Above image: President Emmanuel Macron of France, second from left, and Malcolm Turnbull, then prime minister of Australia, third from left, on an Australian submarine during a 2018 visit by Mr. Macron to Sydney.Credit…Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
At the very least, what happened here is a major blunder in geopolitical respect and basic communications to a longstanding important ally. Not to mention the legal or contractual consequences. That’s a hornet’s nest itself. If this happened in a business deal outside the realm of national security or government military arena, there would be millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of punitive penalties imposed. I understand the decision to go with nuclear powered subs. There’s no comparison with conventional subs. Certainly not for security purposes when patrolling the Pacific. That’s a simple product comparison. They’re better. Period. How the French and Australia approached their original deal with that choice or conversation in mind is another topic. The issue here is not about that. It is about the multi billion dollar contract between them that got severed. It’s not even about why. It’s about how it happened. From how this clumsy decision was presented, it’s almost unforgivable behavior from the full trio of Australia, Britain, and U.S. given the size of the preexisting, now cancelled, agreement between Australia and France. This mishandling will cover Biden’s shoes in excrement for quite some time. It was ultimately his call to handle it this way, and he deserves the pain to fight his way out. But, the equal, if not more accountability, is in the complete failure of multiple military officials and diplomacy advisers to do something, anything, to make sure this incident had a chance, any chance, to be presented in a less damaging light. Instead, what they all collectively let happen, was radioactive fallout.
Ms. Lockwood is the ideas editor at the website Rest of World and the author of the forthcoming book “1,001 Voices on Climate Change,” from which this essay is adapted.
Devi Lockwood spent five years traveling the globe talking to people about changes they were seeing to their local water and climates. Here are some of the stories she heard.
Tuvalu
A little more than 10,000 people live in Tuvalu. Generations ago, Polynesians navigated here by the stars, calling the sprinkles of land in the vast blue of the South Pacific home. With 10 square miles of total area, less than five miles of roads and only one hospital on the main island, Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest countryin the world. Disney World is four times larger in area. Tuvalu’s capital city, Funafuti, sits about 585 miles south of the Equator.
By some estimates, Tuvaluans will be forced, by water scarcity and rising sea levels, to migrate elsewhere in the next 50 years. This mass exodus is already happening. Large Tuvaluan outposts exist in Fiji and New Zealand.
I came to Tuvalu with a question: What does it mean for a whole nation to become uninhabitable in my lifetime?
Tauala Katea, the director of Tuvalu’s meteorological service, sat in his office near the airport and tilted a monitor to show me an image of a recent flood when water bubbled up under a field by the runway. “This is what climate change looks like,” he told me.
“In 2000, Tuvaluans living in the outer islands noticed that their taro and pulaka crops were suffering,” he said. “The root crops seemed rotten and the size was getting smaller and smaller.”
Those two starchy staples of Tuvaluan cuisine are grown in pits dug underground. This crop failure was the first indication that something was wrong. The culprit was found to be saltwater intrusion linked to sea level rise.
The last 20 years have marked a period of significant change in the Tuvaluan way of life. Thatched roofs and freshwater wells are things of the past. The freshwater lens underneath the island, a layer that floats above denser seawater, has become salty and contaminated. Each home now has a water tank attached to a corrugated iron roof by a gutter. This rainwater is boiled for drinking and also used to wash clothes and dishes and for bathing.
Imported food is now commonplace. During my month in Tuvalu (from December 2014 to January 2015), I learned what climate change tastes like: imported rice, tinned corned beef, a handful of imported carrots and apples, the occasional local papaya, bananas and many creative uses for custard powder.
As United States reveals its plan to offer an extra dose of COVID-19 vaccine, equity and scientific questions abound.
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 373, Issue 6558.
As the extraordinarily infectious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread around the world, vaccines’ powers are showing their limits. Although they are still extremely effective at preventing severe COVID-19, the tantalizing hope that the shots could block almost all infections—and squelch transmission—has evaporated. That has upended return to office and school plans, threatened economic recoveries, and spurred fresh political rows over mask and vaccination mandates.
The Delta variant of the coronavirus can evade antibodies that target certain parts of the virus, according to a new study published on Thursday in Nature. The findings provide an explanation for diminished effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta, compared with other variants.
The variant, first identified in India, is believed to be about 60 percent more contagious than Alpha, the version of the virus that thrashed Britain and much of Europe earlier this year, and perhaps twice as contagious as the original coronavirus. The Delta variant is now driving outbreaks among unvaccinated populations in countries like Malaysia, Portugal, Indonesia and Australia.
Delta is also now the dominant variant in the United States. Infections in the country had plateaued at their lowest levels since early in the pandemic, though the numbers may be rising. Still, hospitalizations and deaths related to the virus have continued a steep plunge. That’s partly because of relatively high vaccination rates: 48 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 55 percent have received at least one dose.
But the new study found that Delta was barely sensitive to one dose of vaccine, confirming previous research that suggested that the variant can partly evade the immune system — although to a lesser degree than Beta, the variant first identified in South Africa.
French researchers tested how well antibodies produced by natural infection and by coronavirus vaccines neutralize the Alpha, Beta and Delta variants, as well as a reference variant similar to the original version of the virus.
The researchers looked at blood samples from 103 people who had been infected with the coronavirus. Delta was much less sensitive than Alpha to samples from unvaccinated people in this group, the study found.
One dose of vaccine significantly boosted the sensitivity, suggesting that people who have recovered from Covid-19 still need to be vaccinated to fend off some variants.
The team also analyzed samples from 59 people after they had received the first and second doses of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.
Blood samples from just 10 percent of people immunized with one dose of the AstraZeneca or the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were able to neutralize the Delta and Beta variants in laboratory experiments. But a second dose boosted that number to 95 percent. There was no major difference in the levels of antibodies elicited by the two vaccines.
“A single dose of Pfizer or AstraZeneca was either poorly or not at all efficient against Beta and Delta variants,” the researchers concluded. Data from Israel and Britain broadly support this finding, although those studies suggest that one dose of vaccine is still enough to prevent hospitalization or death from the virus.
The Delta variant also did not respond to bamlanivimab, the monoclonal antibody made by Eli Lilly, according to the new study. Fortunately, three other monoclonal antibodies tested in the study retained their effectiveness against the variant.
In April, citing the rise of variants resistant to bamlanivimab, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration revoked the emergency use authorization for its use as a single treatment in treating Covid-19 patients.
As we have seen over the last year, perceptions of the Coronavirus/Covid lethality, the risks of contraction, and the vaccines available to contain it, vary among the population. The response has been predictably wide. Ranging from thoughtful and informed behavior from many states and communities country-wide, to outright flouting of any responsible behavior. Whether based on blind denial or blunt philosophical frankness in rejecting any unwanted lifestyle or behavioral modification.
The consequences from the latter group’s behavior have been clear and on display from the start of the Covid pandemic last Spring. It no longer matters how or why the net response to the pandemic became so fragmented and fractured instead of unified in battle. What matters now is that we all get on board now together unified against this thing. If we do not, it will spin out of control…again. More people will get sick…again. More people will die…again. Lockdowns will come back…again. Business will suffer and go down…again. People will argue and blame each other…again. The only thing possibly different this time around is that all of the above will be worse.
Because of the second group’s behavior above, along with worldwide breakdowns in political structures, public trust, information guidance, and inadequate health systems, the Coronavirus has infected far more people than it could have, and in the process, has mutated into more dangerous variants of the original strain that can escape vaccination defenses.
In particular, the South African variant, aka B.1.351, and the Brazilian variant, aka P.1, are concerning to all virologists and medical professionals. There are now reports these strains have infected previously vaccinated people and caused illness. Both of these variants are already in the U.S. in numbers enough to grow exponentially if they are not contained in the very near future.
BUT, there IS good news. It does NOT have to be this way. We have the power to prevent this from happening. It comes from medicine. It comes from informed and responsible behavior.
There is one way to fight the growth of mutated variants and thus, any virus. Stop infection transmission in the population with vaccines.
If you don’t want to get the vaccine, and you’re okay constantly wearing a mask, staying distant from everyone, being anxious every time you leave the house, and segregating from virtually everyone outside your home bubble, not being able to travel, for possibly ever, then stand your ground, and don’t get the vaccine. Maybe you’ll wait out the herd immunity thing (80% vaccination) hoping it’ll happen soon enough, and you’ll just get the benefits from everyone else’s immunity. You’ll then be part of the illustrious group tagged “Free Riders.” Not too flattering.
I’m not scared of medicine. I’m thankful of it. I’m thankful there are smart enough people in science and medicine that have confidence and skill to treat my ailments and those around me for years. It’s illness I have a problem with. Covid is a tough adversary. It caught us short sighted and required an EUA vaccine to help us fight it. That’s not something anyone I know has been through before. It’s understandable to be skittish. It’s normal.
We’ve been here before. Humanity has been here before. The global timeline of health, illness, disease, treatments, medicine, vaccines, and recovery are long and rich enough in detailed history to give us all perspective. In most ways, medicine is so far advanced today that it almost isn’t meant to be understood by patients. Not unless you want to study genome sequencing and DNA up close. No. What ultimately matters is trust. You either trust medicine and your health providers, or you do not. If you’re already receiving medical care, you’ve decided to trust the doctors.This doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to be anxious or scared. That’s called being normal. But trust is a conscious, necessary decision to make. If you trust medicine, and doctors (in general) you have to trust the EUA vaccine. Get it done. Help us fight this damn thing, or, just stop going to the doctor altogether. You can’t have it both ways.
If you’ve been vaccinated. You’ve already taken a crucial step to helping all of us out of this muck and mire. The vaccine, however, is not an automatic ticket to freedom and normalcy. Many states have opened up businesses and relaxed restaurant and congregant capacity guidelines as infection rates have dropped. But (again another “BUT”), the political and commercial pressure on state governors is tremendous. It’s not right that these factors are playing a role in public health decisions, but unfortunately that is reality. This is why it is incumbent on all of us to not look to political leaders for guidance on our personal decisions going forward from this pandemic. It is naiive and dangerous to do so. The people to look to for clues and cues on what to do and how we should do it after vaccinations are medical and health professionals who have no political ties.
Beyond that, don’t push aside your own deductive reasoning and common sense for assessing risk just because you can’t wait to go out with friends, jump on a plane, get a facial, a massage, or go to a gym. It doesn’t work that way.
You may not like math, but the math here is simple. Take a few measly minutes and look at what’s happening with the variant trend in your state. There are some good interviews available with medical people. There are articles, columns, op-eds, easy to read graphs and charts. There is plenty of good info out there. There is no excuse to not be informed with credible health and safety guidance about what’s going on. Whether it’s deciding on the vaccine, or how to act after you’ve gotten the vaccine. Like anything worthwhile learning, or understanding. It takes your time. It takes your effort. Give both to learn and understand.
