• Deaths of Undocumented Migrants in Southeastern U.S. Cluster in Hot, Dry Areas

    Deaths of undocumented migrants crossing the deserts that span the southern United States border between Mexico and Arizona are disproportionately clustered within regions of greatest physiological stress, including those where dehydration is likely, reports a new study.

  • Creating Dangerous Viruses in the Lab Is a Bad Way to Guard against future Pandemics

    In 2011, three top U.S. government scientists — Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Francis Collins, the head of NIH, and Gary Nabel, then a top official at Fauci’s institute – wrote that given the uncertainties regarding the emergence of new, pandemic-causing pathogens, “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.” Laura H. Kahn writes that “There are other less risky ways of preventing pandemics than conducting gain-of-function research on pathogens.”

  • All Countries Remain Dangerously Unprepared for Future Epidemic, Pandemic Threats

    Despite important steps taken by countries to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, all countries—across all income levels—remain dangerously unprepared to meet future epidemic and pandemic threats, according to the new 2021 Global Health Security (GHS) Index. The report calls on national and global leaders to sustain and expand upon preparedness capacities developed to fight COVID-19.

  • Jabbed in the Back: Russian, Chinese COVID-19 Disinformation Campaigns

    The public health and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have also become a battle about the nature of truth itself. From the emergence of the first reports of a virus in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, opportunistic leaders in China, Russia, and elsewhere have used the virus as a pretext to further erode democracy and wage information warfare. They have inundated an already polluted information environment with disinformation and propaganda about the virus’s origins and cures, and, most recently, vaccines.

  • Some Doctors Spreading Coronavirus Misinformation Are Being Punished

    State medical boards are receiving more and more complaints about false or misleading information about COVID-19, but only a handful have taken action against doctors. Researchers say that misinformation delivered by doctors can be particularly insidious as a result of the credibility associated with their profession and the difficulty that patients may experience try to debunk their highly technical language.

  • Human and Economic Impacts of Covid-19

    The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the behavior of businesses and households.  Those behavioral changes, intensified by government actions like mandatory closures, have had a reverberating impact on the U.S. economy.

  • “Big Data Paradox”: 2 Early Vaccination Surveys Worse Than Worthless

    “Big data paradox” is a mathematical tendency of big data sets to minimize one type of error, due to small sample size, but magnify another that tends to get less attention: flaws linked to systematic biases that make the sample a poor representation of the larger population. Analyst found that that tendency caused two early vaccination surveys to be misleading – a findings which holds warning for tracking efforts as governments and health officials as they formulate policies to battle the pandemic.

  • How the U.K. Government Managed the Balance between Taking Credit and Apportioning Blame for Its Covid Response

    How does a government manage a problem like COVID-19? Political scientists have long noted that governance is not just about managing the problem itself: Governance is also the managing of wider perceptions and expectations of how the problem is being managed. To manage the perceptions of how it was managing the crisis, the U.K. government used four key narratives: unprecedented government activism; working to plan; national security, wartime unity and sacrifice; and scientific guidance.

  • How Has COVID-19 Changed the Violent Extremist Landscape?

    Coronavirus has highlighted how anxiety, uncertainty, and the reordering of democratic state-citizen relations can breed susceptibility to violent extremist thinking and action.

  • German Police Investigating Anti-Vax Assassination Plot against German Politician

    A group of conspiracy theorists used Telegram to call for an armed response to Saxony’s state premier Michael Kretschmer’s restrictions on the unvaccinated. The right-wing extremism branch of Saxony’s anti-terror unit is investigating.

  • Viral Vendettas: Pandemic-Driven Growth of Online Conspiratorial Movements

    Graphika has just released a new report which  tracks the growth of conspiratorial movements online throughout the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, seeking to understand how these communities have evolved, and to what extent they have enabled real-world and online harms.

  • Preventing and Responding to High-Consequence Biological Threats

    A new report offers actionable recommendations for the international community to bolster prevention and response capabilities for high-consequence biological events.

  • The U.K. Government’s Preparedness for COVID-19: Risk-Management Lessons

    A new report from the U.K. National Audit Office (NAO) examines the government’s risk analysis, planning, and mitigation strategies prior to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report notes that the pandemic has exposed a vulnerability to whole-system emergencies – that is, emergencies which are so broad that they require the engagement of the entire system.

  • Covid Is Less Risky to Children than Covid Vaccines

    We should be careful about vaccinating children against the COVID-19 because it is likely that more children will die from the effects of the vaccine than from Covid itself.

  • COVID: Will the U.K. Vaccinate Children Under 12?

    The U.K. Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunizations (JCVI) will help decide whether the U.K. should follow other countries – the U.S., Israel – in offering COVID-1 vaccines to all children aged five and over. When the JCVI weighed up vaccinating the next youngest age group – 12-to-15-year-olds – it found that the benefits were only “marginally greater than the potential known harms.” So marginal, in fact, that it advised against offering vaccines to this group. So, for the JCVI to give the green light to vaccinating over-fives, the health benefits will need to be more compelling than for 12-to-15-year-olds. But what does the evidence say?