hackingbear shares a report from The Guardian: Residents [in the Canadian province of New Brunswick] first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province's public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a "cluster" of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases. "The majority of cases are linked to the Acadian peninsula, a sparsely populated region in the north-eastern part of the province," the report says. Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Stanford scientists saved drops of the COVID-19 vaccine destined for the garbage can, reverse engineered them, and have posted the mRNA sequence that powers the vaccine on GitHub for all to see. The GitHub post is four pages long. The first two are an explanation by the team of scientists about the work, the second two pages are the entire mRNA sequence for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. "RNA vaccines have become a key tool in moving forward through the challenges raised both in the current pandemic and in numerous other public health and medical challenges," the scientists said on GitHub. "Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNA. Standard methods facilitate such sequencing."

According to Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura, this isn't technically "reverse-engineering" a vaccine. "We didn't reverse engineer the vaccine. We posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021," they told Motherboard in an email. "As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies. Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility." [...] According to Shoura and Fire, the FDA cleared the Stanford project's decision to share the sequence with the community. "We did contact Moderna a couple of weeks ago to indicate that we were hoping to include the sequence in a publication and asking if there was anything that we should reference with respect to this... no response or objection from them, so we assume that everyone is busy doing important work."

"The idea of artificially cooling the planet to blunt climate change — in effect, blocking sunlight before it can warm the atmosphere — got a boost on Thursday when an influential scientific body urged the U.S. government to spend at least $100 million to research the technology," reports the New York Times: That technology, often called solar geoengineering, entails reflecting more of the sun's energy back into space through techniques that include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere. In a new report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said that governments urgently need to know whether solar geoengineering could work and what the side effects might be.

"Solar geoengineering is not a substitute for decarbonizing," said Chris Field, director of the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and head of the committee that produced the report, referring to the need to emit less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Still, he said, technology to reflect sunlight "deserves substantial funding, and it should be researched as rapidly and effectively as possible." The report acknowledged the risks that have made geoengineering one of the most contentious issues in climate policy. Those risks include upsetting regional weather patterns in potentially devastating ways, for example by changing the behavior of the monsoon in South Asia; relaxing public pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and even creating an "unacceptable risk of catastrophically rapid warming" if governments started reflecting sunlight for a period of time, and then later stopped.

But the authors argue that greenhouse gas emissions are not falling quickly enough to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, which means the world must begin to examine other options. Evidence for or against solar geoengineering, they found, "could have profound value" in guiding decisions about whether to deploy it.

While President Trump's former CDC director says he still thinks SARS-Cov-2 somehow originated from a lab in China, "a team of experts from the World Health Organization, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a number of virology experts have said the evidence to support such a claim just isn't there," reports CBS News: Redfield, a virologist who headed the CDC under President Trump, stressed several times that this is just his opinion, not a proven fact. "I'm allowed to have opinions now," he said... Dr. Anthony Fauci addressed Redfield's comments at Friday's COVID-19 response briefing and suggested that most public health officials disagree.... Kristian G. Andersen, director of the infectious disease genomics, translational research institute at Scripps Research, told CBS News that "none of (Redfield's) comments" on the lab theory are "backed by available evidence."

"It is clear that not only was he the most disastrous CDC director in U.S. history where he utterly failed in his sworn mission to keep the country safe, but via his comments, he also shows a complete lack of basic evolutionary virology," Andersen said.

Andersen was the lead author of a study published in Nature Medicine last year which found that the virus was a product of natural evolution. Furthermore, through analysis of public genome sequence data, the scientists "found no evidence that the virus was made in a laboratory or otherwise engineered," according to a press release from Scripps. "By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes," Andersen said at the time. W. Ian Lipkin, a study co-author with Andersen and the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, said that while there's still a lot we don't know about the virus, including exactly how long it's been circulating, there is "no evidence" to suggest that it was created in a lab...

Andersen noted that "We know that the first epidemiologically linked cluster of cases came from the Huanan market and we know the virus was found in environmental samples — including animal cages — at the market," he said. "Any 'lab leak' theory would have to account for that scenario — which it simply can't, without invoking a major conspiracy and cover up by Chinese scientists and authorities."

His scathing conclusion: "Redfield has no idea what he's talking about — plain and simple. It's no surprise given his disastrous tenure as CDC director."

Beeftopia shares a report from Axios: Former CDC Director Robert Redfield told CNN on Friday that he believes the coronavirus "escaped" from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that it was spreading as early as September or October of 2019 -- though he stressed that it was his "opinion." "I'm of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory. Escaped. Other people don't believe that. That's fine. Science will eventually figure it out," Redfield told CNN's Sanjay Gupta... "That's not implying any intentionality. It's my opinion, right...?"
Axios calls it "a stunning assertion, offered with little evidence," even though Redfield "is a career virologist," argues Slashdot reader Beeftopia. "He received his medical degree from Georgetown University before conducting his residency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center as a US Army officer. Both of his parents were scientists at the National Institutes of Health. Before starting his position as the director of the CDC, Redfield was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and was once one of the US Army's leading AIDS researchers. He does have a controversial incident regarding an AIDS vaccine on which his lab was working." In fact, Kaiser Health News reports Redfield had been the principal investigator for clinical trials of a treatment vaccine: "Either he was egregiously sloppy with data or it was fabricated," said former Air Force Lt. Col. Craig Hendrix, a doctor who is now director of the division of clinical pharmacology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "It was somewhere on that spectrum, both of which were serious and raised questions about his trustworthiness...." Washington Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the health committee, cited the research controversy as an example of a "pattern of ethically and morally questionable behavior" by Redfield that should prompt the president to reconsider the appointment.
Earlier this month, a member of the WHO investigative team said wildlife farms in southern China are the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic. Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance and part of the WHO delegation that traveled to China earlier this year, told NPR that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach humans in Wuhan.

Swinging above the African savannah, an upside-down rhino suspended from a helicopter looks comically surreal. But for the black rhino, flying to new territory is no laughing matter -- it's about survival. From a report: Most rhino translocations are carried out with trucks, but some remote locations can't be reached by road. So ten years ago, conservationists began using helicopters, on an occasional basis, to move rhinos to and from inaccessible terrain. The rhino is either placed on its side on a stretcher, or hung upside down by its legs. Conservationists like the upside-down airlift because it's faster, easier and less expensive than the stretcher option, but until now it hasn't been clear how being flipped affects the rhinos. Seeking to find out, the Namibian government asked a research team at Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine to look into the practice. The results, published in January, were surprising. "We were anticipating that the rhinos would fare worse hanging upside down," says Robin Radcliffe, a senior lecturer in wildlife and conservation medicine. Instead, Radcliffe and his team found that although it looks like an uncomfortable experience, upside-down flying is the better option for rhino health. [...] Radcliffe says the upside-down position allows the spine to stretch which helps to open the airways. Additionally, the team found that when lying on their side, rhinos have a larger "dead space" -- the amount of air in each breath that does not contribute oxygen to the body. The difference between the two postures was small, but because the strong anaesthetic used on the rhino causes hypoxemia -- low oxygen levels in the blood -- even a minor improvement makes a difference to the rhino's welfare.

whh3 writes: The NIAID issued a statement early Tuesday saying that they had concerns about the data that AstraZeneca included in their Monday-morning release touting the effectiveness of their Covid-19 vaccine. Slashdot reader phalse phace has shared additional information via The Hill. They write: U.S. health officials from the Data and Safety Monitoring Board issued an unusual statement that it was "concerned by information released by AstraZeneca on initial data from its COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial." This comes less than 24 hours after AstraZeneca said its vaccine had an "efficacy of 79% at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 and 100% efficacy at preventing severe disease and hospitalization" and a week after several countries suspended dosing of the vaccine due to concerns of dangerous blood clots.

The Data and Safety Monitoring Board "expressed concern that AstraZeneca may have included outdated information from that trial, which may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data." As an oversight committee, the Data and Safety Monitoring Board helps regulate and evaluate clinical trials of new medicines to ensure accuracy and adherence to protocols. In a statement released early Tuesday morning, AstraZeneca said the interim results it announced on Monday were current as of Feb. 17. The latest development could throw a wrench in AstraZeneca's plan to seek the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's emergency use authorization for its vaccine. Additional coverage: The New York Times

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, hospitals are blocking confidential prices from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites. It's problematic because pricing information for hospital services must be disclosed under a new federal price transparency rule that went into effect on Jan. 1. Becker's Hospital Review reports: The code prevents pages from appearing in searches, such as a hospital's name and prices, computer experts told the Journal. While the prices are still there, it requires clicking through multiple layers of pages to find them. "It's technically there, but good luck finding it," Chirag Shah, an associate computer professor at the University of Washington, told the Journal. "It's one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it's another thing to tag it so it can't be searched. It's a clear indication of intentionality."

Hospitals burying their pricing data include those owned by HCA Healthcare and Universal Health Services as well as the University of Pennsylvania Health System, NYU Langone Health, Beaumont Health and Novant Health, according to the Journal. Penn Medicine, NYU Langone Health and Novant Health told the publication they used the blocking code to direct patients first to information they "considered more useful than raw pricing data," for which they included web links. UHS uses the blocking code to ensure consumers acknowledge a disclosure statement before viewing prices and is making no effort to hide information, a hospital spokesperson told the Journal.

After the Journal reached out to hospitals about its discovery, the search-blocking code was removed from sites including those of HCA, Penn Medicine, Beaumont, Avera Health, Ballad Health and Northern Light Health. An HCA spokesperson told the publication the search blocker was "a legacy code that we removed," and Avera, Ballad, Beaumont and Northern Light said the code had been left on their websites by mistake.

The BBC reports: The number of daily Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the UK has hit a record high for a third consecutive day. A combined total of 844,285 first or second doses were given on Saturday, up from 711,157 on Friday. On Twitter, Prime Minister Boris Johnson thanked "everyone involved".

More than 27.6 million people in the UK — more than half the adult population — have now received at least one dose of a vaccine... Of the vaccinations administered on Saturday, 752,308 were first doses and 91,977 were second, meaning 2,228,772 people in the UK have now been fully vaccinated.
How does that compare to other regions? In the USA — which has roughly five times the UK's population — 81.4 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine, representating about 24.5% of the eligible population. But 41.9 million Americans have been fully vaccinated (according to figures compiled by the Washington Post).

And here's some more figures from the Los Angeles Times, including vaccination stats for the state of California — roughly 60% of the UK's population: The last six days have seen the six highest single-day totals of shots given out statewide, according to data compiled by the Los Angeles Times. During that stretch, roughly 2.35 million doses were administered statewide — including 344,489 on Thursday and 387,015 on Friday... To date, nearly 13.8 million shots have been administered statewide [and] 23.5% of Californians have received at least one vaccine dose — a proportion that ranks 33rd out of all states and U.S. territories, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By comparison, 31.4% of New Mexico's population has gotten at least one shot, as have 29.6% of Alaskans and 29% of those living in South Dakota. California measures up better compared with more populous states. As of Friday, 24.3% of residents had received one shot in Pennsylvania, 24.2% in New York, 22.2% in Florida and 20.9% in Texas, CDC data show.. Roughly 11.8% of all Californians have been fully vaccinated. California is somewhat ahead of the national curve when it comes to vaccinating its older residents. Roughly 71.9% of residents ages 65 and older have received at least one dose, according to the CDC, compared with the nationwide figure of 67.1%.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a discussion between a 77-year-old "father of the internet" and a 75-year-old "father of public key cryptography". Long before Vinton Cerf and Martin Hellman changed the world with their inventions, they were young assistant professors at Stanford University who became fast friends... More than 50 years and two technological revolutions later, the friendship between Vint and Marty — as they know each other — endures. This is despite, or perhaps because of, their sometimes different views. You see, while they do not always agree, they both enjoy a good intellectual debate, especially when the humans they sought to bring together with their inventions face existential threats.

Not long after giving the world public key cryptography, Hellman switched his focus from encryption to efforts that might avoid nuclear war. "What's the point of developing new algorithms if there's not likely to be anybody around in 50-100 years?" Hellman recalls thinking at the time... On a recent private phone call with each other, the two friends discussed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's project seeking to answer the question, "Should the U.S. use quantitative methods to assess the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism?"

While both agree that the US needs to understand the risk of nuclear war, they disagree about whether a quantitative analysis is necessary.
"Quantitative estimates run either the real or perceived risk of being twisted to support whatever conclusion is desired," Cerf argues — while sharing instead an analogy he believes illustrates the risks of the 13,410 nuclear weapons currently in the world (91% divided between Russia and the U.S.)

But Hellman counters that "When the risk is highly uncertain, how do you determine who's right?" He ultimately suggests quantifying the risks would make society more fully aware of the stakes.

"I hope you will agree with either my quantitative approach or Vint's qualitative approach," Hellman concludes, "both of which conclude that the risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high and risk reduction measures are urgently needed." But for those who accept neither approach, Hellman adds two questions:

• What evidence supports the belief that the risk of nuclear deterrence failing is currently at an acceptable level?
• Can we responsibly bet humanity's existence on a strategy for which the risk of failure is totally unknown?

If you were on the call — what would you say?

"If that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred," says Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. "We may never have even known about it!"

Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that "The coronavirus pandemic almost didn't happen." Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," Worobey told CNN...

The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread... The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said... What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said.

"It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said...

In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and that the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge -- cancer. Ozlem Tureci, who founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, Ugur Sahin, was working on a way to harness the body's immune system to tackle tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus infecting people in China. Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they'd been researching for two decades to the new threat.

Britain authorized BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for use in December, followed a week later by Canada. Dozens of other countries, including the U.S., have followed suit and tens of millions of people worldwide have since received the shot developed together with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. [...] As BioNTech's profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, adding much-needed funds the company will be able to use to pursue its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer. The vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.

"We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA," said Tureci. Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said "that's very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people." For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure the vaccines governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.

Microsoft unveiled new technology to boost government and health care organizations' vaccine management systems, including scheduling shot appointments and monitoring results, to fix shortcomings weeks after the company's initial custom-built programs ran aground in a few states. From a report: The Microsoft Vaccine Management product released Friday is made up of features and new apps that the software company said will improve upon and fix the glitches that occurred when its previous effort, the Vaccination Registration and Application System, failed to work properly in New Jersey and Washington D.C. The new software "incorporates lessons learned from VRAS regarding scalable architecture, improved user experiences for residents and health care workers," the company said in an email. It also uses health care standards for information transfer so data can be exported more quickly to other record systems, such as electronic medical records. The software also addresses other issues that hampered the previous option, including requiring users to pre-register before seeking a Covid-19 vaccine appointment and providing a way to proactively handle spikes in demand.

A digital certificate to kick-start foreign travel should be given to citizens across the EU "without discrimination," officials say. From a report: The aim is to enable anyone vaccinated against Covid-19, or who has tested negative or recently recovered from the virus to travel within the EU. The 27 member states will decide how to use the new digital certificate. Vaccine passports have faced opposition from some EU member states over concerns they might be discriminatory. Some argue that they would enable a minority to enjoy foreign travel without restrictions while others, such as young people who are not seen as a priority for inoculation, continue to face measures such as quarantine. European Commission officials have made clear they want to avoid discrimination.

Another issue raised has been that data on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing a person from carrying or passing on the virus is incomplete. Ahead of the EU's announcement, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was working to "create an international trusted framework" for safe travel, but that vaccinations should not be a condition. Separately, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to withhold exporting vaccines to the UK and any other countries outside the EU that do not supply doses in a reciprocal way. "We're still waiting for doses to come from the UK," she said. "So, this is an invitation to show us that there are also doses from the UK coming to the European Union."

A whole list of countries -- including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Latvia -- have suspended dosing of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine over reports of dangerous blood clots in some recipients. The company and international regulators say there is no evidence the shot is to blame, but that isn't stopping countries from taking action out of an abundance of caution. Derek Lowe, a medical chemist working in the pharmaceutical industry, explains what's going on with this vaccine: I think that there are several distinct levels to this problem. The first, obviously, is medical. The big question is, are the reports of vascular problems greater than one would expect in the vaccinated population as a whole? It's not clear to me what the answer is, and it may very well be "No, they aren't." That CNBC link above quotes Michael Head at Southampton as saying that the data so far look like the problems show up at at least the same levels, and may even be lower in the vaccinated group. AstraZeneca has said that they're aware of 15 events of deep vein thrombosis and 22 events pulmonary embolisms, but that's in 17 million people who have had at least one shot -- and they say that is indeed "much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size." It also appears to be similar to what's been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines, which rather than meaning "they're all bad" looks like they're all showing the same baseline signal of such events across a broad population, without adding to it.

In that case, this could be an example of what I warned about back in December (and many others have warned about as well), the post hoc ergo propter hoc "false side effects" problem. I've been looking this morning, and so far have not found anyone clearly stating that the problems seen are running higher in the vaccinated patients [...]. I realize that there's a possibility (not a likely one, though) that some particular batch of vaccine is more problematic, but I haven't seen any solid evidence of that, either.

The second half of the medical problem is naturally what happens when you suspend dosing of what is, in many cases in the EU, the only vaccine available. We've been seeing cases falling here in the US ever since a peak on the first week of January -- many of us were worried about what might have been a rise in February but which now just seems to have been a plateau, with cases continuing to drop since then. But many European countries are definitely seeing another wave of infections, and the EU case numbers as a whole are going in the opposite direction to the US ones. There are surely a lot of reasons for this, with new viral variants being one, slow vaccine rollouts being another, and now complete vaccination halts set to add even more. Put as bluntly as possible, even if the AZ/Oxford vaccine has these side effects (which again, I don't see any evidence for yet), you are still very likely to kill more people by not giving it. Lowe goes on to question what good the EMA and World Health Organization's recommendations and regulatory approvals are when one European country after another shuts down its use.

He also brings up the third problem, which is public confidence. "The AZ/Oxford vaccine has been in trouble there since the day the first data came out," writes Lowe. "The efficacy numbers looked lower than the other vaccines that had reported by then, and as mentioned, the presentation of the data was really poorly handled and continued to be so for weeks. Now with these dosing suspensions, I have to wonder if this vaccine is ever going to lose the dark cloud it's currently sitting under..."

Germany on Monday halted use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, the Health Ministry announced in a statement, with Italy, France and Spain following suit later in the day. Several other EU countries have stopped use of the vaccine because of the possibility of blood clots. From a report: The Health Ministry announced that use of the vaccine was "suspended as a precaution" on the basis of advice from the national health regulator, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI). According to the Health Ministry, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will decide "whether and how the new information will affect the authorization of the vaccine" pending an investigation. "After new reports of thrombroses of the cerebral veins in connection with the vaccination in Germany and Europe, the PEI considers further investigations to be necessary," the Health Ministry announced. German Health Minister Jens Spahn said "the decision is a professional, not political one," following advice from the PEI. Spahn said the risk of blood clots from the AstraZeneca jab is low, but could not be ruled out. "The most important thing for confidence is transparency," Spahn said during a briefing.

The Washington Post reports: Facebook is conducting a vast behind-the-scenes study of doubts expressed by U.S. users about vaccines, a major project that attempts to probe and teach software to identify the medical attitudes of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. The research is a large-scale attempt to understand the spread of ideas that contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or the act of delaying or refusing a vaccination despite its availability, on social media — a primary source of health information for millions of people...

Its early findings suggest that a large amount of content that does not break the rules may be causing harm in certain communities, where it has an echo chamber effect... Just 10 out of the 638 population segments contained 50 percent of all vaccine hesitancy content on the platform. And in the population segment with the most vaccine hesitancy, just 111 users contributed half of all vaccine hesitant content... The research effort also discovered early evidence of significant overlap between communities that are skeptical of vaccines and those affiliated with QAnon, a sprawling set of baseless claims that has radicalized its followers and been associated with violent crimes, according to the documents...

Facebook, which owns WhatsApp messenger and Instagram, collects reams of data on its more than 3.3 billion users worldwide and has a broad reach onto those users' devices. Public health experts say that puts the company in a unique position to examine attitudes toward vaccines, testing and other behaviors and push information to people.

But the company has a steep hill to climb when it comes to proving that its research efforts serve the public because of its history of misusing people's data.
Facebook is removing content which violates its policies. Yet the documents obtained by the Post say "While research is very early, we're concerned that harm from non-violating content may be substantial."

Today much of the world honors an annual tradition: setting their clocks backwards by one hour. "I hope you enjoy it," writes Boston Globe Jeff Jacoby.

In an essay titled "Heed the science and abolish daylight saving time," Jacoby writes "I also hope this is the last year we have to go through this business of shifting our clocks ahead, and that by this time next year we'll be back on standard time for good." I am not a fan of daylight saving time, and if the polls are accurate, neither are most Americans. According to a 2019 survey by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center, 71 percent of the public wants to put an end to the twice-yearly practice of changing clocks... Most of the rest of the world doesn't want it either. In Asia, Africa, and South America, it's virtually nonexistent. Most of Australia and many of the nations of the South Pacific eschew it, as do Russia and most of the former Soviet republics. The European Parliament voted by a large margin to end daylight saving time across the European Union, though whether to implement that change is left up to each EU member state...

The point of "saving" daylight was to save fuel: Congress believed that by shifting the clock so daylight extended later into the evening, the law would reduce demand for electricity and thereby conserve oil. But researchers attempting to measure the effects of clock-changing on energy savings have found them pretty elusive... But daylight saving time doesn't just fail to deliver the single most important benefit expected of it. It also generates a slew of harms. In the days following the onset of daylight time each March, there is a measurable increase in suicides, atrial fibrillation, strokes, and heart attacks. Workplace injuries climb. So do fatal car crashes and emergency room visits. There is even evidence that judges hand down harsher sentences. All of which helps explain the growing chorus of scientists calling for an end to daylight saving time. The public-health problems stem not just from the loss of an hour of sleep once a year but from the ongoing disruption to the human circadian clock...

We should no longer be thinking about "springing forward" and "falling back" in terms of personal preference or convenience but should be focusing instead on the proven degradation to human well-being. Scientists now understand vastly more about the workings and importance of circadian rhythm than they did when clock-shifting was instituted decades ago. There is a growing medical consensus that what we've been doing with our clocks each spring is unhealthy.

It's time to stop doing it.

Eli Lilly and Company's experimental intravenous drug donanemab "could slow the cognitive decline of patients with Alzheimer's disease," reports CNN, citing early clinical trial results, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine: The study included 257 patients with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease; 131 received donanemab, while 126 received a placebo. The researchers found donanemab slowed the decline of cognition and daily function in Alzheimer's patients by 32% after 76 weeks, compared to those who received a placebo. Taken over 18 months, that 32% slowing of decline could be noticeably impactful for Alzheimer's patients, noted Maria Carrillo, chief science officer at the Alzheimer's Association, who was not involved in the study. "Out of 18 months, in comparison to the people that did not get the drug, these folks were declining six months slower," Carrillo said. "That's six more months of better cognition, better memories, better enjoyable times with your family...."

"This has a lot of potential," Carrillo added. "It could be a first step towards slowing more significantly, or stopping, cognitive decline in these earlier stages, which would really be transformational for our field..."

The researchers also looked at the drug's impact on the buildup of amyloid beta plaque and tau proteins, which are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. At 52 weeks, almost 60% of participants had reached amyloid-negative status, meaning their levels were at those of otherwise healthy people. At 76 weeks, amyloid plaque levels — measured in centiloids — decreased by 85 centiloids more than in those who received the placebo, the researchers reported...

"We are extremely pleased about these positive findings for donanemab as a potential therapy for people living with Alzheimer's disease, the only leading cause of death without a treatment that slows disease progression," Dr. Mark Mintun, Eli Lilly's vice president of pain and neurodegeneration, said in a January statement announcing the trial results...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia, and currently affects 6.2 million Americans age 65 and older, according to the Alzheimer's Association.

"Tens of millions of doses of the coronavirus vaccine made by the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca are sitting idly in American manufacturing facilities," reports the New York Times, "awaiting results from its U.S. clinical trial while countries that have authorized its use beg for access."

schwit1 shares their report: The fate of those doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine is the subject of an intense debate among White House and federal health officials, with some arguing the administration should let them go abroad where they are desperately needed while others are not ready to relinquish them, according to senior administration officials...

About 30 million doses are currently bottled at AstraZeneca's facility in West Chester, Ohio, which handles "fill-finish," the final phase of the manufacturing process during which the vaccine is placed in vials, one official with knowledge of the stockpile said. Emergent BioSolutions, a company in Maryland that AstraZeneca has contracted to manufacture its vaccine in the United States, has also produced enough vaccine in Baltimore for tens of millions more doses once it is filled into vials and packaged, the official said. But although AstraZeneca's vaccine is already authorized in more than 70 countries, according to a company spokesman, its U.S. clinical trial has not yet reported results, and the company has not applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization.

AstraZeneca has asked the Biden administration to let it loan American doses to the European Union, where it has fallen short of its original supply commitments and where the vaccination campaign has stumbled badly. The administration, for now, has denied the request, one official said...

Johnson & Johnson, which has authorization for its vaccine in the United States but fell behind on its production targets in both the United States and Europe, recently asked the United States to loan 10 million doses to the European Union, but the Biden administration also denied that request, according to American and European officials... The administration has focused on Johnson & Johnson's one-shot vaccine, brokering a deal to have the pharmaceutical giant Merck manufacture and bottle the shot and announcing plans to secure 100 million additional doses... Privately, two senior administration officials said that by helping Johnson & Johnson scale up with the Merck deal, the White House is laying the groundwork for the company to eventually make its vaccine available overseas.