OUR PICKSAn Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust | How Much Worse Would a Bird-Flu Pandemic Be? | Biden’s Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families, and more
· How Much Worse Would a Bird-Flu Pandemic Be?
The world has been through multiple flu pandemics. That doesn’t mean it’s any more prepared
· Biden’s Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families
Parents with children represent 40 percent of migrants who crossed the southern border this year. Now, they will be turned back within days, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times
· An Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust
I hope the pandemic, both as lived experience and now as rewritten history, has proved that paternalistic, infantilizing messaging backfires
· Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conspiracy Theory of Western Decline
To explain trends she dislikes, she embraces a tale of subversion
· MIT Researchers Ordered and Combined Parts of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus. Did They Expose a Security Flaw?
Without proper guardrails in place, experts and governments worry, artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier for more people to do harm with biology
How Much Worse Would a Bird-Flu Pandemic Be? (Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic)
Our most recent flu pandemic—2009’s H1N1 “swine flu”—was, in absolute terms, a public-health crisis. By scientists’ best estimates, roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people around the world died; countless more fell sick. Kids, younger adults, and pregnant people were hit especially hard.
That said, it could have been far worse. Of the known flu pandemics, 2009’s took the fewest lives; during the H1N1 pandemic that preceded it, which began in 1918, a flu virus infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, at least 50 million of whom died. Even some recent seasonal flus have killed more people than swine flu did. With swine flu, “we got lucky,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. H5N1 avian flu, which has been transmitting wildly among animals, has not yet spread in earnest among humans. Should that change, though, the world’s next flu pandemic might not afford us the same break.
Biden’s Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families (Hamed Aleaziz and Miriam Jordan, New York Times)
A new border crackdown unveiled by the Biden administration this week is likely to disproportionately affect families, whose soaring numbers in the last decade have drastically changed the profile of the population crossing the southern border.
Family units have come to represent a substantial share of border crossers, accounting for about 40 percent of all migrants who have entered the United States this year. Families generally have been released into the country quickly because of legal constraints that prevent children from being detained for extended periods.
They then join the millions of undocumented people who stay in the United States indefinitely, under the radar of the U.S. authorities, as they wait for court dates years in the future.
But according to a memo issued by the Homeland Security Department and obtained by The New York Times, families will be returned to their home countries within days under President Biden’s new border policy, which temporarily closed the U.S.-Mexico border to most asylum seekers as of 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. (Cont.)
