Archives for May 2021

Vatican conference features Fauci, Francis — and Aerosmith

ROME (AP) — The CEOs of vaccine-makers Pfizer and Moderna joined cardinals, academics and the lead guitarist of Aerosmith in opening a unique Vatican conference on COVID-19, other global health threats and how science, solidarity and spirituality can address them.

The three-day online conference, which began Thursday and ends Saturday with a virtual audience with Pope Francis, was planned well before the pandemic erupted last year.

Organizers said the event has only taken on more relevance amid a growing appreciation of the need for global access to health care, new advances in vaccine technology and greater understanding of the mental health cost of loneliness.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who leads the U.S. pandemic response, opened the meeting by saying the pandemic had confirmed to him that faith and science are constantly evolving — and that scientists in particular must humbly admit they don’t have all the answers all the time.

One answer the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said he did have was that the key to overcoming current vaccine hesitancy is pairing the right medical message with the right messenger.

“You have someone who’s a deeply religious person who will listen to their clergy. That’s different than me with a suit going into an area telling people to do something,” he said.

Fauci was referring to the religiously inspired resistance to taking COVID-19 vaccines that were indirectly developed using lines of cells derived from aborted fetuses. The Vatican has declared that all COVID-19 vaccines are not only morally licit, but that people have a moral responsibility to get the jabs to protect others.

The multidisciplinary conference was originally scheduled to take place at the Vatican in May 2020 but was postponed a year and eventually put online due to the pandemic.

The virtual format, however, has allowed for an even greater variety of participants.

A Harvard neuroscientist is leading a conversation about brain health and rock stars with Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. Soprano Rene Fleming is participating in a panel discussion on the role of music in treating cardiac patients. Supermodel Cindy Crawford has a slot to talk about “beauty from the inside out,” and Chelsea Clinton is teaming up with an Italian public health official to promote equal access to health care.

Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla told the conference in recorded remarks that the race to produce a COVID-19 vaccine had created unprecedented examples of collaboration and efficiency. He recalled that Pfizer didn’t have a final commercial agreement signed with its development partner, German firm BioNTech, until January – after Pfizer-BioNTech jabs were already going into arms.

Bourla recalled he and BioNTech’s chief executive, Dr. Ugur Sahin, did a virtual handshake “through the Zoom camera” and got to work.

“They shared their intellectual property with us, we shared our intellectual property with them,” he said. “Agreements that will gather billions of dollars were just put on hold just to make sure that we are all focusing on making the vaccine happen.”

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel, for his part, said the Trump administration’s vaccine development drive, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, allowed Moderna to not only clear regulatory hurdles faster than usual but to take business risks it normally wouldn’t have because it had government funding.

The fact that mRNA vaccines have now been approved for use by federal regulators will only spur more development in the new technology, Bancel said.

“Today, we know that we can get an mRNA vaccine authorized by the regulator. And in business, (the difference) between believing and knowing is a huge difference in your willingness to take the risk,” he said.

The conference, which featured prominent U.S. journalists as moderators and academics in a variety of fields, also had a religious component. Rabbis, cardinals, imams and representatives of Christian denominations are discussing the role of religion and spirituality in health.

It’s the fifth time the Vatican’s culture ministry has teamed up with the Cura Foundation to mount a conference that aims to pair advances in science and technology with ideas about how to deliver them effectively, efficiently and at a lower cost.

“People are very focused on the pandemic. It’s changed our lives in many, many ways. But there are also other areas of our health that are impacted,” said Dr. Robin Smith, the Cura Foundation’s founder and president.

The goal of the conference, she said, is to put aside political, religious and ideological differences and focus on improving health care around the globe.

“We really want to sort of check all that at the door and say, ‘How can you make a difference? How can we help?’”

Florida gov signs GOP voting law critics call ‘un-American’

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a wide-ranging list of new voting restrictions into law Thursday, staging a misleading, made-for-TV ceremony meant to tout his credentials on a top priority for the Republican Party’s conservative base.

At a live bill-signing event aired exclusively on Fox News, DeSantis said the new law would prevent fraud and restore confidence in Florida’s elections — although the state has found no evidence of widespread fraud. The move made Florida the latest GOP-led state to enact tighter voting rules over the objections of Democratic critics who charge the law only makes it harder for people, particularly the elderly and people of color, to vote.

But DeSantis’ unusual promotion of the bill — on the GOP-friendly morning show Fox & Friends — demonstrated the rising Republican leader’s confidence the new law would only boost his standing.

“Right now I have what we think is the strongest election integrity measures in the country,” the governor said.

Florida’s new law restricts when ballot drop boxes can be used, and who can collect ballots — and how many. It mandates that drop boxes must be guarded, and available only when elections offices and early voting sites are open. To protect against what Republicans call “ballot harvesting,” someone can only collect and return the ballots of immediate family, and no more than two from unrelated people.

“I’m actually going to sign it right here,” DeSantis said as he signed a piece of paper live on television.

A spokesperson for the governor, Taryn Fenske, said later that DeSantis did not sign the actual bill on camera and that the event was purely ceremonial. No other media outlets were advised of the bill signing or allowed in.

Even Fox News appeared taken aback by the stunt. It later issued a statement saying it had booked DeSantis’ appearance on its program “as an interview and not as a live bill signing. Neither the network, nor the show, requested or mandated the event be exclusive to Fox News Media entities.”

Fox News is clearly the network of choice for Republican politicians, as Donald Trump illustrated time and again during his presidency, but staging a semi-official event for Fox’s cameras is highly unusual.

Still, it wasn’t the first time the governor, who is up for reelection next year and is widely viewed as a potential presidential candidate in 2024, has used Fox for photo ops before.

In January, the governor found himself backtracking after a Fox appearance in which he claimed that a 100-year-old World War II veteran he invited with him would be the 1 millionth senior in his state to get a COVID-19 vaccine shot in the arm. In fact, it took several more days for the state to hit that milestone. DeSantis’ office later said the event was meant to be symbolic of the achievement.

On Thursday, the governor did not acknowledge the theatrics. He celebrated “a wonderful bill signing for this great elections bill” that “millions” could watch, including Floridians.

DeSantis’ critics pounced. Democratic U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, a former Florida governor who announced this week that he is seeking to challenge DeSantis, tweeted, “This is the difference between @GovRonDeSantis and me. He locks out the public and caters to Fox News. When I was Governor, everyone was invited in — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. And when I’m Governor again, this will be a Florida for all.”

Another potential Democratic rival for the governor’s mansion, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, blasted DeSantis for the staged signing.

“He is using Fox News as a state news source,” she said during her own news conference.

In recent months, DeSantis has tried to burnish his credentials with his party’s base. He pushed through an “anti-riot” bill, which he signed last month, that was clearly aimed at the Black Lives Matter movement that roiled the country over the summer. He is also expected to soon sign into law a measure that would punish social media companies that, he claims, censor conservatives.

The elections law clearly plays into that strategy.

It’s the latest victory in the nationwide push by Republicans to restrict access to the polls, which party leaders say is necessary to deter fraud. The campaign has been fueled by former President Donald Trump’s false claim that his reelection was stolen from him, an assertion widely repeated across the GOP. Florida’s Republican legislators passed this law — without a single Democratic vote.

Voter advocates assailed the elections law as a blatant attempt to impede access to the polls so Republicans might retain an advantage.

“The legislation has a deliberate and disproportionate impact on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students and communities of color. It’s a despicable attempt by a one party ruled legislature to choose who can vote in our state and who cannot. It’s undemocratic, unconstitutional, and un-American,” said Patricia Brigham, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.

The league joined the Black Voters Matter Fund, the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans and others in assailing the new law in a federal lawsuit filed minutes after the signing. A separate federal suit filed in Tallahassee by the NAACP and Common Cause also says the law targets people who are Black, Latino or disabled.

“For far too long, Florida’s lawmakers and elected officials have created a vast array of hurdles that have made it more difficult for these and other voters to make their voices heard,” these groups said.

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Bauder, the AP’s media writer, reported from New York. AP Writer Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee contributed to this story.

Follow Bobby Caina Calvan at https://twitter.com/BobbyCalvan

NY: Broadband cos paid for 8.5M fake net neutrality comments

The Office of the New York Attorney General said in a new report that a campaign funded by the broadband industry submitted millions of fake comments supporting the 2017 repeal of net neutrality.

The Federal Communications Commission’s contentious 2017 repeal undid Obama-era rules that barred internet service providers from slowing or blocking websites and apps or charging companies more for faster speeds to consumers. The industry had sued to stop these rules during the Obama administration but lost.

The proceeding generated a record-breaking number of comments — more than 22 million — and nearly 18 million were fake, the attorney general’s office found. It has long been known that the tally included fake comments.

One 19-year-old in California submitted more than 7.7 million pro-net neutrality comments. The attorney general’s office did not identify the origins of another “distinct group” of more than 1.6 million pro-net neutrality comments, many of which used mailing addresses outside the U.S.

A broadband industry group, called Broadband for America, spent $4.2 million generating more than 8.5 million of the fake FCC comments. Half a million fake letters were also sent to Congress.

The goal of the broadband industry campaign, according to internal documents the attorney general’s office received, was to make it seem like there was “widespread grassroots support” for the repeal of net neutrality that could give the FCC chairman at the time, Ajit Pai, “volume and intellectual cover” for the repeal.

The agency is supposed to use the comments it receives, from industry and public-industry groups and the public, to shape how it makes its rules.

The FCC did not immediately answer how or if it has changed its commenting process, but the acting chairwoman, Jessica Rosenworcel, said in a prepared statement that “widespread problems with the record” of the 2017 proceedings “was troubling at the time” and the agency has to learn and improve the commenting process.

The fake comments had high-profile victims. In 2018, two senators, Democrat Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, said their identities were stolen to file fake comments for the net neutrality proceeding. “We were among those whose identities were misused to express viewpoints we do not hold,” they wrote to the FCC’s then-chairman, Pai, asking him to investigate the fake comments.

Many expect the FCC to try to reinstate net neutrality rules once a third Democratic commissioner is appointed. The agency is currently split half Democrat and Republican, which makes undoing the repeal unlikely.

Broadband for America’s website says its members include AT&T and Comcast as well as major trade groups for the wireless, cable and telecom industries.

The campaign hired companies known as lead generators which created the fake comments, but that the attorney general’s office had not found evidence that the broadband companies had “direct knowledge of fraud” and thus they had not violated New York law, according to the report.

Still, the report criticized the broadband industry group’s behavior as “troubling,” saying the campaign organizers ignored red flags and hid the broadband industry’s involvement.

The lead generators copied names and addresses they had already collected and said those people had agreed to join the campaign against net neutrality, the report said. One company copied information that had been stolen in a data breach and posted online.

The attorney general, Letitia James, also announced agreements with three of the companies that were responsible for millions of the fake comments, Fluent Inc., Opt-Intelligence Inc. and React2Media Inc., that require them to change practices in future advocacy campaigns and pay $4.4 million in fines. The companies did not reply to requests for comment.

The attorney general’s office and other law enforcement agencies are still investigating ″other responsible parties,” according to the report.

AT&T, Comcast and industry trade groups NCTA and USTelecom did not respond to questions.

Study: Residents left big metros during pandemic for family

Cece Linder was living in a 770-square-foot apartment outside Washington, D.C., last spring when the area went into lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In May 2020, after a few months of both living and working in the small space, Linder decided to leave the capital area and move into the 2,000-square-foot (186-square-meter) beachside home she jointly owns with her parents in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Now she gets to see the sunrise over the water each morning before work.

“If I’m teleworking anyway, why not move to this other place that is more visually attractive, it’s beachside, and someone can occasionally cook for me?” Linder said. “Though that didn’t exactly work out. My mom has me cooking for them.”

Linder was not alone in her thinking. According to a new study and data from the U.S. Census Bureau, she was one of thousands of people who migrated out of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas and into smaller ones during the pandemic.

The study found that, like Linder, many of the migrants weren’t driven by new jobs or weather — or even a fear of the virus — but a desire to be closer to family and a freedom to make it happen because of remote working. Although the pattern of people moving from larger to smaller cities has been going on for several years, the pandemic exacerbated that trend, said Peter Haslag of Vanderbilt University, who conducted the study on migrant motivations with Daniel Weagley of Georgia Tech. Their paper has not yet been published.

The data adds to understanding of how the pandemic has changed where and how Americans live. The moves were most common among those with higher incomes and more job flexibility. If the trends continue, it could have long-term implications for real estate markets, tax bases and the wealth inequality in cities, according to researchers.

“For us, the question is, is this a temporary blip or is it going to continue?” Haslag said. “If work-from-home really is going to be a factor in job and company decisions, and by allowing work and location to be separate decisions, people are going to be able to optimize their locations, if they have the right jobs.”

The Census Bureau data shows that the New York metro area — which was hit early by the new coronavirus — declined by about 108,000 residents, or 0.5%. Roughly 216,000 residents moved out of the metropolitan area, but the natural increase from births and gains in international migration offset the departures. The New York metro area has experienced decelerated growth over the past several years, but last year’s decline was a bigger bite of the Big Apple than in 2019, when it lost 60,000 residents.

The nation’s next largest metro areas — Los Angeles and Chicago — also experienced greater population declines last year compared to the previous year: around 0.5% last year compared to 0.3% in 2019 for both metros. San Francisco also had a drop of around 0.5% last year compared to a 0.1% gain in 2019.

“I think some core urban counties like Manhattan, San Francisco and others may have taken a bigger brunt of pandemic-related out-movement, as well as lower immigration,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. “Overall, it was a year of slow growth with selective movement out of some urban centers.”

Smaller metros in the Sun Belt and West, several with large communities of vacation homes, saw the biggest population gains last year, mostly driven by migration. Led by the Florida retirement community The Villages, the metros seeing population increases between 3% and 4% included St. George, Utah; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Sun Belt megalopolises, such as Dallas, Houston and Phoenix, also grew last year, though not as much as their smaller cousins.

The Census Bureau data captured changes in states, metros and counties between July 1, 2019, and July 1, 2020. The last third of that time-frame overlapped with the first three months of the spread of the virus in the U.S. Population-change estimates are different from the 2020 census, a head count of every U.S. resident that determines how many congressional seats each state gets. Those numbers were released last week. Population changes are estimated using data on births, deaths and migration.

Haslag and Weagley estimate that 10% to 20% of the 300,000 interstate moves they studied between April 2020 and February 2021 were influenced by the pandemic. Their study used four years of long-distance moving data obtained from UniGroup, the parent company of United Van Lines and Mayflower Transit.

Job-related reasons for moving dropped from 46.6% of responses before the pandemic to 34.5% after the start of the pandemic in the U.S. in March 2020, while the desire to be closer to family jumped from 24.7% to 29.9%. The researchers theorized the jump for family reasons was due to people wanting to create social “bubbles” with family members, and the drop in job-related reasons was due to remote working and the decoupling of jobs from offices.

“It’s not really about the infection rate when it comes to moving. It’s about all the other things that came with the pandemic, whether it was to be closer to family or work from home,” Haslag said. “That was really surprising to us.”

Higher-income households moved less because of job loss or to take a new job than for other reasons such as lifestyle or the ability to work remotely. In fact, 75% of those who cited the ability to work remotely had annual households earnings of $100,000 or more. Lower-income households were more likely to move for financial reasons such as job loss or to move to a place with a lower cost of living, the researchers said.

David Mann and his wife, Lauren, had been wanting to move to the U.S. southeast from Dallas to be closer to family and friends for some time, but it was the pandemic that made it possible. Knowing they could work from home in their jobs in supply-chain consulting and merchandise planning, they made the leap and moved to Atlanta last summer.

“Working from home gave us the opportunity to move without having to look for new jobs,” Mann said.

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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

Facebook’s oversight board: Watchdog or distraction?

Facebook’s oversight board, which on Wednesday upheld the company’s ban of former President Donald Trump, also had some harsh words for the company. Calling Facebook’s indefinite ban of Trump a “vague, standardless penalty,” the board accused Facebook — its corporate sponsor — of seeking to ”avoid its responsibilities” by asking its quasi-independent oversight group to resolve the issue.

But critics aren’t convinced that the board’s decision represents a triumph of independence or accountability. Many, in fact, see its narrow focus on one-off content issues as a distraction from deeper problems such as Facebook’s massive power, its shadowy algorithms that can amplify hate and misinformation, and more serious and complicated questions about government regulation.

“It’s much easier to talk about Donald Trump” than about Facebook’s business, said Color Of Change President Rashad Robinson, a longtime critic of Facebook. “They want to keep us in conversation about this piece of content or that piece of content, that this is about freedom of speech rather than about algorithms amplifying certain types of content, which has nothing to do with freedom of speech.”

The board, Robinson said, is “is a ruse to stave off regulatory action.”

Coming after months of deliberation and nearly 10,000 public comments on the matter, the board’s decision on Trump told Facebook to specify how long the suspension of his account would last, saying that its “indefinite” ban on Trump was unreasonable. The ruling, which gives Facebook six months to comply, effectively postpones any possible Trump reinstatement and puts the onus for that decision squarely back on the company.

“They made the right choice,” said Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA officer who worked for six months in 2018 as Facebook’s global head for election-integrity operations for political advertising and is now a researcher at Betalab.

But the focus on the oversight-board process, she said, gives Facebook exactly what it wants. “We’re diverting our time, attention and energy away from the more important discussion about how to hold the company accountable for their own tools, designs and business decisions that helped spread dangerous conspiracy theories,” she said.

Facebook said it has publicly made clear that the oversight board is not a replacement for regulation.

“We established the independent Oversight Board to apply accountability and scrutiny of our actions,” the company said in a statement. “It is the first body of its kind in the world: an expert-led independent organization with the power to impose binding decisions on a private social media company.”

One major source of concern among Facebook critics: The oversight board reported that the company refused to answer detailed questions about how its technical features and advertising-based business model might also amplify extremism. The watchdog group Public Citizen said it was troubling that Facebook declined, for instance, to say how its news feed affected the visibility of Trump’s posts.

“Not everybody sees what any individual posts, so the algorithms decide who sees it, how they see it, when they see it and Facebook presumably has all kinds of information about the engagement levels,” said Robert Weissman, the group’s president. “The company owes us all a post mortem on the way Facebook is used and operated — did it amplify what Trump was saying and contribute to the insurrection.”

Another worry: How Facebook’s actions resonate overseas. The board looks at whether Facebook’s decisions are accountable to international human rights norms as well as the company’s own policies.

“The question that everybody’s asking is if Facebook is in a lucrative market and is confronted with a political leader who incites violence, will Facebook choose human rights and human safety above its bottom line?” said Chinmayi Arun, a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. “It’s fair to say a former U.S. president is not the only world leader seen as inciting violence.”

Facebook created the oversight panel to rule on thorny content issues following widespread criticism of its mishandling of misinformation, hate speech and nefarious influence campaigns on its platform. The Trump decision was the board’s 10th since it began taking on cases late last year. The board’s nine previous decisions have tended to favor free expression over the restriction of content.

The company funds the board through an “independent trust.” Its 20 members, which will eventually grow to 40, include a former prime minister of Denmark, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian newspaper, plus legal scholars, human rights experts and journalists. The first four board members were directly chosen by Facebook. Those four then worked with Facebook to select additional members.

Facebook’s most prominent critics — including misinformation researchers, academics and activists — are notably missing from the roster.

“These are very smart and capable people who put themselves on this board,” Robinson said. But, he said, “the oversight board is a bunch of Mark Zuckerberg consultants. He hired them, he paid for them and he can get rid of them if he wants to.”

Board spokesman Dex Hunter-Torricke urged critics to judge the board on the decisions it makes.

“This is not a group of people who feel any obligation to go soft on the company,” said Hunter-Torricke, who previously served as a speechwriter for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In Wednesday’s decision, he added, “the board has very clearly said Facebook broke the rules as well as Mr. Trump, and that’s not appropriate.”

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Associated Press Writer David Klepper contributed to this story.

Archives for May 2021

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