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08 May 21
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Reader Supported News
Bernie Sanders Congratulates Biden for Putting 'People Before Profits' by Releasing COVID Vaccine Patents
Clara Hill, The Independent
Hill writes: "The Biden administration's decision follows international pressure, and from some US politicians like Mr Sanders, who previously urged Mr Biden to support the move."
Senator pleased at US government for backing short term removal of patent on vaccines
enator Bernie Sanders has applauded President Joe Biden for vocalising his support for the sharing of COVID-19 vaccination patents.
The Biden administration’s decision follows international pressure, and from some US politicians like Mr Sanders, who previously urged Mr Biden to support the move.
In a statement, the Independent senator from Vermont said, “I applauded President Biden and his administration for taking this bold step in response to the world’s most urgent crisis. Our vaccinations efforts at home will only be successful if vaccinations efforts in the developing world happen simultaneously.
“Supporting this waiver, and putting people over profits, will help us do that by speeding up the production and availability of vaccines.”
Mr Sanders’ praise comes after the US government announced that it supported waiving the intellectual property claims for coronavirus vaccines in an effort to increase access around the globe.
“These extraordinary times and circumstances call for extraordinary measures,” Katherine Tai, the US trade ambassador, said in a statement.
She stated the Biden administration “believes strongly intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections”.
Currently, the World Trade Organisation is considering putting a temporary block on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, which has largely enabled pharmaceutical companies to establish a monopoly on vaccine development. This power over the vaccine supply chain has arguably blocked poorer countries from increasing their supplies.
Alongside 100 developing nations, a number of aid organisations and government figures have spoken out about vaccine equity. That includes Tedros Adhanom, the director general of the World Health Organisation, whom Sanders’ statement acknowledged.
“I also recognise the dedicated work done by activists in communities around the world to put this issue on the global agenda. We are all in this together,” Mr Sanders’ statement read.
There is significant concern over the increase of variants and the various vaccinations not offering adequate protection.
Throughout the span of the pandemic, multiple variants have been identified across the world, in places such as Brazil, the UK and South Africa. Experts are concerned about the situation in India, which on Wednesday recorded more than 412,000 cases, sparking concern about the effectiveness of the vaccines to combat the virus.
Last month, Sanders pushed the US government for action on the matter. On 16 April, he signed an open letter, alongside other senators such as Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey and Raphael Warnock, urging the White House to “prioritize people over pharmaceutical company profits” and push for a short term loosening of intellectual property rights.
“Simply put, we must make vaccines, testing and treatments accessible everywhere if we are going to crush the virus anywhere,” the letter read.
Those who oppose the lifting of the patent believe it sets a worrying precedent by permitting their research to be copied by other scientists, a line shared by the previous government led by President Donald Trump.
Medical staff attend to a patient infected with COVID-19. (photo: Thomas Samson/AP)
How the World Missed More Than Half of All Covid-19 Deaths
Umair Irfan, Vox
Irfan writes: "The world may have undercounted Covid-19 deaths by a staggering margin, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine."
A new IHME analysis finds 6.9 million deaths worldwide, and suggests countries have been undercounting since the beginning of the pandemic.
he world may have undercounted Covid-19 deaths by a staggering margin, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington School of Medicine. The actual count may actually be 6.9 million deaths, more than double official tolls.
The United States alone is estimated to have had 905,000 Covid-19 fatalities, vastly more than the 579,000 deaths officially reported, and more than any other country. The calculation is based on modeling of excess mortality that has occurred during the pandemic.
The drastic difference highlights how difficult it is to keep track of even basic metrics like deaths when a deadly disease is raging. The higher toll also means the ripples of the pandemic have spread wider than realized, particularly for health workers on the front lines who have repeatedly faced the onslaught with limited medical resources and personal protection. And the undercounts have important consequences for how countries allocate resources, anticipate future hot spots, and address health inequities.
Researchers who weren’t involved with the analysis say it confirms what many already presumed: that official death counts were far, far off.
“Big picture, it’s not really surprising,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “We’ve long suspected that the tolls of Covid are undercounted for a number of reasons, but probably a big part is having capacity to diagnose infections and count them.”
Now, with the number of reported cases around the world reaching new highs, the findings should serve as a stark reminder that disease surveillance and tracking remain dangerously inadequate, and that the world may have already overlooked some of the greatest tragedies of the pandemic. Preventing deaths going forward demands a coordinated international effort to contain Covid-19, vaccinate as many people as possible, and monitor the spread of the virus, led by countries with the most resources helping those with the fewest.
Otherwise, an even greater toll may lie ahead.
Almost every part of the world is underreporting Covid-19 deaths
To come up with the new estimate of 6.9 million total Covid-19 deaths so far around the world, the IHME team constructed a model that incorporated observations about the pandemic. They also constructed a baseline estimate of how many deaths there would have been in a world without Covid-19. The team drew on weekly and monthly death records from 56 countries and 198 sub-national locations — city, state, and provincial records — from places like the US and Brazil.
Researchers also drew on previously published death estimates. They then subtracted the anticipated deaths from the actual number of deaths to find the excess mortality stemming specifically from the disease.
Excess mortality is mostly due to deaths directly from Covid-19, but it also includes deaths indirectly caused by the pandemic like people unable or unwilling to receive medical care, a decline in vaccination rates for other diseases, an increase in drug use, and a rise in depression. So researchers tried to correct for these factors to get their Covid-19 death estimate.
It’s a well-worn approach in public health circles and has been used to calculate other health indicators like the global burden of disease.
The model showed that, around the world, more than half of Covid-19-related deaths are not labeled in the official tallies. And the actual number could still be higher.
According to Christopher Murray, the director of IHME, while just about every part of the world missed cases of Covid-19, some countries missed more than others.
“In many parts of the world — sub-Saharan Africa, India, Latin America, differences by state in Brazil and Mexico — you can account for much of the under-reporting because of lower testing rates,” Murray said during a press conference. “But there is this phenomenon — Egypt stands out, as do a number of different countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia — where these excess mortality rate numbers suggest dramatically larger epidemics than have been reported that cannot be accounted for through testing.”
Egypt has officially reported just over 13,000 Covid-19 deaths, but IHME found its estimated death toll was more than 170,000. It’s not clear why the discrepancy is so large, but it shows Covid-19 epidemics in different countries can be far worse than the death reports reveal.
“We are absolutely, absolutely undercounting deaths,” said Ruth Etzioni, a professor and biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who was not involved in the study.
IHME’s Covid-19 models missed the mark before, but researchers say they’ve improved
Scientists have also been critical of IHME’s past modeling work during the Covid-19 pandemic.
IHME’s forecasts last spring were criticized for projecting many fewer deaths than actually occurred. In March 2020, the organization projected fewer than 161,000 deaths total in the US. Then in April 2020, the group revised their death toll projections through August to be 60,415, with an uncertainty range between between 31,221 and 126,703 deaths. The projections were out of step with other epidemiological models, which were anticipating far more casualties from Covid-19.
The Trump White House, however, was eager to use the rosy IHME projections as the basis for planning for the pandemic and lifting public health restrictions, as well as a political tool to downplay the severity of Covid-19. “I was furious with [IHME], and I’m still kind of getting over it,” Etzioni said. “In the beginning, it was unacceptably un-rigorous.”
By the end of August 2020, more than 180,000 Americans had died of the disease.
“So far as I can tell, IHME has substantially improved their modeling from the early days of the pandemic,” said Alexey J. Merz, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, in an email. “My major criticisms pertain to those early efforts, and IHME’s ongoing failure to address what went wrong, or to assess the (in my opinion, considerable) damage arising from those flawed estimates.”
Asked about IHME’s track record, Murray explained how his team’s Covid-19 forecasting improved and even outperformed other models. “For example, if you go back to August last year, we were forecasting the winter surge, and nobody else thought there was going to be a winter surge in the United States,” he said. “We spend a lot of time on our model trying to look at what are the long-term drivers so we have been able to pick up these long-term trends quite a bit sooner than others.”
Why the US official count is so low compared to the new analysis
It makes sense that countries with less robust health care systems and fewer resources would struggle to keep track of how many people are dying of Covid-19. But the US, a wealthy country that has a national Covid-19 death reporting system, also missed almost 40 percent of Covid-19 deaths, according to the IHME model.
That’s because while death can seem like a pretty obvious health indicator, the causes of death can be mercurial.
The problems start with the death certificate. Ivor Douglas, chief of the Pulmonary Sciences and Critical Medicine division at the Denver Health Medical Center, explained that death certificates emphasize the primary cause of death, which is the most immediate condition leading to the fatality. Death certificates also have space for secondary and indirect causes.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed, the disease can manifest in myriad ways and leave lasting damage, even in people who had a mild illness.
So a Covid-19 death certificate could list something like a blood clot in the lungs as the primary cause of death, with Covid-19 as a secondary or indirect cause. Whether that specific death is then coded as a Covid-19 fatality could differ depending on the state. That local-level reporting has sometimes become politicized and led to discrepancies in death tolls.
And when Covid-19 first arrived in the US, many health workers didn’t realize what they were dealing with and thus didn’t include it in their paperwork. “I think the preponderance of missed cases were early on in the pandemic,” Douglas said. “Often, certainly early in the pandemic, there was the primary diagnosis without Covid-19 attribution.”
The missing Covid-19 deaths are also another manifestation of the inequities in US society. “If you’re poor, don’t have access [to health care], and die at home, you’re much less likely to have an attribution of Covid pneumonia as a cause of your death than ‘oh, you’re a sad old person with diabetes’ and that was the cause of death,” Douglas said.
That means that the groups that are being most severely harmed by Covid-19 may also be underrepresented in the official numbers. That makes it harder to properly allocate resources like tests, vaccines, and treatment to the most vulnerable people, forcing them to bear an even greater health burden.
“There’s real policy implications, it has political implications, and social justice implications, in my mind,” Douglas said. On the other hand, accurate monitoring could help mitigate the harms of the Covid-19 pandemic, helping health officials figure out not just where to deploy vaccines and treatments, but other factors driving transmission, like crowded living conditions. Intervening before infections begin to spread is what will yield the greatest dividends in containing the disease. “You cannot simply vaccinate your way out of this problem,” Douglas said.
Finding the true toll of Covid-19 is more urgent than ever
Regardless of how high the actual number of deaths is, the devastation of Covid-19 is clear. “Even the reported numbers are so utterly staggering that I’m not even sure doubling it should make us even more horrified,” Nuzzo said.
Still, the fact that Covid-19 deaths appear so vastly underreported should be a warning that the virus can still take millions more lives, and why containing Covid-19 is imperative for every country in the world. “We should feel more personally threatened by these numbers. And we should recognize it as a societal threat,” Etzioni said.
The devastating Covid-19 outbreak in India is all the more urgent now that multiple variants of Covid-19 that are more transmissible and better able to evade immunity are spreading around the world. As the virus continues to spread, the likelihood of even more dangerous variants arising will grow.
What’s more, the countries that have been reporting lower deaths so far deserve more attention. “Many of us contend that sub-Saharan Africa has been extensively devastated by the pandemic but because of lack of testing medical reporting, it appears as if there has been a relatively minor event there,” Douglas said.
As for countries that have so far been genuinely spared from Covid-19, they must remain vigilant and take active measures to keep the disease at bay. “It may be that they haven’t yet been hit or it could be that we don’t fully understand how they’ve been hit, but I want to put to bed this idea that any country has simply escaped the worst of it,” Nuzzo said. “The countries that have done the best are ones that have been very, very aggressive in responding to it.”
The Amazon fulfillment warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. (photo: Rederic J. Brown/Getty Images)
The Amazon Workers in Bessemer Would Already Have Their Union if We Had the PRO Act
Kim Kelly and Shaun Richman, In These Times
Excerpt: "The April union election loss at an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama has been treated in the media as a signal event for the labor movement in the Biden era. But what exactly it signaled remains subject to debate."
READ MORE
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin)
"They Were Tortured": 4 Families Torn Apart by Trump Are Reunited. 1,000+ Still Separated, Missing
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "This week, four parents from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico were reunited with their children in the United States after being separated under former President Trump's 'zero tolerance' immigration policy."
his week, four parents from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico were reunited with their children in the United States after being separated under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. They’re the first families to be reunited on U.S. soil since the Biden administration began its reunification process. At least two of the mothers were separated from their children since 2017. Biden initially agreed to reunite 35 parents with their children, out of more than a thousand youths who remain separated.Immigrant justice group Al Otro Lado — in English, The Other Side — said the Department of Homeland Security did nothing to facilitate the return of the four parents and that it was groups like theirs who had to negotiate the travel visas, pay for airline tickets and actually arrange the reunifications. Al Otro Lado shared with us this video of 18-year-old Bryan Chávez as he was reunited with his mother Sandra Ortíz this week. This came three years, seven months and four days after they were separated. In 2017, the last words Sandra heard before Customs and Border Protection officers took Bryan away were, “Say goodbye to your son because you’ll never see him again.” Well, on Tuesday, Sandra and Byran embraced each other at the San Ysidro border crossing — the very same place where they were first separated — with Bryan holding a bouquet of balloons that read “Best Mom Ever.”
SANDRA ORTÍZ: It’s real, son.
BRYAN CHÁVEZ: It feels like a dream. Like, I was in the car, and I was just like, “This is finally happening, and I’m really going to be reunified with her after all these times.” It was just like — they barely let me know this week. This week. And it was just like just very brief, four days ago. And I was just like, “I can’t believe it. You know, am I actually going to see her today or no?” because you never know. And I was in the car, and I was just thinking, like, it just sounds unreal that I’m actually going to see her today after all these days, after me thinking every day, “How is she doing?” Like, I was talking to her on the phone and everything, but still not making sure — like, seeing her in person, being able to give her a hug and everything. It was just —
REPORTER: Does it feel like a dream?
BRYAN CHÁVEZ: Yes, it actually really does.
REPORTER: End of a nightmare?
BRYAN CHÁVEZ: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s 18-year-old Bryan Chávez being reunited with his mother Sandra Ortíz on Tuesday. He had been living with relatives in California, enrolled in high school, after the U.S. deported his mother to Mexico when he was 15. Well, this Sunday is Mother’s Day here in the United States. The holiday is celebrated Monday in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala.
For more, we’re joined by Carol Anne Donohoe, managing attorney for Al Otro Lado’s Family Reunification Project, and Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and the attorney leading the ACLU’s lawsuit over family separations.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I wanted to begin with Carol Anne. Talk about this moment with Bryan and his mother, this moment that has the country crying, both its poignancy and also why it took so long for them to come back together, more importantly, why they were separated to begin with.
CAROL ANNE DONOHOE: Well, as far as this moment, as the reporter asked him, it’s the end of a nightmare, it’s the beginning of a dream. This is a culmination of years of trauma. And although we love to see the reunifications and they’re very moving, we have to keep in mind what led to that and that it should never have happened in the first place, let alone what they’re going to have to overcome in the years ahead to heal from everything that was done to them.
AMY GOODMAN: So, can you explain what happened to Bryan when he was 15 with his mother at that same port of entry?
CAROL ANNE DONOHOE: Yeah, and that’s one thing. Sandra, when we told her about the reunification, she didn’t realize that she was going to be entering into the very same port of entry where she was separated from her son. And they entered seeking asylum. There were separated after a couple of days. They were told, as you said, that — she was told to say goodbye to her child. They were told to say goodbye to their children, they weren’t going to see them again. And according to Sandra, they were told, “Don’t be emotional about it, so that your kids don’t react.” And so, for two weeks, she had no idea where he was. He had no idea what had happened to her. And then she was deported back to the harm that she fled. She’s been in hiding ever since.
AMY GOODMAN: And how was it that they were reunited, Carol Anne Donohoe?
CAROL ANNE DONOHOE: Well, this is the culmination of years’ worth of effort and a lot of work done through the steering committee of the Ms. L. litigation, other organizations on the ground. And Sandra was referred to us by the steering committee to represent her in her reunification. And that was July of 2020. So that’s how long we’ve been representing her.
The border was, under Trump, effectively closed, so it wasn’t a question of being able to bring her there to the border like we had previously with a group of reunifying parents. And there was no way that the government was going to allow them in. So, we had to ask them to be patient. And we have to remember that throughout that time, we all went through the pandemic. There was one mom who wasn’t sure if she should just bring her child back to the harm, because her father had died of COVID, and she said, “What if I never see my child again? What if I die of COVID, and I never see her again?” They went through, endured two hurricanes in Honduras. We had to kind of wait, and holding our breath during the election, to see the outcome of that before we could even have some semblance of hope.
So, once Biden was elected, and we have to — you know, I have to be clear that if that were not the case, we would not be having this conversation right now. And we, as Al Otro Lado, the families that we represent, we have been preparing for this moment. We have been just waiting for the OK, so that when the time came where the government gave us the OK, that they can be processed through the port of entry, we were ready. We had done the prep work. And they told us to give them seven days’ notice, and we gave them seven days’ notices that day.
AMY GOODMAN: So what happens now? Is Sandra allowed to stay in this country?
CAROL ANNE DONOHOE: Well, what happens now is, of course, one of the biggest concerns. These parents will tell you that what they’re concerned about are the other parents who are still separated from their children and also the uncertainty around what will happen to them now. And we heard yesterday Secretary Mayorkas say that they’re looking into legal permanent status, but that’s not something that they can guarantee. And I can say that without permanent legal status, without some sort of guarantee that they’re going to be able to stay and not have to go through our adversarial process, they’re just going to be in limbo and continuously retraumatized.
And I just have to center this, that the families are — it’s easy to talk abstractly, but they were — according to Physicians for Human Rights’ own report, they were tortured. And so, we need to remedy the fact that our government tortured children and their mothers and their fathers. And so, unfortunately, there’s not — the executive branch is limited in what they can do as far as giving permanent status, but there is — Senator Blumenthal and Representative Castro just reintroduced the Families Belong Together Act, which would do a lot to remedy the harm. And so we’d ask Congress to act on that.
AMY GOODMAN: Lee Gelernt, you have been working on this for years, since the families started getting separated, just like Al Otro Lado. Can you talk about — are we at this point talking about thousands more children?
LEE GELERNT: Well, there were 5,500 — at least 5,500 — children separated by Trump. We believe that there are likely more than a thousand who still need to be reunited. We have not even found the parents of 455 children. But our best estimate is now that — and the government has joined us in that estimate — is that there are likely more than a thousand that are left to be reunited. So, we are thrilled for these first four families. I was at one of the reunions in Philadelphia. And, you know, that kind of emotion is indescribable.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you describe that one to us, though?
LEE GELERNT: Yeah, I mean, the best I can. There’s a great New Yorker piece by Jonathan Blitzer doing it, and there’s video out there people should look at on The New Yorker website. But, you know, it’s just sort of — it’s an intense emotional moment that I have not witnessed in my professional career outside of these reunifications. I think there’s an element of “We may never have seen each other again.” It’s not just that they haven’t seen each other for three-and-a-half years, but there is always that lingering thought all the time: “We may never see each other again in person.”
And the mother who reunited in Philadelphia actually surprised her kids — and I was there — and just walked in the door. And they hugged each other for what seemed like an eternity, just sobbing. And these were now, you know, boys who were separated when they were teenagers and have now had to adjust to America on their own, the culture, the language, a strange place, with the trauma of being separated. And, you know, I have teenage boys, and I think it’s hard enough, in the best of circumstances, those years in a teenage boy’s life, but to do it in a strange land without your mother is just unbelievable and a testament to this family that they’ve persevered. The big question now is —
AMY GOODMAN: In fact, we’re showing the video of —
LEE GELERNT: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: — Mabel’s children. They were 13 and 15. She came from Honduras. They were fleeing the violence there. She spent two years in ICE detention in El Paso, Texas, before being deported back to Honduras. The boys were in a detention center before ultimately ending up with a family in Philadelphia. As I look at it now, they cannot let go of their mother.
LEE GELERNT: Exactly. Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: So, go ahead with what you were saying, Lee.
LEE GELERNT: Yeah. So, I think, you know, now the question, of course, is, going forward — hopefully the process has been developed. We would have liked to have seen — obviously, everyone would have liked to have seen it go quicker. But we are where we are. And hopefully the process the government has developed over this initial time is scalable so the thousands — the thousand more can be reunited much more quickly.
But I think, beyond reunification, what we are pressing for, the ACLU is pressing for, in these negotiations — we’re trying to comprehensively settle our lawsuit against the Trump administration — is not just reunification; social services, including mental health trauma and other social services, compensation in the form of damages and, as Carol Anne said, most critically, legal permanent status. You know, we’ll never make these families whole again, but we have to try, and we have to give them permanency, legal status here, a safe place, so that they can begin to overcome the trauma. The medical community has been so clear that without real care, these families may not stand a realistic chance of leading a healthy, productive life, going forward.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, like Sandra in San Ysidro at the port of entry, Mabel Gonzáles from Honduras can stay, at least at this point, for three years in Philadelphia with her boys. How are you pushing the Biden administration on this? I mean, it’s been months, and four families have been reunited, and you say there are over a thousand to go. Also, is the government doing this? And let me put this question to Carol Anne Donohoe. Is the government doing this, or are your groups, like Al Otro Lado, doing this? It sounds like you’re paying for the reunification, and yet it was the government of the United States that separated them and did the damage.
CAROL ANNE DONOHOE: Well, I just want to be clear that what we’re referring to in that case are these particular families. Of the four that reunited this week, Al Otro Lado represented three, and they were all — although they were not all Mexican nationals, they were all in Mexico. So, we did the legwork to get them there. And again, it was because we are in constant contact with these parents, we know and sense the urgency that not only is it torture for them to spend one more day without their children, but they are in physical danger. They’re back to where they’re in hiding. They’re hiding from their persecutors. So we understood the urgency. And while — you know, we couldn’t ask them to wait while policy and process was debated, so we just took that action. But going forward, as Lee said, they are working on a process for the larger group. We don’t anticipate that that’s going to be our role, moving forward. But in this case, as I said, we just wanted to get them there as quickly as possible.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, speaking to NBC News’s Jacob Soboroff in an interview Thursday, that the Biden administration can’t guarantee a path to permanent residency for families separated by Trump. This is what he said.
DHS SECRETARY ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: We are very much focused on providing stability to the reunited families, not just for her, but for the family as a unit. It’s not something we can guarantee at this point in time, but we are dedicated to achieving more than what we have delivered thus far. This, I think, is a temporary measure — unite the family, reunite the family, and then let’s work together, with those representing the family, to see what we can achieve under the law and, I think, what these families both need and deserve.
AMY GOODMAN: So, today, the Department of Homeland Security will visit a tent facility for unaccompanied migrant children at the border in Donna, Texas. And this week, DHS released pictures of their tents there, which had previously been packed with children. Democratic Congressmember Henry Cuellar said the photos are misleading, because the children are still at the same compound but are now being held in tents run by DHHS, the Department of Health and Human Services. The news outlet Border Report visited the compound Wednesday and said it’s now full of white tents, and everything is surrounded by black fencing that prevents anyone outside from looking in. Lee Gelernt, can you talk about this?
LEE GELERNT: Yeah, I just want to return quickly to the prior segment. I mean, we are working with the government to do all these things on a scale of sorts, but they will ultimately pay for all the transportation, including reimbursing the NGOs that paid for these initial four.
But beyond that, as to the unaccompanied minors who are coming and being held, we are very concerned with how they’re being held, but we believe the Biden administration is starting to turn the corner. They got caught off guard by the numbers. They want to get them out of there quickly. You know, we are going to continue monitoring that, if they’re not able to. Ultimately, though, they need to speed up the process and get these unaccompanied minors to relatives or even parents who are in the United States. Overwhelmingly, these children are coming to join relatives or parents. So, we’ll see how long it takes. They’ve been making progress. The Biden administration, to their credit, has been making progress. But it needs to continue and be quick.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Carol Anne Donohoe, apparently, the Biden administration has gotten down by 90% the number of kids in Customs and Border [Protection] custody. I think now they’re at 735 children. But more than 22,000 are in HHS custody. What is the difference? And what do you think needs to happen to speed up this process?
CAROL ANNE DONOHOE: Well, I can’t speak directly to that process, but I can just say that, as Lee said, it does appear that they are working very hard to get children certainly out of CBP custody. We hope that they work just as hard to get them out of HHS custody.
And I would argue that the overwhelming thread in this particular discussion is that we need to end Title 42, which was the Trump-era policy that supposedly had a public health rationale for expelling immigrants, asylum seekers. And unfortunately, one of the ramifications of that is families are being forced to make the awful decision about sending their children over without them, because the parents would be expelled, or, as a family, they would be expelled. So we really need to look at how our overall policies are affecting asylum seekers across the board.
AMY GOODMAN: And the class-action suit, Lee Gelernt, if you could explain it more fully, that the ACLU has brought?
LEE GELERNT: On Title 42, Amy?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
LEE GELERNT: Right. So, we are negotiating with the Biden administration both on family separation and on Title 42. The Trump-era policy said no asylum seekers; we’re going to expel you without any due process or without an asylum hearing. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has kept that for families. It’s allowing unaccompanied children in, but not families. We sued over the children. The Biden administration has backed down. We sued over the families. We are now in negotiations with the Biden administration. I think we’re getting a little impatient that they’re continuing to expel families.
We believe that there is no public health rationale — there never was — for expelling families. If they need to test people, so be it. If they need to quarantine people, you know, that may be necessary at times. But you cannot use the public health laws as a pretext to send people back to danger.
The Biden administration is allowing us to get the most vulnerable families in. But, as Carol Anne said, often the family cannot get in. They’re making this horrendous choice, deciding whether their child should go forward and at least save the child or keep the child with them. And so it’s creating this sort of coercive self-separation. There are families in real danger with little children being sent back to really horrible situations, dangerous situations — Central America, Haiti — after they’ve fled danger.
So, we need the Biden administration to stop this. We need CDC to step up and say, “We’re not going to let CDC be used in this way.” The Trump White House overrode the CDC. We are surprised and troubled that the Biden CDC is not standing up to this, because the order is ultimately in CDC’s name.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Lee Gelernt is the deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and the attorney leading the ACLU’s lawsuit over family separations. And Carol Anne Donohoe, managing attorney for Al Otro Lado’s Family Reunification Project. Thanks so much.
When we come back, The Man Who Lived Underground. We’ll go to Portugal to speak with Julia Wright about how she unearthed an unpublished novel about racist police violence written by her father, the legendary African American writer Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son and Black Boy. Stay with us.
Sean Ellis is united with his mother Mary Ellis, left, and sister Sharday Taylor, right, after he was released from prison. (photo: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe)
Sean Ellis, Wrongly Convicted of Murder in 1993, Is Finally Fully Exonerated
Sarah Betancourt, Guardian UK
Betancourt writes: "Sean Ellis, a Black man who featured in a Netflix documentary after spending decades in prison wrongly convicted of murdering a white police officer, has finally been fully exonerated."
READ MORE
Police detain a demonstrator during a protest in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Ivan Valencia/AP)
Colombia: More Than 900 Arbitrary Detentions of Protesters
teleSUR
Excerpt: "More than 900 arbitrary arrests have been registered during the repression by agents of the Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD) and the Colombian Army against demonstrators who reject the neoliberal policies of President Ivan Duque, reported Plataforma Grita."
READ MORE
Researchers and tourists explore the edge of an ice shelf along the Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed faster than nearly any other region in the past few decades. (photo: Bob Berwyn)
Meeting the Paris Climate Goals Is Critical to Preventing Disintegration of Antarctica's Ice Shelves
Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News
Berwyn writes: "The warming climate will push Antarctica's ice sheets to the brink of irreversible melting, even if nations make good on the new commitments to cut carbon dioxide emissions they announced during the U.S.-led climate summit last month, according to two new studies published in Nature on Wednesday."
New studies show that the current rate of warming will push ice shelves past a tipping point the second half of this century, driving a steep increase in sea level rise.
he warming climate will push Antarctica’s ice sheets to the brink of irreversible melting, even if nations make good on the new commitments to cut carbon dioxide emissions they announced during the U.S.-led climate summit last month, according to two new studies published in Nature on Wednesday.
The studies show that the best chance of stopping the meltdown is to reach the Paris agreement’s most ambitious target to cap warming at 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial level. The alternative is millennia of sea level rise that will swamp Pacific islands, flood shoreline cities and displace millions more people from coastal regions.
“Even the low-end scenarios for sea level rise are pretty bad,” said Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-author of one of the studies. Major climate reports project that, even with rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions, global average sea level will rise at least 12 to 16 inches by 2100.
In some regions, including the Western Gulf of Mexico and the Northeast United States, sea level will rise much higher than that, swamping thousands of square miles of coastal land, backing up storm drains and polluting water used for drinking and irrigation with salt. Sea level rise in parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean is projected to be as much as double the global average, which will submerge some of the far-flung islands that are home to 2.3 million people.
Right now, the world is on a path to about 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming—twice the amount of the Paris goal—which, “by the second half of this century means you clearly reach a threshold that changes ice sheet stability,” Dutton said. That would cause so much melting that sea level rise would increase from “millimeters to centimeters per year.” she said. “Coastal communities are totally unprepared to deal with that.”
The study Dutton worked on concluded that, with “global warming limited to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) or less, Antarctic ice loss will continue at a pace similar to today’s throughout the twenty-first century.” But at the current rate of warming, there would be an “abrupt jump in the pace of Antarctic ice loss after around 2060.”
That’s because Antarctica’s giant floating ice shelves are tenuously anchored to outcrops and ridges on the seafloor, and if the ocean warms enough to loosen those bonds, the flow of land-based ice held back by the floating shelves would accelerate toward the sea.
The edges of the floating shelves, including ice cliffs towering hundreds of feet above the ocean, are also very susceptible to the warming atmosphere, said University of Exeter climate modeler Ed Gasson, a co-author of the Nature study.
“It’s a phase change,” he said, describing the climate threshold that would be breached somewhere between 2.7 and 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit of warming. “When you get rainfall instead of snowfall, and melting on the surface in the summer, that’s what starts the breakdown of the ice shelves.” The rain and meltwater seeps down into cracks in the ice and when it refreezes and expands, it acts like a wedge that can split off huge sections of the shelves, he said.
Related: Global Warming Is Changing the Winds Off Antarctica, Driving Ice Melt
A big question mark for many researchers is whether warming will boost snowfall over Antarctica, which could change the melt equation significantly if enough new snow and ice piles up to compensate for some of the losses.
That’s why the total amount of sea level rise from land-ice melt is still a big unknown, said GEOMAR University of Kiel climate researcher Mojib Latif, who was not involved in the new studies. Projections will be more accurate when new climate models can accurately simulate the complex interplay between oceans, ice and the atmosphere, he said.
Such interactions include the possibility of unexpected climate feedback loops like the potential for ice shelf melting to fuel sea ice expansion with more freshwater, which freezes easier, explained Gasson.
Some of the current research with the latest models will shape revised sea level rise projections in the upcoming climate assessments from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Cracking Up and Melting Down
The Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit “wasn’t just pulled out of the air,” climate researcher Bill Hare, chief scientist with Climate Analytics, posted recently on Twitter.
The potential crackup and meltdown of Antarctica’s ice above that temperature is one of the things proving his point. Warming much more than that will also bring a steep increase in the number of deadly heat waves and droughts, the decline of coral reefs by as much as 99 percent, increased loss of biodiversity and other dangerous climate extremes, as detailed by a 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Earth’s geologic record reinforces the current warnings. Global temperatures during the Pliocene Epoch, from about 2.6 to 5.5 million years ago, were similar to today’s, but sea level was about 20 feet higher. The only way that climate models can recreate those conditions is by including a rapid disintegration of Antarctica’s ice shelves, Dutton said.
Research published in 2020 hinted that some ice shelves retreated by as much as 6 miles per year during rapid climate shifts in the geologic past, and that sea level rose at a rate of about 1.5 to 2.3 inches per year for about 500 years at the end of the last ice age. That would be a quantum increase from today’s rates of glacial melting in Antarctica and global sea level rise. The fastest current ice shelf retreat has been measured at between about a half mile to 1.2 miles per year in West Antarctica.
The difference between 2.7 and 3.6 degrees Celsius warming may not seem like all that much, but it has a “huge planetary scale impact,” she said. During the peak of the last ice age, the global average temperature was only about 5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than today, yet ice sheets a mile thick covered most of North America.
Another way to think of it is in terms of your own body temperature, she added. “If you had a long-term 3.6 degree fever, you’d be pretty sick,” she said. In Antarctica, when air temperatures are near freezing over the surface of the ice sheet, those small increments make the difference between ice remaining frozen or thawing. Once you pass the threshold, “it increases melt exponentially.”
Steps to reduce emissions and avoid that threshold should be the big policy priority, Gasson said. If the signatories to the Paris agreement can hold warming to its least ambitious target of 2 degrees Celsius of warming, meltwater from Antarctica will raise seas between 2.4 and 4.3 inches. But at the current trajectory toward 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, that range would be 6.6 to 8.2 inches.
Another Study Highlights Uncertainty
The other Nature study published Wednesday did a statistical analysis of climate simulations developed by 62 research institutions in 15 countries to show how all global land ice, including the polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers, will respond to different levels of greenhouse gas emissions and temperature increases.
Lead author Tamsin Edwards, a climate scientist at King’s College, London, said the research aimed to highlight some of the uncertainties associated with the future of Antarctica’s ice, because for policy makers and planners, the unknowns can be just as important as what is known.
Despite the intense research into increasing sea levels, officials responsible for coastal flood preparations are still faced with a wide range of sea level rise scenarios. Narrowing projections of how much the water will rise would require detailed modeling of every individual glacier, ice sheet and ice shelf, down to the shape and gradient of the valleys they flow through—a near impossible task.
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