20 February 22
We’re Not Here to Entertain You, We’re Here to Protect You
The mission of Reader Supported News is, take whatever steps are necessary to inform our readership of the threats that exist to democracy, the environment, social justice and international order.
That gets messy and risky. When the budget disappears it gets exponentially more difficult. Nonetheless if we have to fight for a budget we can do that too.
We must have a budget.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
20 February 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Trump Judge Lee Rudofsky’s decision could completely neutralize the Voting Rights Act when the GOP controls the White House.
To be clear, this is a decision by a federal trial judge, which means that it must survive contact with an appeals court and the Supreme Court before its narrow approach to voting rights becomes the law of the land. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 Republican majority is typically hostile to voting rights suits, so there is a very real risk that they will agree with this trial judge.
The case is Arkansas State Conference NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment, and the plaintiffs claim that Arkansas’s statehouse maps are racially gerrymandered in violation of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark civil rights law that probably did more than any other statute to end Jim Crow. Among other things, the plaintiffs note that the maps contain only 11 (out of 100) majority-Black districts, even though Black voters make up more than 16 percent of the state’s population.
But Lee Rudofsky, the Trump judge assigned this case, barely engages with the substance of this racial gerrymandering claim. Instead, Rudofsky concludes that such a claim “may be brought only by the Attorney General of the United States” and not by private plaintiffs.
Private suits enforcing the VRA have been a fixture of American civil rights law since the 1960s. As the Supreme Court explained in Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969), “the achievement of the Act’s laudable goal could be severely hampered ... if each citizen were required to depend solely on litigation instituted at the discretion of the Attorney General.” Among other things, “the Attorney General has a limited staff and often might be unable to uncover quickly” new state policies that target voters of color.
And a law that only the attorney general can enforce will be utterly useless if the attorney general does not choose to enforce it. During the entire Trump administration, for example, the Justice Department’s voting section brought only one lawsuit alleging discrimination under the Voting Rights Act — and that was a fairly minor suit alleging that the method of electing school board members in a South Dakota school district “dilutes the voting strength of American Indian citizens.”
Nevertheless, Rudofsky now seeks to neutralize one of the most important protections against racism in American elections.
Rudofsky opinion is wrong
The most straightforward reason why Rudofsky is wrong is that the Supreme Court determined that he is wrong in Morse v. Republican Party of Virginia (1996). In that case, a majority of the Court concluded that Section 2 of the VRA, the provision at issue in Arkansas State Conference, is enforceable through private lawsuits.
Additionally, while the Voting Rights Act does not contain any language which explicitly states that “private plaintiffs may sue under this law,” it does contain some provisions which make no sense unless private suits are permitted. One provision, for example, states that federal courts hearing VRA lawsuits shall exercise their jurisdiction “without regard to whether a person asserting rights” under the VRA has exhausted other potential legal remedies.
It makes no sense for the VRA to contain a provision referring to “a person asserting rights” in a Voting Rights Act lawsuit unless the law permits such a person to assert those rights in the first place.
Rudofsky wants to shift the goalposts in order to neutralize the Voting Rights Act
Rudofsky’s primary argument is that Allen and Morse do not apply because the Supreme Court has since abandoned their approach to interpreting federal laws, and that the VRA must be retroactively reinterpreted in line with this new approach.
The Voting Rights Act became law in 1965. One year earlier, in J.I. Case v. Borak (1964), the Supreme Court established that federal statutes should generally be read broadly to permit enforcement by private lawsuits. “It is the duty of the courts to be alert to provide such remedies as are necessary to make effective the congressional purpose,” Borak explained.
Thus, the Congress that wrote the Voting Rights Act operated under the assumption that it did not need to explicitly write a private right to sue into the statute because the Supreme Court had recently signaled that private suits are permitted when a federal law would be ineffective without them. The Court validated this reading of the VRA four years later in Allen.
Then, nearly four decades after Congress wrote the VRA — and 19 years after Congress enacted important amendments to the law in 1982 — the Court decided Alexander v. Sandoval (2001), which laid out a much stingier approach to private lawsuits. Sandoval does contain some language that undermines the case for permitting private suits under the Voting Rights Act.
Sandoval, for example, states that “statutes that focus on the person regulated rather than the individuals protected create ‘no implication of an intent to confer rights on a particular class of persons’” — so if a federal law uses language like “no state shall do X” instead of “all persons have a right to X,” courts typically should not permit private lawsuits under that statute.
The relevant provision of the Voting Rights Act uses both kinds of language — it starts with the phrase “no voting qualification or prerequisite to voting or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State,” but then goes on to forbid any voting practice “which results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote.”
But there are good reasons not to read Sandoval too restrictively with respect to the VRA. One is that, while Sandoval does lay out some interpretive guidelines that courts can use to determine whether a particular law permits private lawsuits, Sandoval also states that “the judicial task is to interpret the statute Congress has passed to determine whether it displays an intent to create not just a private right but also a private remedy,” and that “statutory intent on this latter point is determinative.”
And, in this case, there is overwhelming evidence that Congress intended the Voting Rights Act to contain a private right that is enforced by private lawsuits. Again, Congress wrote the law against the backdrop of decisions like Borak, which emphasized that private parties should generally be allowed to sue to enforce their legal rights. Federal courts have understood the law to permit private suits at least as far back as 1969, when the Court decided Allen. And Congress has amended the VRA multiple times, but it’s never questioned the longstanding assumption that the law permits private lawsuits.
Justice John Paul Stevens, moreover, anticipated Rudofsky’s objection to an enforceable Voting Rights Act in an opinion he wrote in the Morse case. Recognizing that the law governing when private parties are allowed to sue under federal statutes was in flux in 1996, when Morse was decided, Stevens acknowledged that a decision proving that only the attorney general may enforce the law “might have been correct if the Voting Rights Act had been enacted recently.” But such a decision would fail “to give effect to our cases holding that our evaluation of congressional action ‘must take into account its contemporary legal context.’”
Stevens, in other words, relied on a fairly basic rule of fundamental fairness. Courts should not interpret a statute written in 1965 using interpretive rules that the Court came up with years later. If Congress had known about Sandoval when it wrote the Voting Rights Act, it would have known to use more explicit language. But Congress did not have a time machine.
In any event, Rudofsky is not alone in his desire to burn down a landmark civil rights statute because lawmakers in 1965 failed to predict the future. Concurring in Brnovich v. DNC (2021), Justice Neil Gorsuch claimed that “our cases have assumed — without deciding — that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied cause of action under §2,” and suggested that he would eliminate this right of private parties to sue under the law.
Gorsuch’s opinion was joined by only one other justice, Justice Clarence Thomas. So it is not the law. But given this Supreme Court’s record of hostility toward the Voting Rights Act, there is no guarantee that Gorsuch won’t find five votes to affirm Rudofsky’s decision.
Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes stands guard during a pro-Donald Trump rally at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park in Berkeley, California, on April 27, 2017. (photo: Philip Pacheco/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Judge Amit Mehta said Friday that Stewart Rhodes is “extremely sophisticated” and should not be released before his seditious conspiracy trial
Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee on the D.C. District Court, passed down the ruling Friday afternoon, denying a plan proposed by Rhodes’ legal team that would have let the militia leader live with a cousin in California.
Mehta characterized Rhodes as “extremely sophisticated,” and likely able to undermine any conditions of a pre-trial release. The judge added that the government had made a “clear and convincing” case as to the militia founder’s ongoing dangerousness.
During Friday’s proceeding Mehta reviewed the conspiracy charges and the government view that Rhodes is an ongoing “danger to plot and prepare for political violence.” He referred to Rhodes as the “top of the leadership chain” of the alleged conspiracy, and said that “if the conduct is true … the danger cannot be overstated.”
Mehta cited Rhodes’ “sophisticated and conscious” planning for violence on Jan. 6 — specifically, bringing an arsenal to the outskirts of Washington, D.C. — as behavior that “enhances the danger that Mr. Rhodes presents.” While Rhodes himself did not breach the Capitol building, Mehta said that, as the alleged leader of the conspiracy, Rhodes would be liable for the actions of his deputies, including the Oath Keepers who allegedly sought out the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Judge Mehta shot down several of Rhodes’ defenses. “If anyone believes this is about speech they are mistaken,” Mehta said. The judge insisted that the case was about “overt acts … in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
Mehta added that the notion that the Oath Keepers were just on the scene to provide security made little sense given that the Oath Keepers had abandoned that security role when they stormed the Capitol. Mehta said he was “highly dubious” of the legal theory that Trump could have blessed the militia’s activities with a declaration of the Insurrection Act, and read aloud texts in which Rhodes “celebrated” the breach of the halls of Congress, insisting that Rhodes didn’t sound like a man “surprised” that his “fellow Oath Keepers had entered the Capitol without his OK or knowledge.”
Mehta said the sum of the allegations “weighs in favor of detention.” In his view, Rhodes’ mass weapons purchases after Jan. 6 were not consistent with self defense. He cited messages Rhodes had written to his subordinates about how to lay low and avoid false flag operations. He said Rhodes showed “key awareness” of how to avoid scrutiny, adding, “This is the language of someone sophisticated in avoiding detection.” The judge insisted that, were Rhodes released, there is “simply no way to fully ensure that Mr. Rhodes will not” return to his dangerous conduct.
Today’s decision affirms an earlier ruling by a federal magistrate judge in Texas who had ruled Rhodes was a significant danger to the community and should stay locked up.
Friday’s ruling follows a contentious hearing on Wednesday in which the government and Rhodes’ attorneys laid out starkly opposing views of the dangers posed by the militia leader — and Rhodes, trained as a lawyer, kept trying to interject on his own behalf.
Rhodes’ lawyers insisted that their client, lacking a passport and requiring DHS clearance to board an airplane, was not a flight risk and that he was eager for his day in court. “Mr. Rhodes does not want to avoid the trial,” Phillip Lindner, one of his attorneys argued. “He wants a public trial. He wants to testify. He’s not trying to run from anything.”
The government countered that Rhodes remained a danger because they alleged he was “the architect” and “the leader in the conspiracy” to use force to keep Trump in office. U.S. Attorney Kathryn Rakoczy made the case that Rhodes’ violent, revolutionary outlook had not changed since Jan. 6, and and that Rhodes could tap his network of like-minded followers and possibly access large caches of weapons.
In the hearing the judge asked many questions about the heavily armed Quick Reaction Forces that Rhodes had on call across the river in Arlington, Virginia, on the day of the insurrection. Rhodes’ lawyers pointed to the fact that the QRFs were never activated as evidence of their client’s “meticulous” respect for Washington, D.C.’s gun laws, and they argued the QFRs would only have been summoned had president Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, giving the president powers to call on militias to suppress a rebellion.
The government presented their theory that the QRFs were not summoned, only because the Capitol was breached without needing their weapons, and alleged that Rhodes wanted to keep them available to fight another day. “The defendant had an eye on the larger war,” Rakoczy said, insisting that Rhodes believed Jan. 6. was only “an initial skirmish or battle in the larger war” to block the transfer of power to Joe Biden.
In making their case for why Rhodes’ respect for the rule of law was less than meticulous, the government cited several previously undisclosed text messages written by the militia leader. A Christmas 2020 chat already in the record featured Rhodes allegedly plotting to gather outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 and “scare the shit out of” Congress to “convince them it will be torches and pitchforks time if they don’t do the right thing.”
Rakoczy read into evidence a new text from that same chat in which Rhodes wrote that the Oath Keepers wouldn’t wait around for authorization from Trump. “He must know that if he fails to act, we will,” Rhodes wrote. “He has to understand that we will have no choice.”
As Jan. 6 approached, prosecutors say, Rhodes instructed his subordinates to “be prepared for a major letdown on the 6th through the 8th, and get ready to do it ourselves.” He added: “On the 6th, they are going to put the final nail in the coffin of this republic unless we fight our way out, with Trump (preferably) or without him, we have no choice.”
Such messages continued even after the Capitol attack, but before Trump left office. On Jan 12, Rhodes wrote: “My prediction is that Trump will not invoke the Insurrection Act…. If that’s the case and he doesn’t use it to drop the damn hammer then we need to accept reality… and prepare to walk the founders’ path.” Rhodes’s texts made frequent references to the battles of the Revolutionary War.
As he heard these arguments, Judge Mehta at times seemed skeptical of both sides. He pressed the federal government for evidence that Rhodes had personally directed the incursion of the Capitol by the Oath Keepers. The government conceded it had only circumstantial evidence — including records of a call between Rhodes and alleged co-conspirator Kelly Meggs right before Meggs entered the Capitol complex. The judge conceded that it seemed “far fetched” that Meggs had acted without authorization from Rhodes.
Mehta also pressed Rhodes’ lawyers on their client’s legal theory that the Insurrection Act could even apply to the Oath Keepers. The act, written in 1807, authorizes the president to “call into Federal service… the militia of any State.” The language, the judge noted sternly, seems to apply to forces authorized by a state government. “Do the Oath Keepers consider themselves the militia of given states?” he asked, incredulous. He suggested they were in fact a “private militia” that had “self-designated themselves a militia that the president could call.”
At several points during Wednesday’s hearing — which was conducted by video conference, to which the media were only patched in by phone — Rhodes himself attempted to interject and add context. The judge acknowledged Rhodes’ legal training (the militiaman graduated from Yale Law school) but said: “I wouldn’t urge you do do that. That may not be the wisest choice.” Rhodes’ lawyers concurred.
Despite the government’s grave warnings, Mehta had appeared open to the notion that Rhodes might stay with extended family in California, though he shot down the notion that the militia leader could take a job at his relative’s firm. “If I release him,” the judge said, it would be “24-hour house arrest with no access to the Internet and only communications with counsel” to prepare for court. “About as strict as it gets without being behind bars,” he said, offering “nothing that would resemble regular freedoms.”
Rhodes will now remain in jail until the conclusion of the trial on conspiracy charges. Earlier in the week, Rhodes’ legal team filed a court memo, alleging the government was conspiring against him. The filing claimed the militia leader had been made into a “boogeyman” by the federal government, which had targeted the Oath Keepers as “the perfect scapegoat for the events of January 6, 2021.”
Facial recognition. (image: Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: ID.me Gathers Lots of Data Besides Face Scans.
Scam Artists Still Found a Way Around It.
The use of ID.me’s services had been strongly criticized since the partnership was announced
The announcement was made in a press release published by the agency today. It follows weeks of intense public criticism after the agency announced in January that by summer 2022, ID.me would be the only way for taxpayers to log in when managing tax accounts online, requiring that all users upload a selfie to access their account at irs.gov.
“The IRS takes taxpayer privacy and security seriously, and we understand the concerns that have been raised,” said IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig. “Everyone should feel comfortable with how their personal information is secured, and we are quickly pursuing short-term options that do not involve facial recognition.”
The IRS said it would bring online an additional authentication process that does not involve facial recognition to avoid disruption to taxpayers.
Privacy advocates began to raise concerns over the use of ID.me’s technology almost immediately after the IRS’s initial contract with ID.me was announced, and the revenue agency reportedly began to look for alternatives soon after.
Criticism increased after ID.me walked back an initial claim that its facial recognition systems did not use a one-to-many matching technique. Having initially called one-to-many matching “complex and problematic,” CEO Blake Hall admitted in a LinkedIn post that ID.me did use the matching technique in certain circumstances.
“If companies and the government have to lie about facial recognition in an effort to avoid public scrutiny, they shouldn’t be using it,” said Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director for Fight for the Future, at the time.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), a longtime privacy advocate, called for the IRS to end its plan to require facial recognition in an open letter just hours before the news was announced.
“This is big: The IRS has notified my office it plans to transition away from using facial recognition verification, as I requested earlier today,” Wyden tweeted in response to the latest news. “While this transition may take time, the administration recognizes that privacy and security are not mutually exclusive.”
An ID.me spokesperson declined to comment on the news when contacted by The Verge.
Pride rally. (photo: Getty Images)
Tennessee, Kansas, Indiana and Oklahoma are some of the states proposing bills to restrict how LGBTQ+ identity, issues and history are taught in schools.
President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten condemned the bill as hateful and dangerous; actress Kerry Washington said she was “horrified by what’s happening;” and activists say the law would effectively “erase young LGBTQ students across Florida.”
Yet Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill is one part of a nationwide trend. There are 15 similar bills moving through state legislatures that restrict how textbooks and curriculums teach LGBTQ+ topics, who can be hired and what teachers are allowed to say around gender identity and sexual orientation.
A House bill in Tennessee would ban textbook and instructional materials that “promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) lifestyles” in K-12 schools. Another, in Kansas, seeks to amend the state’s obscenity law to make using classroom materials depicting “homosexuality” a Class B misdemeanor. Legislators in Indiana are working to bar educators from discussing in any context “sexual orientation,” “transgenderism” or “gender identity” without permission from parents.
Bills like these are “anti-people,” Barbara Simon, head of news and campaigns for the LGBTQ+ media advocacy group GLAAD, told Changing America. “They divide schools and businesses when those should be safe spaces to learn and earn a living.”
Florida’s House committee passed Thursday an updated version of its Parental Rights in Education bill, HB 1557, to specifically prohibit “classroom instruction” on sexual orientation or gender identity for kindergarten and third grade classes, as well as in older grades if it’s deemed inappropriate for students. Parents could also sue schools if they believe the school violated these laws, under the House and accompanying Senate bill.
While Florida is currently a poster state for anti-LGBTQ+ curriculum laws, others are proposing and moving faster on farther-reaching bills. Oklahoma legislators have put five measures before its Congress that regulate how schools from K-12 to higher education teach LGBTQ+ issues. Two bills, SB 1142 and SB 1654, would prohibit librarians and teachers from distributing materials on or outright discussing “any form of non-procreative sex,” gender identity, and “lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender issues.”
Another Oklahoma Senate bill would ban public schools from employing anyone who “promotes positions in the classroom or at any function of the public school that is in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of students.” And SB 1141 would bar requiring public university courses on “gender, sexual, or racial diversity, equality, or inclusion,” supplementing an already-passed House bill that is currently part of a federal lawsuit brought by the ACLU.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has signaled support for Florida’s bill, which the House could vote on as soon as next week. Speaking at a media event last week, DeSantis said he believed it was “entirely inappropriate” for teachers to talk to their students about their gender identity, claiming children are being told “don’t worry, don’t pick your gender yet.” The governor conceded that he doesn’t think this is happening “in large numbers.”
Simon said voters should be “wide awake to what's going on here,” accusing conservative lawmakers like DeSantis of pushing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation to “score points for their own careers at the expense of citizens.” DeSantis has already launched a bid for reelection this year, and has been discussed as a potential 2024 presidential candidate for Republicans.
Earlier this month, more than a hundred people gathered in Florida’s capital to debate the bill, where parents like Dan Van Trice spoke on how it could censor kids: “They take pictures of their family to school and they put them up on the bulletin board, and they talk about their families. Well, my kids won’t be able to participate in that,” ABC3 reports.
Others, like Sen. Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala), stressed that the bill gives parents more control of their children in school: “These children belong to families. They are not wards of the state,” he said.
Still, advocates worry that the passage of legislation like “Don’t Say Gay” will come at the expense of LGBTQ+ youth in particular, who are already at greater risk of mental health issues, self-harm and suicide.
A recent report from the LGBTQ+ suicide prevention and crisis intervention group The Trevor Project found that LGBTQ+ youth who learned about LGBTQ+ people or issues in school had 23 percent lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the last year.
Among middle and high school LGBTQ+ students, 19 percent who reported never learning about LGBTQ+ issues or people in school attempted suicide in the last year compared to 16 percent of students who had.
“We know that what happens in schools impacts mental health and suicide risk,” Sam Ames, director of advocacy and government affairs at the Trevor Project, told Changing America. “We know that youth learning about themselves, being able to see themselves reflected in their curriculum, being able to speak openly about who they are to their classmates and their teachers reduces suicide risk significantly.”
Ames said striking LGBTQ+ figures and stories from the classroom would mean stamping out swaths of American history.
“We are seeing entire chapters of textbooks being erased,” they said. “Do you not talk in a civics class about Pete Buttigeig? Do you not talk in a history class about Harvey Milk or Marsha P. Johnson? These are fundamental moments, not just in LGBTQ history, but in American history, that are being written out of existence.”
A woman wearing a mask. (photo: Alex Wroblewski/NYT)
As U.S. health guidelines start to loosen as COVID-19 cases fall from record-high levels of infection, we look at how there there are still millions of immunocompromised people who face acute risk of illness and feel they have received little to no guidance on how to stay safe in a prolonged COVID-19 world. Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong of The Atlantic spoke to immunocompromised people for his new report and says, “While a lot of the world opens up, their world shuts down, and they feel left behind and abandoned by the government, by their friends, by their workplaces.” Yong notes immunocompromised people “want their lives back, too,” but are just asking for structural solutions to help keep them and non-immunocompromised people safe.
The World Health Organization says the number of confirmed coronavirus infections worldwide fell by 19% last week as many countries in Europe and the Americas saw a sharp drop from record-high levels of infection. Even so, there were 16 million new cases and about 75,000 deaths reported around the globe last week. Here in the U.S., where more than 3,300 new COVID-19 deaths were reported Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said her agency is preparing to issue new guidelines that will suggest loosening public health restrictions.
We’re joined now by Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic who won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic. His new piece is headlined “The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo: What does society owe immunocompromised people?”
Ed, welcome back to Democracy Now! You write, “This isn’t a small group. Close to 3 percent of U.S. adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised people — a number that’s already larger than the populations of 36 states, without even including the millions more who have diseases that also hamper immunity, such as AIDS and at least 450 genetic disorders.” Take it from there, Ed. Talk about the immunocompromised population and how that should affect federal policy and state policy in this country in the midst of the pandemic.
ED YONG: Yeah, I think that we always have had, and continue to have, a responsibility to care for the most vulnerable among us. And at the moment, that includes these 7 million-plus people. Immunocompromised folks have had a really rough time over the pandemic. They continue to feel abandoned and isolated, and increasingly so as the rest of society is so intent on pushing back towards normal. The lifting of protections that safeguarded them, like mask mandates and vaccine mandates, hurts them. It means that while a lot of the world opens up, their world shuts down, and they feel left behind and abandoned by the government, by their friends, by their workplaces, who are buying into this rhetoric that Omicron is mild, that the pandemic is over. It’s very much not over for them. And as I said, this is not a small group. Most of the people who I interviewed for this piece are vaccinated, but for a lot of them, vaccines don’t trigger the same strong immune response that they do in the rest of us. So, many of them know they’re not protected, and a lot of them simply are in the dark about how safe they are during this era when so many other people are luxuriating in the security of immunity.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Ed, could you explain what you know of the impact that Omicron has had on immunocompromised people? And also, immunocompromised people, as you point out in your piece, have always lived with a heightened risk of infection. Explain why COVID is different.
ED YONG: Yeah, so, one really common misconception about immunocompromised people is that they are both, like, visibly and obviously sick and are already secluding themselves in some kind of bubble. In the main, that is not true. Many of them look — most of them probably look very, very healthy. They’re just out and about. They’re part of society. They’re the people checking your books out in the library or driving your Uber, or they’re bagging groceries at the grocery store. They’re people around you. Most of us will likely know immunocompromised people, who we have no idea are immunocompromised. And what they — so, they already lived with a heightened risk from infections, and many of them took steps to manage that, whether it’s getting flu vaccines or wiping down surfaces or avoiding events during the height of flu seasons.
But COVID is different, right? COVID is deadlier than a lot of preexisting respiratory viruses. Obviously it is everywhere. It is spread really quickly. It can spread asymptomatically from people who aren’t sick. And it has forced many of them to take even greater steps to protect themselves from infections that they know can hit them really, really hard.
And Omicron is no different, right? There is this common narrative that Omicron is mild. Well, it might be milder than, say, Delta, but it is not mild in certainly not people whose immune systems are already suppressed. Plus, the fact that Omicron is everywhere, it spreads so quickly, just seriously heightens the risks posed to immunocompromised people, including those, as I’ve said, who have been vaccinated but may still be unprotected.
But the big difference that Omicron brought about was just an intense lack of care, an intense dismissal by friends, by family members, by colleagues, who really just threw their hands up and said that the world was done with the pandemic. Well, immunocompromised people are not done. And a lot of them feel really, really dismissed and often mocked by people who are meant to be close to them, who are meant to be taking their lives into account. You know, things like — it goes from small insults, like social options disappearing — a lot of people talk to me about how friends refuse to talk to them on Skype or Zoom anymore, instead only — because they only want to do in-person gatherings — to workplace options disappearing. A lot of folks managed to protect themselves over the last two years because of remote working options. A lot of employers are rolling those back now at the same time that big protections like mask mandates are lifting. And that just crunches a lot of immunocompromised people into a very, very difficult spot. As one person told me, it’s like being told — that it’s like being unable to swim, but being told that you have to jump into the ocean instead of first trying out a pool. There’s this common stereotype that immunocompromised people are holding the rest of society back in some way, when, in fact, it’s completely the opposite. It’s the rest of society is dragging them back into a kind of forced reintegration with absolutely no regard for the huge residual risks that they still carry.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Ed, could you also explain what some of the obstacles have been for immunocompromised people, and others, of course, in accessing treatments to COVID? And then also explain what the people you spoke to — what are immunocompromised people calling for? I mean, presumably, they are, as you say in your piece, not interested in prolonging the restrictions that have gone on with the pandemic. What would they like to see happen?
ED YONG: Absolutely. So, better — more equitable access to treatments is certainly one of them. I talk in this piece about Evusheld, the combination of antibodies that could be given to prevent infections. Those hold promise for immunocompromised people. You know, they’re sort of doubling in for the antibodies that their own bodies are not producing in response to vaccines. The problem is that the doses of Evusheld that we have on hand are just pitifully short. You know, there’s just one-point-something million, as opposed to the at least 7 million immunocompromised people who exist in this country alone. And the fact that doses were underordered and undersupplied means that you often have to be — you have to be very sick, you have to be at the very height of immunosuppression, to get it. A lot of hospitals have had to do lotteries for some of their immunocompromised patients. And all of that heightens this sense of being abandoned by the government and by the rest of society. Consider how much effort went into producing and distributing vaccines, and compare that to the comparative lack of effort in distributing antivirals that could make a huge difference to this population.
AMY GOODMAN: Before —
ED YONG: In terms of what they — let me just answer the second bit. In terms of what they want, you’re right. Like, exactly none of the people I spoke to said permanent lockdown. They want their lives back, too. They want to be part of the world, and they need to be. Their jobs are out there. You know, their lives are out there. Their families are out there. They just need it to be safer.
And their demands and requests are really reasonable. It’s things like better ventilation standards; easier access to treatments and testing; things like mask mandates, but in a flexible way, when cases are surging; especially remote options, flexibility around things like working and schooling, so that people who have a higher risk find it easier to protect themselves; structural solutions, like paid sick leave. All of these measures, I will note, are things that would also benefit immunocompetent people.
And so it’s really not like immunocompromised people are asking for the world. Again, there’s this stereotype that, you know, they just want a permanent lockdown. Nothing could be further from the truth. They want a world that they can exist in, much like the world that everyone else wants, but they just need that world to be safer for them. And we can make it. We can create a society in which immunocompromised people are less disabled. We have a choice in the matter. Disability is a matter of society as much as it is about biology. It comes down to a lot of the choices that we decide to make and about whose lives we choose to value.
AMY GOODMAN: Ed Yong, we want to thank you for being with us, science writer at The Atlantic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic. We’ll link to his piece in The Atlantic, “The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo: What does society owe immunocompromised people?”
Grace Slick and Janis Joplin clowning in San Francisco, 1967. They were good friends. (photo: Jim Marshal)
Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit lyrics
from the 1967 album, Surrealistic Pillow
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
He called Alice, when she was just small
When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's off with her head
Remember what the Dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head
Colorized footage of the last-known Tasmanian tiger. Scientists say numbat DNA could be used to revive its cousin the thylacine. (photo: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia)
Scientists are convinced reviving extinct species is no longer confined to science fiction. Can we really do it, and should we?
But in announcing the development last week, scientists also had a more extraordinary suggestion: that the numbat’s DNA could be used as a blueprint to bring its extinct cousin, the thylacine, back from the dead.
The last known Tasmanian tiger died in 1936, but the apex predator – which once also roamed the Australian mainland and Kangaroo Island – continues to beguile and obsess even in extinction.
It seems hard to imagine that the carnivorous marsupials might once again roam the Apple Isle in future, but recent advances in gene-editing technology have scientists convinced that de-extinction is no longer confined to the realm of science fiction. Can we really revive a species from extinction, and if so, should we?
Building a genomic puzzle
One de-extinction avenue scientists are exploring is to take the genome of a living species and edit its DNA to more closely resemble that of an extinct relative.
The first step in this process requires an intact genetic blueprint of the extinct animal, says Prof Andrew Pask at the University of Melbourne. In 2017, Pask’s team sequenced the thylacine genome from a juvenile specimen held in Museums Victoria’s collection. “It’s one of the best genome builds we have for an extinct animal,” he says.
“It’s in lots of little tiny pieces when we get it from an extinct specimen, so the DNA is broken up.
“The problem with any mammal genome, not just the thylacine … is that half of our genome is made up of repeat sequences,” Pask says – repeating patterns of A, C, G and T nucleotide bases. “Those bits are really hard to put back together when you’re building your puzzle, particularly because we don’t have the picture on the box of the puzzle – we don’t know what [the thylacine genome] is meant to look like.”
This is where the numbat genome could be helpful. Numbats and thylacines had a common ancestor that lived about 35m to 41m years ago – “not a long time in the evolutionary timescale”, says Parwinder Kaur, the director of DNA Zoo Australia and an associate professor at the University of Western Australia.
Kaur estimates numbats and thylacines share 95% of their DNA, and that the living marsupial’s genome could be used as a reference to fill in the gaps for the thylacine, for which “we don’t have a complete blueprint”.
Both species belong to the Dasyuromorphia order of animals, which also includes most of Australia’s carnivorous marsupials, such as Tasmanian devils, quolls and dunnarts.
The genetic makeup of these animals “has been highly conserved in terms of keeping its DNA in the same order,” Kaur says.
The comprehensive thylacine genome can then be compared to a relative’s genome to determine which sequences differ, Pask says. Using Crispr-Cas9, the Nobel prize-winning genome editing method, it is possible to “turn all of those bits that are different to look like thylacine DNA”.
Though the numbat is genetically similar to the thylacine, it is not an ideal candidate for gene editing, Pask says. “We wouldn’t use the numbat because of its specialisation as an anteater. We would probably use another, like a Tasmanian devil or a dunnart … [which] eat meat, so they’re going to have a much more thylacine-like digestive system.”
Currently, gene editing isn’t advanced enough to be able to change all of the differing sequences to thylacine DNA in a timely manner. “It would take hundreds of years to go through and do it with our current technology,” Pask says. Any de-extinction via this process would therefore involve prioritising which DNA sequences to target, yielding a gene-edited animal genome that isn’t exactly the same as the extinct one.
Pask adds: “We then need to be able to turn a marsupial DNA-containing cell into a living marsupial, and we don’t have that technology developed yet either.”
Short-lived de-extinction success
Another way to bring a species back from the dead is to clone it, à la Dolly the sheep, using a method called somatic cell nuclear transfer. The process involves taking a nucleus – the structure containing the genome – from the cell of an extinct animal and inserting it into an egg of a living relative species, which has had its own nucleus removed.
It relies on intact cells from the extinct species, so is only practical when the last animal has recently died – which effectively rules the method out for thylacines.
Scientists have already used the technique successfully, although the triumph was short-lived. In 2003, researchers cloned a Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of the Iberian wild goat that went extinct when Celia, the last living individual, was killed by a falling tree. The team successfully cloned Celia, reviving the subspecies from extinction for several minutes, before the newborn animal died of a lung defect.
The aptly named Lazarus project, led by Prof Mike Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, is taking a similar approach to try to bring back the southern gastric-brooding frog. The last known specimen of the frog, which was native to Queensland, died in 1983, but the team have some well-preserved tissues.
Though the project has successfully produced early-stage embryos, no clones so far have survived to tadpoles or adult frogs.
Playing God?
How to bring species back from the dead is one question; whether we should is another.
Pask believes the thylacine is one of the best candidates for de-extinction efforts because there are sound ecological reasons for bringing it back. Apex predators like the Tasmanian tiger play an important role in stabilising ecosystems, he says.
Archer agrees, citing the successful reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone national park in the US. “The primary habitat where the thylacine was is still there, and the animals that they fed on are still there,” he says.
Archer – who previously led the Australian Museum’s 1999 effort to revive the thylacine, which was scrapped in 2005 – says de-extinction is “too enticing [and] probably too important” a research topic for the scientific community not to progress on.
“There are those people who would argue that this is playing God … I don’t buy that,” he says. “This is about playing smart human to redress the times when we inappropriately played God by exterminating things.”
In the US, an effort to bring back the woolly mammoth by editing the genome of the Asian elephant has been widely publicised, and also criticised.
“Ecologically, it’s a very hard argument to make to bring that animal back,” Pask says, though he is personally excited by the project. “I don’t think it’s particularly good for the environment or the mammoth.”
Because woolly mammoths have been extinct for thousands of years, it is more difficult to piece together an intact genome, Pask says. “It’s likely then that whatever the animal is that they bring back will be more of an amalgamation between the Asian elephant and the mammoth.”
The project to genetically revive the mammoth “undermines the ongoing effort to save every sad species on the brink”, Mark Carnall, an Oxford University Museum of Natural History curator, wrote in this masthead in 2017.
Pask agrees that money is better spent on conservation efforts for endangered species. “That is a much more noble pursuit than trying to bring back something that’s been dead for [thousands of] years.”
But he believes the same approaches that underpin de-extinction efforts are useful in the short-term for marsupial conservation, particularly in the face of existential threats like increasingly severe bushfires. “The recent bushfires that we’ve had started to wipe out … populations of marsupials that have different genetic diversity.
“If we were able to go out and collect cells [from fire-affected species], freeze them down, and then bring back members of that species with that genetic diversity, we could really help safeguard marsupials against things like these horrendous weather events.
“We want to do that work for conservation benefits right now for marsupials,” he says. “It will one day then provide the basis that we would need if we want to consider bringing the thylacine back.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.