Tag: Pandemic

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Politics

Secret Service returns fraudulent pandemic loans to federal SBA

Secret Service returns fraudulent pandemic loans to federal SBA

The US Secret Service returned $286 million in fraudulently obtained pandemic aid loans to the Small Business Administration, the agency announced Friday.

The funds sent back to the SBA were obtained via the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program using both fabricated information and stolen identities.

The suspects used Green Dot Bank, a fintech institution, to hold and move the fraudulent funds. More than 15,000 accounts were used in the conspiracy, by individuals in the US as well as domestic and transnational organized crime rings, the agency said.

Investigations are ongoing and further information about suspects was not immediately released. the Investigation was initiated by the Secret Service field office in Orlando, Florida, and Green Dot bank worked with the agency to identify the fraudulent accounts.

“Fraudsters in general are always looking for ways and techniques to better do their crimes and modern conveniences are just one of those things they use. So currently, cryptocurrency is a big thing, fintechs, third-party payment systems. But there’s not an institution , even our traditional financial institutions, that weren’t targeted during the pandemic,” Roy Dotson, lead investigator for the Secret Service, told CNBC in an interview.

Initial investigations indicated the majority of the fraudulent accounts at Green Dot were established with synthetic and stolen identities, and involved using “willing and unwilling money mules,” Dotson said.

The Secret Service and SBA Office of Inspector General put out advisories to 30,000 financial institutions in early 2020 to lay out fraud indicators and guide the banks to partner with federal agencies to recover fraudulent funds, Dotson said. He added these investigations will likely last years due to their size and scope.

OIG Inspector General Hannibal Ware said the partnership with the Secret Service has to date resulted in more than 400 indictments and nearly 300 convictions related to pandemic fraud.

The US government allocated more than $1 trillion to Main Street under both the Paycheck Protection Program and EIDL program. The PPP allowed small businesses to borrow loans that may be forgiven if the borrower used the majority of the capital on payroll, while the Covid-19 EIDL program allowed borrowers to access loans based on temporary losses of revenue due to the pandemic. An advance grant was also available under the EIDL.

Reviews of the two programs by the SBA’s Office of Inspector General warned that criminals would potentially exploit the system due to the fast-moving nature of the rollout and demand for aid. CNBC investigations revealed, in some cases, how easy it was for criminals to obtain fraudulent aid via stolen identities.

The SBA OIG said it has identified $87 billion of potentially fraudulent EIDL loans.

Over the past two years, the Secret Service said it has seized over $1.4 billion in fraudulently obtained funds and assisted in returning some $2.3 billion to state unemployment insurance programs. Nearly 4,000 pandemic-related fraud investigations and inquiries have been initiated by the Secret Service. More than 150 field offices and 40 cyber task forces are involved.

“This is not going to be a quick fix. As we talked about today, 15,325 accounts at one financial institution — this is one case, so you can just think of the potential number of suspects and how many investigations that could come out of those . And with all of our federal, state and local partners working this and having the same mission. It’s going to be a long process,” Dotson said at a news conference announcing the returned funds.

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World News

How Canadian Leaders Marketing campaign in a Pandemic

How Canadian Leaders Campaign in a Pandemic

After nearly two weeks of campaigning, it would be a stretch to say that election fever is sweeping Canada. Lawn signs are relatively scarce in Eastern Ontario, where I live, and others tell me similar stories from other parts of the country.

Political scientists and pollsters expect, or hope, that the nation’s focus will turn to the campaign after Labor Day brings an unofficial end to summer’s all-too-short reign.

Meanwhile, inside the campaigns, candidates and their teams are busy looking for new ways to get their messages across and interact with voters during the pandemic, without risking in-person gatherings.

This week, I checked out a modified campaign event hosted by the Conservative Party in Ottawa, my first event of this campaign. The party has transformed part of a ballroom in a downtown Ottawa hotel into a television studio that Erin O’Toole, its leader, uses for what the party calls virtual town hall meetings, which it targets to specific parts of the country. On Tuesday, when I dropped by, the audience was in British Columbia.

For about an hour, the Conservatives robot-dialed voters in the province and asked them if they would listen in and try to ask Mr. O’Toole questions.

Mr. O’Toole had an answer for every question, of course. But the callers weren’t allowed to follow up, making it impossible to determine if his answers actually satisfied them. That said, it’s likely safe to assume that the man who asked if Mr. O’Toole would take the advice of a recent U.N. report to immediately start moving away from fossil fuels was not sated. After acknowledging that the Conservatives did not have a valid climate plan in 2019, Mr. O’Toole praised the party’s new proposal, a system that would aim for substantially smaller emissions reductions than the government’s current target.

Mr. O’Toole has conducted 10 virtual town halls from Ottawa to date. The sessions are streamed live on YouTube and through Facebook, where questions can be submitted in writing. But the questioners, and the listeners, are found mostly through automated phone calls placed by the campaign, and none of them appear on video. The party declined to describe the screening process it uses before putting anyone through to Mr. O’Toole. But there are clearly people vetting the callers.

Whether by chance or by design, many of the questions at the session that I attended, and others that I watched, were on issues that polls show resonate the most with Conservative voters, such as the budget deficit and rolling back recently strengthened gun controls. But at least two people called for action on climate change far beyond what the Conservatives are proposing.

The session had the feel of a video stream of a talk radio show. Its moderator was Michael Barrett, a Conservative member of Parliament from Eastern Ontario, who never challenged any of Mr. O’Toole’s claims and promises, the way an independent host might.

The vast ballroom-turned-studio, dominated by a flag lined stage that vaguely evokes the interior of the Parliament buildings, was utterly devoid of campaign atmosphere during the session.

The only people physically present during the town hall were professionals. In addition to me, the very socially distanced, in-person audience consisted of a television producer, a television network camera operator, a handful of Conservative Party technicians running the show, Mr. O’Toole’s bodyguards and, briefly, a photographer.

Despite the absence of a crowd, let alone crowd energy, Mr. O’Toole remained enthusiastic and energetic for the entire hour.

It’s much too early to say if virtual town halls, like other pandemic make-dos, will succeed the traditional campaign road show with its jets and buses. Mr. O’Toole is, like the other leaders, still hitting the road. I’ll also be out there soon to see how the campaigns of Mr. Trudeau and Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats have adjusted to the pandemic.

This week: Letter Boxed, where you try to create words using letters surrounding a square. All of The Times’s games, and tips on playing them, can be found here.

A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.

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Health

Residing With O.C.D. in a Pandemic

Living With O.C.D. in a Pandemic

If they find that looking at the tissue did not cause disease, therapy can progress to more provocative exposures like touching the tissue, etc., until they overcome their unrealistic fear of contamination. In particularly anxious patients, this therapeutic approach is often combined with a drug that counteracts depression or anxiety.

One silver lining of the pandemic is that it may have allowed more people to seek remote treatment through online health services. “With telemedicine, we are able to treat patients very effectively, regardless of where they live in relation to the therapist,” said Dr. Paint. “I can visit patients in 20 states without ever leaving central Oklahoma. Patients do not need to be within 30 miles of the therapist. Telemedicine is a real game changer for people who do not want to or cannot leave their home. “

For severely impaired obsessive-compulsive patients who have had nothing else to do, the newest option is transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, a non-invasive technique that stimulates nerve cells in the brain and helps redirect neural circuits involved in obsessions and compulsions.

“It’s like the brain is stuck in a dead-end street, and TMS is helping the brain’s circuits take a different path,” said Dr. Paint. As with exposure and reaction prevention, he said, TMS uses provocative exposures but combines them with magnetic stimulation to help the brain respond to the urge to respond more effectively.

In a study published in May of 167 severely affected OCD patients at 22 clinical sites, 58 percent continued to offer significantly improved coverage after an average of 20 sessions with TMS.

Bradley Riemann, a psychologist with the Rogers Behavioral Health System in Oconomowoc, Wisc., Said his organization, with 20 locations in nine states, relies on treatment teams that include psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers to provide both outpatient and inpatient treatments for OCD. Patients as early as 6 years of age. Too often, said Dr. Riemann, parents inadvertently exacerbate the problem by clearing a path for their child to avoid their obsessive fear and the resulting compulsive reaction. For example, they could routinely open doors to a child who is afraid of contagion.

The Boston-based nonprofit International OCD Foundation can help patients and families find therapists and support groups for those struggling with the disease. A message can be left at 617-973-5801.

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Health

‘X’ Marks the Spot: Officers Map a Route Out of the Pandemic

‘X’ Marks the Spot: Officials Map a Route Out of the Pandemic

At their regular pandemic response meetings over the past year, officials in Suffolk County, N.Y., found themselves returning, again and again, to questions of geography.

“One of the common questions I used to get was, ‘Where is it bad?” said Dr. Harsha Rajashekharaiah, the senior project coordinator for the county’s Covid-19 response. “Where is the Covid transmission bad? Where is the testing bad? Where should we improve? Where should we invest our resources?”

To find answers, Dr. Rajashekharaiah used geospatial data, brandishing brightly colored maps that pinpointed the exact neighborhoods where cases were rising or where testing rates were lagging.

And after inoculations began, he started using digital mapping tools — commonly known as geographic information system, or G.I.S., software — to explore how vaccination rates varied across the county and how they correlated with a variety of demographic factors.

Several patterns soon emerged on the color-coded maps. In March, for instance, magenta splotches on the western side of the county made it clear that vaccination rates were low in neighborhoods with a high share of residents who did not speak English well. After he presented the map to his colleagues, they quickly added Spanish and Haitian Creole language assistance to their county vaccine hotline.

Over the next few months, as vaccination rates rose in these neighborhoods, portions of the map turned to yellow or even green. “I cannot sit here and conclude that our G.I.S. system is the reason that this has happened,” Dr. Rajashekharaiah said. But, he added, “G.I.S. has been a very, very powerful tool for us to communicate these barriers.”

Amid the highly uneven rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, many health officials and community organizations are drawing upon geospatial data to plan their vaccination campaigns and track their progress in fine-grained detail. Esri, a California-based company that makes widely used G.I.S. software, says that hundreds of organizations around the world — including many U.S. states and more than 20 national governments — are using its digital mapping tools to help them get shots into arms.

“G.I.S. and mapping tools have been really important to helping these health departments get people vaccinated — to be more organized in the process, more streamlined and strategic and even tactical,” said Dr. Este Geraghty, the chief medical officer of Esri.

By allowing officials to quickly spot vaccine deserts, pinpoint high-risk populations and target their resources more efficiently, digital maps have become crucial tools in the effort to ensure that vaccination campaigns leave no neighborhood behind.

Coronavirus Pandemic and U.S. Life Expectancy

As the virus raced across Wisconsin in the spring of 2020, officials in Milwaukee County became concerned about its unequal toll. In late March and early April, for instance, Black residents accounted for 69 percent of the Covid deaths in the county despite making up just 27 percent of its population, according to a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee report.

These disparities were front of mind when the Covid-19 vaccines were finally authorized. “We wanted to make sure that we were equitably distributing this vaccine,” said David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive.

They began categorizing census tracts according to their vaccination rates and their scores on a national “social vulnerability index.” The index uses data on 15 different social, economic and demographic factors — including the age, minority status and education levels of residents, as well as local poverty and unemployment rates — to calculate how susceptible a given community would be in the event of some kind of disaster, like a hurricane or a pandemic.

Then the officials displayed the results online on a color-coded map. In mid-March, when the county first released it, much of the city of Milwaukee was colored dark orange, signaling that the area had high levels of social vulnerability but low vaccination rates.

On the other hand, the suburbs, where the population is wealthier and whiter, were shaded a pale yellow, indicating that they had low scores on the vulnerability index but climbing vaccination rates. “And so there was this story of the haves and have-nots, or two different cities,” said Dr. Ben Weston, who oversees the medical aspects of the county’s Covid-19 response.

County and city officials began pouring resources into deep orange neighborhoods, prioritizing those residents for vaccine appointments, adding more vaccination sites in those areas and creating pop-up sites and events at churches, food pantries, libraries, schools and cultural centers. They also started a community ambassador program — the Crush Covid Crew — to train volunteers from those deep orange census tracts to talk to their neighbors about the vaccines and dispel misinformation about them.

Although vaccination rates in the most vulnerable areas still lag behind, they have more than tripled since mid-March. “The darkest orange communities are now gone,” Dr. Weston said. “So we’re making progress.”

Updated 

Aug. 1, 2021, 11:42 a.m. ET

The Count Me In initiative in Georgia — which was created by Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia Democratic candidate for governor — has taken a similar approach. But instead of focusing on vaccination rates, it mapped vaccination sites across the state and then overlaid data on potential barriers to vaccination, including a lack of computer access and low rates of car ownership.

The map revealed numerous potential trouble spots, particularly in rural, southwest Georgia. “We saw this very large concentration of folks that had very limited vaccine access,” said Ali Bustamante, a senior research associate at the Southern Economic Advancement Project, which runs the initiative with the nonprofit organization Fair Count. “There were very few vaccination sites, while at the same time they were facing huge access constraints.”

The groups partnered with vaccine providers to send mobile clinics to some of these vaccine deserts and began an all-out canvassing effort, borrowing the tools of a political campaign to encourage people to get shots. Volunteers ultimately made 79,000 phone calls, delivered vaccine information to 17,000 doors and helped book 4,500 vaccine appointments. “Particularly in rural areas, we have seen the vaccination gap close considerably,” Dr. Bustamante said.

Geospatial data is also critical for logistics. Carto, a cloud-based platform for analyzing geospatial data, has helped dozens of logistics companies around the world optimize their vaccine storage and transportation networks to get the shots distributed more quickly and efficiently, said Luis Sanz, the company’s chief executive.

And in Clackamas County in Oregon, G.I.S. data has become the backbone of efforts to vaccinate people who are homebound. “Because we are a large county with somewhat rural areas, we do have some transportation issues and access is a challenge for many of our residents,” said Kim La Croix, a public health program manager for the county. “Those mass vaccination sites were just not accessible to homebound seniors and homebound people with mental, developmental or physical disabilities.”

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

When residents call or email the county to request an at-home vaccination, staff members log their location, which pops up on a digital map. Then, when assigning specific appointment slots, they review the map, which displays the number and type of vaccines that have been requested across the county. The goal is to reduce nurses’ travel time, maximize the number of shots they give in a day and to minimize waste, by ensuring that the number of doses a nurse gives in a shift matches the number of doses in a vial.

In low and middle-income countries, basic geospatial data — about how many people need to be vaccinated and where they live — has been critical to the success of prior mass vaccination campaigns. About a decade ago, for instance, government officials and global health experts realized that polio vaccination teams in northern Nigeria were using inaccurate, hand-drawn maps.

“There were missing settlements, wrong settlement names,” said Emilie Schnarr, the Nigeria project manager for the Geo-Referenced Infrastructure and Demographic Data for Development, or GRID3, program. “And that was one of the reasons children were being missed.”

Credit…Inuwa Barau et al., Journal of Infectious Diseases

Without reaching these children, the highly contagious polio virus was likely to continue circulating. So in the years that followed, the Nigerian government, in partnership with several global health organizations, used satellite imagery and local field teams to create detailed, high resolution maps, filling in missing buildings, settlements, and local points of interest.

The maps helped Nigeria eradicate polio, which the country finally achieved last year. And GRID3, which grew out of these efforts, recently distributed updated maps to local officials across Nigeria, who are using them to help plan and track their Covid-19 vaccination campaigns.

They’re not alone. In March, five organizations that specialize in geographic data and information management — Alcis, CartONG, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, iMMAP and MapAction — joined forces to launch the Geographic Information Management Initiative for Covid-19 Vaccine Delivery. Their goal is to help 15 low-income countries, including Haiti, Sudan and Bangladesh, fill gaps in their geospatial data and then harness that information to get vaccines out to their residents.

The work, the say, will be of use not just for this pandemic, but for the delivery of all sorts of essential services, ensuring that local health authorities know where their citizens live and can help them meet their needs.

“To be on the map is to be acknowledged,” said Ivan Gayton, the senior humanitarian adviser to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. “Every community in the world should be able to put themselves on the map.”

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Politics

Biden, Republicans and the Pandemic Blame Recreation

Biden, Republicans and the Pandemic Blame Game

President Biden finds himself in a difficult position: he advocated the ideas that he had the team to deal with a pandemic and that his five-decade long career as a deal maker in Washington was just the thing to reverse political polarization of the land to overcome.

That doesn’t happen, not even a little.

Not only are Republicans resisting Mr Biden’s push to end the pandemic, some of them are actively obstructing it. The Republican governors have slowly pushed ahead with vaccination efforts and lifted the mask requirement early. In Washington, GOP leaders like Steve Scalise, the second-tier Republican in the House of Representatives – who was vaccinated only about two weeks ago – mocked public health guidelines that even vaccinated people should wear masks indoors as “government control”.

There is little Mr. Biden can do. Nearly a year and a half of living in a pandemic has shown exactly who will and will not adhere to public health guidelines.

It was only last week in my Washington neighborhood, which has one of the highest vaccination rates in the city and who voted 92 percent for Mr. Biden, started masking themselves again in supermarkets and even outdoors in parks.

In places like Arkansas, hospitals are overloaded with Covid patients and vaccination rates remain persistently low. The anti-mask sentiment is so strong that the General Assembly of the state has passed a law banning any mandate that requires it. On Thursday, Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, announced a special session of lawmakers to amend the anti-mandate bill he signed in April to allow schools to require masks for students who are too young to receive a vaccine. Good luck with that, replied his Republicans in the legislature.

That leaves the President at a loss. With the Delta variant proving to be far more contagious and dangerous than previous iterations of the virus, the people he needs most to hear his message about vaccines and masks are the rarest.

Six years of Donald J. Trump largely hiding all other voices in his party left Republicans without a credible messenger to push vaccines forward, even if they wanted to. Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, may use his campaign money to advertise vaccinations in his home, Kentucky, but he is barely a popular figure within the party and is viewed by its grassroots as just another member of the Washington establishment.

There are certainly other communities of vaccine resistance out there, including the demographics of people who have been mistreated by the federal government in the past (and also a small but noisy minority of professional athletes and Olympians), but it is Republicans and Republican-led states that are considered biggest hurdle in American vaccination efforts.

Without the ability to convince the vaccination hesitation and the party he had pledged to work with, Mr Biden and the federal government were left with a step that he had been resisting for weeks: making the lives of the unvaccinated more difficult to try to force them to change their minds.

That brings us to the President’s press conference on Thursday. Mr Biden said that for the first time all federal employees would be required to provide evidence that they have been vaccinated (or wear a mask at work), undergo weekly tests, and maintain social distance.

He stopped short of a vaccine mandate, saying such a requirement was a choice for local governments, school districts and businesses. He said if things get worse and those who oppose vaccines are denied access to workplaces and public spaces, maybe things would get better.

“I suspect if we don’t make further progress, a lot of companies and lots of companies will need proof in order to attend,” said Mr Biden.

This maneuver – essentially a shift of responsibility away from the federal government – is in line with the way Mr Biden often tries to project a tone of hope while airbrushing the reality of a highly divided nation.

Updated

July 30, 2021, 7:36 p.m. ET

The disinformation market in America is bigger than ever with Mr Trump despite starting the program that resulted in the full vaccination of 164 million Americans, leading to charges of discrediting the same program during the Biden administration.

But it wasn’t Mr Trump and the Republicans running to end the pandemic last year – it was Mr Biden and the Democrats who successfully turned the election into a referendum on how to tackle a unique global public health crisis.

Now, just weeks after celebrating the great strides made against the pandemic, Mr Biden is facing a new wave. And it probably won’t be long before Republicans, who did everything in their power to resist counter-measures, blame the president for failing to get the country out of the crisis he promised to resolve .

“SO EXCITED. SO PROUD,” Marathon County board member Ka Lo wrote on Thursday in a series of cheering text messages, “IT’S SOOOOOO GOOD !!!”

It remains to be seen how much Ms. Lee’s triumph will give a boost to local efforts to gain recognition for the Hmong in Wisconsin. Both the district marathon and the city council of Wausau have rejected the resolutions “community for all”, which led to the spreading of “community for all” labels and a further attempt to pass the measure in the district executive committee.

The next vote of the executive committee of the district board is planned for August 12th.

Sometimes even presidents get a little dirt on their chins.

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Health

Purnell Choppin, 91, Dies; Researcher Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Struggle

Purnell Choppin, 91, Dies; Researcher Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Fight

In addition to his daughter, his wife Joan also survived.

After taking over the Hughes Institute, Dr. Choppin likes to tell his colleagues a story about meeting their famous reclusive benefactor. In 1938, Hughes, an accomplished aviator and industrialist, stopped at Baton Rouge to refuel, and Arthur Choppin took 9-year-old Purnell and his brother Arthur Jr. to see him. They shook hands, but his main memory was that Hughes was “very tall.”

Dr. Choppin graduated from high school at the age of 16 and went to LSU, where he also attended medical school. He received his PhD in 1953 and completed his residency at Washington University. From 1954 to 1955 he served in the Air Force in Japan.

He began as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and was promoted to professor in 1959. He later moved into administration and was vice president and dean of studies when he was hired by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Howard Hughes founded the institute in 1953 and later transferred all of his shares in the Hughes Aircraft Company to it for tax reasons.

Just a few weeks before Dr. Choppin, the institute sold the company to General Motors for $ 5.2 billion, immediately making it one of the richest philanthropists in the country.

In 1987 the president of the institute had to resign after a financial scandal and was replaced by Dr. Chopin replaced. Over the next decade, he built it into a premier source of funding for biomedical research, distributing approximately $ 4.5 billion to hundreds of scientists and elementary and high school science education.

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Health

Fauci Needs to Make Vaccines for the Subsequent Pandemic Earlier than It Hits

Fauci Wants to Make Vaccines for the Next Pandemic Before It Hits

In a way, the world was lucky with the new coronavirus. By sheer coincidence, scientists coincidentally spent years studying coronaviruses and developing the exact tools needed to make Covid vaccines once the virus’s genetic sequence was released.

But what if the next pandemic comes from a virus that causes Lassa fever, or from the Sudanese Ebola tribe, or from a Nipah virus?

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, promotes an ambitious and expensive plan to prepare for such nightmare scenarios. It would cost “a few billion dollars” a year, take five years to get results, and employ a huge cadre of scientists, he said.

The idea is to produce “prototype” vaccines to protect against viruses from around 20 families that could trigger a new pandemic. With research tools proven successful for Covid-19, researchers would uncover the molecular structure of each virus, learn where antibodies should hit it, and how to get the body to make those exact antibodies.

“If we get the funding, which I think we will, it will likely start in 2022,” said Dr. Fauci, adding that he had promoted the idea “in discussions with the White House and others”.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, thought it likely that the necessary funding would be made available and called the project “imperative.”

“As we begin to think about a successful end to the Covid-19 pandemic, we must not lapse into complacency again,” said Dr. Collins.

Much of the financial support would come from Dr. Fauci are coming, but a project of this size would require additional funding that would have to be provided by Congress. This year’s budget for the Institute for Infectious Diseases is just over $ 6 billion. Dr. Fauci did not specify how much additional money would be needed.

Logically, if surveillance networks discovered a new virus spilling from animals to humans, scientists could stop it by immunizing people in the outbreak by quickly making the prototype vaccine. And if the virus spreads before the world realizes what’s happening, the prototype vaccines could be used more widely.

“The name of the game would be to try to limit spillovers to breakouts,” said Dr. Dennis Burton, a vaccine researcher and chairman of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute.

The prototype vaccine project is the brainchild of Dr. Barney Graham, Associate Director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He presented the idea in February 2017 at a private meeting of the institute directors.

Year after year, viruses threatened to turn into pandemics, said Dr. Graham: H1N1 swine flu in 2009, Chikungunya in 2012, MERS in 2013, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2016. Each time scientists tried to make a vaccine. Her only success was a partial one, with an Ebola vaccine that helped control the epidemic but was not effective against other Ebola strains. The other epidemics receded before the vaccines could be made or tested.

Updated

July 24, 2021 at 11:34 a.m. ET

“We were tired,” said Dr. Graham.

But researchers over the past decade have come up with new tools that could make a big difference. They enabled scientists to see the molecular structures of viruses, isolate antibodies that block the viruses, and figure out where they bind. The result was an opportunity for “structure-based design” for new vaccines that more precisely target the pathogen.

When he won the pitch for Dr. Graham heard was Dr. Fauci thrilled. “It struck me and others on the board as something that was really feasible,” said Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Graham published a review paper in Nature Immunology in 2018 outlining the proposal. But without the urgency of an impending pandemic, his idea remained just that.

But now many believe that the time has come.

The Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases has created a table for each of the 20 virus families that shows what is known about the anatomy and susceptibility of each pathogen, said Dr. John Mascola, director of the institute’s vaccine research center.

Understand the state of vaccine mandates in the United States

“We are at a different level of knowledge and vaccine development for each virus family,” said Dr. Mascola. Vaccinations against Lassa fever and the Nipah virus, for example, are in the early stages. Chikungunya and Zika vaccines are more advanced.

Work to fill the gaps in vaccine development would be done through research grants to academic researchers. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm” among academic researchers, said Dr. Barton Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. Although the proposal is not known to the public, Dr. Fauci, he discussed it in conversations with a scientific audience.

The program would also enter into collaboration agreements with pharmaceutical companies to quickly manufacture prototype vaccines, said Dr. Fauci.

That happened during the shooting because of Covid-19. The SARS and MERS epidemics prompted scientists to work on a coronavirus vaccine. This led to the discovery that coronaviruses use a spike protein to infect cells, but the spike changes shape easily and must be held in position to be useful as a vaccine. Researchers found that it can do this with tiny molecular changes in the spike protein.

Days after the sequence of the new coronavirus was released, scientists had developed vaccines to fight it.

That, said Dr. Fauci, is what pandemic preparation can do. He would like to have prototype vaccines for 10 of the 20 virus families in the first five years of his work.

“It would take quite a bit of money,” admitted Dr. Fauci a. “But after what we’ve been through, it’s not out of the question.”

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World News

Life Expectancy in U.S. Dropped 1.5 Years in 2020, Largely From the Pandemic

Life Expectancy in U.S. Dropped 1.5 Years in 2020, Largely From the Pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic was largely responsible for cutting American life expectancy by a year and a half in 2020, the sharpest decline in the United States since World War II, according to federal statistics released Wednesday.

An American child born today, if hypothetically all of their life in 2020 conditions, would live 77.3 years, down from 78.8 years in 2019. This is the lowest life expectancy since 2003. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the agency that released the numbers, and part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The troubled year also exacerbated racial and ethnic differences in life expectancy, with black and Hispanic Americans losing nearly two years more than white Americans. The life expectancy of Hispanic Americans decreased from 81.8 to 78.8, while the number of black Americans decreased from 74.7 to 71.8. The life expectancy of non-Hispanic White Americans decreased from 78.8 to 77.6.

The statistics further quantified the terrifying toll of the pandemic, which killed more than 600,000 Americans as it temporarily pushed the health system to its limits.

Life expectancy measurements are not intended to accurately predict actual life; Rather, it is a measure of the health of a population that shows either societal hardship or progress. The sheer scale of the 2020 decline has shaken researchers as it undermines decades of advances.

For the past few decades, life expectancy in the United States had risen steadily until 2014 when an opioid epidemic broke out and caused a decline rarely seen in developed countries. The decline had flattened out in 2018 and 2019.

The pandemic appears to have impacted the opioid crisis as well. According to the American Medical Association, more than 40 states have seen increases in opioid-related deaths since the pandemic began.

The sharp drop in 2020, mainly caused by Covid-19, is unlikely to be permanent. In 1918, the pandemic flu wiped Americans’ life expectancy by 11.8 years, but the number fully recovered the following year.

But even if deaths from Covid-19 decline, the economic and social effects will persist, especially among the disproportionately affected racial groups, researchers have found.

Although racial and ethnic differences in life expectancy have long existed, the differences have been narrowing for decades. In 1993, white Americans were expected to live 7.1 years longer than black Americans, but the gap was reduced to 4.1 years in 2019.

Covid-19 has undone much of that advancement: White Americans are now projected to live 5.8 years longer.

The gender gap remains: women in the United States lived to be 80.2 years old, according to the new numbers, up from 81.4 years in 2019, while men were counted at 74.5 years (after 76.3 years).

While the 1.5-year decline was mainly caused by Covid-19 and accounted for 74 percent of the negative contribution, there was also a smaller increase in accidental injuries, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, homicides and diabetes.

As a slight silver lining, mortality rates fell from cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, heart disease, suicide, and certain diseases that date back to the perinatal period.

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World News

The Pandemic Has a New Epicenter: Indonesia

The Pandemic Has a New Epicenter: Indonesia

BEKASI, Indonesia — By the thousands, they sleep in hallways, tents and cars, gasping for air as they wait for beds in overcrowded hospitals that may not have oxygen to give them. Others see hospitals as hopeless, even dangerous, and take their chances at home.

Wherever they lie, as Covid-19 steals their breath away, their families engage in a frantic, daily hunt for scarce supplies of live-giving oxygen.

Indonesia has become the new epicenter of the pandemic, surpassing India and Brazil to become the country with the world’s highest count of new infections. ​ The surge is part of a wave across Southeast Asia, where vaccination rates are low but countries had, until recently contained the virus relatively well​. Vietnam, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand are also facing their largest outbreaks yet and have imposed new restrictions, including lockdowns and stay-at-home orders.

In Indonesia, cases and deaths have skyrocketed in the past month as the highly contagious Delta variant sweeps through densely populated Java island, as well as Bali. In some regions, the coronavirus has pushed the medical system past its limits, though hospitals are taking emergency steps to expand capacity.

Bekasi Regional Public Hospital, where some Covid patients have waited days for treatment, has erected large tents on its grounds, with beds for up to 150 people. Nearby in Jakarta, the capital, a long line of people waited for hours outside a small dispensary, hoping to fill their portable tanks with oxygen.

Among them was Nyimas Siti Nadia, 28, who had been searching for oxygen for her aunt’s family, all sick with Covid.

“She is a doctor and she is afraid to go to a hospital because she knows the situation,” Ms. Nyimas said. “There are many instances where patients do not get beds or oxygen. If we go to the hospital, we have to bring our own oxygen.”

On Thursday, Indonesian authorities reported nearly 57,000 new cases, the highest daily total yet — seven times as many as a month earlier. On Friday, they reported a record 1,205 deaths, bringing the country’s official toll from the pandemic to more than 71,000.

But some health experts say those figures vastly understate the spread in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, because testing has been limited. Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia, estimates that the true number of cases is three to six times higher.

In India, where the Delta variant was first identified, daily cases peaked at more than 414,000 in May, but have since dropped to about 40,000.

Despite Indonesia’s mushrooming caseload, officials say they have the situation under control.

“If we talk about the worst-case scenario, 60,000 or slightly more, we are pretty OK,” said Luhut Pandjaitan, a senior minister assigned by President Joko Widodo to handle the crisis. “We are hoping that it will not reach 100,000, but even so, we are preparing now for if we ever get there.”

Many Indonesians, however, have been facing their worst-case scenarios for weeks.

Family members describe nightmare scenes of trying to get a hospital to admit their sick relatives. Some hospitals were accepting only patients who brought their own oxygen, they said. At others, patients waited wherever they could find space to lie down.

In Bekasi, a city of 2.5 million that adjoins Jakarta, patients have flocked to the regional public hospital. To accommodate the surge, 10 large tents were set up on the grounds, equipped with beds for as many as 150 people.

Updated 

July 17, 2021, 4:28 p.m. ET

Lisa Wiliana’s husband had been in one of the tents since the previous day, waiting for space in a ward. After nine days of sickness, she said, his oxygen saturation level had dropped to 84, well below the range of 95 to 100 that is considered healthy. The hospital was giving him some oxygen, but she had to arrange to get more.

“We are waiting for an available room because it is full,” she said. “What else can we do? The important thing is to get the oxygen, because he already had trouble breathing. It was scary.”

Even being admitted does not make getting oxygen a certainty. At Dr. Sardjito General Hospital in the city of Yogyakarta, 33 patients died this month after the central oxygen supply ran out. The staff switched to tanks donated by the police, but it was too late for many patients.

Overwhelmed hospitals have added thousands of beds, but on average, 10 percent of their health care workers are in isolation after exposure to the virus, said the secretary general of the Indonesian Hospital Association, Dr. Lia G. Partakusuma. Some hospitals are using five times as much liquid oxygen as normal, and distributors are having difficulty keeping up with the demand, she said.

“Some hospitals have said, ‘If you brought your own oxygen tank, please use it first because we have a limited oxygen supply,’” she said. “But it is not a requirement for them to bring their own oxygen.”

With hospitals so overcrowded, many people choose to stay home — and many die there. Lapor Covid, a nonprofit group that is tracking deaths from the disease, reports that at least 40 Covid patients a day are now dying at home.

Mr. Joko, the president, has stopped short of a nationwide lockdown but ordered restrictions in Java and Bali, including closing places of worship, schools, shopping malls and sports facilities, reducing public transit capacity and limiting restaurants to takeout. The restrictions are set to expire on Tuesday, but officials are weighing whether to extend them.

Only about 15 percent of Indonesia’s 270 million people have received a dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and just 6 percent are fully inoculated. Indonesia has relied heavily on the vaccine made by Sinovac Biotech, a Chinese company, which has proved less effective than other shots. At least 20 Indonesian doctors who were fully vaccinated with Sinovac have died from the virus.

This week, the United States donated 4.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine to Indonesia. Officials said the first priority would be to give booster shots to nearly 1.5 million health workers.

Dr. Budiman, the Indonesian epidemiologist in Australia, predicted more than a year ago that Indonesia would become a pandemic epicenter because of its dense population and weak health care system. He has urged more testing, contact tracing and isolation of infected individuals.

Indonesia’s health minister, Budi Gunadi Sadikin, said Friday that the country had increased testing to about 230,000 people a day, from about 30,000 in December. His target is 400,000 a day.

But Dr. Budiman contends that testing is still woefully limited, noting that in recent days, the share of tests that came up positive had risen to more than 30 percent. Health experts say a high rate is a sign of too little testing.

“For more than a year, our test positivity rate has almost never been below 10 percent, which means we are missing many cases and we cannot identify the majority of infections and the clusters,” he said.

Outside the small CV Rintis Usaha Bersama oxygen shop in South Jakarta, more than 100 customers lined up in the street with their oxygen tanks and waited hours for the chance to refill them.

Alif Akhirul Ramadan, 27, said he was getting oxygen for his grandmother, 77, who was being cared for by family members at home. He said that her condition had suddenly worsened and that her tank was running low.

“Now it has to be refilled,” said Mr. Alif, who has had Covid twice. “There is no backup at home. That is why we need to refill it quickly.”

Fira Abdurrachman reported from Bekasi, Richard C. Paddock from New York and Muktita Suhartono from Chonburi Province, Thailand.

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Health

C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’

C.D.C. Director Warns of a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated’

As the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus fuel outbreaks in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned on Friday that “this is going to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated”.

Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths remain well below last winter’s peak, and vaccines are effective against Delta, but CDC director Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, urged people to get fully vaccinated for robust protection, pleading, “Do it for yourself, your family, and for your community. And please do it to protect your young children who cannot be vaccinated at the moment. “

The number of new virus cases is likely to increase in the coming weeks, and those cases are likely to be concentrated in low-vaccination areas, officials said at a White House briefing on the pandemic.

“Our greatest concern is that we will continue to see preventable cases, hospital admissions and, unfortunately, deaths among the unvaccinated,” said Dr. Walensky. According to a New York Times database, the nation exceeded 34 million cumulative cases as of Friday.

Delta now accounts for more than half of the new infections across the country, and the number of cases has increased in all states. Around 28,000 new cases are reported every day, up from just 11,000 per day less than a month ago.

So far, data suggests that many of the vaccines – including Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccinations – offer good protection against Delta, especially against its worst outcomes, including hospitalization and death. (Receiving a single dose of two-shot therapy, however, offers poor protection against the variant.) Nearly 60 percent of US adults were fully vaccinated, but fewer than 50 percent of Americans were vaccinated; only people aged 12 and over are eligible to participate.

“We have come a long way in our fight against this virus,” said Jeffrey D. Zients, the government’s Covid-19 response coordinator, at the briefing.

The rate of vaccination has slowed considerably since the spring and the rate of vaccination remains very inconsistent. Delta is already skyrocketing case numbers in undervaccinated areas, including parts of Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The World Health Organization recently reiterated its recommendation that vaccinated people should continue to wear masks, also because of the global spread of Delta.

Updated

July 16, 2021, 9:50 p.m. ET

However, the CDC has stood by its mask policy, with Dr. Walensky pointed to WHO’s global jurisdiction and the fact that wealthy nations took so many of the recordings available. She added that local officials in the United States can opt for stricter measures to protect the unvaccinated.

On Thursday, the Los Angeles District said that as of this weekend, indoor mask requirements will be reintroduced for everyone, regardless of vaccination status. On Friday, Dr. Walensky pointed out the heterogeneity of the country and said: “These decisions have to be made at the local level.”

“If you have areas with low vaccination and high case numbers, I would say local politicians are considering whether masking would be helpful for their community at this point,” she added.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday there are currently no plans to reinstate a mask mandate for everyone across the city, nor did he consider the move necessary. The city recently reported a streak of more than 400 cases per day, up from an average of about 200 per day a few weeks ago. “We have to see it like a hawk,” he said on a radio broadcast, referring to the Delta variant.

Health officials are focusing on hospital stays that have remained low over the past few weeks. According to the city, about 53 percent of city residents are fully vaccinated. Should hospital stays increase, the city will adapt.

“We currently have no plan to change course,” he said. “When we see something that we need to change, we say it right away and call people to arms.”

After narrowly missing a self-imposed target of at least partially vaccinating 70 percent of adults by July 4, the Biden government is trying again to reach out to those who have still not received their vaccinations. Officials also recently announced the creation of surge response teams to help hard-hit states manage delta-driven outbreaks. Missouri and Nevada have already asked for help.