CC News Letter 08 June - Refer The Lakshadweep Issue To National Commission for Scheduled Tribes

 

Dear Friend,

Prior consultation with the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) mandatory for policy changes in Lakshadweep

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In Solidarity

Binu Mathew

Editor

Countercurrents.org

Appeal To President Of India: Refer The Lakshadweep Issue To National Commission for Scheduled Tribes

by E A S Sarma

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/appeal-to-president-of-india-refer-the-lakshadweep-issue-to-national-commission-for-scheduled-tribes/

Prior consultation with the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) mandatory for policy changes in Lakshadweep

Rural Teacher Pedro Castillo Poised to Write a New Chapter in Peru’s History

Written by Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/rural-teacher-pedro-castillo-poised-to-write-a-new-chapter-in-perus-history/

Castillo’s victory will be remarkable not only because he is a leftist teacher who is the son of illiterate peasants and his campaign was grossly outspent by Fujimori, but there was a relentless propaganda attack against him that touched on historical fears of Peru’s middle class and elites.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Hits Highest Level in Over 4 Million Years

by Brett Wilkins

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-hits-highest-level-in-over-4-million-years/

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego working at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory in Hawaii said the May measurements—an

increase from 417 parts per million (ppm) in May 2020—mean that “the atmospheric burden of CO2 is now comparable to where it was during the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when CO2 was close to, or above 400 ppm.”

International Energy Agency report underscores inadequacy of US government response to climate change

by Ronan Coddington

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/international-energy-agency-report-underscores-inadequacy-of-us-government-response-to-climate-change/

The report, which is titled Net Zero by 2050, states that in order to achieve a carbon neutral world by that year producers will need to immediately stop any new fossil fuel production. This is only one of 400 “milestones” along the road to 2050, and its implausibility only underscores the difficulties of combining a rational, science-based response to the danger of climate change with the maintenance of global capitalism, driven by private profits and the interests of

rival nation-states.

126 Nobel Laureates and Experts Issue Timely Warning on Some Crucial Issues, But  Miss Other Urgent Concerns

by Bharat Dogra

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/126-nobel-laureates-and-experts-issue-timely-warning-on-some-crucial-issues-but-miss-other-urgent-concerns/

While this statement makes several very important observations, it is really surprising and regrettable to find that it makes some omissions of very critical importance and  some issues of critical importance for resolving the present crisis  are more or less left out of this statement’s concerns. Hence while this statement deserves great attention for its several important and profound observations, it deserves attention also for the glaring omissions that have been made. For example the most important task of complete elimination of nuclear weapons ( and in fact all weapons of mass destruction) is hardly mentioned in this statement.

Educating for the future we want

by Stephen Sterling

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/educating-for-the-future-we-want/

We are approaching fifty years since the UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm endorsed the key role of education, nearly thirty years since Agenda 21 proposed that education is “critical for achieving environmental and ethical awareness,” and five years since the SDGs set a target date of 2030. The ambitious UNESCO “Futures of Education” initiative promises a chance to reset direction and priorities. But to date, strong cultural inertia and the counterforce of neoliberalism have slowed progress, and the time is long overdue for holding Westernized education policy and practice to account. Now, efforts to transform education are greater than ever, but so, too, are the stakes and urgency. We need to move fast and with bold aspiration, while retaining critical reflexivity, as we create a new chapter in the evolution of our ways of educating on this—as yet—still beautiful planet.

Young farmers

in Ladakh: the future of our food

Written by Kunzang Deachen, Chozin Palmo and Jigmet Singge

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/young-farmers-in-ladakh-the-future-of-our-food/

Westernisation has come with a lot of glamour and promises of affluence, but today, many younger people are beginning to realise that the chase for modernity and glamour brings little more than dissatisfaction, disconnection, and feelings of addiction.

A People’s Vaccine Against a Mutating Virus and Neoliberal Rule

by Nicolas J S Davies

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/a-peoples-vaccine-against-a-mutating-virus-and-neoliberal-rule/

Ending international vaccine apartheid is not just a matter of altruism, or even justice. It is a question of whether we will end this pandemic before vaccine-resistant, super-spreading and deadlier variants fuel even more toxic new waves. The only way humanity can win this struggle is to act collectively in our common interest.

Universal Health Coverage and Unmet

Reproductive Health needs of Migrant Women at times of Pandemic COVID-19 in India

by Ujjwala Gupta

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/universal-health-coverage-and-unmet-reproductive-health-needs-of-migrant-women-at-times-of-pandemic-covid-19-in-india/

The spread of COVID in rural areas created a state of emergency due to ill-equipped infrastructure in Public Health system to handle spike in cases. This directed the Government to shift its priority deeming SRH activities as non-emergency, to respond to the needs of pandemic , consequently sidelining the reproductive health needs. Above that, seasonal migration disrupts the access to health care services in actual place of origin and also simultaneously creating missing and duplicity in public health records of antenatal, family planning and vaccination.

To avoid catastrophes India should adopt a risk minimization for all policy

by Sagar Dhara

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/to-avoid-catastrophes-india-should-adopt-a-risk-minimization-for-all-policy/

COVID-19 is a gray rhino event, an event that is highly probable and with a large impact. It can be seen well in advance due to its size and early warning signs, but which are ignored. Now over a year into the pandemic, India remains completely unprepared for COVID-19’s second wave.

Major news, social media sites back online after massive internet outage

by Countercurrents Collective

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/major-news-social-media-sites-back-online-after-massive-internet-outage/

Dozens of major websites — including The New York Times, CNN, Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify — were beginning to return online Tuesday morning after crashing in an apparent massive internet outage.

Downward Social Mobility and Authoritarianism

by Jon Kofas

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/downward-social-mobility-and-authoritarianism/

In the next economic downturn, the US already has a political party with the ideological and political makings of a native-style Fascist Party. Given the expanding local and state-base of the populist right wing, it will be very easy for any number of Republicans to rise to power as Fascist in ideology and policies, while claiming to represent democracy.

Twilight of the Pandemic? Bracing for a Surge of Trumpism or…

by John Feffer

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/twilight-of-the-pandemic-bracing-for-a-surge-of-trumpism-or/

Sure, I continue to worry about what the next wave of Covid-19 might look like. I fear both the continued lunacy of the Republican Party and the pallid incrementalism of the Democrats. But I’m heartened by the energy of people all over the world determined to beat back dystopia, take control of their lives, and transform the optimists’ credo of “hope and change”

into something a great deal more significant than a campaign slogan.

At His Best, Dilip Vengsarkar Could Sit In The Company of The All-Time Greats

by Harsh Thakor

https://countercurrents.org/2021/06/at-his-best-dilip-vengsarkar-could-sit-in-the-company-of-the-all-time-greats/

Without doubt Dilip Vengsarkar is one of the finest batsmen ever to have graced a cricket field. This week we commemorate the feat of Dilip Vengsarkar becoming the 1st overseas batsman ever to score three consecutive centuries in test matches at Lords. It is a landmark that would inscribe a permanent place in the museum of cricket. We also coincidentally celebrate the 35th anniversary of India’s first win at Lords, the mecca of cricket.

 

Study finds 7 newly-identified COVID-19 variants circulating in the United States

CNNWIRE By Maggie Fox CNN

Monday, February 15, 2021

Researchers said Sunday they have identified a batch of similar troubling mutations in coronavirus samples circulating in the United States. They've not only drawn attention to them; they've come up with a better shorthand for referring to them. They've named them after birds.

The mutations all affect the same stretch of the spike protein -- the knob-like extension on the outside of the virus that it uses to dock onto the cells it infects, the researchers wrote in a pre-print report. It's not peer reviewed yet, but researchers are rushing such findings online to share them quickly with other experts. 

The genetic stretch that is mutated, or changed, is called 677. The various changes are so similar that the researchers think evolution favors these particular variants. And it's in a troubling place, said Vaughn Cooper, director of the Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, who worked on the study.

"This stretch of Spike is important because of its proximity to a region key for virulence," Cooper told CNN via email.

"We actually think these mutations are relatively rare (compared to other types of mutation), but they are disproportionately selected when then occur," he added.

Average US daily COVID-19 cases dip below 100K for 1st time in months

The team has been reviewing genomic sequences deposited into GISAID, a global database that researchers are using to share genetic information about the virus. It's where scientists first noticed the rise of troubling new variants such as B.1.1.7, first seen in the United Kingdom, and B.1.351, first seen in South Africa.

"In late January of 2021, our two independent SARS-CoV-2 genomic surveillance programs, based at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, each noticed increasing numbers of ... viruses carrying an S:Q677P mutation, and that this variant had increased in frequency in samples collected in late 2020 to mid-January," the researchers wrote.

What if COVID-19 never goes away? What scientists say about future of virus

That shorthand -- Q677P-- refers to the specific change in the amino acid making up that part of the spike protein.
They've identified seven similar mutations at 677 -- each one appearing to have arisen independently. They named them after birds to make it easier to identify them.

One, called Robin 1, has turned up in more than 30 US states, predominating in the Midwest, they said. A second "first appeared from a Oct 6, 2020 sample from Alabama and is named 'Robin 2' owing to its similarity to the parental Robin 1 sub-lineage," they wrote. It's mainly seen in the Southeast. One called Pelican was first seen in a sample from Oregon, and has since turned up in 12 other states as well as Australia, Denmark, Switzerland and India.

Pelican was the first variant that grabbed the attention of the researchers, in part because it was found in nearly 28% of samples from Louisiana and 11% of samples from New Mexico.

"The remaining Q677H sub-lineages each contain around 100 or fewer sequences, and are named: Yellowhammer, detected mostly in the southeast US; Bluebird, mostly in the northeast United States; Quail, mainly in the Southwest and Northeast; and Mockingbird, mainly in the South-central and East coast states," the research team wrote.

Can your employer force you to get vaccinated? The answer might surprise you

The United States has barely studied the genomic sequences of coronaviruses circulating, so if these variants have turned up so often in databases, they are probably very prevalent, the researchers said. The appearance of so many similar mutations at the same time is "remarkable," they said.

"These variants were not detected until mid-August 2020, but as of 03 Feb 2021 already account for over 2,327 of the 102,462 genomes deposited to GISAID from the USA," they wrote. That merits close attention, they said.

LINK

RSN: Can the COVID-19 Vaccine Beat the Proliferation of New Virus Mutations?

 

 

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FOCUS: Can the COVID-19 Vaccine Beat the Proliferation of New Virus Mutations?

Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker
Wright writes: "All viruses change. sars-CoV-2 had been remarkably stable as it coursed around the world, being so well adapted to the human host."

 This stability allowed the development of vaccines that are finely targeted for vulnerable regions of the virus’s spike protein. In February, 2020, a new variant emerging from Italy proved to be more infectious than the original Wuhan variant. Scientists were on guard, expecting an assault of new mutations. “We were getting sequencing up and running” to detect new variants, Gregory Armstrong, the director of the Advanced Molecular Detection program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. “Then for ten months, it was crickets.”

Last September, just as the first vaccine candidates were undergoing their Phase III trials, an aggressive new variant began circulating in southeast England, centered in Kent, along the highway from London to Dover. On Halloween, England announced a monthlong lockdown, which was dramatically successful in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in other parts of the country, but not in the Kent corridor. There were already a number of distinct variants of the novel coronavirus, with a few genetic variations of little consequence. But the U.K. variant, initially labelled a “Variant Under Investigation,” contained twenty-three different mutations, including several on the spike protein; moreover, it was rapidly driving out competitors and becoming the predominant virus in the country, especially among younger people. On December 18th, it was upgraded to a “Variant of Concern.”

What made the U.K. variant so much more successful than the original virus? One possibility is pure chance. It could have been amplified through some superspreader event, like the variant that took root at an employee conference at the Boston biotech firm Biogen, in February, 2020, which eventually accounted for more than three hundred thousand infections. Or perhaps it got seeded in a school or a church, and spread rapidly among a tightly knit population. But, as researchers went back and studied the growth of the U.K. variant’s mutations through serum samples, they realized that neither of these hypotheses could account for the accelerated pace of the spread. “Some mathematicians modelled how the variant has spread, and they found it was between forty and seventy per cent more infectious,” John Brooks, the chief medical officer at the Centers for Disease Control’s COVID-19 Emergency Response, told me. The current hypothesis is that the Kent variant, now called B.1.1.7, has a mutation that switched an amino acid in the spike protein, allowing it to bind more tightly to the body’s ACE2 receptors. “That means it takes less virus to infect you,” Brooks said. “That tighter binding also means that it can replicate more efficiently.” Once infected with the new variant, a person will be shedding more virus than someone infected with another variant. “It’s a wicked cycle,” Brooks observed. B.1.1.7 quickly spread to dozens of countries. The ongoing mystery is why it is not more fatal, given its increased viral load. It may be just a matter of luck.

England entered lockdown once again. By the second week in January, one in thirty people in London was infected. The worrisome mutation in the B.1.1.7 variant affects the area of the virus where the antibodies that neutralize the disease do their work. The new mRNA vaccines present a modified spike protein to the body, alerting the immune system to a foreign invader and commanding the production of antibodies. It appears that B.1.1.7 partially alters the main target on the spike protein. That set off alarms in the public-health community, because such mutations could erode the effectiveness of the vaccines. Viruses are always looking for hidden opportunities that mutations create, much as hackers search out flaws in application codes.

A month after the new variant was uncovered in England, a similar lineage emerged in South Africa, called B.1.351. It quickly became the dominant variant in that country and began its own tour of the world. It has the same mutation as B.1.1.7, which allows it to adhere more tightly to the ACE2 receptors, but it also carries an additional mutation that is far more concerning. The mutation is denominated E484K, meaning that the amino acid, glutamic acid (code letter E), has been replaced by another, lysine (code letter K), in position 484 of the genetic sequence of the spike protein. This tiny alteration may possibly make the vaccine less effective against it. In a lab experiment, the E484K mutation caused greater than tenfold drop of immunity in the antibodies of some COVID-19 survivors. The vaccines that are being deployed now should still be effective, researchers have said, but clearly the virus is evolving new strategies that make it more contagious and less able to be corralled by a vaccine.

Yet another dangerous variant, B.1.1.28, turned up in Brazil. A forty-five-year-old health-care worker in the northeastern part of the country, who had no comorbidities, got COVID-19 in May of 2020. She was sick for a week with diarrhea, muscle aches, exhaustion, and pain while swallowing, but she fully recovered. Then, in October, a hundred and fifty-three days later, she fell ill again with COVID-19, and, this time, the disease was more severe.

“This made the hair on my neck stand up,” Brooks said. Like the South African variant, the Brazilian variant does have the mutation that makes it more infectious, and it also has the E484K mutation, which raises the unsettling possibility that “it could possibly overcome the vaccine, and it may reinfect.” He compares the coronavirus to the flu or the common cold, which are constantly changing, dodging the body’s immune system. Gregory Armstrong told me of an experiment to determine how many mutations it would take to create what is known as an “immune escape” strain. “They grew it up in tissue culture from a generic SARS-CoV-2 in dilute convalescent sera,” he said. “They were eventually able to grow one that had three mutations that conferred almost complete resistance” to the antibodies in the survivors’ blood.

“So how do we fight these mutants?” Brooks asked. “The best way is to suppress replication—and that means stopping infections.” The more replications that occur, the greater the number of mutations. Occasionally, a slight error in replicating the genetic code creates a mutant variant that spreads more successfully and, when that happens, evolution takes over. Stopping transmission blocks the opportunity for viral mutation; it’s the only thing that does. And the only means we have of standing in the way of the virus is vaccination. “It’s a race,” Brooks said. “We’ve got to get people vaccinated before more of these mutations occur.”

The World Health Organization says that herd immunity is reached when sixty to seventy per cent of the population has had the disease or a vaccination, although Anthony Fauci has upped the figure incrementally, now saying that a more reliable figure may be between eighty-five and ninety per cent. The increased transmissibility of the mutant variants makes the higher figures more likely.

The C.D.C. predicts that B.1.1.7 will be the predominant variant in the U.S. by March, and is warning overburdened hospitals to expect another surge, which will outrace the immunization process now underway. If stricter masking and social-distancing measures are not taken, and the vaccine is not given more time to make an impact, the coronavirus will become endemic. In fact, that appears to be happening already, with the proliferation of mutant variants, although stricter measures could mitigate the spread.

On January 19th, two preprint research papers were published. One had good news: the Pfizer vaccine (and because it is highly similar, probably the Moderna one) was just as effective in blocking the B.1.1.7 variant as the virus that originated in Wuhan. The other paper contained findings that Brooks and others have been dreading: the South African variant, B.1.351, has shown that it can escape the antibodies in the blood of previously infected persons. This suggests that the therapies that use what are called monoclonal antibodies—such as what President Trump received—could fail. The authors of the study, led by Kurt Wibmer, at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, in Johannesburg, underscored the implications for the effectiveness of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, which are based on immune responses to the spike protein. “These data highlight the prospect of reinfection with antigenically distinct variants and may foreshadow reduced efficacy of current spike-based vaccines.”