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The Catholic Bishops� Brawl Over Denying Joe Biden Communion

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:21:24 +0300

he workings of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have once again become headline news, as the members, after airing sharp differences among themselves in an online meeting, approved a plan, released last Friday, to draft a �teaching document� about the role of the Eucharist and about their dealings with Catholic politicians who support abortion rights�in particular, President Joe Biden.

The plan raised the dramatic prospect that the nation�s second Catholic President, a faithful Sunday churchgoer, would not be allowed to go to the front of the altar and receive the Eucharist�the act at the center of the Mass, which represents the believer�s communion with Christ and the Church. The plan was interpreted by the press and by the bishops themselves as a sign of deep divisions in American Catholicism; it thrust the conference �into the very heart of the toxic partisan strife� of electoral politics, as Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark put it. And it left many Catholics bewildered: How can it be that the Church here is putting President Biden in the dock, while last month Catholic officials in London abruptly cleared Westminster Cathedral for the wedding of two baptized Catholics, the twice-divorced Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his live-in paramour, who bore their child last year?

The U.S. bishops� immediate motive is clear: they want to send a message that to be a Catholic is to oppose legal abortion. The battle, though, is about much more. It is a sign of the traditionalists� profound anxiety about the stature of the Church and its leaders in public life�an anxiety akin to that of white working-class Trumpists about their stature in a changing American society. But it is also, strangely, a sign of openness: it suggests that under Pope Francis the Church hierarchy is finally coming clean as a group of men with differing points of view, shaped by alliances and compromises, and led by a pope who has forsworn the papal prerogative to shut down conflict by authoritarian means.

The last time the bishops� conference got this much attention was in February, 2004, when the prelates released a report on priestly sexual abuse�two years after allegations of widespread abuse and an official coverup in the archdiocese of Boston had become a matter of national scandal. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, of Belleville, Illinois, who was the president of the conference, presented the report in terms that suggested that the scandal had passed. �I assure you that known offenders are not in ministry,� he said. �The terrible history recorded here is history.� The Times printed his remarks on the front page.

The same year, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a Catholic, was his party�s presumptive candidate for the White House, against President George W. Bush. As with Biden today, traditionalists, led by Raymond Burke, the archbishop of St. Louis, raised the prospect of denying Kerry the Eucharist because he supported the legal right to an abortion. That June, the bishops took up a proposal to restrict politicians� access to Communion on that basis. After some temperate internal debate�and a letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., on the topic�the conference decided to leave matters in the hands of local bishops, rather than address it as a group. But, in the process, public attention was shifted away from the bishops� handling of sexual abuse and toward their supervision of Mass and the sacraments.

The pattern is now repeating itself, with crucial differences. Again the bishops have been disgraced by allegations of clerical sexual abuse: this time, multiple acts of abuse of minors committed beginning in the nineteen-seventies by McCarrick himself, and detailed in a Vatican-commissioned report, the release of which last November led his eventual successor�Wilton Gregory, now a cardinal�to speak of �dark corners of our church of which I am deeply ashamed and profoundly angry�again.� (McCarrick, who was defrocked in 2019, has denied the allegations.) In what can be seen as another attempt to reclaim lost authority, traditionalists are once more asserting that support for abortion rights makes politicians �unworthy� to receive the Eucharist. But, this time, the politician who is the focus of that effort is the President, not a candidate. This time, the Pope is not Benedict but Francis, a moderate whose reluctance to join in the culture wars leaves traditionalists vexed. And, this time, the traditionalists are prevailing.

Their campaign began with the formation of a working group shortly after Biden defeated Donald Trump, whom traditionalist Catholic leaders had openly courted as a come-lately opponent of abortion and an appointer of conservative judges. It hardened on Inauguration Day, when the current president of the bishops� conference, Archbishop José H. Gomez, of Los Angeles, put out a statement denouncing the new President�s plans to further the �moral evils� of abortion rights and gay rights�whereas Pope Francis sent Biden a telegram of congratulations. Gomez�s statement sparked an unprecedented open disagreement in the hierarchy this spring, as bishops took to stating their own positions, in the press and on social media. Bishop Robert McElroy, of San Diego, writing in the Jesuit magazine America, �warned against letting the sacrament be �weaponized,� � citing Pope Francis�s 2013 statement that the Eucharist is �not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.� Meanwhile, Charles Chaput, the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, resorting to the �rights talk� that conservatives used to despise, wrote in the conservative journal First Things that, when the likes of Joe Biden receive Communion, �they not only put their own souls in grave jeopardy but�just as grievously�they also violate the rights of Catholics who do seek to live their faith authentically.�

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Cardinal Gregory�who now, as the archbishop of Washington, is the President�s local bishop�has made clear that he will not bar Biden from the sacrament, so the argument is somewhat academic. (Biden, at a press conference last Friday, said of the proposal, �I don�t think that�s going to happen.�) But it�s an argument that the traditionalists are determined to continue. In May, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican�s doctrinal office, sent a letter to the head of the conference recommending that the bishops undertake �extensive and serene dialogue� among themselves and with Catholic politicians, rather than putting the matter to a vote at the June meeting. They put it to a vote anyway, and, after a couple of hours of testy virtual debate, approved the planned document, 168�55, with six abstentions. Traditionalists accused moderates of trying to �filibuster,� with a call to wait for an in-person discussion at their next meeting, in November. Moderates warned traditionalists of mission creep and overreach. Prelates on each side accused those on the other of playing politics with the stuff of faith.

The controversy is plainly political. First of all, the document is likely to be released prior to the 2022 midterm elections, enabling traditionalists to cast aspersions on Democratic Catholic political figures�among others, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, and Representative Ted Lieu, both California liberals. Meanwhile, it confirms a decades-long shift in the bishops� role from local potentates to media-ready actors in the national political realm. But the shift shows not the strengthening of Catholic clerical authority in American life but the waning of it. For the most part, especially in the wake of priest sex-abuse scandals, American bishops no longer enjoy positions of prestige as community leaders, teachers, or shepherds of their flocks. Having failed to persuade their congregations about abortion�nearly seventy per cent of American Catholics don�t want Roe V. Wade to be overturned�traditionalist bishops have joined forces with hard-charging Republican legislators and legal theorists funded by the corporate right, making freedom of religion the linchpin in conservative grievances about gay rights, federally organized health care, and restrictions on campaign donations and political advocacy.

Nowhere is the decline of clerical authority in ordinary Catholic life more evident than in the sacrament of the Eucharist. In the middle of the past century, Sunday Mass was the vital center of American Catholic life, preceded by weekly confession. (You needed a priest to forgive your sins, so as to be fit to receive Communion on Sunday.) Then, in the years after the Second Vatican Council concluded, in 1965, people stopped going to confession (the reasons are complex, involving everything from fresh interpretations of the nature of sin to the introduction of psychology and other forms of self-examination in Catholic culture); and, as they did, priests lost the everyday power to judge their actions, mete out penance, and grant forgiveness. Sunday Mass has remained the center of Catholic life, but Catholics� belief that the consecrated bread is the actual body of Christ has declined to the point where a 2019 Pew poll found that only a third of Catholics held it. It follows that, if Catholics are less prone to believe that the Eucharist is the actual body of Christ than they once were, they�re also less prone to believe that they must be deemed free of mortal sin by a priest in order to receive it.

The pandemic compounded these developments. All at once, people couldn�t assemble en masse for Mass. Priests held online services, but the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist couldn�t be reproduced virtually. Meanwhile, the government restriction on public gatherings in houses of worship became a political issue: the bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio (who faces two allegations of sexual abuse of minors, dating from the seventies, which he has denied), sued Governor Andrew Cuomo to allow houses of worship to open more fully, on religious-freedom grounds. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, and, in November, DiMarzio prevailed, 5�4, with the newly appointed Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic, joining the majority. Still, it may be that the habit of weekly Mass will fall away as the habit of confession did after Vatican II. In 2019, about forty per cent of American Catholics still went to Mass every week; it is as yet hard to tell whether empty spaces in the pews represent lingering precautionary measures or evidence of further decline.

The traditionalists� campaign about Communion is having an unintended consequence: the sight of bishops strenuously disagreeing with one another has affirmed the long-denied fact that the hierarchy operates according to raw political dynamics. When Benedict XVI resigned in 2013�becoming the first Pope to do so since 1415�episcopal politics, typically practiced behind closed doors and sotto voce, were brought out into the open. If it is no longer to be presumed that a Pope will rule until he dies, it�s less unseemly for the bishops to be seen trying to shape the Church that the next Pope will lead. Francis, who was elected after Benedict�s resignation, clearly understands this. He has promoted a view of the Church as a dynamic entity, saying that it should sponsor �processes� that encourage dialogue, rather than maintain formal structures (�spaces,� he calls them) for their own sake. The fact that he is standing aside as the U.S. bishops quarrel over abortion politics is evidence that he is committed to this view, even if the traditionalists seek to undermine his efforts to address climate change, immigration, and inter-religious dialogue.

The traditionalists are acting within their rights. In ignoring the C.D.F.�s warning, they behaved much as some moderate bishops did when they distanced themselves from a harsh statement against same-sex unions that the C.D.F. issued in March. Yet their plan is both hard-hearted and shortsighted. Such influence as the bishops exercise in public life derives from the fact that they lead a church full of people like Biden�Catholics who, unlike the bishops, bring experience as laypeople, spouses, and parents to bear on their faith. It is a Church whose roughly seventy million U.S. members hold a range of positions on legal abortion, with significant numbers not merely tolerating it but supporting it, in that it recognizes profound decisions about childbearing as a matter of individual conscience.

Cardinal Ladaria, in his letter, advised the bishops that the standard of Eucharistic worthiness should be applied to �all the faithful, rather than only one category of Catholics��not just to politicians, that is. And he stressed that abortion shouldn�t be seen as a �grave matter� to the exclusion of other issues. That position gives rise to rhetorical questions: Why shouldn�t the bishops seek to withhold the Eucharist from all Catholics whose views on abortion are akin to Biden�s�or who use birth control, or who live with their partners and have sex before marriage, as Boris Johnson clearly did? Catholics have been answering such questions in their own ways. On Twitter, Ted Lieu dared the Church to withhold the Eucharist from him because of his liberal positions on a number of issues. On Sunday morning, an old friend�a financier, a Catholic-school trustee, a wearer of vested suits, as buttoned-down as they come�texted me a photo of his Mass collection envelope, on which he�d written that he was withholding the weekly donation he makes to his parish in a New York City suburb owing to the controversy.

How will the controversy be resolved, and what kind of American Catholicism will it sponsor? It�s possible to imagine a Church in which people, prejudged as unworthy, stay seated in the pews on Sunday rather than approach the altar to receive Communion�or just stay away from Mass altogether, in their recognition that support for legal abortion, divorce, gay rights, and the like are not weaknesses in need of healing but positions held in conscience. In fact, such an image of the Church resembles the Church as it actually is�one whose size and diversity and variety in the expressions of the faithful are key sources of the authority that the bishops claim for themselves.

New York City�s Mayoral Election Didn�t Meet the Moment

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:20:27 +0300

n Tuesday night, the polls closed and the counting began in New York City�s municipal primaries. Eric Adams, the ex-cop turned Brooklyn borough president, attracted more than thirty per cent of first-choice votes in the Democratic Party mayoral primary, with Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia both topping twenty per cent, and Andrew Yang trailing, with less than twelve per cent. The final results won�t be known for weeks�the city�s election officials will give absentee ballots another week to come in by mail, and then allow more time for voters to �cure� any errors or issues with their ballots�but the results were enough for Yang to concede, and for Adams to deliver a bullish speech to supporters at his primary-night party at a Williamsburg night club. �There�s going to be twos and threes and fours,� Adams said, referring to the ballot counting and sorting to come as part of the city�s new ranked-choice voting system. �But there�s something else we know: New York City said, �Our first choice is Eric Adams.� �

Until quite recently, New Yorkers had to click the right hyperlinks to even find the mayor�s race. The winter surge in covid-19-infection numbers made in-person campaigning impossible, so the candidates�thirteen eventually qualified for the ballot in the Democratic primary, the winner of which will become the presumptive mayor-elect�spent months attending one Zoom forum after another, nodding and smiling like members of the Brady Bunch. In early May, when the pandemic receded and the weather turned, the candidates emerged, blinking, into the open air, and proceeded to spend the next six weeks running around town trying to politically strangle one another. That was the race: a long, dull beginning; a short, hostile ending; and little in between.

What the ending would look like became evident over Mother�s Day weekend. That Saturday, according to the N.Y.P.D., two brothers selling CDs in Times Square got into an argument. One pulled out a gun and started firing. He missed his brother but hit three passersby, including a four-year-old girl in a stroller. Within hours, Adams held a press conference at the scene to decry a spike in shootings that has coincided with the pandemic. The next day, Yang, who was then considered the candidate to beat, held his own press conference in Times Square. �There�s nothing more fundamental than the ability to walk in your own neighborhood with your family without fear,� Yang, who lives nearby, in Hell�s Kitchen, said. Adams saw an opening. He returned to the scene later that day to criticize Yang and embrace the mantle of the law-and-order candidate. �It should not have taken gunshots blocks from his home before he said, �Let me listen to what the most qualified person in this mayor�s race has been saying,� � Adams said, warning that the city risked returning to the high-crime days of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. �The enemy is winning, and we are waving a big white flag of surrender.�

That crime in the city over all was still at historic lows didn�t matter. The spike in shootings was real. The news was full of accounts of disturbing attacks on people of Asian and Jewish descent, and of slashings and other horrors in the subway. Polls began to show crime leapfrogging covid-19 as the top issue on voters� minds and Adams, correspondingly, rising in voters� estimation.

A year ago, after the police murder of George Floyd and weeks of Black Lives Matter protests, it seemed like the city might seek a leader capable of transforming, or at least standing up to, the N.Y.P.D. Instead, during the final rounds of official debates, the candidates were asked, again and again, about �public safety.� Adams, who first gained prominence in the city, in the nineteen-nineties, as a cop willing to speak out against racist and abusive policing, staked a position as a full-throated defender of the necessity of cops on the streets. He was in his comfort zone. None of the other candidates ever figured out a way to effectively offer an alternative argument. At a time when many New Yorkers expressed wariness about taking the subway, the language of �defund the police� was deemed a political liability. �We�re in a very precarious position,� Al Sharpton, the civil-rights leader, told the Times. �People are afraid of the cops and the robbers. We have both of them that we�ve got to deal with. And anyone that cannot come up with a comprehensive plan that threads the needle of both should not be running for mayor.�

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All other issues shrank in the face of the public-safety debate. Little time was given to discussion of public health, for instance, despite a pandemic that is still infecting hundreds of New Yorkers a day, or climate change, despite how little has been done to protect the city since Hurricane Sandy, in 2012. Most of the candidates� campaign platforms contained detailed, serious policy plans on a range of issues, including housing, education, and economic development, and most of the candidates could discuss those details competently in public. But few of these details filtered out to voters. On Sunday, two days before primary day, Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner who made climate resilience a centerpiece of her campaign, shook hands with voters outside Zabar�s, on the Upper West Side, where one would expect to find many voters open to her pragmatic, get-stuff-done attitude. �A bunch of people tell her they�re voting for her,� Politico�s Erin Durkin tweeted from the scene, �though one woman vocally noted she�s for @ericadamsfornyc �because he�s a vegan and that�s the #1 thing you can do to save the planet.� �

Every candidate in the race had obvious political flaws. Yang has no government experience and seemed torn between playing the rah-rah city cheerleader and the transactional champion of the business class. Adams had long been considered a crank by many people in New York politics, and his coziness with donors and the strangeness of his personality became fodder for reporters. Garcia, whose long record in city government helped earn her the endorsement of the Times, had little to contribute to the public-safety debate and proved incapable of making the race about the issues she�s strongest on. Wiley, a former top City Hall lawyer, consolidated support from the city�s progressives, but only at the very end of the race, after splitting endorsements and public support with two other candidates, Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales, who wound up seeing their campaigns sunk by allegations of sexual misconduct and a campaign-staff revolt, respectively. Wiley�s candidacy felt like a second choice, because, for many, it was.

The new ranked-choice voting system meant that voters got to pick as many as five candidates by order of preference. Ranked-choice voting is supposed to make elections more nuanced, more civil, and less polarized. But, by primary day, the Democrats running for mayor seemed fine being sorted into the same two broad ideological groups, the moderates and the progressives, that have fought over the future of their party since the 2016 Presidential election. What the race ended up lacking was any kind of coherent public debate between these two camps. For months, campaign operatives and other political observers said that the candidates were avoiding direct confrontation with their opponents in order to preserve �broad appeal� among the electorate, the thinking being that any candidate could be the second choice of any other candidates� voters. But no candidate in the race proved capable of straddling multiple disparate constituencies. Even Adams, who banked on support from Black voters in the outer boroughs, attracted less than a third of first-choice votes in a low-turnout, closed party primary.

Ranked-choice voting also helped explain why none of the candidates who qualified for the ballot dropped out, even after it was clear that the race was down to less than a half-dozen contenders. Shaun Donovan, a former Cabinet secretary, and Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive, stuck it out until the end, taking up time during the debates and, in McGuire�s case, raising so much money from his allies on Wall Street that it prompted the city�s campaign finance board to increase the spending caps for other candidates by $3.6 million.

In the end, the candidates turned nasty anyway. Yang and Garcia agreed to campaign together in the race�s closing days, which Adams denounced as a racist plot to deny him victory. His campaign issued statements from supporters echoing that sentiment, including one from Ashley Sharpton, Al Sharpton�s daughter, calling the Yang-Garica alliance an attempt to �steal the election from us.� Not to be outdone, Yang, who never seemed to grasp why he�d gone from a well-liked Presidential long shot to a divisive mayoral contender, spent the last days of the campaign talking about people in need as eyesores. �We all see these mentally ill people on our streets and subways, and you know who else sees them? Tourists,� he said, during a radio interview. �And then they don�t come back, and they tell their friends, �Don�t go to New York City.� � The last days of the race were a frenzy of calculated and desperate gambits, and no one could say whether they even made sense on a tactical level. �I can see the logic,� Eric Phillips, a former City Hall spokesperson, told Politico, about the Yang-Garcia alliance. �On the other hand, I don�t think any of us know what we are talking about at this point.�

As of Wednesday morning, turnout in the primary looked like it wouldn�t top a million votes, in a city of 8.3 million. Those trying to read the results for broad conclusions were stymied�even as Adams had reason for confidence, progressive candidates looked likely to prevail in the city-wide comptroller race and in the contest for Manhattan District Attorney. For months, the mayoral candidates had tried and mostly failed to make themselves heard through this unprecedented and devastating time of transition for the city: a pandemic ending, but still here; its economic fallout staunched by federal dollars, but a rent crisis still looming, and small and big businesses alike scrambling to return to something like normal; policing, education, and housing-market indicators all in flux. Adams may well take office in January as New York�s hundred and tenth mayor, and he was the choice of many of the people most affected by the crises currently besieging the city. He knew what he was doing in this election more than any of his opponents did. But no one running was able to take the full measure of the moment.

The Delta Variant Is a Grave Danger to the Unvaccinated

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:19:27 +0300

ineage B.1.617.2, now known as the Delta variant, was first detected in India, in December, 2020. An evolved version of sars-CoV-2, Delta has at least a dozen mutations, including several on its spike protein that make it vastly more contagious and possibly more lethal and vaccine-resistant than other strains. In India, the Delta variant contributed to the most devastating coronavirus wave the world has seen so far; now, it has been detected in dozens of countries, including the United States. In the U.S., it accounts for a minority of cases�but it is rapidly outcompeting other variants, and will likely soon become our dominant lineage.

Much of what we know about Delta is preliminary, and based on reports from India and, more recently, the U.K., where it now accounts for more than ninety per cent of new cases. Four-fifths of British adults have received at least one shot of a covid-19 vaccine, and more than half are fully vaccinated�but the variant has spread widely enough among those who remain vulnerable to fuel a quadrupling of cases and a doubling of hospitalizations in the past month. The vast majority of Delta-variant cases seem to have occurred in adults under fifty, whose rates of vaccination remain lower than those of older people. Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the U.K.�s full reopening, originally scheduled for June 21st, would be postponed.

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Earlier this year, scientists estimated that lineage B.1.1.7�the Alpha variant, first isolated in England�could be some sixty per cent more transmissible than the original version of sars-CoV-2. Now, experts believe that the Delta variant is sixty per cent more transmissible than Alpha�making it far more contagious than the virus that tore through the world in 2020. It hasn�t yet been conclusively shown that Delta is more lethal, but early evidence from the U.K. suggests that, compared to Alpha, it doubles the risk of a person�s being hospitalized. Even if the variant turns out to be no deadlier within any one person, its greater transmissibility means that it can inflict far more damage across a population, depending on how many people remain unvaccinated when it strikes.

In this regard, India�s apocalyptic surge is Exhibit A. In May, at the crest of the wave, the role of the Delta variant was still unclear. A number of factors�the return of large gatherings, a decline in mask-wearing, and a sluggish vaccination campaign�had made a disaster of some kind more or less unavoidable. But it now seems likely that the rise of Delta accelerated the crisis into a shockingly rapid and widespread viral catastrophe. In the course of weeks, millions of people were infected and tens of thousands died; the country�s medical system buckled under the weight of a mutated virus. One of the most disturbing aspects of India�s surge was that many children fell ill. And yet there is currently no data to suggest that Delta causes severe illness in a greater proportion of kids; instead, it seems likely that the sheer transmissibility of the variant simply resulted in a higher absolute number of infected children.

One vitally important finding to emerge from the U.K. and India is that the covid vaccines are still spectacularly effective against Delta. According to one study from the U.K., a full course of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is ninety-six per cent effective at preventing hospitalizations due to the Delta variant; AstraZeneca�s vaccine is in the same ballpark, reducing the chance of hospitalization by ninety-two per cent. But these findings come with caveats. The first is that, with Delta, partial immunization appears to be less effective at preventing disease: a different study found that, for people who have received only the first shot, the vaccines were just thirty-three per cent effective at preventing symptomatic illness. (A first dose still appears to offer strong protection against hospitalization or death.) The second is that even full courses of the vaccines appear somewhat less effective at preventing infection from Delta. This may be especially true of the non-mRNA vaccines. A team of scientists in Scotland has found that both doses of AstraZeneca�s vaccine reduced the chance of infection with Delta by just sixty per cent�a respectable showing, but less impressive than what the same vaccine offers against other strains of the virus. (The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine demonstrated seventy-nine per cent efficacy against Delta infection�a significant, but smaller, decrease.)

Taken together, these findings have led some experts to propose adjustments in vaccination strategy. Muge Cevik, an infectious-diseases expert at St. Andrews University and an adviser to the British government, told me that, given the arrival of Delta, it was important to ask �what our main aim of vaccination is.� She went on, �If our primary objective is to reduce hospitalizations and deaths, a first dose still gives very good protection. If it�s to stamp out transmission, then the second dose becomes quite important. I think that, especially in hot spots, we need to expedite second shots.� Others have proposed the idea of mRNA-vaccine booster shots for Americans who have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which, like AstraZeneca�s, uses non-mRNA technology. The C.D.C.�s official guidelines tell Americans that �the best covid-19 vaccine is the first one that is available to you. Do not wait for a specific brand.� But that advice was minted when vaccine supply was constrained. The accumulated evidence has led many people to wonder whether the mRNA vaccines, from Moderna and Pfizer, are preferable to the one offered by Johnson & Johnson, and whether the Delta variant makes them even more so.

�It�s likely that J. & J. offers strong protection against severe disease, but because it�s a one-shot regimen it might not offer the same protection against infection for a highly transmissible variant like Delta,� Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, told me. �A second shot reëxposes the immune system to the vaccine, and allows the body to make even better antibodies.� Rasmussen received the J. & J. vaccine; she lives in Canada, where health authorities have encouraged people to mix and match the vaccines. �I�m considering topping off my immune system with a dose of Pfizer,� she said. �It�s something worth thinking about.�

To a significant degree, the emergence of a variant like Delta was predictable, and, with rapid and widespread immunization, the threat that it poses can be subdued. But its arrival is still incredibly consequential. Delta drives an even wider wedge between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. They have already been living in separate worlds, facing vastly different risks of illness and death; now, their risk levels will diverge further. People who�ve been fully vaccinated can, by and large, feel confident in the immunity that they�ve received. But those who remain susceptible should understand that, for them, this is probably the most dangerous moment of the pandemic.

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�The good news is that we have vaccines that can squash the Delta variant,� Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told me. �The bad news is that not nearly enough people have been vaccinated. A substantial share of Americans are sitting ducks.� He went on, �We haven�t built a strong enough vaccination wall yet. We need a Delta wall��a level of vaccination that will prevent the new variant from spreading. �There are still large unvaccinated pockets in the country where this could get ugly,� Topol added. Because about half of Americans are vaccinated, and millions more have some immunity from prior infection, the Delta variant �won�t cause monster spikes that overwhelm the health system,� Topol said. But Delta spreads so easily among the unvaccinated that some communities could experience meaningful increases in death and disease this summer and fall.

In America, the speed of vaccination is slowing. In some states, mainly in the South, only about a third of the population has been fully vaccinated. Big differences in the covid-19 toll are already visible: cases and hospitalizations have plummeted in some places with higher vaccination rates but are holding steady or rising in others. Fortunately, nearly ninety per cent of older Americans�the group most at risk for severe covid�have received at least one shot, and three-quarters are fully vaccinated. But, as is clear from the Indian and U.K. experiences, the Delta variant could still lead to major spikes in infection among younger, unvaccinated people.

In a recent piece, I likened a society that�s reopening while partially vaccinated to a ship approaching an iceberg. The ship is the return to normal life and the viral exposure that it brings; the iceberg is the population of unvaccinated people. Precautions such as social distancing can slow the speed of the ship, and vaccination can shrink the size of the iceberg. But, in any reopening society that�s failed to vaccinate everyone, a collision between the virus and the vulnerable is inevitable.

Because of its exceptional transmissibility, the Delta variant is almost certain to intensify the force of the collision. The U.K., by postponing a full reopening, is trying to soften the blow. But the U.S. is pressing ahead�perhaps out of hubris, or because officials hope that our vaccination campaign can outrun the spread of Delta. Last week, New York and California, among the pandemic�s hardest-hit states, did away with virtually all restrictions. Meanwhile, states with half the vaccination rates of New York or California have been open for weeks. A lot depends on where, and how fast, Delta is spreading.

Federal, state, and local officials are trying to accelerate vaccination. Governors have announced incentives such as lotteries, college scholarships, gift cards, and free beer for those who get immunized; California alone plans to spend more than a hundred million dollars on vaccine incentives. The Biden Administration has made immunizing seventy per cent of American adults by the Fourth of July a central priority, and has declared June a �national month of action.� The Administration has offered tax credits to employers that provide paid time off for people to get immunized, erected mass-vaccination sites, sent funds to community health centers, and partnered with local organizations, celebrities, and volunteers to get shots in arms. The White House recently announced that four of the nation�s largest child-care providers would offer free services to parents who want to get immunized before July 4th; Uber and Lyft have been offering free rides to vaccination sites for weeks.

And yet, the pace of vaccinations hasn�t picked back up. Topol, for his part, believes that a major impediment to wider vaccination is the fact that the F.D.A. has not yet fully approved the covid vaccines; right now, they�ve received only an emergency-use authorization, or E.U.A. About a third of unvaccinated Americans say that F.D.A. approval would make them more likely to get immunized. Full approval could also pave a clearer path for vaccine mandates in schools, businesses, and the military. Topol argues that mandates would allow us to build a Delta wall more quickly�along with walls for Epsilon, Zeta, and the rest of the Greek alphabet. Both Pfizer and Moderna have applied for F.D.A. approval, but it�s unclear how soon they will receive it; the usual process takes six to ten months. �Hundreds of millions of people have safely taken these vaccines, but there�s still a perception among some that they�re experimental,� Topol said. �E.U.A. versus full approval may sound like semantics, but it�s actually a B.F.D.�

Globally, more people died of the coronavirus in the first half of this year than in all of last year�an astounding fact, given the emergence of the vaccines. The tragic truth is that, for much of the world, the vaccines may as well not exist. On the one hand, the U.S. is vaccinating children as young as twelve; on the other hand, health-care workers, elderly people, and cancer patients in many other countries remain defenseless. Three-quarters of covid-vaccine shots have been administered in just ten countries, whereas the poorest nations have received less than one half of one per cent of the supply. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director-general, has called this a �scandalous inequity.�

The Biden Administration recently announced that the U.S. would donate half a billion doses to the global vaccination effort; it hopes to deliver two hundred million by the end of the year. The U.K. and other European countries have also committed hundreds of millions of doses to covax, the international initiative to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. These efforts are important, and they will help immensely�but not for months, and perhaps not until 2022. In the meantime, many countries will continue to grapple with the social and economic challenges created by variant-catalyzed surges and the public-health measures needed to thwart them. Even where the political will for continuing such measures exists, it�s not infinite; countries can�t remain in lockdown forever.

In a sense, Delta is the first post-vaccination variant. Pockets of the human race�perhaps five hundred million people out of 7.6 billion�are protected against it, despite its transmissibility; for them, the pandemic�s newest chapter is something of an epilogue, since the main story has, in effect, already concluded. But, for those who remain unvaccinated, by choice or by chance, Delta represents the latest installment in an ongoing series of horrors. It�s a threat more sinister than any other�one that imperils whatever precarious equilibrium has taken root. In a partially vaccinated world, Delta exposes the duality in which we now live and die.

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How Many in Tri-State Tested Positive for Coronavirus? See Latest Case

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:18:01 +0300

The numbers below were last updated at 3:27 p.m. on June 23, according to the governors of the respective states
Published March 9, 2020 � Updated on June 23, 2021 at 3:27 pm

0:21/ 3:55
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More than 3.46 million tri-state residents have tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

New York's first positive case was announced on Sunday, March 1, 2020; the state's first death was announced nearly two weeks later, on March 14, 2020. New York City accounts for the vast majority of cases and deaths in the state.

The number of cases in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut has climbed into the millions, while deaths are in the tens of thousands.

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Here are the latest number of cases, last updated at 3:27 p.m. on June 23, according to the governors of the respective states:

Tri-State Area Total: 3,465,895
NOTE: County- and city-wide breakdowns may not add up to total statewide cases at times pending additional updates from the governors' offices. Total state and tri-state numbers are updated to reflect latest official totals.

New York
New York City 938,747
Albany County 24,722
Allegany County 3,561
Broome County 18,641
Cattaraugus County 5,723
Cayuga County 6,338
Chautauqua County 8,959
Chemung County 7,776
Chenango County 3,507
Clinton County 4,839
Columbia County 4,068
Cortland County 3,931
Delaware County 2,386
Dutchess County 29,493
Erie County 89,620
Essex County 1,593
Franklin County 2,563
Fulton County 4,425
Genesee County 5,439
Greene County 3,405
Hamilton County 315
Herkimer County 5,196
Jefferson County 6,159
Lewis County 2,811
Livingston County 4,527
Madison County 4,567
Monroe County 69,090
Montgomery County 4,254
Nassau County 183,825
Niagara County 20,051
Oneida County 22,644
Onondaga County 38,998
Ontario County 7,410
Orange County 48,365
Orleans County 3,121
Oswego County 7,633
Otsego County 3,465
Putnam County 10,623
Rensselaer County 11,242
Rockland County 46,986
Saratoga County 15,398
Schenectady County 13,213
Schoharie County 1,694
Schuyler County 1,081
Seneca County 2,011
St. Lawrence County 6,654
Steuben County 6,961
Suffolk County 201,261
Sullivan County 6,686
Tioga County 3,838
Tompkins County 4,353
Ulster County 13,918
Warren County 3,668
Washington County 3,165
Wayne County 5,791
Westchester County 129,757
Wyoming County 3,585
Yates County 1,179
New York State Total 2,095,233
New York State Deaths 42,942
New York City Deaths
(Note: NYC stopped reporting probable COVID deaths as of 11/9, which explains the decrease. For consistency's sake, the NYC deaths reported here are from the state's data.) 23,026
New Jersey
Bergen County 104,791
Middlesex County 92,608
Monmouth County 75,863
Essex County 94,451
Hudson County 88,337
Burlington County 44,348
Morris County 50,311
Camden County 55,854
Passaic County 73,316
Mercer County 34,151
Ocean County 76,284
Somerset County 30,181
Union County 71,691
Hunterdon County 9,861
Warren County 10,015
Sussex County 14,094
Cape May County 9,263
Gloucester County 30,666
Cumberland County 17,205
Atlantic County 31,634
Salem County 6,087
Cases With Unassigned County 811
New Jersey State Total
(Note: The state moved to include probable cases from antigen, or rapid, tests starting on Jan. 4, causing a one-time spike in both statewide totals since March and individual counties) 1,021,822
New Jersey Deaths
(Note: The state moved to include probable deaths
in the total count starting on June 25, causing a spike) 26,410
Connecticut
Fairfield County 100,388
Hartford County 84,382
Litchfield County 14,665
Middlesex County 12,845
New Haven County 92,280
New London County 22,546
Tolland County 9,642
Windham County 10,913
Connecticut State Total (includes probable and confirmed cases) 348,840
Connecticut Deaths 8,271

Meet the Man Seen Riding a Hoverboard Through Times Square (No, He's N

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:16:45 +0300

Crazy stunts are nothing new to the crossroads of the world, but the video showing a man riding 10-20 feet through Times Square brought things to new heights � literally
By Adam Harding � Published June 24, 2021 � Updated on June 24, 2021 at 1:58 am

0:21/ 2:08

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The man who was seen riding on a hovercraft above Times Square is not a superhero or a supervillain, but he�s an engineer and a YouTuber. NBC New York�s Adam Harding reports.

He's not the Green Goblin from Spider-Man � but like Norman Osborn, the man seen in a viral video riding a hoverboard through Times Square is something of a scientist himself.

Crazy stunts are nothing new to the crossroads of the world, but the video showing Hunter Kowland riding 10-20 feet through the tourist destination brought things to new heights.

Kowland is the engineer behind the devices he calls the "sky surfer hoverboard aircraft," which he designed and built, and has been perfecting for years.

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"I guess over the years I've been interested in the art of flight. I've been trying to see if it would ever be possible or sustainable to be able to achieve flight in a smaller form to where it actually makes sense to use it on kind of an everyday basis," Kowland told NBC New York.

Millions of people have watched the wild clip of him surfing up Seventh Avenue. And yes, while many have compared what is in the video to the infamous Spider-Man nemesis, Kowland is no villain � although the legality of such a device has been questioned.

With air space heavily regulated in New York City, the FAA said they would "look into the matter." The NYPD said that they are "aware of the video and are looking into it."

As for Kowland, he said that what he did was allowed.

"I've been speaking with everybody that we need to to make sure it was done properly in advance, pushing it forward in the right way. So, everything is taken care of for that," he said, but would not say who he spoke with to be given such permission.

The 28-year-old is now making headlines, and he said he hopes his plan to one day sell the machine takes off, and he's not grounding that dream any time soon.

"I'm excited to be leading this space and helping with the regulations," Kowland said.

How Over 390,000 Homeowners Increased Their Property Value In Under 6

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:08:02 +0300

Recently, an NBC TV reviewed an "all-in-all" gutter protection solution that sweeps Canada and the US. It works with almost any type/size of gutters (no matter 5 or 6 inches), fits every home, and it takes less than 6 hours to install the whole thing. This ingenious solution is called LeafFilter�, and it is #1 Gutter protection nationwide with more than 37,000,000 ft. Installed! LeafFilter is backed up by 100% No-Clog Guarantee, Lifetime Warranty and will increase your home value the moment it lands on your gutters... and here's WHY:

How to (Literally) Drive the Coronavirus Away

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:07:02 +0300

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue officials said more than 80 units responded to the collapse at a condominium building near 88th Street and Collins Avenue around 2 a.m.
By NBC 6 � Published 5 hours ago � Updated 1 min ago

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At least one person was killed and a massive search and rescue effort was underway early Thursday following the partial collapse of a 12-story condo building in Surfside, Florida.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue officials said more than 80 units responded to the beachfront condo near 88th Street and Collins Avenue just north of Miami Beach around 2 a.m.

The collapse sent a cloud of debris through the neighborhood, coating cars up to two blocks away with a light layer of dust. Footage from the scene showed a large section of the sea-view side of the building collapsed into a pile of rubble.

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Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett confirmed at least one person was killed in the collapse. It was unknown exactly how many people were injured or were inside the building at the time of the collapse but Burkett said at least 10 people were treated at the scene.

Officials at nearby Aventura Hospital said they had received three patients from the scene. Two were in critical condition.

"The building has literally pancaked, it has gone down, and I mean there's just feet in between stories where there were 10 feet," Burkett said. "That is heartbreaking because it doesn't mean to me that we're gonna be as successful as we would want to be to find people alive."

A witness told NBC 6 said he saw the entire rear of the building collapse.

"I just can't put into words, it looks like a bomb hit, it looks like something in one of these Third World countries that just literally collapsed, like a pancake straight down, and there's just an incredible pile of rubble," he said.

Earlier Thursday, firefighters were seen pulling a boy from the rubble and putting him onto a stretcher. The boy's condition was not immediately clear. Firefighters were also seen using a ladder truck to rescue people who were still in sections of the building that were still standing.

Officials said search dogs were also helping to look for survivors.

1:12
Boy Pulled From Rubble of Collapsed Condo Building in Surfside
A boy is rescued by firefighters from the rubble of a partial collapse of a condo building in Surfside.
Daniel Groves was staying at a hotel staying at a hotel across the street and said he had to be evacuated after the collapse. Groves posted footage of the aftermath on social media, calling it "the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life."

"The building, one of these huge buildings, gone, right there beside us, the craziest thing I've ever heard in my life," he said in the video. "Look at the building, it's gone."

0:45
Witness Video Shows Aftermath of Surfside Building Collapse
Footage from a witness shows the aftermath of a partial building collapse in Surfside.
Officials said they don't know what caused the collapse.

Miami Beach Police said their officers also responded to the building and Miami-Dade County's Technical Rescue Team was being assisted by municipal fire departments in searching the scene for survivors, officials said.

"It's a very active scene, I advise everyone to just stay out of the area so that fire rescue and officers can conduct rescues and do what we need to do," Surfside Police Sgt. Marian Cruz said.

The Champlain Towers South Condos is located at 8777 Collins Avenue. The development was built in 1981 in the southeast corner of Surfside, on the beach, and has more than 130 units. It had a few two-bedroom units currently on the market, with asking prices of $600,000 to $700,000, an internet search showed.

Burkett said there had been recent roof work done on the building but it was unknown if that had anything to do with the collapse.

Officials said residents were being moved to the Surfside Community Center, and streets in the area were closed.

No other information was immediately known.

Musical Chairs? Swapping Seats Could Reduce Orchestra Aerosols.

mybb@mybb.ru (gracheva_yaroslava) — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 15:05:35 +0300

Moving super-spreading instruments, like the trumpet, closer to air vents could limit the aerosol buildup on stage, according to a new study.

Rearranging musicians could significantly reduce aerosol buildup on stage, a new study says.
Rearranging musicians could significantly reduce aerosol buildup on stage, a new study says.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
By Emily Anthes
June 23, 2021
If musical instruments were people, trumpets would be super spreaders. When a trumpeter blows into the mouthpiece, tiny respiratory droplets, known as aerosols, travel out of the musician�s mouth, whiz through the brass tubing and spray into the air.

During a deadly pandemic, when a musician might unwittingly be exhaling an infectious virus, that poses a potential problem for orchestras. And the trumpet is not the only musical health hazard.

�Wind instruments are like machines to aerosolize respiratory droplets,� said Tony Saad, a chemical engineer and expert in computational fluid dynamics at the University of Utah.

A simple but radical change � rearranging the musicians � could significantly reduce the aerosol buildup on stage, Dr. Saad and his colleagues reported in a new study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.

The work began last summer, when the Utah Symphony began to wonder whether, and how, they could return to performing safely.

�They were looking for people that could provide insight into mitigation strategies that people would have some faith in,� said James Sutherland, a chemical engineer at the University of Utah and a co-author of the study.

Video
Cinemagraph
Comparison of aerosol concentrations, both instantaneous and averaged, for the baseline scenario and for the proposed mitigation strategy.CreditCredit...Hedworth et al
The researchers created a detailed computer model of the symphony�s concert hall, noting the location of every air vent and the rate of air flow through the HVAC system.

Then they mapped the typical position of each musician. The Utah Symphony, like most modern orchestras, positioned its musicians in a standard pattern, with the string instruments at the front of the stage, followed by several rows of woodwinds and brass instruments � the flutes and oboes, then the bassoons and clarinets, and then the trumpets and French horns. The trombones and the percussion section were positioned at the very back of the stage.

To model the spread of aerosols during a concert, they incorporated recent research led by Jiarong Hong, a mechanical engineer at the University of Minnesota. Working with the Minnesota Orchestra, Dr. Hong and his colleagues had measured the concentration and size of aerosol particles emitted by a variety of different wind instruments. (Among their findings: The trumpet, bass trombone and oboe posed the highest risk.)

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With these parameters in place, Dr. Saad and Dr. Sutherland used what are known as computational fluid dynamics simulations to model how the air, and aerosols, would flow through the Utah concert hall when all the musicians were playing.

The simulation revealed complex patterns of airflow. In general, the air flowed down from the air supply vents in the ceiling to the air return vents in the floor at the back of the stage. But two distinct vortices, at the front and the back of the stage, also formed, they found. �You see these large regions that are recirculating like a big tornado,� Dr. Saad said.

Aerosols can get caught in these vortices, swirling around and around the stage and building up over time.

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The trumpets, which emitted large, concentrated aerosol clouds, posed a particular problem. As the instruments� aerosol plumes traveled toward the air vents at the back of the stage, they passed directly through the percussionists� breathing zone.

�We saw this and said, �OK, this is a big problem, we�ve got to solve this,�� Dr. Sutherland said. �And given the insight we had into how the flow was moving, we said, �Well, let�s move some of these instruments around.��

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They knew the idea might be controversial; orchestras have generally been arranged the same way for decades, for reasons that include both acoustics and tradition. �We asked them when we started the project, �What constraints do we have to work with? Can we move people?�� Dr. Sutherland said. �And they said, �You do whatever you think you can to mitigate risk.��

Video
Cinemagraph
A visualization of the proposed seating arrangement for the orchestra. Colors indicate the speed at which the respiratory aerosols are being emitted at (red is high, blue is low) and size indicates the amount of aerosols emitted per second.CreditCredit...Hedworth et al
They moved the trumpets to the very back of the stage, right next to the air-return vents. Then they shifted the other wind instruments from the middle of the stage, moving them either closer to the back air vents or to the stage doors, which they suggested opening.

These moves, the team hoped, would allow the aerosols to flow directly out of the concert hall, without passing through the breathing zones of other musicians or getting caught in an onstage vortex. �You want the smoker to sit close to the window,� Dr. Saad said. �That�s exactly what we did here.�

Finally, they moved the instruments that do not generate aerosols at all � the piano and the percussion section � to the center of the stage. Together, these tweaks reduced the average aerosol concentration in the musicians� breathing zones a hundredfold, the researchers calculated.

Although the precise air flow patterns will be different in every venue, the general principles should hold everywhere, the team said. Orchestras can reduce the risk of aerosol spread by positioning the highest risk instruments near open doors and air return vents. (Orchestras that cannot do their own computer modeling could put a fog machine onstage and track how the fog flows, the researchers suggested.)

Dr. Hong, who was not involved in the Utah study, praised the modeling work. �Simulating the flow inside an orchestra hall is not easy,� he said. �They did beautiful work in terms of characterizing flow.�

But he questioned whether moving musicians was really a practical solution. �We work with musicians closely, and they don�t like to be rearranged,� he said. (He did note, however, that �for a student band, I think it�s perfectly fine.�)

Instead, he proposed a different, albeit equally unconventional, solution: Masks, for the instruments. In a recent study, he found that covering the bell of a trumpet with a single layer of acoustic fabric could reduce particle emissions by about 60 percent without compromising sound quality.

The Utah Symphony, for its part, proved open to rethinking the seating. And when it took the stage last fall, it did so with the stage doors open and the wind instruments at the rear.

�That was a huge challenge for the musicians,� said Steven Brosvik, the president and chief executive of the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera. �But they all dove into it, and said, �Let�s go, let�s give it a try.��

It took a few weeks for the musicians to get comfortable with the new arrangement, and they plan to return to their traditional seating configuration this fall, Mr. Brosvik said. But the simulations gave the musicians peace of mind and allowed them to get back onstage, he said: �For us, it was life changing.�

The researchers were pleased with how willing the musicians were to embrace an unusual solution, although their findings may have hit some instrumentalists harder than others. As Dr. Sutherland said, �We had to apologize to the trumpets in advance.�