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

    By Paul Hunter

    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?

  • Are Political Parties Getting in the Way of Our Well-Being?

    Today, the two major political parties are often blamed for a plethora of problems in American governance. But for most of the last century and a half, political party competition has had positive effects on the welfare of Americans. Party competition is linked to increased public investment, greater social well-being.

  • Two-meter COVID-19 Rule Is “Arbitrary Measurement” of Safety

    A new study has shown that the airborne transmission of COVID-19 is highly random and suggests that the two-meter rule was a number chosen from a risk ‘continuum’, rather than any concrete measurement of safety.

  • Big Batteries on Wheels: Zero-Emissions Rail While Securing the Grid

    Trains have been on the sidelines of electrification efforts for a long time in the U.S. because they account for only 2 percent of transportation sector emissions, but diesel freight trains emit 35 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually and produce air pollution that leads to $6.5 billion in health costs, resulting in an estimated 1,000 premature deaths each year. Researchers show how battery-electric trains can deliver environmental benefits, cost-savings, and resilience to the U.S.

  • Russian Anti-Vaccine Disinformation Campaign Backfires

    By Jamie Dettmer

    For more than a year, Russian-aligned troll factories overseeing thousands of social media accounts have been spreading anti-vaccine messages in an aggressive campaign to spread conspiracy theories and cast doubt on Western coronavirus vaccines. But the year-long offensive appears to have backfired. Russian officials now worry that the anti-vaccine skepticism encouraged by the troll factories has spilled over and is partly responsible for the high level of vaccine hesitancy among Russians.

  • News Manipulation by State Actors

    Did authoritarian regimes engage in news manipulation during the pandemic? How can such manipulation be brought to light? New report shows that both Russia and China appear to have employed information manipulation during the COVID-19 pandemic in service to their respective global agendas.

  • Zombie Apocalypse? How Gene Editing Could Be Used as a Weapon – and What to Do About It

    By Pin Lean Lau

    There is a scarier scenario that a repeat of the COVID-1 pandemic: What if the threat wasn’t COVID-19, but a gene-edited pathogen designed to turn us into zombies – ghost-like, agitated creatures with little awareness of our surroundings? With recent advances in gene editing, it may be possible for bioterrorists to design viruses capable of altering our behavior, spreading such a disease and ultimately killing us. And chances are we still wouldn’t be sufficiently prepared to deal with it.

  • Public Health as National Security

    Experts agree that it is not a matter of if, but when, the next large-scale outbreak of infectious disease will occur. Even as more countries devote more resources to health security – defined as the framework for preventing, detecting, and responding to biological threats, whether naturally occurring, accidental, or deliberate – there are still disagreements about whether public health be framed as a national security issue.

  • Addressing Natural and Deliberate Biological Threats: Early Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

    “Infectious disease threats will continue to emerge, whether naturally, by accident, or deliberately. Stopping them from spreading and causing mass effects is possible even today, but we have much work to do bringing our assets to bear” said Andy Weber, Senior Fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR).

  • Nation of Islam Pushes Anti-COVID-19 Vaccine Message, Conspiracy Theories

    Months before the first COVID-19 vaccine began to be distributed in the United States, the Nation of Islam (NOI) had already widely disseminated its directive that Black people refuse the vaccine. Through all of this, the NOI has exploited legitimate concerns and distrust about the history of medical experimentation on marginalized communities in the United States in order to promote conspiratorial claims about a government-sponsored depopulation plot that targets Black people.

  • Biological Weapons in the “Shadow War”

    The COVID-19 pandemic has led to renewed discussion of biological weapons, but Glenn Cross, a former deputy national intelligence officer for Weapons of Mass Destruction responsible for biological weapons analysis, argues that the development and possession of biological weapons is trending dramatically downward since the end of World War II. “Nations likely no longer see utility in developing or possessing biological weapons for use in large-scale, offensive military operations given the devastating capabilities of today’s advanced conventional weapons,” he writes.

  • COVID-19: The Swedish Model

    In the spring of 2020, as it was deciding on what policies to take to deal with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic, the Swedish government chose a different path to many other countries, one based on a voluntary approach and personal responsibility rather than more intrusive measures. The Swedish government has created a commission of experts to assess whether the Swedish model of dealing with the pandemic was reasonable and effective.

  • Women in Global Health: Providing Actionable Insights to Healthcare Providers

    Women make up 70 percent of the healthcare workforce. After almost 2 years of pandemic-driven challenges, women healthcare workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 response are facing burnout, are leaving the healthcare workforce, and are shifting to part-time work.

  • Preventing Future Pandemics Starts with Recognizing Links between Human and Animal Health

    By Deborah Kochevar and Guilherme Werneck

    The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that zoonotic diseases – infections that pass from animals to humans – can present tremendous threats to global health. More than 70 percent of emerging and reemerging pathogens originate from animals.

  • DHS Strategic Framework for Addressing Climate Change

    Two weeks ago, the Biden administration released four reports, by DHS, the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council, on how climate change-driven developments — among them:  worsening conflict within and between nations; increased dislocation and migration as people flee climate-fueled instability; heightened military tension and uncertainty; infrastructure destruction; worsening public health; food and water shortages; financial hazards, and more – are posing an increasingly more serious challenge to global stability and to U.S. national security.