World Obesity Day was marked last week (March 4) and with over a billion people afflicted worldwide, obesity is now considered more dangerous to global health than hunger. The numbers are staggering.
Sometime in the mid-20th century a cameraman captured an unforgettable black-and-white photo depicting thousands of American sunworshippers crowded onto Coney Island, New York City. What is most conspicuous about the iconic photograph, aside from the sheer number of beachgoers, is the lack of excessive cellulite packed into the assorted bathing suits and bikinis. Sadly and not a little tragically, those halcyon days are over. While hunger overwhelmingly afflicts the poverty-stricken nations of the world, obesity represents a unique type of affliction in that it targets both rich and poor alike. Between 1990 and 2022, global obesity rates quadrupled for children and doubled for adults, according to a new study by the Lancet (The World Health Organization classifies obesity as having a body-mass index equal to or greater than 30 kilograms per square meter). In the WHO's top-ten 'hefty' list, it may come as some surprise that the tiny Polynesian nations of Tonga and American Samoa had the highest prevalence of obesity in 2022 for women, while American Samoa and [nearby] Nauru had the highest rates among men. In those picturesque island paradises, more than 60% of the adult population were clinically obese. Other surprises included Egypt, weighing in at number ten in the female category, while Qatar took tenth place in boys’ obesity levels. Among the wealthy countries, the United States was the heavyweight representative and is tenth in the world for obesity among men. Shockingly, the US adult obesity rate increased from 21.2% in 1990 to 43.8% in 2022 for women, and from 16.9% to 41.6% in 2022 for men, placing the nation of 330 million fast-food consumers 36th in the world for highest obesity rates among women and, for men, tenth in the world. By contrast, the adult obesity rate in the United Kingdom increased from 13.8% in 1990 to 28.3% in 2022 among females, ranking it 87th highest in the world, while the obesity rate for males surged from 10.7% to 26.9%, placing Britain at 55th. Among children, the study found the US obesity rates increased from 11.6% in 1990 to 19.4% in 2022 for girls, 11.5% to 21.7% for boys. In 2022, the US ranked 22nd in the world for obesity among girls, 26th for boys. Considering the rapid rates of change among Americans, the US will be predictably dominating the charts in just a few years, creating what could be considered a national emergency. None of this should have been unpredictable. After all, what does a society expect that can’t even park the car and walk several steps into the restaurant? And it’s not like consumers are ordering homemade soup and salads at the drive-thru window. The junk food served at fast food enterprises is loaded with sodium content in order to prolong its shelf life, as well as saturated fatty acids that increase cholesterol levels in the body, clog the blood vessels and restrict normal blood flow, leading to heart disease. And that’s not even mentioning the high-fructose corn syrup found in the cola drinks. The real challenge, however, is how to combat obesity at a time when so many people have become addicted to a sedentary, order-online lifestyle. It probably comes as no surprise that the same people who demand their food fast and fried, will also expect an easy cure as well. Americans anxious about having to purchase a new wardrobe have taken to various diet pills, like Ozempic, a diabetes drug that is being used off-label as an appetite suppressant, and which got a shout out by none other than Elon Musk. The investment bank Morgan Stanley was panicked enough by the potential dent in junk-food profits that it released a white paper detailing how the diet pills could make Americans’ consumption of snack foods around 3% lower. But do the American people really need another drug to combat the battle of the bulge, or is there a better, more natural way forward? Back in 2022, the World Health Organization adopted an obesity response plan that includes a number of lifestyle changes, including the promotion of breastfeeding, restrictions on marketing unhealthy food and drinks to children, nutrition labelling, and physical activity standards for schools. Now, if the WHO can just get Big Business behind the initiative, it just might make an impact.
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Scientists have hailed a potentially ‘revolutionary’ breakthrough in the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, after a team of Swedish researchers found that a commercially available blood test can detect biological markers of the disease about ten to 15 years before symptoms develop.
In a study of 768 people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies over an eight-year period conducted by the University of Gothenburg, it was found that the test – which detects the presence of tau proteins in blood – was 97% accurate in assessing if a subject was liable to develop the disease. The results of the study, published in the JAMA Neurology journal on Monday, have been hailed as a breakthrough in early screening tests for the disease well in advance of the onset of symptoms. Alzheimer’s, which causes the brain to shrink and its cells to eventually die, is the most common form of dementia, and is characterized by a decline in cognitive function, as well as behavior and social skills. The research “adds to a growing body of evidence that this particular test has huge potential to revolutionize diagnosis for people with suspected Alzheimer’s,” Sheona Scales, the director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said, according to The Times on Monday. She added that the testing is “superior to a range of other tests currently under development,” and preferable to more invasive methods currently used by medical practitioners, such as lumbar punctures. David Curtis of the UCL Genetics Institute said that the findings of the Swedish team of scientists “could potentially have huge implications.” “Everybody over 50 could be routinely screened every few years, in much the same way as they are now screened for high cholesterol,” he added. “It is possible that currently available treatments for Alzheimer’s disease would work better in those diagnosed early this way.” The developer of the blood test, Californian company ALZpath, has said that it hopes to make the test widely available for clinical use in the first quarter of this year. About 1 in 9 people (10.7%) aged 65 or over has the disease, according to data from the Alzheimer’s Association. This is expected to rise substantially in the next 25 years, the group says on its website, “barring the development of medical breakthroughs to prevent or cure Alzheimer’s disease.” News has been spreading throughout the media about a “disease outbreak” in China. For many, this brings back bad memories. The illness, described as a form of pneumonia, has reportedly gone widespread very quickly, triggering comparisons to how the Covid-19 pandemic emerged. As with the coronavirus, it was not long before there followed accusations of a government cover-up of the extent of the spread.
Cases of the same illness occurring outside of China have been the target of media attention, such as those in Denmark and the US, as has the World Health Organization’s request for more information and Beijing’s response. In reality, there doesn’t appear to be that much to worry about this time around. The pathogen responsible has already been determined not to be a novel virus and therefore not posing a distinctive new threat to humans the way Covid did. Known as “white lung syndrome,” it is a form of pneumonia that is resistant to some antibiotics and usually causes mild flu-like symptoms. In fact, the aforementioned Denmark suffers nationwide outbreaks every few years. So, rather than a mysterious political conspiracy wrapped in secrecy and malign intentions, this outbreak has a much simpler explanation: China is facing its first winter after having opened up from its zero-Covid policy and therefore old illnesses are reasserting themselves. But that won’t stop the scaremongering. Throughout history, it has been a human trait to scapegoat a group of 'others' when a disease emerged to threaten the community. Humans are tribalistic creatures, and each social group usually bonds together through a commonly held sense of values and customs, which are deemed superior to those of outsider groups. Disease, however, as abundant as it always has been, contravenes the group’s collective sense of self-esteem, causes misery and consequentially demands accountability on a political level. Because of this, it becomes habitual of human thinking to deflect the origins of a disease outbreak on an outsider group and to frame it as an invasive force which challenges the values they hold, and therefore could not have come from themselves. This mode of thinking is especially relevant in the East-West geopolitical dynamic, whereby Western countries hold themselves to be inherently superior and the ultimate standard of civilization in the world. In such thinking, most of the East, be it Asia or the Middle East, is deemed uncivilized, inferior and brutal. This mode of thinking is only confirmed by popular stereotypes, rather than introspecting material, economic and social realities. As a result, it has become commonplace to scapegoat the Eastern world, especially a large and powerful country like China – which happens to also a be a geopolitical adversary to the main Western power, the US – as being a source of disease outbreaks 'inflicted' upon the West. This was the narrative which took hold during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Western media and governments scrambled to deflect attention from unpopular decisions and their dramatic consequences. They sought to blame the Chinese government’s negligence, malice or both, for Covid, and propping up that narrative was an astronomical amount of racism which sought to play on stereotypes about Chinese culinary habits and hygiene, perfectly in line with the West-East mentality of Oriental 'inferiority'. Anti-communism, especially in the US, was conveniently layered on top of these prejudices, concealing them in a somewhat acceptable manner. Thus, the science of how Covid spreads was ignored in favor of a dramatic political blame game, which was aggressively amplified by the Trump administration. This time around, there won’t be a new pandemic, but it’s easy to draw false comparisons. It’s a basic fact that for the past three years China has lived under a strict zero-Covid regime which often entailed extreme precautions to prevent the spread of the disease. Entire major cities such as Shanghai found themselves in lockdown, and these restrictions only became more tedious as Covid variants became more transmissive. Because of this, there was no space in the disease ecosystem for flu and other less sensational illnesses, as they were jammed between the rock and hard place of Covid and all these protection measures. Therefore, as soon as China abandoned these restrictions, with the coronavirus having swept through the population, the winter season meant the less severe viruses could spread their wings again. Despite this, we are likely to see more media headlines about the scary new “Chinese disease,” because fear of disease, and especially fear of disease linked to a fear of China, sells well. Even though this development is a nothingburger, expect some close coverage, baseless speculations, even outright propaganda and hearsay about how things are worse than they seem, how the Communist Party is covering up deaths, how statistics are rigged, hospitals are full, etc. – we’ve heard it all before. The Covid pandemic has been a lesson in how diseases can be politically weaponized to suit an agenda, and in this case it’s happening again at a smaller scale. World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared on Wednesday that the end of the Covid-19 pandemic is close at hand. While the virus is still spreading at the same level as last year, despite mass vaccination, deaths have fallen significantly. “We are not there yet. But the end is in sight,” Tedros said at a press briefing. Claiming that vaccination and other public health measures have reduced the threat posed by the virus, the WHO chief called on governments to push for 100% vaccination of vulnerable people and healthcare workers, and 70% vaccination of the general public. “A marathon runner does not stop when the finish line comes into view, she runs harder with all the energy that she has left,” he said. “Now is the worst time to stop running.” The impact of vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and other public health measures on the virus’ spread has been a controversial issue, with near-totally vaccinated countries like Singapore still experiencing waves of infection this summer that dwarfed similar spikes in 2021 and 2020. Some 3.1 million cases of Covid-19 were confirmed globally in the week ending September 5, compared to 3.9 million in the same week in 2021, and 1.9 million in the same week in 2020. Deaths have fallen, however, with 11,000 linked to the virus in the week ending September 5, the lowest weekly total since March 16, 2020. Tedros announced that the WHO would release six policy briefs for governments later on Wednesday, outlining the steps the organization thinks are necessary to avoid “more variants, more deaths, more destruction and more uncertainty.” Among these steps are the aforementioned vaccination push, the maintenance of infection control measures in hospitals, increased testing and sequencing, and the administration of appropriate treatment to patients.
The Dead Daisies have announced a temporary new vocalist and bassist after Glenn Hughes was diagnosed with Covid. The band issued a statement on Monday afternoon (25th July) confirming that Glenn Hughes will be sitting out the rest of their European tour following his positive Covid test. David Lowy’s rock collective have drafted in Whitesnake’s Dino Jelusick as their new vocalist for their European tour dates, while Yogi Lonich will play bass. “We're sad to have to announce that the dreaded virus has hit the camp again with Glenn testing positive and unfortunately unable to continue,” The Dead Daisies said. “He's doing OK and please join us in wishing him a speedy recovery.“As Yogi filled in for David when he was crook, we're forging forward with Yogi playing bass and Dino Jelusick joining us on vocals for the rest of these shows. “We know some of you were coming to see Glenn but we hope you will still come out, rock with us and have a great time. “Too many bands find it easy to just cancel but we're determined to keep playing for you guys ... Rain, Hail, Heat or Virus. “If you do want to give it a miss, we're in the process of speaking with the promoters to work something out .. we'll keep you posted. “Look forward to seeing you at the shows.” The Dead Daisies support Judas Priest at Vienna Ancient Roman Theatre in France tonight (26th July) and they wrap up their European trek at Time To Rock Festival in Sweden on 5th August. The current incarnation of The Dead Daisies features Glenn Hughes, sole constant member David Lowy, guitarist Doug Aldrich and drummer Brian Tichy.
Alan Li no longer sees any future for his family in China after harsh Covid rules decimated his business, upended his son's education and left his country out of step with the rest of the world. He has given up hope of a return to normal after months of lockdowns in Shanghai, and now plans to close his firm and move to Hungary, where he sees better opportunities and his 13-year-old son can attend an international school.
"Our losses this year mean that it's over for us," he told AFP wearily, asking to withhold his real name. "We have been using our own cash savings to pay 400 workers (during the lockdown). What if it happens again this winter?" Shanghai's long shutdown, which brought food shortages and protests, has driven some to reconsider staying in a country where livelihoods and lifestyles can vanish at the whim of the state. Schools have been closed and exams called off, including assessments for applying to American universities. Li is frustrated that his son's expensive bilingual schooling has been mostly online for two years, and he is anxious about the way Beijing has tightened oversight of the curriculum. "This is a waste of our children's youth," Li said. Being fairly well off, he has been able to take advantage of a European investment scheme that grants him and his family residency in Budapest. "Many people know that if they sold all their assets they could 'lie flat' in a European country," he said, using a slang phrase meaning to take it easy. Beijing-based immigration consultant Guo Shize told AFP his company has seen an explosion of enquiries since March, including a threefold increase in Shanghai clients. Even after the lockdown eased, requests continued flooding in at more than double the usual level. "Once that spark has been lit in people's minds, it doesn't die down quickly," he said. Exit ban Censors have sought to suppress discussion of emigration, prompting nimble internet users to adopt the term "run" instead. Searches for the term on messaging app WeChat peaked during Shanghai's shutdown. But as more people consider ways to leave, Beijing has doubled down on strict exit policies for Chinese citizens. All "unnecessary" travel out of the country has been banned. Passport renewals have been all but halted, with authorities blaming the risk of Covid being carried into the country. In the first half of 2021, immigration authorities issued only two percent of the passports given out in the same period in 2019. One woman who emigrated to Germany told AFP she receives dozens of messages from Chinese people looking for tips on escaping. Emily, who did not want to use her real name, tried to help a relative obtain a new passport to take up a job in Europe, but the application was denied. "It's like being a child who wants to go to their friend's house to play but their parents won't let them leave," she said, adding that she has heard of passports being sold for up to 30,000 yuan ($4,500) on the black market. 'Absolutely insane' A Chinese freelancer told AFP he was turned back by immigration officers while attempting to fly to Turkey for work last October, despite having already checked in. "My itinerary sounded too suspicious to them. They took my passport into an office and 15 minutes later told me I do not meet the requirements" for leaving, he said on condition of anonymity. "It was absolutely insane." He managed to leave weeks later by entering semi-autonomous Macau on a different travel document, before catching an onward flight. Some are disillusioned with Beijing's growing controls, which have been ramped up during the pandemic. "I just want to live in a country where the government won't crudely interfere in my personal life," said Lucy, a 20-year-old student at an elite Beijing university involved in LGBTQI+ and Marxist activism. The virus policies had "allowed the government to control and monitor everything", she said. "Perhaps rather than accepting and adapting to this system, we must go elsewhere and create a new life." The Chinese government demands that the United States disclose full and detailed information about the activity of US military laboratories in Ukraine, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a news briefing while commenting on the Pentagon’s factsheet concerning support for Ukrainian biological facilities.
"Once again we call on the United States to explain fully and in detail the activities that it had carried out in Ukraine, and not the activity that was carried out by the Ukrainian side," he said. "Also, we urge the United States once more to drop objections to creating a verification protocol," Zhao added. The Pentagon on Thursday released a factsheet saying that over the past 20 years the US authorities supported 46 various civilian laboratories and health care centers in Ukraine as part of peaceful programs. Previously, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Igor Konashenkov stated that during the special military operation in Ukraine Russian forces unearthed evidence pointing to an emergency cleanup by the Kiev regime of traces of a military biological program, carried out in Ukraine and bankrolled by the US Defense Department. According to Konashenkov, staff from these Pentagon-run Ukrainian-based labs revealed the emergency disposal of particularly dangerous pathogens on February 24, namely, the plague, anthrax, tularemia, cholera and other deadly diseases. US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland on March 9, speaking at a hearing at the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Senate, said that there were facilities in Ukraine that did research in the field of biology and that Washington was trying to prevent them from falling under the control of Russian forces. Zhao has also branded the theory of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus leak from a Wuhan laboratory as "fabricated lies" and called for an investigation at two US biological laboratories. "Establishing the origin of coronavirus should be based on a scientific approach and be free of political intervention. The theory of a laboratory leak is a lie fabricated for political purposes. It completely defies logic," he said, commenting on a recent report by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) in which they urged to study this theory in greater detail. "China has already organized visits of WHO expert groups several times. Their report clearly says that the theory of a coronavirus leak as a result of a laboratory incident is highly improbable," the diplomat added. "If we want to conduct an investigation, why not look at Fort Detrick as well as at the University of South Carolina. Both of these sites in the US are highly suspicious. And also, there is increasingly more evidence that coronavirus appeared in different parts of the world," the spokesman continued. On Thursday (June 9, 2022), the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) organized by the WHO published a report in which it urged to study the theory of a laboratory origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in greater detail. The SAGO consists of more than 20 experts, including specialists from Russia, Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, China, the US, France and South Africa. The March 2021 joint report by the WHO and China published following an international mission to Wuhan noted that the most likely scenario of the emergence of COVID-19 is the transmission of the disease from bats to another animal which subsequently infected humans. However, the specialists did not reach a conclusion as to how the virus appeared at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan. There were also assumptions of its laboratory origin. Podcaster Matt Walsh can be abrasive on Twitter, where he’s known for skewering liberals and their causes mercilessly. But when he began posing a four-word question to strangers a year ago, Walsh was polite and nonconfrontational; it was the question itself — and his insistence that there is a correct answer — that got under people’s skin.
The question was “What is a woman?” and it’s both the title and subject of a film released last week by Walsh and The Daily Wire, the conservative media company founded by Jeremy Boreing and Ben Shapiro. In the film, Walsh, a 35-year-old father of four who lives in Nashville, travels around the world asking the question of strangers, from women on the streets of U.S. cities to men in Africa. He also interviews specialists, including a gender-affirming marriage and family therapist in Nashville and author and psychologist Jordan Peterson. The Daily Wire bills the film as a documentary, although it’s not quite a documentary in the vein of those produced by National Geographic; it’s too cheeky for that. But neither is Walsh a conservative Borat making an outlandish “mockumentary” like those produced by Sacha Baron Cohen. He’s just a funny guy asking a serious question, one that he believes “brings down the house of cards” of gender ideology. “Most of the people we talked to either didn’t want to talk about it, or they appeared to be confused about something as simple as what a woman is,” he told me. The wafflers included the Nashville therapist who said, “I’m not a woman so I can’t really answer that,” to a group of women who laughed and said, “That’s a stumper,” to a man on the street who said, “I honestly don’t know.” Dr. Marci Bowers, a gynaecologist and surgeon, said womanhood is “a combination of your physical attributes and what you’re showing to the world and the gender clues you give.” Patrick Grzanka, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, said a woman is “a person who identifies as a woman” and angrily pushed back at Walsh, asking why he would even ask the question. It’s a question, of course, that’s not only being asked by a podcaster on the street but also in the halls of Congress. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to define a woman during Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings in March. Jackson replied that she couldn’t, “not in this context. I’m not a biologist.” There is method in what Walsh’s critics see as his madness. He believes that extremists in gender ideology have dealt conservatives a winning hand in the culture war by trying to vaporize ideas about sex and gender that were unquestioned for most of human history. Walsh points out that he’s being called an “extremist” and a “dinosaur” for saying things that were widely considered biological facts two decades ago. “This is a fight we can actually win,” he told me. “When I say ‘we,’ I mean rational, sane people. "You don’t have to be a conservative to realize that men are men and women are women.” He added, “The other side can be brought to its knees by one question, ‘What is a woman?’ There’s a real weakness there, and we can win this fight, and then it becomes like kicking blocks out of the Jenga tower. You win this one, and then you move on to the other cultural battles.” Beyond that, Walsh hopes to bring the issue to the attention of people beyond the “conservative bubble of people who listen to my podcast” and reach people who are not politically engaged and may be unaware of what’s being taught on the frontlines of gender ideology. Some of the people Walsh interviews in the film say that gender cannot and should not be assigned by doctors at birth and that children should be encouraged to explore different forms of gender expression without being influenced by their parents or society. At the centre of this discussion is the issue of transgender rights, which Americans are still divided on, largely along party lines. According to a February report from Pew Research Center, 38% of Americans said that greater acceptance of transgender people is generally good for society, 32% said it is bad and 29% said neither good nor bad. Although a growing share of Americans say they know someone who is transgender or uses gender-neutral pronouns (they/theirs instead of she/hers and he/him) they remain sharply divided on the subject of pronouns. Last year, half of respondents said they are comfortable using alternative pronouns when asked, while 48% said they are not. These percentages are “virtually unchanged” since 2018, Pew said. Walsh, who calls progressive gender ideology a cult, uses the divide over pronouns as a tidy insult, often responding to negative tweets about him by simply saying of his critics “pronouns in bio.” US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer on Wednesday said it would sell its patented drugs on a not-for-profit basis to the world’s poorest countries, as part of a new initiative announced at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The time is now to begin closing this gap” between people with access to the latest treatments and those going without, chief executive Albert Bourla told attendees at the exclusive Swiss mountain resort gathering.“An Accord for a Healthier World” focuses on five areas: infectious diseases, cancer, inflammation, rare diseases and women’s health-where Pfizer currently holds 23 patents, including the likes of Comirnaty and Paxlovid, its COVID vaccine and oral treatment. “This transformational commitment will increase access to Pfizer-patented medicines and vaccines available in the United States and the European Union to nearly 1.2 billion people,” Angela Hwang, group president of the Pfizer Biopharmaceuticals Group. Five countries: Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, Senegal and Uganda have committed to joining, with a further 40 countries — 27 low-income and 18 lower-middle-income-eligible to sign bilateral agreements to participate. “Pfizer’s commitment sets a new standard, which we hope to see emulated by others,” Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame said. But he added that “additional investments and strengthening of Africa’s health systems and pharmaceutical regulators” would also be needed.
Seven years behind Developing countries experience 70 percent of the world’s disease burden but receive only 15 percent of global health spending, leading to devastating outcomes. Across sub-Saharan Africa, one child in 13 dies before their fifth birthday, compared to one in 199 in high-income countries. Cancer-related mortality rates are also far higher in low and middle-income countries-causing more fatalities in Africa every year than malaria. All this is set to a backdrop of limited access to the latest drugs. Essential medicines and vaccines typically take four to seven years longer to reach the poorest countries, and supply chain issues and poorly resourced health systems make it difficult for patients to receive them once approved. “The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the complexities of access to quality healthcare and the resulting inequities,” said Hwang. “We know there are a number of hurdles that countries have to overcome to gain access to our medicines. That is why we have initially selected five pilot countries to identify and come up with operational solutions and then share those learnings with the remaining countries.” ‘Very good model’ Specifically, the focus will be on overcoming regulatory and procurement challenges in the countries, while ensuring adequate levels of supply from Pfizer’s side. The “not-for-profit” price tag takes into account the cost to manufacture and transport of each product to an agreed upon port of entry, with Pfizer charging only manufacturing and minimum distribution costs. If a country already has access to a product at a lower price tier, for example vaccines supplied by GAVI, a public-private global partnership, that lower price will be maintained. Hwang acknowledged that even an at-cost approach could be challenging for the most cash-strapped countries, and “this is why we have reached out to financial institutions to brief them on the Accord and ask them to help support country level financing.” Pfizer will also reach out to other stakeholders-including governments, multilateral organizations, NGOs and even other pharmaceuticals-to ask them to join the Accord. It is also using funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance work on a vaccine against Group B Streptococcus (GBS), the leading cause of stillbirth and newborn mortality in low-income countries. “This type of accord is a very good model, it’s going to help get medicines out,” Gates told the Davos conference, adding that “partnerships with companies like Pfizer have been key to the progress we have made” on efforts like vaccines. China's "zero coronavirus" policy is facing a serious dilemma. The authorities there have imposed extremely severe movement restrictions to try and stamp out all traces of the virus, and this has got some results. But the long lockdown in Shanghai, the country's largest hub of international commerce, is inevitably starting to put a drag on the economy.
China's harsh lockdown measures are premised on successes in tamping down the outbreak in Wuhan, Hubei province, where the virus was first reported. The measures got infections under control far more quickly than in Europe or the United States, and boosted Chinese President Xi Jinping's power at home. Then came the highly infectious omicron variant. Omicron spread, and the prevention methods focused on containment that were effective in Wuhan have had far less impact. In Shanghai, residents are barred from going outside, and even getting food is becoming more difficult. There have been cases reported of people with chronic health conditions dying because they could not access proper treatment. And some analysis suggests that these severe movement limitations have been expanded to cover dozens of cities. The resulting blow to the Chinese economy has been significant. The supply chain has been badly disrupted by production halts and clogged logistics channels. Economic growth for the January to March quarter was sluggish, falling far below the annualized target of "about 5.5%." Many observers both at home and abroad are sounding the alarm, but President Xi has insisted that "victory is a matter of sticking to" the lockdown measures. His stance is a marked contrast to the shift in other countries toward "living with the coronavirus." Each country is faced with deciding how to prevent the virus's spread. China, as the most populous nation on Earth, has not been able to build a healthcare system capable of covering all its many citizens. We understand that the prospect of an infection wave would be highly disconcerting to Chinese authorities. However, international cooperation is indispensable for any effort to confront a global pandemic. And China, as the world's second-largest economy in an era when countries are ever more dependent on one another, has a major role to play. One major worry is that continuing the "zero coronavirus" policy will become an end in itself for the Chinese government. We wonder if so much stock has been put into this policy as proof of the Chinese Communist Party's fitness to rule, that it has become difficult for the government to respond flexibly to changes in the situation. One senior Chinese government official stated emphatically that "it is a mistaken idea to try to live with the virus." However, the coronavirus crisis is likely to be with us for the long haul, and we are at a point where a flexible approach taking both the virus and the functioning of society is called into account. Obsessing over past success could very well damage the "stability" so prized by the Xi government. But have a little sympathy for them: they do this not just because it is cynically convenient (though it is), but because this is literally the only way they know how to navigate and influence the world. The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).
Normally all one need do is recast the dominant narrative of events in such a way as to allow the system to reestablish compliance by enough links in the informational control chains to inspire physical action in meat space – or at least just distract the public until the problem goes away. The problem is that none of this has worked to move the trucks. The Virtual class can’t move the trucks. Smears alone can’t move trucks. All the towing companies in Ottawa have refused to move the trucks. Because, surprisingly, it turns out tow truck drivers also drive trucks for a living. There aren’t enough police to seize the trucks, because the rank and file police in Ottawa have been taking all of their vacation and sick days, mysteriously not showing up for work, or simply resigning. It turns out that police officers tend to also be part of the Physical class, and class solidarity may actually be a thing. But the most relevant distinction between Virtuals and Physicals is that the Virtuals are now everywhere unambiguously the ruling class. In a world in which knowledge is the primary component of value-added production (or so we are told), and economic activity is increasingly defined by the digital and the abstract, they have been the overwhelming winners, accumulating financial, political, and cultural status and influence.
In part this is because the ruling class is also a global class, and so has access to global capital. It is global because the world’s city-brains are directly connected with each other across virtual space, and are in constant communication. Indeed their residents have far more in common with each other, including across national borders, than they do with the local people of their own hinterlands, who are in comparison practically from another planet. But the Virtual ruling class has a vulnerability that it has not yet solved. The cities in which their bodies continue to occupy mundane physical reality require a whole lot of physical infrastructure and manpower to function: electricity, sewage, food, the vital Sumatra-to-latte supply chain, etc. Ultimately, they still remain reliant on the physical world. The great brain hubs of the Virtuals float suspended in the expanse of the Physicals, complex arterial networks pumping life-sustaining resources inward from their hosts. So when the Physicals of the Canadian host-body revolted against their control, the Virtual class suddenly faced a huge problem. When the truckers rolled their big rigs, which weigh about 35,000 pounds, up to the political elite’s doorstep, engaged their parking brakes (or removed their wheels entirely), and refused to leave until their concerns were addressed, this was like dropping a very solid boulder of reality in the Virtuals’ front lawn and daring them to remove it without assistance. And because the Virtuals do not yet actually have the Jedi powers to move things with their minds, the truckers effectively called their bluff on who ultimately has control over the world. To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways. The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.
The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it. Like many, I have spent the last couple of weeks a bit entranced by the trucker protests happening in Canada (and now around the world, from Paris to Wellington). I initially tried to document here every twist and turn of the Freedom Convoy drama, but found it nearly impossible. Events continue to unfold very quickly. As I write this, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just invoked the Emergencies Act (i.e. martial law), allowing him to suspend civil liberties and basically do whatever he wants (more on that later) to crush the protests. So they may soon be quelled. Or perhaps not. No one can yet say precisely how all this may end.
But in any case news and commentary detailing the protests can now be found everywhere, so I’m just going to assume you already have a familiarity with what’s happening, as I want to try to distill a few more unique thoughts on why I find these protests so striking. Specifically, why all this seems like such a perfect reflection of the Reality War. In that essay, I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.” In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism,” the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.” I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here: The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labour is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself. So let’s consider this using the protests as a lens, and vice versa. A new HIV variant with higher virulence and more damaging health impacts has been discovered in a study led by the University of Oxford. As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated, new mutations in viral genetic sequences can have significant impacts on the virus’s transmissibility and the damage it causes. For many years, there have been concerns that this could arise in the HIV-1 virus, which already affects 38 million people worldwide, and has caused 33 million deaths to date (www.unaids.org). This has now been confirmed with the discovery of a new, highly virulent HIV strain in the Netherlands, in an international collaborative study with key contributions from the Dutch HIV Monitoring Foundation and led by researchers from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute. The results are published today in Science.
Individuals infected with the new “VB variant” (for virulent subtype B) showed significant differences before antiretroviral treatment compared with individuals infected with other HIV variants:
Reassuringly, after starting treatment, individuals with the VB variant had similar immune system recovery and survival to individuals with other HIV variants. However, the researchers stress that because the VB variant causes a more rapid decline in immune system strength, this makes it critical that individuals are diagnosed early and start treatment as soon as possible. Further research to understand the mechanism that causes the VB variant to be more transmissible and damaging to the immune system could reveal new targets for next-generation antiretroviral drugs. The VB variant is characterized by many mutations spread throughout the genome, meaning that a single genetic cause cannot be identified at this stage. Lead author Dr Chris Wymant, from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute and Nuffield Department of Medicine, said: ‘Before this study, the genetics of the HIV virus were known to be relevant for virulence, implying that the evolution of a new variant could change its impact on health. Discovery of the VB variant demonstrated this, providing a rare example of the risk posed by viral virulence evolution.’ Senior author Professor Christophe Fraser from the University of Oxford’s Big Data Institute and Nuffield Department of Medicine, added: ‘Our findings emphasise the importance of World Health Organization guidance that individuals at risk of acquiring HIV have access to regular testing to allow early diagnosis, followed by immediate treatment. This limits the amount of time HIV can damage an individual’s immune system and jeopardise their health. It also ensures that HIV is suppressed as quickly as possible, which prevents transmission to other individuals.’ The VB variant was first identified in 17 HIV positive individuals from the BEEHIVE project, an ongoing study which collects samples from across Europe and Uganda. Since 15 of these people came from the Netherlands, the researchers then analysed data from a cohort of over 6,700 HIV positive individuals in the Netherlands. This identified an additional 92 individuals with the variant, from all regions of the Netherlands, bringing the total to 109. By analysing the patterns of genetic variation among the samples, the researchers estimate that the VB variant first arose during the late 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands. It spread more quickly than other HIV variants during the 2000s, but its spread has been declining since around 2010. The research team believe that the VB variant arose in spite of widespread treatment in the Netherlands, not because of it, since effective treatment can suppress transmission. The individuals with the VB variant showed typical characteristics for people living with HIV in the Netherlands, including age, sex, and suspected mode of transmission. This indicates that the increased transmissibility of the VB variant is due to a property of the virus itself, rather than a characteristic of people with the virus. |
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