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"content": "\u003cp>Experts say it’s possible for athletes to play football safely during the COVID-19 pandemic — with the right protective measures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But college football poses its own risks. With athletes attending class and living the freewheeling campus lifestyle, it’s a much more challenging prospect, according to leading Bay Area doctors and epidemiologists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The players are supposed to go to school, too, the last time I checked,” said George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at UCSF. “Locker room, games, practices, weight training, all that can be made safe through testing, cleaning, wearing masks, improved ventilation in weight rooms.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even in a contact sport like football, the risk of transmission can be lowered if the game is played outside and helmets are outfitted with face-shields.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But the wild card is what happens when they walk out into the general student body,” says Rutherford.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With confirmed coronavirus cases inside major football programs like \u003ca href=\"https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/29559800/rutgers-football-covid-19-outbreak-linked-campus-party\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Rutgers\u003c/span>\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.si.com/college/2020/06/20/lsu-football-players-quarantined-coronavirus\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">LSU\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, athletes are growing increasingly concerned about catching and transmitting the virus. Some are accusing league officials of failing to meet calls for improving safety measures, while exploiting the athletes for the economic gain of the school.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Players Go Public\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Dissatisfied with how their universities have handled the pandemic, a group of a dozen Pac-12 football players threatened to opt out of the season in an open \u003ca href=\"https://www.theplayerstribune.com/en-us/articles/pac-12-players-covid-19-statement-football-season\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">letter\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to conference managers, published over the weekend and distributed on social media with the hashtag #WeAreUnited.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/peneisewell58/status/1289974930155569153?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are being asked to play college sports in a pandemic in a system without enforced health and safety standards, and without transparency about COVID cases on our teams, the risks to ourselves, our families, and our communities,” the letter reads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The players say they’ve been communicating with more than 400 of their peers throughout the Pac-12, the Associated Press \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/f23c78cc8d09e6adc1797964d57bd40b\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The players tied the actions to what they describe as the league’s failure to meet a broader range of social justice commitments. They demand that universities distribute half of the revenue generated by each sport among the athletes, stop requiring athletes to sign coronavirus liability waivers, provide extended health insurance and develop a social justice task force. In recent years, \u003ca href=\"https://morningconsult.com/2019/03/20/racial-divides-persist-on-compensation-for-student-athletes/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">nearly half\u003c/a> of Division I men’s football players were Black.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p3\">“The lack of regard for our health and safety is central to the systemic racial injustices imposed by NCAA sports that disproportionately exploits Black athletes physically, academically, and financially,” they wrote in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.si.com/college/2020/08/04/pac-12-responds-to-players-threatening-boycott-season\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">email\u003c/span>\u003c/a> to league officials. \u003cspan class=\"s2\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align='right' citation='Brian Feeley, UCSF']‘As much as I love football, as much as I love college sports — my gut instinct is that we should hold off.’[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">In a two-page response letter, Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott, agreed to speak with the players, Sports Illustrated \u003ca href=\"https://www.si.com/college/2020/08/04/pac-12-responds-to-players-threatening-boycott-season\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">reported\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the letter, Scott said that player health is the league’s \u003cspan class=\"s3\">“No. 1 priority,” and “We support any student-athlete who chooses to opt out for health and safety reasons.” For players with pro football aspirations, opting out of a season could have enormous career consequences.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Mercury News \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/04/pac-12-boycott-threat-examining-the-players-demands-and-commissioner-larry-scotts-response-item-by-item/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">reported\u003c/a> that players and the conference appear close on some matters and “galaxies apart on others.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/wilnerhotline/status/1290722923943100418?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Long-Term Health Risks\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brian Feeley, chief of sports medicine at UCSF, says the long-term health impacts of COVID-19 need to be better understood. By example he points to Eduardo Rodriguez, ace pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, who suffered only minor symptoms of COVID-19, only to be \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/08/02/red-sox-ace-27-wont-pitch-this-season-because-heart-ailment-linked-covid-19/\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">sidelined\u003c/span>\u003c/a> for the season due to inflammation around his heart linked to the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“To be honest — as much as I love football, as much as I love college sports — my gut instinct is that we should hold off until we know more about the disease process and potentially even have a vaccine,” Feeley tells KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Sports are important,” he says, adding, “They’re not as important as your livelihood and your life. Setting people up for long-term disability when they’re already inherently at risk from playing sports — it is not worth the risk at this time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cassandra Lee, a physician and chief of sports service at UC Davis, agrees that with face shields, aggressive testing and other protective measures, the risk of coronavirus infection during the game is less. But she wonders if athletes kept up with their training during government-mandated shelter-in-place orders, and she worries about players getting hurt while competing in less than peak condition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“These high-level athletes are working out, training hard and then they get the rug pulled out from under them in early spring,” she says. “We joke that we’ve all gained the ‘COVID 20.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Dean Winslow, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford, says the NBA has demonstrated that contact sports can be safer for players with aggressive testing and isolation. The league built a quarantine zone inside Disney World designed to shield players and staff from exposure to the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The NBA did it right,” he says, but questioned whether that could be replicated at universities and state schools with fewer resources and where college athletes are free to eat at restaurants, attend parties and drink at bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my mind, these are more significant factors for transmission than athletes acquiring infection from the actual sport,” Winslow says. \u003cspan class=\"s5\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Long-Term Health Risks\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brian Feeley, chief of sports medicine at UCSF, says the long-term health impacts of COVID-19 need to be better understood. By example he points to Eduardo Rodriguez, ace pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, who suffered only minor symptoms of COVID-19, only to be \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/08/02/red-sox-ace-27-wont-pitch-this-season-because-heart-ailment-linked-covid-19/\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">sidelined\u003c/span>\u003c/a> for the season due to inflammation around his heart linked to the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“To be honest — as much as I love football, as much as I love college sports — my gut instinct is that we should hold off until we know more about the disease process and potentially even have a vaccine,” Feeley tells KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Sports are important,” he says, adding, “They’re not as important as your livelihood and your life. Setting people up for long-term disability when they’re already inherently at risk from playing sports — it is not worth the risk at this time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cassandra Lee, a physician and chief of sports service at UC Davis, agrees that with face shields, aggressive testing and other protective measures, the risk of coronavirus infection during the game is less. But she wonders if athletes kept up with their training during government-mandated shelter-in-place orders, and she worries about players getting hurt while competing in less than peak condition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">“These high-level athletes are working out, training hard and then they get the rug pulled out from under them in early spring,” she says. “We joke that we’ve all gained the ‘COVID 20.'”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Dean Winslow, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford, says the NBA has demonstrated that contact sports can be safer for players with aggressive testing and isolation. The league built a quarantine zone inside Disney World designed to shield players and staff from exposure to the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The NBA did it right,” he says, but questioned whether that could be replicated at universities and state schools with fewer resources and where college athletes are free to eat at restaurants, attend parties and drink at bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my mind, these are more significant factors for transmission than athletes acquiring infection from the actual sport,” Winslow says. \u003cspan class=\"s5\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp class=\"p1\">A possible link between air quality and the coronavirus is about to go under the microscope in a state-sponsored research effort.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Since the early days of this pandemic, public health officials have suspected there is a direct link between dirty air and serious illness or even death from COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Air pollution damages the lungs and can cause inflammation and interfere with normal immune functions, two factors that could increase susceptibility to the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">In April, researchers at Harvard released a \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/air-pollution-linked-with-higher-covid-19-death-rates/\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">nationwide study\u003c/span>\u003c/a> that found a large overlap between counties with long-term exposure to pollution and deaths from this coronavirus.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research, published as a preprint study, concluded that COVID-19 patients in areas with high levels of air pollution before the pandemic are more likely to die from the virus than people who live in places with cleaner air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the months since the study was published, the virus has spread to all corners of California, which recently passed the grim milestone of being the first state in the nation with a half-million infections. Statistics \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11813696/latinos-around-the-bay-area-are-disproportionately-affected-by-covid-19\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">show\u003c/span>\u003c/a> the disease disproportionately affects communities of color.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, researchers with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.phi.org/\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Public Health Institute\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, an Oakland-based nonprofit health organization, and UCSF are launching a joint study funded by the California Air Resources Board to examine the link between dirty air and disparate health outcomes at the neighborhood level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s already evident that low-income communities of color in California are at disproportionate risk of getting COVID-19, and also at increased risk of hospitalization and death,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.phi.org/experts/gina-solomon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gina Solomon\u003c/a>, the lead researcher on the study.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>“That’s a stark and horrifying fact already from the data.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An open question, she says, is the extent to which air pollution is contributing to these health impacts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Harvard study examined data at the county level, but research has shown that air quality can vary wildly among neighborhoods and even individual\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1955755/a-fleet-of-cars-will-collect-bay-area-air-quality-data-block-by-block-24-7\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\"> city blocks\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Solomon says it’s important for researchers to examine the “differences in air quality and health vulnerabilities across the counties,” as well as to examine the impact of recent exposure to air pollution along with long-term exposure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Her team will be analyzing local air quality models and exposure to particulate matter, ozone, smog, nitrogen oxides from diesel trucks and other air pollutants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re already seeing higher rates of COVID in communities,” said Solomon. “For example, in the L.A. area, in Imperial County, Riverside County, where we see bad air locally.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The researchers will look closely at data in the neighborhoods of West Oakland, Bayview-Hunters Point, Richmond and other communities in the Bay Area with heavy diesel truck traffic and dirtier air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Solomon says the results of the study could be available as soon as the end of the year.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the months since the study was published, the virus has spread to all corners of California, which recently passed the grim milestone of being the first state in the nation with a half-million infections. Statistics \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11813696/latinos-around-the-bay-area-are-disproportionately-affected-by-covid-19\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">show\u003c/span>\u003c/a> the disease disproportionately affects communities of color.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, researchers with the \u003ca href=\"https://www.phi.org/\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">Public Health Institute\u003c/span>\u003c/a>, an Oakland-based nonprofit health organization, and UCSF are launching a joint study funded by the California Air Resources Board to examine the link between dirty air and disparate health outcomes at the neighborhood level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s already evident that low-income communities of color in California are at disproportionate risk of getting COVID-19, and also at increased risk of hospitalization and death,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.phi.org/experts/gina-solomon/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gina Solomon\u003c/a>, the lead researcher on the study.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"> \u003c/span>“That’s a stark and horrifying fact already from the data.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An open question, she says, is the extent to which air pollution is contributing to these health impacts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Harvard study examined data at the county level, but research has shown that air quality can vary wildly among neighborhoods and even individual\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1955755/a-fleet-of-cars-will-collect-bay-area-air-quality-data-block-by-block-24-7\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\"> city blocks\u003c/span>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Solomon says it’s important for researchers to examine the “differences in air quality and health vulnerabilities across the counties,” as well as to examine the impact of recent exposure to air pollution along with long-term exposure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">Her team will be analyzing local air quality models and exposure to particulate matter, ozone, smog, nitrogen oxides from diesel trucks and other air pollutants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re already seeing higher rates of COVID in communities,” said Solomon. “For example, in the L.A. area, in Imperial County, Riverside County, where we see bad air locally.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">The researchers will look closely at data in the neighborhoods of West Oakland, Bayview-Hunters Point, Richmond and other communities in the Bay Area with heavy diesel truck traffic and dirtier air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Solomon says the results of the study could be available as soon as the end of the year.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU_Fom02PIw\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When shelter-in-place orders began in March, memes about how “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/22/shakespeare-in-lockdown-did-he-write-king-lear-in-plague-quarantine\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine\u003c/a>” were impossible to miss on the internet. It was a way for droves of suddenly homebound people to joke about how to use this unprecedented time to focus on creative projects.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/bobvulfov/status/1238896746689974280\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since then, we’ve seen countless coronavirus-inspired \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/arts/13876781/surprisingly-good-coronavirus-songs-to-stream-while-youre-sheltering-in-place\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">songs\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Add to the list a music video from Nicholas Braun called “\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Antibodies (Do You Have The),”\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> a (very) of-the-moment hook-up song that’s as cautious as it is anthemic. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Braun, who may be better known to “Succession” fans as Greg Hirsh (or to “Sky High” fans as Zach Springer) has actually been \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://soundcloud.com/nicholasbraun\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">making music for years\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> alongside his acting career. This latest single is a collaboration with PLUS1, and a portion of the proceeds from the \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.doyouhavetheantibodies.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">single and merch\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> sales will go toward Partners In Health and the COPE Program. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From the video’s website, “\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This partnership will empower \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.pih.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Partners In Health\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to control the spread of COVID-19 and ensure the most vulnerable people around the world receive access to dignified healthcare. The \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.copeprogram.org/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">COPE Program\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> will work to bring equity of care and essential supplies and goods to the people of the Navajo Nation, the area that currently has the highest death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Check out the video for yourself, and watch for B-roll footage of Gov. Gavin Newsom with the lyrics, “I’ve been waiting patiently, I obeyed the rules / Now I’m ready to break them on you, no more sending nudes.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Inside the ‘Huge Experiment’ to Rapidly Develop a COVID-19 Vaccine",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">N\u003c/span>\u003c/span>ever before have prospective vaccines for a pathogen entered final-stage clinical trials as rapidly as candidates for COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just six months ago, when the death toll from the coronavirus \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/11/first-death-from-wuhan-pneumonia-outbreak-reported-as-scientists-release-dna-sequence-of-virus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">stood at one,\u003c/a> and neither it nor the disease it caused \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/11/disease-caused-by-the-novel-coronavirus-has-name-covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">had a name\u003c/a>, a team of Chinese scientists uploaded its genetic sequence to a \u003ca href=\"https://virological.org/t/novel-2019-coronavirus-genome/319\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">public site\u003c/a>. That kicked off the record-breaking rush to develop vaccines — the salve that experts say could ultimately quell the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[pullquote align='right' citation='Barney Graham, NIH']‘We were more prepared for a coronavirus than for any other family. To me, this is a wake-up call that we need to have a more systematic universal approach to developing vaccines and other countermeasures for virus families ahead of time.’[/pullquote]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The colossal impact of the coronavirus is motivating the speed, opening a spigot of funding and inspiring research teams around the world to join the hunt. But the astonishing pace of the progress is also a consequence of the virus itself: It is, scientifically speaking, an easier target for potential vaccines than other pathogens, and a prime candidate for cutting-edge vaccine platforms new to scientists’ toolkits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once we got the sequence, we pulled the trigger to ask how fast we could go,” said Barney Graham, the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center. “And because it was a coronavirus, we could get into a Phase 3 trial in six months instead of two years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, progress so far remains just that. The vaccines are now facing their real tests: the monthslong, Phase 3 trials that will demonstrate whether or not they protect people from the virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a huge experiment and no one knows how it’s going to turn out,” said James Le Duc, the director of the University of Texas Medical Branch’s Galveston National Laboratory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vaccines typically take years, if not decades, to reach people; the record now is four years for the mumps vaccine. Here’s what has propelled the COVID-19 endeavor to eclipse prior efforts so far.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Familiar Family\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>t’s difficult to associate anything with this pandemic with good fortune, but the fact that the culprit was a coronavirus — one that was strikingly similar to others that had previously leapt from animals to people — meant scientists could quickly rejigger vaccine projects in the works for those. It was almost like swapping a blue Lego for a red one in their assemblies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the teams pursuing vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 (the scientific name of the new coronavirus) have previously worked on vaccines for the original SARS virus, which caused a 2003 outbreak that killed some 800 people, and MERS, which has caused 2,500 cases since it started spreading in 2012.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The earlier projects had pointed to a component of the coronaviruses called the spike protein as a ripe target for a vaccine, which gave scientists a head start for crafting their candidates. Work on SARS also illuminated stumbling blocks in designing coronavirus vaccines that COVID-19 immunizations have so far avoided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What really helped was the knowledge gained from the SARS-1 infection,” said Rama Rao Amara, an immunologist and vaccine researcher at Emory University. “SARS-2 is quite similar to SARS-1, especially in that spike protein. People could take a very educated guess that this is the protein that we need to be going after.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>An Acute, Not Chronic Infection\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">S\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>ARS-CoV-2 causes an acute disease, COVID-19. It’s an infection that most people will clear on their own, which means there’s a vanquishing immune response that a vaccine can aim to induce in order to protect people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s not true for something like HIV, a virus for which there is no vaccine despite decades of research. HIV causes a chronic infection and integrates itself into people’s genomes; there’s no natural immune response that eliminates the virus that a vaccine can mimic. HIV also mutates much faster than coronaviruses do, meaning it’s more difficult to rally a lasting defense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s possible, then, that a pathogen that’s harder to design a vaccine for than the coronavirus could ignite the next pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were more prepared for a coronavirus than for any other family,” NIH’s Graham said. “To me, this is a wake-up call that we need to have a more systematic universal approach to developing vaccines and other countermeasures for virus families ahead of time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cutting-Edge Approaches\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">V\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>accines train the immune system to recognize a pathogen it hasn’t yet encountered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Normally, our immune system builds that memory by battling an infection, so that it can halt a virus in its tracks should it try to invade a second time. A vaccine acts like that first exposure, but without making people sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With SARS-CoV-2, researchers are working with new ways of providing that first look, building vaccines on adaptable platforms engineered to easily pivot from pathogen to pathogen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older strategies for developing vaccines, such as obtaining the virus and weakening or inactivating it, are lengthy processes. But the cutting-edge approaches require scientists only to know the virus’ genetic sequence. With that, they can string together the right pieces of code to synthesize vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s allowed scientists to move with record speed. Less than 10 weeks after the Chinese scientists published the SARS-CoV-2 sequence, a team from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the biotech company Moderna had a candidate ready for a Phase 1 trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Moderna/NIAID vaccine was built with mRNA, a piece of genetic code containing the instructions for the coronavirus’ spike protein. The vaccine shuttles the mRNA into cells, which “read” those instructions and churn out the protein — providing the immune system with that first peek to the spike, like giving a hound a scent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A team from Pfizer and the German company BioNTech is \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/01/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-shows-positive-results/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">also working\u003c/a> on an mRNA vaccine, while a company called Inovio is \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/30/inovio-claims-positive-results-on-covid-19-vaccine-but-critical-data-are-missing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">pursuing a vaccine\u003c/a> based on a different genetic material, DNA. Neither an mRNA nor a DNA vaccine has been approved before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing the sequence of the coronavirus has also spurred other approaches. Some groups — including Johnson & Johnson, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/22/early-study-of-covid-19-vaccine-developed-in-china-sees-mixed-results/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chinese firm CanSino\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/20/study-provides-first-glimpse-of-efficacy-of-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca\u003c/a> — are attaching the gene for the spike protein to another, harmless virus that ferries it into cells. There, it gets expressed into the spike, allowing the immune system to mount its forces. Another company, Novavax, is producing versions of the spike from the gene and using them directly in its vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The spike protein is a strategic choice. The proteins, which give SARS-CoV-2 the crown-like appearance that’s characteristic of coronaviruses, attach to receptors on people’s cells, allowing the virus to enter and replicate. By blocking spike proteins, then, vaccines could prevent infection. The spikes are also the “immunodominant” piece of the virus, meaning they elicit the strongest immune response. (Some vaccines are based on the whole spike, while some include select portions.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers are not only relying on advances in vaccine platforms. Innovations in basic genetics, immunology, and structural biology have also fueled the pace at which COVID-19 vaccines are moving. One way scientists have discovered so much about the spike protein, for example, is by applying methods honed over years to research the proteins on HIV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Money, Money, Money\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">G\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>etting a vaccine approved is not just a scientific expedition. It’s also about money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One reason vaccine development is so slow normally is because companies want to see candidates successfully pass through each sequence in the development process before sinking funding into the next phase.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that playbook doesn’t fly in a pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is the biggest emergency we’ve had in our lifetime,” said Kawsar Talaat, a Johns Hopkins infectious disease physician and vaccine researcher. “Money is kind of no object. We don’t have time to wait.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To rally companies, funding agencies, including governments and foundations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, are throwing millions — and in some cases, billions — into the hunt for vaccines. On Sunday, for example, Moderna said it had received $472 million from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, on top of the $483 million it got in April.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The money isn’t just to cover the research and trials; it’s also to get companies to start manufacturing their products — even though their vaccines might not prove to be effective. It’s a strategy called manufacturing “at risk,” and public health experts say it’s necessary to ensure that any authorized vaccine can be rolled out to as many people as quickly as possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. government is also striking deals with companies to purchase their vaccines even before clinical trials are completed, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/07/novavax-maker-of-a-covid-19-vaccine-is-backed-by-operation-warp-speed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a $1.6 billion agreement\u003c/a> with Novavax that includes 100 million doses and a $1.95 billion compact with Pfizer and BioNTech, also for 100 million doses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The fact that industry is able to hedge their bets like this and to make these investments is because the government has put up the money,” said UTMB’s Le Duc, who formerly led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s viral diseases division. “The government has recognized that this is an incredibly important issue and we need to be going full blast knowing full well that not all these vaccines will work. Some are going to be duds, and will lose money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Regulatory Nimbleness\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>n-the-weeds regulatory decisions don’t get much public attention, but they are helping expedite clinical trials and the ultimate evaluation of how effective a vaccine is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of these lessons were first learned during the West African Ebola crisis, when regulators embraced a new dexterity in green-lighting vaccine trials and took a more proactive approach to communicating with companies about the efficacy thresholds products needed to meet. That’s continuing with COVID-19: the Food and Drug Administration, for example, has \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-takes-action-help-facilitate-timely-development-safe-effective-covid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">outlined\u003c/a> that vaccines need to prevent infections or reduce the severity of COVID-19 in 50% of recipients to be approved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Ebola crisis “really did give the regulators greater experience and more comfort with the idea that they could have greater flexibility than they normally would have,” said Mark Feinberg, the president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and a former executive at Merck Vaccines. “They could make decisions more quickly and really be true partners in the development process.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Textbook clinical trials include three increasingly large phases that establish how safe and effective a drug or vaccine is. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the trials have been collapsed into Phase 1/2 or Phase 2/3 trials. It’s a wonky distinction, but it can shave weeks or months off the process by saving research teams from having to write new protocols or get additional clearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The speed of vaccine development can also have an adverse effect. Some people have questioned how such a fast-moving process can ensure safety and might abstain from a vaccine. An \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/dacdc8bc428dd4df6511bfa259cfec44\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Associated Press poll\u003c/a> in May found that Black and Latinx Americans, who have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic and have a history of mistreatment by the medical field, are more skeptical about COVID-19 vaccines than white Americans — showing the importance of outreach campaigns that public health experts say are required to increase the uptake of immunizations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Others have raised suspicions that President Donald Trump — whose vaccine initiative is dubbed \u003ca href=\"https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/06/16/fact-sheet-explaining-operation-warp-speed.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Operation Warp Speed\u003c/a> — might force an emergency authorization of a vaccine before the election, even if it hasn’t cleared efficacy and safety standards. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/my-statement-on-vaccines-2133deed94ee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">raised the specter\u003c/a> of politics interfering in the quest for a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists and regulators are already stressing that safeguards aren’t being jettisoned. Public health experts say vaccine makers need to be transparent that while manufacturing and regulatory steps are being streamlined, safety checks aren’t being sacrificed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a call with reporters Monday, NIH Director Francis Collins, whom former President Barack Obama first tapped for the position, defended the integrity of the decisions regulators will make. “Nothing is being done here to compromise the safety” of COVID-19 vaccine trials, he said, “nor will we compromise on an ultimate conclusion about whether the vaccine is effective. Those issues are going to be tested in the most rigorous way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Challenges Ahead\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Exactly what all this speed will translate into remains to be seen. The monthslong, final-stage clinical trials starting now will settle that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech candidates \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/pfizer-biontech-pick-covid19-vaccine-begin-pivotal-study/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">respectively launched\u003c/a> Phase 3 and Phase 2/3 trials this week, and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is in a Phase 2/3 trial. Others are entering pivotal studies soon. These involve enrolling thousands of people, injecting half with the candidate and half with a placebo or control, and then comparing whether people who received the vaccine are less likely to be infected than their counterparts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some vaccine candidates could very well fail — a normal part of the scientific pursuit, experts say. “I hope that doesn’t happen, but people need to accept when things don’t pan out the way they hope,” said Maria Elena Bottazzi, the co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also not clear yet what a vaccine “working” will look like. A COVID-19 vaccine might \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/22/the-world-needs-covid-19-vaccines-it-may-also-be-overestimating-their-power/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">be like the flu vaccine\u003c/a> — only preventing infections in some people, or staving off serious disease but still leaving people contagious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A vaccine that prevents even 50% of infections would be a massive lifeline. But experts worry there’s a disconnect between a public expecting vaccines to instantly reset their lives and what the first vaccines may actually allow. Successful vaccines \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/22/confusion-spreads-over-system-to-determine-priority-access-to-covid-19-vaccines/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">will likely be restricted\u003c/a> to front-line workers and vulnerable populations at first. It could take some time for enough vaccine to be made for everyone who wants a shot. Some vaccines might require two doses to confer protection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It might not be some magic bullet that’s going to stop the pandemic in its tracks, and people need to be prepared for that possibility,” said Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen about the first vaccines that reach people. “I really hate the term vaccine race. Because that implies there’s going to be a medal ceremony, and the pandemic is over.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">STAT\u003c/a>, an online publication of Boston Globe Media that covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">N\u003c/span>\u003c/span>ever before have prospective vaccines for a pathogen entered final-stage clinical trials as rapidly as candidates for COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just six months ago, when the death toll from the coronavirus \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/11/first-death-from-wuhan-pneumonia-outbreak-reported-as-scientists-release-dna-sequence-of-virus/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">stood at one,\u003c/a> and neither it nor the disease it caused \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/11/disease-caused-by-the-novel-coronavirus-has-name-covid-19/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">had a name\u003c/a>, a team of Chinese scientists uploaded its genetic sequence to a \u003ca href=\"https://virological.org/t/novel-2019-coronavirus-genome/319\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">public site\u003c/a>. That kicked off the record-breaking rush to develop vaccines — the salve that experts say could ultimately quell the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The colossal impact of the coronavirus is motivating the speed, opening a spigot of funding and inspiring research teams around the world to join the hunt. But the astonishing pace of the progress is also a consequence of the virus itself: It is, scientifically speaking, an easier target for potential vaccines than other pathogens, and a prime candidate for cutting-edge vaccine platforms new to scientists’ toolkits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Once we got the sequence, we pulled the trigger to ask how fast we could go,” said Barney Graham, the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s Vaccine Research Center. “And because it was a coronavirus, we could get into a Phase 3 trial in six months instead of two years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, progress so far remains just that. The vaccines are now facing their real tests: the monthslong, Phase 3 trials that will demonstrate whether or not they protect people from the virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is a huge experiment and no one knows how it’s going to turn out,” said James Le Duc, the director of the University of Texas Medical Branch’s Galveston National Laboratory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vaccines typically take years, if not decades, to reach people; the record now is four years for the mumps vaccine. Here’s what has propelled the COVID-19 endeavor to eclipse prior efforts so far.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A Familiar Family\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>t’s difficult to associate anything with this pandemic with good fortune, but the fact that the culprit was a coronavirus — one that was strikingly similar to others that had previously leapt from animals to people — meant scientists could quickly rejigger vaccine projects in the works for those. It was almost like swapping a blue Lego for a red one in their assemblies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of the teams pursuing vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 (the scientific name of the new coronavirus) have previously worked on vaccines for the original SARS virus, which caused a 2003 outbreak that killed some 800 people, and MERS, which has caused 2,500 cases since it started spreading in 2012.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The earlier projects had pointed to a component of the coronaviruses called the spike protein as a ripe target for a vaccine, which gave scientists a head start for crafting their candidates. Work on SARS also illuminated stumbling blocks in designing coronavirus vaccines that COVID-19 immunizations have so far avoided.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What really helped was the knowledge gained from the SARS-1 infection,” said Rama Rao Amara, an immunologist and vaccine researcher at Emory University. “SARS-2 is quite similar to SARS-1, especially in that spike protein. People could take a very educated guess that this is the protein that we need to be going after.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>An Acute, Not Chronic Infection\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">S\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>ARS-CoV-2 causes an acute disease, COVID-19. It’s an infection that most people will clear on their own, which means there’s a vanquishing immune response that a vaccine can aim to induce in order to protect people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s not true for something like HIV, a virus for which there is no vaccine despite decades of research. HIV causes a chronic infection and integrates itself into people’s genomes; there’s no natural immune response that eliminates the virus that a vaccine can mimic. HIV also mutates much faster than coronaviruses do, meaning it’s more difficult to rally a lasting defense.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s possible, then, that a pathogen that’s harder to design a vaccine for than the coronavirus could ignite the next pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We were more prepared for a coronavirus than for any other family,” NIH’s Graham said. “To me, this is a wake-up call that we need to have a more systematic universal approach to developing vaccines and other countermeasures for virus families ahead of time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Cutting-Edge Approaches\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">V\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>accines train the immune system to recognize a pathogen it hasn’t yet encountered.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Normally, our immune system builds that memory by battling an infection, so that it can halt a virus in its tracks should it try to invade a second time. A vaccine acts like that first exposure, but without making people sick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With SARS-CoV-2, researchers are working with new ways of providing that first look, building vaccines on adaptable platforms engineered to easily pivot from pathogen to pathogen.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older strategies for developing vaccines, such as obtaining the virus and weakening or inactivating it, are lengthy processes. But the cutting-edge approaches require scientists only to know the virus’ genetic sequence. With that, they can string together the right pieces of code to synthesize vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s allowed scientists to move with record speed. Less than 10 weeks after the Chinese scientists published the SARS-CoV-2 sequence, a team from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the biotech company Moderna had a candidate ready for a Phase 1 trial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Moderna/NIAID vaccine was built with mRNA, a piece of genetic code containing the instructions for the coronavirus’ spike protein. The vaccine shuttles the mRNA into cells, which “read” those instructions and churn out the protein — providing the immune system with that first peek to the spike, like giving a hound a scent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A team from Pfizer and the German company BioNTech is \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/01/covid-19-vaccine-from-pfizer-and-biontech-shows-positive-results/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">also working\u003c/a> on an mRNA vaccine, while a company called Inovio is \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/30/inovio-claims-positive-results-on-covid-19-vaccine-but-critical-data-are-missing/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">pursuing a vaccine\u003c/a> based on a different genetic material, DNA. Neither an mRNA nor a DNA vaccine has been approved before.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Knowing the sequence of the coronavirus has also spurred other approaches. Some groups — including Johnson & Johnson, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/22/early-study-of-covid-19-vaccine-developed-in-china-sees-mixed-results/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chinese firm CanSino\u003c/a>, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/20/study-provides-first-glimpse-of-efficacy-of-oxford-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca\u003c/a> — are attaching the gene for the spike protein to another, harmless virus that ferries it into cells. There, it gets expressed into the spike, allowing the immune system to mount its forces. Another company, Novavax, is producing versions of the spike from the gene and using them directly in its vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The spike protein is a strategic choice. The proteins, which give SARS-CoV-2 the crown-like appearance that’s characteristic of coronaviruses, attach to receptors on people’s cells, allowing the virus to enter and replicate. By blocking spike proteins, then, vaccines could prevent infection. The spikes are also the “immunodominant” piece of the virus, meaning they elicit the strongest immune response. (Some vaccines are based on the whole spike, while some include select portions.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers are not only relying on advances in vaccine platforms. Innovations in basic genetics, immunology, and structural biology have also fueled the pace at which COVID-19 vaccines are moving. One way scientists have discovered so much about the spike protein, for example, is by applying methods honed over years to research the proteins on HIV.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Money, Money, Money\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">G\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>etting a vaccine approved is not just a scientific expedition. It’s also about money.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One reason vaccine development is so slow normally is because companies want to see candidates successfully pass through each sequence in the development process before sinking funding into the next phase.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that playbook doesn’t fly in a pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is the biggest emergency we’ve had in our lifetime,” said Kawsar Talaat, a Johns Hopkins infectious disease physician and vaccine researcher. “Money is kind of no object. We don’t have time to wait.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To rally companies, funding agencies, including governments and foundations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, are throwing millions — and in some cases, billions — into the hunt for vaccines. On Sunday, for example, Moderna said it had received $472 million from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, on top of the $483 million it got in April.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The money isn’t just to cover the research and trials; it’s also to get companies to start manufacturing their products — even though their vaccines might not prove to be effective. It’s a strategy called manufacturing “at risk,” and public health experts say it’s necessary to ensure that any authorized vaccine can be rolled out to as many people as quickly as possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The U.S. government is also striking deals with companies to purchase their vaccines even before clinical trials are completed, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/07/novavax-maker-of-a-covid-19-vaccine-is-backed-by-operation-warp-speed/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">a $1.6 billion agreement\u003c/a> with Novavax that includes 100 million doses and a $1.95 billion compact with Pfizer and BioNTech, also for 100 million doses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The fact that industry is able to hedge their bets like this and to make these investments is because the government has put up the money,” said UTMB’s Le Duc, who formerly led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s viral diseases division. “The government has recognized that this is an incredibly important issue and we need to be going full blast knowing full well that not all these vaccines will work. Some are going to be duds, and will lose money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Regulatory Nimbleness\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp class=\"p1\">\u003cspan class=\"s1\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap-wrap\">\u003cspan class=\"big-cap\">I\u003c/span>\u003c/span>\u003c/span>n-the-weeds regulatory decisions don’t get much public attention, but they are helping expedite clinical trials and the ultimate evaluation of how effective a vaccine is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of these lessons were first learned during the West African Ebola crisis, when regulators embraced a new dexterity in green-lighting vaccine trials and took a more proactive approach to communicating with companies about the efficacy thresholds products needed to meet. That’s continuing with COVID-19: the Food and Drug Administration, for example, has \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavirus-covid-19-update-fda-takes-action-help-facilitate-timely-development-safe-effective-covid\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">outlined\u003c/a> that vaccines need to prevent infections or reduce the severity of COVID-19 in 50% of recipients to be approved.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Ebola crisis “really did give the regulators greater experience and more comfort with the idea that they could have greater flexibility than they normally would have,” said Mark Feinberg, the president of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and a former executive at Merck Vaccines. “They could make decisions more quickly and really be true partners in the development process.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Textbook clinical trials include three increasingly large phases that establish how safe and effective a drug or vaccine is. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the trials have been collapsed into Phase 1/2 or Phase 2/3 trials. It’s a wonky distinction, but it can shave weeks or months off the process by saving research teams from having to write new protocols or get additional clearances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The speed of vaccine development can also have an adverse effect. Some people have questioned how such a fast-moving process can ensure safety and might abstain from a vaccine. An \u003ca href=\"https://apnews.com/dacdc8bc428dd4df6511bfa259cfec44\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Associated Press poll\u003c/a> in May found that Black and Latinx Americans, who have been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic and have a history of mistreatment by the medical field, are more skeptical about COVID-19 vaccines than white Americans — showing the importance of outreach campaigns that public health experts say are required to increase the uptake of immunizations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Others have raised suspicions that President Donald Trump — whose vaccine initiative is dubbed \u003ca href=\"https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2020/06/16/fact-sheet-explaining-operation-warp-speed.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Operation Warp Speed\u003c/a> — might force an emergency authorization of a vaccine before the election, even if it hasn’t cleared efficacy and safety standards. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Monday \u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@JoeBiden/my-statement-on-vaccines-2133deed94ee\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">raised the specter\u003c/a> of politics interfering in the quest for a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists and regulators are already stressing that safeguards aren’t being jettisoned. Public health experts say vaccine makers need to be transparent that while manufacturing and regulatory steps are being streamlined, safety checks aren’t being sacrificed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a call with reporters Monday, NIH Director Francis Collins, whom former President Barack Obama first tapped for the position, defended the integrity of the decisions regulators will make. “Nothing is being done here to compromise the safety” of COVID-19 vaccine trials, he said, “nor will we compromise on an ultimate conclusion about whether the vaccine is effective. Those issues are going to be tested in the most rigorous way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Challenges Ahead\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Exactly what all this speed will translate into remains to be seen. The monthslong, final-stage clinical trials starting now will settle that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech candidates \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/pfizer-biontech-pick-covid19-vaccine-begin-pivotal-study/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">respectively launched\u003c/a> Phase 3 and Phase 2/3 trials this week, and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is in a Phase 2/3 trial. Others are entering pivotal studies soon. These involve enrolling thousands of people, injecting half with the candidate and half with a placebo or control, and then comparing whether people who received the vaccine are less likely to be infected than their counterparts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some vaccine candidates could very well fail — a normal part of the scientific pursuit, experts say. “I hope that doesn’t happen, but people need to accept when things don’t pan out the way they hope,” said Maria Elena Bottazzi, the co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also not clear yet what a vaccine “working” will look like. A COVID-19 vaccine might \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/22/the-world-needs-covid-19-vaccines-it-may-also-be-overestimating-their-power/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">be like the flu vaccine\u003c/a> — only preventing infections in some people, or staving off serious disease but still leaving people contagious.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A vaccine that prevents even 50% of infections would be a massive lifeline. But experts worry there’s a disconnect between a public expecting vaccines to instantly reset their lives and what the first vaccines may actually allow. Successful vaccines \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/22/confusion-spreads-over-system-to-determine-priority-access-to-covid-19-vaccines/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">will likely be restricted\u003c/a> to front-line workers and vulnerable populations at first. It could take some time for enough vaccine to be made for everyone who wants a shot. Some vaccines might require two doses to confer protection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It might not be some magic bullet that’s going to stop the pandemic in its tracks, and people need to be prepared for that possibility,” said Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen about the first vaccines that reach people. “I really hate the term vaccine race. Because that implies there’s going to be a medal ceremony, and the pandemic is over.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">STAT\u003c/a>, an online publication of Boston Globe Media that covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/Neq_CwpkPvsGmMG7hVOy7A?domain=insideclimatenews.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">InsideClimate News\u003c/a> is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/pD-rCxklQwf1V61yTviMEq?domain=insideclimatenews.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Monterey Bay Community Power is entering the world of agricultural electrification.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The community-owned electricity provider launched its first \u003ca href=\"https://www.mbcommunitypower.org/ag-electrification-grant-program/\">agriculture-specific grant program\u003c/a> this week, an initiative that will fund the replacement of fossil fuel-powered farm equipment, like tractors and forklifts, with electric alternatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Funding will be allocated based on the number of customers that the electricity provider serves in each county. Of the $160,000 available — enough to fund at least eight grants of up to $20,000 each — half the money is earmarked for agricultural customers in Monterey County and a quarter for Santa Cruz County, with the remainder split between San Benito County and the cities of San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The hope is to learn, establish ourselves as a trusted resource for the Ag sector, and then just build upon the success of this program,” said J.R. Killigrew, director of communications and outreach for Monterey Bay Community Power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The electricity provider’s leaders have said their goal is to electrify the Central Coast, and they want to ensure that agricultural customers are included in that transition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The grant program would mean new customers for the small but growing array of companies that make electric farm equipment. One of those companies is \u003ca href=\"https://www.solectrac.com/\">Solectrac\u003c/a>, a startup based in Mendocino County, California, that makes compact electric tractors. Its eUtility model provides the equivalent of 40 horsepower for a base price of $45,000, which is roughly 50% more than an equivalent diesel tractor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I became converted that this is going to work, and this is coming,” said Roger Hoy, director of the University of Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory, who has tested the Solectac model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">He said he expects that the electric tractor market will start with small models and build from that niche, adding that there is not yet a viable electric alternative to the large tractors used for row crops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The grants from Monterey Bay Community Power would reduce or eliminate the cost difference between an electric model and a diesel one, which should make the EVs an attractive option.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">“At the end of the day, they’re trying to make a buck,” Killigrew said about the farmers that may apply. “They’re trying to make sure that they stay in business. So any way they could find means that could help support their operations, and if we can do it in a clean and sustainable way, then we’re meeting their goals and we’re also meeting our goals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Applications for the grant close at the end of August. The electricity provider plans to announce recipients by late September.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003cem>Reporter Nicole Pollack contributed to this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003ca href=\"https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/Neq_CwpkPvsGmMG7hVOy7A?domain=insideclimatenews.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">InsideClimate News\u003c/a> is a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for the ICN newsletter \u003ca href=\"https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/pD-rCxklQwf1V61yTviMEq?domain=insideclimatenews.org\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Monterey Bay Community Power is entering the world of agricultural electrification.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The community-owned electricity provider launched its first \u003ca href=\"https://www.mbcommunitypower.org/ag-electrification-grant-program/\">agriculture-specific grant program\u003c/a> this week, an initiative that will fund the replacement of fossil fuel-powered farm equipment, like tractors and forklifts, with electric alternatives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Funding will be allocated based on the number of customers that the electricity provider serves in each county. Of the $160,000 available — enough to fund at least eight grants of up to $20,000 each — half the money is earmarked for agricultural customers in Monterey County and a quarter for Santa Cruz County, with the remainder split between San Benito County and the cities of San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">“The hope is to learn, establish ourselves as a trusted resource for the Ag sector, and then just build upon the success of this program,” said J.R. Killigrew, director of communications and outreach for Monterey Bay Community Power.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The electricity provider’s leaders have said their goal is to electrify the Central Coast, and they want to ensure that agricultural customers are included in that transition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The grant program would mean new customers for the small but growing array of companies that make electric farm equipment. One of those companies is \u003ca href=\"https://www.solectrac.com/\">Solectrac\u003c/a>, a startup based in Mendocino County, California, that makes compact electric tractors. Its eUtility model provides the equivalent of 40 horsepower for a base price of $45,000, which is roughly 50% more than an equivalent diesel tractor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I became converted that this is going to work, and this is coming,” said Roger Hoy, director of the University of Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory, who has tested the Solectac model.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">He said he expects that the electric tractor market will start with small models and build from that niche, adding that there is not yet a viable electric alternative to the large tractors used for row crops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">The grants from Monterey Bay Community Power would reduce or eliminate the cost difference between an electric model and a diesel one, which should make the EVs an attractive option.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">“At the end of the day, they’re trying to make a buck,” Killigrew said about the farmers that may apply. “They’re trying to make sure that they stay in business. So any way they could find means that could help support their operations, and if we can do it in a clean and sustainable way, then we’re meeting their goals and we’re also meeting our goals.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">Applications for the grant close at the end of August. The electricity provider plans to announce recipients by late September.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003cem>Reporter Nicole Pollack contributed to this story.\u003c/em>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "San Mateo County Says More Closures Likely After Addition to COVID Monitoring List",
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"content": "\u003cp>After weeks of indecision, California health officials Wednesday added San Mateo to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CountyMonitoringDataStep2.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">watchlist\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of counties experiencing troubling coronavirus transmission.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a county is on the watchlist for three days or longer, the state can order the shuttering of businesses while the county works with health officials to lower the numbers below watchlist thresholds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county “will be in involved in active engagement with the state while the case rate is closely monitored” over the next three days, the county said in an \u003ca href=\"https://cmo.smcgov.org/press-release/san-mateo-county-added-state%E2%80%99s-covid-19-monitoring-list-preparing-potential-additional\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">update\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it acknowledged that health officials believe the case rate will not decrease in time to prevent more business closures and disruptions. The county advised gyms, salons, malls, places of worship and other businesses to prepare to operate outside or through customer pickup by Saturday morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Businesses like tattoo parlors that are not allowed to operate outside must temporarily close. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools in counties on the state’s monitoring list are not allowed to hold in-class instruction, though elementary schools can request a waiver from the county.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>More Coronavirus Cases\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state will add a county to the watchlist if it detects a surge in coronavirus cases or hospitalizations; if ICU bed and ventilator capacity are stretched too thin; or if not enough tests are given.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Currently, county data shows an average case rate of 110.4 per 100,000 people — higher than the state benchmark of 100.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“San Mateo County is experiencing an elevated case rate that exceeds the State threshold,” the California Department of Public Health explains on its \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CountyMonitoringDataStep2.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">County Data Monitoring\u003c/a> webpage. “The County sees roots of community transmission related to social gatherings without sufficient physical distancing and wearing of facial coverings, as well as higher exposure for residents performing work that involves person-to-person contact and crowded housing conditions that make home isolation difficult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state is asking the county to expand testing and contact tracing, find more places for those infected with the coronavirus to quarantine away from their families, and prepare its hospital systems for a potential surge in COVID-19 patients.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Mateo County, the last of nine Bay Area counties to escape monitoring status, has teetered on the edge of getting listed since mid-July, when monitoring of its coronavirus data registered a spike in cases.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/davidcanepa/status/1288575595425628161?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> Open … For Now\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Staying off the list has meant businesses like Physique Magnifique Fitness Training Academy can keep their doors open while those in watchlist counties have been forced to mostly shut down after a brief period of activity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Physique Magnifique is operating with modifications. Staffers take the temperatures of members at the door, sanitize shoe bottoms, and wipe down the equipment once an hour, said Futaba Takashima, co-owner of the bodybuilding gym with her husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the past weeks, as the county’s numbers crossed over into the red zone, her anticipation mounted that the state would drop the hammer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We expect it,” Takashima said last week. “The first time we got shut down, we didn’t think it would go on for so long. But we were shut down for three-and-a-half-months, which was not good.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mike Callagy, county manager, said in a statement it’s clear that COVID-19 is spreading in the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s vital that we all do everything we can — wearing face coverings, washing our hands, and avoiding gatherings — to slow and eventually stop the spread,” he said. “These individual actions can make a huge difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jon Brooks contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The county was pessimistic about its chances of decreasing its case count in time to prevent the forced closure of indoor operations at gyms, salons, malls, places of worship and other businesses starting Saturday morning.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>After weeks of indecision, California health officials Wednesday added San Mateo to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CountyMonitoringDataStep2.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">watchlist\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> of counties experiencing troubling coronavirus transmission.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If a county is on the watchlist for three days or longer, the state can order the shuttering of businesses while the county works with health officials to lower the numbers below watchlist thresholds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The county “will be in involved in active engagement with the state while the case rate is closely monitored” over the next three days, the county said in an \u003ca href=\"https://cmo.smcgov.org/press-release/san-mateo-county-added-state%E2%80%99s-covid-19-monitoring-list-preparing-potential-additional\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">update\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But it acknowledged that health officials believe the case rate will not decrease in time to prevent more business closures and disruptions. The county advised gyms, salons, malls, places of worship and other businesses to prepare to operate outside or through customer pickup by Saturday morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Businesses like tattoo parlors that are not allowed to operate outside must temporarily close. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schools in counties on the state’s monitoring list are not allowed to hold in-class instruction, though elementary schools can request a waiver from the county.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>More Coronavirus Cases\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state will add a county to the watchlist if it detects a surge in coronavirus cases or hospitalizations; if ICU bed and ventilator capacity are stretched too thin; or if not enough tests are given.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Currently, county data shows an average case rate of 110.4 per 100,000 people — higher than the state benchmark of 100.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“San Mateo County is experiencing an elevated case rate that exceeds the State threshold,” the California Department of Public Health explains on its \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CountyMonitoringDataStep2.aspx\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">County Data Monitoring\u003c/a> webpage. “The County sees roots of community transmission related to social gatherings without sufficient physical distancing and wearing of facial coverings, as well as higher exposure for residents performing work that involves person-to-person contact and crowded housing conditions that make home isolation difficult.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state is asking the county to expand testing and contact tracing, find more places for those infected with the coronavirus to quarantine away from their families, and prepare its hospital systems for a potential surge in COVID-19 patients.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>San Mateo County, the last of nine Bay Area counties to escape monitoring status, has teetered on the edge of getting listed since mid-July, when monitoring of its coronavirus data registered a spike in cases.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> Open … For Now\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Staying off the list has meant businesses like Physique Magnifique Fitness Training Academy can keep their doors open while those in watchlist counties have been forced to mostly shut down after a brief period of activity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Physique Magnifique is operating with modifications. Staffers take the temperatures of members at the door, sanitize shoe bottoms, and wipe down the equipment once an hour, said Futaba Takashima, co-owner of the bodybuilding gym with her husband.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over the past weeks, as the county’s numbers crossed over into the red zone, her anticipation mounted that the state would drop the hammer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We expect it,” Takashima said last week. “The first time we got shut down, we didn’t think it would go on for so long. But we were shut down for three-and-a-half-months, which was not good.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Mike Callagy, county manager, said in a statement it’s clear that COVID-19 is spreading in the Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s vital that we all do everything we can — wearing face coverings, washing our hands, and avoiding gatherings — to slow and eventually stop the spread,” he said. “These individual actions can make a huge difference.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Jon Brooks contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Researchers Testing if Harvested Antibodies Can Prevent COVID-19 Infection",
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"content": "\u003cp>If you’re bitten or scratched by an animal with rabies, your doctor can \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/vis-statements/rabies.pdf\">give you a shot\u003c/a> to prevent the virus from taking hold in you and causing an infection. The same concept is now being put to the test for the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most people who get sick with COVID-19 produce antibodies in their blood that seem to protect them from reinfection. A \u003ca href=\"https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04323800?term=NCT04323800&draw=2&rank=1\">study is now underway\u003c/a> to see whether an infusion of those antibodies can protect someone who has been exposed to the virus and is at high risk of infection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the first volunteers for this study is a physician who treats transplant patients at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. \u003ca href=\"https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/directory/profile/0013314/jonathan-orens\">Jonathan Orens \u003c/a>had a close brush with the coronavirus involving not his work, but his family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His daughter from Los Angeles wanted to come home to be near her sister, who was about to give birth to her first baby. Orens says the traveling daughter was careful about protecting her health in Los Angeles and did everything she could think of to stay safe on her flight to Baltimore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She wore a mask, she wore gloves, she had sanitizer, she had wipes,” he said. “The load on the plane was relatively small.” They chose the Fourth of July as a travel day, knowing that even fewer people were likely to be traveling that day. “We actually bought the two seats in the row to keep her away from everybody else.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She wore masks through the airports and in the car ride back to her parents’ house. Once there, she kept her distance from them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just to be sure, about a week after she arrived, she and her parents went for coronavirus testing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though she had no symptoms, “she was positive,” Orens said. “And fortunately my wife and I were negative.” But they were still at high risk of contracting the disease, given the close contact with their daughter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As luck would have it, one of Orens’ colleagues at Johns Hopkins was just starting a study to see if purified blood serum from people who have recovered from COVID-19 — called convalescent plasma — could prevent the disease in someone else. Orens and his wife, who are in their early 60s, are entering an age group at higher risk of serious disease if infected with the coronavirus. They signed up for the experimental treatment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Half the people in this clinical trial get an intravenous infusion of convalescent plasma, while the other half get an infusion of blood serum that had been donated before the pandemic emerged (so it lacked protective antibodies). Neither the participants nor the doctors treating them know who’s getting what.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The infusion took about an hour, Orens says. “I didn’t feel anything except for the pinprick from the IV, and we went on our merry way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He now returns to the clinic for regular blood tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll follow him along to see if he develops symptoms and if he turns positive,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/directory/profile/4090026/shmuel-shoham\">Dr. Shmuel Shoham\u003c/a>, who is directing the study. Shoham says he plans to enroll up to 500 patients — though, in the best-case scenario, if the treatment is highly effective he won’t need to study that many people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to recruiting patients in Baltimore, “right now we have sites in Houston, sites in Alabama,” Shoham said. “We’re opening up additional sites in Dallas and Arizona. We have sites all over Southern California.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s also involved in a second study that looks at whether plasma will prevent serious illness in people who are infected but not sick. He says if both of these strategies work, they could help a lot of people, even in the absence of a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That would give people a lot of confidence, I think, to go back to school, go back to work,” he says, “because if somebody gets sick it’s not a tragedy — because we can protect them and protect those around them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These studies are among \u003ca href=\"https://ccpp19.org/healthcare_providers/component_3/index.html\">a growing number of experiments\u003c/a> involving convalescent plasma, both as preventive measures and as treatments for COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/people/our-faculty/jj2158\">Dr. Jessica Justman\u003c/a> at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York tried to launch a similar study this spring. Good news for New York — but a complication for her study — was that the disease had largely abated in the city, and she didn’t have luck recruiting people to participate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Compared to March and April, people have become less worried, less scared of COVID and perhaps a little bit less inclined to go for a preventive treatment,” Justman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That situation could turn around if the disease roars back in her area. And Justman says the idea is well worth pursuing. A similar strategy works against other diseases — not just rabies, but hepatitis B, botulism and a potentially serious viral infection in babies called \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6702a4.htm\">respiratory syncytial virus\u003c/a>. In fact, this general strategy dates back more than a century. Shoham was involved in a study that attempted to use convalescent serum to treat the flu, and it was not successful — so it isn’t a cure-all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Piggybacking on this strategy, drug companies are gearing up to manufacture antibodies, instead of collecting blood from recovered patients. But those products — monoclonal antibodies — wouldn’t be cheap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I like about the convalescent plasma idea is that if it worked, I see it as something that could really be scalable in resource-limited settings,” Justman says, referring to developing countries where expensive pharmaceuticals are frequently out of reach. “And I think that’s where convalescent plasma has this really great potential.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the Orens family, nobody fell ill — whether that was due to in part to treatment or luck, nobody knows. Their quarantine period ended just in time for a quick trip to New York after the baby’s birth to see the new mom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The plan is to drive up after she is out of the hospital. Hopefully, everything will go well, and we will all be outside,” Orens said. “We will see the baby from a distance. I’ve already been informed by my daughter that I am not allowed to get anywhere near the baby. And then we will turn around and come back to Baltimore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hardly the way he was hoping to greet his first grandchild, he says, “however it’s the price we have to pay to bring this pandemic under control.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers in Baltimore hope to know by mid-September whether the convalescent plasma will in fact inoculate people from COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You can contact NPR science correspondent Richard Harris at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:rharris@npr.org\">\u003cem>rharris@npr.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Harvested+Antibodies+Now+Being+Tested+As+A+Prevention+Tool+Against+COVID-19&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you’re bitten or scratched by an animal with rabies, your doctor can \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/vis-statements/rabies.pdf\">give you a shot\u003c/a> to prevent the virus from taking hold in you and causing an infection. The same concept is now being put to the test for the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most people who get sick with COVID-19 produce antibodies in their blood that seem to protect them from reinfection. A \u003ca href=\"https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04323800?term=NCT04323800&draw=2&rank=1\">study is now underway\u003c/a> to see whether an infusion of those antibodies can protect someone who has been exposed to the virus and is at high risk of infection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the first volunteers for this study is a physician who treats transplant patients at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. \u003ca href=\"https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/directory/profile/0013314/jonathan-orens\">Jonathan Orens \u003c/a>had a close brush with the coronavirus involving not his work, but his family.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His daughter from Los Angeles wanted to come home to be near her sister, who was about to give birth to her first baby. Orens says the traveling daughter was careful about protecting her health in Los Angeles and did everything she could think of to stay safe on her flight to Baltimore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“She wore a mask, she wore gloves, she had sanitizer, she had wipes,” he said. “The load on the plane was relatively small.” They chose the Fourth of July as a travel day, knowing that even fewer people were likely to be traveling that day. “We actually bought the two seats in the row to keep her away from everybody else.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She wore masks through the airports and in the car ride back to her parents’ house. Once there, she kept her distance from them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just to be sure, about a week after she arrived, she and her parents went for coronavirus testing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though she had no symptoms, “she was positive,” Orens said. “And fortunately my wife and I were negative.” But they were still at high risk of contracting the disease, given the close contact with their daughter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As luck would have it, one of Orens’ colleagues at Johns Hopkins was just starting a study to see if purified blood serum from people who have recovered from COVID-19 — called convalescent plasma — could prevent the disease in someone else. Orens and his wife, who are in their early 60s, are entering an age group at higher risk of serious disease if infected with the coronavirus. They signed up for the experimental treatment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Half the people in this clinical trial get an intravenous infusion of convalescent plasma, while the other half get an infusion of blood serum that had been donated before the pandemic emerged (so it lacked protective antibodies). Neither the participants nor the doctors treating them know who’s getting what.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The infusion took about an hour, Orens says. “I didn’t feel anything except for the pinprick from the IV, and we went on our merry way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He now returns to the clinic for regular blood tests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ll follow him along to see if he develops symptoms and if he turns positive,” said \u003ca href=\"https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/directory/profile/4090026/shmuel-shoham\">Dr. Shmuel Shoham\u003c/a>, who is directing the study. Shoham says he plans to enroll up to 500 patients — though, in the best-case scenario, if the treatment is highly effective he won’t need to study that many people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to recruiting patients in Baltimore, “right now we have sites in Houston, sites in Alabama,” Shoham said. “We’re opening up additional sites in Dallas and Arizona. We have sites all over Southern California.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s also involved in a second study that looks at whether plasma will prevent serious illness in people who are infected but not sick. He says if both of these strategies work, they could help a lot of people, even in the absence of a vaccine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That would give people a lot of confidence, I think, to go back to school, go back to work,” he says, “because if somebody gets sick it’s not a tragedy — because we can protect them and protect those around them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These studies are among \u003ca href=\"https://ccpp19.org/healthcare_providers/component_3/index.html\">a growing number of experiments\u003c/a> involving convalescent plasma, both as preventive measures and as treatments for COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/people/our-faculty/jj2158\">Dr. Jessica Justman\u003c/a> at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York tried to launch a similar study this spring. Good news for New York — but a complication for her study — was that the disease had largely abated in the city, and she didn’t have luck recruiting people to participate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Compared to March and April, people have become less worried, less scared of COVID and perhaps a little bit less inclined to go for a preventive treatment,” Justman said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That situation could turn around if the disease roars back in her area. And Justman says the idea is well worth pursuing. A similar strategy works against other diseases — not just rabies, but hepatitis B, botulism and a potentially serious viral infection in babies called \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6702a4.htm\">respiratory syncytial virus\u003c/a>. In fact, this general strategy dates back more than a century. Shoham was involved in a study that attempted to use convalescent serum to treat the flu, and it was not successful — so it isn’t a cure-all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Piggybacking on this strategy, drug companies are gearing up to manufacture antibodies, instead of collecting blood from recovered patients. But those products — monoclonal antibodies — wouldn’t be cheap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I like about the convalescent plasma idea is that if it worked, I see it as something that could really be scalable in resource-limited settings,” Justman says, referring to developing countries where expensive pharmaceuticals are frequently out of reach. “And I think that’s where convalescent plasma has this really great potential.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the Orens family, nobody fell ill — whether that was due to in part to treatment or luck, nobody knows. Their quarantine period ended just in time for a quick trip to New York after the baby’s birth to see the new mom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The plan is to drive up after she is out of the hospital. Hopefully, everything will go well, and we will all be outside,” Orens said. “We will see the baby from a distance. I’ve already been informed by my daughter that I am not allowed to get anywhere near the baby. And then we will turn around and come back to Baltimore.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s hardly the way he was hoping to greet his first grandchild, he says, “however it’s the price we have to pay to bring this pandemic under control.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers in Baltimore hope to know by mid-September whether the convalescent plasma will in fact inoculate people from COVID-19.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You can contact NPR science correspondent Richard Harris at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:rharris@npr.org\">\u003cem>rharris@npr.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Harvested+Antibodies+Now+Being+Tested+As+A+Prevention+Tool+Against+COVID-19&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>Updated July 30\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Child care looks very different at Baby Steps Nature School in San Francisco since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. And it’s not just because staff are taking temperatures, greeting families at the curb, and everyone over three is wearing a face mask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The games the children and staff play are different too, said owner Patricia Sullivan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of their big games right now is ‘The Floor Is Lava,'” Sullivan said. “We do obstacle courses, things that they still get to have fun together, but they don’t have to necessarily touch each other all the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said the songs that staff sing with kids are more calming, as are the books that the group reads. Sullivan said that’s because her young pupils know something is off these days, even if they can’t articulate it. Instead of focusing on activity after activity, she said, the whole group is slowing down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The most important thing to do this is to really spend more time talking to each other, listening to what the kids are saying,” said Sullivan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside the daily routine at Baby Steps, the entire child care industry has absorbed a seismic jolt. Parents are grappling with the decision of whether to send their kids back to day care, and persistent low enrollment endangers the long-term health of the field.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align='right' citation='Gina Fromer']‘If you’re a family day care home and you were supporting 24 kids pre-COVID and now you can have six, what does that do for your business?’[/pullquote]Sullivan represents hundreds of other home-based providers through the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fccasf.com/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Family Child Care Association of San Francisco.\u003c/a> She said the group is made up largely of women of color, and they’re facing a challenging loss of income.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If the parents chose not to return, we were no longer getting paid,” she said, reflecting on the time since June 1, when day care centers serving the general public were allowed to reopen. Those serving the children of essential workers have been allowed to stay open throughout the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sullivan said there were already shortages in available child care spots for infants and toddlers in San Francisco, and if providers close permanently, people with very young children “are going to have a hard time finding care.” She also said providers who offer “off-hours care,” anything outside of the hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., are less likely to stay open, since many are primarily essential workers in other sectors, like grocery stores, and caring for children would be too risky in terms of coronavirus transmission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gina Fromer, CEO of the nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://www.childrenscouncil.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Children’s Council of San Francisco\u003c/a>, an advocacy group for child care, said providers “are hurting right now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While San Francisco and the state have extended some financial relief, Fromer said strict COVID guidelines mean “the majority of the sites in San Francisco are operating at half capacity,” as they must adhere to social distancing, smaller group sizes, and fewer children returning out of family choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re a family day care home and you were supporting 24 kids pre-COVID and now you can have six, what does that do for your business?” she asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, just over 40% of San Francisco’s roughly 1,100 child care providers are currently closed, according to the \u003ca href=\"https://sfoece.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">San Francisco Office of Early Care & Education\u003c/a>. This includes larger centers, often run by companies out of a specific site, and family day cares, which are smaller and typically based in a provider’s home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fromer said some of these providers won’t open back up again, which is not just a problem for children, families, and the child care industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no road to recovery in San Francisco without child care,” she said, noting that businesses will suffer if their employees can’t find proper care for their kids. She estimates that 40% of child care providers shut down after the 2007-8 economic recession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need local, state and federal investment in child care infrastructure in order for the economy to bounce back,” said Fromer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some families are choosing not to send their children back to day care due to the expense and fear of their children getting or passing the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Naomi Bardach, associate professor of pediatrics and health policy at UCSF, said there are risks of children getting COVID-19 and transmitting the virus to adults, but those dangers are low.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most younger kids get very mild illness if they get ill at all, and they are much less likely to get it compared to adults,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout all of California, the number of child care staff, children and their parents \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdss.ca.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">who’ve tested positive\u003c/a> for the virus is roughly 1,518 as of July 29. Of that number, 313 were children, 562 were staff, 489 were parents, and 154 were in none of those categories, such as people who live in the home of a family day care worker but are not on staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compared to the total number of preschool children in California, which she estimated “in the hundreds of thousands at least,” the number of children at day care who’ve tested positive is relatively low, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bardach said of the positive coronavirus cases associated with child care, “We’re not totally sure if it came from the community or the preschools. And then the other thing is we have to just put it in the context of [how] we take some risks normally in our lives when we drive in a car or cross the street.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She added that when parents make their decisions, it’s important to consider how prevalent the virus is in their community, and what the safety practices are at their specific child care setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back at Baby Steps Nature School, Sullivan understands that parents are fearful. Even if they do send their kids to day care, she sees that fear pop up in other ways — through the kids. She said her young charges are afraid to separate from their parents because they worry their mom or dad may get the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sullivan is calming these fears with another change to her day care: pasting pictures of parents in the children’s cubbies.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>Updated July 30\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Child care looks very different at Baby Steps Nature School in San Francisco since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. And it’s not just because staff are taking temperatures, greeting families at the curb, and everyone over three is wearing a face mask.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The games the children and staff play are different too, said owner Patricia Sullivan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“One of their big games right now is ‘The Floor Is Lava,'” Sullivan said. “We do obstacle courses, things that they still get to have fun together, but they don’t have to necessarily touch each other all the time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She said the songs that staff sing with kids are more calming, as are the books that the group reads. Sullivan said that’s because her young pupils know something is off these days, even if they can’t articulate it. Instead of focusing on activity after activity, she said, the whole group is slowing down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The most important thing to do this is to really spend more time talking to each other, listening to what the kids are saying,” said Sullivan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside the daily routine at Baby Steps, the entire child care industry has absorbed a seismic jolt. Parents are grappling with the decision of whether to send their kids back to day care, and persistent low enrollment endangers the long-term health of the field.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Sullivan represents hundreds of other home-based providers through the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fccasf.com/en-us\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Family Child Care Association of San Francisco.\u003c/a> She said the group is made up largely of women of color, and they’re facing a challenging loss of income.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If the parents chose not to return, we were no longer getting paid,” she said, reflecting on the time since June 1, when day care centers serving the general public were allowed to reopen. Those serving the children of essential workers have been allowed to stay open throughout the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sullivan said there were already shortages in available child care spots for infants and toddlers in San Francisco, and if providers close permanently, people with very young children “are going to have a hard time finding care.” She also said providers who offer “off-hours care,” anything outside of the hours of 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., are less likely to stay open, since many are primarily essential workers in other sectors, like grocery stores, and caring for children would be too risky in terms of coronavirus transmission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gina Fromer, CEO of the nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://www.childrenscouncil.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Children’s Council of San Francisco\u003c/a>, an advocacy group for child care, said providers “are hurting right now.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While San Francisco and the state have extended some financial relief, Fromer said strict COVID guidelines mean “the majority of the sites in San Francisco are operating at half capacity,” as they must adhere to social distancing, smaller group sizes, and fewer children returning out of family choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re a family day care home and you were supporting 24 kids pre-COVID and now you can have six, what does that do for your business?” she asked.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, just over 40% of San Francisco’s roughly 1,100 child care providers are currently closed, according to the \u003ca href=\"https://sfoece.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">San Francisco Office of Early Care & Education\u003c/a>. This includes larger centers, often run by companies out of a specific site, and family day cares, which are smaller and typically based in a provider’s home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fromer said some of these providers won’t open back up again, which is not just a problem for children, families, and the child care industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There is no road to recovery in San Francisco without child care,” she said, noting that businesses will suffer if their employees can’t find proper care for their kids. She estimates that 40% of child care providers shut down after the 2007-8 economic recession.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We need local, state and federal investment in child care infrastructure in order for the economy to bounce back,” said Fromer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some families are choosing not to send their children back to day care due to the expense and fear of their children getting or passing the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dr. Naomi Bardach, associate professor of pediatrics and health policy at UCSF, said there are risks of children getting COVID-19 and transmitting the virus to adults, but those dangers are low.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most younger kids get very mild illness if they get ill at all, and they are much less likely to get it compared to adults,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout all of California, the number of child care staff, children and their parents \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdss.ca.gov/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">who’ve tested positive\u003c/a> for the virus is roughly 1,518 as of July 29. Of that number, 313 were children, 562 were staff, 489 were parents, and 154 were in none of those categories, such as people who live in the home of a family day care worker but are not on staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compared to the total number of preschool children in California, which she estimated “in the hundreds of thousands at least,” the number of children at day care who’ve tested positive is relatively low, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bardach said of the positive coronavirus cases associated with child care, “We’re not totally sure if it came from the community or the preschools. And then the other thing is we have to just put it in the context of [how] we take some risks normally in our lives when we drive in a car or cross the street.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She added that when parents make their decisions, it’s important to consider how prevalent the virus is in their community, and what the safety practices are at their specific child care setting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back at Baby Steps Nature School, Sullivan understands that parents are fearful. Even if they do send their kids to day care, she sees that fear pop up in other ways — through the kids. She said her young charges are afraid to separate from their parents because they worry their mom or dad may get the virus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Anti-Vaccine Misinformation on Facebook Has Gained a Lot of Traction During Pandemic",
"headTitle": "Anti-Vaccine Misinformation on Facebook Has Gained a Lot of Traction During Pandemic | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>As scientists begin to clear a path to a potential coronavirus vaccine, researchers and advocates are increasingly sounding the alarm over what they see as a looming threat: Facebook’s apparent inability to police dangerous falsehoods about vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the outset of the pandemic, vaccine-related falsehoods have ballooned on the platform — and recent research suggests some of those inaccurate posts are gaining traction among people who weren’t previously opposed to vaccinations. Part of the problem appears to be the way Facebook’s algorithms \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">capitalize on divisive or extremist content\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compounding the issue is Facebook’s history of hesitating to address misinformation until a particular subject has snowballed into an urgent problem. In the middle of a global measles outbreak last year spurred by low vaccination rates, Facebook rolled out a series of policies to curb vaccine misinformation. But the changes did little to prevent the problem from resurfacing again amid the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concerned that Facebook’s failure to crack down on vaccine falsehoods will backfire at the worst possible time, advocates and scientists have called on Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to take action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“COVID-19 misinformation is the equivalent of an ideological dirty bomb: It has the capacity to hurt tens of thousands of people when it detonates in the moment that vaccines are available,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and chief executive officer of the U.K.-based nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which recently assessed the growing influence of anti-vaccination content on social media platforms including Facebook since the outset of the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Facebook did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to combat COVID-19 vaccine information. But in a July \u003ca href=\"https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_7aa1bf9819904295a0493a013b285a6b.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">report\u003c/a>, Ahmed’s organization assessed the influence of 409 English-language social media accounts sharing anti-vaccination content between May and June of 2020, just after the pandemic began. The report found that falsehoods about a COVID-19 vaccine have been prevalent on Facebook and other social media sites for months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a dire situation — and one that has only worsened with time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The first thing that came back from our researchers was, ‘Oh no. They’ve grown a lot,’” Ahmed said. In their sample, Facebook groups and pages spreading vaccination falsehoods had over 31 million followers, representing more than half of the combined following of all the social media accounts they studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the pages spreading falsehoods, the researchers identified one prominent category: people who sell or profit off of vaccine misinformation. These “anti-vaccination entrepreneurs” — who collectively garnered a total following of 28 million people — saw their followers grow by 854,000 between May and June. Zeroing in on groups, the researchers identified 64 that regularly shared vaccine misinformation, with a collective following of 1 million that has also kept growing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on the research findings, Ahmed is deeply concerned that the growth in vaccine-related falsehoods will sow distrust in an eventual vaccine before one even arrives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Personally, I’m scared,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since people have been asked to stay at home, more conversations have moved online — giving misinformation a chance to gain even more of a foothold on social media sites. Anti-vaccination content, in particular, has thrived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s basically like if you injected adrenaline into them,” said Neil Johnson, a professor of physics and researcher at the Institute for Data, Democracy, & Politics at George Washington University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In May, Johnson and his colleagues \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">published a study in Nature\u003c/a> that showed a sizable uptick in the followers of pages promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric on Facebook between February and October of 2019. While pages spreading falsehoods about vaccines had fewer followers than pages that shared factual vaccine content, the researchers found that there were more pages spreading falsehoods, and those pages were faster-growing and increasingly more connected to neutral pages where people did not yet have a clear leaning one way or the other. If the trend continues, Johnson predicted that anti-vaccination rhetoric will dominate online discussion by 2030.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He and his team have been studying the change on a rolling basis in the months since their study ended — and from their view, the problem is growing more pressing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on what we’re seeing now, “it would only take something to go wrong with one of the vaccines and then that [change] would happen in a year,” Johnson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Critics say another possible factor in the social media giant’s failure to get rid of vaccine misinformation is Zuckerberg’s own approach to moderation. Zuckerberg has, in the past, presented the social network \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-defends-free-speech-amid-calls-for-tighter-controls-11571335528?mod=article_inline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">as a stalwart of free speech\u003c/a>, even if that speech is potentially harmful — one of the reasons the company has \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/technology/facebook-political-ads-lies.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">repeatedly opted to permit lies in political ads\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent months, some of Zuckerberg’s dissenters have appealed to his more philanthropic intentions. In a June letter, hundreds of scientists affiliated with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — the research organization he and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, founded in 2015 — \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/06/in-unusual-revolt-scientists-funded-by-mark-zuckerberg-criticize-facebooks-inaction-on-president-trumps-posts/\">called the social network’s practices “antithetical”\u003c/a> to their benefactor’s mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The spread of news that is not vetted for factual accuracy leads to confusion and a mistrust of experts,” they wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Facebook’s failure to eradicate scientific falsehoods is difficult to reconcile with the research efforts spearheaded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. While Facebook has avoided public calls to uniformly crack down on misinformation, Zuckerberg and Chan have continued to funnel millions into CZI, including funding for several research efforts aimed at better understanding the spread of the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, Zuckerberg and Chan invested \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/29/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-funds-bay-area-coronavirus-tracking/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">$13.6 million into a pair of coronavirus studies\u003c/a>, led by CZI, to flag new infections and better understand how immunity to the virus develops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From my vantage point, we’re all just trying to figure out how to do our part to answer these questions and rebuild,” Chan said in an interview with STAT in April. At the same time, though, rampant falsehoods about the virus — including the dangerous notion that an eventual vaccine will be deadly — were spreading quickly across Facebook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not that Facebook is doing nothing about the issue; rather, its piecemeal approaches are simply too little too late, according to researchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last March, amid worldwide measles outbreaks, for example, the company instituted its first policy to combat vaccine misinformation, which involved using its algorithms to demote groups and pages that spread vaccine-related falsehoods and to exclude them from recommendations and predictions when users search within the platform. But as researchers pointed out at the time, demoting certain pages doesn’t stop anti-vaccination conversations from cropping up in others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the pages where Johnson found anti-vaccine falsehoods, most were dedicated to things like hobbies and mutual interests. There were pages tailored to parents of kids who played soccer, people who like cats, and aficionados of organic produce, for example. But every so often, a strand of a conversation about something like the best way to treat a leg sprain would devolve into an inaccurate — and dangerous — diatribe against vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Often in these communities, the number of what I’d call ‘bad’ posts is small — they’re mostly talking about cats or their favorite sports team or whatever, and then all of a sudden there’s a post stuck in there about vaccines,” Johnson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More recently in response to the coronavirus, Facebook began targeting people who had interacted with certain COVID-19 falsehoods with generic messages that read, “Help friends and family avoid false information about COVID-19.” Those messages point users to the World Health Organization’s myth-busting page about the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Facebook \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/01/facebooks-covid-19-misinformation-campaign-is-based-on-research-the-authors-worry-facebook-missed-the-message/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said the strategy was based on psychological research\u003c/a>, the authors of the studies the platform cited as justification for their policies told STAT in May that Facebook seemed to have misinterpreted their findings. Rather than placing a generic message in people’s news feeds, Facebook should be correcting falsehoods by providing the facts, the researchers said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts said that if Facebook is to combat misinformation in time for the arrival of an eventual coronavirus vaccine, there’s a significant amount of work that needs to happen quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s going to be a heavy lift,” Johnson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">STAT\u003c/a>, an online publication of Boston Globe Media that covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Since the outset of the pandemic, vaccine-related falsehoods have ballooned on the platform — and recent research suggests some of those inaccurate posts are gaining traction among people who weren’t previously opposed to vaccinations.",
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"description": "Since the outset of the pandemic, vaccine-related falsehoods have ballooned on the platform — and recent research suggests some of those inaccurate posts are gaining traction among people who weren’t previously opposed to vaccinations.",
"title": "Anti-Vaccine Misinformation on Facebook Has Gained a Lot of Traction During Pandemic | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>As scientists begin to clear a path to a potential coronavirus vaccine, researchers and advocates are increasingly sounding the alarm over what they see as a looming threat: Facebook’s apparent inability to police dangerous falsehoods about vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since the outset of the pandemic, vaccine-related falsehoods have ballooned on the platform — and recent research suggests some of those inaccurate posts are gaining traction among people who weren’t previously opposed to vaccinations. Part of the problem appears to be the way Facebook’s algorithms \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">capitalize on divisive or extremist content\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compounding the issue is Facebook’s history of hesitating to address misinformation until a particular subject has snowballed into an urgent problem. In the middle of a global measles outbreak last year spurred by low vaccination rates, Facebook rolled out a series of policies to curb vaccine misinformation. But the changes did little to prevent the problem from resurfacing again amid the COVID-19 pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Concerned that Facebook’s failure to crack down on vaccine falsehoods will backfire at the worst possible time, advocates and scientists have called on Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to take action.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“COVID-19 misinformation is the equivalent of an ideological dirty bomb: It has the capacity to hurt tens of thousands of people when it detonates in the moment that vaccines are available,” said Imran Ahmed, founder and chief executive officer of the U.K.-based nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, which recently assessed the growing influence of anti-vaccination content on social media platforms including Facebook since the outset of the pandemic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Facebook did not respond to a request for comment about its efforts to combat COVID-19 vaccine information. But in a July \u003ca href=\"https://252f2edd-1c8b-49f5-9bb2-cb57bb47e4ba.filesusr.com/ugd/f4d9b9_7aa1bf9819904295a0493a013b285a6b.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">report\u003c/a>, Ahmed’s organization assessed the influence of 409 English-language social media accounts sharing anti-vaccination content between May and June of 2020, just after the pandemic began. The report found that falsehoods about a COVID-19 vaccine have been prevalent on Facebook and other social media sites for months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s a dire situation — and one that has only worsened with time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The first thing that came back from our researchers was, ‘Oh no. They’ve grown a lot,’” Ahmed said. In their sample, Facebook groups and pages spreading vaccination falsehoods had over 31 million followers, representing more than half of the combined following of all the social media accounts they studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the pages spreading falsehoods, the researchers identified one prominent category: people who sell or profit off of vaccine misinformation. These “anti-vaccination entrepreneurs” — who collectively garnered a total following of 28 million people — saw their followers grow by 854,000 between May and June. Zeroing in on groups, the researchers identified 64 that regularly shared vaccine misinformation, with a collective following of 1 million that has also kept growing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on the research findings, Ahmed is deeply concerned that the growth in vaccine-related falsehoods will sow distrust in an eventual vaccine before one even arrives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Personally, I’m scared,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since people have been asked to stay at home, more conversations have moved online — giving misinformation a chance to gain even more of a foothold on social media sites. Anti-vaccination content, in particular, has thrived.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s basically like if you injected adrenaline into them,” said Neil Johnson, a professor of physics and researcher at the Institute for Data, Democracy, & Politics at George Washington University.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In May, Johnson and his colleagues \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2281-1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">published a study in Nature\u003c/a> that showed a sizable uptick in the followers of pages promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric on Facebook between February and October of 2019. While pages spreading falsehoods about vaccines had fewer followers than pages that shared factual vaccine content, the researchers found that there were more pages spreading falsehoods, and those pages were faster-growing and increasingly more connected to neutral pages where people did not yet have a clear leaning one way or the other. If the trend continues, Johnson predicted that anti-vaccination rhetoric will dominate online discussion by 2030.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He and his team have been studying the change on a rolling basis in the months since their study ended — and from their view, the problem is growing more pressing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Based on what we’re seeing now, “it would only take something to go wrong with one of the vaccines and then that [change] would happen in a year,” Johnson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Critics say another possible factor in the social media giant’s failure to get rid of vaccine misinformation is Zuckerberg’s own approach to moderation. Zuckerberg has, in the past, presented the social network \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-defends-free-speech-amid-calls-for-tighter-controls-11571335528?mod=article_inline\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">as a stalwart of free speech\u003c/a>, even if that speech is potentially harmful — one of the reasons the company has \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/technology/facebook-political-ads-lies.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">repeatedly opted to permit lies in political ads\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent months, some of Zuckerberg’s dissenters have appealed to his more philanthropic intentions. In a June letter, hundreds of scientists affiliated with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — the research organization he and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, founded in 2015 — \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/06/in-unusual-revolt-scientists-funded-by-mark-zuckerberg-criticize-facebooks-inaction-on-president-trumps-posts/\">called the social network’s practices “antithetical”\u003c/a> to their benefactor’s mission.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The spread of news that is not vetted for factual accuracy leads to confusion and a mistrust of experts,” they wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Facebook’s failure to eradicate scientific falsehoods is difficult to reconcile with the research efforts spearheaded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. While Facebook has avoided public calls to uniformly crack down on misinformation, Zuckerberg and Chan have continued to funnel millions into CZI, including funding for several research efforts aimed at better understanding the spread of the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April, Zuckerberg and Chan invested \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/29/chan-zuckerberg-initiative-funds-bay-area-coronavirus-tracking/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">$13.6 million into a pair of coronavirus studies\u003c/a>, led by CZI, to flag new infections and better understand how immunity to the virus develops.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“From my vantage point, we’re all just trying to figure out how to do our part to answer these questions and rebuild,” Chan said in an interview with STAT in April. At the same time, though, rampant falsehoods about the virus — including the dangerous notion that an eventual vaccine will be deadly — were spreading quickly across Facebook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not that Facebook is doing nothing about the issue; rather, its piecemeal approaches are simply too little too late, according to researchers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last March, amid worldwide measles outbreaks, for example, the company instituted its first policy to combat vaccine misinformation, which involved using its algorithms to demote groups and pages that spread vaccine-related falsehoods and to exclude them from recommendations and predictions when users search within the platform. But as researchers pointed out at the time, demoting certain pages doesn’t stop anti-vaccination conversations from cropping up in others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among the pages where Johnson found anti-vaccine falsehoods, most were dedicated to things like hobbies and mutual interests. There were pages tailored to parents of kids who played soccer, people who like cats, and aficionados of organic produce, for example. But every so often, a strand of a conversation about something like the best way to treat a leg sprain would devolve into an inaccurate — and dangerous — diatribe against vaccines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Often in these communities, the number of what I’d call ‘bad’ posts is small — they’re mostly talking about cats or their favorite sports team or whatever, and then all of a sudden there’s a post stuck in there about vaccines,” Johnson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More recently in response to the coronavirus, Facebook began targeting people who had interacted with certain COVID-19 falsehoods with generic messages that read, “Help friends and family avoid false information about COVID-19.” Those messages point users to the World Health Organization’s myth-busting page about the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Facebook \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/01/facebooks-covid-19-misinformation-campaign-is-based-on-research-the-authors-worry-facebook-missed-the-message/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said the strategy was based on psychological research\u003c/a>, the authors of the studies the platform cited as justification for their policies told STAT in May that Facebook seemed to have misinterpreted their findings. Rather than placing a generic message in people’s news feeds, Facebook should be correcting falsehoods by providing the facts, the researchers said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts said that if Facebook is to combat misinformation in time for the arrival of an eventual coronavirus vaccine, there’s a significant amount of work that needs to happen quickly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s going to be a heavy lift,” Johnson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">STAT\u003c/a>, an online publication of Boston Globe Media that covers health, medicine, and scientific discovery.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Recent Headlines Suggest Coronavirus Immunity Doesn't Last. The Science is More Reassuring",
"headTitle": "Recent Headlines Suggest Coronavirus Immunity Doesn’t Last. The Science is More Reassuring | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>So many people are counting on a vaccine to help end the coronavirus pandemic that any hint of bad news gets a lot of attention. That’s proving to be the case for a series of studies examining how long antibodies persist in people who have been infected with the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote]Three recent studies — from China, Britain and the U.S. — have called into question how long people carry antibodies after infection. But the reality may be less dire than recent headlines suggest.[/pullquote]Antibodies help ward off infections. In some diseases, they can prevent reinfection, though scientists can’t say for sure if that’s true for the coronavirus. And it’s also not clear how long antibodies linger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three recent studies — from \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0965-6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">China\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Britain\u003c/a> and now the United States — have called into question how long people carry antibodies after infection. But the reality may be less dire than \u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/13/study-immunity-to-coronavirus-may-fade-away-within-weeks/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">recent headlines\u003c/a> suggest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The latest of these papers is from a research group at UCLA. It tracked antibodies in 34 people with the coronavirus and found that the average antibody levels dropped to half of where they started over a period of about 2 1/2 months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The big caveat is of course that this is just one snapshot for a relatively short period of time,” said \u003ca href=\"https://bioscience.ucla.edu/faculty/otto-yang\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr. Otto Yang at UCLA,\u003c/a> “so we don’t know that it will continue that same rate of drop over time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists have noticed that people with milder symptoms — or no symptoms at all — tend to have a weaker immune response to the coronavirus. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Yang’s letter,\u003c/a> published online in \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>New England Journal of Medicine,\u003c/em> focused on people with mild illness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The majority just recovered at home with no hospital care, so their antibody titers [levels] weren’t extremely high,” Yang said. “Indeed, we have seen other people that have very, very high antibody titers, on the order of 10 to 100 times higher than these.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A research group based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York looked at nearly 20,000 people with mild to moderate illness. The group tells a more reassuring story in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.14.20151126v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">unpublished research report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It finds that 90% of those people had antibody responses that lasted at least three months. And these antibodies neutralized the virus, at least in the lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s reasonable to assume that there will be protection for a time frame of one to three years,” said \u003ca href=\"https://icahn.mssm.edu/profiles/florian-krammer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Florian Krammer\u003c/a>, one of the scientists on that study. “But of course, we are scientists. We have to prove that, right? That’s why everyone’s cautious about it. But I think that’s a pretty fair assumption.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists focus a lot on antibodies as markers of immunity in part because they are easy to measure. Antibodies do tend to wane over time in many instances, but when that happens, the immune system doesn’t necessarily have to start again from scratch. Memory of a past infection can be stored in a cell called a memory B cell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Those are cells that don’t actually make any antibodies unless the virus comes back, and then they see that virus again,” Krammer said. “But then they react very, very quickly and make antibodies quickly. So, there are many arms that the immune system has to tackle this virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet another line of defense is a kind of immune cell called a T cell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“T cells are very important in fighting viruses,” said \u003ca href=\"https://profiles.stanford.edu/kari-nadeau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr. Kari Nadeau\u003c/a> at Stanford. They can kill viruses. “And so, one thing we’re looking at [is] as the antibodies wane, do the T-cell responses also wane?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists developing some of the coronavirus vaccines have noticed that their experimental products spark a strong T-cell response. That includes \u003ca href=\"https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31604-4/fulltext\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the vaccine from the University of Oxford\u003c/a>, which is in an advanced stage of testing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know from many other infections, the vaccine response can be much more durable than the natural infection response,” said Adrian Hill, who is the principal investigator for this vaccine study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s partly because people get a strong dose with a vaccine, which stimulates strong immunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m pretty confident that in COVID we’re going to see the vaccines are more durable than a natural COVID infection,” Hill said. “But again, we don’t know yet. We need to wait and see.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, for now, people who have already been infected with the coronavirus will also have to wait and see whether they remain immune, and if so for how long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Immunity to four milder coronaviruses, which circulate widely and cause common colds, doesn’t persist for years on end. So, the duration of an antibody response may depend at least in part on whether an infection led to a significant illness — and a significant immune reaction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You can contact NPR science correspondent Richard Harris at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:rharris@npr.org\">\u003cem>rharris@npr.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=How+Long+Will+Immunity+To+The+Coronavirus+Last%3F+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Recent studies have raised fears that immunity to the coronavirus might be fleeting, thus making potential vaccines ineffective. The reality of the science is more complex — and more reassuring.",
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"description": "Recent studies have raised fears that immunity to the coronavirus might be fleeting, thus making potential vaccines ineffective. The reality of the science is more complex — and more reassuring.",
"title": "Recent Headlines Suggest Coronavirus Immunity Doesn't Last. The Science is More Reassuring | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>So many people are counting on a vaccine to help end the coronavirus pandemic that any hint of bad news gets a lot of attention. That’s proving to be the case for a series of studies examining how long antibodies persist in people who have been infected with the coronavirus.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "Three recent studies — from China, Britain and the U.S. — have called into question how long people carry antibodies after infection. But the reality may be less dire than recent headlines suggest.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Antibodies help ward off infections. In some diseases, they can prevent reinfection, though scientists can’t say for sure if that’s true for the coronavirus. And it’s also not clear how long antibodies linger.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Three recent studies — from \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0965-6\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">China\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Britain\u003c/a> and now the United States — have called into question how long people carry antibodies after infection. But the reality may be less dire than \u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/13/study-immunity-to-coronavirus-may-fade-away-within-weeks/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">recent headlines\u003c/a> suggest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The latest of these papers is from a research group at UCLA. It tracked antibodies in 34 people with the coronavirus and found that the average antibody levels dropped to half of where they started over a period of about 2 1/2 months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The big caveat is of course that this is just one snapshot for a relatively short period of time,” said \u003ca href=\"https://bioscience.ucla.edu/faculty/otto-yang\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr. Otto Yang at UCLA,\u003c/a> “so we don’t know that it will continue that same rate of drop over time.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists have noticed that people with milder symptoms — or no symptoms at all — tend to have a weaker immune response to the coronavirus. And \u003ca href=\"https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Yang’s letter,\u003c/a> published online in \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>New England Journal of Medicine,\u003c/em> focused on people with mild illness.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The majority just recovered at home with no hospital care, so their antibody titers [levels] weren’t extremely high,” Yang said. “Indeed, we have seen other people that have very, very high antibody titers, on the order of 10 to 100 times higher than these.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A research group based at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York looked at nearly 20,000 people with mild to moderate illness. The group tells a more reassuring story in an \u003ca href=\"https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.14.20151126v1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">unpublished research report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It finds that 90% of those people had antibody responses that lasted at least three months. And these antibodies neutralized the virus, at least in the lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s reasonable to assume that there will be protection for a time frame of one to three years,” said \u003ca href=\"https://icahn.mssm.edu/profiles/florian-krammer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Florian Krammer\u003c/a>, one of the scientists on that study. “But of course, we are scientists. We have to prove that, right? That’s why everyone’s cautious about it. But I think that’s a pretty fair assumption.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists focus a lot on antibodies as markers of immunity in part because they are easy to measure. Antibodies do tend to wane over time in many instances, but when that happens, the immune system doesn’t necessarily have to start again from scratch. Memory of a past infection can be stored in a cell called a memory B cell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Those are cells that don’t actually make any antibodies unless the virus comes back, and then they see that virus again,” Krammer said. “But then they react very, very quickly and make antibodies quickly. So, there are many arms that the immune system has to tackle this virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet another line of defense is a kind of immune cell called a T cell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“T cells are very important in fighting viruses,” said \u003ca href=\"https://profiles.stanford.edu/kari-nadeau\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Dr. Kari Nadeau\u003c/a> at Stanford. They can kill viruses. “And so, one thing we’re looking at [is] as the antibodies wane, do the T-cell responses also wane?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists developing some of the coronavirus vaccines have noticed that their experimental products spark a strong T-cell response. That includes \u003ca href=\"https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31604-4/fulltext\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">the vaccine from the University of Oxford\u003c/a>, which is in an advanced stage of testing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know from many other infections, the vaccine response can be much more durable than the natural infection response,” said Adrian Hill, who is the principal investigator for this vaccine study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s partly because people get a strong dose with a vaccine, which stimulates strong immunity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m pretty confident that in COVID we’re going to see the vaccines are more durable than a natural COVID infection,” Hill said. “But again, we don’t know yet. We need to wait and see.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, for now, people who have already been infected with the coronavirus will also have to wait and see whether they remain immune, and if so for how long.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Immunity to four milder coronaviruses, which circulate widely and cause common colds, doesn’t persist for years on end. So, the duration of an antibody response may depend at least in part on whether an infection led to a significant illness — and a significant immune reaction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>You can contact NPR science correspondent Richard Harris at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:rharris@npr.org\">\u003cem>rharris@npr.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=How+Long+Will+Immunity+To+The+Coronavirus+Last%3F+&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Inside SF's New Biosafety Lab, Where Scientists Wrangle Live Coronavirus",
"headTitle": "Inside SF’s New Biosafety Lab, Where Scientists Wrangle Live Coronavirus | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>There’s so much scientists still don’t know about the novel coronavirus: basic stuff, like how exactly it invades a host’s healthy cells, the molecular interactions that enable it to spread through the body and why it affects some people more than others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a handful of labs in the Bay Area, including ones at UCSF and UC Berkeley, are trying to gain a better understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 behaves by doing basic research with live virus. The work could help scientists develop and test new treatments or vaccines to target the virus more effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To handle live coronavirus and other potential deadly airborne pathogens, these labs must meet strict Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/infographics/biosafety.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">containment requirements\u003c/a> set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a recent visit to San Francisco’s \u003ca href=\"https://gladstone.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gladstone Institutes\u003c/a>, we got a look inside its newly launched BSL-3 lab (before any live virus arrived) with Dr. Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, and lab director Mauricio Montano.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I learned, getting into a BSL-3 lab requires a few extra steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>From Surgical Mask to ‘Space Suit’\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967668\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967668\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">To enter the BSL-3 lab, researchers must go from street clothes to scrubs to full body suits. Here, reporter Peter Arcuni steps into the “clean space” with booties over his sneakers. \u003ccite>(Peter Arcuni/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>These days, a basic cloth facial covering or surgical mask is required even to enter Gladstone’s Mission Bay headquarters. But gaining access to the BSL-3 lab requires two more wardrobe changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first takes place in a locker room, where researchers go from street clothes into scrubs, gloves and a bonnet that resembles a gauzy shower cap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s part of the sacrifice of making sure everybody’s safe and clean,” Montano said. Then he walked me through the protocol for putting a pair of booties on over my sneakers, before stepping over a line of yellow tape on the floor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll put a booty on one foot, and then you’ll be able to plant your foot into this clean space. And then you’ll put the other booty on and you’ll be able to walk in here,” he coached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It took me a few tries to get it right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even very experienced Ph.D.-level virologists who come in here for the first time will have the same experience,” Montano said. “The environment requires a really hyperactive vigilance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next we head down the hall to the BSL-3 lab’s secure anteroom. A digital monitor by the door showed the air pressure as negative, which ensures that no aerosolized particles (stuff floating in the air) can escape. Instead, a high-powered HVAC system draws in the lab’s air and cleans it with a series of filters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A BSL-3 is like a giant vacuum cleaner,” Montano said. “No pathogens or anything could come out of that room.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967660\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967660\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-800x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-2048x1367.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-1920x1282.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dr. Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, inside the BSL-3 lab, where researchers will try to learn how the coronavirus infects a host’s cells and spreads through the body. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Gladstone Institutes)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The lab’s safety is closely monitored by officials at UCSF, as well as state and federal health regulators.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once inside with the anteroom’s outer door shut, scientists will don Tyvek hazmat suits — or “space suits,” as Montano calls them — and respiratory purifiers to filter out potential pathogens. Only then can they enter the lab’s inner workspace. (Because there was no live virus present during our visit, we skipped this last step.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here researchers will work with the virus with gloved hands reaching inside glass-shielded biosafety cabinets that resemble laboratory hoods from chemistry class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Any physical waste, like used reagents, that needs to leave the room must first be sterilized by the lab’s autoclave, which is essentially a high-temperature medical-grade pressure cooker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>Anything to come out of here basically has to be dead and has to be clean,” Montano said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As I always say, I feel much safer here than I feel at the local grocery store,” Ott added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>‘We Know Very Little About This Virus’\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ott says the ability to work with active SARS-CoV-2 opens up avenues of inquiry that aren’t possible using inactive viral fragments or looking at genomic sequences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>A Biosafety Level 3 lab is allowing you to work with dangerous viruses that are actually fully functional and replicating,” Ott said. “So you can study the virus, the full viral life cycle, in an animal or in a cell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967674\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967674\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Before leaving the room, waste and unused research materials need to be sterilized by the lab’s autoclave, which is essentially a medical-grade pressure cooker. \u003ccite>(Peter Arcuni)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The lab is equipped to run animal studies using mice, which will be housed in cages inside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The approach, she says, can uncover ways to interfere with that life cycle either by attacking the virus itself or by targeting parts of the host cells that the virus interacts with to block it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re coming really from the mechanistic side,” Ott said. “You’re diving deep into the interaction of the virus with the host.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ott says scientists still don’t fully understand precisely how the coronavirus spreads throughout the body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have to learn how it engages the upper airway, how it gets into the lower airway and how it disseminates into other organs from there,” she said. “There’s a lot that we don’t know\u003ci>.”\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To tackle this, Ott says the lab plans to culture the types of cells that are the primary or secondary targets of the virus. These include lung, gut, liver and heart cells\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we are trying to reconstruct the more complex cell systems in a dish and then see how the virus behaves,” Ott said. “Is it infecting everybody? Is it infecting dependent on a certain factor, like an important entry factor and receptor? Is that all mediated by this molecule?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gladstone’s BSL-3 lab, Ott says, can also serve as a place to test potential treatments and vaccines before they are tested in human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before you go into a clinical trial, you want to make sure that what you’re doing is efficient, that it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do,” Ott said. “These preclinical studies can give you a much better idea about what exactly is happening when you give that drug to a patient.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>‘Too Many Questions to Answer At Once’\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gladstone’s new facility will allow virologists to gain a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2, but the virus is a puzzle with many pieces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s too many questions to answer at once,” Ott said. “Collaboration, I think, is absolutely essential. … This has been unprecedented, at least in my experience, how people have come together around this virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967662\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967662\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lab director Mauricio Montano with his hands inside a biosafety cabinet. To work with active SARS-CoV-2, labs need to meet biosafety level 3 containment requirements set by the CDC. . \u003ccite>(Peter Arcuni/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In preparation for the new lab’s launch, Ott partnered with UCSF’s BSL-3 to culture cells and prepare the virus for transfer to Gladstone. She’s collaborating with other researchers at the university who have identified \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2286-9\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">more than 300 interactions\u003c/a> between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are in very good relationship with all the BSL-3s here in the Bay Area,” Ott said. “Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF, I think everybody recognizes that these laboratories are in short supply.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are roughly 200 BSL-3 labs throughout the U.S., according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.selectagents.gov/resources/FSAP_Annual_Report_2018_508.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2018 report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point, Ott says, the coronavirus pandemic has affected everyone. Her brother-in-law, a physician in a small Austrian village, contracted the virus and became seriously ill. But the science, she says, gives her hope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>You see all the politics, you see all the rush. But at the end,” she says, “you settle down, you look at your data and you see that you’re making progress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The basic coronavirus research done by Gladstone and its collaborators, Ott says, could help fight not only this virus, but the next wave as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>It’s a constant evolutionary battle,” says Ott. “There will be other clever viruses, whether they’re coronaviruses or influenza viruses or even something like HIV. So it’s important to have facilities like this where we can prepare for the future pandemics that are coming.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Working with live coronovirus allows scientists to learn how it behaves and develop treatments to fight it. But only some labs are set up to handle it.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>There’s so much scientists still don’t know about the novel coronavirus: basic stuff, like how exactly it invades a host’s healthy cells, the molecular interactions that enable it to spread through the body and why it affects some people more than others.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a handful of labs in the Bay Area, including ones at UCSF and UC Berkeley, are trying to gain a better understanding of how SARS-CoV-2 behaves by doing basic research with live virus. The work could help scientists develop and test new treatments or vaccines to target the virus more effectively.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To handle live coronavirus and other potential deadly airborne pathogens, these labs must meet strict Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/cpr/infographics/biosafety.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">containment requirements\u003c/a> set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a recent visit to San Francisco’s \u003ca href=\"https://gladstone.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Gladstone Institutes\u003c/a>, we got a look inside its newly launched BSL-3 lab (before any live virus arrived) with Dr. Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, and lab director Mauricio Montano.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I learned, getting into a BSL-3 lab requires a few extra steps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>From Surgical Mask to ‘Space Suit’\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967668\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967668\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-3-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">To enter the BSL-3 lab, researchers must go from street clothes to scrubs to full body suits. Here, reporter Peter Arcuni steps into the “clean space” with booties over his sneakers. \u003ccite>(Peter Arcuni/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>These days, a basic cloth facial covering or surgical mask is required even to enter Gladstone’s Mission Bay headquarters. But gaining access to the BSL-3 lab requires two more wardrobe changes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first takes place in a locker room, where researchers go from street clothes into scrubs, gloves and a bonnet that resembles a gauzy shower cap.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s part of the sacrifice of making sure everybody’s safe and clean,” Montano said. Then he walked me through the protocol for putting a pair of booties on over my sneakers, before stepping over a line of yellow tape on the floor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll put a booty on one foot, and then you’ll be able to plant your foot into this clean space. And then you’ll put the other booty on and you’ll be able to walk in here,” he coached.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It took me a few tries to get it right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even very experienced Ph.D.-level virologists who come in here for the first time will have the same experience,” Montano said. “The environment requires a really hyperactive vigilance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next we head down the hall to the BSL-3 lab’s secure anteroom. A digital monitor by the door showed the air pressure as negative, which ensures that no aerosolized particles (stuff floating in the air) can escape. Instead, a high-powered HVAC system draws in the lab’s air and cleans it with a series of filters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A BSL-3 is like a giant vacuum cleaner,” Montano said. “No pathogens or anything could come out of that room.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967660\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967660\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-800x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-2048x1367.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-BSL3-facility8-1920x1282.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dr. Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, inside the BSL-3 lab, where researchers will try to learn how the coronavirus infects a host’s cells and spreads through the body. \u003ccite>(Courtesy of Gladstone Institutes)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The lab’s safety is closely monitored by officials at UCSF, as well as state and federal health regulators.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Once inside with the anteroom’s outer door shut, scientists will don Tyvek hazmat suits — or “space suits,” as Montano calls them — and respiratory purifiers to filter out potential pathogens. Only then can they enter the lab’s inner workspace. (Because there was no live virus present during our visit, we skipped this last step.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here researchers will work with the virus with gloved hands reaching inside glass-shielded biosafety cabinets that resemble laboratory hoods from chemistry class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Any physical waste, like used reagents, that needs to leave the room must first be sterilized by the lab’s autoclave, which is essentially a high-temperature medical-grade pressure cooker.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>Anything to come out of here basically has to be dead and has to be clean,” Montano said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As I always say, I feel much safer here than I feel at the local grocery store,” Ott added.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>‘We Know Very Little About This Virus’\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ott says the ability to work with active SARS-CoV-2 opens up avenues of inquiry that aren’t possible using inactive viral fragments or looking at genomic sequences.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>A Biosafety Level 3 lab is allowing you to work with dangerous viruses that are actually fully functional and replicating,” Ott said. “So you can study the virus, the full viral life cycle, in an animal or in a cell.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967674\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967674\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-800x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-Autoclave-1920x1440.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Before leaving the room, waste and unused research materials need to be sterilized by the lab’s autoclave, which is essentially a medical-grade pressure cooker. \u003ccite>(Peter Arcuni)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>The lab is equipped to run animal studies using mice, which will be housed in cages inside.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The approach, she says, can uncover ways to interfere with that life cycle either by attacking the virus itself or by targeting parts of the host cells that the virus interacts with to block it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re coming really from the mechanistic side,” Ott said. “You’re diving deep into the interaction of the virus with the host.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ott says scientists still don’t fully understand precisely how the coronavirus spreads throughout the body.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We have to learn how it engages the upper airway, how it gets into the lower airway and how it disseminates into other organs from there,” she said. “There’s a lot that we don’t know\u003ci>.”\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To tackle this, Ott says the lab plans to culture the types of cells that are the primary or secondary targets of the virus. These include lung, gut, liver and heart cells\u003ci>.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we are trying to reconstruct the more complex cell systems in a dish and then see how the virus behaves,” Ott said. “Is it infecting everybody? Is it infecting dependent on a certain factor, like an important entry factor and receptor? Is that all mediated by this molecule?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gladstone’s BSL-3 lab, Ott says, can also serve as a place to test potential treatments and vaccines before they are tested in human subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Before you go into a clinical trial, you want to make sure that what you’re doing is efficient, that it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do,” Ott said. “These preclinical studies can give you a much better idea about what exactly is happening when you give that drug to a patient.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>‘Too Many Questions to Answer At Once’\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gladstone’s new facility will allow virologists to gain a better understanding of SARS-CoV-2, but the virus is a puzzle with many pieces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s too many questions to answer at once,” Ott said. “Collaboration, I think, is absolutely essential. … This has been unprecedented, at least in my experience, how people have come together around this virus.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1967662\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1967662\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2020/07/Gladstone-2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lab director Mauricio Montano with his hands inside a biosafety cabinet. To work with active SARS-CoV-2, labs need to meet biosafety level 3 containment requirements set by the CDC. . \u003ccite>(Peter Arcuni/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>In preparation for the new lab’s launch, Ott partnered with UCSF’s BSL-3 to culture cells and prepare the virus for transfer to Gladstone. She’s collaborating with other researchers at the university who have identified \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2286-9\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">more than 300 interactions\u003c/a> between SARS-CoV-2 and human proteins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We are in very good relationship with all the BSL-3s here in the Bay Area,” Ott said. “Stanford, Berkeley, UCSF, I think everybody recognizes that these laboratories are in short supply.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are roughly 200 BSL-3 labs throughout the U.S., according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.selectagents.gov/resources/FSAP_Annual_Report_2018_508.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">2018 report\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At this point, Ott says, the coronavirus pandemic has affected everyone. Her brother-in-law, a physician in a small Austrian village, contracted the virus and became seriously ill. But the science, she says, gives her hope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>You see all the politics, you see all the rush. But at the end,” she says, “you settle down, you look at your data and you see that you’re making progress.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The basic coronavirus research done by Gladstone and its collaborators, Ott says, could help fight not only this virus, but the next wave as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>“\u003c/i>It’s a constant evolutionary battle,” says Ott. “There will be other clever viruses, whether they’re coronaviruses or influenza viruses or even something like HIV. So it’s important to have facilities like this where we can prepare for the future pandemics that are coming.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "As US Racial Reckoning Escalates, Reformers Target Environmental Icons",
"headTitle": "As US Racial Reckoning Escalates, Reformers Target Environmental Icons | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The death of George Floyd has triggered a top-to-bottom house cleaning of the racial skeletons in America’s collective closet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The broad push for racial justice has touched every aspect of American life and has caught up with a movement many people associate with progressiveness, not overt racism. Even the environmental icon, John Muir, a founding father of the nation’s national park system, isn’t beyond reproach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the largest and oldest conservation groups in the U.S., circulated a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club\">detailed post\u003c/a> last week titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align='right' citation='Michael Brune, Sierra Club']‘The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea. One that’s still circulating today. It’s the idea that exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs.’[/pullquote]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the piece, Brune reckons with some of the racist statements and actions of the group’s founders, its early history of excluding people of color, and what he described as an ongoing resistance from current members who say the Sierra Club should “‘stay in our lane,’ and stop talking about issues of race, equity, and privilege.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune wrote that as “defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments,” the conservation movement must also “take this moment to re-examine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history,” he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The letter ignited an online conversation about the future of one of the nation’s most powerful environmental organizations and about the state of the conservation movement, where a new generation of reform-minded advocates have sought to create change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They point to the fact that visitation at national parks \u003ca href=\"https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=8eb4b125e53d4efeb36a6d0495fdddd0\">skews\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=8eb4b125e53d4efeb36a6d0495fdddd0\">white\u003c/a>. They’re pressing for investment in city and county parks in communities of color and for better representation in powerful organizations like the Sierra Club and in the natural places the groups protect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of these reformers is Rue Mapp, the founder of Oakland-based Outdoor Afro, which seeks to challenge what she\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10481490/african-american-hiking-group-turns-to-nature-for-beauty-and-community\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> calls\u003c/a> the myth that Black Americans don’t get out in nature\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10481490/african-american-hiking-group-turns-to-nature-for-beauty-and-community\">.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says many Black people like herself have not always felt welcome in groups like the Sierra Club, which she learned from experience when she started Outdoor Afro and partnered with the organization (although Brune remains a friend and a member of her organization’s board).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s a fundamental challenge that [Brune] must embrace in this moment; it is a culture of change,” she says. “It’s like turning around a big ship on a dime, nearly impossible. But we can’t deduct points for timing. And it’s not too late for organizations like the Sierra Club to shift and reinvent themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says the letter is a good step forward, but that its arrival is overdue. Now it’s on the group’s membership to embrace a new vision of conservation that acknowledges the experience of people of color.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damon Nagami, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and an advocate for environmental justice in conservation, agrees that it’s a reckoning “long overdue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was very glad to see Sierra Club taking its history head-on,” he says. “But it’s undeniable that environmentalism and the conservation field is predominantly white.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Japanese American, Nagami says it’s been “difficult at times to navigate this space.” He says a similar conversation is happening within his own powerful environmental organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Troubling Past\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune’s post examines the history of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and a towering figure in conservation circles, especially in California, where he fought to preserve some of the most grand and beautiful places in the Sierra Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the “patron saint of the American wilderness” was a complicated person, Brune wrote. Muir not only described Black people and Native Americans using offensive and racist language, he maintained friendships with Joseph LeConte, David Starr Jordan and Henry Fairfield Osborn, leaders in the eugenics \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement\">movement\u003c/a>, which sought to prove the genetic superiority of white people. (Brune does not indicate that Muir personally espoused eugenics.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During its early years, Brune said, the Sierra Club was “basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through — wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group’s composition was maintained by an exclusive membership program until the 1960s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Membership could only be granted through sponsorship from existing members, some of whom screened out any applicants of color,” Brune wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea,” he wrote. “One that’s still circulating today. It’s the idea that exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group’s membership and views have evolved. Recently, the Sierra Club led the \u003ca href=\"https://content.sierraclub.org/coal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Beyond Coal\u003c/a> campaign, a successful effort to shutter hundreds of dirty and aging coal plants across the U.S. and Europe, with a focus on facilities surrounded by neighborhoods of color. The group’s organizers have often partnered with local environmental justice groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nevertheless, Brune’s letter went on to highlight what he calls “willful ignorance” in the environmental movement, adding that this complacency “allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It allows them to overlook, too, the fact that only people insulated from systemic racism and brutality can afford to focus solely on preserving wilderness,” he wrote. “Black communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color continue to endure the traumatic burden of fighting for their right to a healthy environment while simultaneously fighting for freedom from discrimination and police violence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune’s post landed in the middle of a raging debate about whether historical figures should be considered by contemporary social standards, or in the context of the views of their time. Some \u003ca href=\"https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/23/beyond-john-muirs-racism-the-sierra-club-and-the-changing-face-of-environmentalism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">argue\u003c/a> that parks named after John Muir should drop his name because of his racists comments, while others point to the fact that — as Brune notes — Muir’s views “evolved later in his life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the John Muir Wilderness, the Muir Woods National Monument in Marin and many California schools are named after the mountaineer. Visitors to parks such as Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon will find trails with his name; his writing, which strove to describe the sacred aspects of the rugged wilderness, is quoted on postcards, in pamphlets and on \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/muir.htm\">websites. \u003c/a>Theater groups routinely \u003ca href=\"https://www.johnmuirlive.com/\">perform\u003c/a> his story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The board of John Muir Health, a health care system located in the East Bay, said it will “examine the history and legacy of the John Muir name” and consider “recommendations on this complex topic,” The Mercury News \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/22/sierra-club-director-cancels-founder-john-muir-should-parks-schools-be-renamed/\">reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>New Legislation Brings Hope of Change\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune’s manifesto arrived in the same week that Congress \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1967495/the-most-significant-conservation-measure-in-50-years-is-now-headed-to-trumps-desk\">passed\u003c/a> the Great American Outdoors Act, which is being celebrated by Mapp, Nagami and other people of color who work in conservation and hope it can chart a future for the nation’s parklands that is more inclusive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GreenLatinos, a national nonprofit watchdog for conservation issues that affect the U.S. Latino community, said in a statement that the bill “allows for more equitable access to outdoor spaces for Latinx communities” and called it “one of the most important environmental legislations in this country’s history.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>President Donald Trump supports the legislation and has said he will sign it. The bill includes $900 million a year — double the current spending — for the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund, and an additional $1.9 billion per year on improvements at parks across the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many communities of color don’t have access to parks or green space, so they don’t get the many proven benefits — physical, emotional and psychological — of being out in nature,” said the NRDC’s Nagami. “This act helps by creating a permanent funding source for our state and local parks, among other things, so we can build and maintain green spaces in the park-poor communities that need them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The act is also seen as a long-needed investment in basic park infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s literally like, how are we going to fix broken pipes and visitor centers and everything that needs updating,” says José González, founder of Latino Outdoors, a group that advocates for diversifying parks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“With John Muir, it’s the cultural infrastructure,” he says. “How do we define conservation now and knowing that the nation’s parks weren’t designed for people of color? Given this brokenness, how do we construct something different and ideally better?”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The broad push for racial justice has now come to the environmental movement.",
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"title": "As US Racial Reckoning Escalates, Reformers Target Environmental Icons | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The death of George Floyd has triggered a top-to-bottom house cleaning of the racial skeletons in America’s collective closet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The broad push for racial justice has touched every aspect of American life and has caught up with a movement many people associate with progressiveness, not overt racism. Even the environmental icon, John Muir, a founding father of the nation’s national park system, isn’t beyond reproach.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the largest and oldest conservation groups in the U.S., circulated a \u003ca href=\"https://www.sierraclub.org/michael-brune/2020/07/john-muir-early-history-sierra-club\">detailed post\u003c/a> last week titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea. One that’s still circulating today. It’s the idea that exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the piece, Brune reckons with some of the racist statements and actions of the group’s founders, its early history of excluding people of color, and what he described as an ongoing resistance from current members who say the Sierra Club should “‘stay in our lane,’ and stop talking about issues of race, equity, and privilege.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune wrote that as “defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments,” the conservation movement must also “take this moment to re-examine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history,” he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The letter ignited an online conversation about the future of one of the nation’s most powerful environmental organizations and about the state of the conservation movement, where a new generation of reform-minded advocates have sought to create change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They point to the fact that visitation at national parks \u003ca href=\"https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=8eb4b125e53d4efeb36a6d0495fdddd0\">skews\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=8eb4b125e53d4efeb36a6d0495fdddd0\">white\u003c/a>. They’re pressing for investment in city and county parks in communities of color and for better representation in powerful organizations like the Sierra Club and in the natural places the groups protect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of these reformers is Rue Mapp, the founder of Oakland-based Outdoor Afro, which seeks to challenge what she\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10481490/african-american-hiking-group-turns-to-nature-for-beauty-and-community\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"> calls\u003c/a> the myth that Black Americans don’t get out in nature\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/10481490/african-american-hiking-group-turns-to-nature-for-beauty-and-community\">.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says many Black people like herself have not always felt welcome in groups like the Sierra Club, which she learned from experience when she started Outdoor Afro and partnered with the organization (although Brune remains a friend and a member of her organization’s board).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s a fundamental challenge that [Brune] must embrace in this moment; it is a culture of change,” she says. “It’s like turning around a big ship on a dime, nearly impossible. But we can’t deduct points for timing. And it’s not too late for organizations like the Sierra Club to shift and reinvent themselves.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says the letter is a good step forward, but that its arrival is overdue. Now it’s on the group’s membership to embrace a new vision of conservation that acknowledges the experience of people of color.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damon Nagami, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and an advocate for environmental justice in conservation, agrees that it’s a reckoning “long overdue.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I was very glad to see Sierra Club taking its history head-on,” he says. “But it’s undeniable that environmentalism and the conservation field is predominantly white.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A Japanese American, Nagami says it’s been “difficult at times to navigate this space.” He says a similar conversation is happening within his own powerful environmental organization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Troubling Past\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune’s post examines the history of John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and a towering figure in conservation circles, especially in California, where he fought to preserve some of the most grand and beautiful places in the Sierra Nevada.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the “patron saint of the American wilderness” was a complicated person, Brune wrote. Muir not only described Black people and Native Americans using offensive and racist language, he maintained friendships with Joseph LeConte, David Starr Jordan and Henry Fairfield Osborn, leaders in the eugenics \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement\">movement\u003c/a>, which sought to prove the genetic superiority of white people. (Brune does not indicate that Muir personally espoused eugenics.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During its early years, Brune said, the Sierra Club was “basically a mountaineering club for middle- and upper-class white people who worked to preserve the wilderness they hiked through — wilderness that had begun to need protection only a few decades earlier, when white settlers violently displaced the Indigenous peoples who had lived on and taken care of the land for thousands of years.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group’s composition was maintained by an exclusive membership program until the 1960s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Membership could only be granted through sponsorship from existing members, some of whom screened out any applicants of color,” Brune wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The whiteness and privilege of our early membership fed into a very dangerous idea,” he wrote. “One that’s still circulating today. It’s the idea that exploring, enjoying, and protecting the outdoors can be separated from human affairs.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group’s membership and views have evolved. Recently, the Sierra Club led the \u003ca href=\"https://content.sierraclub.org/coal/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Beyond Coal\u003c/a> campaign, a successful effort to shutter hundreds of dirty and aging coal plants across the U.S. and Europe, with a focus on facilities surrounded by neighborhoods of color. The group’s organizers have often partnered with local environmental justice groups.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nevertheless, Brune’s letter went on to highlight what he calls “willful ignorance” in the environmental movement, adding that this complacency “allows some people to shut their eyes to the reality that the wild places we love are also the ancestral homelands of Native peoples, forced off their lands in the decades or centuries before they became national parks.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It allows them to overlook, too, the fact that only people insulated from systemic racism and brutality can afford to focus solely on preserving wilderness,” he wrote. “Black communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color continue to endure the traumatic burden of fighting for their right to a healthy environment while simultaneously fighting for freedom from discrimination and police violence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune’s post landed in the middle of a raging debate about whether historical figures should be considered by contemporary social standards, or in the context of the views of their time. Some \u003ca href=\"https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/23/beyond-john-muirs-racism-the-sierra-club-and-the-changing-face-of-environmentalism/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">argue\u003c/a> that parks named after John Muir should drop his name because of his racists comments, while others point to the fact that — as Brune notes — Muir’s views “evolved later in his life.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the John Muir Wilderness, the Muir Woods National Monument in Marin and many California schools are named after the mountaineer. Visitors to parks such as Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon will find trails with his name; his writing, which strove to describe the sacred aspects of the rugged wilderness, is quoted on postcards, in pamphlets and on \u003ca href=\"https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/historyculture/muir.htm\">websites. \u003c/a>Theater groups routinely \u003ca href=\"https://www.johnmuirlive.com/\">perform\u003c/a> his story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The board of John Muir Health, a health care system located in the East Bay, said it will “examine the history and legacy of the John Muir name” and consider “recommendations on this complex topic,” The Mercury News \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/07/22/sierra-club-director-cancels-founder-john-muir-should-parks-schools-be-renamed/\">reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>New Legislation Brings Hope of Change\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brune’s manifesto arrived in the same week that Congress \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1967495/the-most-significant-conservation-measure-in-50-years-is-now-headed-to-trumps-desk\">passed\u003c/a> the Great American Outdoors Act, which is being celebrated by Mapp, Nagami and other people of color who work in conservation and hope it can chart a future for the nation’s parklands that is more inclusive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>GreenLatinos, a national nonprofit watchdog for conservation issues that affect the U.S. Latino community, said in a statement that the bill “allows for more equitable access to outdoor spaces for Latinx communities” and called it “one of the most important environmental legislations in this country’s history.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>President Donald Trump supports the legislation and has said he will sign it. The bill includes $900 million a year — double the current spending — for the popular Land and Water Conservation Fund, and an additional $1.9 billion per year on improvements at parks across the country.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many communities of color don’t have access to parks or green space, so they don’t get the many proven benefits — physical, emotional and psychological — of being out in nature,” said the NRDC’s Nagami. “This act helps by creating a permanent funding source for our state and local parks, among other things, so we can build and maintain green spaces in the park-poor communities that need them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The act is also seen as a long-needed investment in basic park infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s literally like, how are we going to fix broken pipes and visitor centers and everything that needs updating,” says José González, founder of Latino Outdoors, a group that advocates for diversifying parks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"rss": "https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nq0gn.rss"
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},
"californiareport": {
"id": "californiareport",
"title": "The California Report",
"tagline": "California, day by day",
"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
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"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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}
},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
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"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
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"order": 1
},
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"here-and-now": {
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"info": "One of public radio's most dynamic voices, Sam Sanders helped launch The NPR Politics Podcast and hosted NPR's hit show It's Been A Minute. Now, the award-winning host returns with something brand new, The Sam Sanders Show. Every week, Sam Sanders and friends dig into the culture that shapes our lives: what's driving the biggest trends, how artists really think, and even the memes you can't stop scrolling past. Sam is beloved for his way of unpacking the world and bringing you up close to fresh currents and engaging conversations. The Sam Sanders Show is smart, funny and always a good time.",
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