In RI, when can I get my first COVID shot?

 

For those of you bothered by critters

Seasonal Wildlife Solution Sessions Announced

The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) Division of Fish & Wildlife will host a series of four Seasonal Wildlife Solution Sessions beginning next month. 

Rhode Islanders are invited to join DEM's Wildlife Outreach Team to discover effective strategies for coexisting with our native wildlife. Sessions are designed to address common seasonal conflicts between humans and wildlife and provide the public with guidance. 

Each session will cover the life history of the focal species, rules and regulations, solutions, and research being done in our state, and will include a dedicated time for questions. The winter and spring sessions will be presented virtually.

The price of a drug should be based on its therapeutic benefits

Not just what the market will bear

Nicole Hassoun, Binghamton University, State University of New York

The average price for an orphan drug is more than $150,000
per year. GP Kidd/Cultura/Getty Images

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has innovated in response to the pandemic, providing not only vaccines but also therapies to treat people with COVID-19. 

But an outdated law designed to spur development of lifesaving drugs risks making new treatments – for COVID-19 as well as other diseases – unaffordable for many Americans.

Many pharmaceutical companies rely on the Orphan Drug Act, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1983, to bring cutting-edge treatments to market quickly. 

The act gives pharmaceutical companies tax credits, market exclusivity and other incentives to develop drugs for “orphan” diseases, which are defined as illnesses that afflict fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S. Such diseases include amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Tourette syndrome, but also ones like malaria that are rare in the U.S. but are major killers globally.

But, as scholars and access-to-medicines advocates have argued, the Orphan Drug Act has flaws that risk keeping prices high.

I’m a bioethicist who has studied global health and access to essential medical innovations. I believe there’s an alternative to that modifies the rewards the Orphan Drug Act offers based on the value of a drug – its impact on global health.

RI Senate outlaws sexist insurance pricing

Senate passes Sosnowski bill that would ban gender discrimination in health insurance premiums

The Senate passed legislation introduced by Sen. V. Susan Sosnowski (D-Dist. 37, South Kingstown, New Shoreham) that would ban health insurers from utilizing the discriminatory practice known as gender rating, or routinely charging women and men different premiums for individual insurance.

“Women face unconscionable disparities when buying health insurance in the individual market,” Senator Sosnowski (D-Dist. 37, South Kingstown, New Shoreham) said. 

“Women sometimes are charged 10 percent to 25 percent to 50 percent more than men for insurance providing identical coverage, especially during the age bracket associated with child-bearing years.”

This legislation (2021-S 0003) would prohibit insurance companies from varying the premium rates charged for a health coverage plan based on the gender of the individual policy holder, enrollee, subscriber, or member. 

When it comes to health insurance, women are considered a higher risk than men because they tend to visit the doctor more frequently, live longer, and have babies. The practice is similar to car insurance companies charging a higher premium to insure teenage drivers.

How Trump And Other Cult Leaders Infect Their Disciples

Now That He’s Gone: The State of Public Mental Health He Leaves Behind

By Bandy X. Lee and Harper West

When we published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump in 2017, we emphasized that, despite its title, Donald Trump was not our main focus.  His presidency was more a statement about the nation and its state of public mental health, of which he was a barometer at the time of election and then the chief accelerant and exacerbator of its defects once in office.

Over the course of the last four years, we have witnessed how his “base” remained consistently at more or less 40% of the population despite continuous scandals and policy failures, including vastly increasing the death toll from COVID-19 through malfeasance and misfeasance and even a deadly assault on the Capitol.  

We had warned that this unwavering adherence was not a product of healthy, rational and well-informed decision-making, but followed more the pattern of pathological, abusive relationships.

This does not mean that each follower of the Trump will exhibit abnormal psychology; on the contrary, they will resemble more victims of abuse and members of a cult, predisposed not just because of personal trauma history but because of a state of poor collective mental health.  

Societal mental health is not the same as the sum of the mental health of individual members, and the themes and conflicts of groups are not the same as personal struggles, even though they interact.

Some problems are better conceived of as cultural disorders, as the World Mental Health Coalition recently labeled racism and white supremacy.  Violence, in general, fits more the category of a societal disorder than an individual one—indeed, violence does not depend as much on individual characteristics, such as individual mental illness, as it does on social ones, such as levels of inequality in a society.

Unity?

 

Who's to blame for January 6? Not us.

 

Activist who removed Confederate flag from South Carolina State Capitol in 2015 to address URI community Feb. 2

Bree Newsome is speaker for URI’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration

Dave Lavallee

Bree Newsome Photo courtesy of Sean Lawton

Bree Newsome, the artist who drew national attention in 2015 when she climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina Capitol building and removed a Confederate battle flag, will be the speaker for the University of Rhode Island’s Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration on Feb. 2.

The online presentation, from 7 to 8:30 p.m.,  is free and open to URI students, staff, faculty, and alumni.

The flag was originally raised in 1961 as a racist statement of opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and lunch counter sit-ins occurring at the time. 

The massacre of nine black parishioners by a white supremacist at Emanuel AME Zion Church in Charleston reignited controversy over South Carolina’s continued endorsement of a hate symbol.

Newsome’s act of defiance against the culture of white supremacy has been captured in photographs, artwork and film and has become a symbol of resistance and the empowerment of women.

From her website

According to her website, her roots as an artist and activist were planted early.  Her father served as dean of the Howard University School of Divinity, and the president of both Shaw University and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. 

Her mother spent her career as an educator addressing the achievement gap and disparities in education.

In 2011, while an artist in residence at Saatchi & Saatchi, a communications and advertising agency, in New York, Bree Newsome marched with Occupy Wall Street. 

In 2013, she was briefly involved with the Moral Monday movement organized by Rev. William Barber, III and the North Carolina state chapter of the NAACP.

Newsome volunteered to be arrested as part of a sit-in at the North Carolina State House protesting legislation designed to disenfranchise Black voters. The legislation was later overturned by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,  which found that North Carolina had “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Save the Wood Turtle

Northeast Works to Protect Rare Turtle, Combat Poaching

By ecoRI News staff 

Once

Wood turtle populations in the Northeast are in decline for various reasons,
 including from the impacts of the climate crisis. (Colin Osborn/USFWS)

abundant in many rivers and streams from Nova Scotia to Virginia, the wood turtle has declined during the past century because of habitat fragmentation, dam construction, illegal collection, and climate change.

That’s why conservation partners across the Northeast agreed a decade ago that the best way to help the wood turtle would be to work together.

Now with a nearly $1 million federal grant, these partners will advance a collaborative effort to conserve wood turtles across 13 states, including Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Funding from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s State Wildlife Grant Program will support continued scientific collaboration to address the range-wide decline of wood turtles.

Pandemic has nearly tripled the number of RI households facing hunger

Food Summit Talks Food Inequality in Pandemic World

By GRACE KELLY/ecoRI News staff

Every year, the University of Rhode Island Food Systems Summit brings movers, shakers, and thinkers together to talk about foodways in our small state. And each year, new projects are highlighted, businesses are introduced, and new ways of thinking about how we grow, ship, and eat food are discussed.

This year’s summit, held Jan. 20 virtually, was largely centered on the disruption to the state’s food systems caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the food insecurity that has followed.

One in four households — 25.2 percent — in the state lacks adequate food, according to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank’s 2020 Status Report on Hunger.

This bleak assessment comes after years of betterment. As recently as 2019, food insecurity among all Rhode Island households was at 9.1 percent, the lowest it had been since 2008.

Trump campaign paid over $2.7 million to organizers of January 6 terrorist attack

Amounts could be higher due to use of shell companies to mask payments

Could be the "smoking gun" for upcoming impeachment trial

 Alex Henderson 

Hours before a violent mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, then-President Donald Trump and his allies spoke at a so-called "Save America Rally" in Washington, D.C. According to a study by the Center for Responsive Politics issued on January 22, the rally's organizers received millions of dollars from Trump's reelection campaign.

How much did local Trumpnut Justin Price get?

"Trump's campaign disclosed paying more than $2.7 million to the individuals and firms behind the January 6 rally," the Center for Responsive Politics' Anna Massoglia reports. 

"But (Federal Election Commission) disclosures do not necessarily provide a complete picture of the campaign's financial dealings since so much of its spending was routed through shell companies, making it difficult to know who the campaign paid and when."

The National Parks Service permit for the Save America Rally, Massoglia notes, lists Maggie Mulvaney — a niece of former White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney — as a "VIP lead" for the event. The Trump campaign, according to Massoglia, paid her "at least $138,000 through November 2020."

Others listed on the rally permit, Massoglia reports, include Megan Powers (who was the campaign's director of operations) and Caroline Wren, a long-time GOP fundraiser. 

Powers, according to Massoglia, "was paid around $290,000 by Trump's campaign while on its payroll from February 2019 through at least November 2020, FEC records show" — and Wren "received at least $20,000 from the campaign each month as its national finance consultant for its joint fundraising committee with the Republican National Committee, totaling $170,000 from March through November."

"The rally's production manager is listed as Justin Caporale, the Trump campaign's advance director who received more than $144,000 in direct payroll payments from the campaign in the one-year period leading up to November 2020," Massoglia explains. 

"Caporale's business partner, Tim Unes, was the rally stage manager and was paid more than $117,000 by the Trump campaign through at least November 2020. Event Strategies Inc., their firm, was paid more than $1.7 million from Trump's campaign and joint fundraising committee."

Massoglia adds, "Trump-affiliated dark money group America First Policies paid the firm another $2.1 million from 2018 to 2019, the most recent years for which data is available. 

America First Policies' tax returns obtained by OpenSecrets show it also provided funding to Women for America First, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that submitted the rally's permit records to the National Park Service."

The organizers of the Save America Rally and the far-right insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6 were hoping to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden's Electoral College victory in the 2020 presidential election. 

Regardless, the certification went ahead as planned, and Biden was sworn in as president on January 20.

The rule of law

 

Unity

 

Brown scientists come up with a better water filter

Researchers develop new graphene nanochannel water filters

Brown University

When sheets of two-dimensional nanomaterials like graphene are stacked on top of each other, tiny gaps form between the sheets that have a wide variety of potential uses. 

In research published in the journal Nature Communications, a team of Brown University researchers has found a way to orient those gaps, called nanochannels, in a way that makes them more useful for filtering water and other liquids of nanoscale contaminants.

“In the last decade, a whole field has sprung up to study these spaces that form between 2-D nanomaterials,” said Robert Hurt, a professor in Brown’s School of Engineering and coauthor of the research. 

“You can grow things in there, you can store things in there, and there’s this emerging field of nanofluidics where you’re using those channels to filter out some molecules while letting others go through.”

There’s a problem, however, with using these nanochannels for filtration, and it has to do with the way those channels are oriented. 

Like a notebook made from stacked sheets of paper, graphene stacks are thin in the vertical direction compared to their horizontal length and width. That means that the channels between the sheets are likewise oriented horizontally. 

That’s not ideal for filtration, because liquid has to travel a relatively long way to get from one end of a channel to the other. It would be better if the channels were perpendicular to the orientation of the sheets. In that case, liquid would only need to traverse the relatively thin vertical height of the stack rather than the much longer length and width.

But until now, Hurt says, no one had come up with a good way to make vertically oriented graphene nanochannels. That is until Muchun Liu, a former postdoctoral researcher in Hurt’s lab, figured out a novel way to do it. 

Dr. Birx “too little, too late” remarks about COVID lies in Trump pandemic response

'Dr. Birx went out of her way to praise Trump and just straight up lied'

By Common Dreams staff

Birx covered up Trump lies and thousands died

Dr. Deborah Birx, who was the Trump administration's coordinator of the Coronavirus Task Force, said in a CBS News' Face The Nation interview that aired Sunday that ex-President Donald Trump had been reviewing “parallel” data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.

“I saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,” Birx said. “So, I know that someone out there or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president.”

Birx said she doesn’t know who gave the Trump competing information but "I know now by watching some of the tapes that certainly Scott Atlas brought in parallel data streams."

She added: "I don’t know who else was part of it, but I think when the record goes back and people see what I was writing on a daily basis that was sent up to White House leadership, that they will see that I was highly specific on what I was seeing and what needed to be done."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Despite her claims about what she felt, on March 27, 2020, this is what Birx actually said on camera about Trump: "[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit” I remember seeing her say this and thinking at the time she is not fit to be a doctor, never mind a White House advisor. - Will Collette

Birx was blasted after her comments Sunday for failing to speak out at the time to set the record straight about what she saw in the White House:

“So maybe Dr. Birx should explain why she didn’t set the record straight when she saw this. Of course she won’t, because she was more committed to keeping her job than actually doing it well."

  - Dr. Angela Rasmussen

“So brave of her to speak up now, when in real time she was telling audiences that the President was great at analyzing data. So... Dr. Birx legacy is one of failure, sycophancy and failure."

  - Soledad O’Brien