Citizen Cartwright

Note to readers

An anomaly I haven’t encountered before at Typepad, which powers this blog, prevented me from posting on Friday.

 

Note to email subscribers: I tried to send this to you on Saturday morning but was unable to make the necessary change in Mail Chimp, which sends these emails, in time. 🤪  I hope you're receiving it now, on Sunday!

 

Because of the Memorial Day holiday, I’ll see you next on Tuesday, June 1. Have a great rest of the weekend!

How a little lab may bring the first coronavirus treatment in pill form

"Pharmaceutical companies almost invariably only pursue drugs for diseases that will generate large profits,” says Dr. Dennis Liotta, a professor of organic chemistry at Emory University.

 

So Liotta co-founded in 2012 a nonprofit called DRIVE (short for Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory) to discover and begin development of new drugs.

 

DRIVE is one of dozens of university-based drug discovery centers established over the past two decades in response to the dwindling output in terms of new drugs being approved and rising costs of pharmaceutical research and development.

 

Liotta is a co-inventor of 12 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Two of them, the antiretrovirals lamivudine and emtricitabine, were instrumental in curbing the spread of HIV. Emtricitabine made possible the first-ever combination therapy for the virus in a one-a-day pill. 

 

Now Liotta's lab has created Molnupiravir, an antiviral agent to treat the coronavirus in pill form, a major advantage over current options like remdesivir and monoclonal antibody therapies, which have to be infused intravenously.

 

Molnupiravir has been licensed by Merck in partnership with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics — a smaller company that first acquired the drug and remains involved in its development.

 

As the FDA awaits data from a Phase II/III clinical trial, Merck says it's partnered with generic drugmakers in India to make Molnupiravir available there pending its authorization for emergency use amid that country’s catastrophic second wave of infections.

Also in the news

U.S. tells Russia it won’t rejoin Open Skies arms control pact, citing Russian violations

 

Senate advances tech bill taking aim at China

Biden expected to propose $6 trillion budget to modernize infrastructure, expand social services

 

Former GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan: Voters won't be impressed by 'yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago'

 

FiveThirtyEight: What’s the partisan lean of your state, congressional district?

 

Microsoft says group behind SolarWinds hack now is targeting government agencies, NGOs

In California, nursing home operators can continue running facilities even after they’ve been denied a state license

 

Your city has its own microbial ‘signature,’ researchers say

 

FDA approves third coronavirus antibody treatment for emergency use

Remembering the destruction of America’s Black Wall Street in Tulsa massacre 100 years ago

President Biden is to visit Tulsa, Okla., next Tuesday to mark the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

His visit will cap a weekend of events, speakers and concerts marking what The Associated Press calls “one of the starkest examples of how Black wealth has been sapped, again and again, by racism and racist violence — forcing generation after generation to start from scratch while shouldering the burdens of being Black in America.”

 

In May 1921, Tulsa’s predominantly Black neighborhood of Greenwood was a "fully realized antidote to the racial oppression of the time,” says The New York Times. Built in the early part of the century in a northern pocket of the city, it was a thriving community of commerce and family life to its about 10,000 residents.

 

Segregation kept African Americans from patronizing white-owned stories, and Greenwood thrived with the support of Black-owned businesses.

 

About 40 percent of the community’s residents were professionals or skilled craftspeople, including doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, carpenters and hairdressers, according to a Times analysis of the 1920 census.

 

But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by what the Times says was "among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation’s history.”

 

It began on May 30 with an incident between two teenagers in an elevator in a downtown Tulsa building and morphed into a sexual assault accusation.

 

But a factor driving the ensuing violence was resentment of Black prosperity, says the Times.

 

After two days, 35 blocks had been burned to the ground; as many as 300 people were dead and hundreds were injured; 8,000 to 10,000 people were left homeless; more than 1,470 homes had been burned or looted; and eventually, 6,000 people were detained in internment camps.

 

The people rebuilt, and by the 1950s, Greenwood again was one of the most successful Black neighborhoods in the United States, says NBC News.

 

But what now remains of the neighborhood’s historic prosperity is one block of Black-owned businesses and the Vernon Chapel AME Church, where many massacre survivors found refuge from the violence.

 

Greenwood residents say they were robbed twice: in 1921 and again 50 years later when eminent domain took their homes to build highways.

 

As the Biden administration seeks to address institutionalized racism, federal officials are talking more openly about the way the government for generations has used redlining, urban renewal and eminent domain to tip the scales against people of color, says NBC News. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has acknowledged how federally funded highways have sliced through neighborhoods of color, displacing residents and reducing the home values of those who remain.

Also in the news

Hong Kong’s legislature changes electoral law, reduces direct public vote

 

Biden orders intelligence officials to ‘redouble' their efforts to investigate origins of coronavirus pandemic

 

AP: Deep-rooted racism and discrimination permeate U.S. military

 

Mitt Romney receives JFK Library Foundation's Profile in Courage Award

 

Exxon loses board seats to activist hedge fund in landmark climate-change vote

 

Study: Seven out of 10 hospitalized coronavirus patients will have long-haul symptoms

 

Former Virginia GOP Sen. John Warner, a force on military affairs and respected consensus builder, dies at 94

Let’s celebrate the doubling of the average human life span between 1920 and 2020

"There are few measures of human progress more astonishing than this,” says an excerpt from the book “Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer” that ran recently in The New York Times Magazine.

 

"If you were to publish a newspaper that came out just once a century, the banner headline surely would — or should — be the declaration of this incredible feat. But of course, the story of our extra life span almost never appears on the front page of our actual daily newspapers, because the drama and heroism that have given us those additional years are far more evident in hindsight than they are in the moment.

 

"That is, the story of our extra life is a story of progress in its usual form: brilliant ideas and collaborations unfolding far from the spotlight of public attention, setting in motion incremental improvements that take decades to display their true magnitude."

 

The book’s author, Steven Johnson, also is a host of a four-part PBS/BBC series of the same title that’s airing this month.

 

"When the history textbooks do touch on the subject of improving health, they often nod to three critical breakthroughs, all of them presented as triumphs of the scientific method: vaccines, germ theory and antibiotics,” says Johnson.

 

"But the real story is far more complicated. Those breakthroughs might have been initiated by scientists, but it took the work of activists and public intellectuals and legal reformers to bring their benefits to everyday people. From this perspective, the doubling of human life span is an achievement that is closer to something like universal suffrage or the abolition of slavery: progress that required new social movements, new forms of persuasion and new kinds of public institutions to take root. 

 

"And it required lifestyle changes that ran throughout all echelons of society: washing hands, quitting smoking, getting vaccinated, wearing masks during a pandemic.”

 

Johnson poses the question whether the trends behind these positive changes will continue. 

 

"All those brilliant solutions we engineered to reduce or eliminate threats like smallpox created a new, higher-level threat: ourselves,” he says. "Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality."

 

For example, "Extending our lives helped give us the climate crisis,” Johnson says. “If we had invented steam engines and coal-powered electrical grids and automobiles but kept global population at 1800 levels — climate change would be much less of an issue. There simply wouldn’t be enough humans to make a meaningful impact on carbon levels in the atmosphere.”

 

Well, let’s see what future the scientists, activists, intellectuals, reformers and we “everyday people” create.

Also in the news

President and prime minister of Mali ousted by officer who led last year’s coup and now serves as vice president

 

Roman Protasevich, Belarus activist who ‘refused to live in fear’

 

A year after his death, George Floyd's family meets with Biden as congressional negotiators work on policing bill

 

Biden opens California coast to wind farms

 

Science studies that may be wrong are the most widely read, researchers say

Trump backers want more review of last election — and to run the next one

Six months after President Trump’s loss, his supporters and conspiracy theorists are continuing their push for repeated examinations of ballots and finding limited success, reports The Associated Press.

A Georgia judge last Friday awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in a rural Michigan county have expressed interest in reviewing their voting machines. A similar debate has caused sharp divisions in a town in New Hampshire. In some cases, the efforts have been inspired by the audit of votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County, an exercise engineered by the GOP-led state Senate.

 

Leading the Georgia ballot review effort is Garland Favorito, who’s been on the "conspiracy fringe" of American politics for decades, according to The New York Times. In 2002, he published a book questioning the origin of the 9/11 attacks. He's also promoted unproven theories about the Kennedy assassination. In 2014, he appeared in a video promoting the idea that the 14th Amendment was itself unconstitutional and argued that the federal government therefore was illegitimate and should be overthrown.

 

The profusion of audits is alarming election experts, who note that the Arizona audit has set a troubling new precedent of third-party, partisan review of ballots long after elections are over, says AP.

“This is bad enough to see it happen once,” says Eddie Perez, an expert on voting systems at the Open Source Election Technology Institute, of Arizona, but seeing it elsewhere in the country is “dangerous for democracy.’”

 

Meanwhile, Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, reports Politico.

 

Candidates running for secretary of state in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 and who wins the White House in 2024 include, according to Politico:  

 

Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the vote audit in Arizona’s largest county; Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to have his five-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election.

Also in the news

U.N. Security Council condemns attacks on peacekeepers, urges prosecution, security measures

 

EU leaders agree on Belarus sanctions after forced diversion of passenger jet to arrest opposition journalist

Justice Department releases part of internal memo on not charging Trump in Russia probe, appeals to keep rest secret

 

Florida to be first state to fine social media companies that bar candidates

 

ProPublica: Self-promoting cybersecurity firms were a ‘secret weapon’ for Colonial Pipeline ransomware hackers 

 

KHN: Pandemic leads doctors to rethink unnecessary treatments

 

Pfizer, AstraZeneca vaccines effective against Indian variant of coronavirus, British health officials say

 

Heart issue spotted in a few young recipients of Pfizer, Moderna coronavirus vaccines

 

In a first, doctors use a form of gene therapy to restore partial vision in blind person

‘Shareholder democracy’ seen as at risk, too

"In the near future, giant index funds, those low-cost investments that have helped millions of people to build nest eggs, will gain 'practical power over the majority of U.S. public companies,’” says New York Times markets and financial columnist Jeff Sommer.

 

About half of American households own stocks. But most own those stocks indirectly through funds, mainly index funds.

 

Index funds, which track the market and make no attempt to outperform it, are so effective and cheap that they've become the investment vehicle of choice for trillions of dollars of assets. Yet under current rules, it's the index fund executives, not the millions of people who invest in them, who have the power to cast shareholder votes.

 

Those votes are the heart of a system intended to give investors a voice on issues including how much the chief executive is paid or whether a company is damaging the environment. 

 

John Coates, a former Harvard Law School professor who now is acting director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of corporation finance, wrote in a 2018 paper, “Control of most public companies — that is, the wealthiest organizations in the world, with more revenue than most states — will soon be concentrated in the hands of a dozen or fewer people.”

And the biggest fund companies have sided with management about 90 percent of the time, says Sommer.

 

Mutual fund companies often are conflicted, says Sommer. Many get revenue from publicly traded corporations for providing financial services connected to retirement plans, yet they have the responsibility of casting critical votes on the way those companies are run. 

 

A possible alternative could be “index proxy polling,” a way for shareholders to convey their preferences on proxy votes, Sommer says.