“Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended a pause in distributing the vaccine after six reported cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST). These clots block blood flowing out of the brain and can quickly turn deadly.
The complications were found in women between the ages of 18 and 48, and they arose between six and 13 days after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Of the clots seen in the United States, one case was fatal, and one patient is in critical condition,” said Peter Marks, the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, during a Tuesday press conference.”
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“For regulators, the episode highlights the tricky challenge of balancing caution against an urgent need for a vaccine in a still-raging pandemic. And as they investigate the problem, they also have to try to maintain public confidence in the vaccination program. The pause helps show that regulators are taking potential problems seriously, but if they botch the messaging, that could make people less likely to get vaccinated.”
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“there are several factors that made regulators pay close attention to the recent cases following vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson shot. Marks explained that patients with these clots also had thrombocytopenia, a condition where platelets in the blood drop to very low levels, leading to bleeding and bruising. The combination of blood clots and low platelets means that patients cannot receive conventional blood clot therapies like heparin, a blood thinner. That’s why health officials want to wait to resume vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine until they can investigate the concern and come up with new guidelines if necessary.
Another factor is that these cases occurred in younger women, who normally don’t face a high risk of these types of clots.”
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“when vaccines make the jump from thousands of carefully screened trial participants to millions of people in the general population, rare problems — the one-in-a-million complications — start to emerge.”
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“Regulators could, then, take a similar approach with the Johnson & Johnson shot to the one they used for allergies and the mRNA vaccines, adding a screening criterion for people at highest risk of these blood clots before they receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.”
https://www.vox.com/recode/22379584/spending-foot-traffic-earnest-research-data-pandemic-recovery
“just one of 34 currently active national emergencies—each coming with its own special powers that the president can use until he decides to stop. The longest-running was invoked by President Jimmy Carter in response to the Iran hostage crisis (which ended in 1981, though the “emergency” never did). Other emergencies authorized by Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are still humming along too, many with no obvious end in sight.
Congress can respond to presidential emergency declarations by disapproving of them after the fact, which it occasionally does.”
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“But doing so requires a supermajority of both chambers and, generally, Congress can’t be persuaded to get off its collective duff.”
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“Under a bill the two senators reintroduced..all presidential emergency declarations would expire after 72 hours unless Congress votes to allow them to continue.”
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“the bill is undermined by the fact that Paul and Wyden propose to exempt some presidential powers, such as those granted by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows presidents to impose sanctions on foreign officials and businesses deemed a threat to American national security. The powers granted by the IEEPA form the basis of many of the 34 ongoing national emergencies”
“Income-driven repayment (IDR), an existing set of programs that function somewhat poorly, can be improved to ensure that not a single borrower will ever have to make an unaffordable payment on federal student loans. Under IDR, monthly payments are tied to a borrower’s income and unaffordable balances are ultimately forgiven. IDR accomplishes this in a way that minimizes moral hazard and delivers benefits in a true progressive manner — with more benefits going to people who invested in a college degree, and took on debt to do so, but didn’t see the return they were promised in the form of a high-paying job.”
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“IDR allows borrowers to make monthly payments that are equal to a fixed percentage of their current disposable income. When income is high, they pay the full amount due, and when income is low, they can make a reduced payment without penalty.”
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“The balance is forgiven once a borrower has made a requisite number of IDR payments. This takes between ten and 25 years depending on the student’s eligibility and choice of IDR program. Borrowers may not like having a balance hanging over their head for that long, but the reduced monthly payments (often reduced to zero) mean the process isn’t excessively burdensome.”
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“Despite the IDR system’s appropriateness for the policy challenge at hand, the system hasn’t been working well. The reason for this is largely that IDR is administered through a variety of programs each with different eligibility criteria and a range of program parameters. The amount borrowers are expected to pay is calculated differently across programs, as is the number of years before borrowers can qualify to have their balance forgiven. The result is a system that is excessively complex to navigate, with many borrowers unaware of the benefits that are available to them. While IDR is now universal for all federal student borrowers, it became that way only after a series of legislative and executive interventions, between 1992 and 2015, stitched together a patchwork of loosely related programs. Factual evidence about how IDR has been used is limited, but anecdotes about the challenges of navigating the system, even by financially savvy consumers, indicate systemic problems. This rickety policy framework desperately needs to be replaced with a single user-friendly, income-driven repayment plan that can be universally marketed and better understood.
Reasonable people can disagree about how generous IDR should be. Moving the conversation away from mass loan forgiveness to reforming IDR would be a step in a fairer and more efficient direction.”
“The world’s wealthy need cuts of over 90 percent of their carbon emissions, to get to their carbon fair share. The top-skew is so huge that the world’s richest 1 percent cause double the carbon burden of the poorest 50 percent combined (that’s 3.5 billion people).
Most “middle class” Americans are in the global top 1 or 10 percent.”
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“So what the hell can anyone do? The main answer for the majority of folks reading this is to cut your personal consumption, and to press for political and systemic changes to get off the “hedonic treadmill,” at least until we’ve stabilized. The “hedonic treadmill” refers to the effect that increases in consumption often result in no permanent gain in happiness.
We’ve all felt negligible or fleeting satisfaction from consumption, but sadly the carbon impacts are far from fleeting — they will last centuries. It’s critical to avoid mindless overconsumption. Many carbon footprint calculators are available to help you figure out your own carbon impact.”
“every single state in the country has a legislature that is disproportionately white.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/11/trudeau-hailfax-security-forum-taiwan-480722
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/12/ukraine-us-missile-weapons-russia-480985