History has seen many waves of globalization. The current one is different because it is less a matter of choice and more driven by shared constraints on resources. How much each of us consumes, and how many of us live on this earth will determine how long humans survive. There is no escape from the simple arithmetic of consumption (C), numbers (N), and time (T). Environmental, sustainability, and climate change movements may give us a few more years. However, unless supplemented by other efforts, they will not save our species from the resource-driven starvation, pestilence, and wars we are hurtling towards.

Consumption and reproduction have been and remain the basic values of human societies. The two lie at the root of our moral codes. Even virtue is promoted with the promise of entitlement to more consumption in the future. Development, prosperity, and welfare are euphemisms for higher consumption. There is little support for the goal of reducing per capita consumption. Sustainability conferences are well-supplied with bottled water in disposable plastic that are beginning to show up in islands of trash floating in the oceans. Moral values are defined for individuals; the burden of their aggregate consequences on society can be unacceptable.

Reproduction, preservation, and prolongation of life is embedded into our psyche as the other ultimate value, both biologically and socially. Such instincts and norms may have served to select and evolve hominids through their millions of years as hunter-gatherers. The discovery of microbes and the introduction of public health in the 19th century began to lower the death rate in various parts of the world. But the birth rates do not decline until a generation or two later.

As the absolute birth rates decline in most parts of the world, this time lag results in a rapid increase of our numbers, which quadrupled from 1.6 to 6.8 billion over the 20th century and continue to rise faster than 1% each year. Even the low forecasts have the population peaking above 8 billion later this century.

Even if we ignore the expected rises in per capita consumption and population, for how many years will resourceswater, food, energy, minerals, etc.last? As they become scarcer, rising prices will render some additional harvesting economical. New technologies will almost certainly increase efficiency, but we shall have to be extraordinarily lucky for a long time to depend on either of these to support our current levels of consumption and population.

Waiting for economic growth to stabilize (or reduce, as in Europe and Japan) the population will not generate global C and N which are inconsistent with any T that can be called sustainable. Chinas one-child policyan effective attempt in this directionis the target of widespread moral disapproval.

Estimates of T are subject to uncertainties of technology, prices, and natural variations. In the context of human history, it is persnickety to arguewhether it will take two, four, or six generations of seven-plus billion to exhaust the water, food, and minerals at our standard of living. Socio-political and military conflicts will not await the actual exhaustion.

The environmental discourse cannot continue to avoid dealing with the conflict between resource constraints and the place of consumption and reproduction in our moral code. Decades of political wrangling to reduce carbon emissions to deal with the threat of climate change suggests that agreement is not going to be easy, even if we could find a solution. Who, for example, has the stomach for imposing the Chinese solution in democratically ruled countries, if that were the chosen route? The severe demographic, economic, and social dynamics of such a solution will reverberate for centuries. Even if we did so, the arithmetic of C, N, and T may tell us we already have crossed the point of no return. Could this be why the subject is rarely on agenda of international conferences?

The environmental movement has focused on cleaning the beaches, so to speak, while a tsunami is on the horizon. The only way to sustainable existence is when every used resource (and its substitutes) is either renewable or available in unlimited quantities. Painful and extreme as the ways of ensuring the CNT consistency might be, perhaps they are preferable to starvation, disease, and war. Validity of claims to human exceptionalism must by supported by our deliberative ability to devise an orderly global solution which does not depend on letting the nature take its coursethe way every other species has followed to extinction so far.

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Consumption, Numbers and Time: The Arithmetic of Sustenance - Yale Insights

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, March 4closing date to be announced; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 15, 2020January 18, 2021

an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, February 28April 25, 2020

(The gallery is temporarily closed.)

In 2002 Gerhard Richter was included in a conversation about the restoration of the great gothic cathedral of Cologne. The building had survived the thousand-bomber raids that flattened the city in 1942, but the stained glass of the enormous tracery window in the south transept had been lost, and the cathedral chapter now wanted to replace the plain-glass postwar repairs with something that lived up to the buildings spectacular presence and spiritual purposeideally, a work by a major artist, commemorating victims of Nazism.

Richter was, in one sense, an obvious choiceone of Germanys most prominent artists, he had lived in Cologne for years. In other ways, the decision was curious. Richter is not religious, and while his work had made glancing references to the Third Reich, his position on the often reflexive commemoration of war crimes was not uncomplicated. For the cathedral, he considered, then rejected, the possibility of transmuting Nazi execution photographs into stained glass. Instead he turned to a 1974 painting of randomly arranged color squares, part of a series that had included paintings, prints, and a design for commercial carpeting. Colognes archbishop, who had wanted something demonstrablyeven exclusivelyChristian, did not attend the unveiling.1 But while Richters window is, in theory, a repriseits approximately 11,500 color squares were arranged by algorithm and tweaked by the artist to remove any suggestion of symbols or ciphersthe experience it provides is utterly distinct. The squares are made of glass using medieval recipes, they rise collectively some seventy-five feet, and are part of a gothic cathedral. When the sun shines through and paints floors, walls, and people with moving color, the effect is aleatoric, agnostic, and otherworldly. It should mean nothing, and feels like it could mean everything.

Decades earlier, fresh from two rounds of art schoolone in East Germany, one in WestRichter had made a note to himself: Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A good picture takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Richter is contemporary arts great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the worlds most influential living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectualpersonally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia. One measure of his status is that visitors today enter the Reichstag flanked by two soaring Richters: on one side a sixty-seven-foot glass stele in the colors of the German flag; on the other, facsimiles of Birkenau (2014), the paintings through which he finally succeeded in responding to the Holocaust, abandoning earlier attempts across five decades.

The Birkenau paintings, which had never been seen on this side of the Atlantic, were among the eagerly anticipated inclusions in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All, the last exhibition to be held at the Met Breuer before the building is ceded to the Frick Collection in July. A streamlined, eloquent summa of Richters career, curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, the show opened on March 4, nine days before being shuttered by Covid-19 (along with a concurrent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery). Im one of thousands who missed that brief window. It is not yet known whether the show will reopen in New York before it travels to Los Angeles in August. In the meantime, we are left with an expansive website (the museum has posted images of all works in the show, installation shots, and some film clips), a weighty catalog, and memories of works seen in person. This is, of course, not ideal: many of the things shown depend on properties of scale and reflectivity that cannot be experienced in reproduction. But this is a retrospective about retrospection, and the situation is not without a certain resonance.

The opening wall is a preview of the elliptical path taken through Richters career. Table (1962), the first painting Richter put into his catalogue raisonn, is a mix of Pop-ish consumer culture (the titular subject was clipped from an Italian design magazine) and ersatz expressionism (it devolves at the center into circular sweeps of paint thinner). Eleven Panes (2004), forty-two years younger, is a leaning stack of eleven-foot-tall sheets of glass, individually transparent but collectively reflective, windows ganged up to make a stammering mirror. The small photo-painting September (2005) bears a discreet echo of Tables inchoate mess in the desolate cloud leaking from the South Tower on September 11; the brash colors of the source photograph have been drawn down, the orange of the explosion scraped away, time hovers like a bee, neither frozen nor moving forward. Even in reproduction, the arrangement of these works is affecting: three visions of the world being unmade and made again. In real life, this idea would be further extended by the ephemeral animation of passersby reflected in the glass. The installation photographs, however, were cleverly constructed to conceal the photographer in the mirroran uncanny absence that evokes the emptiness of public space in Covid-time.

American audiences came late to Richter. In the 1960s and 1970s the hegemony of American Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism tended to crowd out curiosity about what was going on elsewhere. Richters first solo show in New York in 1973 did not ignite great excitement, and for many years he was understood here primarily as a graphic artist; his first interview in the American press appeared in The Print Collectors Newsletter in 1985.2 By then, a series of influential exhibitions (as well as favorable exchange rates for American dealers and collectors) had stoked new interest in European art, but Richters reputation lagged behind those of Germans such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer who made raw work that spoke of war and atonement in no uncertain terms.

Richters oeuvre, by contrast, was measured and indirect and took a confusing variety of forms. His foggy photo-paintings suggested an oxymoronic lugubrious Pop, the random color squares an ebullient Conceptualism, and his soft-focus landscapes and portraits channeled both the Sturm und Drang of German Romanticism and the cool distance of contemporary photography. Uncertain terms were Richters mtier, and critics simply did not know what to do with it. Many concluded he was a cynic bent on invalidating art itself: Richter wars on poetries, declared a 1989 review in The Washington Post. When he depicts a cloudy sky, or a log fence and a red-roofed barn in the quiet countryside, he somehow makes you queasy. Even admiring critics like Peter Schjeldahl acknowledged Richters reputation for severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty.

It was not until the 2002 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, organized by Robert Storr, that American audiences really warmed to Richter. He was then seventy years old, and the emotional hypervigilance of his early work had softened. American viewers had also matured: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of that hopeful experiment in peace and prosperity, the European Union, bathed Germany in a more benign light than it had enjoyed in the anglophone world for a century. The photo-paintings now looked plangent rather than snide; the multivalent shifting of styles was recognized not as sarcasm but as a defense against dogma; the portrait of his daughter turning from the camera (Betty, 1988), hushed and luminous, made no one queasy. His peculiar breadth was evidence of a patient regard for the world. Richter, it turned out, was a mensch.

Painting After All recapitulates this history (indeed, it features many of the same paintings), while extending the timeline both later and earlier. The shows interest in memory is visible through groupings and inter-gallery vistas that illuminate continuities and repetitions across time. The catalog takes a more didactic approach, and how you feel about it probably depends on how you feel about Buchloh, Richters long-time interlocutor (though the two have famously disagreed about some of Buchlohs conclusions) and an art historian deeply entrenched in Frankfurt School social theory and philosophical postulates. Perhaps because of the wealth of Richter literature already in the world, the text bypasses the usual career overview; each of its seven authors (all but one quotes from Buchloh) targets a specific subset of works. This has the advantage of illuminating some less-visited corners of Richters oeuvre (Hal Fosters discussion of the glass works and Peter Geimers pocket history of German abstract photography are particularly useful), though readers new to Richter may feel like theyve accidentally enrolled in the second term of a class in which every other student has taken the intro.3

Richters biography mattersnot because he has made it the subject of his work (he has not), but because the historical systems and events he has lived through have directly informed the way he thinks about art and about history. Born in Dresden in 1932, he grew up in smaller towns along the Polish border during World War II. In postwar East Germany he received a rigorous technical training at the venerable Dresden art academy, but had only limited exposure to modern art: We werent able to borrow books that dealt with the period beyond the onset of Impressionism because that was when bourgeois decadence set in. (Only one work from this period, a remarkably prescient series of monotypes, is included in Richters official catalog; it was on view in facsimile form at both the Met Breuer and Marian Goodman.) After some early success as a painter of affirming Socialist Realist murals, he was permitted to travel to West Germany in 1959 to visit the second Documenta exhibition in Kassel, where he encountered paintings by Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock that upended everything he knew about pictures. Two years later he defected to the West, writing to his favorite professor in Dresden, mine was not a careless decision based on a desire for nicer cars.

Dsseldorf, where he reenrolled in art school, was a world apart from the monoculture of official East German art: Beuys had recently arrived with his mystical cult of personality, the Zero group was developing its language of impersonal geometries, and Informel (Europes attenuated answer to New York School abstraction) was championed as the subjective antidote to totalitarianism and its instrumentalizing of soppy figuration. Even in the West, artistic style was a badge of political allegianceabstract/universalist vs. figurative/populist. And both Germanies, focused on building their respective new societies, chose not to ruminate on the unprecedented destruction perpetrated byand inflicted ontheir people. It would not be until the cusp of the millennium that W.G. Sebalds On the Natural History of Destruction anatomized the silence around the German civilian experience of the war: When we turn to take a retrospective view, Sebald wrote, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.4

Among the group of young, irreverent artists Richter met in Dsseldorf was Sigmar Polke, who for several years provided a crucial, puckish complement to Richters circumspection. Discarding the various high-minded models around them, Polke and Richter began painting from newspaper clippings and magazines, toying with the ways mechanical reproduction remakes its subjectsthe flattening and fragmentation of cheap printing and the unseemly croppings and juxtapositions of the commercial printed page. The stupidity of copying was part of the irreverenceserious modern art is supposed to despise the copy. But copying, done attentively, is a way into something. Academic art training depended on it as a means of internalizing the canon, but even as children we copy something when we cant get it out of our heads. Richter began keeping photographs, clippings, and sketches of potential source material that would become Atlas, his now career-long half-archive, half-artwork of things somewhere between art and garbage and that somehow seemed important to me and a pity to throw away.

Most of Richters subjects appeared affably Popfamilies by the seaside, tabloid perp walks, household goodsbut where Pop Art tended to ratchet up the volume with brighter colors and sharper edges, Richter turned the dial in the other direction, painting everything in plaintive grays with a subaqueous wobble. And the subjects were not all as banal as they seemed. Scattered amid the race cars and drying racks were bombers dropping their payloads and family members destroyed by the Third Reich: Uncle Rudi (1965), smiling jauntily in his enormous Wehrmacht overcoat, later killed in combat; Aunt Marianne (1965), shown as a teenager with the infant Richter, years before she was institutionalized as a schizophrenic and starved to death by the Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia of the unfit. Richters paintings of Rudi and Marianne are no more or less anguished than his ones of kitchen chairs. But for German viewers in the 1960s they must have invoked numberless pictures of relativesvictims, villains, heroesremoved from display as markers of a world best not mentioned.

By the 1970s Richter had also become intrigued with the possibilities of pictures that originated not in a preselected image, but in an a priori set of rules. The random color squares that later dappled worshipers in Cologne Cathedral were one result; a body of heavily impastoed canvases made by moving paint around in semi-predetermined ways was another. This edging toward Conceptualism did not mark an abandonment of representation, however. He continued making paintings from photographs, now usually his own, including color landscapes so refulgent they might, in thumbnail, be mistaken for Turners. Some of these were tricks, painted from photomontages that unravel as you look. Others, like his lit candles and misty skulls, balanced reality and Romanticism on a knifes edge.

Gradually Richters art-historical allegiances were laid bare: Caspar David Friedrich, Vermeer, Velzquezpainters with a gift for inviting us through the illusory window while showing us how the trick was played (the oversized sequins of light that Vermeer scatters on metalwork and bread rolls call attention to the materiality of paint as surely as any Pollock drip). In the portraits of his friends and family especially one senses the double desire to capture the emotional load of a moment and to reveal the means by which image turns into feeling. When things slip too far toward tender, he adjusts the surface with lateral swipes of paint or abrasions, pushing and pulling until that magical space between looking and knowing is reached.

Academic writers often view Richter as a master strategist plotting from on high, but his own statements suggest something less mandarin: It is my wish, he told Storr, to create a well-built, beautiful, constructive painting. And there are many moments when I plan to do just that, and then I realize that it looks terrible. Then I start to destroy it, piece by piece, and I arrive at something that I didnt want but that looks pretty good. In 1980 he began using squeegees to drag paint in broad, uneven swaths that partly obscure whatever lies belowphotographs, printed matter, prior paintings. Its the look of mechanical failuremachine parts wearing badly, jammed printers, skid marks, abraded film. When repeated over and over, it generates complex color fields full of fissures and pockets exposing older strata. Geological metaphors feel aptthe surfaces resemble landscapes shaped by the scouring and dumping of glaciers. Richter has limited control over what happens in any one layer, so composition becomes the joint product of accumulation and knowing when to stop.

Sometimes I think I should not call myself a painter, but a picture-maker, Richter remarked in 2013. I am more interested in pictures than in painting. Painting has something slightly dusty about it. I suspect it is not paintings long history that bothers him, but a more specific quality. Dust accumulates on things that are settled, immobile. And painting, in our culture, has the unassailable fixity of a monument. Its a property Richter has repeatedly undermined, cutting up paintings and distributing the pieces as editions, rereleasing finished paintings as photographic editions and digital facsimiles under Plexiglas. (The Aunt Marianne in Painting After All is not, in fact, a painting.) Like Jasper Johns, his near contemporary, he is fascinated by doubling, mirroring, and illusionthe same-not-same quandary of image and object. His many prints, facsimiles, and artists books are not so much spin-offs of his paintings (though that is how they are often regarded) but partners with painting in a bantering, ongoing conversation. Even the persistent doubling back and restructuring of earlier work can be seen as a corrective to the presumed finality of painting.

One squeegee painting from 1990, Abstract Painting (#724-4 in his catalogue raisonn), has been repeatedly reformulated: resized and defocused in photographic editions, digitally refracted as kaleidoscopic tapestries and stained glass windows for a sixth-century monastery in rural Saarland, and slivered in a Photoshop version of Xenos paradox for the series called Strip. (The image was digitally bisected and mirrored; those halves were each bisected and mirrored, then those quarters, and so on, to produce 4096 (212) segments, each less than 100 microns wide, that fuse together in the eye to produce a pattern of stripes. These patterns were then cut up, arranged in different orders, and printed at different sizes.) The Strip in Painting After All runs an optically dazzling thirty-three feet across.

The monumental painting sextet Cage (2006)also in the US now for the first timestarted out as photo-paintings of scientific images of atoms (resembling fuzzy photographs, these are records of particle behavior translated into light and dark to accommodate human sensibilities). Having committed the pictures to canvas, Richter found himself bored by the result and began adding color, painting in and scratching out. At the end of four months, the atom arrays were present only as an inherited rhythm within the complex accretion of paint. In its grandeur of agitation and resolution, Cage may be as close to the sublime as contemporary painting can get. Perhaps it was to knock the dust off that sublimity that Richter followed up with two facsimile editions, breaking Cage 6 into sixteen parts that can be carried in a flight case and hung in any configuration that suits the owner.

Everything, Richter demonstrates, is a derivative, everything is contingent, nothing is immutable. This has implications for how one thinks about history. Even about catastrophes.

The Birkenau paintings are also abstract responses to failed photo-paintings, but the underlying images are of a different moral order: four photographs taken clandestinely in late summer 1944 by Sonderkommando prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The ethics of using, exhibiting, or even viewing Holocaust photographs has always been complicated. Moving east with American troops in 1945, Robert Capa declined to use his camera: From the Rhine to the Oder I took no pictures. The concentration camps were swarming with photographers, and every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect. As early as the spring of 1945, Peter Geimer explains in the catalog, the Allies began circulating camp photographs in Germany, but the anticipated ethical shock never materialized, and the pictures disappeared. Richter remembers being shown them for the first time by a fellow student in Dresden in the mid-1950s: It was like irrefutable proof of something we had always half known.

Shoah director Claude Lanzmann objected not just to the numbing effects of profusion, but to visual representation itselfthe illusion of a presence when the reality was one of appalling absence. The opposing view, voiced by Jean-Luc Godard and others, was that documents are our strongest defense against amnesia, and that images can be powerful agents of imaginative reconstruction. (Whether or not imagination should have a role here is the heart of the conflict.)

As the only pictures taken by victims of the killing system they document, the Sonderkommando photographs occupy a special place in this debate. In 2001 the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman wrote an essay for an exhibition in which they were shown and was roundly attacked in the pages of Lanzmanns journal, Les temps modernes. Didi-Huberman responded with a carefully considered book, Images malgr tout, which Richter read in Geimers German translation, Bilder trotz allem. In English the title is Images in Spite of All, but the German can also be translated as Painting After All.

The Sonderkommando photographs are unique not only because of who took them and what they show, but because of their appearance. They had to be shot secretly from a distance and are hard to read. Two of them look out through an angled trapezoid of doorway onto a landscape where people are working by a bonfire, smoke rising against silhouetted trees. It takes a moment to register the barbed wire and to understand that the things piled on the ground are not logs but bodies. The other two photos show tree trunks at a sharp angle. One is a misfirejust black trees and white sky. But one includes a wedge of land over which small figuresnaked womenare walking or running. Reconstructions show that they are headed to the gas chambers and that the bonfire pictures were shot from within one of the gas chamber buildings.

The human element is overwhelming once recognized, but it occupies only a small area and reveals itself slowly. The pictures initial impression is one of visual dynamism, modernist angles slamming into tropes of Friedrich-era Romanticism: soaring trees, billowing vapor, nature seen through a doorway. Perhaps because of the paradoxical way form and content cut across each other here, Richter felt it might be possible to make them into paintings. He flipped them left-right, projected them, and transcribed them onto canvas.

Their failure as photo-paintings has, I think, nothing to do with visual quality and everything to do with history. Richters photo-paintings work because, no matter how intimate the subjects, they function as types. Individuals and events are elided, commonalities revealed, through a concentration on form. Even his elegiac paintings of dead Baader-Meinhof members are as much about the dislocating formats of news as they are about the wasted lives in question. Given the Sonderkommando photographs singular status as historical documents, however, they cannot be stand-ins for anything elsenot for the look of clandestine photography, not for mans inhumanity to man, not for German accountability. They do not work as pictures in Richters sense of precluding the emergence of any single meaning or depriv[ing] a thing of its meaning and its name. Here, meaning and name are untouchable.

Richter did not abandon the images but, as with Cage, began working into and over them, pulling paint horizontally and vertically, layer upon layer. The Met website shows the progression from source photo to drawing, to photo-painting, to successive states of overpainting. The final canvases have the tenor of a forest after a firetwitchy, ashy crusts over an underworld of dun, crimson, and kelly green. They are complex, scarified, and alsoheres the rubbeautiful. In places the juddering repetition of fragmented color recalls, of all things, late Monet water lilies.

Max Glickman, the Holocaust-obsessed cartoonist in Howard Jacobsons novel Kalooki Nights, captures the moral vertigo induced by the collision of aesthetics and the Holocaust: A mass grave at Belsenthe bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, thats if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.5 Perhaps to brace us against that fall, Richter has gone to some lengths to structure how we experience the paintings. They do not stand alone. The original photographs are hung on an adjacent wall, in prints small enough to be understood as documents, and large enough to be legible. There are sources and there are commentaries, Richter tells us, events and reverberations of those events. More eccentrically, he has doubled the paintings themselves. The four canvases hang opposite four full-scale not-quite doppelgngers, each divided into quarters. Source, commentary, and gloss.

The events of 1944 are beyond our reach. The subject of these paintings is not that world, but our ownthe place where we actively choose to know or not know, see or not see. At the Met Breuer, the whole confab of paintings, facsimiles, and historical photographs is further multiplied by a thirty-foot-long stretch of gray mirrors at the backSebalds looking and looking away at the same time made inescapable.

The writer William Maxwell, who, like Richter, was a habitual spinner of fictions that were barely fictions, once had a (barely fictional) character observe:

What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memorymeaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivionis really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.6

Richters oeuvre is, at some level, a six-decade-long disquisition on this lieits inevitability, its emotional utility, its shape-changing instability. His stylistic ticsthe hazy edges, overlaying, chopping into pieces, and reconfiguring of partsare visual reminders that you are not seeing everything, that availability to the eye is no guarantee of clarity. The story always changes with the telling. Uncertainty is truth.

Fair enough. But what is perhaps most remarkable about Richters art is its affirmation that this is not a bad thing. The story of the color-square painting that became a carpet that became a cathedral window (and now, undoubtedly, somebodys cell phone wallpaper) is not a tragedy, its an assertion of endless possibility.

Originally posted here:
Gerhard Richter: The Master of Unknowing | by Susan Tallman - The New York Review of Books

More than 7,000 people from over 150 countries work for the WHO at150offices around the world and at its Geneva headquarters.

The United States has temporarily suspended its funding to the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Here is a look at most recent US contributions to the UN health agency and how the money was spent.

US President Donald Trump announced on April 14 that US contributions to the WHO would be frozen while his administration carried out a review of the organisations response to the pandemic. The review was likely to take 60-90 days, he said.

The US decision has sparked condemnation by numeroushealth experts and leaders, such as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and European Union foreign policy chiefJosep Borrell.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he regretted Trump's decisionbut called on world unity to fight the pandemic.

"The United States of America has been a long-standing and generous friend of the WHO and we hope it will continue to be so," Tedros told a press conference on Wednesday. "We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a halt in the funding to the WHO."

WHO was still examining the impact and would "try to fill any gaps with partners", Tedros said.

Trump had accused the WHO of severely mismanaging the pandemic and covering up its spread. He also criticised its relationship with China and said the UN agency must be held accountable.

The halt to US funding, if it became permanent, would leave a huge hole in the WHOs finances. The US is the biggest overall donor to the UN health agency, contributing roughly 15%external link of its $5.6 billion (CHF5.4 billion) budget for 2018-2019.

The WHO is financed through a mix of assessed contributions dues countries pay in order to be a WHO member and voluntary funding. Just over a quarter of US contributions for 2018-2019, or $237 million, were assessed. The amount a member state must pay is calculated on a sliding scale relative to the countrys wealth and population.

For 2018-2019 the US also gave $656 million in voluntary funding, earmarked to specific programmes or countries (see below).

In recent years, assessed contributions to the health agency have declined and voluntary contributions from a range of sources, public and private, have accounted for more than three-quarters of the WHOs financing.

Here is an overview of the top ten donors to the WHO for 2018-2019.

WHO graphic 1

The WHOs polio eradication programmesexternal link received the largest chunk of earmarked US money for 2018-2019 ($158 million, or almost 30% of its entire voluntary funding during that period).

Polio-related work in Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia received the lions share of the money.

WHO graphic 2

The US gave $100 million to the WHOs work supporting community health programmes, primary health care, ambulance services and hospitals and other tertiary care facilitiesexternal link, mainly in Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Syria and Afghanistan, in this time period.

It also gave $44 million to the WHOs vaccines and preventable diseases operationsexternal link around the world, helping countries implement vaccination plans to eliminate and control diseases such as measles, rubella and hepatitis B. An additional $33 million went to work on tuberculosisexternal link.

For 2018-2019, Switzerland gave the organisation $38.8 million $10.9 million in assessed contributions and $27.9 million in voluntary contributions. Of this $4.4 million was spent on tropical disease research, $3.1 million on research into human reproduction and $2.2 million on national health policies and strategies.

Switzerland is oneof the countries most affected by the coronavirus. This is where things stand and the latest on the measures in place.

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Funding the World Health Organization: where the US money goes - swissinfo.ch

20 April 2020

Andy Glewlost his eight-month battle with a brain tumour on 27 March aged 54, an example of what bravery, courage and acceptance truly mean.

As a former colleague and friend, I knew Andy to be a man dedicated to his field, a successful clinical scientist and entrepreneur, and always humble about his achievements. His cheeky smile and charismatic laugh inspired those around him with his love and zest for life. This tribute to Andy combines memoirs he began writing during his illness with contributions from friends, family and colleagues.

Andy's career started in 1984 in Cambridgeshire, where he worked with Dr Robert Moore and Dr Chris Polge at a government funded institute specialising in animal reproduction and genetic research. His job was varied, with everything from injecting sheep in the morning through to collecting semen samples and taking animals to abattoir to retrieve the ovaries.

This work led the way for Andy to develop his interest in human IVF. He moved to the Cromwell Hospital in London where he was initially assigned to perform research on eggs but was quickly recognised as a valuable member of the clinical team.

Andy later moved to the Human Wellington Hospital with Professor Ian Craft and had fond memories of travelling to Mexico City with the 'Prof' to advise on the set up of a new clinic. During this time, Andy formed a strong relationship with Michael Ah-Moye. Together, they set up one of the first independent IVF clinics at Holly House Hospital in Essex in 1989, which later relocated to become Herts and Essex Fertility Centre.

'Andy was so proud of his new unit, and the success rates. When it was first set up, he was almost as nervous as the patients waiting for the results of pregnancy tests and was as happy as them when they were positive.'

The Holly House team was a small family, many of the embryologists who had the honour of working with him have gone on to run laboratories across the country.

'Andy was always smiling and happy. I never saw or remember him being in bad form, he never appeared to have an off day. That is also the memory of all who worked with and knew him. Nobody could ever remember him not smiling.'

'Andy was one person who was always willing to help at any hour. He always believed in sharing his knowledge and as many of his close friends would say that Andy's infectious smile and his jovial sense of humour made him a truly admirable and inspirational human being.'

In 2013, Andy proudly established his own clinic, Simply Fertility, with his second wife and colleague Sarah. He was able to apply all of his skills, whether it be a difficult ICSI in the laboratory, introducing new technology or leading business management projects.

Andy was honoured to witness the advancements in his field, 'from glass petri dishes to everything being disposable', and his entrepreneurial flare characterised his approach: he worked for example with equipment providers to develop electronic witnessing, now common-place in laboratories around the world. His impressive track record has earned him both national and international acclaim.

'We used to meet most years at the annual ESHRE meeting. I was always assured of a big smiley welcome and a breath-taking hug. It used to be said that if you didn't know Andy Glew then you didn't work in IVF.'

Andy was a co-founder of the Association of Clinical Embryologists (ACE), ensuring the professional status of embryologists.He hosted the first ever ACE conference and served with many professional bodies.

'Andy taught me what it is to be an honest scientist. He always had two feet on the ground and was incredibly grateful for his fulfilling career. I even remember him presenting results at a conference which critiqued his own performance.'

Andy was accepting of his diagnosis when asked if he was angry or fed up, he would reply, 'What would be the point in that?'His positivity, kindness, selflessness and compassion will no doubt continue in all those whose lives he has touched. An incredible father, stepfather, son, brother, uncle, husband, businessman and embryologist.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing measures, a memorial to celebrate Andy's life will take place later in the year. Andy wished for a 'big' occasion with the coming together of family, friends and colleagues. Please keep checking BioNews for an announcement of further details.

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Obituary: Andy Glew, embryologist at the heart of his field - BioNews

Dr. Lori Brotto and Dr. Peter Leung, professors in the UBC department of obstetrics and gynaecology, and Dr. Kendall Ho, professor in the department of emergency medicine, have been awarded the 2019 Faculty of Medicine Distinguished Researcher Awards. The annual awards recognize faculty who have made significant contributions in basic science research in the areas of health and life sciences, as well as clinical and applied research to improve health outcomes of populations.

Dr. Lori Brotto

Dr. Lori Brotto, the Canada Research Chair in Womens Sexual Health at UBC and executive director of the Womens Health Research Institute, was recognized for her contributions to the field of womens sexual health and mental health. Her research has influenced the assessment and treatment of sexual dysfunction around the world.

It is such an honour to receive this award because it recognizes the important contributions that psychology makes to the field of medicine, and I am proud that our evidence-based psychological treatments have been implemented in so many medical centres, Dr. Brotto said. Moreover, to be recognized for my research in womens health is so important because womens health continues to be misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and dismissed. In my mind, research is the route towards ending these gender-based biases, and I am happy that my research has played one small part in doing so.

Dr. Brottos research has also influenced local clinical practice through the introduction of psychological skills training for treating womens chronic genital pain in hospital-based programs. Her recommendations for mindfulness and psychological approaches to treating sexual dysfunction have also appeared in the International Consultation on Sexual Medicine. Dr. Brotto has published her research in more than 170 peer-reviewed publications, regularly participates in media interviews, and wrote Better Sex Through Mindfulness to translate her research to the public. Dr. Brotto is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

Dr. Peter C.K. Leung

Dr. Peter C.K. Leung, the faculty of medicines former associate dean of graduate and postdoctoral education, was recognized for his work in womens reproductive biology and medicine. Dr. Leungs research seeks to understand hormonal factors in womens reproductive health and improve the treatment of reproductive health and gynaecologic cancers

This honour is a recognition of the collective efforts of a great many postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, staff and visiting scholars who I have been privileged to work with, said Dr. Leung. Their talents and dedication to scientific pursuit are deeply appreciated.

Dr. Leung has received worldwide recognition for discovering and categorizing the human gene encoding the genadotrophin-releasing hormone receptor (GnRH), which is a key regulator of reproduction. His findings have influenced further research and clinical practice, including treatments and therapies for infertility, endometriosis and uterine fibroids, as well as prostate cancer. Dr. Leung has established international academic and research partnerships between UBC and top universities, and published more than 420 peer-reviewed papers in academic journals. He has received the Medical Research Council of Canada Scientist and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Distinguished Scholar awards among many others. Dr. Leung is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Dr. Kendall Ho

Dr. Kendall Ho, the lead investigator for Digital Emergency Medicine at UBC and an attending emergency physician at Vancouver General Hospital, was recognized for his contributions to research in digital health. Dr. Ho leads a research program integrating digital applications to enhance health outcomes of diverse patient populations.

I am very honoured and humbled to be selected for this award, Dr. Ho said. I feel very fortunate to be in the field of emergency medicine, being a member of the UBC faculty of medicine, and pursuing my vocation in Canada. All of these factors allow me to develop my scholarship and knowledge translation in digital health with strong clinical grounding, fertile innovative milieu, rich contexts of care, and meaningful partnerships across Canada and globally, so as to make positive impact to patient care. This award recognizes this diverse tapestry upon which I am nurtured and grow as a clinician-researcher.

Dr. Ho is a national leader in digital health with an extensive clinician-researcher career. His most recent project, TEC4Home, investigates home monitoring of patients with heart failure to help improve the lives of patients through digital health practices. Dr. Hos research regularly informs provincial and national health policy-making organizations, such as the B.C. Ministry of Health and Health Canada, on digital health. He has significantly impacted the training of health professionals in digital health, as well as published more than 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Ho is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and has received numerous awards and recognition, including, most recently, the Canadian Medical Association Physician Changemaker.

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Three faculty members recognized for outstanding contributions to health research - UBC Faculty of Medicine

As the number of cases of COVID-19 continues to accelerate, researchers and epidemiologists at the Maine Center for Disease Control are using several scientific models to prepare for an outbreak that could kill between 100 and 1,000 residents.

The wide variance in the fatality forecast, as well as the potential overwhelming of the states health care system, reflects the imprecision of epidemiological modeling. Included in those forecasts are scientists evolving understanding of the novel coronavirus that is now hitting its peak in certain parts of the U.S.

[What Mainers Need To Know About The Coronavirus]

Also underpinning the forecasts is Mainers adherence to social distancing restrictions implemented by Gov. Janet Mills - something thats difficult to track or quantify, but central to Maines fight against an outbreak thats already killed 10 residents as of Monday, while hospitalizing nearly 100 others.

In the absence of a vaccine, the human distancing restrictions are all weve got against COVID-19, said Dr. Nirav Shah, director of the Maine CDC.

Shah revealed the CDC modeling with three reporters at the Maine Emergency Management Agency offices in Augusta. He emphasized repeatedly that the models were for planning, not predictions, adding that the forecasts were designed to produce a range of scenarios so that state public health officials can prepare for a medical surge that could overwhelm Maines critical care beds or require more people to operate ventilators than are currently in the workforce.

While Shah said he believed the chances of a worst-case scenario seemed small, he also said its important to understand how devastating COVID-19 could be in a state with the oldest median age in the country.

This is a really serious disease. The fatality rate is not anything to trifle with. It spreads a lot more easily than the flu, he said.

The forecasts center on a range of assumptions that include whats known as the basic reproduction number, or how many people can be infected by coming into contact with just one person. Shah says that number is determined by how infectious the disease is, but also how society and people respond to it by limiting human interactions, travel or frequent handwashing.

When we talk about flattening the curve, this is precisely what were talking about, he said.

For example, one person with the flu can transmit the virus to between one and two people. Early research shows that one person with COVID-19 can spread the virus to nearly four people, a single digit increase over the flu that can have far more devastating consequences.

Likewise, reducing the COVID-19 reproduction number even by a small percentage can produce widely different results.

Shah showed models forecasting the effects of a 60- and 70-percent decrease in reproduction on the availability of critical care beds in Maine hospitals. A 70 percent decrease showed that Maines inventory of critical care beds could be sufficient. A 60 percent decrease showed a significant shortfall.

The same scenario applied to COVID-19 case numbers. A 70 percent decrease in the reproduction rate showed case counts slowly accumulating over the next few months before leveling off. A 60 percent decrease showed cases skyrocketing to cases in the thousands each day.

In nearly all of the modeling scenarios, Maine could see the peak of the outbreak in the next couple of weeks.

Shah said the duration will depend on whether Mainers continue to follow social distancing rules. He acknowledged that measuring adherence to social distancing is also tricky. But he said state officials are tracking it through traffic and cellphone data. He said the state is using publicly available cell phone data supplied by carrier companies, not accessing it on its own.

Shah says Maine CDC is also using county-level traffic data gathered by the Maine Department of Transportation.

Early traffic data show a 50 percent drop in travel. In Cumberland County, Shah said there was an additional 17 percent reduction. Not reflected in those findings is the impact of Gov. Mills stay at home order issued last week. Shah said that it can take two to three weeks to measure the impact of any kind of restriction, whether its on gatherings of people or on travel.

He said aggressive actions and adherence to them are Maines best chance against COVID-19.

Many of the governors mandates began as recommendations. Given that changes in Mainers behavior can play a significant role in reducing the reproduction rate of COVID-19 cases, Shah was asked if the governors restrictions were aggressive and timely enough.

Yeah, I think so, he said. I think the order and the timing in which we took the steps was when they needed to be.

He said social distancing remains the core strategy, but the aggressiveness of that strategy - such as enforcement measures - could change if it looks like Maines reproduction rate of COVID-19 is tracking with a worst-case scenario.

Shah said he debated whether to show reporters the fatality forecasts knowing that they could be wrong.

I want to be straight because I know thats a question thats on everyones mind, he said. And ... this is serious stuff.

Shah also said that the epidemiological models are not glimpses at the future, but instead a range of possibilities - possibilities that are highly sensitive to people taking the potential outcomes seriously.

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With Social Distancing Their Only Tool, Maine Health Officials Prepare For Range Of Grim Outcomes - Maine Public

In 2016, a few months before Donald Trumps election, Nancy Fraser, a professor of philosophy and politics at the New School and acclaimed critical theorist, argued that the country was facing a crisis of care. Care work, which Fraser defined more broadly as social reproduction, included everything from raising children and caring for friends and family to maintaining the social bonds that bring communities together. Fraser contended that our capitalist system devalued this type of work, despite the fact that we all depend on such care every daypaying very little for it or taking it for granted and subsequently making it more and more difficult to do.

During the pandemic, the essential nature of care work has been made more clear. The value of the work that was being done in the shadows, by the nannies and cleaners who can no longer come into our buildings, is now suddenly obvious as we try to live without it. The infrastructure that we dont usually define as care, from our public school system to our grocery stores, is now apparent as such. The connections that we didnt know existed, like those made among strangers offering each other mutual aid, are now our lifelines. But to Frasers point, were also seeing how our system has devalued that workwhether its the precarious conditions for teachers and domestic workers or the lack of universal child care to help essential workers do their jobs right now.

VICE called up Fraser at her Vermont home, where she was waiting on a grocery delivery in social isolation. While we were in this care crisis long before coronavirus came along, Fraser said that this pandemic is like a lightning flash, illuminating all of the failures in our capitalist system. We also spoke about the new visibility of care work, what we can learn from this current moment, and whether or not she sees the potential for a more socialist feminist future after coronavirus.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Youve argued that weve long been in a crisis of care. Can you talk about that crisis and the ways in which this epidemic has reinforced it?

What I would have said before is that theres a deep bias in capitalist societies against the whole aspect of the care economy that is unwaged and often much less visible. Capital, which is a huge center of power in our society, is kind of primed in its DNA to try to avoid paying for that absolutely necessary care work. It wants to help itself to the fruits of that activitythe workers that get birthed and raised and educated. It wants the benefits of all of that, the home-life where workers can rest and replenish before they go back the next day, without paying for it. A huge aspect of class struggle in the history of capitalism has been over that care work and whos going to pay for it.

I would say that our current form of capitalism, which many people would call neoliberal capitalism, is a perfect storm of this kind of care crisis even before COVID-19. On the one hand, it has massively recruited women into the paid workforcenot just young unmarried women, but everybody. And at the same time, the whole financial sector puts enormous pressure on governments to cut social spending to institute what they euphemistically call austerity.

So we now have women being expected to devote many more hours to waged labor, while the governments providing less and less of the social provision that would conceivably take up some of the slack. Then you add in real wages being driven downwards despite the huge rise in profits, which means every household requires more and more hours of waged labor in order to just end up with the same amount of income to support the household. This is a kind of time crunch, if you see what I mean. Whos going to provide unwaged care work under these conditions? Weve been seeing this long before coronavirus came, this huge squeeze on the whole social reproductive sector.

So how are we seeing this play out in the current moment?

What coronavirus does in a way is it shows us the huge costs that weve incurredlets say the unpaid bill for social reproductionthat has been accumulating for decades, if not longer. Decades of unreplenished energies and costs including those questions about disinvestment in the infrastructure of public health, which is so consequential right now. What was a simmering of a crisis, now its become really explosive in a way.

We were already facing a crisis of care before coronavirus hit because of this under-investment in social reproduction and the shifting of more and more energies and resources and human capacities into the for-profit sector. I would say coronavirus in the age of neoliberalism is a textbook lesson of the absolute imperative for a socialist feminist reorganization of society. It gives new meaning to the idea of disaster capitalism. Its not that the disaster comes from outside and [capitalism] is not able to deal with it so well. It is the disaster itself.

Care work under capitalism is defined by its invisibility. Yet as coronavirus has forced everyone to socially isolate, children are being sent home from school, domestic workers cant come to work, and families staying home, all have to take on care duties now. Do you see this pandemic as a moment when care work seems more visible than ever?

Yes I do. Or at least, a great deal of it. It puts the spotlight on peoples interior lives and what it takes under these conditions to keep a household running. In theory those who are staying home now have time for the domestic front of care work. But on the other hand, they have whole new burdens, such as disinfecting everything, homeschooling, or dealing with children who are not normally home. Many people are working from home, theyre still juggling. And then you add the stress level that everybodys under, including being in a confined space with people you're not used to spending 24 hours with, and all the worrythat is also part of care work.

What coronavirus does in a way is it shows us the huge costs that weve incurredlets say the unpaid bill for social reproductionthat has been accumulating for decades, if not longer.

The other part about care work is that we should not only define it in these domestic familial terms. The whole public health system is also a part of care. The spotlight is really on that and on the ways it's been allowed to deteriorate through underinvestment. So I define care work broadly, not just doing the laundry and so on, but it includes education, health, all of the functions, some of which are done outside the home, usually by public employees.

The health part is where there is really a new kind of visibility, in that we think about health provisions too narrowly. Weve been thinking who has insurance and who doesnt, who can go to a doctor and who cant, who has access to abortion and who doesnt. But what were now seeing is the infrastructural side and that includes hospitals, clinics, personal protective equipment, ventilators. All of this is part of the material infrastructure that makes care possible, so its not just the people who we usually think of performing the care, but all those who are keeping the supply chain going or failing to do so.

Its not just that care has become visible, which it has. But I think were starting to see how production and reproduction are so intertwined that you cant care without this material infrastructure. And to the degree that that is organized on the basis of a for-profit production system, there are all kinds of gross irrationalities that cause a breakdown in the supply chain in the need for care. Thats the most important insight Ive gotten out of all of this. We socialist feminists in particular are always going on and on ad nauseam about the importance of care. Youre right, that's becoming crystal clear. But I think we now see the other side of this; it's not just that the production system depends on the care work, the care work depends on the production system. At this moment, thats one of the key bottlenecks and irrationalities in how this all works under a capitalist for-profit system.

And that extends beyond health care.

Right. Just keeping the food system going and uncontaminated and whos an essential worker and who isntall of this is really crying out for a socialist feminist analysis.

Some states have now made grocery workers essential personnel and are providing them free child care . When their labor is suddenly seen as valuable so is the need for their care, like their child care and health care. What does this have to say about how care under capitalism works?

There are many lessons to be learned here, which have a much broader applicability than the specific case at hand. You give us a specific example about grocery store workers: Everybody understands under coronavirus conditions why their work is so essential and why we have to do whatever it takes to make sure they can do that work, including child care and so on. That becomes clear in a flash. It lights up a whole understanding. The key question though is how broadly we apply this flash of illumination.

What do we do after we get through the worst of this? Are we going to take what we learn and apply it to some significant social transformation? I mean, why do we have people doing work that is not essential. Why would we have non-essential work at all, why wouldnt we just have leisure? Why isnt everything that people do designed to be essential and therefore why isnt child care just taken for granted as an obvious thing that is available across the board?

These are the kind of lessons that you could learn, and of course there are lots of people on the left who have been entertaining these heterodox and scandalous radical ideas here and there for a while. Lets include Bernie Sanders in that category. These people are now getting a bigger audience. One thing about a crisis is it forces people to think outside the box. You cant fall back on the same old bromides that are so patently useless and harmful. So in times like this, its possible to get a bigger hearing for very radical ideas. Thats great. Then its important that we all rise to the occasion and think together and try to develop some kind of vision for a new society, a new way of coming out of this on the other side. We need a set of strategies for how we convince broader strata that this is the way to go.

Speaking of new understandings, we also have this situation where some people cannot reach their nuclear families and are relying on their neighbors, friends, mutual aid from strangers. Do you think this is a moment where we can redefine care as something that is not necessarily tied to the family unit and is valuable beyond the metrics of the market?

I think the realitybefore, during, and presumably after coronavirusis that care was never confined within the walls of a private dwelling. Its never been an exclusively familial situation. But in the imagination, people always think of the home, the mother, the housewife. And I do think that this is another lightning flash, its like coronavirus lights up the skies and shows us that. It calls on us really to depend on those who are at hand. That can forge relationships even if only through a window, like this woman whos getting my groceries.

Why would we have non-essential work at all, why wouldnt we just have leisure? Why isnt everything that people do designed to be essential and therefore why isnt child care just taken for granted as an obvious thing that is available across the board?

These networks of interdependencies can actually make people feel very much more connected, like their fates are tied together. This question of whether you observe social distancing is one kind of test of that. Whether you see how you cant take care of your own health or that of your familys without at the same time taking care of everyone else. Again, the connection between public health and individual health all becomes lit up in a way that is normally not clear in daily life. Thats the nature of pandemic.

The impulse here is towards broader solidarity, but on the other hand you see this kind of survivalism. You have to figure out, how can New York get these ventilators instead of California. This is also on the personal, smaller levelhow can I make sure I get the toilet paper, the masks. Both things are going on at once. The question, then, is how can we take the better impulses that are coming out and highlight them. We need to show where they might lead and show why the restrictive, self-protective forms of survival are irrational.

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Taking Care of Each Other Is Essential Work - VICE

As South Africa joins the global community in fighting a pandemic, this presents an opportune moment to also reflect holistically on our health system, especially health services for womxn. As today marks World Health Day, its also important to remind ourselves of the importance of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) for our overall health and well-being. ByAngelica Pino, Programmes Director, Sonke Gender Justice.

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The last several weeks have witnessed a flurry of crucial actions and activities that have been implemented as countries globally battle the deadly, novel coronavirus. South Africa has not been spared either and in line with other countries across the globe, the government has now implemented a 21-day lockdown with the hope that we may be spared the worst of this ravaging pandemic.

It has evidently not been an easy decision and there are concerns about access to other health services that have been raised by citizens on various public fora. These include womxn who are anxious about their ability to access crucial sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services during this lockdown.

Several activists and organisations in the last weeks have been raising awareness and working to ensure that SRH and gender-based violence issues remain a priority in the discourse around Covid-19. This includes sharing information and preparing womxn for possible challenges and delays they might encounter when they seek services and ways to mitigate this, like taking home pregnancy tests, seeking safe abortion services earlier, encouraging the use of emergency contraceptives, among others. They also encourage staying at home in case of symptoms of Covid-19 and rather, phoning for assistance.

As we mark World Health Day, lets celebrate our constitution, which is one of the most progressive in the world, one that enables South Africans from all walks of life to exercise their freedoms and rights, which include SRHR for all. SRHR is defined as a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social wellbeing in relation to all aspects of sexuality and reproduction, not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction, or infirmity1.

According to the World Health Organisation, SRHR includes access to a comprehensive suite of SRH interventions, which are an essential component of the overall health, rights and well-being of womxn. These include access to family planning, contraception and abortion services; prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cervical cancer as well as sexually transmitted and reproductive tract infections; and prevention of female genital mutilation and violence against womxn, among others. But it is not just about the accessibility to services; it is also about the quality. Womxn need and deserve access to safe, non-judgmental SRH services (including youth-friendly setups) that respect the rights to confidentiality and privacy of those who seek it.

Unfortunately, the promises of our constitution have not been always been fulfilled, in particular for poor women who have to make use of the public health sector services. Violations of womxs SRH rights have been frequent in our country. These are manifested through challenges in accessing SRH services, which is most concerning in a context of high rates of gender-based violence. Womxn have reported lack of post-trauma care in instances of rape and violence, prolonged contraceptive stockouts are common and there is the long-standing refusal of care by many healthcare providers when patients seek services like abortion. Most shockingly, an investigation by the Commission for Gender Equality revealed in February this year that state hospitals in South Africa have sterilized some pregnant HIV-positive womxn without their consent. The lack of youth-friendly SRH services continues to disadvantage girls and young womxn, which is evident in the high rates of unintended teenage pregnancies. This also speaks to lack of access to family planning needs and safe and legal abortion services.

According to the new draft National Integrated SRHR policy, all individuals have a right to make decisions governing their bodies and to access services that support that right. As a society, we must keep working to create an enabling environment so that all South African womxn can exercise their reproductive rights, so that we stay on our path to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity.

As we fight the scourge of Covid-19, its important to keep these rights in mind and support womxn so they dont face challenges while trying to access essential services. This is an opportunity to reflect as well on the deep socio-economic inequalities that prevent the majority of our population from accessing quality health care. As activists for social justice, we must reflect and learn from the Covid-19 crisis and integrate these lessons in our discussions around the National Health Insurance Bill.

In solidarity and with determination, we will overcome this current health crisis, but we must also use this time to reflect on strategies that will further intensify our efforts to promote health and save the lives of womxn and girls in South Africa. As the old rallying cry of feminists all over the world saywomxns rights are human rights!

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[Op-Ed]Sexual and reproductive health and rights are an important component of human rights - Health-e News

Are we really all in this together? It is true that until December 2019, no human had encountered the 2019 novel coronavirus, and so none of us was immune. It is also true that political and national boundaries have not halted the spread of this contagion throughout the world. But it is just as true that COVID-19 has washed away any veneer of equal opportunity or equal risk in the population.

The "pre-existing health conditions" that put a person at risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19 are over-represented in communities of color and poor communities as a result of long-term disinvestment and neglect. And now our country's delayed response to the looming pandemic has resulted in unprecedented and under-resourced demands on our health care system. It has raised the specter of health care providers having to make decisions in real time, at the bedside, of who will receive life-saving treatment and who will not.

These decisions used to be made from a distance by our insurance companies, economic system and legally structured racial residential segregation. Now, they will seem personal and real in a whole new way.

Health equity is assurance of the conditions for optimal health for all people. It is a process, not a magical outcome. As we navigate through the immediate health, economic and social demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, three principles for achieving health equity can provide us with both a moral and practical compass: valuing all individuals and populations equally, recognizing and rectifying historical injustices, and providing resources according to need.

These principles can serve as a framework for evaluating current and proposed policy solutions, as well as a checklist for identifying gaps in policy where no solutions have yet been suggested. They can also be the basis for decision-making at the health care provider level.

How can we operationalize these principles for our response to the COVID-19 pandemic?

We need to consider how to reach all communities with our life-saving messages of social distancing, frequent hand-washing, stay-at-home orders and symptoms of COVID-19. And we need to enable all individuals to take up these practices. We need to value those who are detained in jails, prisons and immigration detention centers, as well as those who are unhoused, as much as we value people living in senior communities. We need to anticipate all of the needs that exist.

And we have to be bold in imagining solutions to the issues raised when we decide to value all individuals and populations equally. For example, the decarceration of jailed, imprisoned and detained people who pose little risk to society and are at high risk of death from COVID-19 due to their age or underlying health status. And connection to community resources to support these returning citizens. Or the housing of previously unhoused individuals in available vacant properties. Or at least providing hand-washing stations and opening public restrooms for their use.

At the policy level, the most important way to value all individuals and populations equally is by looking at who is at the decision-making table and who is not, what is on the agenda and what is not. When any of us is at a decision-making table, we need to look around and ask, "Who is not here who has an interest in this proceeding?" And then our job is not just to represent the interests of the missing parties, although that may be a necessary short-term strategy. Our job is to create space for them at the table.

Even now, when Congress is working on the fourth COVID-19 rescue plan for the nation, we need to ensure that all voices can be heard in the deliberations. In the short term, that may be active solicitation of citizen input by our elected representatives. In the long term, that may take overturning Citizens United.

Communities of color should not be "sacrifice zones" with regard to the COVID-19 response. One wonders about the decision to disembark infected persons from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Oakland Bay rather than in San Francisco Bay, noting that Oakland has a much higher population of color. Or about the decision to convert Carney Hospital in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston to be the country's first hospital devoted to the care of COVID-19 patients, depriving that predominantly black neighborhood of access to other medical services and possibly increasing the risk of infection in the area.

Certainly, the since-abandoned policy proposal to provide lower one-time cash payments to Americans with lower incomes was the opposite of valuing all individuals and populations equally.

At the bedside, decisions about the allocation of life-saving treatments should not be done by the medical professionals directly involved in the patient's care. It is too easy for implicit bias about relative worth based on race or ethnicity, class, gender, language, disability or other characteristics to manifest itself in decision-making when a provider is tired or stressed. If patient prioritization will instead be done by a hospital ethics board, the composition of that board also needs to be examined for balance along axes of difference and power, and community input into the criteria and processes for decision-making should be rapidly sought.

If we really want to value all individuals and populations equally, should we use a lottery system for allocation of scarce resources? At least structured inequity and subjective valuation would be taken out of the decision-making. This is a provocative suggestion. But perhaps the threat of a fair system in which all people would have equal chances at life would stimulate a more rapid production and distribution of life-saving health resources, solving the issue of scarcity.

The principle manifestation of historical injustices during the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic is how segregation of resources and risks, societal devaluation, and environmental hazards and degradation are written into the bodies of people of color and poor people. The greater health burden borne by these people may not only predispose them to more severe manifestations of the virus itself, but may also disadvantage them in any ethical protocol established for the rationing of scarce health resources. That would be wrong. It would be counter to the health equity principle of recognizing and rectifying historical injustices, putting at double jeopardy those who already bear the brunt of chronic assaults to health. Instead, this principle should lead to the provision of more ventilators and health services in populations with higher pre-existing health burdens.

Recognizing and rectifying historical injustices also necessitates collection and disaggregation of data on coronavirus testing, diagnosis, treatment, and outcome by "race" and ethnicity so that the impacts of those historical injustices can be recognized and addressed.

In the longer term, attention by policymakers to the history of each problem to be solved will always provide useful insight into effective solutions. Understanding how a knot got tied will always help in untying the knot. The United States population is notoriously ahistorical, thinking that the present is disconnected from the past and that the current distribution of advantage and disadvantage is just a happenstance. The long-term application of this principle will involve the large-scale teaching of our full histories as a nation and a commitment to apologize and make reparations for past injustices, recognizing that they continue to have present-day impacts.

This is perhaps the easiest of the three principles to understand but often the hardest to implement. It takes a tremendous amount of political will. The first step is to establish a metric of need on which there is wide consensus. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it might be the number of diagnosed cases or indicators of the trajectory of the epidemic (including doubling time and basic reproduction number) in a given jurisdiction. It might include projected number of deaths, projected demands on the health care system, current health system capacity or current levels of resources in an area.

Once a metric of need is established and agreed upon, it would then seem simple to take all available resources and distribute them according to that metric of need. However, even in the clear current situation of New York, topping out these measures of need all around, there is not a rapid deployment of national resources to the city. Other jurisdictions are holding on to theirs because of projected need in a few weeks. And the federal government is slow in using its full power to rapidly commission and deploy resources to areas of need. Instead of conducting targeted and fluid mobilization as the pandemic moves across the nation, there appears to be a stance of disbelief and paralysis at the scope of the need.

As often happens, people (and political jurisdictions) never compare themselves to those who have less than what they have. They always compare themselves to those who have more, so they always feel needy. A pre-established metric of need should solve that. But perhaps strong community pressure is also required.

This pandemic will not end in days or weeks. It could be a year, maybe 18 months. By then, the world will have faced immeasurable loss in terms of life. And economies will need to get back into gear. But maybe the lesson that we are all human and all vulnerable will have sunken through to those who feel better than, or removed from, or insulated from the conditions of others.

It is my hope that these three principles for achieving health equity will be useful in guiding decision-making during these treacherous times. But looking forward, I also hope that they will provide a guide for how we value and treat one another as we build a better, new normal after COVID-19.

Camara Phyllis Jones, M.D., Ph.D., is the Evelyn Green Davis Fellow of Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a senior fellow at the Morehouse School of Medicine and past president of the American Public Health Association.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Coronavirus Disease Discriminates. Our Health Care Doesn't Have To | Opinion - Newsweek

When Laura Dykstra was finishing up high school, she had research on her mind. Dykstra, from West Chester, Ohio, saw opportunity just a few hours to the north.

There are a lot of diverse ecosystems and wildlife species in Michigan and the Great Lakes area, and I thought it would be great to study them in person, said Dykstra.

So, she visited some schools, looking for an opportunity to get started.

Calvin was one of her stops.

I was impressed by all of the research opportunities at Calvin even freshmen are able to get involved in the lab or in the field, said Dykstra.

It didnt take Dykstra long to realize the unique opportunity she would have at Calvin to pursue her dream. So, she chose Calvin, and with the help of her professors she was plugged into research right away.

One of the greatest things about Calvin is how much the professors are invested in their students; I feel like Ive gotten to know my professors well and that they care about my career goals, said Dykstra, a biology major.

Along with two other undergraduate students, Dykstra is working in biology professor Keith Grasmans lab. They are monitoring the impact of environmental contaminants on the health of Great Lakes colonial waterbirds.

Following World War II, industrial and agricultural activity introduced high concentrations of pollutants into the Great Lakes ecosystem. These chemicals persist in the environment and bioaccumulate in organisms at higher trophic levels, including fish-eating birds. Since contaminants are associated with poor reproduction, reduced chick survival, immune suppression, and deformities in fish-eating birds, gulls and terns are effective indicators of contamination in the Great Lakes.

In the summer, we travel to herring gull and Caspian tern colonies at contaminated sites in Michigan, including Saginaw Bay, Grand Traverse Bay, and the River Raisin in Monroe, said Dykstra. At the colonies, we measure egg size, embryo viability, nest productivity, chick growth, and chick immune function.

I appreciate that Im involved in every aspect of the research: preparing for fieldwork, collecting data, and analyzing that data, said Dykstra. Thats a unique experience for an undergrad to have.

Dykstras experiences at Calvin have led to some important discoveries.

Our research has found that chicks at contaminated colonies continue to show reproductive, growth, and immunological impairments, which informs U.S. Fish & Wildlife remediation efforts at these sites.

And these discoveries have led to bigger platform

Dykstra, in her third year at Calvin, has already presented posters at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistrys North America Meetings in 2018 in Sacramento, California, and in 2019 in Toronto, Canada.

She also works with a group studying suburban red-shouldered hawks and recently published an article in the Journal of Raptor Research titled Red-Shouldered Hawks Banded in Suburban Southern Ohio, 1996-2018. And she has another submitted paper that is still under review.

These experiences have set Dykstra up for her crowning achievement at Calvin. In late March, Dykstra was awarded a Goldwater Scholarshipwidely considered the top research award for undergraduate students in the sciences. Only 396 college students across the United States received this honor in 2020-2021. The scholarship, a partnership between the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation and the Department of Defense National Defense Education Programs, comes with a $7,500 scholarship to support students in their research journeys.

The Goldwater opens up opportunities for studying in the future, said Dykstra.

For Dykstra, that means more opportunities to do what she loves: research!

And with the research experience she has had at Calvin, and the prestigious Goldwater honor, she should have her pick at where she wants to go to graduate school to study Wildlife Ecology.

Im most interested in wildlife conservation, Im hoping to work in academia or in a government agency, said Dykstra. Im interested in how anthropogenic activity affects wildlife, and how our work can influence policies that protect the environment and human health.

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When research on the water turns to gold - Calvin News

Britain has been in lockdown for two weeks and it has been the grimmest of fortnights. The number of daily deaths from Covid-19 has continued to rise steadily and large chunks of the economy have been brought to a standstill.

As yet, there are few hard numbers to judge the economic impact, but the collapse seen in the past few weeks is without precedent both in its speed and its severity. The increase in the numbers applying for universal credit suggest that unemployment is rising rapidly despite the government schemes to support both the employed and the self-employed.

The aim of the Treasury and the Bank of England is to get the UK through the crisis with a minimum of scarring. Hence there are loan guarantees designed to prevent businesses that were perfectly viable a month ago from going bust as a result of the shutdown. The hope is that wage subsidies will prevent workers from losing touch with the labour market and becoming long-term unemployed.

But clearly the longer it takes to tackle the health emergency the greater the economic damage will be. A 20% drop in output in one quarter a perfectly feasible possibility would be bad enough, but what if the lockdown were extended into the summer or the autumn?

Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, said last week that it was unrealistic for the government to keep the lockdown in place indefinitely and that if it went on for months on end there would be a rebellion against it.

That assessment is almost certainly right. The government does need an exit strategy but it is also being warned by epidemiologists that if the restrictions are relaxed too soon the virus could return. A second lockdown would not just be hugely unpopular, it would also magnify the economic damage.

The government says any decisions it takes on ending the lockdown will be based on science, but the scientists dont always agree. Thats because they are using models and these have limitations. Why? Because the results of epidemiological models depend on what is fed into them, and this requires the scientists to make a number of assumptions about human behaviour.

This is a point made by Gerard Lyons and Paul Ormerod in an important new paper that might just offer the government the sort of exit strategy that King was talking about.

Lyons and Ormerod do not dispute that a lockdown was necessary. Indeed, they think that the governments initial idea that the population would develop herd immunity to the virus was dangerous nonsense.

The evidence from other countries is that social distancing, shutting the restaurants and bars, discouraging unnecessary travel and getting people to work from home if they can does have an impact.

Before the lockdown began, estimates suggested that on average each person with the virus infected between two and 3.5 other people. Without action, the virus would have carried on spreading, putting intolerable pressure on the NHS and killing many more people. This is known as the reproduction number: if it is above one, someone who is infected will pass it on to more than one person. If it less than one, it will fade away. The experience of China and Italy is that lockdowns will get the reproduction number below one.

But the danger is that the reproduction number could go back up again if Britain went straight back to business as usual the moment the lockdown restrictions were lifted. If people celebrated en masse by going to the pub, to the football or by having a street party, there would be risk that the reproduction number would go up again and the virus would return. It is this possibility that concerns the epidemiologists.

Taken to extremes, this would involve continuing the lockdown until there was no longer a risk of someone with the virus infecting anyone else and so ensuring that no one dies. But as Lyons and Ormerod points out, a similar approach would involve the banning of all road traffic to prevent the nearly 2,000 deaths a year on the road in Britain.

Instead, they suggest that the return to normal life takes place under a traffic light system that will exploit the fact that people are going to be a lot more cautious in their behaviour after the crisis than they were before.

If people revert very quickly to the patterns of behaviour before the crisis, the epidemiological models are correct. There would be a second wave of infections. But behaviour will be different, either because of the lessons people have learned during this crisis, or because of the constraints placed upon them by rules and regulations.

The paper suggests that phase one of the process involves moving from lockdown to red. In this period, more but not all shops would open and they would have to observe the strict social distancing currently seen in supermarkets. Travel would be discouraged and many international flights banned.

In the amber phase, unlimited car journeys would be allowed, and the wearing of face masks and disposable gloves would be mandatory on public transport. Restaurants would be allowed to open only if they had strict seating demarcations to keep people at a safe distance.

It would only be when the light turned to green that any sort of sporting event or other mass gatherings, such as music festivals could take place, and the churches, temples and mosques open their doors.

Inevitably there will be those with different views about what should be included in the red, amber and green phases. But its worth noting that Lyons was once an adviser to Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London. The prime minister might just be listening.

Read more here:
The traffic light exit strategy to free the UK from lockdown - The Guardian

Epidemiologists measure how a disease spreads through a population using the basic reproduction number, otherwise known as R0. Typical seasonal flu has an R0 of 1.2, while that of Covid-19 is reported to be approximately 2.5.R = Reproductive number: How many people a given patient is likely to infect. If R >1, each case on average is giving it to at least one other person. The epidemic will increase. R0 is affected by factors like population density, environment, host factors (age, immunity), etc. Typical seasonal flu has an R0 of 1.2, Spanish Flu had an R0 of 2-3, while that of Covid-19 is reported to be approx. 2.5. From a policy planning perspective, it offers a very clear objective: Reduce R

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Strategies that can be used to fight Covid-19; their merits and demerits - Standard Digital

This past weekend, as coronavirus radiated across the country and sent Americans scurrying into their homes, Rosanne Cash tweeted: Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.

I wonder what the King Lear of Covid-19 will be. Maybe this woman licking an airplane toilet seat on TikTok?

Shakespeares plague streak hes believed to have written King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra in the space of a couple of years coincided with London playhouses shuttering, acting troupes leaving town to play plague-free villages and the Bard hanging back at home, nothing to do but plot an elaborate series of tragic murders. But Shakespeare was not online. Four hundred years later, isolation doesnt help to dispel creative distraction it beckons it in. We are sheltering in place with devices designed to amplify diversions and exploit obsessions.

As the virus has spread, it has also ravaged our outlets for sustained creative expression. Theaters have been darkened, exhibitions shuttered, wedding dances postponed, Eurovision canceled. People-watching is out. But bingeing and posting and thumbing incessantly through social media are open for business. In fact, a slavish devotion to our devices has come to feel like a practical necessity. Social media platforms have been unexpectedly reliable in spreading information about the pandemic, and in a time of social isolation, they have spontaneously delivered on their promise of community connectivity.

But they have also ensnared our attention with an alarming grip. The virus has clarified the dark bargain of these devices: We look to them to protect our bodies and soothe our nerves, and in return, we hand over our minds.

By Day 2 of a self-imposed kind-of quarantine, I was pacing my apartment, riding the crests of my anxiety, periodically sucking a thermometer and tapping idly through every content-emitting app on my phone. No crevice of the internet remained untouched by the virus. It has infected the content of beefcake influencers, wellness personalities and cat Twitter. There is surgical glove nail art and a masked makeup tutorial. Everybody is yelling about how to prepare beans and wash your hands. The impulses to signal awareness of the looming public health crisis and to reap the benefits of a coronavirus traffic bump align here. Even puppy rescue Instagrams are starting their captions with phrases like In this time of uncertainty

New coronavirus personalities have been forged in the diseases wake: a sophisticated Canadian boy forced to cancel a Disneyland vacation; Arnold Schwarzeneggers indoor donkey Lulu; Arnold Schwarzeneggers indoor mini-horse Whiskey. Then there is the toilet licker, a TikToker named Ava Louise who once described herself to Dr. Phil as a skinny legend and then released a song capitalizing on the moment titled Skinny Legend Anthem. Her video represents the apotheosis of coronavirus trolling: a global crisis is filtered through the influencer machine and emerges as a purely self-serving spectacle. We love a successful PR stunt, she tweeted recently.

The viruss effect on the celebrity reputation is wildly unpredictable. The grown-up charming teen actress Vanessa Hudgens turned instantly nefarious when she tousled her curls on Instagram, pitched her voice into a disturbingly cutesy register and said, Yeah, people are gonna die, and thats terrible, but also like inevitable? (She followed it with what may be the first Notes app apology of the pandemic.)

Meanwhile, Chet Hanks, the rapper son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson who once called himself Chet Haze and most recently came to public attention after speaking in patois on the Golden Globes red carpet, appeared strangely lovable when he appeared shirtless on Instagram to address his parents Covid-19 diagnoses. (Whats up everyone, its true, my parents got coronavirus, crazy.)

Virus content finally reached Jared Letos feed on Tuesday, when he emerged from a 12-day desert silent meditation retreat and tweeted, Wow.

These offerings, under normal online conditions, might produce a spike of intellectual or emotional activity. Chet Hanks should prompt a reflection on the wonders of human reproduction; mini-versions of regular-sized animals are thrilling. But they are all tied so inextricably to punishingly anxious online behavior that they seem to function purely on the level of stimulation. They evoke nothing but the low buzz of distraction from the invisible threat surrounding us.

Even flashes of online inspiration swiftly flicker and dim. The voraciousness of the meme, which instantly seizes fresh content and leaches it of meaning, has taken on an unsettling quality in the time of literal virality. Soon after quarantined Italians took to their balconies to sing the national anthem in unison, people made memes replacing the anthem with American pop songs. A doctored video of the Italians singing Katy Perrys song Roar prompted Perry to tweet, You cannot break the human spirit. When she capped it with an emoji of the Hungarian flag, she just about broke mine.

Its interesting that those who are holed up with their phones, isolating themselves for the greater good, seem drawn to representations of the careless. Images of packed Spring Break beaches and New York City restaurants are bandied about Twitter with grotesque fascination. Ive watched the video of the 21-year-old immunocompromised St. Patricks Day parade reveler who is not even worried because I take supplements and I self medicate about 20 times. The toilet-licker haunts me. Sharing these images provides a vicarious thrill while making us feel as if we have done a public service.

Any Instagram induced envy we used to feel while lurking on vacationers feeds has been seamlessly converted into moral superiority. Though coronavirus content feels inescapable to the masses hunkering at home, unbothered crowds persist outside the sphere of influence of online scolds, which only drives some to scream louder into the void.

A rare content oasis can be discovered on TikTok, a medium forged through a more quotidian kind of social isolation. The visual grammar of TikTok was developed by teenagers messing around alone in their childhood bedrooms, and so the platform has adapted easily to the quarantine, serving up videos of dogs running errands and unsettled house cats and online learning jokes that are oddly soothing in their effect. Whatever may be happening outside, life on TikTok feels oddly unchanged.

But life has changed, in ways we are only beginning to understand. One reason that we are so consumed with representations of coronavirus, dousing our brains in it like a kind of mental sanitizer, is that the view from our homes is still so limited. We are mentally unprepared for the changes to daily life that will unfold over the next several months. The virus is weeks ahead of our testing capabilities and perhaps years ahead of a vaccine. The virus is invisible to us, but it can track us down seemingly anywhere.

Perhaps thats why I keep coming back to this video of a penguin waddling around the halls of an aquarium, perusing its exhibits like a human being. When Chicagos Shedd Aquarium closed to visitors, it let a penguin named Wellington out of his enclosure and introduced him to the other side. In the video, he looks stutteringly behind him at his handler, flaps his wings and ventures up to the glass, where he examines the fish of the Amazon. He is on dry land but has a full view of the waters depths.

I dont know how penguins think, or what Wellington feels, but as a character in a video for human viewing, he imparts the sensation of vicarious enlightenment. He has leveled up to a new plane of aquarium knowledge. Finally, he can see the other animals as he himself was once seen. He can observe their patterns and movements from a vantage point of near omniscience. Watching Wellington gives the feeling of a vast unknown being spontaneously revealed. Must be nice.

The rest is here:
The Unending Anxiety of Coronavirus Content - The New York Times

Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, has given an unwitting boost to an Alabama lawmakers attempt to push back on restrictive abortion laws in her state, by tweeting about her proposal to force men to have vasectomies when they reach the age of 50.

Democratic representative Rolanda Hollis introduced the measure to the states House last week, intending it as protest against a law passed by the Alabama legislature last year to outlaw abortion in almost every case unless the life of the mother was at risk.

The responsibility is not always on the women. It takes two to tangle [sic], Hollis wrote in a tweet acknowledging that her long-shot House bill, which would also a mandate a vasectomy after the birth of a fathers third biological child, was intended to neutralize the abortion ban bill.

After an initial flare of mostly local publicity, the issue was set to fade back into obscurity until Cruz waded in with a tweet that placed it firmly before a national audience and his own 3.5 million Twitter followers, exposing his apparent hypocrisy over reproductive legislation at the same time.

Yikes. A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything literally! Cruz wrote, linking to an Alabama news websites account of the story from three days previously.

Cruz is noted for his staunchly conservative views on abortion and has previously condemned the Democratic partys efforts to protect access to abortion as a war on women. Comments on his tweet, however, allude to his opposition to the governance of male reproduction while supporting laws that dictate what women can and cannot do with their bodies.

Its outrageous to have government involved in these personal reproductive decisions! So glad you are pro-choice, Ted! one commentator wrote.

The controversial Alabama abortion measures, signed into law by Governor Kay Ivey in May 2019, was struck down by a federal court judge in October, two weeks before they were due to take effect.

The law, which threatens doctors with up to 99 years in prison for performing abortions at any stage of pregnancy, is intended by its supporters to bolster efforts to have the US supreme court overturn its 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, the landmark case that legalized abortion across the country.

A number of right-leaning states, including Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky and Louisiana, have passed stricter anti-abortion legislation in recent months as opponents grow in confidence that the supreme courts new conservative majority will reverse its 47-year-old ruling.

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Ted Cruz criticizes vasectomy bill, exposing his hypocrisy on reproduction rights - The Guardian

The Society For The Study Of Reproduction, or SSR, unveiled its 2020 award winners honoring seven individuals from some of the most prestigious universities in the world who have made outstanding contributions to the scientific discipline of reproductive biology.

MSU University Distinguished Professor and associate chair of research Asgi Fazleabas, from the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology in the College of Human Medicine, was honored with the Carl Hartmann Award, which is the highest award given by the SSR. The award recognizes a career of research and scholarly activities in the field of reproductive biology.

Six other award recipients come from institutions including University of Michigan, Yale University and the National Cheng Kung University of Taiwan.

SSR is the worlds leading association for supporting the scientific study of reproduction by fostering interdisciplinary communication among scientists, holding conferences and publishing original, meritorious studies.

The scientific research conducted by these seven biology scientists, physicians and professors have significantly advanced the science of reproduction, fertility and development, said Saima Hedrick, executive director, SSR, Their original research on a broad range of topics in the field of reproductive biology is helping lead us toward new discoveries, more mentorship opportunities and greater professionalism in the discipline. Their work has improved the lives of millions of humans and animals."

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Society for the study of reproduction honors MSU scientist - MSUToday

Anopheles arabiensis is an opportunistic malaria vector that rests and feeds outdoors, circumventing current vector control methods. Furthermore, this vector will readily feed on animal as well as human hosts. Targeting the vector, while feeding on animals, can provide an additional intervention for the current vector control activities. Agricultural animals are regularly vaccinated with recombinant proteins for the control of multiple endo- and ecto-parasitic infestations. The use of a Subolesin-vaccine showed a mark reduction in tick reproductive fitness. The orthologous gene of Subolesin, called Akirin in insects, might provide a valuable species-specific intervention against outdoor biting An. arabiensis. However, the biological function of this nuclear protein has not yet been investigated in this mosquito. The effects on An. arabiensis lifetable parameters were evaluated after Akirin was knocked down using commercial small-interfering RNA (siRNA) and in vitro transcribed double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). The siRNA mediated interference of Akirin significantly reduced fecundity by 17%, fertility by 23% and longevity by 32% when compared to the controls in the female mosquitoes tested. Similarly, dsRNA treatment had a 25% decrease in fecundity, 29% decrease in fertility, and 48% decrease in longevity, when compared to the control treatments. Mosquitoes treated with Akirin dsRNA had a mean survival time of 15-days post-inoculation, which would impact on their ability to transmit malaria parasites. These results strongly suggest that Akirin has a pleiotropic function in An. arabiensis longevity and reproductive fitness.

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Characterising the effect of Akirin knockdown on Anopheles arabiensis (Diptera: Culicidae) reproduction and survival, using RNA-mediated interference....

On March 11th, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to be a global pandemic, the first since the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Initially reported in the city of Wuhan in Central China in December, just four months later there are now over 150,000 cases in more than 130 countries which has put many on total lockdown while the world economy has been brought to a virtual standstill. While the Peoples Republic of China was the first country to report COVID-19, there has been a widespread presumption that the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) must have emerged in the capital of Hubei province that has not been held under sufficient scrutiny by Western corporate media.

The question of whether the COVID-19 coronavirus could have come from the U.S. army was controversially raised by Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liljian Zhao, who tweetedan articlefrom the Center for Research on Globalization website which subsequently went viral. Feigning concern over the spread of disinformation, Western media coverage uniformly avoided sourcing the article Zhao had shared on social media while predictably dismissing the claim as a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, Irans Civil Defense Chief alsosaidthe coronavirus could be a biological attack on China and Iran, as the Islamic Republic has been the third-most impacted nation with more than 12,000 cases including many at the highest levels of its government with multiple senior officials infected. Contrary to such mainstream media scaremongering, it is completely reasonable and should be permitted to speculate about the origins of the virus. That Zhaos posing of the theory received such a hostile response from the U.S. establishment is telling of how delicate their propaganda echo chamber is.

Although the disease is widely assumed to have been first transmitted through zoonosis because the earliest grouping of cases were linked to a Wuhan seafood market trading exotic wildlife in late December, the actual first known case was traced to the beginning of the month and may not have been originally passed through an animal. Many on the political right have even suggested the coronavirus is an effect of Chinese biological warfare which unexpectedly leaked from a lab in Wuhan, a theory disseminated in the pages of propaganda rags likeThe Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the founder of the right-wing Korean Unification Church cult, Sun Myung Moon, as well asThe Epoch Timesof the similarly fascistic religious sect of Chinese expatriates, the CIA-linked Falun Gong. In spite of that, it is true that the Wuhan Institute of Virology hasclose tiesto the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas, one of the Pentagons largest biological defense lab programs. Whereas no evidence exists that the Chinese government is responsible for COVID-19, nor does the PRC have a history of engaging in bio-warfare, there is an abundance of proof that the U.S. government has long been involved in the manufacturing and use of biological weapons since the Korean war.

When the accusations were first made by North Korea and China that the U.S. was using biological and germ warfare in the 19501953 Korean War, they were rejected outright by Washington as a hoax and rebuffed by the Western-biased WHO. In the decades since, the U.S. has maintained its denial while scholarly debate on the subject isdivided. However, anunredacted reportfrom 1952 from an investigation sponsored by the World Peace Council and conducted by an International Scientific Commission headed by Sir Joseph Needham, a highly reputable British biochemist of his era, was unearthed in 2018 and presents ample substantiation of the allegations, including eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence and documented confessions by American POWs. More disturbingly, the investigation indicates direct links between the U.S. biological warfare program and the germ warfare program of Unit 731, a clandestine bio and chemical warfare unit of Imperial Japan during World War II. During the Cold War, the Japanese researchers were secretly given immunity and recruited by the U.S. in exchange for their knowledge in human experimentation, along with many former Nazi scientists in Operation Paperclip.

Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army collected data not only through performing deadly experiments on humans but environmentally testing plague bombs by dropping them on Chinese cities to see whether they could start disease outbreaks. Many of these tactics were continued by the U.S. in the KoreanWar.According to Stephen Kinzer,journalist and author ofPoisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, the CIAs Project MK-ULTRA which was coordinated with the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratories was:

Essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

Frank Olson,one of the biowarfare scientists and CIA employees in the program who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, is the subject of the Netflix docu-drama seriesWormwood,directed by Errol Morris and featuring renowned journalist Seymour Hersh, which reveals Olson may have been a potential government whistleblower on the CIAs activities and U.S. bio-war crimes. It is worth noting that the usage of such agents in the Korean War included Chinese targets, the last and only major armed conflict between the U.S. and China, so if the COVID-19 pandemic were proven to be a product of U.S. biowarfare against Beijing, it would not be the first time.

Officially, the U.S. is said to have abandoned its bioweapons program in 1969, but its installation in Fort Detrick, Maryland, has continued conducting research into deadly pathogens and viruses on the stated purpose of bio-defense, as well as fighting disease outbreaks, developing vaccines, and other public health concerns. Yet just last year, research into fatal viruses and bioweapons were suspendedamid concerns they could be accidentally be released. The last time Fort Detricks germ warfare research was suspended was in 2009 after the Pentagon found discrepancies in the inventory of its infectious agents, the same year as the last pandemic of the H1N1 swine flu outbreak.

Fort Detrick has been under tighter restrictions since the 2001 anthrax attacks were traced to Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefense researcher at the facility. The suspected perpetrator and army biologist committed suicide in 2008 after learning the FBI was going to charge him with terrorism, which if proven to be true would mean that the Pentagons own biodefense research itself had led to rather than protected the American public from bioterrorism though there is plenty of evidence suggesting Ivins was framed by the feds. As journalist Whitney Webb uncovered, the U.S. Armys Medical Research branch headquartered in Maryland hascooperatedwith the Wuhan Institute of Virology mentioned previously for decades.

Toying around with organisms that can produce disease is a regular practice for the Pentagon. In 2005, U.S. scientists announced that they had even successfullyrecreated the avian influenza flu virusin a lab which killed at least 50 million people worldwide in 1918, widely known as the Spanish flu. The name is actually a misnomer, as it was disproportionately attributed to Spain which was neutral in World War I and was not subject to the same wartime censorship of the press to upkeep morale like in Germany, the UK, France and the U.S. whose media initially underreported the pandemics effects in their respective countries. The geographic source of the Spanish flu is still the subject of much debate, but the first observation of the disease was at a U.S. military installation in Fort Riley, Kansas in 1918. Needless to say, the risks involved with resurrecting a disease that wiped out more than a quarter of the worlds population are not trivial, but this did not prevent the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology from extracting the genetic coding of the Spanish flu from the exhumed corpse of a Native Alaskan woman frozen in the ground who died of the disease in an Inuit town in 1918.

There is no direct evidence showing that the 2009 swine flu said to have originated in Mexico through zoonosis from pigs was any leak of the restored Spanish flu, but the previous swine flu outbreak of 1976 began at a U.S. army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey, just like the Spanish flu of 1918. After the Gerald R. Ford administration jumped the gun and announced a flu epidemic was pending following the death of a single soldier, a subsequent mass immunization program without proper testing for side effects was administered to a staggering 45 million people, exactly a quarter of the entire U.S. population at the time, which ended up killing more Americans than the disease itself. The scandal forever sowed the seeds of public distrust regarding inoculation after more than 450 people developed Guillain-Barr Syndrome and 25 died from the immunization before it was halted.

If such a mandatory vaccination program were to be implemented again in the U.S. for COVID-19, the government would have to reassure the public its previous negligence of such side effects would not be repeated, an unlikely scenario after the corporate breach of trust exposed on Wall Street in recent years involving large pharmaceutical firms. Regardless, Big Pharma is alreadypartnering with the U.S. army to develop a vaccine for the coronaviruswhich would have to be tested and evaluated before licensing by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and recommended for use by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which partner with the WHO whose largest financial contributor is the U.S. government.

One of the WHOs other largest benefactors is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with whom it has a partnership on vaccinations. The billionaire Microsoft Corporation founder has used his enormous wealth to dodge paying taxes under the guise of philanthropy and his charitable private ventures have mostly focused on producing vaccines for developing countries and purportedly tackling global poverty, especially in Africa. On the surface this may appear to be benevolent work, but like many so-called altruistic projects it is a scheme which allows ultra-wealthy plutocrats like Gates to influence global policy and obtain political power with no accountability by investing in fixing the social problems caused by the very system which made them rich, with the expansion of neoliberalism as their real agenda. The consequences of this can be seen with charitable projects involving Gates in the Congowhich forced its local agribusiness into using GMO seeds which only benefited private companies like Monsanto.

More disturbing is that in regards to environmental concerns about man-made climate change, Gates has made public his views on curbing human population growth as a solution. At a 2010 TED Conference, Gatesstated:

First we got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. Thats headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.

To put it another way, one of the worlds wealthiest men admitted in public he believes vaccines should be used for depopulation, just as he is financially investing in both developing and delivering them to countries in the global south. The misanthropic myth of overpopulation pushed by Gates and the elite not only suggests that depopulation is a solution for slowing the warming of the climate but retains the logic of an essential component of eugenics with the implicit idea that the quality of life for the human species can be improved by discouraging human reproduction. Since developing countries have the highest child mortality rates, families are more likely to be larger because children are less likely to survive. Hence, the inherent racism and classism in such a misconception.

Given that the vast majority of carbon emissions are produced by ashort list of fossil fuel companiesand the worldslargest polluter is the U.S. military, promoting this dangerous fallacy is the perfect way for the ruling elite to shift the responsibility for climate change onto the worlds poor. Unfortunately, this dangerous falsehood has been popularized in the mainstream environmental movement and pseudo-left with examples such asBirthStrike, a group of mostly female activists protesting the lack of regulations on the ecological crisis by refusing to bear children that has been irresponsibly endorsed by popular progressive politicians such as U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). AOC is also the face of the Democratic Partys Green New Deal which has troubling ties to the United Nations Agenda 21 sustainable development program that calls for achieving a more sustainable population.

The false notion of overpopulation became a misguided cornerstone of the modern day environmental movement thanks to the publication of American scientist Paul Ehrlichs best-selling book The Population Bombin 1968,an alarmist diatribe that has in the years since become famous for its inaccurate doomsday predictions as a result of the mistaken belief which never came to fruition. Todays doom merchants regarding the climate, no doubt a serious issue, are in many respects channeling Ehrlichs false prophecies which are considered a modern rehash of the influential 18th century British economist and philosopher, Thomas Malthus. No single scholar was more loathed by Karl Marx and and the working class movement than Malthus, whose pseudo-scientific theories about demography were thought to have been intellectually defeated until they found new life in Ehrlichs eco-fascism. As much as todays population bombers like Bill Gates may shun the more explicitly racist Malthusian ideas that the global north should contain the population of developing countries, they still tacitly endorse them by arguing that the size of the population itself is a source a poverty and climate change.

Bill Gates has cited business tycoon John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in American history who had an even greater monopoly on the oil business as Gates had at one time on the computer industry, as an inspiration in using his wealth to invest in medical research as a focus of his philanthropy. However, Gates has something else in common with the Rockefeller family in his views on population, as the Rockefeller Foundation was the single largest donor to the American eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s and helped establish its German branch, even subsidizing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics that Nazi physician Josef Mengele worked in prior to his wartime experiments. Despite the fact that a line can be traced from the American eugenics movement to the Nazi regimes programs, which Nuremberg defendants even tried to use as justification for their atrocities in court, Rockefellers grandson John Rockefeller III continued the family legacy of interest in demography with the founding of the Population Council NGO which conducts research in reproductive health (sterilization) in developing countries. The Nazi government was also the first to ever pass legislation safeguarding the environment which they equated with German national identity, another unexpected intersection between brown and green politics.

In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak. Gates himself has warned of pandemics for years and ominouslywrotethat the world should prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war. The Event 201 fictional scenario just so happened to be a coronavirus called CAPS from Brazilian pigs which infected people globally and after a year and half in the exercise causedtens of millions of deathsand set off a worldwide financial crash. Since the outset of the real COVID-19 coronavirus, Gates himself hasstepped down from Microsoftto focus on his philanthropy while his foundation isbusy working on a vaccine.

Many have observed that some characteristics of COVID-19 bear a resemblance to HIV that could not have happened organically. The recent documentaryCold Case Hammarskjld,which won an award at last years Sundance film festival,puts forth a chillingtheory that a South African white supremacist organizationdeliberately spread HIV/AIDS among black Africans through vaccines in previous decades. The film begins as an investigation of the mysterious plane crash in Northern Rhodesia which killed Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjld in 1961. In 1998, a document authored by a shadowy paramilitary organization called the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) was uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission justice assembly in post-apartheid South Africa which indicated that Hammarskjld was the victim of an assassination. Not only do the filmmakers discover in their inquiry the distinct likelihood that the plane was shot down by a Belgian mercenary employed by SAIMR which was operating under orders from MI6 and the CIA, but the more stunning revelation is arecorded confessionfrom a former SAIMR soldier to havingdeliberately spread HIV/AIDS to black Africansthrough immunization. If what is claimed about SAIMR is true and that they were connected with Western intelligence, that the COVID-19 virus could be something deliberately spread is not outside the realm of possibility.

Maybe it will prove to be the case that the yellow presss version of the coronavirus beginning with the zoonotic transfer of the disease after the consumption of a pangolin or wild bat by a patient zero in Wuhan is accurate. Nevertheless, the pandemic should be a chilling reminder of the elites eco-fascist agenda and the continuous danger that the military-industrial complex puts the worlds population in by continuing to conduct dangerous research into deadly pathogens where the risk vastly outweighs the benefits. If the outbreak has led many to be suspicious of the official story, it is exactly because of the history of U.S. biological warfare and the elites potentially genocidal and pessimistic worldview that the only way to prevent the demise of humanity is by thinning the herd.

This article was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2020 at 7:20pm and is filed under China, COVID-19 (coronavirus), Disinformation, Health/Medical.

Continued here:
Is the Global Pandemic a Product of the Elite's Malthusian Agenda and US Bio-warfare? - Dissident Voice

Ever wondered why so many babies in the world are born around August and September? A study published in the journal, Human Reproduction has now found out that the chances of ahieving favourable results are higher around the late fall and early winter months.

A survey was conducted on 14,331 parents to observe the reason for the seasonal spike up in birth rates. The study used data from women who had been trying to conceive for no more than six months from the United States, Canada and Denmark.

The participants were tracked on a number of factors (every two months till the time of conception) including details like the frequency of intercourse, menstrual cycles, ovulation, age. Apart from this, other lifestyle factors such as their diet, smoking habits, education and income levels.

When all these factors were taken into consideration, it was observed that there was a stark decline in fecundability around the spring and fall season. Fecundability refers to the probability of a woman conceiving within a particular time period, or a menstrual cycle.

Original post:
Best time to have a baby? It's winters, say studies - Times of India

17 February 2020

The UK government has launched a public consultation on whether to change the ten year storage limit on frozen eggs, sperm, and embryos.

Current law generally permits frozen eggs, sperm and embryos to be stored for a maximum of ten years, after which patients must choose either to attempt a pregnancy, destroy the frozen material, or transfer it overseas for fertility treatment abroad. The ten year limit has been criticised (see BioNews1021) as outdated, arbitrary, and especially harmful to women who freeze their eggs to increase their chances of having a baby later in life.

'Currently, under UK law patients are able to store their frozen eggs for longer than ten years but only if they have a medical reason for freezing them, such as before they undergo cancer treatment that will damage their fertility. Yet the factors that affect when someone may wish to use their frozen eggs are the same, irrespective of why they were frozen in the first place. This restriction on the length of time one group of women are permitted to keep their eggs in storage compared with another is discriminatory and illogical,' Dr Jane Stewart, Chair of the British Fertility Society, told BioNews.

The number of women choosing to freeze their eggs has increased by 257 percent in the last five years. There were 1462 egg freezing cycles in 2017 compared with 410 in 2012, and four out of five of these women are freezing their eggs for non-medical reasons, data suggests.

For women freezing their eggs, the viability of eggs is at its highest in a woman's early twenties, therefore eggs frozen at this time will have the best chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. However, under the current law, these frozen eggs would need to be either used or discarded in a woman's early to mid-thirties, before she may be ready to become pregnant.

The announcement of a consultation follows the launch of the '#ExtendTheLimit' campaign, begun by the Progress Educational Trust (PET), the charity which publishes BioNews.

PET's Director Sarah Norcross called the existing storage limit 'a very clear breach of human rights,' and added: 'it limits women's reproductive choices, harms women's chances of becoming biological mothers, does not have any scientific basis (eggs remain viable if frozen for longer than ten years) and is discriminatory against women because of the decline in female fertility with age.'

The consultation is availableuntil 5 May 2020.

Read more:
Ten year storage of eggs, sperm and embryos may be extended - BioNews

Mennonite Central Committee is celebrating 100 years of serving in the name of Christ in 2020. Weve Come This Far by Faith is a celebration open to the public to celebrate the past 100 years but to also look ahead toward the next 100 years. Please join MCC to celebrate this milestone on Feb. 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the Shari Flaming Center for the Arts on the campus of Tabor College, Hillsboro.

Officially, MCC was formed when representatives of various Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren groups met in July 1920 in Elkhart, Indiana. However, there was a small but important meeting in Hillsboro, Kansas, that took place before the Elkhart gathering, explained Michelle Armster, executive director of MCC Central States. Stories of family and friends suffering from hunger back in southern Russia (present-day Ukraine) had reached the Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren in Kansas. As concern grew, it was determined that something had to be done.

Representatives of the various groups came together. Five men met at the home of P.C. Hiebert in Hillsboro - located where Tabor College now stands - on July 19-20, 1920 to inspire and solidify cooperation and unity on this mission, and to work out plans and strategies. After two days of deliberation it was agreed to call a joint meeting of all the Mennonite relief organizations, in Elkhart, Indiana, a short week later, on July 27, 1920, wrote Peggy Goertzen, the Director of Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies in Hillsboro.

MCC started to respond to a particular need of a particular group. However, that began to evolve almost immediately upon arrival in 1920 due to the challenging and changing war taking place in Russia. The MCC workers were not deterred from their mission, but instead met the challenges with faithful courage. In the 100 years since, many have walked in their footsteps, following the example set out by Jesus. In 2020, MCC follows the example of Jesus with over 1,000 workers serving in more than 50 countries around the world.

The centennial celebration will feature a reflection by Michelle Armster on MCC, Weve come this far by faith, based on adaptations from Hebrews 11. Armster said, The history of MCC is about how human people felt that they were responding to Gods call to feed hungry people. Could/Would they ever have imagined that, 100 years later, MCC continues to respond to people in need in the name of Christ?

Money raised at the event will support MCCs New Hope in the Name of Christ campaign that is raising money for special international and domestic projects.

As guests arrive, they are welcome to bid on a variety of silent auction items. A reproduction Mennonite Feeding Station sign from MCCs post-World War II feeding programs in Germany will be available for a suggested donation, also.

Turning 100 is a big deal and were looking forward to kicking off this centennial year with this celebration, Michelle Armster said. There are countless people who have given their time and money over the past 100 years to support MCC and for that we are thankful! Were excited to see what the next 100 years bring.

See more here:
MCC celebrates 100 years with Feb. 29 event - The Hutchinson News