Health

Why spending $2 trillion on child care, health care and fighting climate change won’t make inflation any worse than it already is

By Michael Klein | – One of the main concerns raised by critics of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan is that it will drive up inflation, which is already running at the fastest pace in four decades. The Senate is currently considering a roughly US$2 trillion bill passed by the House that would […]

Agriculture

How Climate Change and extreme Weather may lead to Food Shortages and Escalating Prices

The Conversation

By Paul Ekins | – In a world with an increasing human population, climate change may have a serious impact on our ability to grow enough food. Research from as far back as 2007 found that around 30% of year-to-year fluctuations in tonnes of crops grown per hectare were due to changes in the climate. […]

Anti-Vaccination

As 6x as Many die of COVID in Deep Red Counties as in Deep Blue, Sen. Ron Johnson touts . . . Mouthwash as Cure

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is now alleging that mouthwashes are the way to avoid getting COVID-19. Johnson, a powerful figure in Washington and former chair of the committee on Homeland Security, has a history of promoting quackery regarding the novel coronavirus. He said, “Standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to […]

Epidemics

South Africa did the Right thing on Omicron: Why are Europe and the US Punishing it?

Ramzy Baroud

( Middle East Monitor) – The decision by several governments across the globe to institute travel bans on seven African countries, starting on 27 November, due to the discovery of a new Covid-19 variant, Omicron, was perceived to be hasty in the eyes of some and fully justifiable on medical grounds, in the view of […]

Epidemics

How Greed is Prolonging the Pandemic – Unless the World is Vaccinated, Variants will Keep Emerging

Peter Certo

( Otherwords.org) – Stop me if this sounds familiar. It’s been kind of a hard year, but I felt optimistic about the holidays. My wife and I had just scheduled our COVID-19 boosters. Even better, we’d been able to get our young child vaccinated. We imagined a cautious return to simple family pleasures like indoor […]

Denialism

Fauci on Ted Cruz asking for his Ouster: “What happened on Jan. 6th, Senator?” “I’ll be saving lives and they’ll be lying.”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – CBS’s Margaret Brennan interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday for Face the Nation and got some fireworks. Brennan asked Fauci about the death threats he and his family have received and how he dealt with it. He said he just went on doing his job, pointing to the lightning fast […]

Epidemics

What we know about the Omicron Corona Variant So Far

The Conversation

By Prof. Wolfgang Preiser, Cathrine Scheepers, Jinal Bhiman, Marietjie Venter, and Tulio de Oliveira | – Since early in the COVID pandemic, the Network for Genomics Surveillance in South Africa has been monitoring changes in SARS-CoV-2. This was a valuable tool to understand better how the virus spread. In late 2020, the network detected a […]

Archaeology

Pandemic History: The Great Plague of Justinian in the 500s AD was a Black Death that Shaped the Century before Islam

contributors

Research News of the University of Cambridge | – ‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th– 8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. The same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded […]