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      in World Politics

      Is India’s Vaccine Diplomacy a Good Idea?

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      In terms of numbers, India ranks the third worst after the US and Brazil when it comes to COVID-19 infections. At the time of publishing, the country has recorded over 12.3 million confirmed cases and more than 163,000 deaths. The BBC reports that India is facing a “severe, intensive” second wave of the pandemic. The situation in states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Punjab has reached alarming proportions.

      How Did India Combat COVID-19 in 2020?

      Last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a stringent lockdown that brought economic activity to a shuddering halt. This lockdown led to a dramatic contraction of India’s GDP by 23.9% in the April-June 2020 quarter. The economy recovered somewhat in later quarters, but it experienced a recession in the 2020-21 financial year for the first time in 25 years.

      Arguably, the lockdown was a success in preventing a rapid spread of COVID-19 last year. In percentage terms, India did not do too badly. After all, it has nearly 1.4 billion people in contrast to the US population of 330 million. The daily new cases in India dramatically declined until recently when the second wave hit the country. Thanks to a young population and public health measures, India experienced a remarkably low mortality rate.

      What’s Behind Chile’s Vaccination Success?

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      India has low per capita income and poor health care facilities. So, its achievement in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak has been hailed by many public health experts, including the World Health Organization (WHO). In January, India launched a massive vaccination program to fight the pandemic. This was possible because the country has a track record of mass vaccination and massive vaccine production.

      Indian manufacturers supply more than 60% of the world’s vaccines against diseases like polio and measles. Early on, the country began mass production of two COVID-19 vaccines: Covishield and Covaxin. The Serum Institute of India (SII), which partnered with the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, had already produced and stocked approximately 70 million Covishield doses even before India granted emergency approval to their vaccine. 

      On January 16, India launched an ambitious plan to vaccinate around 300 million people by June. The world’s largest vaccination program focused first on those with high vulnerability to the coronavirus. First on the list were health care workers. They were followed by those who were 65 years or older. This ensured that the vaccine was not monopolized by the richest sections of Indian society. 

      As vaccinations have increased, the Modi government has eased restrictions in the country. Crowds have gathered at large weddings, sporting events and festival celebrations. The government lifted restrictions to stimulate economic activity. A poor country like India with a large population could not afford a lockdown for too long. However, the easing of restrictions has not only led to increased economic growth, but also rising cases of COVID-19 infections. India faces a tough balancing act between stimulating economic activity and curtailing a pandemic.

      India’s Vaccine Diplomacy

      During the pandemic, India has embarked on an ambitious foreign policy initiative. Modi announced the Vaccine Maitri initiative to supply COVID-19 vaccines to other nations only four days after India began domestic vaccinations. With the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines, India has shipped approximately 61 million doses to 84 countries, which have included free batches. It has pledged 200 million doses for the WHO’s COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative to ensure vaccines for 92 low and middle-income countries.

      Embed from Getty Images

      India began its vaccine diplomacy by distributing doses to its immediate neighbors: Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. The country has also exported vaccines to faraway places such as the Caribbean, where the likes of Barbados, Dominica and Jamaica have benefited from Indian aid. Leaders of countries such as Brazil and Antigua and Barbuda have publicly thanked Modi for his country’s generosity.

      As per some foreign policy experts, India’s vaccine distribution is a diplomatic masterstroke. It helps the country gain goodwill and increase its soft power. It could lead to a more peaceful neighborhood. In the future, India might win much support, strengthen its claim to a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and emerge as a great world power.

      Vaccine diplomacy might be giving a rare chance to counter China, which has launched the Belt and Road Initiative to increase its global footprint. For decades, China has backed Pakistan and, for the last few years, has increased its presence in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. With Chinese influence growing in India’s closest neighbors, the country has understandably become anxious.

      In June 2020, Chinese and Indian troops engaged in a bloody hand-to-hand combat with many dying in the process. Since that clash, relations between India and China have been fraught. India has banned over 200 Chinese apps and restricted Chinese investment into the country. COVID-19 has given a unique opportunity to India — the “pharmacy of the world” — to compete with China. By shipping vaccines to low and middle-income countries, India is gaining influence at the Chinese expense whose vaccines have been questioned by Western media.

      Rich countries have failed poorer ones because they have focused on domestic programs. Unlike India, the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom are focused completely on vaccinating their domestic populations. India’s generosity is unique and might lead to long-term gains.

      Masterstroke or Distraction?

      However, there is a counterargument that India has been premature in kicking off vaccine diplomacy. It did so before setting its own house in order. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, as of April 2, India has administered nearly 69 million doses, fully inoculating only 9.6 million people. That is just 0.71% of its population. India’s focus should have been getting every one of its citizens vaccinated instead of basking in complimentary tweets from foreign leaders. Such goodwill might turn out to be very transient. 

      Recently, India has slowed down its vaccine exports and speeded up its vaccination program. The government has now enrolled private hospitals in its vaccination drive, and everyone above the age of 45 is now eligible for the vaccine. Modi himself got vaccinated on March 1, boosting public faith in COVID-19 vaccines and increasing their uptake nearly four-fold. It seems that the government is paying attention to its critics.

      Time will tell whether India’s vaccine diplomacy was a bold masterstroke or an unwise distraction. It reveals that there are no easy choices for any nation during a raging pandemic.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump coronavirus coordinator, Deborah Birx, takes job at air purifier business

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      Dr Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, is taking a private sector job, joining a Texas manufacturer that says its purifiers clean Covid-19 from the air within minutes and from surfaces within hours.Birx will join Dallas-based ActivePure as chief scientific and medical adviser, she and the company said on Friday.An expert in global health, Birx came to the White House in 2020 to help lead the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.But she was criticised for not standing up to former president Donald Trump as he played down the virus, predicted it would disappear, and questioned whether ingesting bleach could help cure infected Americans.[embedded content]While her friend and former mentor, Dr Anthony Fauci, was promoted to become a top medical adviser to Joe Biden, Birx did not get a job in the new administration.“The Biden administration wanted a clean slate,” she told Reuters in an interview. “I understand that completely.”Birx left government earlier this week.She and Fauci, she said, asked themselves regularly what could have been done differently over the last year.“When you have the 100,000 people we lost over the summer, and the 300,000 people we lost over the fall-winter surge, you have to ask yourself and have to know that it didn’t go as well as it should have,” she said.“All of us are responsible for that.”The coronavirus has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States, more than any other country.Birx said she was still processing regrets and steps she could have taken to do be more effective.“I’m trying to rank order them,” she said. “We have to be willing to step back and really analyse where we could have been and why we weren’t more effective.”Birx said she remained concerned about the level of testing in the country, but she praised the new administration for modelling mask-wearing and other behaviours that help to combat the virus.Trump, a Republican, eschewed masks.“I think the messaging has been very good, very consistent,” she said of the Biden team. “That’s really important when you’re asking people to change their behaviours.”In addition to her role at ActivePure, Birx has also joined the George W Bush Institute as a global health fellow and the biopharmaceutical company Innoviva as a board member, she said. More

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      in World Politics

      The Science of Rebuilding Trust

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      During his inauguration, President Joe Biden appealed to us, American citizens, repeatedly and emphatically, to defend unity and truth against corrosion from power and profit. Fortunately, the bedrock tensions between unity, truth, power and profit have newly-discovered mathematical definitions, so their formerly mysterious interactions can now be quantified, predicted and addressed. So in strictly (deeply) scientific terms, Biden described our core problem exactly right.

      Can We Build Social Trust in an Online World?

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      I applaud and validate President Biden’s distillation of the problem of finding and keeping the truth, and of trusting it together. Human trust is based on high-speed neuromechanical interaction between living creatures. Other kinds of trust not based on that are fake to some degree. Lies created for money and power damage trust most of all.

      A Moment of Silence

      As Biden showed in his first act in office, the first step toward rebuilding is a moment of silence. Avoiding words, slowing down, taking time, breathing, acknowledging common grievances and recognizing a common purpose are not just human needs, but necessary algorithmic steps as well. Those are essential to setting up our common strategy and gathering the starting data that we need to make things right.

      The next step, as Biden also said, is to recognize corrupting forces such as money and power — and I would also add recognition. The third step, as I propose below, is to counter those three forces explicitly in our quest for public truth, to do the exact opposite of what money, power and careerism do, and to counter and reverse every information-processing step at which money, power and recognition might get a hold.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Instead of using one panel of famous, well-funded experts deliberating a few hours in public, employ a dozen groups of anonymous lone geniuses, each group working separately in secret for months on the same common question. Have them release their reports simultaneously in multiple media. That way, the unplanned overlap shows most of what matters and a path to resolving the rest — an idea so crazy it just might work.

      Since I’m describing how to restore democracy algorithmically, I might as well provide an example of legislation in the algorithmic language too. To convey data-processing ideas clearly, and thereby to avoid wasting time and money building a system that won’t work, technologists display our proposals using oversimplified examples that software architects like myself call “reference implementations” and which narrative architects like my partner call “tutor texts.”

      These examples are not meant to actually work, but to unambiguously show off crucial principles. In the spirit of reference implementations, I present the following legislative proposal, written to get to the truth about one particular subject but easily rewritten to find the truth about other subjects such as global warming or fake news: The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act.

      The Defend Act

      Over centuries, humankind has defended its children against physical extremes, dangerous chemicals and infectious organisms by resolute, rational application of the laws of nature via technology and medical science. Now is the time to use those same tools to defend our children’s growing nervous systems against the informational damage that presently undermines their trust in themselves, their families and their communities. Therefore, we here apply information science in order to understand how man-made communication helps and hurts the humans whom God made.

      The human race has discovered elemental universal laws governing processes from combustion to gravitation and from them created great and terrible technologies from fire and weapons to electricity grids and thermonuclear reactions. But no laws are more elemental than the laws of data and mathematics, and no technologies more universal and fast-growing than the mathematically-grounded technologies of information capture, processing and dissemination. Information science is changing the world we live in and, therefore, changing us as living, breathing human beings. How?

      The human race has dealt with challenges from its own technologies before. Slash-and-burn tactics eroded farmland; lead pipes poisoned water; city wells spread cholera; radioactivity caused cancer; refrigerants depleted ozone. And we have dealt with epidemics that propagated in weird and novel ways — both communicable diseases spread by touch, by body fluids, by insects, by behaviors, by drinking water, by food, and debilitating diseases of chemical imbalance, genetic dysregulation, immune collapse and misfolded proteins. Our science has both created and solved monumental problems.

      But just as no technology is more powerful than the information sciences, when deployed against an immature, growing, still-learning human nervous system, no toxin is more insidious than extractive or exploitive artificial information.

      The Defend the Growing Human Nervous System With Information Sciences Act aims to understand first and foremost the depth and texture of the threat to growing human nervous systems in order to communicate the problem to the public at large (not to solve the problem yet). This act’s approach is based on five premises about the newly-discovered sciences of information.

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      First of all, there is an urgent global mental-health crisis tightly correlated over decades with consuming unnatural sensory inputs (such as from TV screens) and interacting in unnatural ways (such as using wireless devices). These technologies seem to undermine trust in one’s own senses and in one’s connections to others, with the youngest brains bearing the greatest hurt.

      Second, computer science understands information flowing in the real world. Numerical simulations faithfully replicate the laws of physics — of combustion, explosions, weather and gravitation — inside computers, thereby confirming we understand how nature works. Autonomous vehicles such as ocean gliders, autonomous drones, self-driving cars and walking robots, select and process signals from the outside to make trustworthy models, in order to move through the world. This neutral, technological understanding might illuminate the information flows that mature humans also use to do those same things and which growing humans use to learn how to do them.

      Third, the science of epidemiology understands the information flows of medical research. Research has discovered and countered countless dangerous chemical and biological influences through concepts like clinical trials, randomization, viral spread, dose-response curves and false positive/negative risks. These potent yet neutral medical lenses might identify the most damaging aspects of artificial sensory interactions, in preparation for countering them in the same way they have already done for lead, tar, nicotine, sugar, endocrine disruptors and so on. The specific approach will extend the existing understanding of micro-toxins and micro-injuries to include the new micro-deceptions and micro-behavioral manipulations that undermine trust.

      Fourth, the mathematics of management and communication understands the information flows of businesses. The economic spreadsheets and prediction models that presently micromanage business and market decisions worldwide can, when provided with these new metrics of human health and damage, calculate two new things. First, the most cost-effective ways to prevent and reduce damage. Second, such spreadsheets can quantify the degree to which well-accepted and legal practices of monetized influence — advertising, branding, lobbying, incentivizing, media campaigns and even threats — potentially make the information they touch untrustworthy and thereby undermine human trust.

      America has risen to great challenges before. At its inception, even before Alexis De Tocqueville praised the American communitarian can-do spirit, this country gathered its most brilliant thinkers in a Constitutional Convention. In war, it gathered them to invent and create a monster weapon. In peace, it gathered them to land on the Moon. Over time, Americans have understood and made inroads against lead poisoning, ozone destruction, polluted water, smog, acid rain, nicotine and trans-fats. Now, we need to assemble our clearest thinkers to combat the deepest damage of all: the damage to how we talk and think.

      Finally, we humans are spiritual and soulful beings. Our experiences and affections could never be captured in data or equations, whether of calorie consumption, body temperature, chemical balance or information flow. But just as we use such equations to defend our bodies against hunger, hypothermia or vitamin deficiency, we might also use them to defend against confusion, mistrust and loneliness, without in the process finding our own real lives replaced or eclipsed. In fact, if the human nervous system and soul are indeed damaged when mathematically-synthesized inputs replace real ones, then they will be freed from that unreality and that damage only when we understand which inputs help and hurt us most.

      Informational Threat

      The Defend Act tasks its teams to treat the human nervous system as an information-processing system with the same quantitative, scientific neutrality as medicine already treats us as heat-generating, oxygen-consuming, blood-pumping, self-cleaning systems. Specifically, teams are to examine human informational processing in the same computational terms used for self-driving vehicles that are also self-training and to examine our informational environments, whether man-made or God-made, in the same terms used for the “training data” consumed by such artificial foraging machines.

      An informational threat such as the present one must be met in new ways. In particular, the current threat differs from historic ones by undermining communication itself, making unbiased discussion of the problem nearly impossible in public or in subsidized scientific discourse. Thus, the first concern of the Defend Act is to insulate the process of scientific discovery from the institutional, traditional and commercial pressures that might otherwise contaminate its answers. Thus, the act aims to maximize scientific reliability and minimize commercial, traditional and political interference as follows.

      The investigation will proceed not by a single dream team of famous, respected and politically-vetted experts but by 10 separate teams of anonymous polymaths, living and working together in undisclosed locations, assembled from international scientists under international auspices; for example, the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will collaborate with the World Health Organization.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Each team will be tasked with producing its best version of the long-term scientific truth, that is of the same truth each other team ought to also obtain based on accepted universal principles. Teams pursuing actual scientific coherence thus ought to converge in their answers. Any team tempted to replace the law of nature with incentivized convenience would then find its results laughably out of step with the common, coherent consensus reported by the other teams.

      Choosing individual team members for intellectual flexibility and independence, rather than for fame or institutional influence, will ensure they can grasp the scope of the problem, articulate it fearlessly and transmit in their results no latent bias toward their home colleagues, institution, technology or discipline.

      Each team will contain at least two experts from each of the three information-science fields, each able to approximately understand the technical language of the others and thus collectively to understand all aspects of human informational functionality and dysfunctionality. To ensure the conclusions apply to humans everywhere, at least one-third of each team will consider themselves culturally non-American.

      Each team will operate according to the best practices of deliberative decision-making, such as those used by “deliberative democracy”: live nearby, meet in person a few hours a day over months in a quiet place and enjoy access to whatever experts and sources of information they choose to use. Their budget (about $4 million per team) will be sufficient for each to produce its report in one year, through a variety of public-facing communications media: written reports, slide decks, video recordings, private meetings and public speeches. Between the multiple team members, multiple teams and multiple media, it will be difficult for entrenched powers to downplay inconvenient truths.

      Released simultaneously, all public reports will cover four topics with a broad brush:

      1. Summarizing the informational distractions and damage one would expect in advance, based only on the mathematical principles of autonomous navigation mentioned above, including not only sensory distractions but also the cognitive load of attending to interruptions and following rules, including rules intended to improve the situation.

      2. Summarizing, as meta-studies, the general (and generally true) conclusions of scientifically reputable experimental studies and separately the general (and generally misleading) conclusions of incentivized studies.

      3. Providing guideline formulae of damage and therapy, based on straightforward technical metrics of each specific information source such as timing delay, timing uncertainty, statistical pattern, information format, etc., with which to predict the nature, timescale, duration and severity of informational damage or recuperation from it.

      4. Providing guidelines for dissemination, discussion and regulatory approaches most likely not to be undermined by pressures toward the status quo.

      Within two years of passing this act, for under $100 million dollars, the world will understand far better the human stakes of artificial input, and the best means for making our children safe from it again.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      We're on the verge of breakdown: a data scientist's take on Trump and Biden

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      Peter Turchin is not the first entomologist to cross over to human behaviour: during a lecture in 1975, famed biologist E O Wilson had a pitcher of water tipped on him for extrapolating the study of ant social structures to our own.It’s a reaction that Turchin, an expert-on-pine-beetles-turned-data-scientist and modeller, has yet to experience. But his studies at the University of Connecticut into how human societies evolve have lately gained wider currency; in particular, an analysis that interprets worsening social unrest in the 2020s as an intra-elite battle for wealth and status.The politically motivated rampage at the US Capitol fits squarely into Turchin’s theory. In a 2010 paper, Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780-2010,Turchin wrote that “labour oversupply leads to falling living standards and elite overproduction, and those, in turn, cause a wave of prolonged and intense sociopolitical instability.”Turchin’s Cliodynamics, which he describes as “a more mature version of social science”, rests upon 10,000 years of historical data, as such there is, to establish general explanations for social patterns. He predicts that unrest is likely to get worse through this decade, just as it has in roughly 50-year cycles since 1780.Historians don’t necessarily like the proposal, he acknowledges. “They bring general theories through the back door. Our job is to be explicit.”Explicitly, then, Turchin explains current political warfare as a battle between an overpopulation of elites to some degree exacerbated by a decline in general living standards or immiseration, and financially overextended governments. Initially, Turchin applied the theory to pre-industrial societies, but a decade ago he travelled forward in time, predicting unrest –Ages of Discord– that would intensify in 2020 and endure until reversed.“Societies are systems and they tend to change in a somewhat predictable way,” Turchin told the Observer. “We are on the verge of state breakdown where the centre loses hold of society.”In the US, he points out, there are two political chief executives, each commanding his own elite cadre, with nothing yet being done at a deep structural level to improve circumstances. “We’ve seen growing immiseration for 30 to 40 years: rising levels of state debt, declining median wages and declining life expectancies. But the most important aspect is elite overproduction” – by which he means that not just capital owners but high professionals – lawyers, media professionals and entertainment figures – have become insulated from wider society. It is not just the 1% who are in this privileged sector, but the 5% or 10% or even 20% – the so-called “dream hoarders” – they vie for a fixed number of positions and to translate wealth into political position.“The elites had a great run for a while but their numbers become too great. The situation becomes so extreme they start undermining social norms and [there is] a breakdown of institutions. Who gets ahead is no longer the most capable, but [the one] who is willing to play dirtier.”Turchin’s analysis, of course, is readily applied to Donald Trump who, spurned by mainstream elites, appealed to a radical faction of the elite and to the disaffected masses to forward his political ambition. A similar case could be made for leading Brexiteers.Similar circumstances, says Turchin, can be found with the Populares of first century Rome who played to the masses and used their energy to attain office – “Very similar to Trump, who created a radical elite faction to get ahead.”In the professor’s reading, the incoming administration, notwithstanding the diversity of its appointments, is representative of mainstream elite power. “Think of 2020 as the return of the established elite and separation of dissidents. What’s important is that the incoming administration recognises the root problem.”In recent weeks, Turchin has found himself profiled in the Atlantic (The Historian Who Sees the Future), portrayed as a mad prophet, and name-checked by the Financial Times (The Real Class War is Within the Rich).He has been uplifted by some, but pushed back against by others. “You have this veneer of complicated impressive science. But any analysis like this is only as good as the data upon which it rests,” says Shamus Khan, chair of Columbia University’s sociology department. “It’s easy to imagine that you’re a Cassandra, and forget about the million others who similarly claim that they are.”“I think he’s got a point, because a significant component of the reasonably far left are highly educated but with blocked opportunities,” says Mark Mizruchi, author of The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite. “Where you have disjunctures is where you get political extremism. If Turchin is right, you’re going to get a lot more highly educated people facing limited career prospects. Most of those will turn left rather than right.”Dorian Warren, one of the authors of The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy, says elite warfare is only one way to describe the circumstances. “Frustrated elite aspirants gets radicalised when their expectations meet the reality of a rigid hierarchy. They perceive the system as unjust, but the source of injustice is elite overproduction and too much competition.Warren points to Occupy Wall Street, which was not a working-class movement. “It was mostly disaffected, white college graduates. That was a preview of what we’re seeing now.” In the American context, Warren says, “it’s mostly white elite fighting among each other, while the elites of colour are trying to break into the hierarchy.” For the most part, Warren points out, black elites in the US refuse to participate in white elite warfare.”But the hard science of Turchin’s approach cannot explain all things. After the Great Depression in what some might call a negotiated settlement, elites negotiated a unionised settlement with the masses in a moment of enlightened self-interest.“There was an elite consensus to accept the legitimacy of unions. In the last 40 years, we’ve seen a re-fracturing of that consensus with no worry for peasants with pitchforks who might come.”Without Trump as a unifying villain, elite fracturing is likely to enter a period of multi-dimensional refracture. “The left was always fighting among itself, so in some ways, it’s reversion to normal. There’s a reckoning coming in the Republican party, too, as it turns in on itself again over how it lost power. I think we’ll see intra-elite warfare on both sides.”Warren believes we’re at a critical juncture over a new elite settlement. One reason for optimism can be found in the battle for a minimum wage or corporate support for the social justice movement – “seeds of a new settlement”.Turchin says he feels “vindicated as a scientist who proposed a theory, but I have some consternation that we have to live through this. It may not be very pretty. I’m worried about a state breakdown. Mass shootings and urban protests are the warning tremors of an earthquake. Society can survive, but problems are likely to escalate.” More

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      Joe Biden names scientific advisers and seeks to bring Eric Lander into cabinet

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      Joe Biden has named the geneticist Eric Lander as his top scientific adviser and will elevate the position to the cabinet for the first time, a move meant to indicate a decisive break from Donald Trump’s treatment of science.The US president-elect vowed that “science will always be at the forefront of my administration” as he unveiled a science team headed by Lander as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. If confirmed by the Senate, he will sit in Biden’s cabinet.A mathematician turned molecular biologist, Lander will be the first biologist in the role and would be the first in the cabinet.A high-profile figure, he co-led the Human Genome Project and, since 2003, has headed the Broad Institute, which works on genome sequencing. He is a former adviser to former president Barack Obama, whose former top science official John Holdren said the “science polymath” was a “fabulous choice” to advise Biden.Speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, Biden said Lander was “one of the most brilliant persons I know” and is someone who has “changed the course of human history” through his work to map the human genome.The president-elect said he hoped his science team would lead the way in everything from renewable energy to cancer research, something he said was “deeply personal” to him given the loss of his son Beau.“Science is about discovery but also hope and that’s what in the DNA of America – hope,” Biden said. “I believe we can make more progress in the next 10 years than we’ve done in the last 50 years. We are going to lead with science and with truth and, God willing, this is how we are going to get over this pandemic and build back better than before.”Science advocates who have long pushed for a scientific voice within the cabinet also welcomed Biden’s choice.“Elevating this role to membership in the president’s cabinet clearly signals the administration’s intent to involve scientific expertise in every policy discussion,” said Sudip Parikh, the chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.“Lander has the requisite skills for this critically important role that works across disciplines and federal agencies.”Trump has caused despair among scientists, repeatedly dismissing basic understanding of the climate crisis, falsely claiming the Covid-19 pandemic would “just disappear” and sidelining or rejecting politically inconvenient evidence in governmental decision-making.In a letter to Lander, Biden asked him and his team to help combat public health threats, address the impacts of the climate crisis and help the US be a leader in innovation.Biden also said he wants Lander to go about his role by “working broadly and transparently with the diverse scientific leadership of American society and engaging the broader American public”.The president-elect has also put forward the sociologist Alondra Nelson to be the deputy director for science and society, a new position. Frances Arnold, the first American woman to win the Nobel prize in chemistry, and Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist, will be co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, has been asked to continue in the role. More

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      in US Politics

      21 things to look forward to in 2021 – from meteor showers to the Olympics

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      From finally seeing the back of Donald Trump to being in a football stadium – the new year is full of promiseYou probably found a few things to enjoy about last year: you rediscovered your bicycle, perhaps, or your family, or even both, and learned to love trees. And don’t forget the clapping. Plus some brilliant scientists figured out how to make a safe and effective vaccine for a brand new virus in record time. Continue reading… More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump signs Covid-19 relief and spending bill

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      Donald Trump has abruptly signed a $900 billion Covid-19 relief and spending bill, ending days of drama over his refusal to accept the bipartisan deal that will deliver long-sought cash to businesses and individuals and avert a federal government shutdown.Without the legislation, the government would have shut down on Tuesday and millions of Americans would have lost eviction protections and unemployment benefits. His delay in signing the bill has already allowed crucial unemployment aid programs to lapse.Trump blindsided members of both parties and upended months of negotiations when he demanded last week that the package – already passed by the House and Senate by large margins and believed to have Trump’s support – be revised to include larger relief checks and scaled-back spending.But on Sunday night, while vacationing in Florida, Trump released a statement saying he had signed the bill, and it was his “responsibility to protect the people of our country from the economic devastation and hardship” caused by the coronavirus.Signing the bill into law prevents another crisis of Trump’s own creation and ends a standoff with his own party during the final days of his administration. It was unclear what, if anything, Trump accomplished with his delay, beyond angering all sides and empowering Democrats to continue their push for higher relief checks, which his own party opposes.Trump had received the bill last Thursday and his decision to delay signing it allowed unemployment benefits for millions of Americans to expire. The lapsed benefits will not restart until the first week of January.In the statement, Trump said he would still send a “redlined” version of the bill to Congress highlighting changes he wanted to the legislation. There is no indication Congress plans to act on these changes, in part because Trump’s presidency ends in a few weeks.Trump ended the statement by saying “much more money is coming,” although he provided nothing to back this promise.Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell welcomed Trump’s signing of the bill. “I am glad the American people will receive this much-needed assistance as our nation continues battling this pandemic,” the Kentucky Republican said.Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it was a “downpayment on what is needed” adding: “Now, the president must immediately call on congressional Republicans to end their obstruction and to join him and Democrats in support of our stand-alone legislation to increase direct payment checks to $2,000.”Democratic lawmakers, who have a majority in the House of Representatives and have long wanted $2,000 relief checks, hope to use a rare point of agreement with Trump to advance the proposal – or at least put Republicans on record against it – in a vote on Monday afternoon.It was not immediately clear why Trump changed his mind as his resistance to the massive legislative package promised a chaotic final stretch of his presidency.White House officials have been tight-lipped about Trump’s thinking but a source familiar with the situation cited by Reuters said that some advisers had urged him to relent because they did not see the point of refusing.Republican officials were relieved that Trump had backed away from his veiled veto threat, saying it should help Republican Senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in the Georgia runoff elections on 5 January that will determine control of the Senate.Republican representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said too much was at stake for Trump to “play this old switcheroo game”.“I don’t get the point,” he said. “I don’t understand what’s being done, why, unless it’s just to create chaos and show power and be upset because you lost the election.”Washington had been reeling since Trump turned on the deal, without warning, after it had won sweeping approval in both houses of Congress and after the White House had assured Republican leaders that Trump would support it.The bill laid unsigned on his desk since Christmas Day as the president, who was mostly silent through weeks of intense negotiations, spent the weekend at the Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach.Instead, he assailed the bill’s plan to provide $600 Covid-19 relief checks to most Americans – insisting it should be $2,000 – and took issue with spending included in an attached $1.4 trillion government funding bill to keep the federal government operating through September.And already, his opposition has had consequences, as two federal programs providing unemployment aid expired on Saturday.Lauren Bauer of the Brookings Institution had calculated that at least 11 million people would lose aid immediately as a result of Trump’s failure to sign the legislation; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within weeks.How and when people are affected by the lapse depends on the state they live in, the program they are relying on and when they applied for benefits.In some states, people on regular unemployment insurance will continue to receive payments under a program that extends benefits when the jobless rate surpassed a certain threshold, said Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank.About 9.5 million people, however, had been relying on the pandemic unemployment assistance program that expired altogether Saturday. That program made unemployment insurance available to freelancers, gig workers and others normally not eligible. After receiving their last checks, those recipients will not be able to file for more aid, Stettner said.Joe Biden, who won November’s presidential election and who will be sworn in as Trump’s successor on 20 January, accused him of an “abdication of responsibility” in a statement on Saturday.The relief bill wrangles come as the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen in the US, with medical experts joining Biden in predicting that the darkest days lay ahead.“We very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year, surge,” Dr Anthony Fauci, the US head of infectious diseases, told CNN on Sunday. More

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      in US Politics

      Frankie Boyle’s big quiz of 2020: ‘How much have you subconsciously tried to suppress?’

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      2020: what a time to still briefly be alive. Let’s look back on the year, after a Christmas so grim for Great Britain that it was almost as if Santa had been reading some history. They said it was political correctness that would end Christmas but now, after the humble office worker was reduced to getting off with their own partner at the Zoom Christmas do, we realise it was actually ended by electing people who try to source medical supplies through their mate’s pest control firm. The Tardis would stop in 2020 barely long enough for Doctor Who to empty its chemical toilet.Every so often, I remember we will be leaving the EU in the middle of a plague and the worst recession in modern history, and then black out and wake up at the bottom of my garden in a pile of canned goods. As Brexit negotiations continued, a 27-acre site in Kent was set to become a lorry park that can take 2,000 lorries. Complaining about your locked gym will soon seem very quaint, when every source of dietary protein is in a parked lorry that can’t be processed because the driver has an apostrophe in his name.One way to not get too down about 2020 is to remind yourself that next year will be worse. But how much of the year can you remember, and how much have you subconsciously tried to suppress? Let’s find out!1. The Labour partyIn many ways, the Labour party should be the natural choice to run a bitterly divided country full of people who hate each other. Keir Starmer, looking like a cross between the bloke who says he’s “unstoppable” before getting fired first on the Apprentice, and an Anglican vicar trying to hold in a fart at a funeral, has been pursuing the approval of newspapers that wouldn’t stop backing the Tories if they crop-dusted the whole country in hot shit. The nationalist posturing required makes him look deeply uncomfortable, as if he’s been asked if he personally would sleep with the Queen and is afraid of both answers. By withdrawing the whip from Jeremy Corbyn, Starmer signalled that he can contain the threat posed by the left of the party, which currently consists of a handful of MPs, maybe 10 journalists, and a couple of dozen shitposters called things like @WetAssProletariat.Where did Keir Starmer choose to deliver his keynote Labour conference speech?a) His own kitchen.b) Labour party HQ in Westminster.c) A socially distanced PPE factory in the East End of London.d) A corridor in a deserted Doncaster arts centre.2. Test and traceThe government spent £12bn on it, and yet still the only reliable app for alerting you to the fact that someone deadly is nearby is the one that shows you when your Uber driver has arrived. Of course Jacob Rees-Mogg dismissed complaints from people who had to travel 200 miles for a test: he regularly commutes between now and the 1840s, strapped into something built from plans drawn up to the final words of the tortured HG Wells, with a groundsman furiously shovelling venison into a flux capacitor.Which of these organisations was not given contracts to help implement the NHS test-and-trace system?a) Serco.b) Capita.c) The NHS.d) Sitel.3. Boris JohnsonIt’s difficult to speculate on the long-term effects that the pandemic will have on British politics; all we know for certain is that 40% of the survivors will vote Conservative. One flaw in Labour’s relentless framing of prime ministerial incompetence is that the Conservatives can just replace him with someone more competent – possibly Rishi Sunak, and his air of a sixth former who still wears their school uniform. Boris Johnson may be a marshmallow toasting on the funeral pyre of Britain, a post-apocalyptic snowman with the increasingly dishevelled air of something that’s been tied to the front grille of a bin lorry, a demented, sex-case vacuum cleaner bag; but there’s no denying he does possess some Churchillian qualities: racism and obesity.Which of these did Boris Johnson fail to do in his first 365 days as prime minister?a) Get divorced.b) Have a baby.c) Contract coronavirus.d) Secure a trade agreement with the EU.4. Laurence FoxTaking time out from tweeting denials of his privilege while wearing three-piece pyjamas, Laurence (19th-century) Fox announced the launch of his new political party. He certainly looked determined. Or was it sad? I just never quite know which one he’s doing.No doubt he considers himself to be on the Reich side of history, but he may yet regret his statements on Black Lives Matter: the way his acting career’s going, there could well be auditions where he’ll have to take a knee. Fox’s head points to a combination of robust genes and forceps pressure, showing that from the very start he had a reluctance to face the real world. The sort of people who went to his famous boarding school would never be so gauche as to actually mention the name Harrow, except when phoning up for a Chinese takeaway, pissed.In 2020, Fox received large donations for his laughable new culture-war party, and it must have been odd to receive millions of pounds that wasn’t a divorce settlement from the mother of his children. We can only hope that his interest in politics wanes soon, and he can get back on stage and give us his long overdue Othello.Which of these is not something Laurence Fox did this year?a) Announced a personal boycott of Sainsbury’s.b) Got dropped by his acting agent over the phone.c) Acted in a film.d) Got told to fuck off by the Pogues.5. Social mediaIn 2020, the only thing you could say for sure when you met an optimist was that they weren’t on Facebook. Hate-sharing app Twitter has again spent the year setting itself up as an arbiter of morals, a role it’s as convincing in as the Love Island casting department. Personally, I left Twitter because of death threats: Eamonn Holmes just didn’t seem to be reading them any more.Which of these Twitter users has the most followers, and which the least? One point for each correctly placed. a) Donald Trump.b) Katy Perry.c) Logan Paul.d) BTS.6. Trump v BidenThe broad takeaway from the US election is that Americans count as slowly as one would expect. Joe Biden is not exactly overflowing with presence. You see his picture and the first thing you think is, “Was that already in there when I bought the frame?” Even at his most strident, he barely has the presence of a finger-wagging, spectral grandparent that appears as you hover, undecided, over a perineum. He could become the first president assassinated by an icy patch outside the post office.Still, Biden performed surprisingly well during the campaign, especially when you consider that he had to put up with the distraction of his mother’s voice calling his name gently from a bright light. He’s now so close to death that he can talk directly to the Ancestors, and has been ending every press conference by asking people if they have any questions for David Bowie.How old would Joe Biden be by the end of a second term in office?a) 86.b) 84.c) 88.d) 90.7. AsylumPeter Sutcliffe died and Priti Patel didn’t move on the list of Britain’s 10 Worst People, whereas I went up one. Patel has stood out as uniquely dreadful even in a cabinet that is basically Carry On Lord Of The Flies, dresses as if she’s going to the funeral of someone she hates, and often speaks as if trapped in a loveless marriage with her interviewer.Which of the following proposals did Priti Patel’s Home Office not consider as a way of deterring people from seeking asylum in Britain?a) Building a giant wave machine in the English channel.b) Processing asylum seekers on a volcanic outcrop in the South Atlantic, a thousand miles from the nearest landmass.c) Training swordfish to burst dinghies.d) Housing asylum applicants on decommissioned oil rigs in the North Sea.8. Grant ShappsGrant Shapps looks like a Blackpool waxwork of Clive Anderson, and has the permanent expression in every TV appearance of a man watching his train pull away behind the camera.But what is his actual job title?a) Secretary of state for transport.b) Minister for Brexit.c) Minister of state for international development.d) Chief whip.9. Conspiracy theoristsThe pandemic has been hard on many conspiracy theorists: eight months of men keeping their distance, too. There are people who believe Covid-19 is spread by 5G. If only that were true: put Virgin Media in charge and we’d be clear of it in days.An anti-mask demonstration in Trafalgar Square on 29 August drew thousands of protesters: which of these countercultural celebrities did not speak?a) Piers Corbyn.b) David Icke.c) Chico Slimani from The X Factor.d) Bill Drummond from the KLF.10. Jeff BezosOur disposable culture isn’t all bad. Without it, I’d miss that warm glow on Boxing Day when my son stuffs my gift in the bin and I imagine, in just a couple of years’ time, the joy on the face of the kid who pulls it from a pile of dirty syringes in a Philippines landfill. Jeff Bezos has become the world’s wealthiest man by pioneering a kind of delivery Argos. I look at Bezos and wonder if the rest of us evolved too much: his acquisitiveness is possibly explained by the fact he looks like a newborn constantly searching for a nipple.What was the most money Bezos made in a single day of the pandemic? a) $100m.b) Nothing. He has said all his profits will go towards developing Covid therapies.c) $150m.d) $13bn.11. PrisonGhislaine Maxwell was arrested. For those of you too young to remember, Ghislaine is the daughter of a media mogul whose death sent ripples around the world – because he was obese and fell in the ocean. Steve Bannon was also arrested and charged with fraud. On the wing, prisoners described his potential arrival as “whatever’s the opposite to fresh meat”.But which of the following are not currently in jail?a) Harvey Weinstein.b) Bill Cosby.c) Ricardo Medina Jr, the red Power Ranger.d) The cops who killed Breonna Taylor.12. Donald TrumpThis year’s presidential debates were like looking through the window of a care home on the day the staff thought they’d play prescription roulette. By managing only to speak to his base and alienating everyone else, Trump ended up being the definitive Twitter president. There’s so much wrong with him you could talk about his presidency for ever and never run out of things to criticise. It’s the equivalent of letting a child repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and then pointing out all the bits that aren’t as good as Michelangelo’s. “Is that meant to be God, Timmy? Why is he eating a Babybel?”In hospital, Trump was given a new drug made by Regeneron, which sounds like the robot who’ll present Match Of The Day once Gary Lineker’s been strapped into the re-education dinghy. He seemed to pull through, but it’s hard to gauge the health of someone who looks like Frankenstein’s monster won a holiday, and who chooses to have the skin colour of a dialysis machine emptied on to snow.Which of these is not something Trump achieved this year?a) The most votes for an incumbent candidate.b) The most retweeted tweet of all time.c) The highest US death toll in a century.d) The most golf ever played by a sitting President.13. The EurosScotland qualified for next year’s Euros after beating Serbia. Facing a team that grew up in a war zone in the 1990s, Serbia lost on penalties.When did Scotland last qualify for a major tournament? a) Argentina 1978.b) Italia 1990.c) France 1998.d) Mexico 1986.14. DystopiaIf only late-stage capitalism could get behind equality and lead us to a golden age where people of all skin colours are considered equally dispensable. For the time being, we needn’t fear AI. The robot that steals your job is expensive. You are cheap. You can only die, whereas it may get scratched.I wonder if our leaders’ go-to platitude, “We’re all in this together”, will ever ring true? Perhaps after the next wave of austerity, as it blares through speakers in the bunk-bedded dormitory of a derelict Sports Direct, rousing us at dawn so that we can harvest kelp in the shallows in exchange for the fibre waste collected from the juicers of gated communities, wearing nothing but underpants: ones we never seem to fully own, underpants where there always seems to be one more payment due to the Corporation.We will dream of one day having our own igloo built from blocks cut from sewer-fat, maybe even moving to a better neighbourhood, just as soon as it’s hot enough to slide our house there. As we heave our bales on to the gangmaster’s counter, the ex-performers among us will kid ourselves it’s still showbiz, as we’re permitted to crack a joke, and if the gangmaster smiles he’ll throw us a treat. We opt for a classic: surely no one has ever not laughed at one where bagpipes are confused with an octopus wearing pyjamas? But just as we can almost taste sugar, a mangled tentacle drops from our kelp block into our open mouth and ruins the moment.Which one of these was not a scientific breakthrough in 2020?a) The discovery that bacteria can survive in space for several years.b) A bionic breakthrough that allows people with paralysis to control computers using their thoughts.c) The confirmation that there are several large saltwater lakes under the ice in the south polar region of the planet Mars.d) An AI which can alter magnetic fields in the human brain, influencing thoughts.Answers1. d. 2. c. 3. d. 4. c.5. Most to least: Perry, Trump, BTS, Paul. 6. a. 7. c. 8. a.9. d.10. d. 11. d. 12. b. 13. c. 14. d. More