamlined the term — thanks to a suggestion by biologist Walter Rosen — but brought the buzzword to the forefront, as the growing rate of global species extinctions was given both a name and an urgency. “The biodiversity crisis,” Wilson said at the forum, “is a real crisis.”

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Against the odds, the idea of biodiversity spread outside of science and around the world. “I’d compare the market penetration of ‘biodiversity’ to Madonna,” said Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University.

Pimm witnessed the word’s use rise suddenly in the 1980s as a young associate professor. Before then, Pimm had no simple name for the kind of research he was doing — now called conservation biology — and, more problematically, no term for what he was measuring out in the field. And so biodiversity “hit several things simultaneously,” he said. “It’s easy to popularize, it captures people’s imagination, and it’s scientifically credible.”

Three ecologists shaped “biodiversity” into the kind of science that goes mainstream, according to Pimm. Thomas Lovejoy coined the term “biological diversity” in the 1980s. Elliott Norse defined it as the variety of genes, species, and ecosystems in a given area. And Wilson, who initially deemed the contraction biodiversity “too glitzy,” ultimately popularized the word. In 1992, the UN codified the word biodiversity — and Norse’s definition — into the Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral treaty.

Biodiversity was thus conceived to capture two notions: a world teeming with wildlife, and the political problem of stopping extinctions. The idea had become “a force” capable of influencing global society, as climate and environmental law expert David Takacs wrote in his 1996 book The Idea of Biodiversity. “It is difficult to distinguish biodiversity, a socially constructed idea, from biodiversity, some concrete phenomena,” Takacs wrote.

But over the years, biodiversity has come to mean many things to different people — from “local species” to “wildness” to “natural balance” to just “a fancy word for nature,” according to a study of public opinion in Scotland. Researcher R.A. Lautenschlager, in a 1997 scientific article titled “Biodiversity is dead,” put it more bluntly: “Biodiversity has become so all-inclusive that it has become meaningless.”

“We need to be careful about what we are saying”

A practical question flows from this history: Does saving every species still matter?

Allington has seen colleagues try to address this kind of question publicly, and their answers, she says, tend to get misinterpreted. “We need to be careful about what we are saying,” she said.

To unpack this question in her college courses, Allington — who considers biodiversity to be “multifaceted” — passes out bags of mixed candy to her students, illustrating a key point: “The bags show that not all species play the same role in the ecosystem,” she said. Some species, like oysters, make key contributions to the ecosystem, and their disappearance would threaten all the rest. “The problem is that we still don’t know what functions the majority of species actually provide,” she said.

Scientists in today’s save-all-species debate disagree about where the science ends, and where the subjective idea of right and wrong begins. In this sense, debates about biodiversity may ultimately be debates about ethics, implicit human values, and whose ecological knowledge matters.

“Does every species matter?” asked Mark Vellend, a plant ecologist at University of Sherbrooke in Canada. “You cannot even give an answer unless you say, matter for what?”

How to measure “goodness”

The late biologist Michael Soulé, the “father of conservation biology,” was unequivocal that biodiversity is good — though its goodness, he wrote, “cannot be tested or proven.”

But in specific places, biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake is not necessarily good. On islands, for example, plant diversity is generally increasing because non-native species are arriving; some rare island plant species may go extinct as a result, but not always. Biodiversity might also be the wrong lens in ecosystems that weren’t diverse to begin with, like boreal forests close to the Arctic, which have low numbers of species that rarely face extinction even in the face of logging.

Many scientists recognize biodiversity as an imperfect yardstick. The total number of species, and how it changes, doesn’t capture all the ways that humans and other forces alter landscapes. “‘More biodiversity’ is not a universal prescription for conservation,” journalist Michelle Nijhuis writes in Beloved Beasts, a history of the conservation movement.

It also doesn’t capture the human experience of nature. A 2013 study — “Is biodiversity attractive?” — found that when it comes to outdoor recreation, visitors don’t actually prefer species-rich urban spaces. “Especially during the pandemic people [are] flocking to natural, wild spaces,” said Vellend. “Whether in those spaces there are 1,000 species or 100, to me that’s a pretty small part of the overall story.”

For many people, the on-ramp to nature is not through science. “Their point of entry is aesthetic,” Barry Lopez, the nature writer and Arctic Dreams author, said in a 2001 interview. “It’s not that they don’t know what biodiversity is, but it doesn’t have the pull,” he added. “The door for them lies elsewhere.”

A more measurable dimension of a place’s “goodness” within the human story, some scientists think, is ecosystem function. Forget the number of species, in other words, and focus on what each does for keeping an ecosystem enjoyable and humming, like the life-supporting role of oak trees — which support hundreds of species of caterpillars, a mainstay in most songbird diets — in North American hardwood forests. Using this framework, land managers would focus their conservation efforts on species that appear to play the most crucial role in a given ecosystem. (An 80-page US National Park Service report, called “Resist-Accept-Direct,” recently called for this triage approach.)

Pimm, for his part, thinks this framework is “total bullshit” — and he is not alone in that sentiment. It’s hard to develop a conservation plan around the emerging concept of ecosystem function, according to Pimm, precisely because we still know so little about the role of any given species in a place. “What does one even mean by ecosystem function?” he asked. “It doesn’t have any operational meaning.”

The concept of biodiversity is becoming even more influential in the realm of climate policy: In June, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its first-ever joint report with the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Yet one of its authors, the Paris-Saclay University ecologist Paul Leadley, said while introducing the report that current on-the-ground approaches to saving species are essentially outdated. “We have to really rethink biodiversity conservation,” he said.

There is a broader movement to expand the meaning of “biodiversity”

So if the idea that saving every species saves the planet is imperfect, should we now abandon biodiversity?

“A concept can’t truly die until it’s got a replacement,” said Vellend. He says that the 1980s version of biodiversity should be seen as a starting point, with plenty of room for improvement. “Until somebody comes up with something better, we’re stuck with it.”

Even R. Alexander Pyron, the author of the explosive Post piece, cautioned against dropping “biodiversity” in a mea culpa he posted on his Facebook page after blowback from his peers. “I succumbed to a temptation to sensationalize parts of my argument,” Pyron wrote.

But others see an opportunity to expand the notion of biodiversity into something more inclusive and more just. Campaigns like #BiodiversityRevisited have created virtual dialogues and in-person workshops where an array of voices discuss ways of breathing new life into “biodiversity.” These discussions have pushed out possible replacement terms, like “fabric of life,” that might better capture the full range of life on Earth, from thriving trees to prospering pandas to healthy people.

One starting point might be to broaden the biodiversity concept to include humans, breaking down the barrier between our species and other animals. “My well-educated scientist colleagues will often slip and say ‘mammals and humans.’ Every time, I get a chill down my spine,” said Hopi Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist and curator at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Humans are mammals, after all. That even experts make these slips of the tongue “just highlights that there is still something to overcome there,” Hoekstra said.

Conservationists could also gain from a broadened notion of biodiversity that centers Indigenous and traditional knowledge, which has long been diminished by establishment science. Research shows that lands managed by Indigenous people are home to much of the world’s biodiversity, and that biodiversity tends to decline more slowly on those lands.

“Many of these Westernized concepts, we don’t see ourselves in them,” Andrea Reid, a fisheries scientist at University of British Columbia and a citizen of the Nisga’a nation, said. Indigenous concepts of conservation “include people within the system,” said Reid, who monitors diversity in British Columbia’s coldwater streams by counting species in ways that have cultural meaning to Indigenous people.

Reid has been working with Indigenous “knowledge keepers” who will go to a stream and look for certain species of dragonfly — for them, a “cultural indicator” that marks a healthy ecosystem. Other scientists might go to the same place and tally all insect species to measure local species richness. These measures can be used together, Reid says, to assess the overall condition of the stream over time.

This kind of “pluralistic” perspective, as some scientists call it, aligns with what Reid calls “two-eyed seeing” — a way of bringing together Indigenous and Western understandings. “It’s not about throwing something out, or just walking away from ‘biodiversity’ and its metrics,” Reid said. “It’s about enriching our understanding by bringing multiple perspectives to bear.”

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

What it feels like to get Covid-19 after being vaccinated

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

Michael Miranda had been fully vaccinated for over four months when he tested positive for the coronavirus. “I stared at my phone for a few moments, wondering if this was a death sentence,” said Miranda, who works as a probation officer in Hawaii. After flying home from a trip to the West Coast, Miranda had experienced chills, sneezes, and a fever of 102 degrees Fahrenheit. “I immediately began blaming all the unmasked people,” he said.

Daniele Selby, a writer in New York City, grappled with similar feelings when she started to experience exhaustion, significant congestion, headaches, and a loss of smell and taste. “I was pretty shocked to learn I’d tested positive,” she said. “I am fully vaccinated and have continued to wear masks … so to do all that and still get Covid-19 and feel ill has been pretty upsetting.”

The stories of vaccinated people with “breakthrough” cases of Covid-19, which are increasingly making news, affecting policy, and spreading on social media, have some common threads. A dozen vaccinated people told Vox that testing positive brought up feelings of shock, anger, fear, and even shame. Many said they’re finding themselves at the center of heated debates about vaccines, masks, and the future of the pandemic.

“There have definitely been some that have tried to use [my] experience to discount the efficacy of the vaccines or to push unfounded cures on social media,” said André Gonzales, who traveled from Washington, DC, to New Mexico for a funeral in early June, and tested positive along with other vaccinated members of his family. Gonzales said he had grappled with “a lot of guilt” that he may have exposed “high-risk” family members and unvaccinated children to the virus.

“Patients definitely put a lot of emphasis on signaling to us that they had ‘done everything right’ before they got sick,” says David Putrino, a neuroscientist and rehabilitation expert at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who has treated a few people with breakthrough Covid-19. “I think that unfortunately there is an element of shame [or] guilt associated with getting Covid at this stage.”

People with breakthrough infections are not the first Covid-19 patients to have their stories politicized, or the first to feel guilt or shame after testing positive. But their experiences highlight some of the persistent fault lines in American attitudes toward the coronavirus right now. These cases are yet another example of the emotional toll of the pandemic, and are a frustrating reminder that the crisis isn’t over for anyone.

Patient experiences also show that while breakthrough infections are very unlikely to cause new waves of infection or overwhelm health care systems, they can still have significant ramifications for individuals, their families, and their communities — impacts that are often more difficult because they are unexpected.

There’s more to learn about breakthrough Covid-19

Breakthrough infections refer to positive tests for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, in people who were fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Severe breakthrough cases are uncommon: More than 166 million people have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded 7,525 breakthrough cases that led to hospitalization or death.

“The incidence is relatively low,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist. “But whatever we know as breakthrough data is absolutely an undercount.” The CDC says as much on its website, because reporting from health providers is voluntary and isn’t comprehensive.

“We still need more data on how common breakthrough infections are — and the CDC should be reporting this data,” added Julia Raifman, an assistant professor of health policy at Boston University. The CDC is not currently counting mild breakthrough cases of Covid-19, and Raifman suggested this absence of data could be contributing to public confusion about the level of risk facing vaccinated individuals.

As Katherine J. Wu has written in the Atlantic, the ability to develop Covid-19 is not what separates vaccinated and unvaccinated people. “The choice isn’t about getting vaccinated or getting infected,” Wu wrote. “It’s about bolstering our defenses so that we are ready to fight an infection from the best position possible.” If public health guidance suggests otherwise, it could run the risk of creating false expectations and even stigmatizing the experience of testing positive while vaccinated.

“Vaccinated people should know that their chances of infection are lower than those of unvaccinated people,” Raifman said. “But … infection will not be rare when there is uncontrolled transmission of Covid like we currently face.”

The stories of patients are being politicized

While stories of breakthrough Covid-19 are not representative of the majority of Covid-19 cases — they may be amplified precisely because they’re seen as surprising — many have gone viral on social media, and some have become fodder for commenters making inaccurate arguments against vaccines. Tweets from people with breakthrough infections garner thousands of likes and retweets, and responses range from supportive to skeptical. It can be overwhelming for patients who were not expecting a heated backlash.

“I could not believe how my post blew up,” said Melinda Simmons, a biology professor in Florida whose tweet about her case prompted more than 1,000 comments. “I tried to block the trolls and people using my post as an argument against vaccination, but I gave up after a while. I was sick, and dealing with the responses was exhausting.”

People who have been vaccinated respond with a wide range of reactions, too. “Some vaccinated people seem to respond with very high anxiety and fear, and talk about completely locking down,” said Mike McHargue, a Los Angeles-based author and media founder who tweeted about his breakthrough case of Covid-19 in early July. “Other vaccinated people say my case is a fluke, and they won’t tolerate masks, distancing, or other mitigations.”

Miranda said one person told him his illness was a consequence of “taking risks along with enjoying our freedom.” He felt this comment was political, and declined to respond. “I strongly believe that public health matters should never be politicized,” he said.

There’s still a gap between expectation and experience

Breakthrough infections encompass a wide variety of different experiences. Some are asymptomatic, as Vox’s Dylan Scott has reported. Most will not result in hospitalization. Non-hospitalized cases may be considered either mild or moderate depending on a patient’s symptoms, according to the National Institutes of Health.

However, cases that are defined as mild sometimes do not feel mild to patients, especially for vaccinated people who may be surprised to develop Covid-19 at all. “Medically, I had a ‘mild’ case, but nothing felt mild about it,” said McHargue. A month after the onset of his symptoms, he is still experiencing fatigue and tinnitus. A recent study in Israel found that some vaccinated health care workers with breakthrough infections developed symptoms that lasted for more than six weeks.

“Even if a symptomatic individual does not get hospitalized, [they] can still experience ‘long hauler’ symptoms and be affected in the long run,” Erik Blutinger, an emergency physician at Mount Sinai Queens, told Vox. He said it’s important to analyze all breakthrough cases, regardless of their severity, at least until scientists learn more.

Gonzales and his mother are also both dealing with lingering symptoms, including fatigue, body aches, and a cough. Gonzales had to delay his start date at his new job as a result. Like other Covid-19 patients with lasting symptoms, he and McHargue said that their illness had impaired their ability to work.

“Covid-19 took away 10 days of my life — 10 days of experiences that I’ll never get back,” Miranda said. “But most importantly, I missed the moment of saying goodbye to my uncle before he passed.” Because Miranda was sick with Covid-19, he was unable to visit the hospital where his uncle was being treated for a cardiac event. Other patients described difficulties quarantining from unvaccinated children in their households.

Recommendations for vaccinated people may continue to evolve as scientists and policymakers learn more about breakthrough infections. Rivera, the epidemiologist, echoed CDC guidance that most vaccinated people can avoid routine testing if they have not been exposed to the virus. She and Raifman, of Boston University, both agreed with the CDC in saying that vaccinated people in the US should wear masks indoors.

But Rivera voiced some uncertainty about the CDC’s current recommendation on exposures — that vaccinated people who come into contact with someone who has Covid-19 do not need to quarantine if they don’t exhibit symptoms. This is arguably too lax, she said. “I don’t think that it makes sense for people who have had a confirmed exposure to not pre-emptively … stay home.”

People with breakthrough infections remain grateful for vaccines

Because SARS-CoV-2 is still a novel virus, those infected are sometimes the first to report new experiences, and being first can exacerbate feelings of anxiety or shame. Covid-19 patients seem especially likely to be met with surprise or disbelief when their experiences are new or understood to be uncommon.

When Selby first became symptomatic, she took a rapid test, which came back negative. When her illness persisted, she asked family, friends, and health care workers for advice. “Everyone kind of had the same response: ‘I’m sure you’re fine, you’re vaccinated,’” Selby said. “The physician’s assistant seemed to imply I was overreacting, asking for another test.”

When Selby tested again and the result was positive, even she was surprised: “I had let myself be convinced I was overreacting.”

Four of the people with breakthrough cases who spoke to Vox said they had received surprised reactions from health care workers, and some spoke of conflicting advice. “The staff at the doctor’s office did seem spooked by us, mRNA-vaccinated people with Covid,” said McHargue. Gonzales said he sought care for his symptoms at an emergency room, where he was told he did not need to be tested because he was vaccinated. He later heard from his state health department, which disagreed and told him he needed to be added to the contact tracing database.

Since confirming her breakthrough infection, Selby has used social media to spread awareness about her experience. She thinks the message that breakthrough cases are “super rare” contributed to the doubt and disbelief she encountered from others.

In the process of sharing her story, Selby learned of other breakthrough cases in her wider network, and the knowledge has affirmed her own experience. “Obviously, it’s upsetting to hear other people were sick,” Selby explained. “But it was reassuring, in a twisted way … I kind of felt like my worries were validated.”

Selby is glad she got vaccinated, and the doctor who treated her breakthrough case thanked her for doing so. Other people with breakthrough infections echoed this sentiment.

“I think it’s possible … that I would be on a ventilator right now without the vaccine,” said McHargue. From the moment he tested positive, he was confident that he and his family would be okay, thanks to their vaccination status.

Gonzales was similarly grateful. “Being vaccinated is what saved not only my life, but the lives of my family as well,” he said. “What I went through, and what I saw my family go through, was difficult enough. I don’t want to imagine what it would have looked like had any of us been unvaccinated.”

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Correction, August 11, 4:20 pm: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that Michael Miranda is a parole officer. He is a probation officer.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

Climate change worsens extreme weather. A revolution in attribution science proved it.

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

There’s a cliché that has popped up for years in discussions of climate and weather disasters: You can’t blame any individual event on climate change. Climate is all about trends and statistics, the reasoning goes, so you can’t necessarily draw meaningful conclusions from a single data point, be it a heat wave, a hurricane, or a drought.

But in recent years, climate scientists have been pushing back against this notion: Bolstered with better data and even clearer trends, they’re no longer reluctant to point the finger back at humanity for worsening these calamities. In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a team of leading researchers convened by the United Nations presented some of the most robust research that connects the dots. It shows how some greater weather extremes can be traced back to rising average temperatures, which in turn stem from emissions of greenhouse gases, mainly from countries and corporations burning fossil fuels.

“On a case-by-case basis, scientists can now quantify the contribution of human influences to the magnitude and probability of many extreme events,” according to the report.

Scientists are not just confident that humans are warming the climate — that much is “unequivocal.” Now they’ve concluded it’s “an established fact” that signals of this warming shine bright in events like the severe heat and torrential rainfall that we’re seeing now, increasing their frequency, severity, or both. That’s why scientists only needed a few days to implicate climate change in recent Pacific Northwest heat waves, for example.

The field of extreme weather attribution has made enormous strides since the last major IPCC assessment in 2013, and it’s one of the most significant components of the new report. “What’s new in this report is that we can now attribute many more changes at the global and regional level to human influence — and better project future changes we will see from different amounts of emissions,” said Ko Barrett, vice chair of the IPCC and senior adviser for climate at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, during a press conference.

At the same time, the stunning, record-breaking disasters of recent memory have again forced a public discussion about the role of climate change. This year alone, the world has seen extreme fires in California, Siberia, Greece, and Turkey; devastating flooding in China and Germany; and heat waves and record drought across the US West, to name just a few.

The question is not whether these individual events were “caused” by climate change — such disasters arise from a confluence of factors and could still happen even if humans weren’t spewing heat-trapping gases into the sky. The question is: How has human-caused climate change altered their likelihood and their severity?

“Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a shift in the ways scientists answer that question,” said Kevin Reed, an associate professor at Stony Brook University who studies climate attribution but was not involved in the IPCC report. Rather than invoking general trends, scientists are now keen to quantify climate change’s role in specific events, and increasingly coming up with estimates while a given disaster is still fresh in people’s minds.

The revolution in attribution research highlights that climate change is not just a problem for the future; it’s being felt right now. As humanity’s role becomes increasingly clear, it could have far-reaching consequences for how we prepare for the future and for the countries and corporations that will shoulder the blame for climate disasters.

The science linking weather extremes to climate change is stronger than ever

The planet has warmed by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius on average, the first installment of the new IPCC report concludes, and the effects are visible now. The report dedicates a whole chapter just to attributing elements of extreme weather to humanity’s actions.

Here are some of the findings in how human influence is playing out now:

  • It is “virtually certain” that the frequency and intensity of heat waves has shot up globally since the 1950s due to greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels.
  • The report says there is “high confidence” that tropical cyclones like hurricanes are dishing out more rainfall due to climate change.
  • There is “medium confidence” that warming is leading to less water availability over most land areas as it increases evaporation.
  • Fire weather conditions — hot, dry, windy — have become more probable in some regions, scientists can say with “medium confidence.”

“Evidence of observed changes and attribution to human influence has strengthened for several types of extremes … in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes,” including fires, the IPCC report says. Much of this is due to emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and gas, but changes in land use and aerosol pollutants play a role as well. And as average global temperatures continue to rise, the magnitude of these impacts will grow.

There are also aspects of extreme weather that don’t exhibit human influence, or haven’t been studied enough to yield conclusions. For example, there does not appear to be a distinct global or regional trend in the number of tropical cyclones, also known as hurricanes and typhoons. However, scientists do expect a trend toward higher wind speeds in these storms over the coming century.

Drought is another complicated phenomenon with different mechanisms at play, so it’s hard to make general conclusions about how climate change is influencing them. But scientists have found droughts that overlap with heat waves have become more frequent, and looking ahead, they have “high confidence” that drought will get more frequent and more severe in many parts of the world.

Some scientists have taken this research further by calculating the degree of human influence in specific events, often soon after they occur. The World Weather Attribution initiative, an international research consortium founded in 2014, examined the June 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest of North America. Within a week, they concluded that the searing heat in the region “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.”

There are other examples of how scientists have traced the influence of climate change in extreme weather in the past few years:

  • The WWA team looked at Australia’s massive bushfires in 2020 and found the likelihood of the severe heat, dryness, and winds that fueled the blazes has increased by at least 30 percent.
  • The June 2020 heat wave in Siberia, in which temperatures north of the Arctic Circle topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38°C), was “almost impossible” without climate change.
  • Since 1900, a storm like 2019’s Tropical Storm Imelda, which struck Texas with heavy floods, is now 1.6 to 2.6 times more likely and between 9 and 17 percent more intense.
  • Another research team examined the 2017 record-breaking fire season in British Columbia. They determined that climate change increased the likelihood of fire conditions two- to fourfold and expanded the burned area between seven- and 11-fold.
  • Warming since 1980 increased the record rainfall of 2017’s Hurricane Harvey by about 20 percent.

With more disasters looming on the horizon, scientists are preparing to conduct even more assessments and aim to come up with more precise attributions at a faster pace.

How climate change attribution science works, and how it’s improved

When a storm, heat wave, or flood strikes, scientists ask counterfactual questions: What would this event have looked like if humans didn’t change the climate? Or how often would you see an event like this in a world that hadn’t warmed?

There are several reasons scientists are better able to answer these questions now. For one thing, scientists have been able to observe climate change in real time. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from 400 parts per million in 2013 to almost 420 ppm this year. Computer models of the global climate system have been refined, and the computers themselves have gotten faster.

“The level of simulation and analysis we can do has improved,” said Reed. “Related to that, we have, in some cases, 10 years more of observations, which means we can build better models.”

The tricky thing is that climate change doesn’t just alter extreme weather — it changes everything. Every sunny day and rainstorm that’s occurring now is happening in a world that’s been warmed up. “Climate change is changing the characteristics of the weather we experience on a day-to-day basis,” Reed said. “Every storm is different because of climate change, because the underlying states are different.”

So to figure out how climate change has influenced a given disaster, scientists have to compare it to a baseline without climate change. One way to do this is to look at historical climate records prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, before humans started spewing gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. Another way is to construct computer models that show what would have happened if people didn’t emit greenhouse gases.

The difference in the likelihood or severity of the disaster between what’s observed and what’s calculated without human influence tells scientists just how much climate change influenced the event.

Attribution of extreme weather has real-world consequences

The more researchers know about the impacts of climate change, the more prepared people can be — not only to survive heat waves and hurricanes, but also to implement new climate policies and hold the worst contributors accountable for their actions.

For example, when a hurricane sends a storm surge inland, researchers can compare the flooding to the expected flood levels in a world where warming had not occurred. The First Street Foundation, a nonprofit that studies climate risks, did such an analysis of the flooding following Hurricane Florence’s landfall in the Carolinas in 2018. They found that sea level rise since the 1980s flooded over 11,000 additional homes than would have been inundated if water levels held steady. Findings like this could help planners identify new climate risks and prepare for them.

Extreme weather attribution could also play a role in lawsuits. “As confidence levels grow in the findings that scientists are making, it’s quite possible that it will have legal implications in the courtroom and elsewhere,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “That’s the sort of scientific conclusion that can have direct impacts on the outcome of litigation.”

There’s already a wave of climate change litigation in the US and in several other countries. Some cities have filed suit against oil companies for selling products that contribute to climate change while misleading the public about their harms. Several groups of youth activists are making the case that governments are not doing an adequate job of protecting against worsening climate change, thereby depriving them of a safe climate.

Will the improvements in extreme weather attribution help plaintiffs win these lawsuits? It’s not clear yet. “We haven’t really seen a battle of the experts in the courtroom as to whether an individual event can be attributed to climate change, and if so, what the legal repercussions of that would be,” Burger said.

On the other hand, the limiting factor in these lawsuits may not be the science but the law itself. For the most part, courts in the US have largely accepted the fundamentals of climate change and the conclusions of the IPCC in particular. The main hang-ups in many cases are whether the plaintiffs have standing to sue, and whether courts are actually the proper venue for directing climate policy. Some courts that have agreed climate change is an urgent threat say entirely new laws are needed to properly limit emissions.

But it doesn’t take a judge to rule on what the science now clearly shows. When it comes to climate change and the ensuing turmoil, humanity is guilty as hell.

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By GETAWAYTHEBERKSHIRES

We have to accept some risk of Covid-19

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

There’s a growing consensus among health experts: Covid-19 may never go away. We’ll likely always have some coronavirus out there, infecting people and, hopefully only in rare cases, getting them seriously ill. The realistic goal is to defang the virus — make it less deadly — not eliminate it entirely.

This is not a surrender to the virus. For a long time, we’ve lived with the seasonal flu, a family of viruses that kills up to tens of thousands of Americans each year. While we can and should take steps to mitigate the risks of the flu (including getting vaccinated for it every year), we’ve never been willing to shut down society or close in-person schooling to fully eradicate it. Americans have accepted some level of risk to continue living normally.

The same will likely be true with Covid-19. The highly transmissible delta variant appears to have cemented this possibility, showing the coronavirus will continue to spread even in states and countries with higher vaccination rates.

If you go back to the earlier days of the pandemic, the original hope with vaccines was more modest. Previously, the Food and Drug Administration set the standard for an acceptable Covid-19 vaccine at 50 percent efficacy. The expectation was that the vaccine wouldn’t stop all cases of Covid-19, but would at least reduce the severity of the disease. As Baylor College’s Peter Hotez put it at the time, “Even if it’s not the best vaccine, it still could prevent me from going to the hospital or worse.”

Yet somewhere along the way — perhaps with the news the vaccines were far more effective than expected — that message has been lost. And now anything short of perfection is perceived as a failure.

Consider the recent study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The initial headlines about the study focused on the fact that three-fourths of cases tracked in the study were among vaccinated people, showing the virus spread in a very vaccinated community. The implication, propped up by the CDC’s new guidance that vaccinated people should wear masks indoors in public, was that the delta variant can spread at a high level among even the people who got their shots.

But if you dig into the details of the outbreak, they revealed some very good news for vaccinated people. Among the more than 1,000 cases so far linked to Provincetown, there have only been seven reported hospitalizations (some unvaccinated) and no deaths.

If this was 2020, given overall hospitalization and death rates, the outbreak would have likely produced roughly 100 hospitalizations and 10 deaths.

The Provincetown outbreak, then, showed that the vaccines had worked to defang the coronavirus — to make it more like the flu.

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“We should cheer,” Amesh Adalja at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told me. “The Provincetown outbreak, contrary to what the press reported, was evidence not of the vaccines’ failure but of their smashing success.”

In short: Pay attention to hospitalizations and deaths, not just cases.

There are concerns about “long Covid” — lingering effects in those infected, like overwhelming fatigue. Still, experts say serious long-term symptoms after a Covid-19 infection seem to be fairly rare (though this issue is still being studied). And, at any rate, these kinds of long-term symptoms aren’t unique to the coronavirus; they happen, for one, with seasonal flu.

While we still have to get more people vaccinated, at a certain point we’ll have to acknowledge we’ve done what we can. It might not be ideal, but we can learn to live with a vaccine-weakened version of Covid-19 — hopefully not too unlike how we’ve long dealt with the flu.

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Why it’s so hard to be a nurse in America, according to two nurses

March 23, 2022 | News | No Comments

Last month, at the start of a fourth Covid-19 wave in the US, a nurse in a Seattle-area intensive-care unit announced her resignation on Twitter. “No amount of money could convince me to stay on as a bedside ICU nurse right now,” she wrote. “I can’t continue to live with the toll on my body and mind. Even weekly therapy has not been enough to dilute the horrors I carry with me from this past year and a half.”

The nurse, Sara, who asked to be identified by her first name so she could speak freely about her experiences at work, told Vox that she’s been offered incredible bonuses in exchange for extra hours. She said she could make an entire month’s mortgage payment just by working one extra shift, but has declined. “We’re not soldiers,” Sara said. “We’re not the saviors of humanity. We’re humans who have families and the need to take care of ourselves.”

In June, Julia Belluz wrote for Vox about the many structural barriers that prevent physicians from getting mental health treatment. It led to an outpouring of support, and a question: What about the nurses?

The roughly 3 million registered nurses (RNs) currently employed in the United States are, in Sara’s words, “the eyes and the ears and hands and feet of providing health care.” But nurses are leaving the profession at a staggering rate. According to a 2021 report from Nursing Solutions, the turnover rate for registered nurses last year was close to 20 percent. This leaves hospitals understaffed: About 10 percent of hospital RN positions were vacant last year, the same report found, perpetuating a cycle of burnout and likely worsening the quality of care for patients.

As an ICU nurse, Sara said the pressure and strain have felt unbearable. When Covid-19 arrived, she was often the only health care provider in the room with a critically ill patient, “feeling like this person’s life was completely in my hands, and it was up to me,” she told Vox. She said her own symptoms now mirror some of those of post-traumatic stress disorder: traumatic flashbacks, nightmares, uncontrolled moods, and crying.

Sara was able to carve out time to find a therapist and join a virtual support group, but she worries that many nurses don’t have the capacity to seek support on their own. “It feels like everybody’s running on fumes,” she said. “We need to make the barriers to accessing [mental health support] quite a bit lower because people are just so exhausted.”

The mental health of nurses was taxed even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Female nurses in particular were at twice the risk of dying by suicide as women in the general population, according to research published earlier this year. And that’s only “the tip of the iceberg,” said Christopher Friese, a professor of nursing at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the study. “What I worry about is the large number of nurses that we can’t even quantify, that are suffering in silence.”

Friese, who has practiced as a registered nurse for 27 years, spoke with Vox about the toll nursing can take on mental health, and what has to change for nurses to get the support they need. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

“There’s real consequences for our nation’s health”

What have been some of the biggest strains on nurses, before the pandemic, that might put them at these greater risks for mental health challenges?

I think there are a couple of buckets to think about. The first bucket is their personal experience. Nurses are not only delivering care to the patients and their communities, but they’re also caring for their children, their family members, and loved ones. They take on an added caregiving role beyond their job. So I think we need to understand that better.

The second bucket is the workplace. The health care workplace has not been healthy for nurses for some time. We’ve known for over a decade that nurses have been concerned about their workloads. They’ve been concerned about the resources that they have to take care of patients or communities. And they are often the group that we add new tasks on to. So adding the electronic health record has placed that very heavy burden on nurses because nurses are sort of a catchall for all of that work. And we haven’t taken anything away from nurses. The only thing we’ve done is continued to pile on to their work.

And I think the final point that we need to be aware of, and I’ve certainly seen, is increased hostility in the workplace. Nurses more frequently are bearing the brunt of verbal and physical abuse from patients, patients’ family members, and some staff. And we have not created a safe environment to work.

Have you experienced some of these strains firsthand in your time as a clinical nurse?

Nursing is a very rewarding profession, but there are times when it can be very draining. I’m deeply worried by what I’m seeing. Despite all my experience, it is definitely harder work than it was when I started. It was getting harder before the pandemic, and the pandemic only exposed those fault lines where the system has not served nurses well.

Could you talk more about how Covid-19 might have impacted nurses’ mental health?

In our data, we had over 700 nurses die from suicide in the 2017-2018 period. That was an all-time high. So we were trending up, and then Covid-19 hits. They were dealing with these really risky clinical scenarios where we don’t have good information, early on in the pandemic. How do we protect people? Do people have the right protective gear?

There is also a unique combination of their personal health at risk, their loved ones’ safety, and then the societal split in our approach to this public health crisis, which you’re seeing right now. We have really good tools to protect our population — we have really effective and very safe vaccines. We’ve learned in this pandemic that masking and staying out of crowds is effective. And yet we have a swath of the population who is not doing that. And they’re in our ICU and they’re in our hospital beds, and nurses have to live with that duality.

The other thing we’re observing is staff shortage — either people have left the workforce, or they’re ill themselves, or their loved ones are ill and they’re caring for family members. Everybody’s picking up more work. That just perpetuates the cycle. We’re on a hamster wheel here, where nurses just can’t get off.

Are you worried about attrition from the nursing profession, especially from the added strain of the pandemic?

I’m deeply worried. I’m already aware of particularly experienced nurses who have left their clinical position, and you can’t really replace them, their decades of experience. Those are the folks who train our next generation and help support physicians and others. So it’s a real brain drain.

Then it creates this cyclical problem where you’re always running short. We have very clear evidence: when you don’t have enough nurses, patients have more complications, they’re more at risk of dying, etc. So there’s a direct connection to a healthy, fully staffed nursing workforce and public health. There’s real consequences for our nation’s health if we do not curb this crisis.

Access to mental health care isn’t just about health insurance

Do you find nurses tend to have good access to mental health care?

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Most employed nurses have relatively good health insurance, so they probably have access on paper. But it’s very difficult for health care professionals — and especially nurses — to seek out mental health services because of the stigma we have in place. Nurses might be concerned that if they seek out mental health services and undergo treatment, that might jeopardize their employment.

There are numerous examples. As nurses are applying for positions and interviewing and going under intake questioning, they might disclose that they have a mental health condition or they’re taking medication. And leadership is questioning whether they’re suitable for those positions: Can they handle the pressure of that work? So that only makes it more likely that you’re not going to disclose and you’re not going to access services.

We need a really different kind of model for nurses. We all need mental health services that are safe, accessible, and confidential.

The final piece of that is the disciplinary process for nurses. Right now, if a nurse makes what is assessed to be a clinical error, we quickly go down the disciplinary route, and we don’t realize that there might be someone in trouble, a human being in front of us who needs care. Is this person well? Do they need help? And what kind of help? These should be the first questions we ask, and then we can get to the other things.

As my colleague Julia Belluz reported earlier this year, physicians often seem reluctant to get mental health treatment because in some states, and in some cases, they are worried it could jeopardize their medical license. Do nurses have similar disclosure requirements or licensing concerns?

I don’t know of boards of nursing that formally ask if you have a mental health diagnosis or you’re taking medication. But in a lot of the boards, you have these statements about “moral character.” Assessing one’s character can get wrapped into mental health very quickly in our country. So I think we really want to separate that out. We want people to feel comfortable knowing you can be an excellent nurse and also have a mental health condition. And we want to make sure that you’re getting the recommended treatment you need. It’s just like having diabetes or some other condition. We need to get that stigma out of mental health.

I appreciate there are many nurses who are very public about their struggles, but they’re the exception. And there’s nothing magical that would exempt nurses from having the same underlying health conditions — mental or otherwise — [as] the rest of the population.

Are you comfortable disclosing whether you’ve ever struggled with mental health issues as a registered nurse?

I wouldn’t say that I’ve had a crisis situation. I’ve certainly had stressful moments. I can vividly remember days on the unit even decades later. The work nurses do is physically demanding, and it can be emotionally taxing. It can also be very rewarding. But the kind of work we’re doing, with people’s lives in our hands in very fragile emotional states, you can’t just walk away from that. It sticks with you. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to navigate that, but there are certain events in my career that I will never forget and come back to haunt me.

Do you see your findings about suicide as a potential indicator for the risk of mental health challenges overall?

Below the surface of this is a much larger group of nurses who are, day-to-day, struggling with these issues. We may not even know they are in trouble or they are struggling, and we have no way to know whether they’re getting the help they need. The challenge is to make sure that we can keep them safe before they’re even contemplating suicide.

We have the tools to take better care of nurses

It seems like physicians and their struggles may get more attention than nurses, even though there are so many more nurses in the country. Why do you think that is?

First, we have better data collected on physicians, so it’s a bit easier to track them over time. Their professional organizations have a fairly robust data set. It’s been a little harder to track nurses over time. We only do surveys of nurses. I think, too, the medical profession has done a better job of understanding this risk and developing unique programs for physicians.

One of the areas to think about is the power differential. Physicians tend to enjoy a relatively privileged place, particularly in the US, relative to other health care workers. So their concerns and issues more often reach prominence. We don’t have a lot of information about other demographic factors, such as gender or sexual identity, etc., but you could imagine that groups that are historically disadvantaged are going to be less likely to be heard on this issue.

There’s a ton of other health care professionals — respiratory therapists, pharmacists — who have been strained, too. And the challenge is to get good data on them. This is only the surface of what the problem may be. We don’t have the fundamental research to help us understand why these things are occurring.

Are there other barriers you see standing in the way of nurses getting mental health care?

We need a different model that is specific to nurses. I think that’s the missing piece. We have specific programs for veterans. We have specific programs for rural residents and adolescents. We don’t really have that for nurses, despite the really alarming data we presented.

We also don’t know the sequence of events. Is it the workplace that’s triggering this? The family environment? Unless we do some really basic registry work, we’ll never know the answer to that. So it limits our ability to help, without research, and that adds to the stigma. If we don’t know what we’re dealing with, then we can’t even let nurses know that there are greater risks and maybe they need to reach out.

How can we take better care of nurses?

We all have a family member or a loved one who’s a nurse. And I think oftentimes we don’t necessarily check in with them and ask them how they’re doing, how their day was. We know their work is difficult. Sometimes they’re not able to tell us a lot for privacy reasons. But checking in with loved ones who are nurses, making sure they know they’re valued. If a family member is struggling, making sure they know that is a normal thing and that seeking help is perfectly okay.

I think we also need to have a conversation as a nation about how we value nurses — and how we structure health care so that they can actually be the best nurse they can be for our patients and for our loved ones. Right now, it’s very transactional. We really need to think carefully, particularly after this pandemic: Can we redesign their work so that we take full advantage of their clinical skill? I think right now we’re not doing that.

The last thing would be to advocate for research on nurses. That has not been valued. Just like we want better understanding of diabetes and cancer, we want to have a better understanding of: Are nurses at risk, and what can we do to help them? We have the tools to do this.

Do we as a society want to put value on this? Do we want to try to better understand how we can have a healthy, safe nursing workforce? I think, for our loved ones, that’s the question. Because if we don’t, we’re going to be in big trouble.

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