Preventing the Next Pandemic, Underpaid Women, and Worker Co-ops Growth

 #Jerome Groopman, "Beyond the Vaccine," The New Yorker, April 5, 2021. - [Peter Hotez, author of "Preventing the Next Pandemic," (John Hopkins)] "He [Hotez] identifies a cluster of non-medical drivers of deadly outbreaks -- war, political instability, human migration, poverty, urbanization, anti-science and nationalist sentiment, and climate change -- and maintains that advances in biomedicine must be accompanied by concrete action on these geo-political matters." "Armed conflict causes malnutrition, poor pest control, and sanitation problems; even the soil often becomes contaminated." "Hotez writes that wars in the Middle East have made the region 'a new hot spot of emerging and neglected tropical diseases.' "

"Some forty megacities are predicted to emerge by 2030, many of them in low-income nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Hotez paints an alarming picture of megacities incapable of providing safe water and adequate sanitation, leading to typhoid fever and cholera, as well as leptopirosis..." Hotez observes that there are some five hundred Web-sites spreading anti-vaccine misinformation, whose assertions are further disseminated on social media and on e-commerce platforms."

"Obama spoke of 'a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.' He pledged to provide Muslim-majority countries with a polio-eradication campaign, funding for technological development, and science envoys to disseminate expertise in such areas as agriculture, energy and medicine." "Medically speaking, the fact that many countries around the world now have the capacity to create reliable vaccines so quickly is cause for rejoicing." 

#Julia Lurie, and Maddie Oatman, "Moving the Needle," Mother Jones, May + June, 2021. - "Of the people tested [in San Francisco], 41 percent were Latino, and 41 percent were white. Yet 98 percent of those who tested positive were Latino, 88 percent made less than $50,000 a year, and 93 percent worked in jobs that didn't enable them to shelter in place." "Meanwhile, the Unidos en Solud site in the Mission, with a fraction of the testing capacity, accounted for between 16 and 46 percent of the city's positive tests on any given day." 

#Jeffrey Kluger, "The Psychology of Influences," Mother Jones, May + June  2021. - ""In all three countries, (U.S., Italy, and South Korea), the higher the level of shame and guilt people felt over falling ill, the less likely they were to play it safe, and to report their COVID-19 status." 

"Some 52% of those polled said they got the vaccine because they wanted to travel, for example. The people around us also play a major role, with 56% of respondents saying they got vaccinated after a friend or family member did."  

#Janice Min, "Pinterest paid..." TIME, April 12/April 19, 2021. - "Not just at Pinterest but in the long exclusionary saga of Silicon Valley, where 5% of tech leaders are women, far fewer are Black or Latinx, and only 2% of venture-capita goes to female founders." "A 2017 study found Black women in tech were paid 21% less than white men for comparable jobs; all women 16% less." 

"Since 2015, it has been illegal for California employers to ask workers to keep compensation confidential."

#Maddie Oatman, "a Fair Slice," Mother Jones, April 12/April 19, 2021. - "A 2016 meta-analysis of more than 100 studies across several counties linked employer ownership to better productivity, organizational stability, and business survival. In times of crisis, co-ops have been shown to be more resilient than traditional enterprises, and less likely to lay off workers." "Before the Great Recession, there were about 350 worker co-ops in the country; that number climbed to 465 by 2017, about a tenth of which are restaurants, cafes, or bakeries."

ADDENDUMS:

* A senior Biden employee said political tampering under the Trump administration had 
compromised the integrity of some agency science, The New York Times reports. "The broader list of decisions where staff says scientific integrity was violated is expected to reach 90 items, according to one person involved in the process."

*"Briefly Noted," The New Yorker, April 5, 2021. - "Harsh sentences lead the vast majority of defendants, including an estimated hundred thousand innocent people, to opt for plea bargains, a process that lacks oversight. Meanwhile, prosecutors fail to hold high-level executives accountable for serious offenses."

*Suyin Haynes, "Trans Rights in the Spotlight..." Mother Jones, May + June 2021. - "Over 100 bills attacking transgender people have been introduced in state legislatures since 2020, according to the ACLU." "On March 29, the Arkansas senate passed a bill that would ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth." "Simply a politically motivated bill for the sake of discrimination itself," said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, of Anti-Trans Sports bills.