Spencer Bokat-Lindell

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How Dangerous Is the Delta Variant?

InternacionalSalud Pública,

When a wave of coronavirus infections crashed over India in the spring, scientists wondered whether a new variant, Delta, was partly to blame. Time appears to have answered the question: Having spread to at least 85 countries, the Delta variant is now fueling outbreaks around the world and prompting new lockdowns — even in countries that seemed to have the virus under control.

“The Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate Covid-19”, Dr. Anthony Fauci said last week.

What makes the Delta variant so concerning, and how will it affect the course of the pandemic?…  Seguir leyendo »

Did the Coronavirus Come From a Lab?

InternacionalSalud Pública,

A year and a half later, we still don’t know for certain: How did the Covid-19 pandemic begin?

From the outbreak’s early days, most scientists assumed that the virus, SARS-CoV-2, had jumped from an animal to a person in late 2019, possibly at a meat market in Wuhan, China, the city of 11 million where the first known Covid cases were identified. But in May, The Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies were investigating another explanation that had been debated for months: that the virus had accidentally escaped from a lab.

How did this idea, once dismissed as a conspiracy theory, become a plausible hypothesis for the virus’s origins?…  Seguir leyendo »

Should the Olympics Be Canceled?

MundoAsia,

When the prime minister of Japan and the president of the International Olympic Committee decided last March to postpone the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo, the hope was that the pandemic would be a thing of the past by now.

But the coronavirus had other plans: With five weeks to go before the opening ceremony, cases and variants are still surging in much of the world. Public health experts have expressed grave concerns about the Games’ potential to become a global superspreader event, and a May poll found that 83 percent of the Japanese public did not want them to go forward.…  Seguir leyendo »

Stop Saying ‘Post-Pandemic’

InternacionalSalud Pública, ,

The coronavirus may be receding in New York and Toronto and Tel Aviv, but for much of the world it is a more fearsome threat than ever: Fueled by the spread of more-contagious variants and abetted by a profoundly unequal vaccination drive — 85 percent of all doses have been administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries — the pandemic has already killed more people in 2021 than it did in all of 2020.

“Trickle-down vaccination is not an effective strategy for fighting a deadly respiratory virus”, the director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said last month.…  Seguir leyendo »

What Would a Cold War With China Look Like?

MundoAméricaMundoAsia, ,

Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a speech that many likened to a declaration of a Cold War against China. Gone, he said, was “the old paradigm of blind engagement” that had prevailed since the Nixon administration. “If we want to have a free 21st century,” he continued, “the free world must triumph over this new tyranny.”

Mr. Pompeo’s speech made plain that the relationship between the two superpowers had reached a nadir in recent months, strained by escalating rounds of diplomatic sanctions and retaliations over territory, intellectual property, trade, the coronavirus, allegations of espionage and the repression in Hong Kong, among other disputes.…  Seguir leyendo »

Noam Chomsky, left, and J.K. Rowling. Credit Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by Jim Wilson/The New York Times, Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press, Heuler Andrey/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images and Getty Images

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Last week, 153 writers, artists and academics — including J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky and Nell Irvin Painter — signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine warning of a threat to intellectual life in the United States.

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter reads, condemning “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”

The letter was spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who explained his motivations to The Times: “Donald Trump is the Canceler in Chief,” he said.…  Seguir leyendo »

Xi Jinping, left; Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization; and Donald Trump. Credit Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Doug Mills/The New York Times, Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press, Pool photo by Fabrice Coffrini

InternacionalSalud Pública

On Tuesday, President Trump formally began the process of pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization, having accused the organization of not holding the Chinese government to account for its handling of the coronavirus.

The withdrawal would not go into effect until next July. But the prospect of losing the United States as a member, far and away the W.H.O.’s largest donor, is a big blow to the organization, and comes just a day after 239 scientists in 39 countries wrote an open letter claiming its guidance on airborne transmission was outdated.

Mr. Trump’s criticisms of the W.H.O.…  Seguir leyendo »

So You Want to Convince a Climate Change Skeptic

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

Happy New Year! It’s 2020, and the forecast for this next decade is cloudy with an apprehension of doom. According to the United Nations, the world has only until 2030 to cut carbon dioxide emissions down to roughly half those of 2010 levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the more ambitious target of the Paris Agreement. (The world has already warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since the 19th century.) The outlook, in the words of a United Nations report released in November, is “bleak.”

Daunting as the problem may be, millions of people still don’t accept the premise of its existence: Depending on how you ask, only about half to two-thirds of Americans believe that climate change is caused by humans, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.…  Seguir leyendo »