Tuesday, April 20, 2021
In Minneapolis, a fortified city awaits Chauvin verdict
TIM SULLIVAN, Associated Press
4 hours ago
National Guard members are seen through fencing and wire near the Minneapolis Police 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis on Monday, April 19, 2021, after the murder trial against former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin advanced to jury deliberations. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Just outside the entrance to Smile Orthodontics, in a Minneapolis neighborhood of craft breweries and trendy shops, two soldiers in jungle camouflage and body armor were on watch Monday, assault rifles slung over their backs. Snow flurries blew around them. A few steps away at the Iron Door Pub, three more National Guard soldiers and a Minneapolis police officer stood out front, watching the street. A handful of other soldiers were scattered nearby, along with four camouflaged Humvees and a couple police cars.
Across the street was a boarded-up building spray-painted with big yellow letters: “BLACK LIVES MATTER ALL YEAR ROUND.”
Adam Martinez was walking down the street when he briefly stopped to stare at the scene.
“This city feels like it’s occupied by the military,” said Martinez, a commercial painter who lives in nearby St. Paul. “This is so weird.”
More than 3,000 National Guard soldiers, along with police officers, state police, sheriffs deputies and other law enforcement personnel have flooded the city in recent days, with a verdict looming in the trial ofDerek Chauvin, the former police officer charged with murder in the death last year of George Floyd.
But in the city that has come to epitomize America’s debate over police killings, there are places today in Minneapolis that can feel almost like a police state.
It leaves many wondering: How much is too much?
Concrete barriers, chain-link fences and barbed wire now ring parts of downtown Minneapolis so that authorities can quickly close off the courthouse where the trial is being held. It’s become normal in recent days to pass convoys of desert-tan military vehicles on nearby highways, and stumble across armed men and women standing guard.
One day they’ll park their armored vehicles in front of the high-end kitchen store with its $160 bread knives and $400 cooking pots. The next they’ll be outside the Depression-era movie theater, or the popular Mexican grocery store or the liquor store ransacked by rioters during the protests that followed Floyd’s death.
Meanwhile hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of stores and other buildings have been boarded up across the city, from Absolute Bail Bonds to glass-walled downtown office towers to Floyd’s 99 Barbershop.
Behind all the security are the days of violence that began with protests over Floyd’s death. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz faced withering criticism for not stepping in quicker to deploy the National Guard. City officials estimate the city suffered roughly $350 million in damage, mostly to commercial properties.
“They’re between a rock and hard place,” said Eli Silverman, professor emeritus at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a longtime scholar of policing. “You don’t want to overmilitarize and make it appear that you’ve converted a sovereign state into a police state. But on the other hand, you have to be prepared, too,” in case protests flare again.
More important than the size of the force, he said, is the expertise and planning behind it. Law enforcement leaders, for example, need to ensure proper crowd control training, and that officers from other jurisdictions are under a single command.
“It’s not just numbers, it’s the strategic decisions that are incorporated in these things,” he said.
Minneapolis has a coordinated law-enforcement plan, called Operation Safety Net, that oversees planning and law-enforcement responses.
Speaking on Monday to reporters, top law-enforcement officials stood alongside local community leaders and vowed to protect property, allow peaceful protests, and try to de-escalate tensions before demonstrations turn violent.
Recent history, though, hasn’t been so peaceful. A little over a week ago, 20-year-old Daunte Wright, a Black man, was killed by policeduring a traffic stop in the Minneapolis suburb of Brooklyn Center.
Protests outside the city’s police headquarters regularly spilled into violence, with protesters lobbing water bottles and the occasional rock at an array of law enforcement officers, and law enforcement responding by going after protesters – and sometimes journalists – with pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets.
“We know we need to do better. What happened the last few days wasn’t something we wanted,” Hennepin County Sheriff David Hutchinson said at the press conference. “But we had to act to keep the community safe. And I will never back down from anybody when it comes to keeping this county safe.”
Many here doubt the promises of law enforcement, which has long had a troubled relationship with the city’s Black community.
Burhan Israfael, a community organizer who lives in Cedar-Riverside, a Minneapolis neighborhood with one of the largest East African communities in the country, said the presence of military vehicles and armed soldiers was terrifying. He said the terror strikes particularly sharply at the city’s many immigrants who fled violence for the safety of the United States.
“I don’t know anybody that experienced and lived through something like that, that feels comfortable coming outside,” he said. “To be faced with the violent image of somebody dressed in all that camouflage, sort of parading around those massive weapons — is unsettling for sure.”
But plenty of others believe the city needs to be ready for trouble.
The Rev. Ian Bethel, a leader in the city’s Black church community, sounded almost angry Monday as he spoke alongside the law enforcement officials.
“We’re at a difficult time here, all of us having emotions, anxieties and stress that most of us have not been able yet to express in a proper way,” he said. “But let me make this clear: One way you do not express whatever you got tied up in you is through violence.”
On Monday afternoon, soon after lawyers’ closing arguments and the Chauvin case going to the jury, about 300 protesters marched outside the courthouse.
There was no sign of violence.
___
Associated Press writers Kathleen Hennessey and Mohamed Ibrahim contributed to this report.
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Monday, April 19, 2021
Sunday, April 18, 2021
Science Says - The Corbett Report
The mouthpieces of the scientific establishment have identified the latest global security threat: antiscience. So what does that mean, exactly? Whatever they want it to mean, of course! This week on The Corbett Report podcast, James explores the game of Science Says that the self-appointed experts are playing with the public and outlines how that game is about to get a whole lot darker.
Saturday, April 17, 2021
Why annual COVID-19 boosters may become the norm
Syringes filled with doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan on March 22, 2021.PHOTOGRAPH BY ALESSANDRO GRASSANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX
To keep the coronavirus in check and stay ahead of new variants, people may need yearly shots like they do for the flu.
BYJILLIAN KRAMER
PUBLISHED APRIL 16, 2021
• 10 MIN READ
Even as tens of millions of inoculated Americans breathe a collective sigh of relief after receiving either the one or two-dose COVID-19 vaccine, some wonder whether one round of shots is enough, or if they’ll need another—and another.
Scientists don’t yet know how long protection from the current cohort of coronavirus vaccines will last. Since the discovery of the original strain in late 2019, the virus has continued to mutate, yielding variants—similar-but-distinctive versions of the virus with the potential to be more infectious, deadly, and escape the antibody safeguards provided by the existing COVID-19 vaccines. To stay ahead of virus evolution, some vaccine creators are racing to design new shots to beat back variants while working to determine how long immunity lasts from current doses.
And the new “normal,” some experts say, could mean routine inoculation, or boosters, against COVID-19.
To keep the coronavirus in check and stay ahead of new variants, people may need yearly shots like they do for the flu.
BYJILLIAN KRAMER
PUBLISHED APRIL 16, 2021
• 10 MIN READ
Even as tens of millions of inoculated Americans breathe a collective sigh of relief after receiving either the one or two-dose COVID-19 vaccine, some wonder whether one round of shots is enough, or if they’ll need another—and another.
Scientists don’t yet know how long protection from the current cohort of coronavirus vaccines will last. Since the discovery of the original strain in late 2019, the virus has continued to mutate, yielding variants—similar-but-distinctive versions of the virus with the potential to be more infectious, deadly, and escape the antibody safeguards provided by the existing COVID-19 vaccines. To stay ahead of virus evolution, some vaccine creators are racing to design new shots to beat back variants while working to determine how long immunity lasts from current doses.
And the new “normal,” some experts say, could mean routine inoculation, or boosters, against COVID-19.
What’s a booster, anyway?
A booster shot is “a repeat dose of a vaccine that you’ve already received to literally boost your immunity,” says Susan R. Bailey, an allergist and clinical immunologist and president of the American Medical Association. The immune system creates virus-fighting memory from repeat exposure. It’s common that a second or third encounter with an antigen, a molecule that prompts antibody production, creates a “greater and more long lasting” immune response, Bailey says.
The shingles vaccine, for example, which is recommended for all healthy adults older than 50, requires a first shot and a booster two to six months later to ensure it is 90 percent effective at preventing the infection and its side effects.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, which are mRNA vaccines, include an initial dose and a second shot three or four weeks later, respectively. Currently, the third COVID-19 vaccine authorized for emergency use in the United States, made by Johnson & Johnson, is given in a single dose, but the company is testing the efficacy of a second booster shot, too. (The U.S. has temporarily paused its distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s current dose, however, as it investigates reports of rare but severe blood clots.) In February, Pfizer-BioNTech launched a study of a third dose of its now two-dose regimen. And yesterday, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told CNBC that people would "likely" need a third shot, 12 months after the initial dose.
Each of these vaccines offer impressive efficacy against COVID-19 in their recommended doses. The question that remains, however, is how long that immunity will last—and whether additional shots will be needed in the near (or not-so-near) future to maintain that high level of protection.
The COVID-19 vaccines are brand-new, which means scientists don’t know yet how long they will remain effective without additional intervention. Researchers have monitored the effectiveness of the vaccines in inoculated people, and studies show that they remain highly effective for at least six months.
“Unfortunately, many people have misunderstood that to mean that it lasts only six months,” says Bailey, when, “all that information means is that we know that it lasts six months, and we expect it to last longer.” To know exactly how long protection endures, “we just have to wait and see.”
But, “it’s not obvious that every type of vaccination requires a booster,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease physician and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. For example, the yellow fever vaccine offers lifelong protection after a single shot. And while the tetanus vaccine has long required a booster shot every 10 years to maintain its effectiveness, researchers have recently questioned whether additional doses are necessary.
What’s more, a vaccine booster is different from what some scientists are testing now: new shots targeted at specific variants.
There are at least five known "variants of concern" of the original SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19; B.1.1.7, which was first identified in the United Kingdom; B.1.351, first discovered in South Africa; P.1, which arose in Brazil; and both B.1.427 and B.1.429, which were first seen in California. Moderna has tweaked its vaccine and is currently testing whether it is efficacious against B.1.351—and a spokesperson for Pfizer told National Geographic that the company is discussing the potential for additional trials of vaccines that would target the variants currently circulating.
So far, the existing vaccines have proven to provide protection against these variants. “I don’t think we’re at that point where you pull a trigger, that you have to change something because of the variants,” Adalja says. But not every infectious disease expert agrees with that assessment.
The new normal
Daniel Lucey, an infectious-disease specialist with Georgetown University Medical Center, says that additional shots to boost immunity or target current or future variants “will most likely be a new reality” for some people. The virus will try to mutate “for its own survival benefit,” he says, and could escape the protection of current vaccines.
Lucey adds, “It’s a constant series of battles and multi-year war between SARS-CoV-2, its variants, and our vaccines, which are from 2019. We’re behind. The virus doesn't sleep, but we do.”
Matthew B. Frieman, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who has worked with Novavax to develop its yet-to-be released COVID-19 vaccine, agrees. “It’s highly likely” that booster or brand-new shots will be “required in the future” to fight against SARS-CoV-2 variants, Frieman says. “How frequently we need them — and if they’re needed worldwide or in specific populations — is what we don’t know.”
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines are efficacious against the B.1.1.7 variant, which originated in the U.K. but is now the dominant strain in the U. S. But one initial study shows that B.1.351, the variant from South Africa, can break through at least the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. However, that study has not been peer reviewed—meaning that it has not yet been examined by a panel of experts—and included only a small sample size of people infected with the variant.
Earlier this month, Pfizer and BioNTech updated their COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy, saying in an April 1 press release that it was 91 percent efficacious overall and “100 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 cases in South Africa, where the B.1.351 lineage is prevalent.”
Adalja says that if the vaccines dipped to 50 percent efficacy, then a booster or new shot might be needed. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration has said that it expects any COVID-19 vaccine to prevent disease or decrease severity in at least 50 percent of vaccinated people. When considering additional shots, “I think that is a good threshold to keep in mind,” Adalja says.
And if enough people get vaccinated not just in the U.S. but abroad, “you can block the spread of these variants,” says Frieman, which could impact the need for future shots. However, if boosters or new shots are needed, the same is true: people will need to take them en masse to be effective.
The ethical issues of boosters
Teneille Brown, a professor of law and adjunct professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah, says “asking or requiring people to get a booster might be a tougher sell for some,” because it “reflects an ongoing obligation and not a one-time thing.” Take the influenza vaccine, which is recommended for almost all people: only 45 percent of American adults got their annual shots during the 2017-2018 season; 48 percent got them for the 2019-2020 season.
While the U.S. government has not mandated COVID-19 vaccines, vaccine mandates are already taking shape: So-called “vaccine passports” may be required to board airplanes, for example, or to enter foreign countries. Some colleges are requiring on-campus students to be inoculated. And employers can require employees to get COVID-19 vaccines, though it’s unclear how many will.
If additional shots are needed, it’s conceivable that they could also be mandated in these same or similar ways. The burden of vaccine proof raises some ethics concerns, says Faith E. Fletcher, a public health ethicist in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor College of Medicine, and has the potential to exacerbate existing social and health inequities.
For example, essential workers and Black and Hispanic people have struggled more than their white counterparts to get initial vaccinations. Without finding ways to “make vaccines available and accessible to marginalized populations,” Fletcher says, “we’re going to see disparities down the line related to this issue,” including with any future COVID-19 shots, mandated or otherwise.
Brown and Fletcher agree that the cost of future doses should be covered. “There would need to be some requirement that the booster shots are covered by insurance, waiving copays, or they will not be equitably distributed,” Brown says, “and we will see gross inequities of who’s getting the booster and who’s not.” Even a $20 copay, she says, could keep people from getting a shot.
But for those who simply don’t want to follow work or private sector mandates for any future shots, “the law is not on their side,” Brown says. Existing laws permit mandates so long as exemptions are available for religious and medical reasons — for example, having an allergy.
Even so, Brown likens such mandates to driving a car.
“If you want to drive, you have to get a license, insurance, etc.,” Brown says. “It isn’t a one-time thing. The privilege of driving creates ongoing obligations to get your car registered, to get your emissions tested, and to continue to comply with changing traffic laws. You might disagree with these laws … but that doesn’t give you permission to ignore them at your choosing.”
Brown says that she is hopeful that any maintenance to keep COVID-19 at bay will become as routine as renewing a license or registration. “I actually think that the ongoing nature will help,” she says, because “resistance will fade with time and [as] vaccines become less politicized.”
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