The Prometheus League
Breaking News and Updates
- Abolition Of Work
- Ai
- Alt-right
- Alternative Medicine
- Antifa
- Artificial General Intelligence
- Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial Super Intelligence
- Ascension
- Astronomy
- Atheism
- Atheist
- Atlas Shrugged
- Automation
- Ayn Rand
- Bahamas
- Bankruptcy
- Basic Income Guarantee
- Big Tech
- Bitcoin
- Black Lives Matter
- Blackjack
- Boca Chica Texas
- Brexit
- Caribbean
- Casino
- Casino Affiliate
- Cbd Oil
- Censorship
- Cf
- Chess Engines
- Childfree
- Cloning
- Cloud Computing
- Conscious Evolution
- Corona Virus
- Cosmic Heaven
- Covid-19
- Cryonics
- Cryptocurrency
- Cyberpunk
- Darwinism
- Democrat
- Designer Babies
- DNA
- Donald Trump
- Eczema
- Elon Musk
- Entheogens
- Ethical Egoism
- Eugenic Concepts
- Eugenics
- Euthanasia
- Evolution
- Extropian
- Extropianism
- Extropy
- Fake News
- Federalism
- Federalist
- Fifth Amendment
- Fifth Amendment
- Financial Independence
- First Amendment
- Fiscal Freedom
- Food Supplements
- Fourth Amendment
- Fourth Amendment
- Free Speech
- Freedom
- Freedom of Speech
- Futurism
- Futurist
- Gambling
- Gene Medicine
- Genetic Engineering
- Genome
- Germ Warfare
- Golden Rule
- Government Oppression
- Hedonism
- High Seas
- History
- Hubble Telescope
- Human Genetic Engineering
- Human Genetics
- Human Immortality
- Human Longevity
- Illuminati
- Immortality
- Immortality Medicine
- Intentional Communities
- Jacinda Ardern
- Jitsi
- Jordan Peterson
- Las Vegas
- Liberal
- Libertarian
- Libertarianism
- Liberty
- Life Extension
- Macau
- Marie Byrd Land
- Mars
- Mars Colonization
- Mars Colony
- Memetics
- Micronations
- Mind Uploading
- Minerva Reefs
- Modern Satanism
- Moon Colonization
- Nanotech
- National Vanguard
- NATO
- Neo-eugenics
- Neurohacking
- Neurotechnology
- New Utopia
- New Zealand
- Nihilism
- Nootropics
- NSA
- Oceania
- Offshore
- Olympics
- Online Casino
- Online Gambling
- Pantheism
- Personal Empowerment
- Poker
- Political Correctness
- Politically Incorrect
- Polygamy
- Populism
- Post Human
- Post Humanism
- Posthuman
- Posthumanism
- Private Islands
- Progress
- Proud Boys
- Psoriasis
- Psychedelics
- Putin
- Quantum Computing
- Quantum Physics
- Rationalism
- Republican
- Resource Based Economy
- Robotics
- Rockall
- Ron Paul
- Roulette
- Russia
- Sealand
- Seasteading
- Second Amendment
- Second Amendment
- Seychelles
- Singularitarianism
- Singularity
- Socio-economic Collapse
- Space Exploration
- Space Station
- Space Travel
- Spacex
- Sports Betting
- Sportsbook
- Superintelligence
- Survivalism
- Talmud
- Technology
- Teilhard De Charden
- Terraforming Mars
- The Singularity
- Tms
- Tor Browser
- Trance
- Transhuman
- Transhuman News
- Transhumanism
- Transhumanist
- Transtopian
- Transtopianism
- Ukraine
- Uncategorized
- Vaping
- Victimless Crimes
- Virtual Reality
- Wage Slavery
- War On Drugs
- Waveland
- Ww3
- Yahoo
- Zeitgeist Movement
-
Prometheism
-
Forbidden Fruit
-
The Evolutionary Perspective
Daily Archives: May 4, 2021
Hybrid Animals Are Not Natures Misfits – The Scientist
Posted: May 4, 2021 at 8:25 pm
The whales teeth were what had caught molecular ecologist Eline Lorenzens attention. Of the 18 chompers lining the front of the skulls mouth, some were twisted, not unlike a narwhals tusk. But the 30-year-old specimen, hidden away in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen, didnt have a tusk at all. When Lorenzen became director of the museum in 2015, she decided to examine the skull more closely. Working with a team of collaborators, she extracted genetic material and compared it with DNA from the teeth of narwhal and beluga specimens in the museum. The skull, it turned out, was the first-ever confirmed narluga, the son of a beluga dad and a narwhal mom.
A deeper dive into the history of the skull (it had been found fixed atop a hunters home) revealed that this animal may not have been the only one of its kind. The hunter said hed seen it with two other similar-looking whale creatures, and he, apparently, isnt the only one to have seen a narluga. In fact, they are common enough that natives of western Greenland have a word for the narwhal-beluga hybrid, itorsaq.
Because several narlugas have been spotted before, researchers suspect that the creatures may be fertile, and that some narlugas may be the product of two narluga parents rather than one beluga and one narwhal. That notion challenges naturalists traditional view of hybrids as the result of maladaptive crossings, such as when a female horse mates with a male donkey and gives birth to a sterile mule. If the hybrids cant reproduce, they would seem to be irrelevant evolutionarily, but studies of the narluga and other naturally occurring hybrids have begun to hint that such offspring may not be the biological misfits they were once thought to be. They are not evolutionary dead-ends, and in some cases, may serve as evolutionary accelerators.
Were beginning to realize that hybridization exists in the evolutionary history of many organisms we didnt expect it to, including Homo sapiens, Scott Taylor, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, tells The Scientist.
At some point in the past, black-tailed jackrabbits (Lepus californicus) and snowshoe hares (L. americanus) crossbred, with the hybrids mating again with snowshoe hares. A combination of whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing revealed that the resultant hares retained a variation of the Agouti gene that led to brown, rather than white, coat color in hare populations experiencing mild, less snowy winters, allowing them to better blend into the drab surroundings of dirt and dead leaves.
As far back as the 1930s, botanists realized that hybridization plays a role in the evolution of plant species. In 1938, Edgar Anderson and Leslie Hubricht laid out the idea of introgression to describe the hybridization of species of herbaceous perennial wildflowers of the Tradescantiagenus. The crosses led to offspring with an even split of parental genetic material, and typically those offspring then repeatedly bred with one of the original parent species, while still retaining genetic material from the other parent species. Alternatively, hybrids bred with other hybrids, and, eventually, entirely new plant species would emerge.
Zoologists knew about these and other examples of hybridization in the plant world, but there was a perception, Taylor says, that cross-species breeding was much less common in animals. That idea stemmed from biologist Ernst Mayrs description in the 1940s of the biological characteristics that defined speciesessentially, any animal population that could not or did not breed with other, similar populations. For more than two decades, including in his 1963 book Animal Species and Evolution, Mayr argued that the evolutionary importance of hybridization seems small in the better-known groups of animals. But the idea is not universally accepted, Taylor says. I dont know a lot of evolutionary biologists who study hybridization who adhere strictly to that concept.
Despite the dogma that hybrid animals in nature were rare and therefore not catalysts of evolutionary innovation, some biologists continued to study them, curious to uncover the barriers that prevented them from becoming new species, identify the new gene combinations created by hybridization, and understand how natural selection acted upon them. Focusing on animals in what scientists call hybrid zonesgeographical regions in which two species interbreed to produce offspring of mixed ancestryresearchers in the late 1980s and early 1990s began to show that, contrary to the prevailing viewpoint, hybridization was a valid mechanism of evolutionary changeone that could radically influence an animals ability to adapt to its environment.
A genetic analysis of a rare skull found at the Natural History Museum of Denmark showed that in the past few decades a male beluga (Delphinapterus leucas)and a female narwhal(Monodon monoceros) mated, creating a hybrid called a narluga that looked a bit like both. The animals 18 teeth were small, like a belugas, and twisted, like a narwhals tusk. Those teeth may have changed the way the narluga fed, not hunting on cod, squid, and shrimp in the water column as both of its parents did, but instead feeding off the bottom. Its teeth may have allowed it and others like it to occupy a different ecological niche than its parents.
Evidence for hybrid-driven adaptation is perhaps nowhere more profound than in the warm, tropical waters of Lake Victoria in Africa. There, more than 500 species of bony fishes called cichlids that sport brilliant orange, yellow, and blue hues, roam the lakes 2,400 cubic kilometers. Some species eat only plants, others eat invertebrates, the bigger species eat other fish, and still more feed on Lake Victorias detritus. Theres incredible diversity of species that live together in the same ecosystem, evolutionary ecologist Ole Seehausen of the University of Bern tells The Scientist. This struck me as a beautiful system, the interaction between ecology and evolution . . . to study speciation.
When Seehausen began to study the lakes cichlids roughly 30 years ago, it wasnt clear how the hundreds of species there had evolved. They werent geographically isolated, a common driver of speciation. Rather, the fish were all living in the same lake and could interact, yet there was still incredible cichlid diversity. Something else appeared to be driving their speciation.
With continued observation, Seehausen and others found that the barriers preventing the species in the lakes from mating were rather shallow, with some of the major ones being behavioral in nature. Males, for example, were defending their territories from males of both the same and other species, or females were choosing flashing mates of only their own species. That last barrier, based on color signaling, began to break down, Seehausen says, when the clarity of the water diminished in the 1990s, a result of wastewater from farms and other human activities polluting the lake. It turns out that when you change the visual signaling, and the perception of those signals, then not much more is needed to break down reproductive isolation, so many species then hybridize, Seehausen says.
Something similar appears to have happened thousands of years ago in Lake Victoria. Genetic analyses of the cichlids have revealed that their vast diversity can be traced back to a hybridization of two divergent lineages around 150,000 years ago. And Lake Victoria wasnt the only body of water in the region where hybridization appeared to play an important role in speciation. Further investigation revealed that cross-species mating had happened and continued to occur in nearby lakes, where it was driving cichlid diversity. This was replicated in several different lakes across Africa, Seehausen says.
As scientists began to look for other examples of hybridization in the wild, both past and present, they were not disappointed. Genetic analyses have revealed crosses between coyotes and gray wolves, polar bears and brown bears, chimpanzees and bonobos, finches in the Galapagos Islands, fish called sculpin, and even modern humans and Neanderthals.
Researchers suspect that hybridization events are perhaps becoming more common, as human disturbances shift species ranges in ways that promote breeding across similar species. In Colorado, for example, two varieties of small, nonmigratory birdsblack-capped chickadees and mountain chickadeeshave recently hybridized in areas being heavily developed by humans. If you look at the map and squint, the places theyre hybridizing seems to correlate nicely with places that humans have modified, whether thats the front range of the Rocky Mountains or Albuquerque, New Mexico, he says. His team hypothesizes that the species, which split some 1.5 million years ago, breed with each other in modified habitats because a resource needed by both, either breeding grounds or certain food sources, is bringing the birds together.
On occasion, a mountain chickadee (above) may mate with a black-capped chickadee.
Robert Taylor
Climate change may also be driving hybridization between species. Evolutionary biologists have seen pulses of cross-breeding as species shift where they live to higher or lower latitudes or altitudes to find cooler temperatures. When they move into those regions, the barriers to hybridization, such as differences in mate choice or other factors, might disappear. There are definitely compelling examples of climate change or environmental shifts influencing hybridization, says Molly Schumer, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, and my suspicion is its pretty widespread.
Obviously not all cases of hybridization involved the equal swapping of genes to form a completely new creature, as appeared to often happen with the cichlids, but in just the last few years, the consensus has been that hybridization in animals in particular is hugely widespread and much more common than was appreciated, Schumer says. The question in the field now, she says, is if this gene swapping is common, what is it doing?
When the waters in Lake Victoria in Africa became increasingly murky in the 1990s after mineral and farm runoff levels increased, two species of cichlids(Haplochromis nyererei and Neochromis sp. Bihiru scraper) no longer selectively mated with conspecifics, whom they had previously identified based on color. They hybridized readily, and others in the lake did too, creating new species, some of which have pervaded the altered ecological niches and adapted to them better than their parent species have.
In the case of cichlid hybrids, Seehausen found that not only did the hybrids have similar developmental and reproductive rates to non-hybrids, in some ways individuals with a genetic mishmash of two distinct species created were actually more suited to a particular environment or food source than their parents were.
A few years ago, Joana Meier, an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Cambridge who did her graduate work and a postdoctoral stint with Seehausen, delved into the genetics of the cichlids and spotted one type of hybrid that caught her attention: dwarf species that combine the body shape of a plant-eating species with the predatory habits of a bigger species that dines on other fish. Genetically, theyre like a mix of both, she says. In some cases, they have higher fitness [than either parent species] in different ecological niches. Seehausen has also shown this in the lab, creating hybrids that dont thrive on the food the parent species ate, but gobble down a new type of food and begin to flourish.
Schumer is seeing something similar in the hybridization of two related species of swordtail fish, Xiphophorus malinche and X. birchmanni. The fish live in the rivers of the Mexican state of Hidalgo and have begun hybridizing within the last 50 to 100 generations, probably as a result of some human disturbance to the river, she explains. The fish rely on their sense of smell and the signals in those scents to choose mates, but the contaminants in the rivers appear to be blocking the fish from picking out their own species, Schumer says, so theyve ended up mating across species boundaries. It turns out, that the mix-up could be helping both species survive by boosting genetic diversity.
Different species of swordtail fish, including Xiphophorus birchmanni (left) and X. malinche (top), can interbreed to form hybrid offspring (bottom).
DAN POWELL
Swordtail cross-breeding is really, really recent and gives us a good snapshot to [see] whats happening right after hybridization, Schumer says. Her genetic studies, along with those from other researchers investigating recent hybridization events, seem to show that right after these crosses occur, the genome of the hybrid undergoes incredible reorganization. Theres a lot of purging of deleterious alleles and rapid evolution happening right after you collide these two divergent genomes. The original swordtail parent species are closely related, differing by only 0.5 percent in their genetic makeup, Schumers studies show. Still, that small bit of genetic variation leads to substantial shifts in the species tolerances to cold, adaptation to elevation, and even an extra-long fin extension, called the sword, seen on X. birchmannibut not onX. malinche.
On the flip side, mushing together the two swordtail species genomes can cause issues in the offspring, with many not being able to reproduce. The combination of genes can even cause the hybrids to develop tumorous melanoma, which the parents dont. One of the biggest questions in the field, Schumer says, is: In this really rapid genome evolution happening after hybridization, how are all of these mechanismspositive effects of hybridization, negative effects of hybridization, interactions with the environment, social interactionsplaying out?
See more here:
Hybrid Animals Are Not Natures Misfits - The Scientist
Posted in Human Genetics
Comments Off on Hybrid Animals Are Not Natures Misfits – The Scientist
Colorado Democrats in the US House want nearly $200 million for earmarked projects – The Colorado Sun
Posted: at 8:25 pm
The four Colorado Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have assembled a list of nearly $200 million in special spending on transportation initiatives and community projects in their districts as Congress reopens the door to the controversial practice of earmarking.
The Colorado projects in an expected $2 trillion infrastructure bill range from $20,000 for Denvers Mi Casa Resource Center to $29.2 million to rebuild the Interstate 70 and Airpark Road interchange east of the city.
Its been 10 years since Congress ended earmarks, the practice of allowing individual members to designate funding for projects in their districts. Scandals and controversy surrounding the spending practice led to its demise, and conservatives remain skeptical of earmarks.
Republicans in conservative districts have disavowed the practice, including the three GOP U.S. representatives from Colorado. That could mean Colorado Springs and the states rural areas lose out on some funding opportunities.
Its been a party-line thing, where if you want to show youre a good GOP member you denounce earmarks, said Kevin Kosar, a scholar specializing in governance for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. If they go after earmarks, they may hurt their small-government cred.
But the projects may be key to getting Democratic President Joe Bidens $2 trillion infrastructure plan through Congress.
The House adopted earmark guidelines for community projects and transportation projects prohibiting conflicts of interest and money going to for-profit organizations. Those rules require House members to post information about their projects on their official webpages, which all the Democrats have done.
Kosar praised those measures. I think this system, assuming they continue to roll it out well, is going to be so much better than the old system, not least because it requires transparency.
The Senate has yet to create guidelines for projects, so Colorados Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet have yet to identify any theyll include in infrastructure bills. Both Democrats are expected to have earmarks, too.
There are no guarantees the designated projects will be included in final spending bills. But the earmarks are a good start toward funding.
Kosar said the projects will be reviewed by the Government Accountability Office to see if there are boondoggles in there.
That is going to force members of Congress to be selective, he said.
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, an Aurora Democrat, has the most costly list of projects, including a $29.2 million request to rebuild the Interstate 70 and Airpark Road interchange near Denver International Airport.
Crow is also requesting $22.4 million for the Interstate 76 and Bridge Street interchange in Brighton and $10 million for the Interstate 25 and Belleview Avenue interchange in Arapahoe County.
Transit and homelessness is a focus for U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a Denver Democrat. Shes asking for $13.5 million to renovate Broadway Station at I-25, and $7.9 million for central corridor rail replacement on behalf of RTD.
Another $10 million requested by DeGette would go toward rebuilding a shelter for Urban Peak, an organization that serves homeless youth in Denver.
The funding requests weve made this year focus on several important issues facing the district including homelessness and improvements to our light rail, DeGette said in a written statement. If approved, this funding will have a significant impact on our community in a wide range of ways.
Want exclusive Colorado political news and analysis? Subscribe here to get The Unaffiliated, the twice-weekly political newsletter from The Colorado Sun.
The top project for U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, of Arvada, is $10 million to widen Wadsworth Boulevard in Wheat Ridge between West 35th Avenue and I-70.
Congressionally-directed spending provides an opportunity to advocate on behalf of the cities, counties and nonprofits in my district and work to secure the funding they need to make critical investments in our community and better serve Coloradans, Perlmutter said in a written statement.
Lafayette Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse asked for the least amount of funding, at $27.6 million. His most expensive request is $6.7 million for a transit center in Frisco.
Take a look at a searchable list of projects submitted by the four Democrats:
Republican U.S. Reps. Doug Lamborn, of Colorado Springs, Ken Buck, of Windsor, and Lauren Boebert, of Garfield County, didnt submit earmarked projects.
Buck and Boebert signed a pledge against earmarks, along with 27 other Republicans, calling them a corrupting practice.
Congressman Buck does not support carving out earmarks for special interests, Bucks spokeswoman, Lindsey Curnette, said in a written statement. Stakeholders in Colorados 4th District are able to submit requests under the regular appropriations process.
Boeberts been a frequent critic of the spending practice, signing on to another letter in March with 24 House members and 10 senators to emphasize her opposition.
Lamborn didnt sign either anti-earmark letter. But he also didntdesignateany projects.
The Sun inquired with Lamborns office about a blank webpage on his official website titled Community Funded Projects. The page changed to say Page Not Found after The Suns inquiry.
As of now, Congressman Lamborns office will not be working on community-funded projects, Cassandra Sebastian, Lamborns spokeswoman, said in an email.
That may disappoint some of the Republicans constituents.
Cathy Shull, executive director of Pro 15, a group that advocates for northeastern Colorado, said rural counties expect to get some benefits from the infrastructure measures being pushed by Democrats. But getting earmarks would provide even more help, she said.
Our group is not a big fan of earmarks, but we hate being left out, she said. Somebodys going to get them. A little extra boost from the federal government would have been really nice.
CORRECTION: This story was updated at 10:22 a.m. on Tuesday, May 4, 2021, to correct a statement about a news release from Doug Lamborn on earmarks. Lamborn didnt sign either anti-earmark letter signed by other Colorado Republicans in the U.S. House. But he also didntdesignateany projects.
The Colorado Sun has no paywall, meaning readers do not have to pay to access stories. We believe vital information needs to be seen by the people impacted, whether its a public health crisis, investigative reporting or keeping lawmakers accountable.
This reporting depends on support from readers like you. For just $5/month, you can invest in an informed community.
Original post:
Posted in Democrat
Comments Off on Colorado Democrats in the US House want nearly $200 million for earmarked projects – The Colorado Sun
Biden Address: Can Democrats Keep the House in 2022? – The Atlantic
Posted: at 8:25 pm
There is this recognition of this moment and how fleeting it is, and an evaluation that, absent the trifecta of control, it is very hard to move big policy, said a senior official at one of the partys leading outside advocacy groups, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategizing. So you have to take your shot. I think thats part of what undergirds Go big.
In one sense, past presidents first two years in office offer Biden and congressional Democrats reason to be optimistic about executing their plans. Looked at another way, though, that history is discouraging, dauntingly so.
Whats encouraging is how past presidents have managed to push through important parts of their agenda. Presidents dont get everything they want during that initial two-year period. Clinton, for instance, failed to pass comprehensive health-care reform, and Donald Trump failed to repeal the comprehensive reform that Obama did passthe Affordable Care Act. But presidents whose party controls Congress typically do pass some version of their core economic proposals during their first two years, even if it usually happens after some significant remodeling.
Trump and George W. Bush each pushed massive tax cuts through a Republican-controlled Congress during their first year in office. In his first months, Ronald Reagan muscled through a landmark tax reduction, despite a Congress divided between a Republican Senate and a Democratic House. With the support of a Democratic-controlled Congress, Obama signed both a large economic-stimulus package and the ACA, and Clinton, by the narrowest possible margins, likewise enacted his deficit-reduction and public-investment plans.
David Frum: The Trump policy that Biden is extending
In each of these cases, the president was compelled to abandon or trim key elements of his blueprint. Congress forced Clinton to jettison his BTU tax (an early attempt to tax energy consumption) and accept the creation of a commission to study entitlement cuts. Dissent from two moderate Republican senators forced Bush to slash his tax cut by nearly one-fourth. Obama was compelled to reduce his stimulus spending to win over Senate Republican votes, and to drop the ACAs public option to obtain the last Democratic votes he needed. Even Reagans watershed reductions in personal-income-tax rates were scaled back. Yet while these concessions were seen at the time as major setbacks, they are now remembered, if at all, as merely smudges on legislative achievements that rank among each of these presidents most consequential.
This history augurs well for Congress eventually approving some version of the infrastructure and human-capital plans Biden touted last night, even if the plans are adjusted to win approval from the Democratic Partys most conservative senators, such as West Virginias Joe Manchin. (Democrats can pass most of Bidens economic agenda through the reconciliation process, which requires only a simple-majority vote in the Senate. His noneconomic priorities face much dimmer prospects of passing in the upper chamber, unless Senate Democrats agree to curtail the filibuster.) Democrats often blame the devastating losses Obama suffered in 2010he lost more House seats than any president in a midterm since 1938on his administrations overly cautious approach, and they dont want to repeat that mistake. Trying to placate the Republicans with a bunch of tax cuts and going for a more modest package, thinking that would gain support, turned out to be dead wrong, Price told me. You got a weaker bill and no bipartisan support: the worst of both worlds. We are trying to get a stronger bill and assuming the net effect will be to increase pressure on Republicans who are opposing it.
Here is the original post:
Biden Address: Can Democrats Keep the House in 2022? - The Atlantic
Posted in Democrat
Comments Off on Biden Address: Can Democrats Keep the House in 2022? – The Atlantic
‘Anybody’s game’: Democratic LG candidates still working to introduce themselves to Virginia voters – Virginia Mercury
Posted: at 8:25 pm
If the last public poll was any indicator, Virginia Democrats still have lots of homework to do before making their picks in the primary for lieutenant governor.
A Christopher Newport University poll conducted in mid-April found 64 percent of likely primary voters undecided in the race, with Del. Sam Rasoul, D-Roanoke, the apparent leader with 12 percent support.
Were glad to see the way things are trending, Rasoul said in an interview, attributing his leading status to a values-based campaign focused on in-person trips to cities and counties throughout Virginia, including areas where voters feel forgotten.
The numbers suggest theres still lots of room for movement in an open field that once stood at eight candidates but has shrunk to six heading into the final month before the June 8 primary.
The other five candidates still in the race Del. Hala Ayala, Del. Mark Levine, former Fairfax County NAACP leader Sean Perryman, Norfolk City Councilwoman Andria McClellan and businessman Xavier Warren all had 1 or 2 percent support, the CNU poll found.
I think its anybodys game, McClellan said in a recent interview.
With a crowded primary for governor happening at the same time, said longtime Virginia political analyst Bob Holsworth, it can be difficult for candidates running in a downballot contest to try to build a statewide profile.
Many of these people are unknown outside of their own region, Holsworth said.
Candidates are just starting to roll out their first TV ads, and the arrival of warm weather is giving them more freedom to do socially distanced events rather than campaigning via computer screen.
Part of the challenge for candidates running for lieutenant governor is explaining just what it is the lieutenant governor does. The mostly ceremonial job involves presiding over the state Senate and breaking ties in the upper chamber, as current Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax recently did to pass legislation legalizing marijuana. The lieutenant governor can advocate for certain causes, but has limited policymaking power. But if the governor becomes incapacitated, the lieutenant governor steps in to run the state, and the role has traditionally been seen as a launchpad to higher office.
Rasoul, a rare western Virginia progressive who has at times criticized his party for what he sees as an inability to connect with voters outside traditional Democratic strongholds, also led the field in the most recent fundraising period, reporting more than $950,000 on hand as of March 31.
I know we have many candidates to choose from, Rasoul said. We feel as though we are a true voice of the people. Thats the way I have legislated and voted over the past eight years.
Shortly after those campaign finance numbers came out, Del. Elizabeth Guzman, D-Prince William, one of two Latinas in the race, announced she was dropping her bid for statewide office to focus on winning another term in her House of Delegates district, where shes facing a strong primary challenge from Democrat Rod Hall.
Paul Goldman, a onetime aide to former Gov. Doug Wilder, dropped out of the lieutenant governor race early last month.
Guzmans departure seemed to free Democratic leaders to jump in and endorse Ayala, D-Prince William, who had already chosen not to seek another term in the House and could help Democrats avoid an all-male ticket in a year when former Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Attorney General Mark Herring are trying to keep or return to offices theyve held before. Ayala, who identifies as Afro-Latina and is a member of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, would be the first woman of color to serve in statewide office.
Late last month, Ayala was endorsed by Gov. Ralph Northam, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn and House Majority Leader Charniele Herring, all of whom are backing McAuliffe for governor over two other competitors, Sen. Jennifer McClellan and former delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy, who are both vying to be the first Black woman elected governor of any state.
In a news release from Ayalas campaign, Filler-Corn said Ayala would bring historic representation to the highest levels of our state government.
Ayala campaign manager Veronica Ingham said Ayala is in a strong position heading into the final month, with the big endorsements underscoring the relationships Ayala, a former activist, has built since joining the House as part of the Democratic wave of 2017.
We know that voters want to make history and elect the first woman of color to the lieutenant governor position, Ingham said.
State Democrats have largely credited women, particularly women of color, as a driving force behind electoral successes that allowed the party to take full control of the statehouse for the first time in decades.
They are the mainstay of the coalition, said Holsworth. In this instance, with McAuliffe being what seems to be a relatively clear favorite at the top of the ticket, the diversity, if the Democrats are going to have it, is going to have to come from the LG race or the AG race. Or both.
In the primary for attorney general, Del. Jay Jones, D-Norfolk, is challenging Attorney General Mark Herring. Jones would be Virginias first Black attorney general, but the CNU poll showed Herring maintaining a fairly comfortable lead, with 42 percent support compared to 18 percent for Jones.
Holsworth said hes usually skeptical of the impact of endorsements, but party leaders rallying behind Ayala could give her a boost in a field of relative unknowns with no incumbent in the mix.
THE MORNING NEWSLETTER
Subscribe now.
My sense is that him putting his thumb on the scale there is likely to have an impact, Holsworth said of Northams backing of Ayala. And its certainly not good news for either Rasoul or the other candidates in the race.
Ayala isnt the only candidate who could diversify the Democratic slate in the lieutenant governor spot.
Apart from Ayala, McClellan is now the only other woman in the race and the only Democrat running for the job from the Hampton Roads area. Energizing the partys base there, she said, could be key to holding the House of Delegates this year. Though shed love to break the glass ceiling and be the first woman elected as lieutenant governor, McClellan said, I want people to vote for me because Im the most qualified.
I think diversity of experience, diversity of background, diversity of geography all should be taken into consideration, she said.
Levine, D-Alexandria, a former radio and TV pundit who has served in the House since 2016, would be the first openly LGBTQ person in statewide office.
Though two Black men have served as lieutenant governor before, both Perryman and Warren would also ensure at least one Black candidate on the Democrats 2021 ticket.
In an interview, Perryman said he thinks its premature to call any candidate a frontrunner given the number of undecided voters.
They dont know Sam Rasoul, Mark Levine, me. They dont know anyone, Perryman said. Theyre just sort of going about their lives trying to get by.
Perryman, who has endorsements from most of the county board in vote-rich Fairfax, said he doubts Democratic leaders embrace of Ayala will have a major impact.
Everyone I think saw clearly that it was an attempt to prop up a candidate and pick favorites in this race, Perryman said. And I dont think theres an appetite for that.
HELP US GROW
Make a tax-deductible donation.
Read more:
Posted in Democrat
Comments Off on ‘Anybody’s game’: Democratic LG candidates still working to introduce themselves to Virginia voters – Virginia Mercury
Blinken and G-7 Allies Turn Their Focus to Democratic Values – The New York Times
Posted: at 8:25 pm
LONDON The Group of 7 was created to help coordinate economic policy among the worlds top industrial powers. In the four decades since, it has acted to combat energy shortages, global poverty and financial crises.
But as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken meets with fellow Group of 7 foreign ministers in London this week, a key item on the agenda will be what Mr. Blinken called, in remarks to the press on Monday, defending democratic values and open societies.
Implicitly, that defense is against China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. While the economic and public tasks of recovering from the coronavirus remain paramount, Mr. Blinken is also employing the Group of 7 composed of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan to coordinate with allies in an emerging global competition between democracy and the authoritarian visions of Moscow and Beijing.
One twist in the meeting this week is the presence of nations that are not formal Group of 7 members: India, South Korea, Australia and South Africa. Also in attendance is Brunei, the current chair of the Association of South East Asian Nations.
It is no coincidence that those guest nations are in the Indo-Pacific region, making them central to Western efforts to grapple with Beijings growing economic might and territorial ambition. China was the subject of a 90-minute opening session on Tuesday morning, and the schedule concluded with a group dinner on the Indo-Pacific.
The broader context for these meetings is China, and the authoritarian challenge that China presents to the democratic world, said Ash Jain, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Mr. Jain noted the way the group is now emphasizing common values over shared economic interests. The G-7 is being rebranded as a group of like-minded democracies, as opposed to a group of highly industrialized nations. Theyre changing the emphasis, he said.
Many of the countries represented at the meeting do big business with China and Russia, complicating efforts to align them against those nations. Chinas pattern of economic coercion was one specific topic of conversation on Tuesday, participants said.
But those efforts have been simplified by the departure of President Donald J. Trump, who repeatedly picked fights with Group of 7 allies and confounded them with calls to restore Russia, which was expelled in 2014 from what was then the Group of 8 after its annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.
Nor is it likely a coincidence that the expanded guest list matches, with the additions of South Africa and Brunei, a group of 10 countries and the European Union, collectively short-handed as the D-10 by proponents of organizing them in a new world body. Those proponents include Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, the host of this weeks gathering and architect of its guest list.
Mr. Johnson has also invited India, Australia and South Korea to send their heads of state to this summers Group of 7 summit in Cornwall, citing his ambition to work with a group of like-minded democracies to advance shared interests and tackle common challenges.
President Biden has similarly suggested that the world is grouping into competing camps, divided by the openness of their political systems. In his address to Congress last week, Mr. Biden said that Americas adversaries, the autocrats of the world, are betting that the nations battered democracy cannot be restored.
As a candidate, Mr. Biden also committed to holding a Summit for Democracy during his first year in office, and officials say planning for such an event is underway. Asked in a Tuesday interview with The Financial Times which countries might be invited to such a summit, Mr. Blinken did not answer directly.
And Wednesdays agenda for the gathering includes a session on open societies, including issues of media freedom and disinformation. Other sessions over the two days include Syria, Russia and its neighbors Ukraine and Belarus, Myanmar, and Afghanistan.
Some Group of 7 nations are concerned about the creation of a new global body that might contribute to a Cold War-style polarization along ideological lines.
In a joint news conference on Monday, Mr. Blinken and his British counterpart, Dominic Raab, were cautious not to suggest that they were forming a new club.
Asked whether a new alliance of democracies might be emerging, Mr. Raab said he did not see things in such theological terms, but did see a growing need for agile clusters of like-minded countries that share the same values and want to protect the multilateral system.
Addressing the same question, Mr. Blinken was careful to insist that this weeks meetings did not amount to plotting against Beijing.
It is not our purpose to try to contain China, or to hold China down, Mr. Blinken said. What we are trying to do is to uphold the international rules-based order that our countries have invested so much in over so many decades, to the benefit, I would argue, not just of our own citizens, but of people around the world including, by the way, China. (The line is not just for public consumption. U.S. diplomats have relayed the same message privately, almost verbatim, to foreign counterparts.)
But in an interview with CBSs 60 Minutes broadcast the night before, Mr. Blinken made clear how the United States views Chinas rise.
I think that over time, China believes that it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world, Mr. Blinken said. China is challenging the international order, he said, adding that were going to stand up and defend it.
Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official in the Obama administration who is now research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that informally expanding the Group of 7 is far easier than constructing a new body.
It is always a pain, from a governmental perspective, to invent a new forum, because you need to have an endless discussion about whos in and whos out, and how it works, and its relationship to the U.N., Mr. Shapiro said.
He added that the Group of 7, whose mission had grown nebulous in recent years, may have acquired a new sense of purpose as it tries to organize a post-Trump democratic world in the face of Chinese and Russian threats.
You would be hard-pressed to look back the past five years or more since they kicked out Russia to name a single thing the G-7 has done of interest, Mr. Shapiro said. It didnt have much to do.
See the original post:
Blinken and G-7 Allies Turn Their Focus to Democratic Values - The New York Times
Posted in Democrat
Comments Off on Blinken and G-7 Allies Turn Their Focus to Democratic Values – The New York Times
Donald Trump, Facing $590 Million in Debt Payments, Gets …
Posted: at 8:24 pm
Former President Donald Trump, who reportedly has $590 million in debts due over the next four years, is set to receive a $617 million cash payout as part of a bond deal made by Vornado Realty Trust, his longtime majority-stake partners.
Trump apparently scored the massive $600-million plus in cash after investors bought up $1.2 billion of bonds tied to the refinancing of a San Francisco office tower, 555 California. Trump has a 30 percent minority stake in the building, which makes up a massive portion, as much as $800 million, of his entire net worth. Because Vornado holds the majority stake, Trump doesn't have any control over the two properties he owns with them, the second being 1290 Avenue of the Americans in New York City. The windfall he "stumbled into" comes at a great time for Trump, analysts said, because numerous banks and businesses cut ties with him in the wake of the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot.
The $617 million cash infusion from the Vornado refinancing in San Francisco is likely to precede another large payout for Trump's 1290 Avenue of the Americans office tower. Steve Roth, Vornado's chief executive officer, told investors this past week, that building is "on deck" for refinancing, Bloomberg News reported.
Trump has a lengthy financial record which includes numerous corporate bankruptcies, suing lenders and provoking nearly every bank except for Deutsche to run the other way. But with $617 million of cash and another lucrative refinancing deal about to fall in his lap, analysts said he may have already dug his way out of more than a half-billion of debt his Trump Organization has sat on since entering the White House.
"What the tax records for Mr. Trump's businesses show, however, is that he has lost chunks of his fortune even before depreciation is figured in," according to The New York Times in an eye-opening September 2020 report on Trump's federal income tax payments.
"To see what a successful business looks like, depreciation or not, look no further than one in Mr. Trump's portfolio that he does not manage...he ended up with a 30 percent share of two valuable office buildings owned and operated by Vornado. That's a $176.5 million share of profits for which he has never had to invest more money in the partnership," the Times report said, highlighting Trump as an overall liability to Vornado.
According to financial disclosure forms that first came to light in 2019, Trump has reported holding 14 loans on 12 properties. Six of those loans, representing around $479 million in debt, are due over the next four yearsa debt that a cash-heavy Trump may now be able to pay.
"Trump has been an even less equal partner in the relationship than his 30 percent stake already implies. He more or less stumbled into the arrangement," Mother Jones' Russ Choma wrote Friday, noting that Trump's partnership role was greatly diminished after his "Trump City" project in the 1980s was a "huge flop."
Trump's tax returns, which The New York Times detailed last September, showed that Trump had $6.67 million in taxable interest$6 million of which came from his investment with Vornado.
Newsweek reached out to Vornado's corporate offices as well as those for the Trump Organization Saturday morning.
Read the original here:
Donald Trump, Facing $590 Million in Debt Payments, Gets ...
Posted in Donald Trump
Comments Off on Donald Trump, Facing $590 Million in Debt Payments, Gets …
Trump launches ‘From the desk of Donald J. Trump’ as potential Facebook ban looms – USA TODAY
Posted: at 8:24 pm
The big three social media platforms have locked President Trump's accounts because his posts violated their policies during riots at the U.S. Capitol. USA TODAY
WASHINGTON As Facebook decides whether to lift its ban on Donald Trump, the former president unveiled a new website Tuesday designed to communicate to his followers without interacting with them.
"From the desk of Donald J. Trump" went operational more than fours months after Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies banned him for lies about the general election that helped trigger the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The website, which includes written statements the ex-president has issued since leaving office Jan. 20, includes a camera feature that Trump can use to make video statements.
More: Will Donald Trump's Facebook, Instagram bans stick? Facebook's Oversight Board to issue ruling Wednesday
"Straight from the desk of Donald J. Trump," said a 30-second video posted on the site that included references to his banning from social media.
Will former President Donald Trump remain banned from Facebook and Instagram? The decision from Facebook's Oversight Board comes Wednesday.(Photo: Gerald Herbert, AP)
The new Trump website, first reported by Fox News,surfaced a day before Facebook'sOversight Board is scheduled to announce a decision on whether to keep the ex-president off Facebook and Instagram.
More: President Trump blocked from posting to Facebook, Instagram 'indefinitely,' at least through end of term
More: President Trump permanently banned from Twitter over risk he could incite violence
This is not the social media platform that Trump has pledged to create; there is no way for viewers to interact or respond to the Trump messages that are posted on the new website.
Autoplay
Show Thumbnails
Show Captions
Trump spokesman Jason Millersaid on Twitter that the new website is "a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office," but added "this is not a new social media platform. Well have additional information coming on that front in the very near future."
Others offered a different description of the venture that allows Trump to post comments, images, and videos.
"Its basically a blog," tweeted pollster Frank Luntz.
Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/05/04/from-desk-donald-j-trump-ex-president-creates-new-website/4945717001/
Read the original:
Trump launches 'From the desk of Donald J. Trump' as potential Facebook ban looms - USA TODAY
Posted in Donald Trump
Comments Off on Trump launches ‘From the desk of Donald J. Trump’ as potential Facebook ban looms – USA TODAY
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr. mocked a new CIA recruitment ad in which a staffer identified as a millennial with anxiety – Yahoo News
Posted: at 8:24 pm
The Guardian
A social media campaign featuring a self-described cisgender millennial Latin intelligence officer drew ire from right and left The CIAs attempt to brush up its image for a new generation drew criticism from left and right but others were supportive. Diversity is an operational advantage, said one former officer. Photograph: Dennis Brack/EPA In its long and colourful history, US intelligence has come in for a lot of criticism, for engineering coups, drug trafficking and torture, but just over 100 days into the Biden administration it faces a new charge no one saw coming: is the CIA just too woke? A social media campaign, Humans of CIA, aimed at boosting diversity at the agency has united critics on the right and left in a moment of shared derision, albeit for different reasons. The focus of the uproar is a video about a Latina intelligence officer, who declares: I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise, she says, in the voiceover to a film of her walking confidently through the CIAs Langley headquarters with a T-shirt emblazoned with a clenched fist motif. I used to struggle with impostor syndrome, but at 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be, she adds. The terminology of wokeness drew a volcanic response on Fox News. One guest, Bryan Dean Wright, a former CIA operations officer turned political strategist, called it propagandist garbage and the culmination of what he claimed was a liberal takeover. What happens when you hire a bunch of folks who are wokesters going out into the world that is not woke? he asked. Is an analyst who is a wokester are they going to bring nuance to their analysis? Of course not, Theyre activists now. The Republican senator Ted Cruz joined in, tweeting: If youre a Chinese communist, or an Iranian Mullah, or Kim Jong Un would this scare you? Weve come a long way from Jason Bourne, he added, before being swiftly reminded in Twitter replies that Bourne was an entirely fictional amnesiac carrying out rogue assassinations, and that Donald Trump, who Cruz had steadfastly supported, had openly declared his love for Kim Jong-un. On the left, the critics accused the agency of appropriating woke language to gloss over an unsavoury history. The job for the US & UK intelligence services, and, indeed, for other centers of establishment power, is to transform the Woke wolf into a domesticated Woke dog. Im betting they succeed, wrote the author and policy analyst David Rieff. A CIA spokesperson said the campaign has been going on for some time. In 2019 we started our ongoing social media series, Humans of CIA, for real officers to share their firsthand experiences, the spokesperson said. Some veteran spies came to the CIAs defence, lauding the agencys efforts at diversity (other videos were about a gay CIA librarian and a blind receptionist), and arguing it would make it more effective. Diversity is an operational advantage. Simple as that. I want case officers who look like the UN, Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior officer, said on Twitter. [The] Agency needs to push Diversity efforts to win, not to be woke. I applaud their efforts, but also note they have a ways to go.
Read more here:
Posted in Donald Trump
Comments Off on Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr. mocked a new CIA recruitment ad in which a staffer identified as a millennial with anxiety – Yahoo News
Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is the New Donald Trump – The New York Times
Posted: at 8:24 pm
The lead item in Politicos signature morning newsletter asked if a certain public figure was losing his mind. His rants made him seem ever more unhinged. Then again, they might be theatrical, a way to keep you guessing as to whether hes just putting you on.
Those words, or their rough equivalents, were used scores if not hundreds of times to describe Donald Trump.
But they were written last Tuesday about Tucker Carlson. And they settled the matter: Hes the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott. Certainly not Ted Cruz.
Those other men are vying merely for Trumps political mantle, with the occasional side trip to Cancn.
Carlson is seizing Trumps theatrical mantle as well.
Moving to fill the empty space created by Trumps ejection from the White House, his banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. Hes animating the pundits like Trump animated the pundits.
Case in point: Carlsons endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.
Your response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart, Carlson railed. Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep calling until someone arrives. What youre looking at is abuse. Its child abuse.
What lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares Trumps knack for that for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect, to pour salt into a civic wound.
His free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need for masks once theyre vaccinated or when theyre outdoors. It was juiced by arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and whats just muscle memory or virtue signaling.
And it was helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced provocateur does: You dont just give your detractors agita. You give them material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable shelf life.
Several shows on MSNBC covered Carlsons rant. Several shows on CNN, too. The View waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When youre the subject of late-night comedians monologues, youve really made it.
Just two and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlsons soliloquies in which he peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian Americans became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our national drama than a chronicler of it.
It was hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the great replacement theory before. But this time around it was more helpfully succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter, he fumed. I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.
He made voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.
Like Trump, he has decided that virality is its own reward. And hes being amply rewarded, as exemplified in this very column. Id prefer to ignore him, but I face the same irreconcilable considerations that all the others who arent ignoring him do.
To give him attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich. In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow and it meant that he was both capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.
Remind you of anyone now clomping through the sand traps near Mar-a-Loco?
The amount of real estate that Carlson occupies in political newsletters that I subscribe to seems to have grown in proportion to the amount that Trump has lost. (Thats my own replacement theory.) And it proves that we need not just villains but also certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.
Trumps dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that theres now something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though its not at all clear that hes willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trumps mtier wasnt politics. It was performance.
Carlson gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he wouldnt allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But debates about whether hes genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people tuned in.
Im not saying that hes Trumps doppelgnger. Hes neither orange nor ostentatious enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent, as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you of a puffy reality-show ham what he was before he rode that escalator downward, a harbinger of the countrys trajectory under him.
But both barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as bravery.
Part of the appeal of Carlsons show is its tendency to generate knockouts rather than split decisions, Kelefa Sanneh wrote in an excellent profile of Carlson in The New Yorker in 2017. His unofficial Reddit page features pictures of guests judged to have performed especially poorly; over each face is written wasted.
That wasted reminds me of Trumps loser. Its the vocabulary of mockery, a sport in which Carlson is a champion. But its stranger when played by him than when played by Trump, who never pretended to be thoughtful. Carlson was thoughtful, back in the days when he was writing long articles for ambitious magazines.
Then came television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark to Carlsons pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.
And now? The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the oceans only a little bit safer.
Read the rest here:
Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is the New Donald Trump - The New York Times
Posted in Donald Trump
Comments Off on Opinion | Tucker Carlson Is the New Donald Trump – The New York Times
Children Now Account For 22% Of New U.S. COVID Cases. Why Is That? – NPR
Posted: at 8:23 pm
Children account for more than a fifth of new U.S. coronavirus cases in states that release statistics by age, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images hide caption
Children account for more than a fifth of new U.S. coronavirus cases in states that release statistics by age, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The number of children contracting COVID-19 in the U.S. is much lower than the record highs set at the start of the new year, but children now account for more than a fifth of new coronavirus cases in states that release data by age, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. It's a statistic that may surprise many: Just one year ago, child COVID-19 cases made up only around 3% of the U.S. total.
On Monday, the AAP said children represented 22.4% of new cases reported in the past week, accounting for 71,649 out of 319,601 cases. The latest report, drawn from data collected through April 29, illustrates how children's share of coronavirus infections has grown in recent weeks.
Experts link the trend to several factors particularly high vaccination rates among older Americans. The U.S. recently announced 100 million people were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. But other dynamics are also in play, from new COVID-19 variants to the loosening of restrictions on school activities.
It's also worth noting that for the vast majority of the pandemic, the age group with the highest case rates has been 18 to 24 in the U.S., as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes.
To get a sense of what's behind the rising proportion of cases in children, we spoke to Dr. Sean O'Leary, vice chair of the AAP's Committee on Infectious Diseases. O'Leary is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Medical Campus and Children's Hospital Colorado.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Does it surprise you, the kind of numbers we're seeing for children right now?
Well, yes and no. I think there are several things going on. One, of course, are the new variants that are circulating. This B.1.1.7 variant that's really becoming dominant in a lot of the country is more transmissible. I think the jury is still a bit out on if it's more severe. It's not clear if it's particularly more transmissible in kids. But at this point, it appears it's just more transmissible in everyone, including kids.
Certainly, vaccination is playing a role in terms of the changing in the demographics of who's getting infected.
In many parts of the country, depending on how states track their data 60 and older, 65 and older, 70 and older very high proportions of those populations in some places have been vaccinated.
We've seen a dramatic drop in the proportion of cases that are happening in those individuals, which is great news. But that, just by simple math, is going to change the proportion of cases that are happening in the other demographics.
In terms of raw numbers, the worst stretch of coronavirus infections for children was in a 13-week stretch from early November to February. The numbers fell as the U.S. exited its end-of-year wave. But since around mid-March, child coronavirus cases have not fallen at the same rate as adult cases.
We are seeing more outbreaks than we had related to school and school activities. We've seen those all along, and we're seeing a little bit more of those now proportionately than we had. And I think that's also due to a combination of factors. Again, the variants, but also more kids in the last couple of months are in in-person school than they had been in prior months.
With mitigation measures in place in school, it still appears that transmission is much lower than it is in the surrounding community. But when you have a surge in the surrounding community, it's inevitable that you're going to see it in schools.
The other thing that we've seen is more outbreaks in school-related activities, particularly sports and indoor sports in particular.
What do you make of the most recent data, showing kids accounted for about 20% of new cases in the past week?
As older portions of the population get vaccinated and we're still seeing circulation, it just stands to reason that the kids who are not eligible for vaccination yet are going to make up a larger share of that pie. I mean, the hope is that the overall pie itself gets smaller the number of infections overall. But yeah, if it's circulating, it's going to hit the people that are most vulnerable, which are the people that haven't been vaccinated.
Now, the good news is we may, in the coming weeks, have the vaccine approved down to age 12. We don't have any official dates on that yet, but it may be soon. Pfizer submitted their data to the FDA last month. So that could be a big game changer because we've known all along that adolescents tend to be both more likely to get infected and to spread the infection relative to the younger kids. So getting that population vaccinated is also going to make a difference in these dynamics. And I think it also can make a big difference for a lot of families' summer plans.
We should note that kids still represent a really small proportion of the worst-case outcomes.
Yeah, that is true. It's a somewhat nuanced conversation though. In Michigan, they've been reporting higher rates of hospitalizations in kids than they had [been]. It's unclear to me if that simply represents intense transmission versus actually increased severity. I think that's not entirely clear yet. Here in Colorado, we have a little surge going on. In most states actually, cases are going down. We're still kind of in a plateau, maybe increasing a bit here in Colorado. We have seen a slight uptick of kids hospitalized with COVID-19 here at Children's Hospital, but it's not dramatically so, not like what we were seeing in November, December or January.
Now, the part where that conversation about severity gets a little bit more complicated is yes, it is absolutely true that it's less severe in kids than it is in adults, and particularly older adults. But it's also not true to say that it's completely benign in kids. Fortunately, pediatric death is a fairly rare event. But when you look at the top 10 causes of death, on an annual basis, this year, we've had, depending on whose numbers you use, somewhere between 300 and 600 pediatric deaths from COVID-19 so far. That's probably an undercount. And that would fit it somewhere in the top 10, somewhere between like No. 6 and No. 9 in terms of causes of death for children.
So the point I'm making, there is that yes, it's less severe, but it's still potentially a very severe disease. We've seen tens of thousands of hospitalizations already. So we do need a vaccine for children, not just to protect, not just to achieve herd immunity, but also to protect the children themselves.
What about "long COVID" are kids showing extended months of symptoms from the disease?
In kids, we have seen it, but it doesn't seem to be as common as adults. We're taking care of a few kids now who are still having symptoms well over a month past their infections. I think, as little as we know about long COVID in adults, we know even less in kids. We really have even less of an understanding of the overall epidemiology of how common it is in kids.
The other question mark in my mind around this phenomenon is, many viruses can trigger sort of longer-term symptoms. A classic example would be mononucleosis: Some kids will have fatigue and symptoms for six to 12 months, occasionally even longer. So what's unclear to me at this point is if long-term symptoms are more frequent with COVID-19 than with some of the other viruses we've seen. But I wouldn't say that we're seeing sort of an epidemic of long COVID kids the way we have in adults.
How difficult is it to get data on children and COVID-19? I know that for its weekly reports, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children's Hospital Association compile data from 49 states, along with New York City, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia and Guam. That leaves out the rest of New York state. And Texas only reports on the lower age range for a small percentage of the state's cases.
That's correct. There have been problems with data around this pandemic all along, including this particular situation. I think as long as you're comparing apples to apples, recognizing the limitations, I think that you can interpret the data. But, yeah, it's clearly an undercount.
Standardized data about COVID-19 cases across states has been pretty hard to get. From early on, it seemed like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies did not comprehensively standardize the different data that was out there.
Yeah, I mean, that's been a frustration throughout the pandemic. It was kind of shocking to me, frankly, even though I kind of worked in this field for a long time, that the AAP was really the best source of pediatric data through much of the pandemic for the U.S. And the AAP is a big organization, but we have a fairly small research shop, and it was the AAP that was compiling this data.
I absolutely adore my colleagues from the CDC. And they have really done herculean work through this pandemic. But they had so many things they had to deal with related to the pandemic crisis after crisis with adults that they just didn't have the capacity at the time to be able to track the kids who were, as we know, less severely affected.
What else should people understand about children and the COVID-19 pandemic?
We've been answering these questions about children and infections for almost a year, I guess. And what we've seen all along is that what is happening in children is simply reflective of what's going on in the surrounding community. It's not really driving what's going around in the surrounding community. And I think that's still the case, actually.
You know, where there are lots of cases happening in a given state that are going to be lots of cases and kids. But it's not to say that the kids are driving those numbers. And I think that that although we have seen increases in the proportion of kids, I think that that is still true.
Traditionally, people think of children sharing viruses among each other and then giving them to adults. And this seems like that dynamic is almost the inverse.
It's a strange virus, isn't it?
Read the original post:
Children Now Account For 22% Of New U.S. COVID Cases. Why Is That? - NPR
Posted in Corona Virus
Comments Off on Children Now Account For 22% Of New U.S. COVID Cases. Why Is That? – NPR