Ensoma Launches to Pioneer Next-Generation In Vivo Approach to Deliver First Off-the-shelf Genomic Medicines – Business Wire

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BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ensoma, a company expanding the curative power of genomic medicine by pioneering a next-generation in vivo approach, today launched with a $70 million Series A financing led by co-founder and seed investor 5AM Ventures, with participation from F-Prime Capital, Takeda Ventures, Viking Global Investors, Cormorant Asset Management, RIT Capital Partners, Symbiosis II, LLC, and Alexandria Venture Investments. In addition to an equity investment of $10 million in the Series A financing, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (Takeda) and Ensoma have entered into a strategic collaboration with the potential for upfront and preclinical research payments totaling $100 million as part of a strategic collaboration worth up to $1.25 billion, announced in a separate press release this morning.

The foundation of the companys platform its Engenious vectors is based on over two decades of academic and clinical research generated by scientific co-founders and renowned experts, Hans-Peter Kiem, M.D., Ph.D., of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Andr Lieber, M.D., Ph.D., of University of Washington School of Medicine. The company will be led by biotechnology industry veterans with demonstrated track records in innovative therapeutic modalities, including gene therapy and editing, across an array of disease areas, including rare disease, hematology and oncology.

Ensomas Engenious vectors are designed to deliver a diverse range of genome modification technologies including those that require a high level of packaging capacity directly to hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) or the various cell types that arise from these cells, such as T cells, B cells and myeloid cells. The companys vectors are optimized to work without the need for stem cell collection or prior myeloablative conditioning (e.g., chemotherapy). As a result, Ensomas therapies will be designed to be delivered via single injection in diverse environments, including outpatient and areas where access to sophisticated healthcare systems may be limited.

With the launch of Ensoma, we aspire to bring innovative new treatments to patients in a way that is accessible for all, said Paula Soteropoulos, executive chairman of Ensoma. Because our in vivo therapies do not require prior conditioning or stem cell donors, we hope to deliver them as off-the-shelf treatments to address diseases both rare and common dramatically simplifying the logistics of scaling production and reducing patient and healthcare-system burden. Every person, no matter where they are in the world, should have access to the innovative technologies that are changing the way we treat disease.

Engenious Vectors

Ensomas Engenious vectors are specially engineered adenovirus vectors devoid of any viral genome and minimal pre-existing immunity, thus minimizing the chance of an immune response and freeing up ample storage space up to 35 kilobases (kb) of DNA packaging capacity to deliver a diverse range of genome modification technologies. Also known as therapeutic cargo, these technologies may include, separately and in combination, the following:

These approaches enable Engenious vectors to engineer various erythroid, lymphoid (e.g., T cells, B cells) and myeloid (e.g., macrophages, microglia) cell types, with great precision and vast therapeutic potential. Addressable indications range from rare monogenic diseases to broader diseases such as oncology, autoimmunity and infectious diseases via precision, off-the-shelf engineering of the immune system.

Given the highly specific nature of these technologies, Ensomas Engenious vectors enable preferential targeting of HSCs inside the body. Additionally, Ensomas founders have developed an in vivo selection system that can increase the population of genetically modified HSCs, if needed. This proprietary approach enables precise titration to lasting therapeutic levels without the need to re-dose patients, bypassing the immunogenic challenges associated with re-dosing for some other gene therapy modalities.

Ensomas Engenious platform has been extensively validated in numerous preclinical models with a range of genome editing technologies, demonstrating robust genetic modification of bone marrow HSCs and stable long-term expression of therapeutic proteins in small and large preclinical models.

There have been tremendous advancements in technologies to precisely target, genetically edit and modify human disease. However, many of these tools pose delivery challenges; some lack the ability to reach the right cells within the body, while others lack the ability to broadly reach significant numbers of patients due to complex procedures and supply chain challenges, said Kush M. Parmar, M.D., Ph.D., founding chief executive officer of Ensoma. Ensomas scientific approach allows us to do what hasnt been done beforeto make the curative power of genomic medicine and stem cell technology portable so they may be administered in low-resource and outpatient settings for the very first time.

Leadership & Scientific Founders

Ensoma was founded by and incubated within the 4:59 Initiative, the company creation engine of 5AM Ventures. The companys scientific co-founders include Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem, an oncologist and world-renowned pioneer in gene-editing technologies, including stem cell and gene therapies, from Fred Hutch, who also serves as vice president of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy and chief scientific and clinical advisor for Ensoma; and Dr. Andr Lieber, an accomplished academic researcher and professor of medicine, Division of Medical Genetics, UW School of Medicine, who has studied the biological and translational aspects of human adenoviruses for more than two decades. Ensoma is based on an exclusively licensed portfolio of technologies developed by the Fred Hutch lab of Dr. Kiem and the University of Washington lab of Dr. Lieber that enable in vivo genome engineering and gene therapy advances of HSCs for therapeutic use in blood diseases.

Following more than 20 years of academic and clinical research, Ensoma has assembled an exceptional team to boldly forge a new era of genomic medicine in vivo, said Bihua Chen, founder and portfolio manager at Cormorant Asset Management. The company is moving swiftly to accelerate and broaden the therapeutic potential of its approach, and I am confident they have the right team and the right technology to potentially bring life-changing, curative therapies within reach for people all over the world.

Additional details surrounding company leadership, including its board of directors, are as follows:

Ensoma has also named its scientific advisory board, which may be viewed here.

About 5AM Ventures

Founded in 2002, 5AM actively invests in next-generation biotech companies. With approximately $1.5 billion raised since inception, 5AM has invested in 89 companies. For more information, please visit http://www.5amventures.com.

About the 4:59 Initiative

The 4:59 Initiative is the internal company creation engine at 5AM Ventures that helps discover, incubate, and fund breakthrough science. The 4:59 team provides hands-on scientific, strategic, and operational support, working closely with academics and entrepreneurs to advance breakthrough science and establish proof-of-concept data to enable a clear path to transformative therapies for patients.

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Ensoma Launches to Pioneer Next-Generation In Vivo Approach to Deliver First Off-the-shelf Genomic Medicines - Business Wire

Ensoma Launches with $70 Million Series A and Takeda Licensing Deal – BioSpace

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With a Takeda collaboration already in its pocket, Ensoma announced a $70 million Series A round to help develop its platform of engineered gene therapy vectors for off-the-shelf in vivo therapeutics, starting in rare diseases.

The venture round was led by 5AM Ventures, which co-founded and seeded Ensoma. F-Prime Capital, Takeda Ventures, Viking Global Investors, Cormorant Asset Management, RIT Capital Partners, Symbiosis II, LLC and Alexandria Venture Investments also participated, with Takeda making a $10 million equity investment in the new company.

As part of the Takeda deal, Ensoma will do preclinical research for therapies in up to five rare disease indications, and both companies will work on Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling studies. Takeda has an exclusive license for Ensomas vectors in the chosen indications. Upfront payments alone were not disclosed, but Ensoma could earn up to $100 million for its early-stage work and up to $1.25 billion overall in milestone payments.

Ensoma is developing helper-dependent adenoviral vectorsvectors with viral coding sequences removedthat would not be limited to ex vivo editing for autologous cell therapies or require myeloablative conditioning to prepare a patients immune system.

The technology is based on the work of scientific co-founders Hans-Peter Kiem and Andr Lieber. Kiem is director of the Stem Cell and Gene Therapy Program Clinical Research Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Lieber is a professor of medical genetics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

In September, Liebers lab published preclinical findings that showed bi-modular helper-dependent adenoviral vectors could deliver a therapeutic gene therapy in vivo to hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in a mouse mode of sickle cell disease.

According to the company, its engineered vectors can be specifically targeted to deliver large payloads for a diverse array of genome-modifying technologies in vivo, not just to HSCs but also the cells those generate like T, B and myeloid cells. And because the vectors have been engineered to lack a viral genome, they are expected to have lower immunogenicity than lentiviral vectors typically used for in vivo genetic therapies, without the need for redosing.

The Ensoma platform offers distinct advantages over AAV and ex vivo lentiviral gene therapy approaches with the potential to overcome some of the challenges associated with first-generation technologies, said Takeda Rare Diseases Drug Discovery Unit Head Madhu Natarajan.

Takeda made similar forays in search of a post-adenoviral vector delivery approach last year. In June, it partnered with extracellular vesicles (EVs) company Carmine Therapeutics to develop and commercialize non-viral gene therapies for two rare diseases. Carmine is developing EVs derived from engineered O-type blood cells as vehicles for gene therapies. And last March, Takeda also partnered with EV company Evox Therapeutics for therapies in up to five rare disease indications.

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Ensoma Launches with $70 Million Series A and Takeda Licensing Deal - BioSpace

Response to Cancer Immunotherapy May Be Affected by Genes We Carry from Birth – UCSF News Services

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A scanning electron micrograph of an oral squamous cancer cell (white) being attacked by two cytotoxic T cells (red), part of a natural immune response. Image by NIH

For all their importance as a breakthrough treatment, the cancer immunotherapies known as checkpoint inhibitors still only benefit a small minority of patients, perhaps 15 percent across different types of cancer. Moreover, doctors cannot accurately predict which of their patients will respond.

A new study finds that inherited genetic variation plays a role in who is likely to benefit from checkpoint inhibitors, which release the immune systems brakes so it can attack cancer. The study also points to potential new targets that could help even more patients unleash their immune systems natural power to fight off malignant cells.

People who respond best to immunotherapy tend to have inflamed tumors that have been infiltrated by immune cells that are capable of killing both viruses and cancer. This inflammation is also driven by the immune signaling molecule interferon.

There are some factors that are already associated with how well the immune system responds to tumors, said Elad Ziv, MD, professor of medicine at UCSF and co-senior author of the paper, published Feb. 9, 2021, by an international team in Immunity. But whats been less studied is how well your genetic background predicts your immune systems response to the cancer. Thats what is being filled in by this work: How much is the immune response to cancer affected by your inherited genetic variation?

The study suggests that, for a range of important immune functions, as much as 20 percent of the variation in how different peoples immune systems are able to attack cancer is due to the kind of genes they were born with, which are known as germline genetic variations.

That is a significant effect, similar to the size of the genetic contribution to traits like high blood sugar levels or obesity.

Rather than testing selected genes, we analyzed all the genetic variants we could detect across the entire genome. Among all of them, the ones with the greatest effect on the immune systems response to the tumor were related to interferon signaling. Some of these variants are known to affect our response to viruses and our risk of autoimmune disorders, said Davide Bedognetti, MD, PhD, director of the Cancer Program at the Sidra Medicine Research Branch in Doha, Qatar, and co-senior author of the paper. As observed with other diseases, we demonstrated that specific genes can also predispose someone to have a more effective anti-cancer immunity.

The team identified variants in 22 regions in the genome, or in individual genes, with significant effects including one gene, IFIH1, that is already well known for the role its variants play in autoimmune diseases as varied as type 1 diabetes, psoriasis, vitiligo, systemic lupus erythematosus, ulcerative colitis and Crohns disease.

The IFIH1 variants act on cancer immunity in different ways. For instance, people with the variant that confers risk of type 1 diabetes had a more inflamed tumor, which suggests they would respond better to cancer immunotherapy. But the researchers saw the opposite effect for patients with the variant associated with Crohns, indicating they might not benefit.

Another gene, STING1, was already thought to play a role in how patients respond to immunotherapy, and drug companies are looking for ways to boost its effects. But the team discovered that some people carry a variant that makes them less likely to respond, which may require further stratification of patients to know who could benefit most from those efforts.

The study required a huge amount of data that could only be found in a dataset as large as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), and from which they analyzed the genes and immune responses of 9,000 patients with 30 different kinds of cancer.

All told, the scientific team, which includes members from the United States, Qatar, Canada, and Europe, examined nearly 11 million gene variants to see how they matched with 139 immune parameters measured in patient tumor samples.

But the 22 regions or genes identified in the new study are just the tip of the iceberg, the researchers said, and they suspect many more germline genes likely play a role in how the immune system responds to cancer.

The next step, Ziv said, is to use the data to formulate polygenic approaches taking a large number of genes into account to predict which cancer patients will benefit from current therapies, and developing new drugs for those who will not.

Its further off, he said, but its a big part of what we hope will come out of this work.

The co-first authors are Rosalyn Sayaman, PhD, at UCSF and City of Hope and Mohamad Saad, PhD, of Qatar Computing Research Institute at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Doha, Qatar. See the paper online for additional author, funding and disclosure information.

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care.UCSF Health, which serves as UCSFs primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.

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Response to Cancer Immunotherapy May Be Affected by Genes We Carry from Birth - UCSF News Services

Im 28 and I Dont Know My Family HistoryHeres How That Affects My Health – Well+Good

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If theres one thing Ive learned over the years as a health and wellness writer, its that information is power. The flip side of that is the fact that not having key information available to you can be deeply disempowering. Like millions of other Americans, Im adopted, which means I havent been able to find out a lot about important health information that most people have readily available to them: family health history and genetic health information.

Family health history is essentially just that: knowing the health histories of members of your biological family. This kind of information can help doctors pinpoint whether you are at risk for certain health conditions that can run in families or be determined by genetics. Family history is a strong clue for chronic disease risks you may face, such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes, says Latha Palaniappan, MD, the scientific director of Genomics and Pharmacogenomics in Primary Care at Stanford Medicine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) CDC recommends documenting as much as you can about your familys health history in order to share with your doctor, and ask for additional testing if youre concerned about your risk for a specific disease.

While Ive always valued a healthy lifestyleI try to eat well, sleep enough, exercise, and manage stress as much as possibleIve wondered recently if my inclination towards healthy living has been driven in part by fear, specifically the fear of what I dont know about my health and genetics. Since I dont know what could be in my genes, at least I do have some control over my lifestyle now, and that counts for a lot, right?

Thankfully, Dr. Palaniappan assures me that family history is not the end-all, be-all of what will happen with your health.Family history is probabilistic, not predictive, she says. (Basically, it can educate you about your odds of experiencing a certain health outcome, but not predict it outright.) But if you do have access to that information, use it, since family history provides important clues about your health risks, says Dr. Palaniappan.

So if you dont have access to this information, should you be worried? And what else can you do, besides actually going out to try to find your biological relatives information (which is a hugely personal choice, and not possible for some)? There are some other things you can do to help you gather more information about your health and feel more empowered about your future.

Honestly, I didnt think about my family health history too much until I started approaching 30. As the mystery surrounding family health information came up a bit more for me, I talked to my mom and my sister about my concerns surrounding what we dont know. When my mom got me a 23andMe DNA test (which start at $199 for the Health + Ancestry test) for Christmas one year, I was excitedand kind of anxiousto have the chance to take a deeper look into my health information.

23andMe is just one example of a direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA test that can give you some more information about your health. According to the companys website, the health reports available with the test include genetic information that can clue you in to your genetic risk for conditions like type 2 diabetes, select variants of BRCA1/BRCA2 (the gene associated with breast, ovarian, and pancreatic cancer), celiac disease, uterine fibroids, and more. The brands test can tell you about your carrier status (meaning if you carry genes linked to an inherited disease that could affect your children) for some diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia.

However, these DTC tests dont often come with specific consultation to walk you through whats present in your genome and how that translates into actual risk. Thats why its important to work with a genetics expert or genetic counselor if you can, says Robert C. Green MD, a medical geneticist who leads the Preventative Genomics Clinic at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Womens Hospital, and is the director of the Genomes2People Research Program.You [can] have a geneticist or genetic counselor who basically talks to you about what [the test results] mean and what should you do about it. What should you worry about and what should you not worry about, says Dr. Green. For example, if you tested positive for the gene for a certain hereditary cancer, a genetic counselor can help you with the next steps, like if you should seek more testing or work with a specialist.

Dr. Green adds that DTC tests arent the most comprehensive testing option. Thats because most of them use whats called chip-based DNA technology, which essentially scan your genome for known common mutations or markers along your genome, he says. [This technology] can be very good for ancestry for [finding relatives] and for certain specific markers, such as the Ashkenazi Jewish BRCA1 mutation that 23andMe looks for. It does not look at every letter in your genes, and its not typically set up to find rare or novel mutations that can affect your health. (Theyre not always super accurate, eithera 2019 study found that these chips have a very high false-positive rate for rare genetic mutations.) For health reasons sequencingwhich looks at every letter in a segment of your genome or across the whole genomeis more expensive, but much, much more comprehensive, he says.

DNA testing is definitely not cheap (it can run anywhere from $200 up to $2,000 for the more in-depth testing, and isnt always covered by insurance) and its certainly not the only way to find out more information about your health.

If you dont know much about your family health history, Dr. Palaniappan encourages paying attention to key health markers including blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, and heart rate, and getting those checked regularly. These measurable risk factors can be effectively treated to reduce your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes, says Dr. Palaniappan. Everyone can reduce the risk of disease by eating a healthy diet, getting enough exercise, and not smoking. Cancer screening tests such as mammograms and colorectal cancer screening can detect precancer and treatable cancers early, she says.

While getting the DNA test felt like a great first step to knowing more about my health, its also good to know that the everyday things that I sometimes dont even think about (like walking my dog) might have a bigger impact on my health than I thought before.What you do each and every daywhat you eat, how much you exercise, and your other health behaviors, can ultimately affect your risk of developing disease, says Dr. Palaniappan. If anything, Ive learned that not knowing your family health history doesnt have to be a huge blank spot, but if I ever do want to know more, there are optionswhich is empowering for sure.

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Im 28 and I Dont Know My Family HistoryHeres How That Affects My Health - Well+Good

NeuBase Therapeutics Reports Financial Results for the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2021 – GlobeNewswire

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Recently demonstrated single-dose intravenous administration of a PATrOL-enabled compound resolves the causal genetic defect in myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) in transgenic animals; Company on course to move one program into clinical development in CY2022

Plans to host an R&D day in the first half of CY2021 to provide updates on platform innovations, the DM1 and Huntington's disease (HD) programs and pipeline expansion in high value indications

Expects to complete consolidation of intellectual property in the space through acquisition of gene modulating technology from Vera Therapeutics in Q1 CY2021

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NeuBase Therapeutics, Inc. (Nasdaq: NBSE) ("NeuBase" or the "Company"), a biotechnology company accelerating the genetic revolution using a new class of synthetic medicines, today reported its financial results for the three-month period ended December 31, 2020.

"In 2020 we validated that our PATrOL platform technology can deliver compounds that are broadly biodistributed, mutant allele-specific and well tolerated, including in non-human primates (NHPs). Thereafter we finalized screening compound libraries and moved into in vivo efficacy and tolerability studies that demonstrated that administration of a PATrOL-enabled compound resolves the causal genetic insult in an established transgenic animal model of myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), a severe genetic disease with no effective therapies. This momentum is being carried forward into 2021 as we set the stage to enter the clinic in CY2022," said Dietrich A. Stephan, Ph.D., chief executive officer of NeuBase. "Predicated on our progress, we recently announced an agreement to acquire additional gene modulating technology to consolidate the intellectual property to protect and enhance value creation with this unique therapeutic modality."

"We look forward to providing more data and insights during an investor R&D day in the first half of CY2021, including updates on platform innovations, continued progress in Huntington's disease (HD) and DM1 and new pipeline programs. This event will provide an opportunity for us to introduce the expanded team, including Dr. Curt Bradshaw, Ph.D. chief scientific officer, who has overseen several development programs into the clinic and complements a world-class team of technical experts and drug developers."

First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2021 and Recent Operating Highlights

Financial Results for the Fiscal Quarter Ended December 31, 2020

About NeuBase TherapeuticsNeuBase is accelerating the genetic revolution using a new class of synthetic medicines which have been shown to be able to increase, decrease and change gene function, as appropriate, to resolve causal genetic defects in living systems. NeuBase's designer PATrOL therapies are centered around its proprietary drug scaffold to address genetic diseases at the source by combining the highly targeted approach of traditional genetic therapies with the broad organ distribution capabilities of small molecules. With an initial focus on silencing disease-causing mutations in debilitating neurological, neuromuscular and oncologic disorders, NeuBase is committed to redefining medicine for the millions of patients with both common and rare conditions. To learn more, visit http://www.neubasetherapeutics.com.

Use of Forward-Looking StatementsThis press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are distinguished by use of words such as "will," "would," "anticipate," "expect," "believe," "designed," "plan," or "intend," the negative of these terms, and similar references to future periods. These forward-looking statements include, among others, those related to the potential significance and implications of the Company's positive in vitro and in vivo preclinical data for its PATrOL-enabled anti-gene therapies for the treatment of myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1), the plan to provide updates on the Company's development pipeline, including the myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) and Huntington's disease (HD) programs, at an R&D day in the first half of CY2021 and the Company's anticipated capital requirements over approximately the next twelve months. These views involve risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and, accordingly, our actual results may differ materially from the results discussed in our forward-looking statements. Our forward-looking statements contained herein speak only as of the date of this press release. Factors or events that we cannot predict, including those risk factors contained in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, may cause our actual results to differ from those expressed in forward-looking statements. The Company may not actually achieve the plans, carry out the intentions or meet the expectations or projections disclosed in the forward-looking statements, and you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Because such statements deal with future events and are based on the Company's current expectations, they are subject to various risks and uncertainties, and actual results, performance or achievements of the Company could differ materially from those described in or implied by the statements in this press release, including: the Company's plans to develop and commercialize its product candidates; the timing of initiation of the Company's planned clinical trials; the risks that prior data will not be replicated in future studies; the timing of any planned investigational new drug application or new drug application; the Company's plans to research, develop and commercialize its current and future product candidates; the clinical utility, potential benefits and market acceptance of the Company's product candidates; the Company's commercialization, marketing and manufacturing capabilities and strategy; global health conditions, including the impact of COVID-19; the Company's ability to protect its intellectual property position; and the requirement for additional capital to continue to advance these product candidates, which may not be available on favorable terms or at all, as well as those risk factors contained in our filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as otherwise required by law, the Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, whether as a result of new information, future events or circumstances or otherwise.

NeuBase Investor Contact:Dan FerryManaging DirectorLifeSci Advisors, LLCdaniel@lifesciadvisors.com OP: (617) 430-7576

NeuBase Media Contact:Cait Williamson, Ph.D.LifeSci Communicationscait@lifescicomms.com OP: (646) 751-4366

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NeuBase Therapeutics Reports Financial Results for the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2021 - GlobeNewswire

PM Modi Waives off Rs 6 Crore Tax on Imported Medicine for 6-month-old Baby Girl from Mumbai – News18

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For baby Teera Kamat, who has been on the earth for a mere six months, every day has been a struggle for existence and a grim reminder to her parents about the fragile little being that needed a miracle to be saved. Mumbai-born Teera is suffering from Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a very rare medical condition that often does not let children live beyond 5 months of age and her condition requires a lot of money for the treatment.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in a humanitarian move, decided to waive off Rs 6 crore as a GST amount against Rs 16 crore of imported medicines that are required to treat Teera. Baby Teera's parents Priyanka and Mihir Kamat have raised Rs 16 crore through crowdfunding for their daughter who needs a surgery to be cured. It also includes the cost of the medicine Zolgensma which has to be imported from the US. The tax exemption for baby's treatment amounts to at least Rs 6.5 crore and it includes 23 percent import duty and 12 percent Goods Services Tax.

The infant's parents had earlier appealed to PM Modi in October last year about Teeras medical condition and in January this year. The Leader of Opposition Devendra Fadnavis also wrote to the Prime Minister and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaraman reiterating the request to exempt taxes on the medicine import.

It is a type of genetic disorder and a motor neuron disease that results in a person not having any control over movement of their muscles due because of the lack of nerve cells, in their spinal cord and/or brain stem.

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) results in muscle wasting and weakness. For someone suffering from SMA, it is very difficult to stand, walk and control their movements. Some intense forms of the SMA can also result in inability to breathe and swallow.

SMA can either occur at birth or even appear at stages of life and they can affect one's life expectancy depending upon the seriousness and the type of the SMA.

So far, there has been no cure of SMA, but certain medicines do help, such as nusinersen (Spinraza) and onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi (Zolgensma), that help slow the disease's progress.

The types of SMA depend on when they start showing up in a patient and how the symptoms vary in them. There are basically four kinds of SMA, as National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke list, which affects symptoms and life expectancy.

The first type of SMA, or Werdnig-Hoffmann disease appears before the infant is even 6 months of age. The child might be born with difficulty in breathing and the serious condition can turn fatal if there's no treatment.

Those with SMA type II will start showing symptoms of the disease usually when they are between 6 and 18 months of age. These children can sit but will not be able to walk or stand without helped and without treatment, they might just lose their power to sit as well.

Children with SMA type III or Kugelberg-Welander disease start showing symptoms after they are 18 months of age and can walk on their own. They however, experience difficultly in walking or running and other such physical exercises related to legs.

Those with SMA type IV usually develop the symptoms after they are over 21 years of age ad have minor muscle weakness and other issues. It doesn't affect one's life expectancy.

The USA Food and Drug Administration has approved the Zolgensma gene therapy for children who show the signs of the disease and are less than 2 years. Last year in August, the FDA also gave its nod to the orally-administered drug risdiplam (Evrysdi) for patients who are older than two months of age and are diagnosed with SMA.

Physical therapy, occupational therapy, and rehabilitation are some measures that can be taken to help improve posture, stop joint immobility and help in case of muscle weakness and atrophy.

You can find the link to the crowdfunding page for baby Teera here.

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PM Modi Waives off Rs 6 Crore Tax on Imported Medicine for 6-month-old Baby Girl from Mumbai - News18

GeneSight Psychotropic Test’s Combinatorial Approach Proves Better than Single-Gene Testing at Predicting Patient Outcomes and Medication Blood Levels…

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New Analysis Published in Psychiatry Research

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Myriad Genetics, Inc. (NASDAQ:MYGN), a leader in genetic testing and precision medicine, announced today the peer-reviewed journal Psychiatry Research has published a new analysis showing the combinatorial approach available in the GeneSight Psychotropic test is better than single-gene testing at predicting patient outcomes and medication blood levels.

Myriads GeneSight test evaluates how variations in multiple genes may influence an individuals outcomes with certain FDA-approved medications commonly prescribed to treat depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric conditions.

Using data from the Genomics Used to Improve DEpression Decisions (GUIDED) randomized-controlled trial, the study evaluated the ability of the combinatorial approach available in the GeneSight Psychotropic test to predict patient outcomes and medication blood levels compared to Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium(CPIC) single-gene recommendations. CPIC recommendations are based on either CYP2C19 and CYP2D6, which are genes that are involved in how the body metabolizes medications commonly used to treat depression and other mental illnesses.

The study included two types of analyses:

Our analysis demonstrated the superior ability of combinatorial pharmacogenetic testing to predict variation in medication blood levels may result in improved patient outcomes, said lead author Anthony J. Rothschild, MD, the Irving S. and Betty Brudnick Endowed Chair and Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. We believe this study provides compelling evidence of the clinical validity of the combinatorial pharmacogenomic test for patients with major depressive disorder, who have at least one prior medication failure.

This analysis demonstrates that the combinatorial approach of the GeneSight test more accurately predicts blood drug levels and identifies more patients with significant gene-drug interactions who would be missed by single-gene testing, said Dr. Mark Pollack, chief medical officer, Myriad Neuroscience. Combinatorial pharmacogenomics like the GeneSight test should become the standard-of-care to help physicians understand gene-drug interactions that could improve care for people with depression, anxiety and other conditions.

This is the second study evaluating the combinatorial approach of the GeneSight test to be published inPsychiatry Research.The earlier study, published in May 2020, demonstrated the combinatorial approach available in the GeneSight Psychotropic test was better at predicting citalopram and escitalopram blood concentrations when compared to single-gene testing.

The GUIDED study, the largest pharmacogenomic randomized controlled trial in mental health, showed that patients whose doctors received GeneSight results had significantly improved response and remission rates from depression, compared to treatment as usual.

About Myriad NeuroscienceMyriad Neuroscience is a business unit of Myriad Genetics, Inc., (NASDAQ: MYGN), a leader in genetic testing and precision medicine. Through its GeneSight Psychotropic test, Myriad Neuroscience provides information to healthcare providers about their patients genetic variations, which may impact how they metabolize or respond to certain psychiatric medications. Learn more at genesight.com/about-myriad-neuroscience/

About The GeneSight TestMyriads GeneSight Psychotropic test is the category-leading pharmacogenomic test for depression medications. The GeneSight test can help inform doctors about genes that may impact how patients metabolize or respond to certain psychiatric medications. It has been given to more than one million patients by tens of thousands of clinicians to provide genetic information that is unique to each patient. It supplements other information considered by a doctor as part of a comprehensive medical assessment. Learn more at GeneSight.com.

About Myriad GeneticsMyriad Genetics Inc., is a leading genetic testing and precision medicine company dedicated to transforming patient lives worldwide. Myriad discovers and commercializes genetic tests that determine the risk of developing disease, accurately diagnose disease, assess the risk of disease progression, and guide treatment decisions across medical specialties where molecular diagnostics can significantly improve patient care and lower healthcare costs. For more information on how Myriad is making a difference, please visit the Company's website:www.myriad.com.

Myriad, the Myriad logo, BART, BRACAnalysis, Colaris, Colaris AP, myPath, myRisk, Myriad myRisk, myRisk Hereditary Cancer, myChoice, myPlan, BRACAnalysis CDx, Tumor BRACAnalysis CDx, myChoice CDx, Vectra, Prequel, Foresight, GeneSight, riskScore and Prolaris are trademarks or registered trademarks of Myriad Genetics, Inc. or its wholly owned subsidiaries in the United States and foreign countries. MYGN-F, MYGN-G.

Safe Harbor StatementThis press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements related to the Companys strategic directives under the caption "About Myriad Genetics." These "forward-looking statements" are based on management's current expectations of future events and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially and adversely from those set forth in or implied by forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: uncertainties associated with COVID-19, including its possible effects on our operations and the demand for our products and services; our ability to efficiently and flexibly manage our business amid uncertainties related to COVID-19; the risk that sales and profit margins of our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services may decline; risks related to our ability to transition from our existing product portfolio to our new tests, including unexpected costs and delays; risks related to decisions or changes in governmental or private insurers reimbursement levels for our tests or our ability to obtain reimbursement for our new tests at comparable levels to our existing tests; risks related to increased competition and the development of new competing tests and services; the risk that we may be unable to develop or achieve commercial success for additional molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services in a timely manner, or at all; the risk that we may not successfully develop new markets for our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services, including our ability to successfully generate revenue outside the United States; the risk that licenses to the technology underlying our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services and any future tests and services are terminated or cannot be maintained on satisfactory terms; risks related to delays or other problems with operating our laboratory testing facilities and our healthcare clinic; risks related to public concern over genetic testing in general or our tests in particular; risks related to regulatory requirements or enforcement in the United States and foreign countries and changes in the structure of the healthcare system or healthcare payment systems; risks related to our ability to obtain new corporate collaborations or licenses and acquire new technologies or businesses on satisfactory terms, if at all; risks related to our ability to successfully integrate and derive benefits from any technologies or businesses that we license or acquire; risks related to our projections about our business, results of operations and financial condition; risks related to the potential market opportunity for our products and services; the risk that we or our licensors may be unable to protect or that third parties will infringe the proprietary technologies underlying our tests; the risk of patent-infringement claims or challenges to the validity of our patents or other intellectual property; risks related to changes in intellectual property laws covering our molecular diagnostic tests and pharmaceutical and clinical services and patents or enforcement in the United States and foreign countries, such as the Supreme Court decisions in Mayo Collab. Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 566 U.S. 66 (2012), Assn for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc., 569 U.S. 576 (2013), and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Intl, 573 U.S. 208 (2014); risks of new, changing and competitive technologies and regulations in the United States and internationally; the risk that we may be unable to comply with financial operating covenants under our credit or lending agreements; the risk that we will be unable to pay, when due, amounts due under our credit or lending agreements; and other factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" contained in Item 1A of our most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2020, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as any updates to those risk factors filed from time to time in our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q or Current Reports on Form 8-K. All information in this press release is as of the date of the release, and Myriad undertakes no duty to update this information unless required by law.

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GeneSight Psychotropic Test's Combinatorial Approach Proves Better than Single-Gene Testing at Predicting Patient Outcomes and Medication Blood Levels...

Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of the First Publication of the Human Genome – Scientific American

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On June 26, 2000 in the East Room of the White House I stood at the podium and announced the sequencing of the human genome, a project accomplished by my relatively small team at company in only nine months. Seated behind me was President Clinton, and on a giant screen was U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. Francis Collins was on stage as the head of the National Institutes of Health human genome team. Seated in front of me were some of the senior scientists associated with human genome sequencing as well as top government officials and ambassadors from around the world. Behind the guests were 50 or so TV cameras and photographers. The entire event was being broadcast live around the world.

After years of never-ending work, criticism (from the outside world and even internally at my company), intervention by top science journal editors and even President Clinton, to be standing where history was being made that day was a very emotional and fulfilling experience. It was hard to believe we made it to this point though, and there was drama leading up to and even into the early hours of the morning. We all had to share drafts of our speeches the day before the event, and when I saw the speech from Prime Minister Blair, I told the head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy that I would not attend unless his speech was changed. I thought it was one-sided and contained disparaging remarks about me and my team. The White House science adviser said that they could not change a foreign head of governments speech. I said that if they wanted me to attend, they needed to do something. I received a call at 2 A.M. indicating that I would be very pleased with his speech, which I was indeed.

How did we get to this historic place? Genome sequencing discussions began in the mid 1980s that led to an NIH/Department of Energy genome effort that was getting funded with billions of dollars but was proceeding slowly by spreading the genome fragments over multiple labs around the world. My team at my first not-for-profit research institute, The Institute for Genomic Research or TIGR, was funded to do a small segment and assumed we would sit out the genome project.

In 1995, we published the first genome of a free-living organism, H. influenzae, in Science. This genome was sequenced using our new algorithm and automation to sequence a genome as a single project in months rather than years. I was certain that this approach would work with the human genome, but I was only one of a few who believed this. In 1998, my world changed with a call from Applied Biosystems (ABI) and their parent company offering $300 million for me to set up a new company to sequence the human genome with my technique and their new machine. I flew out to their headquarters in Foster City, Calif., to look at the prototype version of their new machine and was convinced it would work. We calculated that we would need 300 machines. On returning to TIGR, I told Ham Smith, Nobel laureate and my friend and colleague, what I saw and said that I had to go do this. His reply was: I dont think it will work, but I am going with you.

We started a new company called Celera Genomics with the goal of sequencing the first human genome in three years or less. The companys tagline was Speed Matters, Discovery Cant Wait. This announcement was not met with open arms by the NIH-led sequencing community who said Celeras sequencing plans would end up with the swiss cheese, CliffsNotes, Readers Digest or even Mad Magazine version of the genome. I guess I can understand why they were not thrilled to have a newcomer to the game and thus began what the press dubbed a race to sequencing the human genome pitting Celera against the NIH and international genome effort.

We knew the algorithm that we were using for bacterial genomes would not work for humans, nor would any of the existing computers. We had thousands of resumes sent to us, and fortunately one was from Eugene Myers, who ended up being one of the key heroes of the human genome. Gene, who was then a faculty member at the University of Arizona and had been the key developer of the BLAST tool for sequencing analysis, had been thinking about larger genome assembly and was encouraged by our success with bacterial genomes. Gene and a small team wrote 500,000 lines of computer code in a few months to create the Celera Assembler. Nine months later we had a complete human genome sequence and set out to annotate it to see what it said about us. We published our analysis in Science only after the late Don Kennedy, Science editor, stepped in to override leaders of the public project who had attempted to block our publication. The NIH effort published their data in Nature on the same day.

So, with the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first sequencing of the human genome on February 16, 2001, what do we have to show for the past two decades? The first decade post publication made steady progress in sequencing technology enabling more and more genomes of every class of life being sequenced, but unfortunately little effort has gone into generating knowledge and understanding about the human genome. This is due in part to the fact that significant funding in the United States at the government level has dwindled, while in other countries funding has increased. The good news is that essentially every new drug and vaccine is now based on genomics, and basic research has changed from sequencing genes to more function-based research.

Many thought that just by sequencing large numbers of genomes that understanding and new knowledge would fall into place. While that has helped with ancestry tracing and genome variation, there is still so much for us to learn and understand about how the genome codes for us humans.

Five years ago, I formulated a new approach combining comprehensive phenotyping with deep genome analysis using machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithms and other tools. The new approach came about because my genome showed that I was a heterozygote for the APOE gene, which confers a substantially increased risk for Alzheimers Disease. I convinced some neurologists at University of California, San Diego, to do an MRI brain scan and an MRI/PET scan for amyloid, thought to be a key marker for the disease. The good news for me personally was that both tests came back negative, but it showed me that I needed to combine clinical phenotype tests like the MRI with the genome to understand the predictive risk. This led to the formation of a new company called Human Longevity, Inc (HLI).

The goal of HLI was to offer the most comprehensive set of clinical tests for self-described healthy individuals that we could do in one day, such as whole-body MRI, cardiac CT scans, bone density, 4-D echo cardiac test and remote cardiac monitoring. We included a large array of chemical tests including the complete metabolome screening. The results of these integrated tests on so-called healthy people have been truly stunning. About 40 to 50 percent of people tested had significant disease of which they were unaware. Approximately 5 percent over 50 had a major tumor. The good news is they were almost all at early stages and could be removed or treated with radiation. About 1 percent of all tested had a brain aneurysm. Machine learning is providing new genome loci that correlate with diseases discovered. We are also looking for protective genetic markers for those like me with APOE changes but no Alzheimers, or women with BRCA mutations but no breast or ovarian cancers.

This notion of testing seemingly healthy people is not without critics. Some argue that if you look you will find something, and we might not have a cure or treatment for that disease, thus creating unnecessary distress. Or they say some tumors might be so slow-growing that treating them leads to unnecessary side effects; a wait and see is thus a better approach. As I have tried to show with my career, Im not satisfied with this. I believe that we have an obligation to utilize all the tools and knowledge we fought so hard to develop and uncover, including the one with the most potential, our human genome.

Overall, the practice of medicine needs to drastically change. We can prevent and predict diseases if we combine genomics on a grand scale with clinical phenotyping and machine learning. One factor impeding this progress is the fact that the health care system is incented to offer treatments but not prevention. With new clinical tools, cancers and other diseases can be detected at the earliest stages when treatments and potential cures are minimally invasive.

The genome will play a key role in the future bioeconomy, but the U.S. is already way behind. We are 54th in the world for sequence screening of new COVID-19 virus strains. And except for cancer, the genome is not a part of the practice of medicine. We all thought the genome sequence would allow us to understand ourselves and change medicine. That is happening too slowly, costing tens of millions of lives that could have been saved if we made it a national priority. One example is that it could be relatively easy to know who would be most susceptible to death from COVID-19 and flu. With the specter of more emerging infectious diseases, we need to act sooner rather than later.

When I stood at the podium at the White House press conference to announce the genome I said, The method used by Celera has determined the genetic code of five individuals. We have sequenced the genome of three females and two males, who have identified themselves as Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American. We did this sampling not in an exclusionary way, but out of respect for the diversity that is America, and to help illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis. In the five Celera genomes, there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another. Society and medicine treats us all as members of populations, where as individuals we are all unique, and population statistics do not apply. I still stand by this statement. In fact, what we find today is that socioeconomic background contributes more to health access and outcomes than any other factor, biological or otherwise. The COVID-19 pandemic is a real-world, real-time example of this.

Progress is only made by daring to go where no roads currently exist. As President Clinton said at the White House event in 2000 to unveil the first survey of the human genome, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind. We need more explorers and more funding to fully utilize this map to uncover the new lands yet to be discovered in the human genome.

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Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of the First Publication of the Human Genome - Scientific American

Letter: Censorship and the CPSDB – The Suburban Times

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Censorship is understood to be the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered inconvenient.

At the February 8, 2021 Clover Park School District Board meeting, Director Paul Wagemann asked his fellow board members to amend the December 21, 2020 meeting minutes to include his comments.

In response to Wagemanns request, Director and Board Vice-President Alyssa Anderson-Pearson stated, It is important to remember it (the December 21 minutes) was an overview that happened, not word for word.

The meeting minutes of that December 21 meeting clearly state that each director was given the opportunity to discuss how he or she felt about the choice of words used and to express what equity means to them.

The comments of Superintendent Banner are included.

The comments of Directors Schafer, Jacobs, Anderson-Pearson and Veliz are included.

But the comments of Director Wagemann are not included.

Why?

During the February 8, 2021 meeting, Schafer ironically stated, Objective and accurate these things are very important to me.

What has been objective and accurate about the censoring the suppression of speech of Paul Wagemanns comments during the December 21, 2020 CPSDB meeting?

Related

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Letter: Censorship and the CPSDB - The Suburban Times

Government censorship threats over TikTok spiked interest in VPNs – ZDNet

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TikTok, the video-sharing social network, drove a lot of interest from consumers last year. It also piqued their interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), according to new research.

The research by Brooklyn, NY-based security advisors Security.org found that interest in VPNs was directly correlated with newsworthy events.

The company measured the amount of web traffic in a day compared to the average web traffic of a week prior to the date and correlated this with significant events during 2020.

VPN technology is used for various reasons. It can be used to create a secure channel to communicate with the workplace protecting sensitive business information, to bypass government restrictions, or to hide activity from Internet Service Providers amongst others.

Almost one in 10 US adult VPN users cite whistleblowing, activism, or bypassing government or organization restrictions as a reason for use of VPN technology.

Security.org's research showed that interest in VPN technology tends to increase significantly whenever there is a newsworthy event that impacts travel, or internet usage, or impacts working from home environments.

On March 22020, the first deaths due to COVID-19 were reported, leading to an increase in VPN interest of 99 percent compared with average web traffic the week before..

On March 24 2020 when the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was announced, there was a 78 percent increase in consumers' VPN interest.

This was due to people looking to secure their at-home networks for the possibility of stay-at-home orders and working from home due to the pandemic.

On August 13, average consumer interest in VPNs increased by 74 percent when President Trump proposed a ban on TikTok in August 2020. Interest also spiked by 34% on September 20th - the day the TikTok ban was said to start.

When internet censorship is threatened, average consumer interest in VPNs increases, and consumers flock to buy routers like the GL.iNet Beryl router which has VPN software built in to the router.

A VPN will allow people to access the internet in countries where restrictions are in place. Countries with levels of internet censorship can bypass firewalls to get to otherwise-restricted content.

As restrictions on free content continue to grow, I think that more and more of us will switch to VPN technology. We can then ensure that we have the freedom to access the content we want to and to communicate as if there were no restrictions at all wherever we happen to live.

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Government censorship threats over TikTok spiked interest in VPNs - ZDNet

For a brief period, there was a platform for sensitive political debate in China. Then censors shut it down – CNN

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But on Monday night, social media app Clubhouse appeared to have been blocked in China just days after it became the go-to app for uncensored conversations on a host of sensitive issues banned on other platforms.

By Monday evening, many Clubhouse users in mainland China reported that when they tried to log onto the app, they received a red error message showing "a secure connection to the server cannot be made."

On Tuesday, the hashtag "Clubhouse" was also censored on Chinese social media platform Weibo, where it had been trending. People with mainland phone numbers reported no longer being able to receive text messages from Clubhouse, in effect blocking them from joining as invitation and verification codes are sent to a mobile phone to register a new account.

On Clubhouse, several chat rooms soon sprang up to discuss the blocking of the app. They were joined by hundreds of users, including some who said they were based in mainland China. Greatfire.org, a group which monitors internet censorship in China, also confirmed that the app had been blocked.

The ban, however, came as little surprise. With its political discussions drawing so much interest from mainland China, many users and observers expected it was only a matter of time before the app was blocked. While the censorship might deter new users, it is unclear how many existing users will be kept off the platform.

Susan Liang, a 31-year-old from Shenzhen, said she would continue to join Clubhouse chats on sensitive topics via a VPN because she didn't want to give up the frank and open discussions.

"It is too rare an opportunity. Everyone has lived under the Great Firewall for so long, but on this platform, we can talk about anything," she said. "It's like someone drowning, and can finally breathe in a large gulp of air."

But Liang expects some other users might be discouraged by having to use a VPN, as that technology has been increasingly targeted by Chinese government crackdowns. Any VPN not approved by the government is illegal.

Benjamin Ismail, an expert with Apple Censorship a project run by GreatFire.org said some users would be discouraged by the block but "it might not kill the app immediately" in China.

Popular political chat rooms

While the app first became popular in China among tech industry circles, its political chat rooms quickly drew newcomers eager for release from the tight censorship at home. As it grew in popularity, many Chinese also joined to discuss topics such as culture, lifestyle and celebrity gossip. But the space for free, inclusive political discussions was one of the rarest qualities of the app for Chinese-speaking communities.

One chat room hosted by Taiwan-based blogger Zola was running non-stop for almost 120 hours, joined by Chinese speakers in different time zones.

Another popular chat room invited young people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to share their views and personal stories. The discussions started with lighthearted subjects but soon turned to politics, with users comparing the political systems of China and Taiwan and debating the prospects of unification.

Started Friday evening, the room soon attracted hundreds of people, and reached the upper limit of 5,000 listeners around midnight, according to Tan.

Several Han Chinese from Xinjiang also shared their experience of the security crackdown. A number of overseas Chinese broke down in tears describing the sense of guilt they feel over the alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, while others defended Beijing's policies, and questioned accounts of abuse from the region.

Other users and outside observers expressed skepticism over how representative the groups engaging in these political discussions are of broad Chinese public opinion, pointing to the self-selecting nature of the participants, as well as the barriers to using Clubhouse itself which prevent it from being a completely public app.

"Political topics on the platform are not discussed as rationally as other topics like technology or culture," the paper said.

But even before the app was blocked, there were potential security concerns for users within mainland China. Accounts are also tied to users' mobile phone numbers, which in China are registered under owners' real names. Furthermore, it would be a relatively simple task for the Chinese authorities to infiltrate open chat groups on issues such as Xinjiang and record what is being said for future use.

Badiucao, a Chinese dissident artist based in Australia, said some Chinese users, especially those within China, might not have realized the potential risk before speaking out critically against the government's policies, even semi-anonymously.

"If they were typing their opinions out, they might have the time to think it over," he said. "But when they spoke in these real-time chat rooms, they might not be able to hold their tongue."

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For a brief period, there was a platform for sensitive political debate in China. Then censors shut it down - CNN

Why I think censorship is important in the age of social media | Column – The Daily Collegian Online

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When I think of important topics to discuss, politically and socially, I think of censorship especially reflecting on its endless ability to generate controversy.

Can censorship be too much or too little? For me, it really depends.

Is censoring people and content on social media outlets going to be beneficial in the long run?

I am not one to condone violence, and I think extreme and violent hate speech should not be permitted on social media platforms.

Even though I agree with the First Amendment and understand that censorship can be contradictory to that, I think it is important to censor unnecessarily threatening speech on social media.

While we cannot censor all hate speech, because it is a protected right, there are times where I think that speech can go too far.

Radical speech that I believe deserved censorship could be seen through the recent ban on former President Donald Trump from a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, due to his involvement in the Capitol riots.

Right-winged supporters of Trump thought those bans were a violation of the First Amendment.

This is simply not true because social media platforms can censor whoever they please and there is not a limit. These social media platforms are private companies, making decisions of their own free will.

Social media platforms are not owned by the government, and there is no law that prevents these platforms from regulating their content. A Twitter account is not a First Amendment right.

According to USA Today, advocacy groups called for Marjorie Taylor Greene a recently elected Republican representative from Georgia who has been a controversial figure lately to be removed from Facebook for telling dangerous lies.

Civil rights and other advocacy groups told Facebook in a statement that it allowed Greene to exploit its platform for many years without taking any action.

Greene has made many controversial remarks on social media, including that the Sept. 11 attacks were all a hoax.

The Georgia representative also liked many controversial remarks on Facebook and has worn facemasks that said Trump Won and Free Speech.

Even though the House of Representatives voted to have Greene stripped of her committee assignments, how does that prevent her from spreading misinformation?

Greene was temporarily suspended from Twitter but did that help anything? While she may have different political views than me, I think the lies she has spread through tweets and other social media platforms need to be removed because I believe her statements can be threatening and dangerous.

But is it necessary to censor everything? What should actually be censored and what is unnecessary?

Being censored isnt what we grew up on, but it was kind of forced upon us due to radical speech in the age of social media. While I agree that everyone's opinions are valid, some things said online are offensive and violent that they need to be censored.

The recent statement released by Penn States Black Caucus about the Zoom bombing during the spring Involvement Fair said anti-Semitic and white supremacist language was used as well as racial and homophobic slurs.

Penn State officials have condemned the Zoom bombing and an investigation is still ongoing. But does taking action against these criminals prevent anything from happening in the future?

According to Black Caucuss statement, these kinds of hateful attacks happen all the time in real life and online. Even though incidents like these have happened before and are still going on today, how can we aim for somewhat of a resolution?

I genuinely believe the Zoom bombing incident was disgusting, and while Penn State could not have anticipated it happening, I am glad there is an investigation that will hopefully bring those criminals to justice.

We can prevent some of these things from happening with a bit of censorship.

I dont think censoring everything is the answer to the worlds problems, but censoring violent, dangerous and discriminatory speech even though it is a right is the next step for productive politics and our social wellbeing as a whole.

If you're interested in submitting a Letter to the Editor, click here.

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Why I think censorship is important in the age of social media | Column - The Daily Collegian Online

Chilling trend toward censorship – Chicago Daily Herald

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Reflections on U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky's determination to censor Mary Miller's comments invoking Adolf Hitler's name to make a point, that the later was "right on one thing: whoever has the youth has the future."

A classical definition of evil is that it is the perversion of good, much like rust on metal. It cannot exist without being a leach, has to have something wholesome to hook itself onto in order to twist. Thus, an evil person has to have attributes of goodness (power, intellect, position) in order to even exist and do damage to self and others. In Western tradition, the devil was said to have incredible attributes that he uses for destructive ends. Similarly for the villain Adolf Hitler: What he said was right insofar as it went, as many other writers have said the same truism using slightly different phrasing.

Ought not Ms. Schakowsky assume the high road and give respect to another in one's stated profession? Doubly so for a first-year elected official? How would Ms. Schakowsky like it if a professional linguist or philosopher parsed her mistakes with razor-sharp accuracy for the times she has erroneously overstated something in the past?

Adolf Hitler's evil regime hurt a huge swath of humanity. But so did Josef Stalin and others. Are all evil persons hereby off-limits to quote in order to press home a point? Just where does Ms. Schakowsky's censorship end? Had Ms. Miller quoted Stalin, would she be just as irate?

Lastly, the chilling effects of government officials censoring others when the latter are making a point is quite scary. As in the medical field, a doctor's unintended therapy's bad consequences can overtake the very good that was intended.

Norman Suire

Elgin

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Chilling trend toward censorship - Chicago Daily Herald

Send a Big Message to Big Tech: Stop the Censorship – National Federation of Republican Women

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By Ann Schockett, NFRW President

You know that internet censorship is a real problem when the President of the United States has his social media account cancelled while a Middle Eastern dictator can post whatever he likes. Or when an emerging social media company is de-platformed by its web hosting service. Or when a Big Tech executive must be hauled before a panel of United States senators and lambasted for not allowing a major publication to post an article on its social media account because its critical of a particular presidential candidate.

Countless conservatives have had their social media accounts suspended or canceled by the predominately left-wing employees who make up Americas high tech elite.

How is it that America, where the right to free speech is the first item enshrined in the Bill of Rights, has gotten to the point where internet oligarchs have the power to silence someone for their political beliefs, under the guise of hate speech? It seems as though conservatives are facing a David vs. Goliath battle with Big Tech.

Well, NFRWarrior Sisters, we all know who won that battle.

With your voice and your wallet, you can let the titans of Big Tech know that censorship is unacceptable in a free society. We live in a nation that has allowed people such as themselves to become enormously successful, but it should not be at the expense of our rights. We can make a difference. Heres how.

1. Use Social Media to Call Out Tech Executives When They Censor a Conservative These companies - and all businesses - monitor their social media accounts regularly for customer feedback and are often quick to respond to complaints.

2. Utilize Alternative Social Media Platforms Competition is good for business, and Big Tech companies need to know that their customers can go elsewhere if they find their business practices unacceptable.

3. Own Stock in a Big Tech Company? Participate in their Annual Shareholder Meeting Even just owning one share of company stock grants you a seat at their annual shareholder meetings where investors can submit questions to their executives about their policies and practices.

4. Engage Rather Than Boycott Its better to engage the company as a continuing customer. If youre not a customer, then youre not on their radar, and the company therefore has no incentive to change their policies.

5. Support Small Businesses and Shop Locally Big Tech retailers have made record earnings during the COVID-19 pandemic while small businesses are struggling to survive. Please consider that when shopping online.

6. Always Keep Your Comments Polite and to the Point Youre more likely to get a response if you maintain a calm and professional attitude.

Technology is an important part of all our lives. Like any consumer, we want value for our money. Lets send a reminder to Big Tech that the right to speak ones mind is the cornerstone of freedom and as such, we as a free people are willing to take our business elsewhere.

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Send a Big Message to Big Tech: Stop the Censorship - National Federation of Republican Women

Response to Censorship, freedom of speech article – The Tryon Daily Bulletin – Tryon Daily Bulletin

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Letter to the editor

I would like to respond to Larry McDermott regarding freedom of speech and censorship.

It is a good idea to be aware of laws regarding slander and libel; one can get into a lot of financial trouble with careless or reckless speech. That being said I believe he should refresh his memory of the content of The Bill of Rights, First Amendment. Our Founders clearly valued freedom of religion and freedom of speech above all other Rights. It is also worth remembering that our Founders clearly understood that our Rights derived from our Creator.

We should write and speak as our founders intended, with courage, with forethought and intelligence. We should not look over our shoulders before we speak, being in fear of a government and a legal system that are more and more intimidating every day.

Censorship is always a tricky subject. Our nation has engaged in it during war time. It has been handled by the government and has always been regarded as a necessary evil to achieve our victory. Newspapers have used editorial discretion in publishing letters but there used to be newspapers of differing political viewpoints so that failure to be published in one did not necessarily preclude publishing in another.

Worth noting is that the phone company has never censored phone calls. The phone company has assisted law enforcement with wiretaps but has never on its own authority censored. Now we have communication giants, Facebook and Twitter deciding who can use their services and what their users are allowed to communicate. If FB and Twitter think individuals are a criminal threat, they should certainly contact appropriate law enforcement but otherwise it is not their business to control communication. My personal opinion is that they are monopolies which should be broken up as Bell Telephone was.

We Americans should remember that we are a free people, our problems come from an overbearing govt and people who value security over freedom.

Kim Lynch

Columbus

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Response to Censorship, freedom of speech article - The Tryon Daily Bulletin - Tryon Daily Bulletin

Facebook’s depoliticization aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations – WSWS

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The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being depoliticized.

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed. He said that Facebook was continuing to fine-tune how this works and we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.

While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating community standards in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities would include groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they dont violate our policies.

Zuckerbergs remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear, and for using algorithms that undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.

Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebooks decision before the 2020 elections to stop recommending that users join political and social issue groups and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users newsfeeds.

While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.

The reference to divisive conversation, turning down the temperature, fringe political beliefs and extremist users, make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.

In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally. He added, Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.

A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street J ournal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued Groups, Now Plans Overhaul.

After the Journal makes the lying claim that the Capitol riot was the product of hyper-partisanship, the article goes on to say that the proliferation of extremist groups on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.

That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities using platform tools to build large audiences. Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but Suburban Housewives Against Trump appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.

Facebooks reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.

Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize, Karr said. This isnt rocket science.

It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accountsincluding the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the USby Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.

Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policiesespecially the response to the COVID-19 pandemicand against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.

Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.

The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist systemthe source of the fascist menaceand for socialism on a world scale.

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Facebook's depoliticization aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations - WSWS

Sundance 2021 Review: CENSOR, The Danger Of Confusing Fiction With Reality – ScreenAnarchy

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One of the most popular arguments to despise horror films and related genres in their most violent and explicit incarnations is that they can inspire atrocities in real life. It's a thought as old as the films with Lon Chaney and remains in force to this day: just remember all the controversy generated by Joker and the Death Wish remake before their premieres.

If we talk about extreme measures against extreme films, what happened in the United Kingdom during the Margaret Tatcher years is fundamental. The explosion of the video market in the eighties changed the way of watching cinema forever. "Children can rewind and watch those scenes over and over again," says a character in Censor, a film set precisely in those years, when 72 movies on video, called video nasties, caused mass hysteria and harsh censorship.

Censor, the debut feature by British filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond, joins the long tradition of cinema about cinema, this time from a very particular point of view: that of the censors. Enid (Niamh Algar) is responsible for deciding which images should be cut from some slasher/cannibal movie or, depending on the case, if they should be banned. Not all of her colleagues are as strict, one of them, for example, quotes Un chien andalou to defend a scene where someone's eye is gouged out, which Enid wants to remove.

But let's not get confused, she always tries to do her job in the best way, with responsibility and objectivity. It's evident that she doesn't like this type of cinema, usually made by men and with women as the main victims. She ironically calls them "masterpieces."This doesn't mean that she wants to censor everything, her seriousness allows her to differentiate between over-the-top gore and more realistic violence.

Enid can't overcome a trauma from her past: when she was a child, her sister Nina disappeared while they were strolling in a forest. Enid suffered amnesia, preventing her from contributing to the recapitulation of the events. Confronting the reality that developments in the case had stagnated, her parents decided to stop waiting for a miraculous happy ending, accepting that they would never see Nina again. When they receive the newly-issued death certificate, the parents took the opportunity to move on, even though Enid was unwilling to accept the terrible ending. Guilt still overwhelms the protagonist.

Censor explores that moment when fiction affects reality... at least in appearance. Although Enid is not a filmmaker, she's pointed out as one of the responsible people when the hysteria grows because the press connects the characteristics of a real crime with one of the horror films within the film: Deranged, notorious for a sequence in which a murderer eats the face of his victim, a scene approved by Enid and another colleague.

Likewise, the protagonist's harsh past increasingly controls her head. Reality reminds her of the tragedy: the killer supposedly inspired by Deranged declares to have amnesia and, in the midst of the scandal, she falls prey to guilt again. Fiction evokes her sister: another film within the film, Don't Go in the Church, appears to be directly based on Nina's disappearance. Not to mention when, playing detective, she discovers Asunder, a forbidden video nasty that shares a director with Dont Go in the Church andfeatures an actress that looks like her sister.

Censor creates its own mythology. It mitxes real movies for example, sequences from Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer with fictional titles: Cannibal Carnage, a banned tape that video stores rent clandestinely (there's an extremely funny interaction between Enid and a clerk), derives from the Italian subgenre led by Cannibal Holocaust. These details make noticeablethe director's taste for genre cinema of that time. It's quite enjoyable.

Like other similar contemporary films Knife + Heart, to name one Censor draws on the genre cinema that it's referencing, specifically the giallo style. Dream sequences and saturated colors represent Enid's mind and her downward spiral on screen. Censor intersperses reality with the oneiric, bordering on the nightmarish, playing with the link between the real and the fictitious.

The film explores how her protagonist goes deeper and deeper into the world of video nasties (she meets a producer, "acts" in the sequel to Don't Go in the Church), as well as real-life violence and horror. Censor doesn't fall into nonsense; everything is linked to a personal trauma and her conviction that the creators of Dont Go in the Church are true criminals that leads to delirium.

Reality and fiction, even though they have an undeniable connection, are not the same. Censor remarks on it on several occasions, similar to the Canadian 1980 filmDeadline. We hear, for instance, that the amnesic killer didn't even know about the video nasty Deranged!

In its memorable and brutal climax, the separation is marked by the change in the aspect ratio of the images. At that point Enid no longer distinguishes. And when she finally seems to wake up from that "trance," she prefers fiction over the horrors of reality and imagines herself as a vengeful movie heroine.

She prefers the miraculously happy ending. She even believes that the demonization of video nasties worked, that they were all banned and consequently the evils of British society eradicated. Her last fantasy is a poignant and satirical comment that works for that time and today.

A version in Spanish of this review was also published at Cinema Inferno

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Sundance 2021 Review: CENSOR, The Danger Of Confusing Fiction With Reality - ScreenAnarchy

Blacklisting And Censorship Are Hallmarks Of Repressive Societies – The Federalist

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That is all right. I had them on my list, too, a prominent public figure joked after learning that he had been blacklisted by a political opponent.

Who said this? Was it Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., after Simon and Schuster canceled his book deal because he challenged the Electoral College results from Pennsylvania, even though Democrats had similarly objected in 2001, 2005, and 2017?

Was it a Trump administration official responding to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezs call to blacklist and deny them future employment?

Was it black conservative radio host Larry Elder after Hollywood censored his documentary Uncle Tom, whose IMDB rating of 8.9 surpasses 9 of the past 10 Oscar winners for Best Documentary?

How about someone responding to veteran journalist Katie Courics call to deprogram Trump supporters?

Or My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, after Twitter banned him along with thousands of conservatives, including former President Donald Trump? Or Newmax reporter Emerald Robinsons response to CNNs call to cancel Newsmax?

No. That is all right. I had them on my list, too, was the response of David Low, a prominent British cartoonist, when he learned in 1945 that his name was one of 2,300 Britons on Adolf Hitlers blacklist. Had Hitler captured England, the Gestapo was to arrest those on the list.

No sector of English society or political opinion was spared from Hitlers British blacklist. The Gestapo targeted Jews in England, members of Parliament, executives and employees of more than 170 British firms, dozens of university professors, members of 400 social clubs and organizations, and journalists at 35 media outlets.

Censorship and blacklisting are the hallmarks of an unfree society. The Third Reich seized power in Germany in 1933 and immediately began controlling newspapers, radio, and films through censorship. Books were banned and burned.

Censorship was also a tactic used by Soviet Russia. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917, one of their first acts was to issue the Decree on Press to ban articles critical of their authority. Based on real-life experiences with censorship and other horrors in communist Russia, George Orwell wrote his book 1984 in 1949 to warn the West against totalitarianism. Today Chinas Communist Party uses the Great Firewall to block news and online information from its citizens.

Todays speech punishments by Twitter, Facebook, Hollywood, corporations, and book publishers against Americans are obviously not equal to the mass casualty horrors of totalitarian governments. A direct comparison is not the point here. Its to point out that certain tools are hallmarks of repressive societies that a society that aspires to be free should not emulate, even faintly.

Censorship and blacklisting are serious unjust cultural acts that increasingly filter Americans into second-class citizens based on their political viewpoints. The censorship and blacklisting that we are seeing in America right now is viewpoint discrimination. Censorship and blacklisting need to be fully rejected by American society before they become accepted cultural norms that make even worse injustices likely and more possible.

It was censorship that gave birth to free-speech advocacy in America and fostered the conditions for our nations unique First Amendment, which legally protects unpopular speech. After his brother was thrown in jail for publishing a newspaper in 1722the new social media of the eraBenjamin Franklin wrote a series of articles under a fake name, Silence Dogood.He had to hide his identity because he didnt truly have free speech.

His wise words are fitting for todays threats: Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.

Censorship and blacklisting are narrowing Americans liberties and subduing the freeness of our nation today. We must hold the line and stop it now before the current climate of fear degrades into an even worse social and government climate in which previously unimagined restrictions become possible.

How can you help stop this vicious cycle from degrading further and refuse to do as you are told to do? Watch Larry Elders Uncle Tom. Sign up for updates from Hawleys new publisher (and one of mine), Regnery Publishing.

Use alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, and Google, such as Clouthub and DuckDuckGo. Encourage tolerance for different viewpoints at your workplace and hire conservatives. To counter Courics call to de-program, download, read, and share the 1776 Report. All these and more are strategies all of us can use to exercise our societys weakening free speech muscles.

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Blacklisting And Censorship Are Hallmarks Of Repressive Societies - The Federalist

Fear, uncertainty and doubt – Vaccine hesitancy could put progress against covid-19 at risk | Briefing – The Economist

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Feb 13th 2021

WHEN THE news finally comes it triggers a range of emotions. Most people told when and where they will receive their first shot of covid-19 vaccine speak of their relief, delight, even their elation. One person danced around the room, another screamed a bit, yet another felt giddy. It feels, says one, that my lifes about to begin. But for some, there are other emotions in play: concern, fear, even anger.

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Almost as soon as biomedical researchers began working on vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, people concerned with public health began to worry about vaccine hesitancy. It can sound trivial, even foolish, but it regularly costs lives. Hesitancy is a large part of the reason that few young Japanese women get themselves vaccinated against human papillomavirus, and thus are more likely than vaccine-accepting young women elsewhere to contract cervical cancer. Widespread hesitancy during worldwide campaigns against covid-19 could cost many lives, both among the hesitant and among their fellow citizens. Scott Gottlieb, who led Americas drug regulator, the FDA, from 2017 to 2019 (and who is also on the board of Pfizer, a vaccine-maker) argued in a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that the main challenge to vaccination efforts in America could soon move from supply and logistics to individual reluctance to be vaccinated.

In Britain, a country generally quite keen on vaccination, about 15% of those offered a covid jab so far have refused it. With 13m mostly elderly Britons vaccinated as of February 10th, that suggests almost 2m people who could have been vaccinated have not been. When, eventually, social distancing measures are reduced, those people will remain vulnerable to infection. What is more, that level of refusal, combined with the fact that children are not being vaccinated and that new variants of the virus are less tractable to vaccination, means the country may never see the herd immunity that population-wide vaccination programmes tend to aim forthe state in which people neither previously infected nor vaccinated are so few and far between that the virus is hard put to find them. And the level of refusal could grow in months to come; younger people, perhaps because they feel in less danger, seem less keen on the vaccine.

Hesitancy is promoted and spread by a hard core of proselytising anti-vaxxer voices whose misinformation and downright lies about microchips, infertility and damage to DNA have spread to the four quarters of the internet. They have been helped by large online misinformation campaigns run by China and Russia seeking to undermine confidence in Western vaccines. But hesitancy is a broader and more complex phenomenon than that. Some are worried, not opposed; some reject specific vaccines while accepting various others; some are adamant, some persuadable, some, in the end, willing to get vaccinated despite their reservations. People interpret vaccines in the light of their own experiences, relationships and trust in authority. Such subtleties make the molecular biology behind the vaccines seem simple in comparison.

There is nothing new about this complex set of fears. To introduce anything other than food into your body or blood is always likely to be an emotionally freighted experience. When Edward Jenner, a British doctor, began vaccinating people with cowpox to defend them against smallpox in the late 1790s there was immediate disquiet. Critics said the idea of vaccination was repulsive and ungodly; cartoonists showed people who had been vaccinated sprouting cows heads. But elite medical and political opinion fell in line. Thomas Jefferson was a fan. Napoleon vaccinated his armies, writing that Jenner...has been my most faithful servant in the European campaigns. In Sweden vaccination was compulsory in 1803, in Bavaria in 1807; both countries saw smallpox rates plummet.

In 1853 vaccination was made compulsory for all infants in England and Wales with parents who failed to comply liable to a fine or imprisonment. Opposition to this infringement on personal liberty promptly grew, even more so after the law was strengthened in the 1870s.

Victorian anti-vaxxers spread misinformation eerily similar to todays. In 1878 the National Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Reporter told its readers that vaccination could cause diseases including diphtheria, abscesses, bronchitis and convulsions. On the whole, it wrote, it is a greater evil to humanity than smallpox itself! In echoes of todays concerns about Big Pharma, the Reporter speculated that compulsory vaccination was a plot by the medical establishment and averred that faithful obedience to the sacred laws of health would provide superior protection. It is hard to put a sliver of organic carrot between this sanctimony and the notion that nasty viral pathogens can be warded off by raising children naturally and using alternative medicines.

Nevertheless smallpox vaccination became near universal. And then in 1977, 177 years after Benjamin Waterhouse, a Harvard professor and correspondent of Jeffersons, published his pamphlet A Prospect of Exterminating the Small-pox, it became obsolete. The disease was wiped out. No other human disease has yet followed it to oblivion, though polio is close. But many death tolls have been slashed.

Vaccinations have become the most successful public health measure in history. About 85% of one-year-olds around the world now receive all three doses of the combination vaccine that protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Public support for this is high; nine in ten people worldwide think vaccines are important for children. But there are variations. Support for childhood vaccination is lower in North America, Europe and Russia than in Africa, Asia and South America, and there are pockets where it dips dangerously. What is more, the success of long-running childhood vaccination campaigns does not necessarily translate into acceptance of novel vaccines for adults.

Towards the last quarter of 2020 polls on vaccine hesitancy spurred mounting concern among public health officials. In September a significant number of British people said they were unlikely to get one. A month later, in a STAT-Harris Poll in America, only 58% said they woulddown from 69% a month previously. Though Britain bounced back, other countries have seen worrying drops since (see chart 1).

But such polls come with caveats. One is what psychologists describe as the intention-behaviour gap; humans are sufficiently complicated that what they say and what they do can be very different things. A second is that polls are snapshots of a process in flux. Vaccine hesitancy is extremely fluid in time and space, subject to all manner of influences. A poll is an instantaneous map of temperatures, when what you need is a moving forecast.

One of the main vaccine-weather forecasters is Heidi Larson, a professor of anthropology, risk and decision science at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She is also the founding director of the Vaccine Confidence Project, which monitors global concerns about vaccines. Looking at her latest survey of sentiment toward covid-19 vaccines in 32 countries Dr Larson sees storms brewing in Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)two countries in which the political climate is tense.

Hesitancy in the DRC might seem surprising; novel vaccines recently helped quash an outbreak of Ebola there. But Dr Larson says that unlike Ebola, which people have had to live with for almost half a century, covid-19 is new and brings new distrust. Matre Donat, a lawyer in Kolwezi, a mining city in the south of the country, bears out that case. Here everyone thinks covid is a scam, he says, dreamed up by the whites, by Americans.

Dr Larson worries about this because she has found that, in general, concerns about vaccines that arise in Africa spread much more quickly than in higher-income countries: It is quite explosive. Last year a comment by a French doctor about using Africa as a testing ground for vaccines spread like wildfire across Francophone Africa. He apologised, but the damage was done. There are now reports of rising hesitancy, at least partly tied to trust in government, in South Africa and Nigeria, where plans are being laid to start vaccination.

Just as there is variation over time, so there is in space. Even in countries where there is a rush to get vaccinated, hesitancy can crop up in particular communities, particularly in marginalised groups: some groups distrust state authoritysometimes, given the history of medical experimentation, for sound historical reasons; some seek spiritual rather than temporal guidance on how to live their lives.

Naively, one might believe that education would be enough to change this. It is not. Take the reluctance of some American health-care workers to get vaccinated. This is not down to a lack of information or a failure to understand what vaccines offer. It can often reflect a lack of faith in their employers. As in many other parts of the world, nurses, long-term-care staff and others in similar jobs report feeling badly treated over the past year. They may have been put at risk of covid, or fallen ill, or struggled to obtain protective equipment. They will have seen a lot of death. They will mostly have done so on low pay. And they have either not succumbed to the disease or have survived it. This all disinclines them towards accepting the vaccines that their employers now want them to take.

A December survey of 16,000 employees of a health system in Pennsylvania revealed concerns about unknown risks and side effects. At the nadir 45% said they either did not want the vaccine at all or wanted to wait (see chart 2). One-fifth did not trust the rushed regulatory review. Others worried they were not actually at high enough risk for infection or disease. Hard refusals, though, soon began to wane.

In general, a feeling that the government is cutting corners seems to drive hesitancy up. When Donald Trump appeared to be trying to rush approval along before the election Americans became more hesitant. Concerns have risen in Indonesia and India at the same time as there have been controversies about aspects of government vaccination programmes.

Another factor in hesitancy is peer-group sentiment transmitted through social networks. Parents who choose not to vaccinate children have a much higher percentage of people in their social networks with similar views. The same will be true of people who intend not to get vaccinated against covid-19.

Understanding how the hesitancy weather changes offers ways to modify it. Some are well known to advertisers. People are encouraged by the sight of happy people eagerly lining up to receive vaccines, or by politicians, royalty and celebrities rolling up their sleeves. They may also respond to the notion that something is in scarce supply. Since scares about the H1N1 flu vaccine in 2009 the French have been very dubious about vaccination. But since realising that their country has few doses to offer, their opinions have been changing. To refuse is one thing; to be denied another. Marine Le Pen, a right-wing nationalist who had previously said she would wait and see before getting vaccinated now says she will do so, a decision which is expected to be influential (and which will better position her to attack Emmanuel Macron on the issue in next years election campaign).

The bad news about changing the weather in this sort of way is that it can quickly change back again. Vinay Nair, boss of Lightful, a tech firm that works in the charity sector to enhance its use of technology, says that because vaccine sentiment is dynamic, so the response to it has to be too.

It is also important to reach vaccine-hesitant communities directly rather than through the media. In 2017 Patricia Stinchfield, a nurse practitioner at the Childrens Minnesota Hospital, told Modern Healthcare, a magazine, about intervening this way among Somali-Americans in Minneapolis after their under-vaccinated community suffered a serious measles outbreak. We spend a great deal of time meeting imams in the community and ask them to partner with us. Even with the help of social-media campaigns aimed at younger parents, it is slow, painstaking work. But it is effective.

Unfortunately, help through social media is far from the norm. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a not-for-profit group, is tracking 425 anti-vaccine accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube that it says spread covid misinformation; they have 59.2m followers between them, and the number is rising rapidly. The organisation says that while a minority of these anti-vaxxers act on the basis of profoundly held beliefs, about four-fifths have a financial motive as well, or instead. Half are entrepreneurs with businesses that promote alternative or oddball remedies such as homeopathic immunisation or a bleach nebuliser with a 100% success rate. The other half are conspiracists who profit from the online-advertising revenue their sites attract and the merchandise they sell.

The work of these groups is a lot easier than that of public-health workers: fear and uncertainty are easier to foster than trust and confidence, and inaction easier to encourage than action. In October last year representatives of the CCDH were present at a private online conference held by influential opponents to vaccination who, it says, saw a historic opportunity to reach larger numbers of supporters, and drive long-term vaccine hesitancy. They outlined three basic tools with which to do so: sow doubt about the seriousness of the threat posed by covid-19; spread concern about the safety of the vaccines; stress the untrustworthiness of experts.

These three basic messages will be adapted with selective reportingmaking sure, for example, that Brazilians know that their president has said he will not be vaccinatedhalf-truths and lies. Ethnic minorities will be told that covid vaccines are unsafe for them, or part of a plot or experimentsomething that will resonate in communities that remember stories of this in the past. Young people will be told taradiddles about fertility. The religious groups will hear that vaccines are not halal or contain fetal material. (It is true that the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca is grown in a cell line derived from material taken from a fetus in the 1970s; it is also true that the pope has deemed the use of such cell lines morally acceptable.)

A recent study in Nature using data from 2019 created a network map of 1,300 Facebook pages carrying pro- and anti-vaccine messages and their followers. Anti-vaccine pages were more numerous, faster growing and increasingly connected to pages containing undecided users. If current trends continue, the researchers predicted, anti-vaccine views will dominate online discussion in a decade. A new preprint by many of the same authors reports that the strengthening of online bonds that has been seen during the pandemic has given conspiracy theories greater access to mainstream parenting communities.

On February 8th, in the teeth of ongoing criticism, Facebook said it would remove false claims related to covid vaccines (see article). Many think the move has come too lateand that to shift the balance of power decisively will require further action. Mr Nair believes that tech companies need to amplify positive messages, stories and campaigns

A mix of factors will challenge our plans to defeat covid-19, from new variants to supply issues. But vaccine hesitancy is a significant threat to population protection against covid-19, says Dr Larson. And after emotional contagion has taken hold it is difficult to tamp down. As the French experience with the H1N1 vaccine has shown, once widespread a negative impression about a vaccine can be hard to shift.

At the moment, people are leaving vaccination centres happily, and tweeting and posting about their good fortune and success. They proudly display the badges and stickers that show they have received the vaccine. For now, public health is winning. But continued good news cannot be taken for granted; in this struggle, fair weather has to be fought for, not counted on.

Dig deeper

All our stories relating to the pandemic and the vaccines can be found on our coronavirus hub. You can also listen to The Jab, our new podcast on the race between injections and infections, and find trackers showing the global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by country and the viruss spread across Europe and America.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Broken arrow"

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Fear, uncertainty and doubt - Vaccine hesitancy could put progress against covid-19 at risk | Briefing - The Economist

Electronic Health Records: VA Has Made Progress in Preparing for New System, but Subsequent Test Findings Will Need to Be Addressed – Government…

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What GAO Found

In an October 22, 2020, briefing, GAO informed Congressional staff that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had made progress toward implementing its new electronic health record (EHR) system by making system configuration decisions, developing system capabilities and system interfaces, conducting end user training, and completing system testing events. However, GAO noted that the department had not yet resolved all critical severity test findings (that could result in system failure) and high severity test findings (that could result in system failure, but have acceptable workarounds), as called for in its testing plan. Specifically, 17 critical severity test findings and 361 high severity test findings remained open as of late September 2020. As a result, VA was at risk of deploying a system that did not perform as intended and could negatively impact the likelihood of its successful adoption by users if these test findings were not resolved prior to initial deployment. Accordingly, GAO recommended that VA delay deployment of the new EHR until the (1) critical severity test findings were closed, and (2) high severity findings were closed or otherwise addressed with workarounds.

VA deployed its new EHR system in Spokane, Washington, on October 24, 2020, with no open critical severity test findings and with 306 of the 361 high severity test findings closed (see figure). Of the 55 remaining, 47 had workarounds that were accepted by the user community, seven were associated with future deployments, and one had a solution identified at the time of initial deployment. VA's actions reflect implementation of GAO's October recommendations.

The Department of Veterans' Affairs Electronic Health Record Modernization Open Critical and High Severity Test Findings May 2020-October 2020

Nevertheless, as the department moves forward with deployment of additional capabilities at new locations, VA will likely identify new critical and high severity test findings. If VA does not close or appropriately address all critical and high severity test findings prior to deploying at future locations, the system may not perform as intended.

VA relies on its health information system the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA)to deliver health care to 9 million patients annually. VistA contains the department's EHR and exchanges information with many other applications and interfaces. However, VistA is a technically complex system, has been in operation for more than 30 years, is costly to maintain, and does not fully support VA's needs. In May 2018, VA contracted to acquire a commercial EHR system as part of its EHRM program over 10 years at a maximum cost of $10 billion.

GAO was asked to review VA's EHR deployment. This report discusses progress VA is making on implementing the new EHR system, among other topics.

To perform its review, GAO assessed VA's progress toward making system configuration decisions, developing system capabilities, developing system interfaces, completing end user training, and resolving system test findings. GAO also interviewed relevant officials.

GAO is making two recommendations, including that VA should postpone deployment of its new EHR system at planned locations until any resulting critical and high severity test findings are appropriately addressed.

VA concurred with the recommendations and described actions the department plans to take to address them.

For more information, contact Carol C. Harris at (202) 512-4456 or harriscc@gao.gov.

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Electronic Health Records: VA Has Made Progress in Preparing for New System, but Subsequent Test Findings Will Need to Be Addressed - Government...