Leettaschmidt

Last week, Twitter user @KokomRoily began to feel a creeping sense of déjà vu as they were reading a novel by prolific erotic romance author Romilly King. According to KokomRoily, the book felt familiar after reading the first chapter and, by the second they, “felt sure I could tell what was going to happen next.”

The reason was that, the book in question, Paid to Kneel, was plagiarized from an earlier work by a user named Blue_Jack that was posted on a Supernatural fan fiction forum. After some digging, KokomRoilly found multiple lengthy passages of verbatim copying and posted highlighted passages on their Twitter account.

This kicked off a broad investigation where authors and readers alike began to comb through King’s library of work, which includes more than 20 novels in the past year, to find other instances. While that investigation did bear more plagiarized fruit, it also caught up some innocent bystanders as King’s editors were targeted, despite being unaware of the plagiarism, as did various authors that shared the same editors and voice actors that work on King’s audiobooks.

King, for their part, has not responded to the allegations. A Twitter account connected with the author has been silent for over a week, and a Facebook page for their work has been either made private or removed.

In the meantime, the investigation into King’s work is continuing, with a Discord being launched to help organize and mobilize the movement. Likewise, KokomRoily is continuously updating their Twitter account as new information comes to light.

In short, the story may not be over, but it does appear that King’s career may well be, especially as many of the authors who were plagiarized are getting the plagiarized works removed from Amazon.

However, this case is a very fascinating one. It’s a fairly unique story in plagiarism and highlights the complexities of dealing with plagiarism when the intersection with copyright law is less-than-seamless.

Fan Fiction, Professional Plagiarism

One of the reasons that this story has received so much attention is because of the parties that are involved. King is, or at least was, a prolific professional author that had carved out a fan base for their work. Blue_Jack, on the other hand, is a fan fiction author that writes and posts their stories for free on forums dedicated to the topic.

As we’ve discussed in the past, fan fiction and fan art is a very messy scene from a legal perspective. Though most creators and rightsholders tolerate or even encourage non-commercial fan creations, commercial fan fiction is generally seen as both legally and ethically taboo in the industry.

Though there have been some attempts to legitimize commercial fan fiction, such as Kindle Worlds in 2013, those efforts have largely been short-lived, and the fan fiction community remains almost entirely free of commercialization. It’s a hobby that is created by fans for other fans.

To that end, the fan fiction community is no stranger to plagiarism. There have been many cases where a story published in one fandom was copied and converted into a very similar story in a different one. However, these types of issues are isolated within the communities themselves and are handled accordingly.

This case, however, is extremely different.

Here, a commercial and professional author took content from fan fiction communities and plagiarized them for profit. Not only does this sting a bit more, it also raises legal issues that aren’t present when matters are handled within fan fiction communities.

The reason is that fan fiction works are not authorized creations. Fan fiction authors don’t own the characters and stories that they base their works on. At most, they have a non-exclusive license to use those elements for non-commercial purposes.

However, they do own any original expression that they bring into the work. Most important for this case, that includes the exact words that they used to express their ideas.

That, in turn, appears to be a large part of why Blue_Jack was able to file a claim with Amazon and get the book pulled. However, if the plagiarism had been more limited or more vague, it could have gone very differently.

For one, it’s possible the plagiarism might not have incorporated any elements that can be protected by copyright. Second, it might have only involved elements that Blue_Jack didn’t own.

However, that was clearly not the case here. But this won’t be the last time someone plagiarizes fan fiction for commercial gain and the next one may not have as neat of an outcome.

Bottom Line

In the end, this story has about as happy of an ending as is practical. The plagiarism is clear-cut, the fan community responded well (outside attacking others not involved) and the authors are taking appropriate action.

However, this won’t be the last case like this. As more authors try to increase the rate they publish books, plagiarism will become a bigger and bigger temptation, and the fan fiction community will always be a tempting target.

The reason, as noted by the Daily Dot, is that themes that are prominent in fan fiction, especially erotic and romantic fan fiction, often times can be translated easily to other characters and other settings. Given that fan fiction communities remain one of the largest repositories of free literature available, it’s easy to see why a plagiarist may seek more than inspiration from within those virtual walls.

King likely isn’t the first, but they definitely will not be the last. This is an area to keep a close eye on, especially as self-publishing becomes more and more the norm.

The post Erotic Romance Author Accused of Plagiarism from Fan Fiction appeared first on Plagiarism Today.

This year the Internet Archive turns 25. It’s best known for its pioneering role in archiving the internet through the Wayback Machine, which allows users to see how websites looked in the past.

Increasingly, much of daily life is conducted online. School, work, communication with friends and family, as well as news and images, are accessed through a variety of websites. Information that once was printed, physically mailed or kept in photo albums and notebooks may now be available only online. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed even more interactions to the web.

You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing. As librarians and archivists, we strengthen collective memory by preserving materials that document the cultural heritage of society, including on the web. You can help us save the internet, too, as a citizen archivist.

Disappearing act

People and organizations remove content from the web for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s a result of changing internet culture, such as the recent shutdown of Yahoo Answers.

It can also be a result of following best practices for website design. When a website is updated, for example, the previous version is overwritten – unless it was archived.

Web archiving is the process of collecting, preserving and providing continued access to information on the internet. Often this work is done by librarians and archivists, with assistance from automated technology like web crawlers.

Web crawlers are programs that index web pages to make them available through search engines, or for long-term preservation. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, uses thousands of computer servers to save multiple digital copies of these pages, requiring over 70 petabytes of data. It is funded through donations, grants and payments for its digitization services. Over 750 million web pages are captured per day in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

Why archive?

In 2018, President Donald Trump wrongly claimed via Twitter that Google had promoted on its homepage President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, but not his own. Archived versions of the Google homepage proved that Google had, in fact, highlighted Trump’s State of the Union address in the same manner. Multiple news outlets use the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as the source for fact-checking these types of claims, since screenshots alone can be easily altered.

A 2019 report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism examined the digital archiving practices and policies of newspapers, magazines and other news producers. The interviews revealed that many news media staff either do not have the resources to devote to archiving their work or misunderstand digital archiving by equating it to having a backup version.

When a news story disappeared from the Gawker website a year after the publication shut down, the Freedom of the Press Foundation became concerned with what might happen when wealthy individuals purchase websites with the intent to delete or censor the archives. It partnered with the Internet Archive to launch a web archive collection focused on preserving the web archives of vulnerable news outlets – and to dissuade billionaires from purchasing such material to censor.

Archiving websites that document social justice issues, such as Black Lives Matter, helps explain these movements to people of the present and the future.

Archiving government websites promotes transparency and accountability. Especially during times of transition, government websites are vulnerable to deletion with changing political parties.

In 2017 the Library of Congress announced it would no longer archive every single tweet, because of Twitter’s growth as a communication tool. Twitter supplies the Library of Congress with the texts of tweets, not shared images or videos. Instead of comprehensive collecting, the Library of Congress now archives only tweets of significant national importance.

Archived websites that document the culture and history of the internet, like the Geocities Gallery, not only are fun to look at but illustrate the ways early websites were created and used by individuals.

Citizen archivists

Archiving the internet is a monumental task, one that librarians and archivists cannot do alone. Anyone can be a citizen archivist and preserve history through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The “Save Page Now” feature allows anyone to freely archive a single, public website page. Bear in mind, some websites prevent web crawling and archiving through special coding or by requiring a login to the site. This may be due to sensitive content or the personal preference of the web developer.

Local cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives and museums, are also actively archiving the internet. Over 800 institutions use Archive-It, a tool from the Internet Archive, to create archived web collections. At the University of Dayton we curate collections related to our Catholic and Marianist heritage, from Catholic blogs to stories of the Virgin Mary in the news.

Through its Spontaneous Event collections, Archive-It partners with organizations and individuals to create collections of “web content related to a specific event, capturing at risk content during times of crisis.”

Similarly, it created the Community Webs program, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to help public libraries create collections of archived web content relevant to local communities.

The websites of today are the historical evidence of tomorrow, but only if they are archived. If they are lost, we will lose crucial information about corporate and government decisions, modern communication methods such as social media, and social movements with significant online presences, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

Together with librarians and archivists, you can help ensure the survival of this evidence and save internet history.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Last year, according to a United Nations report published in March, Libyan government forces hunted down rebel forces using “lethal autonomous weapons systems” that were “programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition”. The deadly drones were Turkish-made quadcopters about the size of a dinner plate, capable of delivering a warhead weighing a kilogram or so.

Artificial intelligence researchers like me have been warning of the advent of such lethal autonomous weapons systems, which can make life-or-death decisions without human intervention, for years. A recent episode of 4 Corners reviewed this and many other risks posed by developments in AI.

Around 50 countries are meeting at the UN offices in Geneva this week in the latest attempt to hammer out a treaty to prevent the proliferation of these killer devices. History shows such treaties are needed, and that they can work.

The lesson of nuclear weapons

Scientists are pretty good at warning of the dangers facing the planet. Unfortunately, society is less good at paying attention.

In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing up to 200,000 civilians. Japan surrendered days later. The second world war was over, and the Cold War began.

Read more: World politics explainer: The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The world still lives today under the threat of nuclear destruction. On a dozen or so occasions since then, we have come within minutes of all-out nuclear war.

Well before the first test of a nuclear bomb, many scientists working on the Manhattan Project were concerned about such a future. A secret petition was sent to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945. It accurately predicted the future:

The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.

If after this war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation …

Billions of dollars have since been spent on nuclear arsenals that maintain the threat of mutually assured destruction, the “continuous danger of sudden annihilation” that the physicists warned about in July 1945.

A warning to the world

Six years ago, thousands of my colleagues issued a similar warning about a new threat. Only this time, the petition wasn’t secret. The world wasn’t at war. And the technologies weren’t being developed in secret. Nevertheless, they pose a similar threat to global stability.

Read more: Open letter: we must stop killer robots before they are built

The threat comes this time from artificial intelligence, and in particular the development of lethal autonomous weapons: weapons that can identify, track and destroy targets without human intervention. The media often like to call them “killer robots”.

Our open letter to the UN carried a stark warning.

The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable. The endpoint of such a technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.

Read more: World's deadliest inventor: Mikhail Kalashnikov and his AK-47

Strategically, autonomous weapons are a military dream. They let a military scale its operations unhindered by manpower constraints. One programmer can command hundreds of autonomous weapons. An army can take on the riskiest of missions without endangering its own soldiers.

Nightmare swarms

There are many reasons, however, why the military’s dream of lethal autonomous weapons will turn into a nightmare. First and foremost, there is a strong moral argument against killer robots. We give up an essential part of our humanity if we hand to a machine the decision of whether a person should live or die.

Beyond the moral arguments, there are many technical and legal reasons to be concerned about killer robots. One of the strongest is that they will revolutionise warfare. Autonomous weapons will be weapons of immense destruction.

Previously, if you wanted to do harm, you had to have an army of soldiers to wage war. You had to persuade this army to follow your orders. You had to train them, feed them and pay them. Now just one programmer could control hundreds of weapons.

In some ways lethal autonomous weapons are even more troubling than nuclear weapons. To build a nuclear bomb requires considerable technical sophistication. You need the resources of a nation state, skilled physicists and engineers, and access to scarce raw materials such as uranium and plutonium. As a result, nuclear weapons have not proliferated greatly.

Autonomous weapons require none of this, and if produced they will likely become cheap and plentiful. They will be perfect weapons of terror.

Can you imagine how terrifying it will be to be chased by a swarm of autonomous drones? Can you imagine such drones in the hands of terrorists and rogue states with no qualms about turning them on civilians? They will be an ideal weapon with which to suppress a civilian population. Unlike humans, they will not hesitate to commit atrocities, even genocide.

Time for a treaty

We stand at a crossroads on this issue. It needs to be seen as morally unacceptable for machines to decide who lives and who dies. And for the diplomats at the UN to negotiate a treaty limiting their use, just as we have treaties to limit chemical, biological and other weapons. In this way, we may be able to save ourselves and our children from this terrible future.

Toby Walsh is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and author of the recent book, “2062: The World that AI Made” that explores the impact AI will have on society, including the impact on war.

As Indigenous community members and archaeologists continue to discover unmarked graves of Indigenous children at the sites of Canadian residential schools, the United States is reckoning with its own history of off-reservation boarding schools.

In July 2021, nine Sicangu Lakota students who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania were disinterred and returned to their homelands at Whetstone Bay in South Dakota.

One of these young people was Ernest Knocks Off. Ernest, who came from the Sicangu Oyate or Burnt Thigh Nation, was among the first group of students to arrive at Carlisle, in 1879. He entered school at age 18 and attempted to run away soon after arriving. He ultimately went on a hunger strike and died of complications of diphtheria on Dec. 14, 1880.

My new book “Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School” explores how Indigenous children resisted English-only education at Carlisle, which became the prototype for both Indian schools across the U.S. and residential schools in Canada.

While digging into archives of Carlisle students’ writing, I found that young people like Ernest were not passive victims of U.S. colonization. Instead, they fought – in Ernest’s case, to his death – to retain their languages and cultures as the assimilationist experiment in education unfolded.

‘Unspoken traumas’

U.S. Army Gen. Richard Henry Pratt opened the government-funded Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879. Following his model, more than 350 government-funded and church-run boarding schools later opened across the U.S. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition estimates that hundreds of thousands of young Native people attended these schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first students were recruited by Pratt and sent by their nations in hopes that they could learn English to continue fighting against treaty violations by U.S. settlers. In 1891, attendance became compulsory under federal law.

Boarding schools sought to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Western culture by separating them from their communities. The schools forced them to learn English and practice Christianity and trained them to work in a capitalist economy – often as servants and laborers on farms and in the households of white people.

Students experienced physical abuse, sexual violence and hunger, and hundreds died of diseases like tuberculosis that spread rampantly in institutional settings.

Canada’s national Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified 3,201 children who died in Canadian residential schools. No such estimate exists in the U.S., where a formal reckoning has yet to occur. However, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo Nation, has pledged to “address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past.”

Even as Indigenous students faced teachers and a government trying to replace their cultures, languages and identities, they resisted the assimilationist education. Their strategies were at times blatant, but often covert.

Running away

Ernest may have been one of the first boarding school students to run away, but he certainly wasn’t the last. Scholars have found that running away was a tactic used by students in boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada. It became such a significant shared experience that celebrated Native authors such as Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko capture this act of resistance in their writings.

Running away was a way for students to communicate their rejection of assimilationist education and to fight their separation from their homeland and community. Runaways sometimes succeeded and got back home. But I believe that even when they were forcibly returned to school, running away represented courage and reminded the other students to keep fighting.

Plains Sign Talk

Plains Sign Talk is a sign language that serves as a lingua franca for trade and diplomacy among the Pawnee, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow and Siouan peoples in the Southern Plains. It became a powerful tool at Carlisle, where teachers demanded that students give up their languages for another shared tongue – English. Plains Sign Talk was a way for students to communicate with one another and across tribes that was unintelligible to their teachers.

Carlisle teachers underestimated the importance of Plains Sign Talk, viewing it as a primitive form of communication that students would leave behind as they learned English. When Pratt and his colleagues witnessed students using it, they created a new curriculum based on techniques used to teach deaf students. They did not realize that students were using the sign language to circumvent the English-only policy.

Pictographic writing

Students also drew on Plains pictography to tell their stories. Plains tribes originally painted pictographs – elements of a graphic writing system – on buffalo hides to document victories in battle and record “winter counts,” or annual historical records. After increased contact with settlers, many tribes began to document pictographic histories in ledger books. These texts served as communal histories that would prompt oral retellings of battles and other significant events.

Students at Carlisle regularly used pictographs on slates or chalkboards. On June 25, 1880, for example, a Cheyenne student who was renamed Rutherford B. Hayes at school drew a pictograph of a horse and rider on his slate. He labeled the image John Williams – the Carlisle name of an Arapaho boy who was his classmate and friend.

I argue that these pictographic records show how some students understood their time at school in the context of their developing warrior identities, underscoring their desire to act bravely and return home to recount their stories for their nations’ collective memory.

Speaking Lakota

When students spoke their languages, they faced harsh penalties. This included corporal punishment, incarceration in the campus barracks and public shaming in the school newspaper.

Pratt and his supervisors at the Bureau of Indian Affairs hoped that they could break up tribes by disrupting the transmission of language and culture from one generation to the next. By destroying tribal identities, they hoped to take land in communally held reservations and guaranteed by treaties. For U.S. settlers to gain access, the land would have to shift to a private property system. Boarding schools thus became part of the federal Indian policy later codified as the 1887 Dawes Act.

Although students were supposed to speak only English, they began to learn one another’s languages as well. Lakota, or Sioux, became particularly popular, as it was a majority language in the school’s early years when many students came from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations.

In 1881, Pratt was troubled that students were still speaking their languages two years into their term. When student Stephen K. White Bear was found “talking Indian,” he received a common punishment, which was writing a composition about his discretion. In his essay “Speak Only English” Stephen revealed that “every boy and every girl would like to know how to talk Sioux very much. They do not learn the English language they seem to want to know how to talk Sioux.”

Seeds of pan-Indian resistance

As students met peers across nations as geographically far-flung as the Inuit and the Kiowa, they sowed seeds for the pan-Indian resistance movements of the 20th century. From the founding of the Society of American Indians in 1911 through the American Indian Movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, Native activists unified for advocacy and cultural revitalization. Scholars argue that these movements can trace their roots to intertribal communities of solidarity that were built in the boarding schools.

The outcry against boarding schools that we see today across Canada and the U.S. reflects not only a shared experience of trauma, but a longstanding solidarity among Indigenous peoples working together to maintain land, language, culture and identity in the face of oppression at the hands of Euro-Americans.

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Sarah Klotz received funding from CCCC/NCTE Emergent Researcher Award including a grant of $10,000 for monograph project, Writing Their Bodies: Restoring Rhetorical Relations at the Carlisle Indian School, 2016

If you’re a student about to go to college, then perhaps you’ve scanned college orientation websites and social media feeds for glimpses of your new life. As a college librarian, I believe you should explore your college library, too.

This is based on countless discussions I’ve had with graduating college seniors who told me they regret they didn’t learn more about the library back in their first year of college. To help students avoid a similar fate, here are four things to know about libraries now.

1. Libraries can save you money on course readings

According to the College Board, colleges estimate that students spend approximately $1,200 per year on books and supplies. Students can cut down on that cost by borrowing books from the library instead of purchasing them from a bookstore.

Library staff work hard to make textbooks more affordable. One of the things we’re doing is putting assigned readings on reserve.

What’s “reserve”? It’s a place where we keep course materials that faculty request for their classes. The print reserves collection is for physical books and, in some cases, printed “coursepacks” – which are photocopies of readings that have been bound together like a paperback book. Usually you’ll be able to check out reserve items for a few hours at a time. Sometimes the library will have several copies of each title.

In most libraries you’ll find print reserves at the circulation desk. The circulation desk is the place where all books are checked out, and it’s usually near the library entrance.

Many libraries also offer electronic reserves, with e-books and digital copies of book chapters and journal articles. You’ll usually find a link to electronic reserves on the library homepage.

Not all faculty members use reserves, so you’ll need to sleuth out how to find books and articles elsewhere in the library, too. Go to the library website and look for a link to the catalog, where you’ll find the titles and locations of all the books that the library owns.

For articles, look instead for links to journal indexes and databases. Unfortunately, these may be labeled with a variety of different names. You can always ask a librarian for advice.

2. Using the library can help you earn better grades

Research has shown that students who use the library tend to have higher GPAs than those who don’t. For this reason, it’s helpful to overcome any library anxiety – a term that describes the discomfort some people experience when they imagine walking into a library that is larger or more complex than any to which they are accustomed.

One of the best ways to overcome library anxiety is to get to know the library staff. Librarians regularly teach students how to find and use library resources. Educators who analyze student outcomes have found that making connections with staff and faculty bolsters students’ social capital, and social capital helps students succeed. Social capital is an asset that you earn by having a connection with another person.

Most librarians are accessible via email, chat or in person.

3. Libraries offer ideas for study breaks

Studying all night might seem efficient, but it doesn’t always work. Cognitive science says that when you memorize something, then set it aside, you’re helping your brain absorb the new information. You can start to envision potential study breaks at the library now.

Browse the library events calendar for yoga classes and stress-management workshops. Search the library catalog for self-help books, graphic novels and blockbuster movies. Follow the library’s social media feed and be alerted to stress-buster activities with board games, crafts and even cuddly puppies.

Since libraries now provide resources and services to promote student well-being, it’s easier than ever to take a study break when you’re at the library.

4. Get a job at the library to become a library expert

College can be expensive, even for students who receive financial aid. While some campus jobs make it difficult to carve out enough hours for both homework and paid work, library jobs can help you combine these two essential endeavors. When you work at the library, you’ll get paid to learn how to use the library. Then, you can apply what you learn in your classes.

Go to the college’s student employment website to search for part-time jobs at the library. There’s often a lot of competition, so be sure to contact the hiring manager at the library, too. If there aren’t any openings now, ask if your name can be put on a list to be considered for jobs in the future.

Students who work at libraries can list many benefits of their jobs. Students who staff service desks are taught how to use such essential library resources as the library catalog, article databases and interlibrary loan. They become power library users. They often tell me that they’re the go-to experts among their friends.

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Carrie M. Macfarlane tidak bekerja, menjadi konsultan, memiliki saham, atau menerima dana dari perusahaan atau organisasi mana pun yang akan mengambil untung dari artikel ini, dan telah mengungkapkan bahwa ia tidak memiliki afiliasi selain yang telah disebut di atas.

I’m a Luddite. This is not a hesitant confession, but a proud proclamation. I’m also a social scientist who studies how new technologies affect politics, economics and society. For me, Luddism is not a naive feeling, but a considered position.

And once you know what Luddism actually stands for, I’m willing to bet you will be one too — or at least much more sympathetic to the Luddite cause than you think.

Today the term is mostly lobbed as an insult. Take this example from a recent report by global consulting firm Accenture on why the health-care industry should enthusiastically embrace artificial intelligence:

Excessive caution can be detrimental, creating a luddite culture of following the herd instead of forging forward.

To be a Luddite is seen as synonymous with being primitive — backwards in your outlook, ignorant of innovation’s wonders, and fearful of modern society. This all-or-nothing approach to debates about technology and society is based on severe misconceptions of the real history and politics of the original Luddites: English textile workers in the early 19th century who, under the cover of night, destroyed weaving machines in protest to changes in their working conditions.

Read more: The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed

Our circumstances today are more similar to theirs than it might seem, as new technologies are being used to transform our own working and social conditions — think increases in employee surveillance during lockdowns, or exploitation by gig labour platforms. It’s time we reconsider the lessons of Luddism.

A brief — and accurate — history of Luddism

Even among other social scientists who study these kinds of critical questions about technology, the label of “Luddite” is still largely an ironic one. It’s the kind of self-effacing thing you say when fumbling with screen-sharing on Zoom during a presentation: “Sorry, I’m such a Luddite!”

It wasn’t until I learned the true origins of Luddism that I began sincerely to regard myself as one of them.

The Luddites were a secret organisation of workers who smashed machines in the textile factories of England in the early 1800s, a period of increasing industrialisation, economic hardship due to expensive conflicts with France and the United States, and widespread unrest among the working class. They took their name from the apocryphal tale of Ned Ludd, a weaver’s apprentice who supposedly smashed two knitting machines in a fit of rage.

The contemporary usage of Luddite has the machine-smashing part correct — but that’s about all it gets right.

First, the Luddites were not indiscriminate. They were intentional and purposeful about which machines they smashed. They targeted those owned by manufacturers who were known to pay low wages, disregard workers’ safety, and/or speed up the pace of work. Even within a single factory — which would contain machines owned by different capitalists — some machines were destroyed and others pardoned depending on the business practices of their owners.

Second, the Luddites were not ignorant. Smashing machines was not a kneejerk reaction to new technology, but a tactical response by workers based on their understanding of how owners were using those machines to make labour conditions more exploitative. As historian David Noble puts it, they understood “technology in the present tense”, by analysing its immediate, material impacts and acting accordingly.

Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity.

Third, the Luddites were not against innovation. Many of the technologies they destroyed weren’t even new inventions. As historian Adrian Randall points out, one machine they targeted, the gig mill, had been used for more than a century in textile manufacturing. Similarly, the power loom had been used for decades before the Luddite uprisings.

It wasn’t the invention of these machines that provoked the Luddites to action. They only banded together once factory owners began using these machines to displace and disempower workers.

The factory owners won in the end: they succeeded in convincing the state to make “frame breaking” a treasonous crime punishable by hanging. The army was sent in to break up and hunt down the Luddites.

The Luddite rebellion lasted from 1811 to 1816, and today (as Randall puts it), it has become “a cautionary moral tale”. The story is told to discourage workers from resisting the march of capitalist progress, lest they too end up like the Luddites.

Neo-Luddism

Today, new technologies are being used to alter our lives, societies and working conditions no less profoundly than mechanical looms were used to transform those of the original Luddites. The excesses of big tech companies - Amazon’s inhumane exploitation of workers in warehouses driven by automation and machine vision, Uber’s gig-economy lobbying and disregard for labour law, Facebook’s unchecked extraction of unprecedented amounts of user data - are driving a public backlash that may contain the seeds of a neo-Luddite movement.

As Gavin Mueller writes in his new book on Luddism, our goal in taking up the Luddite banner should be “to study and learn from the history of past struggles, to recover the voices from past movements so that they might inform current ones”.

What would Luddism look like today? It won’t necessarily (or only) be a movement that takes up hammers against smart fridges, data servers and e-commerce warehouses. Instead, it would treat technology as a political and economic phenomenon that deserves to be critically scrutinised and democratically governed, rather than a grab bag of neat apps and gadgets.

Read more: Doomsaying about new technology helps make it better

In a recent article in Nature, my colleagues and I argued that data must be reclaimed from corporate gatekeepers and managed as a collective good by public institutions. This kind of argument is deeply informed by the Luddite ethos, calling for the hammer of antitrust to break up the tech oligopoly that currently controls how data is created, accessed, and used.

A neo-Luddite movement would understand no technology is sacred in itself, but is only worthwhile insofar as it benefits society. It would confront the harms done by digital capitalism and seek to address them by giving people more power over the technological systems that structure their lives.

This is what it means to be a Luddite today. Two centuries ago, Luddism was a rallying call used by the working class to build solidarity in the battle for their livelihoods and autonomy.

And so too should neo-Luddism be a banner that brings workers together in today’s fight for those same rights. Join me in reclaiming the name of Ludd!

Read more: The unmaking of the Australian working class – and their right to resist

Jathan Sadowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

End-to-end encryption is technology that scrambles messages on your phone and unscrambles them only on the recipients’ phones, which means anyone who intercepts the messages in between can’t read them. Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo are among the companies whose apps and services use end-to-end encryption.

This kind of encryption is good for protecting your privacy, but governments don’t like it because it makes it difficult for them to spy on people, whether tracking criminals and terrorists or, as some governments have been known to do, snooping on dissidents, protesters and journalists. Enter an Israeli technology firm, NSO Group.

The company’s flagship product is Pegasus, spyware that can stealthily enter a smartphone and gain access to everything on it, including its camera and microphone. Pegasus is designed to infiltrate devices running Android, Blackberry, iOS and Symbian operating systems and turn them into surveillance devices. The company says it sells Pegasus only to governments and only for the purposes of tracking criminals and terrorists.

How it works

Earlier version of Pegasus were installed on smartphones through vulnerabilities in commonly used apps or by spear-phishing, which involves tricking a targeted user into clicking a link or opening a document that secretly installs the software. It can also be installed over a wireless transceiver located near a target, or manually if an agent can steal the target’s phone.

Since 2019, Pegasus users have been able to install the software on smartphones with a missed call on WhatsApp, and can even delete the record of the missed call, making it impossible for the the phone’s owner to know anything is amiss. Another way is by simply sending a message to a user’s phone that produces no notification.

This means the latest version of this spyware does not require the smartphone user to do anything. All that is required for a successful spyware attack and installation is having a particular vulnerable app or operating system installed on the device. This is known as a zero-click exploit.

Once installed, Pegasus can theoretically harvest any data from the device and transmit it back to the attacker. It can steal photos and videos, recordings, location records, communications, web searches, passwords, call logs and social media posts. It also has the capability to activate cameras and microphones for real-time surveillance without the permission or knowledge of the user.

Who has been using Pegasus and why

NSO Group says it builds Pegasus solely for governments to use in counterterrorism and law enforcement work. The company markets it as a targeted spying tool to track criminals and terrorists and not for mass surveillance. The company does not disclose its clients.

The earliest reported use of Pegasus was by the Mexican government in 2011 to track notorious drug baron Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The tool was also reportedly used to track people close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It is unclear who or what types of people are being targeted and why. However, much of the recent reporting about Pegasus centers around a list of 50,000 phone numbers. The list has been attributed to NSO Group, but the list’s origins are unclear. A statement from Amnesty International in Israel stated that the list contains phone numbers that were marked as “of interest” to NSO’s various clients, though it’s not known if any of the phones associated with numbers have actually been tracked.

A media consortium, the Pegasus Project, analyzed the phone numbers on the list and identified over 1,000 people in over 50 countries. The findings included people who appear to fall outside of the NSO Group’s restriction to investigations of criminal and terrorist activity. These include politicians, government workers, journalists, human rights activists, business executives and Arab royal family members.

Other ways your phone can be tracked

Pegasus is breathtaking in its stealth and its seeming ability to take complete control of someone’s phone, but it’s not the only way people can be spied on through their phones. Some of the ways phones can aid surveillance and undermine privacy include location tracking, eavesdropping, malware and collecting data from sensors.

Governments and phone companies can track a phone’s location by tracking cell signals from cell tower transceivers and cell transceiver simulators like the StingRay device. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals can also be used to track phones. In some cases, apps and web browsers can determine a phone’s location.

Eavesdropping on communications is harder to accomplish than tracking, but it is possible in situations in which encryption is weak or lacking. Some types of malware can compromise privacy by accessing data.

The National Security Agency has sought agreements with technology companies under which the companies would give the agency special access into their products via backdoors, and has reportedly built backdoors on its own. The companies say that backdoors defeat the purpose of end-to-end encryption.

The good news is, depending on who you are, you’re unlikely to be targeted by a government wielding Pegasus. The bad news is, that fact alone does not guarantee your privacy.

[Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s science newsletter.]

Bhanukiran Gurijala does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Decades ago I helped organize a conference that brought together vaccine skeptics and public health officials. The debate centered on what governments can and cannot demand from citizens, and what behaviors one can rightly expect from others.

It took place many years before the current coronavirus pandemic, but many things that happened at that conference remind me of our circumstances today. Not least, as a political theorist who also studies social ethics, it reminds me that arguments grounded in self-interest can often be correct – but still deeply inadequate.

The rationality of vaccine skepticism

I recall one participant summarizing her objection to vaccines in the following way: She said that the government demanded that she allow a live biological agent to be injected into her child’s body even though it could not guarantee her child’s safety. For these reasons, she claimed, she had every right to decide that her child would not receive the vaccine.

This woman’s objection was driven by her suspicion that the MMR vaccine, for measles, mumps and rubella, caused autism. This claim has been shown, repeatedly and conclusively, to be without merit. Still, she was not entirely wrong. Many vaccines do contain live agents, though they are in a weakened or attenuated state. And while adverse and even serious reactions have been known to occur, such a risk is infinitesimally small. Indeed, the preponderance of evidence shows that the risk of harm or death to the unvaccinated child from infections such as MMR is far greater than any associated with receiving the vaccine.

But more importantly, this parent’s decision to reject the vaccine affected more than just her child. Because so many parents refuse vaccination for their children, outbreaks of measles have taken place throughout the U.S. In fact, in 2019 the United States reported its highest number of cases of measles in 25 years.

COVID and vaccine hesitancy

Many individuals are rejecting the COVID-19 vaccine for similar reasons – that is, reasons grounded in self-interest. They say that COVID vaccines are experimental, their long-term effects are unknown and that emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Administration was rushed.

In fact, while the vaccines were given emergency authorization to expedite their availability to the general public, they are not experimental but rather the result of years of already existing research on mRNA vaccines and coronaviruses – the family of viruses including SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19. And they received authorization only after conclusive evidence showing they were indeed safe.

Those who reject the COVID vaccine also note that many receiving the vaccine have had an adverse reaction, including flu-like symptoms that are short-lived but often quite unpleasant. Cases of anaphylactic shock or blood clots have also happened, but they have been extremely rare, and safeguards on how to provide immediate care are in place for any such eventuality.

Here again the risks associated with the vaccine are extremely small, but for some people, still real. Therefore these individuals apparently decided that they would rather take their chances with the disease itself. Many are young and don’t think the disease will affect them, and many more don’t trust the doctors, scientists and politicians who they say are pushing them to take the vaccine.

One could readily dispute these claims, too. In fact, rising vaccination rates over the past few weeks show that many people have reevaluated the risks of remaining unvaccinated. Whether these people have seen evidence of the virulence of the delta variant or have seen for themselves that millions of people have taken the vaccine and are completely fine, their evaluation of their own self-interest has changed.

Nevertheless, many others remain adamant that these risks are unacceptable. Like that parent from many years ago, these individuals are not entirely wrong. There are risks associated with getting the vaccine. And knowing these risks, and knowing that they bear the costs of their decision, many Americans believe that they alone have the right to decide. What the government or anyone else wants is beside the point.

But here again, the costs of refusing the vaccine are not borne by the individual alone. Rising case numbers and hospitalizations, renewed restrictions regarding public events, even the emergence of the delta variant itself are happening largely because many millions of Americans chose not to get the vaccine. And for parents of children under 12 who cannot yet receive the vaccine – some of whom are immune compromised – the thought of returning to school this fall with infection rates again climbing no doubt fills them with dread.

Many would argue that this lack of concern for other people is immoral. The Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have others do unto you — manifests that concern for the well-being of others is at the core of morality. Those who choose not to take the vaccine ignore this concern and therefore act immorally. But, I would argue that their indifference to the welfare of others is not only immoral, it is also un-American.

Democracy and concern for others

Americans are a highly individualistic nation, and the spirit of “rugged individualism,” or the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” runs deep in American culture and history. In fact, from the nation’s very beginning, Americans have accepted the notion that human beings care about themselves and those they love more than they do about other people.

At the time of America’s founding, many contemporaries believed that a democracy is possible only if citizens love their country more than themselves. But America’s founders rejected this idea. Human beings are not angels, James Madison said. The founders accepted the reality of human selfishness and developed institutions – especially the checks and balances among the three branches of government – whereby people’s natural selfishness could be directed toward socially useful ends.

But neither Madison nor any of the other founders believed that human beings were merely selfish. Nor did they believe that a democracy could be sustained on selfishness alone. The Federalist Papers were written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in support of the U.S. Constitution drafted in 1787. In Federalist 55, Madison presents this summation of human nature:

“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

Yes, Madison says, human beings are selfish, and one must not ignore that reality when one is deciding how to run a society. But people are not merely selfish. We are also capable of acting with honesty and integrity and of thinking for the good of the whole rather than merely ourselves.

More, Madison argued that this other side of human nature, this concern for others, had to be operative if democracy were to survive. In fact, he insisted that, more than any other form of government, a democracy depended on virtuous citizens. Speaking at the ratifying convention for the U.S. Constitution in his home state of Virginia, Madison said:

“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks – no forms of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”

Mere selfishness is ‘un-American’

Madison lived through the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. He even advised President George Washington about how he might address this health emergency. But there was no vaccine, nor even an understanding of what caused the epidemic.

While we don’t know what Madison would have said about a vaccine, we do know what President Dwight D. Eisenhower said after the development of the polio vaccine. Eisenhower’s words likewise affirm the idea that our democracy requires that we show concern for one another.

“We all hope that the dread disease of poliomyelitis can be eradicated from our society. With the combined efforts of all, the Salk vaccine will be made available for our children in a manner in keeping with our highest traditions of cooperative national action,” he said.

Because of Madison and the other founders, the United States is a free and democratic society. Within very broad limits, Americans all have the right to make their own decisions. In some cases, Americans may even have the right to ignore the impact of their decision on others.

But a free society demands more of its citizens than mere selfishness. Political institutions can help direct and mitigate the effects of this natural human inclination to selfishness.

Throughout history, America’s leaders have recognized that without concern for others, without the highest tradition of cooperative national action, democracy is in peril. People who decide not to get vaccinated must understand that their actions are not just selfish, they are un-American.

[Understand what’s going on in Washington. Sign up for The Conversation’s Politics Weekly.]

Christopher Beem does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus resides within the Uffizi gallery in Florence, Italy. It is believed to have been painted in the mid-1480s and as such is classed as being in the public domain, free from copyright around the world. However, in early July the Uffizi set its lawyers on the website Pornhub, sending the company a strongly worded letter threatening legal action over the unwelcome use of The Birth of Venus along with several of Uffizi’s other masterpieces.

This came in response to the pornography platform’s launch of an online guide to the nude or erotic aspects of artworks in well-known galleries and museums around the world, such as the National Gallery in London, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Louvre in Paris and the Uffizi Gallery. Particularly controversial has been Pornhub’s turning of classic artworks into pornographic videos.

It seems the letter has produced its desired effect as Pornhub has subsequently removed any references and artworks pertaining to the Uffizi. But how was it able to create this legal pressure over something in the public domain?

Protection of cultural heritage

The Uffizi has likely invoked rules within the Italian Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code. This law empowers possessors of cultural heritage artefacts to prohibit their commercial exploitation, even where the latter have been created centuries ago.

Italian law strongly protects its heritage. The definition of cultural heritage itself under Italian law is broad: any works which “are of artistic, historical, archaeological and ethno-anthropological interest”. So, if you want to use the image of the Colosseum in your pizza delivery commercial, you may need to pay (at central or local level) a licence fee. An action can be taken to stop any unwelcome or controversial use of the image, for example in a context like porn websites.

In 2017, a court in Florence ordered a ticket agency to stop using the image of Michelangelo’s David on its brochures and website. In the same year, another court in Palermo condemned a bank that had used pictures of the local Teatro Massimo in their advertising campaign. Indeed, in Italy entities which own cultural artefacts can oppose any commercial use of such artefacts. Yet, whether this may happen in other countries remains doubtful.

The issue is not only legal. It also political. In 2014, the Italian culture secretary, Dario Franceschini, strongly protested against US arms engineering company ArmaLite which disseminated ads depicting the David carrying a rifle. Franceschini claimed that the Armed David jeopardised the honour and artistic value of Buonarotti’s work.

Copyright and the public domain

Museum and galleries can also rely on copyright to restrict the use of pictures of public domain pieces within their collection, or anyway charge for such use. Several of them actually do that – for example by declaring that their photographs of old paintings are subject to copyright and cannot be used without paying a fee.

But is that fair? One may note that giving custodians of old artefacts a monopoly over those pictures means to artificially monopolise the underlying works, which should instead belong to the public and be available for anyone to use or reuse it.

There is also an issue of originality. Copyright law only protects original works of authorship. While the originality requirement is interpreted generously in most countries, a threshold does exist. In a US case in the late 90s, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp, it was held that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright because the copies weren’t original enough.

Yet, it could be counter-argued that these photographs are not iPhone pics taken by holidaymakers.

Time, labour and skills are needed to move a painting from the gallery or museum to the studio. The photographer must be skilled, good cameras need to be used which avoid glare, and ensure careful light meter readings and faithful colours.

This is an investment – the argument goes - that must be legally protected, for example via a no-photo policy. Indeed, there are economic interests at stake. Take the Uffizi again. It is one of the most visited museums in Italy, and in 2019 around €1 million (£850,000) in revenue came from the sale of photographs of its collection.

While pictures of public domain works are not the focus in the case involving Pornhub, the Uffizi regularly relies on copyright to extract economic profits out of those pictures.

Access to culture

There is also an access to culture angle. Laws which consider pictures of paintings created centuries ago as deserving copyright protection frustrates the most important principle of copyright regimes themselves: namely, that after a specific period of time everyone should be able to use, and build upon, artworks that have fallen into the public domain.

There is the need for a wide category of people to access high quality and faithful representations of public domain works. This is the case of an art university professor showing the pic of an old artwork in class or an art historian publishing the photo in her book. Creators who want to incorporate, build on and reinterpret public domain works should be able to do so on free speech grounds.

Restricting the ability to use these pictures by tampering with copyright law is risky. Yet, it is one thing to rely on criminal law to stop crimes and another to turn copyright upside down so as to indirectly be able to monopolise artistic works, which are simply too old to be protected.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Over a year into the pandemic, questions around immune responses after COVID continue to confound.

One question many people are asking is whether the immunity you get from contracting COVID and recovering is enough to protect you in the future.

The answer is no, it’s not.

Here’s why.

Remind me, how does our immune response work?

Immune responses are innate or acquired. Innate, or short-term immunity, occurs when immune cells that are the body’s first line of defence are activated against a pathogen like a virus or bacteria.

If the pathogen is able to cross the first line of defence, T-cells and B-cells are triggered into action. B-cells fight through secreted proteins called antibodies, specific to each pathogen. T-cells can be categorised into helper T-cells and killer T-cells. Helper T-cells “help” B-cells in making antibodies. Killer T-cells directly kill infected cells.

Once the battle is over, B-cells and T-cells develop “memory” and can recognise the invading pathogen next time. This is known as acquired or adaptive immunity, which triggers long-term protection.

What happens when you get reinfected? Memory B-cells don’t just produce identical antibodies, they also produce antibody variants. These diverse set of antibodies form an elaborate security ring to fight SARS-CoV-2 variants.

Natural immunity is not enough

Getting COVID and recovering (known as “natural infection”) doesn’t appear to generate protection as robust as that generated after vaccination.

And the immune response generated post-infection and vaccination, known as hybrid immunity, is more potent than either natural infection or vaccination alone.

People who have had COVID and recovered and then been vaccinated against COVID have more diverse and high-quality memory B-cell responses than people who’ve just been vaccinated.

Studies indicate mRNA vaccines generate a more potent immune response with previous infection, at least against some variants including Alpha and Beta.

And studies have shown that antibody levels were higher among those who’d recovered from COVID and were subsequently vaccinated than those who’d only had the infection.

Memory B-cells against the coronavirus have been reported to be five to ten times higher in people vaccinated post-infection than natural infection or vaccination alone.

Is one dose enough after COVID?

Some reports have suggested people who’ve had COVID need only one dose of the vaccine. Clinical trials of approved vaccines didn’t generate relevant data because people who’d already had COVID were excluded from phase 3 trials.

One study from June showed people with previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2 tended to mount powerful immune responses to a single mRNA shot. They didn’t gain much benefit from a second jab.

A single dose of an mRNA vaccine after infection achieves similar levels of antibodies against the spike protein’s receptor binding domain (which allows the virus to attach to our cells) compared to double doses of vaccination in people never exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

We need more studies to fully understand how long memory B-cell and T-cell responses will last in both groups.

Also, a single dose strategy has only been studied for mRNA-based vaccines. More data is required to understand whether one jab post-infection would be effective for all the vaccines.

At this stage, it’s still good to have both doses of a COVID vaccine after recovering from COVID.

Does Delta change things?

The development of new vaccines must keep pace with the evolution of the coronavirus.

At least one variant seems to have evolved enough to overtake others, Delta, which is about 60% more transmissible than the Alpha variant. Delta is moderately resistant to vaccines, meaning it can reduce how well the vaccines work, particularly in people who’ve only had one dose.

There’s no data available yet about how effective a single jab is for people who were previously infected with Delta and recovered.

Read more: Why is Delta such a worry? It's more infectious, probably causes more severe disease, and challenges our vaccines

The most important thing you can do to protect yourself from Delta is to get fully vaccinated.

According to a Public Health England report, one dose of Pfizer offered only about 33% protection against symptomatic disease with Delta, but two doses was 88% effective. Two doses was also 96% effective against hospitalisation from Delta. The AstraZeneca vaccine was 92% effective against hospitalisation from Delta after two doses.

A few vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, are now planning to use a potential third dose as a booster to combat the Delta variant.

Sunit K. Singh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

South Africa’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout programme, outlined by the Ministry of Health, had three phases, starting with the most vulnerable population.

Phase one included all the frontline healthcare workers. They received the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. Phase 2 vaccinated people over 60 years old and those in congregate settings. The third and final phase, now under way, covers the remaining South African population.

The programme got off to a shaky start in February 2021. It encountered a number of setbacks such as supply, logistics and governance issues, but has gained momentum in recent weeks. As many as 200,000 doses are being administered daily. By the end of July 2021, almost 2.9% of the South African population had been fully vaccinated and 7.5% had their first of the two Pfizer doses.

Read more: COVID-19: key questions about South Africa's vaccine rollout plan

Despite this uptake, many South Africans are still hesitant to take the vaccine. The circulation of misinformation about it poses the danger of hampering efforts to control the pandemic.

In this article, we aim to dispel some of the myths surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines.

Myth 1: The COVID-19 vaccine will affect a woman’s fertility

This myth was sparked when a social media post was shared in December 2020 by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, a physician and former chief scientist for allergy and respiratory therapy at Pfizer, and Dr Michael Yeadon, a pulmonologist. They claimed that the spike protein on the coronavirus was the same as the spike protein that is responsible for the growth and attachment of the placenta during pregnancy. The fear was that, as a result of the vaccine, the immune system would not be able to differentiate between the two spike proteins and would attack the placental protein.

This is untrue. The overall makeup of the placental protein is very different from the coronavirus spike protein.

Additionally, during the Pfizer vaccine tests, 23 women volunteers became pregnant after taking the vaccine.

Furthermore, the benefits of being vaccinated outweigh the risks of infection for pregnant women.

Myth 2: I’ve had COVID-19, so I don’t need a vaccine

Reinfection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can occur even in individuals who have previously contracted the virus. But receiving the vaccine can provide protection against severe COVID-19 complications.

The level of protection that is achieved from natural immunity after being infected by the virus is unknown. But scientists believe that the vaccine provides better protection than natural infection.

Read more: Why you should get a COVID-19 vaccine – even if you've already had the coronavirus

Myth 3: COVID-19 vaccine side-effects are dangerous

Several studies have been conducted since the start of the pandemic that have measured South Africans’ perceptions of vaccine issues. A recent study by the University of Johannesburg and the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa found that of the respondents who did not want to be vaccinated, 25% were concerned about side-effects.

Most of the side effects of the COVID-19 vaccine are mild. They include low grade fever, sore arm and fatigue, and these usually subside after one to three days.

Rare side effects such as blood clots have been reported from the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The chances of experiencing this side effect are low. The risks of blood clots as a result of COVID-19 infection are 8-10 times higher than risks associated with the vaccine. Doctors are aware of this concern and are trained to identify and treat the condition quickly.

A recent article by Healthline – a medically reviewed and fact checked website – compared the benefits and risks of being vaccinated with those of contracting COVID-19. Lung damage is a complication of COVID-19 while muscle fatigue can be a side effect of the vaccine. This risk-benefit decision is left to the individual to make, but vaccinations have been proven to be safe.

Read more: New COVID-19 vaccine warnings don't mean it's unsafe – they mean the system to report side effects is working

Myth 4: Vaccines have a microchip that will track and control an individual

This conspiracy theory has been propagated by anti-vaxxers who believe that the American business magnate, investor and philanthropist Bill Gates will implant microchips to track people’s movement, using the vaccine as the method of delivery. This is untrue and has been clarified by Gates in the media.

This myth gained traction when a video was shared on Facebook making false claims about the optional microchip on the syringe’s label of the COVID-19 vaccine. This microchip’s purpose is to confirm that the injectable and the vaccine are not counterfeit and haven’t expired. It will also confirm if the injection has been used.

People commenting on the video appeared to have misinterpreted the technology as an injectable. But the microchip is part of the syringe label and not the injectable substance itself.

Read more: The inherent racism of anti-vaxx movements

Myth 5: The COVID-19 vaccine development was rushed, so it may not be effective

The vaccine was developed very quickly. This was possible because the vaccine technology had been in development for many years. When the genetic information of SARS-CoV-2 was identified, the process could begin quickly. There were sufficient resources to fund the research and social media made it easier to recruit participants for the clinical trials. Because SARS-CoV-2 is contagious, it was easy to tell whether the vaccine worked or not.

Read more: Pressure is on to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, but corners can't be cut

Myth 6: The COVID-19 vaccine can alter my DNA

The messenger RNA vaccine (Pfizer) and the viral vector vaccine (Johnson and Johnson) cause your body to develop protection, so that when you are infected by SARS-CoV-2, your body is prepared to fight the virus. DNA is located in the nucleus of your cells and the vaccine material does not enter the nucleus. So it does not alter the DNA.

Read more: Can the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA vaccines affect my genetic code?

Social media plays a huge role in propagating myths and conspiracy theories. Before you share any information, you should ensure that it is from a scientific and reputable source.

Varsha Bangalee is a University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Developing Research Innovation, Localisation and Leadership in South Africa (DRILL) fellow. DRILL, is a NIH D43 grant (D43TW010131) awarded to UKZN in 2015 to support a research training and induction programme for early career academics. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of DRILL and the National Institutes of Health.

Neelaveni Padayachee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Babushka’s is one of the best brunch spots in the Tampa Bay region. The exceptional restaurant is a hidden gem in Temple Terrace. Creative Loafing reports that the gem is working toward opening inside the former Boca restaurant space at 901 W Platt Street.

It’s easy to forget there’s a world beyond downtown Tampa. With so many new concepts debuting on a near daily basis in this sprawling city, and in the region in general, I think it’s good to remember and focus on the local treasures that have been doing something different for a long time. 

Babushka’s is a Temple Terrace Treasure serving up some Russian delicacies you may have never experienced before. The restaurant name comes from the Russian word [Bábushka], literally translating as “Grandmother.” 

One of the best brunch spots in the region

So, what can you expect to eat at a traditional Russian restaurant? 

Start with a sweet drink. Babushka’s serves up a golden nectar called Medovukha. It’s a Russian Homemade honey-based alcoholic drink – stronger and stouter than beer and weaker than wine. 

Babushka’s introduced me to Russian Pancakes: Blinchiki. This is a traditional thin pancake, made with variety of sensational fillings. You can go savory with meat, mushrooms, salmon or caviar; or go sweet with farmer’s cheese, banana and nutella and ice cream. It will change the way you brunch forever. 

Taste Russian caviar 

You can go super old school with Borscht soup and beef stroganoff with pasta. This is the epitome of Russian/Ukrainian comfort food.

In the mood for caviar? Aren’t we all. Alaskan Salmon Roe Caviar on Bruschettas is a key staple of any meal at Babushka’s. The bright hue also makes the appetizer a perfect centerpiece for the table before you devour it.

Another must-try is Pelmeni. It’s a type of dumpling served at almost any restaurant you’re bound to go to in Russia. The dumpling is usually accompanied by lashings of sour cream. Fillings for Pelmeni include minced meat (pork, beef or lamb).

One of the city’s top local treasures

Babushka’s opened in 2018. The restaurant is located at 12639 N 56th Street in Temple Terrace. Follow the restaurant on Facebook to whet your appetite. 

We have a full Tampa brunch guide too, in case you need some early morning guidance. 

Need more food inspiration? 

Check out a new date night sushi joint in the city. 

If you’re hungry for Colombian cuisine, indulge at La Pequena Colombia.

The post Babushka’s bringing Russian brunch to new location in Tampa appeared first on That's So Tampa.

CNN's Aya Elamroussi reports on people in Missouri who have gotten the covid vaccine secretly because they fear their friends and families will ostracize them. To get vaccinated against the killer disease is now a mark of shame among conspiracy-obsessed Americans who see the pandemic as a political sham and are openly shunning and excluding people who are vaccinated. — Read the rest

Vaccinated people need to mask up again, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On July 27, 2021, the CDC recommended that everyone in areas with high COVID-19 infection rates wear masks in public indoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status.

It’s a reversal from the CDC’s May 2021 advice that the fully vaccinated could leave their masks at home and brought U.S. guidelines more in line with World Health Organization recommendations.

The Conversation asked Peter Chin-Hong, a physician who specializes in infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, to help put into context the science behind the changing messages.

What science supports masking after vaccination?

Masks help stop the spread of the coronavirus. They’re a literal layer between you and any virus in the air and can help prevent infection.

The reason public health officials are calling for more mask-wearing is that there is clear and mounting evidence that – though rare – breakthrough COVID-19 infections can occur in people who are fully vaccinated. This is particularly true with emerging variants of concern. The good news is that COVID-19 infection, if it does happen, is much less likely to lead to serious illness or death in vaccinated people.

Some conditions make a breakthrough infection more likely in a vaccinated person: more virus circulating in the community, lower vaccination rates and more highly transmissible variants.

If vaccinated people can get infected with the coronavirus, they can also spread it. Hence the CDC recommendation that vaccinated people remain masked in indoor public spaces to help stop viral transmission.

Where will the guidelines apply?

The CDC mask recommendation targets areas in the U.S. with more than 50 new infections per 100,000 residents or that had more than 8% of tests come back positive during the previous week. By the CDC’s own definitions “substantial” community transmission is 50 to 99 cases of infection per 100,000 people per week, and “high” is 100 or more.

Los Angeles County, for example, far surpassed that mark in mid-July, with more than 10,000 coronavirus cases per week.

Using these criteria, the CDC guidance applied to 63% of U.S. counties on the day it was announced.

Who’s actually protected by masking recommendations?

The recommendation that fully vaccinated people continue wearing masks is primarily intended to protect the unvaccinated – which includes kids under age 12 who are not yet eligible for vaccines in the U.S. The CDC further recommends masking in public for vaccinated people with unvaccinated household members, regardless of local community transmission rates.

Unvaccinated people are at a substantially higher risk of getting infected with and transmitting SARS-CoV-2, and of developing complications from COVID-19.

How do new variants like delta change things?

Preliminary data suggests that the rise of variants like delta may increase the chance of breakthrough infections in people who received only their first vaccine dose. For instance, one study found that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine had an effectiveness of just 34% against the delta variant, compared with 51% against the older alpha variant in terms of warding off symptomatic disease.

The data is more reassuring for those who have been fully vaccinated. After two doses, the Pfizer vaccine still provides strong protection against the delta variant, according to real-world data from Scotland and a variety of other countries; and in preliminary studies out of Canada and England, researchers noted only a “modest” decrease in effectiveness against symptomatic disease, from 93% for the alpha variant to 88% for delta.

Other recent preliminary reports from highly vaccinated countries like Israel and Singapore are sobering, however. Before the delta variant became widespread, from January to April 2021, Israel reported that the Pfizer vaccine was 97% effective in preventing symptomatic disease. Since June 20, 2021, with the delta variant circulating more widely, the Pfizer vaccine has been only 41% effective in preventing symptomatic disease, according to preliminary data reported by Israel’s Ministry of Health in late July. An analysis using government data from Singapore demonstrated that 75% of recent COVID-19 infections were in people who were at least partially vaccinated – though most of them were not severely ill.

In all reports and studies, however, vaccines remain very good at preventing hospitalizations and severe disease due to the delta variant – arguably the outcomes we most care about.

All of this emerging data supports the WHO’s global recommendation that even fully vaccinated individuals continue to wear masks. Most of the world still has low vaccination rates and uses a range of vaccines with variable efficacies, and countries have different burdens of circulating SARS-CoV-2 virus.

With U.S. case counts and breakthrough infection numbers headed in what public health officials consider the wrong direction, it makes sense that the CDC would modify its masking recommendations to be more conservative.

What conditions in the US warrant masking up (again)?

It makes sense that the CDC didn’t immediately change its recommendations to fall in line with the WHO’s June guidelines. With an overall high countrywide vaccination rate and a low overall COVID-19 hospitalization and death burden, the U.S. has a COVID-19 landscape very different from that in most of the world.

Additionally, some experts worried that an official message that the vaccinated should don masks might dissuade unvaccinated individuals from seeking vaccines.

But as President Joe Biden put it on July 27, “new research and concerns about the delta variant” are behind the CDC’s change in masking recommendations.

Some locations are seeing further increase in community transmission, even among vaccinated people. New preliminary research yet to be peer reviewed suggests the delta variant is associated with a viral load a thousand times higher in patients than seen with older strains. And early reports show infected vaccinated people with the delta variant can carry just as high an amount of virus as the unvaccinated that they can in turn spread to others.

The shifting recommendations don’t mean that the old ones were wrong, necessarily, only that conditions have changed. The bottom line? Masks do help cut down on coronavirus transmission, but it’s still vaccines that offer the best protection.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 22, 2021.

Peter Chin-Hong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The spotted lanternfly was first detected in Pennsylvania in 2014 and has since spread to 26 counties in that state and at least six other eastern states. It’s moving into southern New England, Ohio and Indiana. This approximately 1-inch-long species from Asia has attractive polka-dotted front wings but can infest and kill trees and plants. Professor Frank Hale is an entomologist who is tracking this species.

How did the spotted lanternfly get to the U.S., and how quickly is it spreading?

It is native to India, China and Vietnam and probably arrived in a cut stone shipment in 2012. The first sighting was in 2014 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on a tree of heaven — a common invasive tree brought to North America from China in the late 1700s.

By July 2021 the lanternfly had spread to about half of Pennsylvania, large areas of New Jersey, parts of New York state, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia. It also had been found in western Connecticut, eastern Ohio, and now Indiana. To give an idea of how fast these lanternflies spread, they were introduced into South Korea in 2004 and spread throughout that entire country – which is approximately the size of Pennsylvania – in only three years.

How do they spread so fast?

The lanternflies lay egg masses in late summer and autumn on the trunks of trees and any smooth-surfaced item sitting outdoors. The egg masses, which resemble smears of dry mud, can also be laid on the smooth surfaces of cars, trucks and trains. Then, they can be unintentionally transported to any part of the country in just a few days. Once the eggs hatch, they crawl to nearby host plants to start a new infestation.

How do they damage trees and plants? What do they feed on?

They feed by piercing the bark of trees and vines to tap into the plant’s vascular system to feast on sap. For a sucking insect, lanternflies are relatively big. They remove large amounts of sap and excrete copious amounts of clear, sticky “honeydew” that can coat the tree and anything beneath. A black sooty mold grows wherever the honeydew has been deposited. While unsightly, sooty mold isn’t harmful when growing on the bark of the tree or beneath it. Lanternfly feeding seriously stresses trees and vines, which lose carbohydrates and other nutrients meant for storage in the roots and eventually for new growth. Infested trees and vines grow more slowly, exhibit dieback – begin to die from the branch tips – and can even die.

How are scientists and officials trying to stop their spread?

Biological control shows some promise for the future. Two naturally occurring fungal pathogens of spotted lanternflies have been identified in the U.S. Also, U.S. labs are testing two parasitoid insects – insects that grow by feeding on lanternflies and killing them in the process – that have been brought from China for testing and possible future release.

How worried should people be about this lanternfly?

Very worried. Lanternflies easily build to high numbers. The area where host trees live is relatively wide, and lanternflies damage crops, the forest and the landscape. They damage many plants and cause a major nuisance to the general public. The heavy flow of honeydew and the resulting sooty mold makes a mess of the landscape. The adults start to aggregate on plants and structures to lay their egg masses in September. Their sudden, mass appearance can be alarming to people the way periodical cicada populations shock people when they come out of the ground. But lanternflies are more shocking because the few predators that could feed on them, like wheel bugs and predatory stink bugs, do not seem to control the infestations. That is why the introduction of parasitoids from Asia are important for achieving some meaningful level of biological control.

Lanternflies can be a serious pest of grapes, and where found, they have reduced grape yields and damaged or killed vines. Multiple applications of insecticides are often needed to kill them, but this increases the cost of crop production. The pest threatens the major wine-producing regions in the East, such as the Finger Lakes and Long Island in New York; parts of Virginia; and Newport, Rhode Island.

Have any other pests similarly damaged trees?

Yes, the emerald ash borer, which arrived in the U.S. from China by accident and was discovered in 2002. It has killed millions of ash trees in North America. The Asian longhorned beetle, which feeds on and kills many species of trees, has turned up in multiple locations, most recently near Charleston, South Carolina. Maple, buckeye, horse chestnut, willow and elm would be threatened if this pest ever got widely established.

The box tree moth damages boxwoods and is known to live in Canada. It has been seen in Connecticut, Michigan and South Carolina. It possibly was spread accidentally into the U.S. in shipments of boxwoods from Canada. It is not known to be established in any state, but a federal government order has halted importing host plants like boxwood, euonymus and holly from Canada.

What should I do if I see one?

If it has already infested the region where you live and you find spotted lanternflies on your property, contact your local county extension office for control recommendations.

But if it has not been found in your county or state, report it to your state department of agriculture. If the infestation is caught early before it can become established in your area, hopefully it can be eradicated there. Eventually, it will spread to many parts of the country. We can slow the spread by identifying and eradicating new infestations wherever they arise.

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Frank A. Hale as a representative for the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (UTIA) receives funding from USDA APHIS PPQ. In 2020, UTIA received funding to survey for spotted lanternfly and other pests and diseases of grapes at Tennessee vineyards. I was a PI on that cooperative agreement. I have been the state survey coordinator for the Cooperative Agricultural Pest Survey (CAPS) in Tennessee since 2014 as a representative of UTIA. CAPS allows our state to survey for invasive pests and diseases.

In the autumn of 2020, the Tampa Bay Times published an investigation into the Pasco County Sheriff's Department, which was openly boasting about its new Minority Report-inspired intelligence gathering program. I wrote about it then, but here's a quick summary of how it works:

First the Sheriff's Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

In recent weeks, one piece of data has gotten a lot of attention: 99.5% of all the people dying from COVID-19 in the U.S. are unvaccinated.

We are two researchers who work in public health and study immunity, viruses and other microbes. Since the start of the pandemic, public health experts have been concerned about what might happen if large sections of the U.S. population, for whatever reason, did not get vaccinated. Over the past few weeks, the answer to that question is starting to emerge.

‘Two Americas’ of vaccination

As of mid-July 2021, the U.S. has fully vaccinated more than 160 million people – just under 50% of the population – against COVID-19. Despite a surplus of available vaccines, in recent weeks the rate of vaccination has slowed substantially. In early April, health workers administered roughly 4 million new vaccines daily. Today, that number is about 450,000 doses a day.

As people sought vaccines over the past few months, the U.S. has split into what Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is calling “two Americas” – one of the vaccinated population and one of the unvaccinated population. These two Americas are divided geographically and in most cases along political lines.

Vaccination rates will continue to rise, albeit slowly, as rural areas get better access to vaccines and messaging persuades some vaccine-hesitant people to get the shot. But according to survey data from late June and early July, more than 10% of adults 18 or older say they are probably not or definitely not going to get a coronavirus vaccine, with another 5% saying they are unsure. It seems likely there will be a large unvaccinated population for the time being.

Which America is safer?

The vaccines themselves are nothing short of remarkable in their effectiveness at protecting against COVID-19.

Unvaccinated people, by comparison, are extremely susceptible to the coronavirus, particularly to the delta variant and the data on deaths and hospitalizations show this discrepancy clearly.

On July 16, 2021, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky revealed that 99.5% of recent U.S. deaths from COVID-19 were of unvaccinated people. “Those deaths were preventable with a simple, safe shot,” she said. In Early July, Fauci said that 99.2% of people who died recently were unvaccinated. In the state of Maryland, every patient who died from COVID-19 in June was unvaccinated.

In her July 16 statement, Walensky also said that 97% of current COVID-19 hospitalizations are of unvaccinated people. An earlier analysis done by The Associated Press found that 98.9% of all hospitalized COVID-19 patients in May were unvaccinated. The director of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services recently stated that all new hospitalized COVID-19 patients in Los Angeles were unvaccinated.

A tale of two states

It is hard to find data about overall cases among unvaccinated compared with vaccinated individuals. This results partly from the CDC’s transition in May 2021 to focusing on hospitalizations of COVID-19 vaccine recipients rather than cases. But one way to get at this data is to compare two states with large differences in vaccination rates. As the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 surges across the U.S., one can observe the consequences of this split into a vaccinated and unvaccinated America in real time.

In the state of Missouri, only 40% of people are vaccinated. In some counties within Missouri, as few as 14.7% of the residents are vaccinated. Not surprisingly, the state has seen a surge in COVID-19 cases through the middle of July, with 2,000 to 3,000 new cases per day. The rate of spread is also increasing. Already, some hospitals are running out of ventilators and intensive care beds.

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Contrast this with Massachusetts, where 63% of people are fully vaccinated. Though the state is also seeing an increase in cases, total new infections numbered only around 200 to 300 per day. The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in Massachussetts is also down 95% since January 2021.

As of July 20, 2021, Missouri had 1,357 patients hospitalized with COVID-19, almost 13 times more than the 106 patients in Massachusetts. This is despite Missouri’s having a slightly smaller population that is much more dispersed.

Does it matter if people stay unvaccinated?

Ultimately, with a large portion of the U.S. population still unvaccinated, COVID-19 is not going to disappear in the near future. The U.S. will continue to see outbreaks of the virus in communities with low vaccine uptake. Even if people in these undervaccinated areas rush to get shots when outbreaks happen, it takes about a month for vaccination to produce strong immunity.

As long as SARS-CoV-2 is circulating in the U.S., unvaccinated people will continue to experience the full, dangerous clinical effects of COVID–19. But in addition, while the virus spreads among the unvaccinated, it will also continue spreading at a low level to vaccinated individuals. Though most of those infections will not progress to severe COVID-19, according to the CDC, as of mid-July more than 5,000 vaccinated people, mostly over 65 years old, had been hospitalized and 1,000 had died. These numbers are of course sad, but they pale in comparison to hospitalizations and deaths among the unvaccinated population.

The vaccines are doing exactly what they were designed to do: prevent severe COVID-19 with amazing efficiency. With vaccines free and widely available, for most people in the U.S. it is a choice: Do you want to be part of the unvaccinated America or the vaccinated one?

Rodney E. Rohde has received funding from the American Society of Clinical Pathologists (ASCP), American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science (ASCLS), and other public and private entities/foundations. Dr. Rohde is affiliated with ASCP, ASCLS, ASM, and serves on several scientific advisory boards. See https://rodneyerohde.wp.txstate.edu/service/.

Ryan McNamara has received funding from the AIDS Malignancy Consortium and the National Institute for Allergens and Infectious Diseases. He is a member of the International AIDS Society and has served as a consultant for the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute on their Pandemic Response and Recovery Roadmap.

With the highly infectious delta coronavirus variant spreading at an alarming rate, the World Health Organization in late June 2021 urged people to again wear masks indoors – even those who are fully vaccinated. And on July 15, Los Angeles County, California, announced that it would again require masking up in public indoor spaces, regardless of vaccination status. This was followed by a recommendation – though not a mandate – from seven Bay Area counties for all to again don masks in public indoor settings.

Notably, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet taken a similar stance. On July 12, National Nurses United, the nation’s largest professional association for registered nurses, called on the CDC to reconsider in light of the spike in new infections and hospitalizations across the country. The Conversation asked Peter Chin-Hong, a physician who specializes in infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, to help put into context the science behind these seemingly mixed messages.

What’s the science behind the WHO recommendation?

There is clear and mounting evidence that – though rare – breakthrough COVID-19 infections can occur, even in the fully vaccinated. This is particularly true with emerging variants of concern.

The CDC has been following these data closely. By mid-July 2021, nearly 60% of the U.S. population age 18 or older had been fully vaccinated. Infections in those who are fully vaccinated are rare, and serious outcomes from COVID-19 in that population are even rarer – though they do still occur. However, the CDC stopped tracking nonhospitalized cases of COVID-19 for people with and without symptoms among fully vaccinated individuals on May 1, 2021.

The risk of infection leading to serious illness and death, however, differs starkly between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

Are breakthrough infections more likely with the delta variant?

Maybe. Preliminary data suggests that the rise of variants like delta may increase the chance of breakthrough infections in people who received only their first vaccine dose. For instance, one not-yet peer-reviewed study found that a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine had an effectiveness of just 34% against the delta variant, compared with 51% against the older alpha variant in terms of warding off symptomatic disease.

But the data is more reassuring for those who have been fully vaccinated. After two doses, the Pfizer vaccine still provides strong protection against the delta variant, according to real-world data from Scotland and a variety of other countries; and in preliminary studies out of Canada and England, researchers noted only a “modest” decrease in effectiveness against symptomatic disease from 93% for the alpha variant to 88% for delta.

One recent preliminary report from Israel is sobering, however. Before the delta variant became widespread, from January to April 2021, Israel reported that the Pfizer vaccine was 97% effective in preventing symptomatic disease. However, since June 6, with the delta variant circulating more widely, the Pfizer vaccine has been 64% effective in preventing symptomatic disease, according to preliminary data reported by Israel’s Ministry of Health in early July.

And in another new report that is not yet peer-reviewed, researchers compared blood serum antibodies from people vaccinated with Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines and found that the J&J vaccine lent much lower protection against delta, beta and other variants, compared with the mRNA-based vaccines. As a result, the researchers suggest that J&J vaccine recipients would benefit from booster immunizations, ideally with one of the mRNA vaccines. However, this is a limited laboratory study that doesn’t look at whether real people got sick, and contradicts a peer-reviewed study that found the J&J vaccine was protective against delta eight months after vaccination.

In all reports and studies, however, vaccine efficacy is still very high against the delta variant in preventing hospitalizations and severe disease – arguably the outcomes we most care about.

All of this emerging data supports the WHO recommendation that even fully vaccinated individuals continue to wear masks. Most of the world still has low vaccination rates, uses a range of vaccines with variable efficacy at preventing infection and has different burdens of circulating SARS-CoV-2 virus. In this context, it makes sense that the WHO would give a conservative recommendation to mask up for all.

Who’s actually protected by masking recommendations?

The WHO’s latest call for fully vaccinated people to continue wearing masks is primarily intended to protect the unvaccinated – which includes kids under age 12 who are not yet eligible for vaccines in the U.S. Unvaccinated people are at a substantially higher risk of getting infected with and transmitting SARS-CoV-2, and of developing complications from COVID-19.

And, again, there is still a low risk of infection for vaccinated people, but this risk differs regionally. In areas of highly circulating virus and poor vaccination rates, and with highly transmissible variants, there is a higher probability of infection in vaccinated individuals compared with people living in areas with lower levels of virus in the community.

Does the US situation warrant masking up (again)?

I suspect the CDC is unlikely to pursue a universal U.S. recommendation to wear masks at this time. With an overall high countrywide vaccination rate and a low overall COVID-19 hospitalization and death burden, the U.S. has a COVID-19 landscape very different from most of the world.

Some experts also worry that sending an official message that the vaccinated should don masks may dissuade unvaccinated individuals from seeking vaccines.

What changes would signal it’s time for the US to mask up again?

There are emotional red flags and then there are more realistic red flags that may bring about a nationwide call for masking indoors for fully vaccinated people.

Having more than 100 cases of infection per 100,000 people per week is defined as “high” community transmission, the worst category, by the CDC. Los Angeles County, for example, has already surpassed that mark, with more than 10,000 coronavirus cases per week.

A more pragmatic measure for masking is the number of hospitalizations, because it is directly related to use of health care resources. Some researchers have proposed a threshold of five COVID-19 cases – averaged over several days – hospitalized per 100,000 people, which would potentially be a more ominous signal than infection rates. Los Angeles County has also surpassed that as well.

Surges will likely be a regional phenomenon based on how many people are fully vaccinated in an area. As long as hospitalizations and deaths remain generally manageable nationally, and with hospital capacity intact, the U.S. as a whole may not need to return to masking indoors for the fully immunized.

[The Conversation’s most important coronavirus headlines, weekly in a science newsletter]

Peter Chin-Hong does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Spying is a risky profession. For the 14th-century English undercover agent-turned-poet Geoffrey Chaucer, the dangers – at least to his reputation – continue to surface centuries after his death.

In his July 2021 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, A.S.G. Edwards, professor of medieval manuscripts at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, laments the removal of Geoffrey Chaucer from university curricula. Edwards says he believes this disappearance may be propelled by a vocal cohort of scholars who see the “father of English poetry” as a rapist, racist and antisemite.

The predicament would have amused Chaucer himself. Jewish and feminist scholars, among others, are shooting down one of their earliest and wisest allies. This is happening when new research reveals a Chaucer altogether different from what many current readers have come to accept. My decades of research show he was no raunchy proponent of bro culture but a daring and ingenious defender of women and the innocent.

As a medievalist who teaches Chaucer, I believe the movement to cancel Chaucer has been bamboozled by his tradecraft – his consummate skill as a master of disguise.

Outfoxing the professors

It’s true that Chaucer’s work contains toxic material. His “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” in “The Canterbury Tales,” his celebrated collection of stories, quotes at length from the long tradition of classical and medieval works on the evils of women, as mansplained by the Wife’s elderly husbands: “You say, just as worms destroy a tree, so a wife destroys her husband.”

Later, “The Prioress’s Tale” repeats the anti-Semitic blood libel story, the false accusation that Jews murdered Christians, at a time when Jews across Europe were under attack.

These poems in particular generate accusations that Chaucer propagated sexist and antisemitic material because he agreed with or enjoyed it.

Several prominent scholars seem convinced that Chaucer’s personal views are the same as those of his characters and that Chaucer is promoting these opinions. And they believe he abducted or raped a young woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne, although the legal records are enigmatic. It looks as though Cecily accused Chaucer of some such crime and he paid her to clear his name. It’s unclear what actually happened between them.

Critics cherry-pick quotations to support their claims about Chaucer. But if you examine his writings in detail, as I have, you’ll see themes of concern for women and human rights, the oppressed and the persecuted, reappear time and time again.

Chaucer the spy

Readers often assume Chaucer’s characters were a reflection of the writer’s own attitude because he is such a convincing role player. Chaucer’s career in the English secret service trained him as an observer, analyst, diplomat and master at concealing his own views.

In his teens, Chaucer became a confidential envoy for England. From 1359 to 1378, he graced English diplomatic delegations and carried out missions described in expense records only as “the king’s secret business.”

Documents show him scouting paths through the Pyrenees for English forces poised to invade Spain. He lobbied Italy for money and troops, while also perhaps investigating the suspicious death of Lionel of Antwerp, an English prince who was probably poisoned soon after his wedding.

Chaucer’s job brought him face to face with the darkest figures of his day — the treacherous Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, a notorious traitor and assassin, and Bernabò Visconti, lord of Milan, who helped devise a 40-day torture protocol.

Chaucer’s poetry reflects his experience as an English agent. He enjoyed role-playing and assuming many identities in his writing. And like the couriers he dispatched from Italy in 1378, he brings his readers covert messages split between multiple speakers. Each teller holds just a piece of the puzzle. The whole story can only be understood when all the messages arrive.

He also uses the skills of a secret agent to express dangerous truths not accepted in his own day, when misogyny and antisemitism were both entrenched, especially among the clergy.

Chaucer does not preach or explain. Instead, he lets the formidable Wife of Bath, the character he most enjoyed, tell us about the misogyny of her five husbands and fantasize about how ladies of King Arthur’s court might take revenge on a rapist. Or he makes his deserted Queen Dido cry: “Given their bad behavior, it’s a shame any woman ever took pity on any man.”

Chaucer the chivalrous defender

While current critiques of Chaucer label him as an exponent of toxic masculinity, he was actually an advocate for human rights.

My own research shows that in the course of his career he supported women’s right to choose their own mates and the human desire for freedom from enslavement, coercion, verbal abuse, political tyranny, judicial corruption and sexual trafficking. In “The Canterbury Tales” and “The Legend of Good Women,” he tells many stories on such themes. There he opposed assassination, infanticide and femicide, the mistreatment of prisoners, sexual harassment and domestic abuse. He valued self-control in action and in speech. He spoke out for women, enslaved people and Jews.

“Women want to be free and not coerced like slaves, and so do men,” the narrator of “The Franklin’s Prologue” says.

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As for Jews, Chaucer salutes their ancient heroism in his early poem “The House of Fame.” He depicts them as a people who have done great good in the world, only to be rewarded with slander. In “The Prioress’s Tale” he shows them being libeled by a desperate character to cover up a crime of which they were manifestly innocent, a century after all Jews had been brutally expelled from England.

Chaucer’s own words demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that when his much underestimated Prioress tells her antisemitic blood libel tale, Chaucer is not endorsing it. Through her own words and actions, and a cascade of reactions from those who hear her, he is exposing such guilty and dangerous actors as they deploy such lies.

And was he a rapist or an abductor? It’s unlikely. The case suggests he might well have been targeted, perhaps even because of his work. Few authors have ever been more outspoken about man’s inhumanity to women.

It is bizarre that one of the strongest and earliest writers in English literature to speak out against rape and support women and the downtrodden should be pilloried and threatened with cancellation.

But Chaucer knew the complexity of his art put him at risk. As his character the Squire dryly observed, people all too often “demen gladly to the badder ende” – “They are happy to assume the worst.”

Jennifer Wollock is a member of the New Chaucer Society.

We are currently experiencing a worldwide vaccination effort that’s being impeded by rising pockets of anti-vaccination sentiment.

There has been a recent increase in anti-vaccination conspiracy theories, misinformation campaigns and protests in various countries.

And while many accuse anti-vaxxers of a selfish disdain for the health and safety of others, there is a underlying aspect of these movements that needs to be more widely recognized.

Vaccine resistance movements have always been led by white, middle-class voices and promoted by structures of racial inequality.

Racist language to discredit vaccination

The intrinsic racism of anti-vaccination movements began with their historical origin in the 19th century.

Inoculation originally referred to the older form of vaccination, where pus was taken from the pustule of someone with a mild form of smallpox and purposely scratched into the arm of a healthy person. This would ideally convey a mild form of the disease and thereby protect the recipient from more deadly forms.

This type of inoculation had its foundation in a number of non-western cultures before it was incorporated into western medical practice. Indeed, inoculation was practised in China for centuries before it made its way to Europe, as well as in the Middle East and North Africa.

Its use in North America was initiated by the knowledge of an enslaved man, Onesimus, who famously taught the procedure to puritan minister Cotton Mather during a smallpox outbreak in the early 18th century.

These non-western origins fuelled some anti-vaccination criticisms during the 19th century. Opponents to the practice declared it a “filthy, useless and dangerous rite” akin to using the “charms and incantations of an African savage.”

By the turn of the 20th century, racialized language began to appear in anti-vaccination dialogues which, on the surface, had little to do with race. These racial slurs served the purposes of anti-vaccinationists who sought to discredit the practice.

One of the most potent examples of this was in 1920, when vocal anti-vaccination writer Charles Higgins published a book against vaccination. Throughout this work he consistently referred to vaccination as a “savage rite” performed by “the Medicine Man” on helpless innocent children.

Medical freedom, white freedom

The racialized language utilized by these early anti-vaxxers was all the more potent when weaponized by white leaders of anti-vaccination leagues (or organizations).

Between 1860 and 1920, numerous anti-vaxx leagues were founded in Britain, the United States and Canada. One of their main arguments was that compulsory enforcement was a “tyrannical interference with the rightful liberties of the people,” an accusation often levelled at health officials attempting to increase vaccine uptake in the general public.

These people used their social standing to loudly condemn perceived limitations of their rights, while blindly ignoring the systemic absence of the same freedoms for racialized and low-income communities.

In North America, the freedom to choose vaccination was already defined by racial identity in many places. Throughout this period, Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend residential schools, where vaccination was either implemented or ignored at the will of federal or school officials, with little regard for parental or individual choice.

On the West Coast, civic public health officials actively enforced compulsory vaccination on Asian communities based on racial profiling during disease outbreaks. In 1900, city health officials in San Francisco issued mandatory plague vaccination orders for all Chinese individuals after a few cases of plague were found in the city.

American writer Harriet A. Washington has vividly demonstrated how Black communities were frequently enrolled in medical research trials for testing new medical treatments and vaccines, often without their knowledge or consent.

Yet the medical oppression of non-white communities was ignored by anti-vaccination leaders, who instead used their platforms to retain the medical freedoms of dominant white communities.

Today: Anti-vaxx targeting of racialized people

In present times, the leaders of anti-vaccination movements are still predominantly white, with many receiving millions in revenue from their activities.

More concerning is that they have begun to deliberately target racialized communities with anti-vaccine disinformation and propaganda. Recognizing the societal factors that have eroded trust in medical institutions, anti-vaxxers are attempting to direct this distrust to benefit their own cause.

Through their actions, anti-vaxxers deliberately seek to increase the risk of infection in already vulnerable populations. We saw this in 2017 after an outbreak of measles in Minnesota among the Somali-American community in Minneapolis.

Anti-vaxxers staged two public meetings in the community, encouraging parents to avoid vaccination and pushed the false claim that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is linked to rising rates of autism. The result was a drastic reduction in MMR vaccination uptake between 2004 and 2014 — dropping from 92 per cent to 42 per cent — and one of the largest measles outbreaks in the state in three decades.

Deliberate targeting has been amplified even further this year in the attempt to discredit COVID-19 vaccines. The prominent anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense recently released a film aimed at fuelling distrust in vaccination among Black Americans.

Anti-vaccination leaders have also begun to co-opt narratives of persecution and suffering for their own purposes. Last month, a Washington state official wore a yellow Star of David to protest vaccine mandates, while prominent anti-vaccine voice, Naomi Wolf, was scheduled to headline a fundraiser for “liberation” from vaccine mandates on Juneteenth.

It’s not the white, middle- and upper-class anti-vaccination leaders who suffer most from a diminished herd immunity and increased prevalence of vaccine-preventable illnesses. Such individuals are generally protected by the same social and racial privileges that have historically enabled them to continuously gain a large following.

In the end, the individuals who bear the brunt of an increased burden of disease are those from historically vulnerable communities whose concerns continue to be co-opted and overshadowed by anti-vaccination activists.

Paula Larsson receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Did you accidentally wash or dry your favorite shirt the wrong way, causing it to shrink? I have, and when it happens I first try to pawn it off on smaller family members before donating it. But according to Lifehacker, it's possible to unshrink clothes after they've shrunk. — Read the rest

COVID-19 numbers are again beginning to rise. Despite best efforts to vaccinate anyone eligible to be innoculated, anti-vax propaganda is winning the war.

Where winning means killing lots of people unnecessarily.

When Japanese chef Yoshihiro Murata travels, he brings water with him from Japan. He says this is the only way to make truly authentic dashi, the flavorful broth essential to Japanese cuisine. There’s science to back him up: water in Japan is notably softer – which means it has fewer dissolved minerals – than in many other parts of the world. So when Americas enjoy Japanese food, they arguably aren’t getting quite the real thing.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to food. Taking something out of its geographic or cultural context often changes the thing itself.

Take the word “namaste.” In modern Hindi, it’s simply a respectful greeting, the equivalent of a formal “hello” appropriate for addressing one’s elders. But in the U.S., its associations with yoga have led many people to believe that it’s an inherently spiritual word.

Another cultural tradition that has changed across time and place is the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a nonjudgmental expansive awareness of one’s experiences, often cultivated through meditation.

A range of studies have found mindfulness to be beneficial for the people who practice it in a number of ways.

However, very little research has examined its effects on societies, workplaces and communities. As a social psychologist at the University at Buffalo, I wondered if the growing enthusiasm for mindfulness might be overlooking something important: the way practicing it might affect others.

A booming market

In just the past few years, the mindfulness industry has exploded in the U.S. Current estimates put the U.S. meditation market – which includes meditation classes, studios, and apps – at approximately US$1.2 billion. It’s expected to grow to over $2 billion by 2022.

Hospitals, schools and even prisons are teaching and promoting mindfulness, while over 1 in 5 employers currently offer mindfulness training.

The enthusiasm for mindfulness makes sense: Research shows mindfulness can reduce stress, increase self-esteem and decrease symptoms of mental illness.

Given these findings, it’s easy to assume that mindfulness has few, if any, downsides. The employers and educators who promote it certainly seem to think so. Perhaps they hope that mindfulness won’t just make people feel better, but that it will also make them be better. That is, maybe mindfulness can make people more generous, cooperative or helpful – all traits that tend to be desirable in employees or students.

Mindfulness migrates

But in reality, there’s good reason to doubt that mindfulness, as practiced in the U.S., would automatically lead to good outcomes.

In fact, it may do the opposite.

That’s because it’s been taken out of its context. Mindfulness developed as a part of Buddhism, where it’s intimately tied up with Buddhist spiritual teachings and morality. Mindfulness in the U.S., on the other hand, is often taught and practiced in purely secular terms. It’s frequently offered simply as a tool for focusing attention and improving well-being, a conception of mindfulness some critics have referred to as “McMindfulness.”

Not only that, mindfulness and Buddhism developed in Asian cultures in which the typical way in which people think about themselves differs from that in the U.S. Specifically, Americans tend to think of themselves most often in independent terms with “I” as their focus: “what I want,” “who I am.” By contrast, people in Asian cultures more often think of themselves in interdependent terms with “we” as their focus: “what we want,” “who we are.”

Cultural differences in how people think about themselves are subtle and easy to overlook – sort of like different kinds of water. But just as those different kinds of water can change flavors when you cook, I wondered if different ways of thinking about the self might alter the effects of mindfulness.

For interdependent-minded people, what if mindful attention to their own experiences might naturally include thinking about other people – and make them more helpful or generous? And if this were the case, would it then be true that, for independent-minded people, mindful attention would spur them to focus more on their individual goals and desires, and therefore cause them to become more selfish?

Testing the social effects

I floated these questions to my colleague at the University at Buffalo, Shira Gabriel, because she’s a recognized expert on independent versus interdependent ways of thinking about the self.

She agreed that this was an interesting question, so we worked with our students Lauren Ministero, Carrie Morrison and Esha Naidu to conduct a study in which we had 366 college students come into the lab – this was before the COVID-19 pandemic – and either engage in a brief mindfulness meditation or a control exercise that actually involved mind wandering. We also measured the extent to which people thought of themselves in independent or interdependent terms. (It’s important to note that, although cultural differences in thinking about the self are real, there is variability in this characteristic even within cultures.)

At the end of the study, we asked people if they could help solicit donations for a charity by stuffing envelopes to send to potential donors.

The results – which have been accepted for publication in the journal Psychological Science – detail how, among relatively interdependent-minded individuals, the brief mindfulness meditation caused them to become more generous. Specifically, briefly engaging in a mindfulness exercise – as opposed to mind wandering – appeared to increase how many envelopes interdependent-minded people stuffed by 17%. However, among relatively independent-minded individuals, mindfulness appeared to make them less generous with their time. This group of participants stuffed 15% fewer envelopes in the mindful condition than in the mind-wandering condition.

In other words, the effects of mindfulness can be different for people depending on the way they think about themselves. This figurative “water” can really change the recipe of mindfulness.

Of course, water can be filtered, and likewise, how people think about themselves is fluid: We’re all capable of thinking about ourselves in both independent and interdependent ways at different times.

In fact, there’s a relatively simple way to get people to shift their thinking about themselves. As the researchers Marilynn Brewer and Wendi Gardner discovered, all you have to do is have them read a passage that is altered to have either a lot of “I” and “me” statements or a lot of “we” and “us” statements, and ask people to identify all of the pronouns. Past research shows that this simple task reliably shifts people to think of themselves in more independent versus interdependent terms.

Our research team wanted to see if this simple effect could also shift the effects of mindfulness on social behavior.

With this in mind, we conducted one more study. This time, it was online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but we used the same exercises.

First, however, we had people complete the pronoun task mentioned above. Afterwards, we asked people if they would volunteer to contact potential donors to a charity.

Our results were striking: Engaging in a brief mindfulness exercise made people who identified “I/me” words 33% less likely to volunteer, but it made those who identified “we/us” words 40% more likely to volunteer. In other words, just shifting how people thought of themselves in the moment – filtering the water of self-related thoughts, if you will – altered the effects of mindfulness on the behavior of many of the people who took part in this study.

Attention as a tool

The take-home message? Mindfulness could lead to good social outcomes or bad ones, depending on context.

In fact, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard said as much when he wrote that even a sniper embodies a type of mindfulness. “Bare attention,” he added, “as consummate as it might be, is no more than a tool.” Yes, it can cause a great deal of good. But it can also “cause immense suffering.”

If practitioners strive to use mindfulness to reduce suffering, rather than increase it, it’s important to ensure that people are also mindful of themselves as existing in relation with others.

This “water” may be the key ingredient for bringing out the full flavor of mindfulness.

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Michael J. Poulin receives funding from the National Science Foundation. He is affiliated with the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

At the age of 18 I very excitedly packed my bags and headed off for what turned into two years working on a charity hospital ship off the coast of West Africa. Prior to going I was given a list of vaccinations I needed, including yellow fever, hepatitis B, MMR and tetanus/diphtheria.

At the time I did not think twice about arranging (and paying) for these. It was simply the “vaccine passport” that was required for travelling to these parts of the world. Since I would also be working in a healthcare environment, I accepted the vaccines as needed to protect myself and the patients I would be caring for.

Twenty-five years later, a new vaccine is being added to the list of standard vaccinations – COVID-19. It is increasingly likely that we will all need to show evidence of our COVID-19 vaccination status in order to travel, access public events and perhaps even attend workplaces.

The experiences of the last year provide many reasons for using such a “vaccine passport” system, yet some people seem not to want one introduced. Why is it that this new vaccine might be viewed differently to the well-accepted, and somewhat routine, requirement for other vaccines?

Perhaps the first thing to acknowledge is that vaccine hesitancy is not a new phenomenon. Despite being one of the most effective ways of protecting people’s health, the act of injecting a foreign substance into the body understandably raises concerns.

For this reason, many vaccination programmes are voluntary, with health systems preferring to use persuasion rather than the law to get people to take them. In adults, mandatory vaccinations are usually only linked to specific professions (mainly in healthcare) and travel to certain parts of the world.

Given this history, a person keen to avoid all vaccines would simply choose not to follow certain professions or travel to certain places. This lack of vaccination would not impact other aspects of their life, including accessing public events or spaces and travelling to many popular holiday destinations.

But, with COVID-19, things will probably be different. It is likely that participating in these other activities will now also be subject to vaccination status – but is this fair?

The most common understanding of “fairness” is linked to opportunity. If different people have the same opportunities for something – which could be almost anything – the situation is often considered as fair. Relating this to COVID-19 vaccine passports, fairness could be seen as having equal opportunity for gaining a vaccine and thus a passport.

Within the UK, all adults over 18 have the opportunity to receive a vaccine. Where someone can’t – perhaps due to a medical reason – a “fair” vaccine passport system would need to take this into account. A fair system would also need to allow for any type of vaccine approved by the relevant regulator (the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency in the UK) to count for passport purposes.

Under this idea of fairness, the obvious area of concern would be visitors coming from other countries with limited opportunities to receive a vaccine. It could legitimately be considered “unfair” if such people were refused entry to the UK without some form of mitigating arrangement, such as making vaccination available on arrival in the UK followed by perhaps a mandatory period of quarantine.

But some may argue that fairness is about more than just equal opportunity. What about people who have moral or other objections to being vaccinated? Is it fair to also exclude them?

When considering this question, a thought experiment proposed by the American philosopher John Rawls can be helpful. The idea is to consider an issue such as vaccine passports, but try to forget anything that applies to your own personal position. From this “veil of ignorance”, you try to make a decision as to what would be a just or fair arrangement.

In the case of a moral objector to vaccination, this would require the individual to try to discount their own personal reasons for not being vaccinated, and instead think of what would be best for society as a whole.

Given the incredible harm caused by COVID-19 over the last year or so, increasing evidence for the tremendous success of vaccines in preventing deaths and mitigating the severest effects of the disease, the safety of vaccines, and the equal opportunity to receive a vaccine (certainly in the UK), it would be very hard to argue against the vaccine passport concept from a veil of ignorance position.

Of course the devil is almost always in the detail. A poorly implemented vaccine passport system could still be very unfair and cause tremendous unforeseen and undesirable circumstances. Currently there are a number of concerns relating to the recognition of different types, and even different batches, of COVID-19 vaccines. But overall it is important to distinguish between arguments about fair implementation, and arguments that concern the fairness of the concept as a whole.

Simon Kolstoe has previously held UK government funding that partly investigated DNA vaccination. He chairs UK research ethics committees for the Health Research Authority, Ministry of Defence and Public Health England.

What could be so bad about answering a few emails in the evening? Perhaps something urgent pops up, we are tidying up an issue from the day, or trying to get ahead for tomorrow. Always being online and available is one of the ways we demonstrate our work ethic and professionalism.

But the creep of digital communications into our entire lives is not as harmless as we think.

Our new research shows how prevalent out-of-hours communication is in the Australian university sector. And how damaging it is to our mental and physical health.

Our research

Colleagues and I are studying how digital communication impacts work stress, work-life balance, health and sleep in the university sector.

We surveyed more than 2,200 academic and professional employees across 40 universities from June to November 2020. We specifically looked at universities given the advancing technological changes in the sector and importance of universities to our economic, social and cultural prosperity.

Our results

We found high levels of stress along, with a significant amount of out-of-hours communication. This includes:

• 21% of respondents had supervisors who expected them to respond to work-related texts, calls and emails after work
• 55% sent digital communication about work in the evenings to colleagues
• 30% sent work-related digital communication to colleagues on the weekends, while expecting a same-day response.

Employees who had supervisors expecting them to respond to work messages after work, compared to groups who did not, reported higher levels of psychological distress (70.4% compared to 45.2%) and emotional exhaustion (63.5% compared to 35.2%). They also reported physical health symptoms, such as headaches and back pain (22.1% compared to 11.5%).

It’s not just horrible bosses

We also found the same pattern when it came to contact between colleagues.

Groups of employees who felt that they had to respond to work messages from colleagues outside of work hours, compared to groups who did not, also reported higher levels of psychological distress (75.9% compared to 39.3%). They also reported higher levels of emotional exhaustion (65.9% compared to 35.7%) and physical health symptoms (22.1% compared to 12.5%).

Read more: As boundaries between work and home vanish, employees need a 'right to disconnect'

Although the project team surveyed university employees, this is likely to reflect a society-wide problem of digital communication out-of-work hours. An Australia Institute survey last year showed Australians were working 5.3 hours of unpaid overtime on average per week, up from 4.6 hours the year before.

Notably, 31% of employees in our sample reported a moderate or severe psychological disorder, and 62% said they thought the “psychosocial safety climate” – of their workplace — the degree to which it protected their psychological health — was “poor”.

By comparison, an estimated 20% of Australian adults have experienced a common mental disorder in the previous 12 months. A 2014 beyondblue survey, suggested 52% of employees find their workplace mentally healthy.

What does this mean?

The personal and social implications of blurred boundaries between home and work are serious. When employees are answering calls or responding to emails at home, this affects their recovery from work - both mentally and physically.

Being in a constant state of hyper-vigilance awaiting work notifications at home can affect metabolism and immunity, creating susceptibility to serious health problems such as infection, high blood pressure and depression. In fact, recent research by the World Health Organisation and International Labour Organisation suggest that long work hours may even increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.

Another problem is that when we get work calls or emails out of hours, this also reduces the time for recovery activities such as social interaction, physical exercise and spending time in natural settings.

These are critical activities to maintain physical and particularly psychological health. The personal and social ramifications of work intrusion into home life also have the potential to hurt family relationships, and community supports, like volunteering.

Next steps

So what needs to happen now?

We can focus on the immediate problem and reduce the extent of digital connectivity out of work hours. Negotiating work conditions to address the problem like the Victoria Police has recently done is a good start. Amending the National Employment Standards to enforce the “right to disconnect” will also protect vulnerable low paid, non-unionised workers who do not have the capacity to negotiate their own work conditions.

Read more: Long hours at the office could be killing you – the case for a shorter working week

But while these industrial regulations prevent managers from getting in touch, it won’t change the behaviour of colleagues hassling each other. Or the inward pressure many of us feel to work out of hours.

Workplace expert professor Maureen Dollard argues the problem of digital connectivity outside of standard work hours reflects a broader issue around the workplace culture and psychological health. When an organisation values productivity over psychological health, then employees will feel more pressure to manage unrealistic deadlines.

Ultimately, our problem with out-of-hours emails and messaging reflects broader societal issues relating to the pressures of productivity, job insecurity and diminishing work resources.

This work is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP190100853) (CIs Kurt Lushington, Tony Winefield, Silvia Pignata and Arnold Bakker) and the Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (FL200100025) awarded to Maureen Dollard. Research team members who have contributed to this work include Amy Zadow, Rachael Potter, Ali Afsharian and Amy Parkin.

As someone who studies immune responses to respiratory infections, I’ve watched news of the emerging coronavirus variants with concern. I wondered whether vaccination or previous infection would provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 strains, especially the new, highly transmissible delta variant, which has rapidly spread to at least 70 countries.

A person can develop immunity – the ability to resist infection – in two ways: either after being infected with a virus or by getting vaccinated. However, immune protection isn’t always equal. Vaccine immunity and natural immunity for SARS–CoV–2 can differ in terms of the strength of the immune response or the length of time that the protection lasts. Additionally, not everyone will get the same level of immunity from infection, while immune responses to the vaccines are very consistent.

The difference in immune response between vaccination and infection seems to be even greater when dealing with new variants. In early July, two new studies were published that show COVID-19 vaccines, though slightly less effective than they are against the older strains of the virus, still seem to provide excellent immune response against the new variants. Researchers looked at how antibodies bind to new variants of the coronavirus and found that people who were previously infected with coronavirus might be susceptible to the new strains, while people who were vaccinated were more likely to be protected.

COVID-19 vaccines offer a safe and reliable path to immunity against both the older strains of coronavirus and against emerging strains, especially the new delta variant.

Immunity after infection is unpredictable

Immunity comes from the immune system’s ability to remember an infection. Using this immune memory, the body will know how to fight off an infection if it encounters the pathogen again. Antibodies are proteins that can bind to a virus and prevent infection. T cells direct the removal of infected cells and viruses already bound by antibodies. These two are some of the main players that contribute to immunity.

After a SARS-CoV-2 infection, a person’s antibody and T cell responses can provide protection against reinfection. Roughly 84% to 91% of people who developed antibodies against the original strains of coronavirus were unlikely to be infected again for six months, even after a mild infection. People who had no symptoms during the infection are also likely to develop immunity, though they tend to make fewer antibodies than those who felt ill. So for some people, natural immunity may be strong and long-lasting.

One big problem is that not everyone will develop immunity after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. As many as 9% of infected people do not have detectable antibodies, and up to 7% don’t have T cells that recognize the virus 30 days after infection.

For people who do develop immunity, the strength and duration of the protection can vary a lot. Up to 5% of people may lose their immune protection within a few months. Without a strong immune defense, these people are susceptible to reinfection by the coronavirus. Some have had second bouts of COVID-19 as soon as one month after their first infection; and, though it occurs rarely, some people have been hospitalized or have even died after reinfection.

A growing problem is that people who were previously infected by strains present earlier in the pandemic may be more susceptible to reinfection from the delta variant. One recent study found that 12 months after infection, 88% of people still had antibodies that could block infection of cultured cells with by the original coronavirus variant – but fewer than 50% had antibodies that could block the delta variant.

To top this all off, a person who is infected may also be able to transmit the coronavirus, even without feeling sick. The new variants are especially problematic in this case, as they are more easily transmitted than the original strains.

Vaccination leads to reliable protection

COVID-19 vaccines generate both antibody and T cell responses – and these responses are much stronger and more consistent than immunity after natural infection. One study found that six months after receiving their first dose of the Moderna vaccine, 100% of people tested had antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. This is the longest period that has been reported in published studies so far. In a study looking at the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, antibody levels were also much higher in vaccinated people than in those who had recovered from infection.

[The Conversation’s most important coronavirus headlines, weekly in a science newsletter]

Even better, a study in Israel showed that the Pfizer vaccine blocked 90% of infections after both doses – even with new variants present in the population. And a decrease in infections means people are less likely to transmit the virus to the people around them.

For those who have already been infected with the coronavirus, there is still a big benefit to getting vaccinated. A study with the original COVID-19 virus showed that vaccination after infection produces roughly 100 times more antibodies than infection alone, and 100% of people who were vaccinated after infection had protective antibodies against the delta variant.

The COVID-19 vaccines aren’t perfect, but they produce strong antibody and T cell responses that offer a safer and more reliable means of protection than natural immunity – especially with new variants on the loose.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 25, 2021.

Jennifer T. Grier does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Five years since the Brexit vote and three since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we’re now familiar with the role that targeted political advertising can play in fomenting polarisation. It was revealed in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had used data harvested from 87 million Facebook profiles, without users’ consent, to help Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign target key voters with online adverts.

In the years since, we’ve learned how these kinds of targeted adverts can create political filter bubbles and echo chambers, suspected of dividing people and increasing the circulation of harmful disinformation.

But the vast majority of the ads exchanged online are commercial, not political. Commercial targeted advertising is the primary source of revenue in the internet economy, but we know little about how it affects us. We know our personal data is collected to support targeted advertising in a way that violates our privacy. But aside from privacy considerations, how else might targeting be harming us – and how could these harms be prevented?

These questions motivated our recent research. We found that online targeted advertising also divides and isolates us by preventing us from collectively flagging ads we object to. We do this in the physical world (perhaps when we see an advert at a bus stop or train station) by alerting regulators to harmful content. But online consumers are isolated because the information they see is limited to what is targeted at them.

Until we address this flaw, preventing targeted adverts from isolating us from the feedback of others, regulators won’t be able to protect us from online adverts that could cause us harm.

Due to the sheer volume of ads exchanged online, human supervisors cannot vet each campaign. So increasingly, machine learning algorithms screen the content of ads, predicting the likelihood that they may be harmful or fail to conform to standards. But these predictions can be biased, and they typically only ban the clearest violations. Among the many ads that pass these controls, a significant portion still contain potentially harmful content.

Traditionally, advertising standards authorities have taken a reactive approach to regulating advertising, relying upon consumer complaints. Take the 2015 case of Protein World’s “Beach Body” campaign, which was displayed across the London Underground on billboards featuring a bikini-clad model next to the words: “Are you beach body ready?” Many commuters complained, saying that it promoted harmful stereotypes. Shortly after, the ad was banned and a public probe into socially responsible advertising was launched.

Regulating adverts

The Protein World case illustrates how regulators work. Because they respond to consumer complaints, the regulator is open to considering how adverts conflict with perceived social norms. As social norms evolve over time, this helps regulators keep up with what the public considers to be harmful.

Consumers complained about the ad because they felt it promoted and normalised a harmful message. But it was reported that only 378 commuters raised complaints with the regulator, of the hundreds of thousands likely to have seen them. This raises the question: what about all the others? If the campaign had taken place online, people wouldn’t have seen posters defaced by disgruntled commuters and they may not have been prompted to question its message.

What’s more, if the ad could have been targeted to just the subset of consumers most receptive to its message, they might not have raised any complaints. As a result, the harmful message would have gone unchallenged, missing an opportunity for the regulator to update their guidelines in keeping with current social norms.

Sometimes ads are harmful in a specific context, as when ads for high-fat-content foods are targeted to children, or when gambling ads target those who suffer from a gambling addiction. Targeted ads can also harm by omission. This is the case, for example, if ads for shoes crowd out job ads or public health announcements that someone might find more useful or even vital.

These cases can be described as contextual harms: they’re not tied to specific content, but rather depend on the context in which the ad is presented to the consumer.

Machine learning algorithms are bad at identifying contextual harms. On the contrary, the way targeting works actually amplifies them. Several audits, for example, have uncovered how Facebook has allowed discriminatory targeting that worsens socioeconomic inequalities.

Digging deeper

The root cause of all these issues can be traced to the fact that consumers have a very isolated experience online. We call this a state of “epistemic fragmentation”, where the information available to each individual is limited to what is targeted at them, without the opportunity to compare with others in a shared space like the London Underground.

Because of personalised targeting, each of us sees different ads. This makes us more vulnerable. Ads can play on our personal vulnerabilities, or they can withhold opportunities from us that we never knew existed. Because we don’t know what other users are seeing, our ability to look out for other vulnerable people is also limited.

Currently, regulators are adopting a combination of two strategies to address these challenges. First, we see an increasing focus on educating consumers to give them “control” over how they’re targeted. Second, there’s a push towards monitoring ad campaigns proactively, automating screening mechanisms before ads are published online. Both of these strategies are too limited.

Instead, we should focus on restoring the role of consumers as active participants in the regulation of online advertising. This could be achieved by blunting the precision of targeting categories, by instituting targeting quotas, or by banning targeting altogether. This would ensure that at least a portion of online ads are seen by more diverse consumers, in a shared context where objections to them can be raised and shared.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, efforts were made by The Electoral Commission to prise open the hidden world of targeted political ads in the run up to the UK’s 2019 election. Some broadcasters asked their audience to send in targeted ads on their social media feeds, in order to share them with a wider audience. Campaign groups and academics were able to analyse targeting campaigns in greater detail, exposing where ads could be harmful or untrue.

These strategies could also be used for commercial targeted advertising, which would break the epistemic fragmentation that currently prevents us from collectively responding to harmful adverts. Our research shows it’s not just political targeting that produces harms – commercial targeting requires our attention too.

Silvia Milano received funding from Miami Foundation and Luminate Group.

Brent Mittelstadt has received funding from the British Academy, Miami Foundation, and Luminate Group.

Sandra Wachter received funding from the British Academy, Miami Foundation, and Luminate Group.

To Hell With Facebook:

The earliest known version of the idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back” was written by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury in 1677, though it was concerned with horses and feathers: For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the […]