03 August 22
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But the Israel lobby couldn’t take out Rashida Tlaib.
Other conservative pro-Israel groups with deep ties to AIPAC — like Democratic Majority for Israel, Urban Empowerment Action PAC, and Pro-Israel America PAC — also made substantial financial investments in Michigan races. The right-wing Israel lobby spent over $10 million altogether across the state’s 11th, 12th, and 13th congressional districts, far outpacing any other interest group or the fundraising from the candidates themselves.
The campaign to defeat Levin marked a significant escalation in AIPAC’s push to quell criticism of Israel from Jewish members of Congress. “I’m really Jewish,” Levin told MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan last week, “but AIPAC can’t stand the idea that I am the clearest, strongest Jewish voice in Congress standing for a simple proposition: that there is no way to have a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people unless we achieve the political and human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Levin’s was the marquee race Tuesday night, a rare primary between two sitting members in the Oakland County-based 11th District. Due to redistricting, Levin and Stevens both found themselves choosing between the 11th District and the neighboring 10th District, a Trump-leaning seat based in Macomb County. Both ultimately chose the 11th, leading to accusations of carpetbagging against Levin, whose current constituent base is largely within the 10th, and a series of still-unanswered questions about whether Stevens has been truthful about no longer living in the 10th District.
While the race was originally slated to be a typical moderate-versus-progressive affair, pro-Israel groups signaled early in the election that Levin — a self-proclaimed Zionist, former synagogue president, and scion of a prominent Jewish political dynasty — was one of their primary targets this cycle. AIPAC ultimately spent over $4 million in ads and mailers attacking Levin and boosting Stevens, and Stevens received over half a million dollars in bundled donations from AIPAC-aligned conduit PACs. Emily’s List, an establishment group that backs women candidates who support abortion rights, also spent over $3 million to elect Stevens.
AIPAC’s attacks on a candidate who is widely hailed as the most progressive Jewish member of the House brought responses from a suite of progressive organizations — most notably J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group that spent $700,000 on ads in the district, which criticized AIPAC for backing election-denying Republications.
In an email to members of the Michigan Jewish community earlier this year, former AIPAC President David Victor declared that Levin was “the most corrosive member of Congress to the US-Israel relationship.” He contrasted Levin with Muslim members of Congress who have criticized Israeli human rights abuses — saying Levin, as a self-identified Zionist Jew, was “more damaging than Rashida Tliab [sic] or Ilhan Omar.”
A few minutes south of the 11th District, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, arguably the most vocal defender of Palestinian rights in Congress, appeared poised to fend off a fierce primary challenge of her own against Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey, nearly tripling Winfrey’s share of the vote. Winfrey’s bid drew headlines thanks to a massive initial fundraising haul and a pledge of support from a political action committee that claims to represent “a broad coalition of Black and Jewish” leaders, but receives most of its funding from hedge fund billionaire Daniel Loeb.
Despite the fact that Tlaib trounced a well-funded primary challenger in 2020, her opponents hoped a redistricting process would leave her vulnerable. But as the primary progressed, there was little sign Winfrey had made inroads in the district, which is anchored in western Detroit and contains prominent Muslim American communities like Dearborn. Even her backers seemed to recognize Winfrey’s long odds; the PAC funded by Loeb fell short of its pledge to spend over $1 million on her candidacy, instead ultimately spending just under $700,000.
In a third race, in Michigan’s 13th District, an open-seat brawl pitted AIPAC’s newly minted election machine against a purportedly progressive self-funder and a laundry list of other candidates. Adam Hollier, a state senator, received over $4 million in outside support from AIPAC. But that massive assistance was dwarfed by the over $5 million that entrepreneur and state Rep. Shri Thanedar spent to fund his own bid. Thanedar ultimately was declared the winner of the contest with only 28 percent of the vote on Wednesday morning, the clear beneficiary of a fractured field. His win is a blow to AIPAC, but it also leaves Detroit without a Black representative for the first time in over 50 years.
Hollier, who also received over $1 million from the cryptocurrency-aligned Protect Our Futures PAC, was the early favorite among Detroit observers, but late polls showed him struggling to break away from a crowded field. He also struggled to overcome the name recognition Thanedar had built in the area after his unsuccessful run for governor in 2018. Despite losing handily statewide, Thanedar won the city of Detroit in that race.
While Thanedar was purportedly the most progressive candidate vying for the 13th District — his campaign website endorses key progressive planks like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal — his decision to self-fund his run and his prior donations to Republican candidates appear to have alarmed progressive organizations, which overwhelmingly steered clear of endorsing his candidacy despite his lead in pre-election surveys.
A Russian serviceman guards in an area of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in territory under Russian military control, southeastern Ukraine, Sunday, May 1, 2022. (photo: AP)
The head of the UN’s nuclear regulatory watchdog is warning the world that Europe’s largest nuclear power plant “is completely out of control.” Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the Associated Press about the risk in an interview.
The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is in Southeast Ukraine along the Dnipro river. The plant has been a central part of the war since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February. Russian troops besieged it in early March, firing artillery shells at it before taking it over. The firefight between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers was watched by 95,000 people online through the plant’s live streamed CCTV cameras. An administrative building caught fire during the fight but the plant didn’t melt down. Since then, Russia has maintained control of the plant.
Since then, Grossi and others have been lobbying Russia to allow the IAEA inside to inspect the plant. “Every principle of nuclear safety has been violated,” Grossi said. “What is at stake is extremely serious and extremely grave and dangerous.”
Grossi told the AP that it has a few contacts with the Ukrainian workers inside the plant, but believes supplies are limited and that it’s unclear if the plant is being well maintained. “When you put this together, you have a catalog of things that should never be happening in any nuclear facility,” he said. “And this is why I have been insisting from day one that we have to be able to go there to perform this safety and security evaluation, to do the repairs and to assist as we already did in Chernobyl.”
Russia has kept the power plant up and running, but it’s also turned it into a fortress. Ukraine holds the territory across the river and Russia has been shooting rockets over the river from the cover of Zaporizhzhia since July. Ukrainian civilians across the river are losing their homes and loved ones in the attacks and Kyiv’s military can’t fire back.
Grossi told the AP that Zaporizhzhia’s frontline position had made it especially vulnerable. He wants IAEA inspectors on site both to make sure the plant is running without problems and to tamp down the fighting. “The IAEA, by its presence, will be a deterrent to any act of violence against this nuclear power plant,” he said. “So I’m pleading as an international civil servant, as the head of an international organization, I’m pleading to both sides to let this mission proceed.”
National Guard troops outside the U.S. Capitol building. (photo: Jasper Colt/USA TODAY)
American Oversight filed a public records request for the communications of former acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy in the days after the attack on the Capitol.
But they were informed during litigation that the records were not preserved.
“DOD and Army conveyed to Plaintiff that when an employee separates from DOD or Army he or she turns in the government-issued phone, and the phone is wiped. For those custodians no longer with the agency, the text messages were not preserved and therefore could not be searched,” the agencies wrote in a March court filing.
The disclosure follows news that numerous officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also had their messages erased during the transition, including former acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his deputy Ken Cuccinelli. Both had their phones reset following the inauguration, losing any texts from Jan. 6 in the process.
The inspector general at DHS also notified Congress last month that text messages from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 were “erased” as part of a device replacement program.
The Secret Service contends any text messages that might be missing were lost through a software transition.
The effort to obtain Pentagon texts could have shed light on why the National Guard faced delays in getting approval to go to the Capitol as it was under siege.
The suit sought the military leaders’ communications with former President Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. The request also asked for communications from Kash Patel, Miller’s chief of staff; Paul Ney, the Defense Department general counsel; and James E. McPherson, the Army’s general counsel.
Patel was also subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
American Oversight sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate, noting that each official’s phone appears to have been wiped after their records request was filed.
“DOD has apparently deleted messages from top DOD and Army officials responsive to pending FOIA requests that could have shed light on the actions of top Trump administration officials on the day of the failed insurrection,” Heather Sawyer, the groups executive director, wrote in the letter, referring to the Freedom of Information Act.
“American Oversight accordingly urges you to investigate DOD’s actions in allowing the destruction of records potentially relevant to this significant matter of national attention and historical importance.”
Both DOD and the Justice Department declined to comment.
It’s the second time in less than a week that Garland has been called upon to intervene in a Jan. 6-related matter.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) penned a letter to the attorney general last week asking him to review what he called “the destruction of evidence” at DHS. Durbin also asked Garland to “step in and get to the bottom of what happened to these text messages and hold accountable those who are responsible.”
Abortion rights activists march from Washington Square Park to Bryant Park in protest of the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court. The march was in New York on June 24, 2022. (photo: Alex Kent/AFP)
McMahon studies abortion access and she says while women will certainly die because of the Supreme Court's decision, this idea of women dying from back alley abortions is stuck in the past. "I understand why people go to that talking point," she says. "But that's just not where the evidence points."
Medicine has advanced over the past fifty years. Now there are self-managed abortions — known as SMAs — pills people can take to safely terminate a pregnancy from home.
But America's prison and policing system has also grown, McMahon says. Fifty years ago we didn't have our current culture of mass incarceration.
"We're gonna see more people being criminalized, more people being arrested and more people being incarcerated."
"I think a lot of people's first reaction was to pull out the coat hanger imagery," McMahon says about the ending of Roe.
But a more accurate symbol might be prison bars.
The criminalization of pregnancy is already here
The patients were deemed suspicious, or they had not received good prenatal care, some had unexplained preterm labor, others a history of alcohol or drug abuse.
These were the pregnant women that the Medical University of South Carolina, in cooperation with police and the local prosecutor, drug tested without their knowledge in 1989.
"They set up a dragnet," says Michelle Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California Irvine and the author of the book Policing The Womb. Over a period of five years, a total of 30 women were arrested for child abuse.
A few brushstroke details from the lawsuit that would follow: One woman spent the last three weeks of her pregnancy in jail, another was arrested moments after she had given birth, handcuffed while she was still bleeding, wearing only a hospital gown.
"Every one of the arrests were all Black women with the exception of one patient," says Goodwin. "And on her medical chart, the nurse who was in charge wrote 'lives with Negro boyfriend.'"
This was during the rapid growth of the war on drugs, which contributed to mass incarceration and reified racist myths like welfare queens and crack babies.
The shaming of Black women for supposedly creating a generation of crack babies seeped from public discourse into public policy, Goodwin says. It didn't matter that the concept of the "crack baby" was a racist, fictionalized invention.
"Black women who suffered from stillbirths, Black women who had alerted their doctors that they suffered through addiction were being policed, were being stigmatized and ultimately were being arrested," Goodwin says. "Whether they had healthy births or whether they had a miscarriage."
The fact that Black women were targeted has nothing to do with their behavior, Goodwin says. "We have to dispel this notion that the type of policing that was taking place was a result of Black and brown women just being more criminal, more negligent, just simply bad mothers."
"There's absolutely no data that establishes that Black women were any different than white women in conduct during their pregnancy," she says.
What was different was who was deemed suspect, often by medical staff. In the 80's and 90's, Goodwin says, "a Black woman was 10 times more likely to be reported to police and social services on matters related to her pregnancy than were white women."
This kind of disproportionate targeting of women of color continues to this day, and stretches back far into the past.
"When we think about the history of policing the womb, policing reproduction, policing motherhood, it's an experience that is not new," says Goodwin.
Black women and Indigenous women have always been policed like this Goodwin says, which makes them "canaries in the coalmine."
Like the women in North Carolina, whose arrests were harbingers for the criminalization of pregnancy that would increase even while abortion was legal, and for what will happen next, in the post-Roe world.
Policing pregnancy, she says, "is all about power and control."
A new category of crime victim
If one of the major factors in criminalizing pregnancy was the war on drugs, the other was an ongoing wave of post-Roe feticide laws — which created a completely new class of crime victim, the fetus.
These laws often were passed under the auspices of protecting pregnant women, especially from domestic violence. There's no arguing that people who are pregnant need protection. In the United States homicide is the leading cause of death among pregnant women. But the feticide laws didn't work to make pregnant people safer, says Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, known as NAPW. "What these laws are then used for is actually to criminalize the pregnant person herself," says Sussman.
The laws that were supposed to protect women from violence, instead became another way to criminalize pregnancy.
"The first sort of experiment in this area," Sussman says, "were primarily drug- using Black women who were charged with crimes in relationship to their fetus." Those crimes were often things like child abuse or child neglect — but there were also cases where the rhetoric of the war on drugs cases merged into the feticide statutes to create a perfect storm of policing pregnancy.
Sussman says one case from 2006 in particular sticks with her.
When Rennie Gibbs gave birth a month early, her daughter was stillborn, her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She never took a breath. The cause of death seemed clear until the medical examiner found trace amounts of cocaine in the baby's system; then it became murder — Mississippi's "depraved heart" murder. The case was eventually dismissed in 2014.
Sussman says there was zero medical proof that Gibbs' baby had died because the teenager had used drugs, but it didn't matter. And it didn't change the steady increase of prosecutions like that one.
"We are involved now in multiple cases in which the mother is blamed for the pregnancy loss and then criminalized for that loss," Sussman says. "Without really any science or medicine backing it up."
They are currently representing Brittney Pullow, a member of the Wichita Tribe, who was convicted of manslaughter last year for having a miscarriage when she was somewhere between 15 and 17 weeks pregnant. The state of Oklahoma faulted the miscarriage on methampetamine use, without scientific support.
In some cases, medical examiners use an ancient "lung float test" to determine if a baby is born alive, so they can make the case for murder. "Talk about antiquated," Sussman says. "It's like from the era of you're a witch if you float, you're dead if you sink — it's the same stuff." That test helped send another woman, Breyona Reddick, to prison for a decade just this year.
Not just drug use
In 2004, there was the Salt Lake City woman carrying twins who refused a c-section. When one died, she was charged with murder for that refusal. That charge was dropped, but she plead guilty to child endangerment for using drugs during her pregnancy. Many other cases involve no use of substances at all.
Like in Iowa in 2010, when a young woman fell down the stairs, losing her pregnancy. While being treated in the hospital, she confessed to a nurse that she hadn't been sure she wanted a baby. She was accused of feticide, before the charges were dropped.
Then there was Bei Bei Shuai.
"Her boyfriend left her in the cold darkness," says Michelle Goodwin. "One of the coldest days on record in the state of Indiana, I believe."
"She was on her hands and knees, begging and pleading to him in a parking lot, not to leave." After he drove off she swallowed rat poison. She was 33 weeks pregnant.
She survived the suicide attempt. The baby, who was delivered prematurely, died days later.
"Doctors said that they believed it was quite possible that the efforts that they made to save Bei Bei's life may have contributed to the demise of the baby," Goodwin says.
Shuai was charged with attempted feticide and murder, facing between 45 and 65 years in prison.
Suicide is not a crime, Sussman points out. "Often what we see is the conversion of otherwise legal behavior during pregnancy to criminal behavior, simply because the person is pregnant," she says.
The same holds true for drug use, which on its own is also not a crime in most states. It is the person's status as pregnant that changes that, that makes you vulnerable, Sussman says. "All of a sudden, the state can charge you with crimes that do not exist if you were not pregnant."
NAPW has documented more than 1,700 cases in which a woman was charged, arrested, or detained for reasons related to pregnancy since 1973, when Roe was decided. Most of these cases, but not all, involve women who gave birth to healthy babies.
"If the protections of Roe and Casey no longer exist criminalization will increase across all pregnancy outcomes," Sussman says. "This is not just an issue of abortion — this is an issue for anyone who is pregnant or who has the capacity for pregnancy."
The growth of policing and mass incarceration
The last time that abortion was illegal, the landscape of American law enforcement was vastly different. The trend since then has been to increasingly push social problems onto the plate of policing. In most American cities funding for police departments takes up the majority of the budget, even as other public services lack funding.
"Our country in the past 50 years has decided that the police state is the way to respond to public health crises, to mental health crises, to poverty," Sussman says.
"We have weaponized the state to get involved in so many aspects of our lives that were just not present in 1973," she says about the year Roe made abortion legal. "The apparatus of mass incarceration and criminalization and the funding to support it did not exist in 1973."
But it does now. And this matters for people whose pregnancies will increasingly become the direct purview of police. "All you need to show is that a woman exposed their child to some risk or perceived risk of harm or exposed their fetus to some perceived risk of harm," she says, emphasizing that no harm needs to happen for the state to get involved.
"The exposure alone is considered a felony in multiple states already. And we anticipate we will see much more of this post-Dobbs."
Sussman says that means miscarriages, which occur in 10 to 20 percent of pregnancies, could become heavily scrutinized.
"The vast majority of miscarriages have no known cause," she says. "They're often unexplained genetic abnormalities. There is nothing that the pregnant person could have done or not done to have changed that outcome."
But there is virtually no way to tell the difference between a self-managed abortion and a miscarriage. For the most part, they look medically identical.
"There's no examination," says abortion researcher Haley McMahon. "There's no blood test."
"The only way they know is if you disclose that information," she says.
Sussman says the door swings both ways. "I anticipate that prosecutors will sweep in anyone who is experiencing a pregnancy loss that they deem 'suspicious,'" Sussman says.
Suspicious. That was the rationale used to target the women treated at the Medical University of South Carolina in 1989. Black women are twice as likely to have miscarriages as white and Latina women, making them statistically more vulnerable to suspicions that are based less on evidence, and more on racism and classism.
"It's going to be poor people, people of color, young people," says Sussman. "Anyone who is experiencing a mental health crisis, anyone who has a substance-use disorder, those are the people that are gonna be most vulnerable to suspicion and the specter of law enforcement when they experience a pregnancy loss."
Which is why McMahon says it's key to understand that the conversation about pregnancy and abortion is not just about health and physical survival, it's increasingly about prison and policing.
Two years after nationwide protests over systemic racism in policing failed to produce a real reckoning, law enforcement is being handed even more power to surveil and punish pregnancy and women's bodies.
"Who are the people who are going to enforce these abortion bans?" McMahon asks.
"We know exactly who they are, they're the police."
A vial of the oral polio vaccine. (photo: Ezra Acayan/Getty)
How a polio case in the US affects global eradication efforts.
With the country and public health system already struggling under the weight of Covid-19 and monkeypox, this news comes as an unpleasant surprise, and instantly raises questions. How did this happen? Who else is at risk? What does it mean that the Rockland case was a vaccine-derived strain, and what are the implications for the global efforts to fully eradicate polio?
What is polio?
Polio, short for poliomyelitis, is caused by the poliovirus, an enterovirus that can infect the nervous system. Symptoms can range from those similar to the flu (sore throat, fever, and fatigue), to a more severe infection of the spinal cord causing meningitis and even paralysis. But unlike the flu, the poliovirus multiplies mainly in the intestines, and it chiefly spreads when people don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. Polio is highly contagious, at least to the unvaccinated, particularly in areas with poor sanitation and water safety.
From the first documented US outbreak in 1894 until vaccines were developed in the 1950s, polio was one of the most feared childhood diseases. Thousands of children were left paralyzed with every summer outbreak. The most vulnerable were children under the age of 5.
But those victims were the exception; three-quarters of patients infected with the poliovirus show no symptoms at all. For most of the remaining quarter, the illness never progresses beyond flu-like symptoms. In roughly one in 25 patients, however, the virus spreads to the nervous system and causes meningitis. About one in eight of the meningitis cases — or approximately 0.5 percent of total polio cases — will have permanent damage to their nerves that leaves them paralyzed. There was and is no known cure, only supportive treatments including the iron lung — since replaced by more advanced ventilators — and physical therapy.
The threat of polio changed permanently when two vaccines were discovered in short succession: an injected, inactivated vaccine by Dr. Jonas Salk in 1955, and a live-attenuated vaccine, taken orally, by Dr. Albert Sabin in 1961. Both vaccines are very effective, granting 99 percent immunity to infection. Sabin’s oral vaccine was eventually adopted widely in the US, and polio cases dropped drastically in the 1960s and 70s, until the wild virus was stamped out entirely in the country.
The US was ahead of the curve — a global vaccination campaign began in earnest in 1988, a few years after smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980. The US switched to the slightly safer inactivated, injected vaccine in 2000, and the shots are still recommended to all children on the standard childhood vaccine schedule. Worldwide, thanks to ongoing public health efforts, hundreds of millions of children receive the oral vaccine every year, and the original wild virus has been driven out of all but a handful of countries.
Where did this case come from?
Since community spread of polio was eliminated from the US around 1980, all infections have come from other countries that still have the disease. Genetic sequencing shows that the recent case was a vaccine-derived poliovirus strain. This means the circulating virus isn’t from one of the few remaining pockets of endemic wild poliovirus, but rather from one of the many more countries with polio outbreaks that mutated from an oral, live-attenuated vaccine — which is not the vaccine currently used in the US.
Polio vaccines fit into one of two types: inactivated or live-attenuated. Live-attenuated vaccines, like the combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine recommended to all US children, contain a modified, weakened strain of a pathogen that doesn’t cause illness in humans, but still triggers an immune response that protects against the original strain. The oral vaccine used in the most at-risk countries is live-attenuated. Inactivated vaccines, like the polio vaccine currently used in the US, contain only dead virus material, and may need a longer series of booster shots to stimulate the immune system enough to grant long-lasting and full immunity.
Although the live-attenuated poliovirus vaccine almost never causes polio itself — except in the less than one in a million cases when a child is severely immunocompromised — the fact that it contains a live virus inevitably carries some risk, unlike inactivated vaccines. When live-attenuated polio vaccines are given in a community that contains a high fraction of unvaccinated people, the modified virus can infect others, and with enough generations of spread, it can — very rarely — mutate back into a new virulent strain. It’s essential to public health efforts to make sure enough people get vaccinated, to protect against both the wild virus and the possibility of new vaccine-derived strains.
Ironically, the fact that most polio cases are asymptomatic or mild — along with an incubation period that can take up to 30 days before symptoms appear — makes polio particularly challenging for contact tracing and public health containment efforts. The only way to keep the virus suppressed is by achieving herd immunity, which for polio requires vaccinating about 80 percent of the population.
Who is at risk?
For most people in the US, the newly discovered polio case hasn’t raised the risk at all. Rockland County’s public health department believes that the patient is no longer contagious.
The poliovirus can be detected in stool samples, and also in wastewater monitoring, which looks for evidence of viral genetic material in sewage. On August 1, the New York State Department of Health reported that the Rockland polio case was genetically linked to samples of the virus collected in sewage in Jerusalem and London, though the department stressed that the results do not automatically imply the patient had traveled to either location. The Rockland public health department was able to use sewage samples collected earlier for Covid-19 monitoring, and found poliovirus in samples there from June that are genetically connected to the current case.
Given how common asymptomatic cases are and the long incubation period, it’s possible there are other unrecognized cases in the Rockland area. Those may still be infectious, but the odds are against it spreading far. As of 2019, over 90 percent of US children were fully vaccinated against polio on schedule, well above the herd immunity threshold, and this figure has held steady for decades. Infants 4 months or older will usually have received two doses, which already provides 90 percent immunity.
Rockland County, though, has a lower vaccination rate than the rest of the country; it was the site of a 2018-2019 measles outbreak, and currently only 60 percent of 2-year-olds there are fully vaccinated against polio, compared to the national average of 90 percent. The New York State Department of Health is now urging all unvaccinated people, those who haven’t completed their polio vaccine series, and pregnant people to get vaccinated. In the month since the polio case was discovered, the Rockland clinic administered almost 400 vaccine doses. People in the Rockland area who were vaccinated as children but are worried they may have been exposed should schedule a booster shot.
What does this mean for the global eradication effort?
While the US remains protected against polio, the same can’t be said of some more at-risk developing countries where the virus is still active.
After his work developing the oral vaccine, Sabin campaigned for a worldwide eradication effort in the 1960s, and in 1972 donated all of his vaccine strains to the World Health Organization in the hope of reducing the manufacturing cost. Despite recent efforts to introduce the slightly safer inactivated vaccine worldwide, most lower- and middle-income countries still use the oral vaccine.
The global eradication program has been a huge success overall, with total worldwide polio cases declining by more than 99.99 percent since the program started in 1988. But the closer eradication gets, the harder reaching the finish line becomes. When hundreds of millions of doses of oral vaccine are given every year, even the very low risk of a dose spawning a new vaccine-derived strain adds up. Most of the polio cases that have been detected in African countries like Nigeria and Yemen are vaccine-derived. Interruptions in vaccination coverage due to military conflicts and the Covid-19 pandemic likely increased the risk of vaccine-derived variants spreading unchecked.
Despite the risks inherent to live-attenuated vaccines, the oral vaccine has significant advantages, particularly for public health campaigns in developing countries. Each dose costs as little as 12 cents, compared to about $2 per dose for the inactivated vaccine, and because it’s given in drops under the tongue, it doesn’t require needles or trained professionals to administer. Live-attenuated vaccines in general also provide stronger and longer-lasting immunity than inactivated vaccines.
And early on, the infectiousness of the oral vaccine strain was actually considered a plus, since children not reached by health workers could potentially catch the weakened strain from others, ending up immune. In theory, as long as the vaccination campaign reached enough people in the community, the spread would fizzle out long before the virus had a chance to mutate back to virulence in humans.
Phasing out the oral vaccine, which would eliminate the source of new polio variants, will likely be needed to reach full eradication, but replacing the oral vaccine with the full schedule of booster shots needed to grant immunity isn’t yet possible. Even if the funding and personnel were available, the total global supply of inactivated vaccines is far too low to cover the hundreds of millions of children still at risk.
With monkeypox having been recently declared a public health emergency of international concern by the WHO, and the ever-present threat of future pandemics on the horizon, the global effort against polio is more important than ever to ensure that polio will never again be that kind of worldwide threat. Maintaining and ideally increasing the vaccination rate in the US will protect the country in the meantime, and support the worldwide push for eradication by denying polio a foothold.
Mourners attend the funeral of Palestinian Dirar al-Kafrini. (photo: Mohamas Torokman/Reuters)
Israeli army kills 17-year-old and arrests a senior Islamic Jihad leader during a raid in the occupied West Bank.
The youth, identified as 17-year-old Dirar al-Kafrini, was killed late on Monday when the shooting broke out between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters in the camp.
The Palestinian health ministry said al-Kafrini was already dead when he was brought to the Jenin public hospital just before 11pm (20:00 GMT).
[Translation: The martyr Dirar al-Kafrini that was killed by occupation fire in Jenin moments ago]
The ministry reported that another Palestinian was shot with live ammunition in the leg and was hospitalised in moderate condition.
A funeral procession for al-Kafrini took place on the streets of the Jenin camp shortly after the killing.
During the raid, Israeli forces arrested one of the most senior leaders in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement (PIJ) in the West Bank, Bassam al-Saadi.
They also arrested his son-in-law, Ashraf al-Jada, while he was visiting al-Saadi’s home in the camp.
Videos and images shared on social media showed traces of blood on the floor of al-Saadi’s home following the arrest. The family and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society said the army had assaulted al-Saadi and his wife during the arrest. Al-Saadi’s wife, Nawal, was hospitalised due to the injuries she sustained.
In a statement on Monday night, the PIJ’s armed wing Al-Quds Brigades, announced “a state of alertness and readiness among its fighters and active combat units” which it said comes “in response to its duty towards the treacherous aggression that the great leader, the sheikh Bassam al-Saadi and his family were exposed to in Jenin”.
The Israeli army said in a statement it “arrested two suspects who were transferred to the general security services for questioning” on Monday night.
It also said its soldiers were met with live fire in the camp, and they fired back.
Al-Saadi is a former prisoner who spent many years in and out of Israeli jails. He was last arrested in 2018 following a five-year effort by the Israeli army to locate him, and was released in 2020. Two of his sons were killed during Israel’s large-scale invasion of the Jenin refugee camp in 2002.
The Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Prisoners Affairs condemned al-Saadi’s “barbaric arrest”.
Head of the commission Qadri Abu Bakr said they “hold the occupation’s government fully responsible for the life of the captive al-Saadi and for the execution of the martyr Dirar al-Kafrini”, adding that the “occupation does not stop targeting Jenin camp and its residents”.
Israel’s raid on Jenin comes as part of months-long efforts to quash rising armed resistance in the city’s refugee camp, where the armed wings of the PIJ and the ruling Fatah party are active.
On May 11, Israeli forces shot dead veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, while she was reporting on a raid in Jenin.
At least 60 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army since the start of the year, about a third of them were from Jenin.
The Israeli army raids Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank on a near-nightly basis, often resulting in the killing or wounding of Palestinians.
On Sunday night, Israeli forces arrested some 43 Palestinians from across the West Bank.
High tide flooding in downtown Annapolis, Maryland, in 2021. The number of days with high tide flooding is accelerating on the East and Gulf coasts. (photo: Brian Witte/AP)
The findings could hardly be more timely: thousands of households are reeling after floods killed dozens of people in Appalachia and destroyed homes in St. Louis and Arizona last week. And peak hurricane season is looming in the Atlantic.
Flooding associated with sea level rise is accelerating, according to an annual report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ocean water is inundating coastal cities during high tides, even when there is no storm.
"Sea level rise impacts are happening now, and are growing rapidly," explains William Sweet, a NOAA oceanographer and one of the authors of the report.
The number of days when so-called sunny day floods occur is accelerating on the East and Gulf coasts. For example, in 2021 the Northeast experienced an average of 8 high tide flood days, which is a 200% increase compared to the number of flood days in the year 2000.
In the future, such floods could become routine, federal data suggest. By 2050, high tides could send water into neighborhoods dozens of days each year, according to the report.
Sea levels are rising more quickly in some parts of the U.S., such as the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf Coast. The risk is highest in places where the water is rising and the land is also falling. That's happening very quickly in Louisiana and Texas, as humans pump out oil, gas and drinking water, and the land collapses because of that extraction.
"[In] that part of the country, the land is sinking," Sweet says . "And it's sinking at rate, in some areas, faster than the ocean itself is rising."
That has led to a rapid increase in the number of sunny days with water in the streets. For example, the area around Galveston, Texas has gone from an average of three high tide flood days 20 years ago, to 14 such flood days last year, to a projected 170 days or more by the year 2050. That means, every other day there would be a flood in the Galveston area.
Rising seas also exacerbate flooding during hurricanes. That's because storms push more ocean water onto land. Salt water also fills underground drainage pipes, which means rainwater backs up and collects in streets, parking lots and basements. And climate change is causing more rain to fall during storms, which can cause flash floods.
It all adds up to a dramatic increase in flood damage to homes. And floods are extremely expensive. In the last 10 years, floods have caused at least $50 billion in damage in the U.S.
But what does that mean for people living on the front lines of flooding? A new analysis commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that flood damage can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a household, and that many home buyers are unaware of that potential cost.
The new report looks at housing and flood data for three flood-prone coastal states: New York, New Jersey and North Carolina, and estimates that about 29,000 homes that flooded in the past were sold in 2021.
Actuaries used housing and flood models to estimate the future cost of flood damage for those homes. They predict that homeowners in North Carolina could suffer at least $35,000 in flood damage over the course of a 30-year mortgage. In New Jersey and New York, where homes are more expensive, the cost of future flood damage is even higher.
"I think by putting a price on that amount of damage, it really shows just how vulnerable home buyers can be, owning a previously flooded home," says Joel Scata, who studies flood risk at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
He says they focused on those three states because home buyers there receive little or no information about a home's flood history.
"The disclosure laws in these three states are inadequate because they don't explicitly require home sellers to tell buyers whether a house is previously flooded, or the amount of times that the house has previously flooded," Scata explains. Other states, such as Texas and Louisiana, do require disclosure of flood risk information during home sales.
NPR analyzed flood disclosure laws across the country in 2020 and found that living in a flood-prone area without knowing it can be financially devastating, especially for low-income households and those who rent.
"It's really important for home buyers to have a right to know the flood risk that they might face," says Scata. "The damages can be so high, it can be financially ruinous."
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