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Health Board short on PPE and medicine for possible second wave of COVID-19 – ERR News

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

The government has previously said that starting from autumn, a 1+1 rule of coronavirus management will be applied if an institution has experienced cases of COVID-19. This means that the institution has to manage the first month with their own equipment, the state will support them starting in the second month, if necessary.

Andras Banyasz, chief specialist of Emergency Medicine of Health Board, said the current supply of equipment and medicine is not enough.

Banyasz said: "The Health Board manages the current state supply of healthcare equipment and it would not last a month. The Ministry of Finance has started to collect PPE nationally, that equipment will arrive."

The same can be said for medicine for emergency situations. But those can not be acquired before the new year.

Banyasz said: "We have not been allocated resources to acquire medicine, but we will keep applying for it and there's a chance next year, that we can resupply on medicine."

ERR News wrote on July 7 that Estonia has ordered 400 doses of an antiviral drug called remdesivir through a joint European Union procurement.

Former Health Board Director General Merike Jrilo said in May that the institution would need funding to staff some 20 additional positions in various fields of the Health Board's activities. Jrilo, along with two other employees have left, but no additional workforce has been hired yet.

Banyasz said the Health Board has asked for resources to hire analysts. "Truthfully, we are indeed missing about 20 people to be prepared for any next crises. We need more analysts so we could efficiently analyse data as we go. That proposal awaits government's response and approval."

Based on the infection rate, travelers from Sweden, Portugal, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Montenegro and Serbia must self-isolate for 14 days when entering Estonia.

Banyasz said there is no direct surveillance conducted, self-isolation is based on trust and is volunatry. "The goal of it is to stop the spread domestically."

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Health Board short on PPE and medicine for possible second wave of COVID-19 - ERR News

Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market Size By Product Analysis, Application, End-Users, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies And…

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

New Jersey, United States,- Latest update on Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market Analysis report published with extensive market research, Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market growth analysis, and forecast by 2026. this report is highly predictive as it holds the overall market analysis of topmost companies into the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics industry. With the classified Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market research based on various growing regions, this report provides leading players portfolio along with sales, growth, market share, and so on.

The research report of the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market is predicted to accrue a significant remuneration portfolio by the end of the predicted time period. It includes parameters with respect to the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market dynamics incorporating varied driving forces affecting the commercialization graph of this business vertical and risks prevailing in the sphere. In addition, it also speaks about the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market growth opportunities in the industry.

Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market Report covers the manufacturers data, including shipment, price, revenue, gross profit, interview record, business distribution etc., these data help the consumer know about the competitors better. This report also covers all the regions and countries of the world, which shows a regional development status, including Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market size, volume and value, as well as price data.

Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market competition by top Manufacturers:

Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market Classification by Types:

Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market Size by End-user Application:

Listing a few pointers from the report:

The objective of the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market Report:

Cataloging the competitive terrain of the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market:

Unveiling the geographical penetration of the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market:

The report of the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics market is an in-depth analysis of the business vertical projected to record a commendable annual growth rate over the estimated time period. It also comprises of a precise evaluation of the dynamics related to this marketplace. The purpose of the Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market report is to provide important information related to the industry deliverables such as market size, valuation forecast, sales volume, etc.

Major Highlights from Table of contents are listed below for quick lookup into Prostate Cancer Nuclear Medicine Diagnostics Market report

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Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer Market Clinical Research Analysis Report 2020-2026 – Cole of Duty

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

This Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer Industry report provides details of recent developments, trade regulations, import export analysis, production analysis, value chain optimization, market share, strategic market growth analysis, and market size. The report also offers insightful and detailed information regarding the various key players operating in the global Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer market, and their financials, apart from strategies, acquisitions & mergers, and market footprint. The global Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer market is segmented on the basis of component, application, and region.

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https://www.marketinsightsreports.com/reports/07132141792/global-medicine-for-the-treatment-of-advanced-thyroid-cancer-market-research-report-2020/inquiry?Mode=21

Top Leading Manufacturers:

Bayer, AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Exelixis Inc., Ipsen Pharma, Eisai Inc

Market size by ProductCabozantinib

Sorafenib

Vandetanib

Lenvatinib

Market size by End UserCombination therapy

Solo Medication

Contents of the 15 Chapters for This Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer Market Study:-

Chapter 1 provides an overview of Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer market, containing global revenue, global production, sales, and CAGR. The forecast and analysis of market by type, application, and region are also presented in this chapter.

Chapter 2 is about the market landscape and major players. It provides competitive situation and market concentration status along with the basic information of these players.

Chapter 3 provides a full-scale analysis of major players in Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer industry. The basic information, as well as the profiles, applications and specifications of products market performance along with Business Overview are offered.

Chapter 4 gives a worldwide view of Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer market. It includes production, market share revenue, price, and the growth rate by type.

Chapter 5 focuses on the application of Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer, by analyzing the consumption and its growth rate of each application.

Chapter 6 is about production, consumption, export, and import of Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer in each region.

Chapter 7 pays attention to the production, revenue, price and gross margin of Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer in markets of different regions. The analysis on production, revenue, price and gross margin of the global market is covered in this part.

Chapter 8 concentrates on manufacturing analysis, including key raw material analysis, cost structure analysis and process analysis, making up a comprehensive analysis of manufacturing cost.

Chapter 9 introduces the industrial chain of Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer. Industrial chain analysis, raw material sources and downstream buyers are analyzed in this chapter.

Browse the Full report description and TOC at:

https://www.marketinsightsreports.com/reports/07132141792/global-medicine-for-the-treatment-of-advanced-thyroid-cancer-market-research-report-2020?Mode=21

Market Size Estimation:

In the complete market engineering process, both top-down and bottom-up approaches have been implemented, along with several data triangulation methods, to estimate and validate the size of the smart ticketing market and other dependent submarkets listed in this report.

The key players in the industry and markets have been identified through extensive secondary research.

The industrys supply chain and market size, in terms of value, have been determined through primary and secondary research processes.

All percentage shares, splits, and breakdowns have been determined using secondary sources and verified through primary sources.

Note: All the reports that we list have been tracking the impact of COVID-19 the market. Both upstream and downstream of the entire supplychain has been accounted for while doing this. Also, where possible, we will provide an additional COVID-19 update supplement/report to the report in Q3, please check for with the sales team.

Customization of this Report:This Speech Intelligibility Device report could be customized to the customers requirements. Please contact our sales professional ([emailprotected]), we will ensure you obtain the report which works for your needs.

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Medicine for the Treatment of Advanced Thyroid Cancer Market Clinical Research Analysis Report 2020-2026 - Cole of Duty

Will COVID-19 Be Evidence-Based Medicine’s Nemesis? – The Wire

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Representative image. Photo: Julie Viken/Pexels.

Once defined in rhetorical but ultimately meaningless terms as the conscientious, judicious and explicit use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients [1], evidence-based medicine rests on certain philosophical assumptions: a singular truth, ascertainable through empirical enquiry; a linear logic of causality in which interventions have particular effect sizes; rigour defined primarily in methodological terms (especially, a hierarchy of preferred study designs and tools for detecting bias); and a deconstructive approach to problem-solving (the evidence base is built by answering focused questions, typically framed as PICO population-intervention-comparison-outcome) [2].

The trouble with pandemics is that these assumptions rarely hold. A pandemic-sized problem can be framed and contested in multiple ways. Some research questions around COVID-19, most notably relating to drugs and vaccines, are amenable to randomised controlled trials (and where such trials were possible, they were established with impressive speed and efficiency [3, 4]). But many knowledge gaps are broader and cannot be reduced to PICO-style questions. Were care home deaths avoidable [5]? Why did the global supply chain for personal protective equipment break down [6]? What role does health system resilience play in controlling the pandemic [7]? And so on.

Against these and other wider questions, the neat simplicity of a controlled, intervention-on versus intervention-off experiment designed to produce a definitive (i.e. statistically significant and widely generalisable) answer to a focused question rings hollow. In particular, upstream preventive public health interventions aimed at supporting widespread and sustained behaviour change across an entire population (as opposed to testing the impact of a short-term behaviour change in a select sample) rarely lend themselves to such a design [8, 9]. When implementing population-wide public health interventions whether conventional measures such as diet or exercise, or COVID-19 related ones such as hand-washing, social distancing and face coverings we must not only persuade individuals to change their behaviour but also adapt the environment to make such changes easier to make and sustain [10, 11, 12].

Population-wide public health efforts are typically iterative, locally-grown and path-dependent, and they have an established methodology for rapid evaluation and adaptation [9]. But evidence-based medicine has tended to classify such designs as low methodological quality [13]. Whilst this has been recognised as a problem in public health practice for some time [11], the inadequacy of the dominant paradigm has suddenly become mission-critical.

Whilst evidence-based medicine recognises that study designs must reflect the nature of question (randomised trials, for example, are preferred only for therapy questions [13]), even senior scientists sometimes over-apply its hierarchy of evidence. An interdisciplinary group of scholars from the UKs prestigious Royal Society recently reviewed the use of face masks by the general public, drawing on evidence from laboratory science, mathematical modelling and policy studies [14]. The report was criticised by epidemiologists for being non-systematic and for recommending policy action in the absence of a quantitative estimate of effect size from robust randomised controlled trials [15].

Such criticisms appear to make two questionable assumptions: first, that the precise quantification of impact from this kind of intervention is both possible and desirable, and second, that unless we have randomised trial evidence, we should do nothing.

It is surely time to turn to a more fit-for-purpose scientific paradigm. Complex adaptive systems theory proposes that precise quantification of particular cause-effect relationships is both impossible (because such relationships are not constant and cannot be meaningfully isolated) and unnecessary (because what matters is what emerges in a particular real-world situation). This paradigm proposes that where multiple factors are interacting in dynamic and unpredictable ways, naturalistic methods and rapid-cycle evaluation are the preferred study design. The 20th-century logic of evidence-based medicine, in which scientists pursued the goals of certainty, predictability and linear causality, remains useful in some circumstances (for example, the drug and vaccine trials referred to above). But at a population and system level, we need to embrace 21st-century epistemology and methods to study how best to cope with uncertainty, unpredictability and non-linear causality [16].

In a complex system, the question driving scientific inquiry is not what is the effect size and is it statistically significant once other variables have been controlled for? but does this intervention contribute, along with other factors, to a desirable outcome?. Multiple interventions might each contribute to an overall beneficial effect through heterogeneous effects on disparate causal pathways, even though none would have a statistically significant impact on any predefined variable [11]. To illuminate such influences, we need to apply research designs that foreground dynamic interactions and emergence. These include in-depth, mixed-method case studies (primary research) and narrative reviews (secondary research) that tease out interconnections and highlight generative causality across the system [16, 17].

Table 1 lists some philosophical contrasts between the evidence-based medicine and complex-systems paradigms. Ogilvie et al have argued that rather than pitting these two paradigms against one another, they should be brought together [9]. As illustrated in (Fig. 1), these authors depict randomised trials (what they call the evidence-based practice pathway) and natural experiments (the practice-based evidence pathway) in a complementary and recursive relationship rather than a hierarchical one. They propose that intervention studies [e.g. trials] should focus on reducing critical uncertainties, that non-randomised study designs should be embraced rather than tolerated and that a more nuanced approach to appraising the utility of diverse types of evidence is required. (page 203) [9].

In the current fast-moving pandemic, where the cost of inaction is counted in the grim mortality figures announced daily, implementing new policy interventions in the absence of randomised trial evidence has become both a scientific and moral imperative. Whilst it is hard to predict anything in real time, history will one day tell us whether adherence to evidence-based practice helped or hindered the public health response to COVID-19 or whether an apparent slackening of standards to accommodate practice-based evidence was ultimately a more effective strategy.

Trisha Greenhalgh is a professor of primary care health sciences atNuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford.

This article was published as an editorial on PLOS Medicine and has been republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Continued here:

Will COVID-19 Be Evidence-Based Medicine's Nemesis? - The Wire

Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Size By Product Analysis, Application, End-Users, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies And…

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

New Jersey, United States,- Latest update on Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Analysis report published with extensive market research, Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market growth analysis, and forecast by 2026. this report is highly predictive as it holds the overall market analysis of topmost companies into the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine industry. With the classified Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market research based on various growing regions, this report provides leading players portfolio along with sales, growth, market share, and so on.

The research report of the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market is predicted to accrue a significant remuneration portfolio by the end of the predicted time period. It includes parameters with respect to the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market dynamics incorporating varied driving forces affecting the commercialization graph of this business vertical and risks prevailing in the sphere. In addition, it also speaks about the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market growth opportunities in the industry.

Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Report covers the manufacturers data, including shipment, price, revenue, gross profit, interview record, business distribution etc., these data help the consumer know about the competitors better. This report also covers all the regions and countries of the world, which shows a regional development status, including Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market size, volume and value, as well as price data.

Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market competition by top Manufacturers:

Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Classification by Types:

Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Size by End-user Application:

Listing a few pointers from the report:

The objective of the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Report:

Cataloging the competitive terrain of the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market:

Unveiling the geographical penetration of the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market:

The report of the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine market is an in-depth analysis of the business vertical projected to record a commendable annual growth rate over the estimated time period. It also comprises of a precise evaluation of the dynamics related to this marketplace. The purpose of the Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market report is to provide important information related to the industry deliverables such as market size, valuation forecast, sales volume, etc.

Major Highlights from Table of contents are listed below for quick lookup into Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market report

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Radiopharmaceuticals in Nuclear Medicine Market Size By Product Analysis, Application, End-Users, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies And...

Explained: What works (and does not) in Covid-19 treatment – The Indian Express

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Written by Dr Satchit Balsari, Dr Zarir Udwadia | New Delhi | Updated: July 14, 2020 8:03:55 am

Like a wedding guest piling food from a buffet onto their plate until there is no place left, doctors have been prescribing fistfuls of drugs when attempting to manage patients with Covid-19. We summarise based on current evidence from around the world, what scientists say works and does not, from among the treatments currently in vogue in India.

Azithromycin: This must be the most widely prescribed and misused antibiotic in this pandemic. Azithromycin, as with all other antibiotics, does not work in viral infections. Antibiotics are only warranted in patients who have evidence of a secondary bacterial infection as some hospitalised patients will have in the later stages of their disease. Indiscriminate use (as was the case even before the pandemic) in the hope that they will prevent bacterial infection only worsens antibiotic resistance, to which India is a frequent contributor.

Blood Thinners: Hospitalised Covid-19 patients have been observed to have a very high incidence of blood clots. There is current global consensus that all hospitalised Covid-19 patients will benefit from blood thinners injected daily just under their skin (like insulin injections). Though there is sound mechanistic reasoning, randomised controlled trials are awaited.

BCG & other existing vaccines: While the world eagerly awaits a new and SARS-CoV-2-specific vaccine, the use of existing vaccines (BCG, Polio, MMR vaccines) in the hope they will work is inappropriate. Trials are under way to see if they will boost innate immunity. We know that BCG has already been given at birth to all Indians, and it does not seem to have helped keep our case numbers low.

Vitamin C: More vitamin C may have been consumed than oranges since Covid-19 began! It doesnt work.

Vitamin D: A large meta-analysis just released shows that Vitamin D does not protect against Covid-19.

Favipiravir: This is an oral antiviral drug which was fast tracked by the Indian Drug Controller but is not yet approved in the EU or US. Its use should be restricted to mild or moderate infections only. Available data to support its use is sparse but Indian trials have just been completed and the results are awaited.

Hydroxychloroquine sulphate (HCQS): We now have compelling data from multiple large clinical trials including WHOs SOLIDARITY and the UKs RECOVERY trials to categorically say: HCQS does not work. Even Donald Trump may have stopped taking it by now and so should you.

Ivermectin: This is an anti-parasitic drug widely prescribed in India and parts of South America to treat infections from worms. There is no evidence it has any role in Covid-19. It should not be used.

Miscellaneous cures: The state machinery has been used to distribute unproven herbal and Ayurvedic potions (Ukalo), homeopathic drops (Arsenicum album), and treatments peddled by god-men. Anecdotes and observations do not constitute scientific evidence. In the absence of evidence generated from rigorously vetted clinical trials, the distribution of these substances must be condemned. Pushing unproven and supposedly harmless treatments and distributing them to hundreds of thousands is not only disingenuous, but provides people false hope, and risks them lowering their guard. There are no magic pills to boost immunity to fix years of malnutrition, stunting, obesity, and chronically inflamed lungs.

Oseltamivir: This is an antiviral agent prescribed for tempering symptoms from the virus that causes influenza. It has no role in treating Covid-19 infection which is caused by a coronavirus.

Plasma: Our blood is composed of cells and plasma. Plasma from those who have recovered from Covid-19 carries naturally acquired antibodies, and, when transfused to critically ill patients with Covid-19, may help improve outcomes. This form of therapy is being used across the globe and trials to access its efficacy are under way.

Remdesivir: An intravenously administered antiviral medication, it has been shown to be effective in well-designed studies. It seems to shorten recovery time and hospital stay but does not reduce the chance of death. It is currently to be used only in hospitalised patients with severe disease.

Steroids: The only drug so far shown to have a striking impact on mortality is an old and inexpensive one. Current evidence shows that dexamethasone can reduce deaths by one-third in patients with severe Covid-19 infection who need oxygen therapy or ventilators. Their use should, however, be restricted to hospitalised patients. If they are given too soon in the course of an infection, or given to someone with only a mild infection, they could prevent the bodys own immune system from fighting the virus effectively.

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Tocilizumab: This drug is an injection originally used in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. It is being widely used to counter the severe inflammation (cytokine storm) that occurs in some Covid-19 patients. Its use can increase the risk of bacterial infections, and it must therefore be used with caution, if at all, in carefully selected patients.

Zinc: This mineral is also commonly prescribed, despite there being no evidence that it is effective.

In conclusion, six months into the pandemic, we must therefore acknowledge four facts:

(Dr Zarir Udwadia is Consultant Chest Physician, PD Hinduja Hospital & Medical Research Centre, Mumbai. Dr Satchit Balsari is assistant professor in Emergency Medicine and in Global Health at Harvard Universitys medical and public health schools. )

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Explained: What works (and does not) in Covid-19 treatment - The Indian Express

Peru opens the door to CBD medicines, with commercialization imminent – Hemp Industry Daily

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

(A version of this story first appeared on Marijuana Business Daily.)

Peru is giving hemp-derived medicines the green light, with commercialization imminent once the respective companies obtain the necessary import permits.

Two hemp-derived products are registered as cannabis-derived natural health products in Peru.

Toronto-headquartered Ramm Pharma, a company with medical cannabis manufacturing operations in Uruguay, said last week that the Peruvian Ministry of Health approved its Epifractn 5% CBD product for sale in pharmaciesthroughout the country for various indications as prescribed by a medical doctor.

Peruvian CannFarm will be the local distributor of Epifractn.

Peru has only one other registered cannabis-derived natural health product and it belongs to Canada-based Canopy Growth. Both products have CBD as the active ingredient, with minimum or no detectable THC, but can be sold only by medical prescription.

Niklaus Schwenker, director of communications and strategy for Canopy Growth Latin America, told Hemp Industry Daily that Peru has one of the most advanced regulations for cannabis in Latin America and is a priority for the Canopy Growth in the region.

With product approval already in place, the company expects to serve Peruvian patients in the near term while continuing its physician-education activities through the Spectrum Academy, Schwenker said.

Companies with registered products must obtain the necessary import permits to be able to receive the shipments and distribute to pharmacies around the country, Andres Vazquez Vargas, CEO of CannFarm Peru, told Hemp Industry Daily.

After obtaining the import permit, we expect to receive the first shipment from Uruguay and start distributing to patients in Peru in the next weeks, Vazquez said.

Ramm Pharma has been selling the product by doctors prescription in Uruguayan pharmacies since 2018.

Epifractn is also sold in other countries of the region, such as Brazil and Argentina, under compassionate use cannabis programs, which generally means the Uruguayan company ships case-by-case to specific authorized patients.

As of July 10, the public database of the Peruvian health authority showed 17 product registrations were submitted by six companies and were pending approval.

This is in addition to Sativex, a marijuana-derived treatment for multiple sclerosis. Sativex is manufactured by GW Pharmaceuticals in the United Kingdom and was approved as a cannabis-derived pharmaceutical.

Alfredo Pascual can be reached at[emailprotected]

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Peru opens the door to CBD medicines, with commercialization imminent - Hemp Industry Daily

Opinion: Covid-19 and Medicine’s Misguided Romance With Machines – Undark Magazine

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

As Covid-19 began to lay siege to New York Citys hospitals in March, a small but consequential debate broke out in American emergency rooms and intensive care units: Was it possible that ventilators, the much-politicized medical devices widely seen as a lifeline for severely ill Covid-19 patients, were being overused? With a pandemic poised to sweep through the U.S. and the horrific example of Italy still lingering, the dispute gained a particular urgency.

At the core of the debate was a four-letter acronym that most Americans had never heard of: ARDS, or acute respiratory distress syndrome, a harrowing lung condition that was listed on many Covid-19 death certificates. Since it was first identified half a century ago, ARDS has been mired in controversy over how to define it, how to diagnose it, and whether it should be considered a true clinical condition at all. It is because of ARDS, a diagnosis that owes its very existence to a machine, that we went into the pandemic thinking ventilators would save us. Its story serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of prioritizing high technology and its medical paradigms in settings where one medical treatment does not fit all.

Coined in 1967 by Thomas Petty, a respiratory physician at the University of Colorado, ARDS has been a source of contention from the start. The causes of the condition were, in Pettys own words, obscure. He and three colleagues proposed the syndrome after observing a dozen patients with radically different illnesses and injuries (gunshots, pancreatitis, traffic accidents) who all presented with similar respiratory symptoms: low blood oxygen levels; fluid or other infiltrates in the lungs; and stiff lungs that didnt properly expand and contract even under mechanical ventilation.

Desperate for a solution, Petty and his colleagues put the patients on an older ventilator that blew at high pressure, even as a patient exhaled a technique he called positive end-expiratory pressure, or PEEP. The patients blood oxygen levels improved, and Petty and his colleagues felt confident that they had identified a new clinical syndrome, along with an effective treatment for it. They dispatched a paper to The New England Journal of Medicine which promptly rejected it, on the grounds that the doctors use of ventilators was unorthodox and possibly dangerous, Petty reported. The paper was rejected by two other journals before being published by The Lancet in 1967. It remains the foundational paper on ARDS and has been cited more than 4,000 times.

Although Pettys patients shared a number of common symptoms, he insisted that the patients positive response to PEEP was one of the conditions unifying traits. The ventilator, even more so than the underlying disease or injury, was crucial to the definition of the syndrome.

More than a few doctors and scientists were suspicious of the new syndrome. In a 1975 editorial, The Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, (May it Rest in Peace), Pettys main antagonist, pulmonologist John Murray, called ARDS a fashionable disorder, a haphazard lumping together of unrelated chest conditions, which seemed only to share a final set of symptoms. In his response, Confessions of a Lumper, Petty argued that even if you conceded Murrays point the cause of the disorder was irrelevant; the pathology was what mattered. If a disease, injury, or illness resulted in poor oxygenation, lung infiltrates, and stiff lungs, then it had to be ARDS, he wrote. Those advocating for a more nuanced diagnosis he labelled separatists.

Over the ensuing decades, even those doctors who accepted ARDS as a valid clinical condition would frequently disagree over how it should be diagnosed. In 1994, a major redefinition removed the criteria to measure the ability of the lungs to expand and contract in response to changes in pressure known as lung compliance in an attempt to standardize the disorder. In 2012, a panel of experts again redefined the syndrome, specifying that, to make a proper diagnosis, blood-oxygen levels must be measured while a patient is on PEEP. That year, an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted warily that the latest definition has essentially excluded ARDS as a possible diagnosis in patients without ventilation. The diagnosis of ARDS had become tied to the ventilator.

Pettys main antagonist, pulmonologist John Murray, called ARDS a fashionable disorder, a haphazard lumping together of unrelated chest conditions.

So this year, when Covid-19 patients began to arrive at hospitals with frighteningly low blood-oxygen levels, matching preliminary reports from China, they were funneled in droves onto ventilators.

But a 75-year-old Italian anesthesiologist and intensive care specialist, Luciano Gattinoni, along with a group of colleagues, cried foul. He noticed that Covid-19 pneumonia differed from typical ARDS in one important way: His patients blood oxygen levels were low, but many of them had no difficulty breathing on their own; their lungs were relatively compliant. That condition would come to be known as silent, or happy hypoxemia. Yet under the updated protocols, patients were being diagnosed with ARDS and quickly put on a ventilator, a harrowingly invasive procedure that involves inserting a tube down the patients throat and putting them under sedation to keep it there. Ventilators saved lives, physicians say, but they can also have considerable side effects, including lung damage.

Why do you use this kind of PEEP? Are you crazy? Gattinoni remembers counseling his younger colleagues at his hospital.

Gattinoni warned them against viewing ventilators as cure-alls and urged them to, whenever possible, supply patients with the lowest possible PEEP and gentle ventilation, as he later put it in a letter published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. For early-stage patients, he advised non-invasive methods in the hopes of avoiding ventilation altogether. Other ICU and ER doctors related that gentler methods such as using nasal cannulas and face masks to deliver air to the lungs seemed to improve oxygen levels, STAT reported.

Gattinonis recommendations touched off considerable controversy over whether or not Covid-19 causes ARDS, whether ventilators offer the best treatment for the new disease, and how the machines should be operated. That debate is ongoing, and has split, roughly, into two camps: One side argues that conventional protocols should be followed until a detailed characterization of Covid-19 respiratory failure and its response to established ARDS therapies can be made; the other asserts that mistakes were made in the early days of the pandemic and the standard treatment should be deeply reconsidered, as Gattinoni argued in a recent rebuttal.

At the height of New Yorks pandemic in late March, an emergency room doctor at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn named Cameron Kyle-Sidell posted a video on YouTube decrying the risks of relying on a medical paradigm that is untrue. Kyle-Sidells cri de coeur, which has drawn more than 800,000 views to date, now looks prescient: One study in New York City found that 88 percent of Covid-19 patients placed on ventilators died.

What was happening at the bedside was so stark that its always been hard for me to accept the possibility that somehow we werent causing a significant amount of morbidity with our initial practice, said Kyle-Sidell in a recent interview.

There is, perhaps, a moral to the story. While much of the discussion around ventilators in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis centered around their limited supply, it took time before their limited effectiveness was revealed. Doctors like Helen Ouyang, an emergency physician in New York City, reported feeling devastated by the limits of modern medicine, citing a concept most associated with combat veterans known as moral injury to describe the psychological impact on doctors as technology was failing their patients.

Robert Kacmarek, director of respiratory care at Massachusetts General Hospital, also recalled difficult times as Covid-19 exposed the limits of standardized protocols. For this kind of disease especially, you have to have individualized medicine, he said. You have to set the ventilator based on the individual pathophysiology of the patient and not based on a protocol that is designed for multitudes.

Here, earlier uses of mechanical ventilation offer a valuable lesson. In the summer of 1952, when a severe polio epidemic struck the city of Copenhagen, local medical students worked for weeks in eight-hour shifts, squeezing rubber bags to hand ventilate over 300 polio patients. The students adjusted their technique within a human context, based on clues gleaned from eye contact with their patients; the technology itself was secondary. The effects were profound. The mortality rate dropped by about half, and the episode established the value of ventilation in a way that changed the course of medicine.

By contrast, the ARDS controversy that shaded the early response to the Covid-19 pandemic exposed a disconnect between the promise of high technology and the bedside reality. The vigorous debate on the value of a half-century old diagnosis is a reminder that in medicine, no machine or protocol, however well-designed, can substitute for empathy, judgment, and evidence.

Yvan Prkachin is a historian of medicine and medical technologies, and a lecturer in the history of science at Harvard University.

Lisa De Bode is a freelance journalist and a 2019 MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow.

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Opinion: Covid-19 and Medicine's Misguided Romance With Machines - Undark Magazine

COVID-19 medicine price reduced to 75 per tablet by Glenmark Pharma – Livemint

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Drug firm Glenmark Pharmaceuticals on Monday said it has cut price of its antiviral drug Favipiravir, under the brand name FabiFlu, for the treatment of patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, by27 per cent to 75 per tablet.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals hadlaunched FabiFlu last month at a price of 103 per tablet.

In a regulatory filing Glenmark announced a price reduction of 27 per cent for FabiFlu. The new maximum retail price (MRP) is 75 per tab, it said.

"The price reduction has been made possible through benefits gained from higher yields and better scale, as both the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and formulations are made at Glenmark's facilities in India, the benefits of which are being passed on to patients in the country," the filing said.

"Our internal research shows us that we launched FabiFlu in India at the lowest market cost as compared to the cost of Favipiravir in other countries where it is approved. And now we hope that this further price reduction will make it even more accessible for patients across the country," Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Senior Vice President and Head India business Alok Malik said.

Further, the company has commenced a post marketing surveillance (PMS) study on FabiFlu to closely monitor the efficacy and safety of the drug in 1,000 patients that are prescribed with the oral antiviral, as part of an open label, multicenter, single arm study, the filing added.

"We expect this post marketing surveillance study to shed more light on the drug's clinical effectiveness and safety in a large cohort of patients prescribed FabiFlu," Malik added.

On June 20, Glenmark announced that it received manufacturing and marketing approval from India's drug regulator for FabiFlu, making it the first oral Favipiravir-approved medication in India for the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19.

Glenmark has also completed the phase 3 clinical trial with Favipiravir (FabiFlu) in mild to moderate COVID-19 patients in India. The trial results will be available shortly, the company said.

Glenmark is also conducting another phase 3 clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of two antivirals drugs Favipiravir and Umifenovir as a combination therapy in moderate hospitalised adult COVID-19 patients in India.

Shares of Glenmark Pharma were trading 1.34 per cent lower at 421.00 apiece on BSE. PTI SVK DRR DRR

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Aesthetic Medicine Market: How Much Changes Will Need to Defeat COVID 19 Effect on Industry Allergan, Hologic, Johnson & Johnson – Daily Research…

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Aesthetic Medicine Market has witnessed continuous growth within the past few years and is projected to grow even more throughout the forecast period (2020 2027). The analysis presents a whole assessment of the market and contains Future trends, Current Growth Factors, attentive opinions, facts, historical information, and statistically supported and trade valid market information.

The report, titled Global Aesthetic Medicine Market defines and briefs readers about its products, applications, and specifications. The research lists key companies operating in the global market and also highlights the key changing trends adopted by the companies to maintain their dominance. By using SWOT analysis and Porters five force analysis tools, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of key companies are all mentioned in the report. All leading players in this global market are profiled with details such as product types, business overview, sales, manufacturing base, competitors, applications, and specifications.

You Can Request A Demo Version of Report Before Buying (Higher Preference For Corporate Email ID User): https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/sample/298826

Allergan, Hologic, Johnson & Johnson, Galderma, Lumenis, Solta medical, Alma Laser of the major organizations dominating the global market.(*Note: Other Players Can be Added per Request)

1. Industry outlookThis is where youll find the current state of the Aesthetic Medicine industry overall and where its headed. Relevant industry metrics like size, trends, life cycle, and projected growth included here. This report comes prepared with the data to back up your business idea. On a regional basis, the Global Aesthetic Medicine market has been segmented into Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa.

2. Target marketThis target market section of study includes the following:

User persona and characteristics: It includes demographics such as age, income, and location. It lets you know what their interests and buying habits are, as well as explain the best position to meet their needs.

Market size: How big is the potential Aesthetic Medicine market for your business? It brings to light the consumption in the Aesthetic Medicine industry by the type and application.

3. Competitive analysisDiscover your competitors. The report lets you know what youre up against, but it also lets you spot the competitions weaknesses. Are there customers that are underserved? What can you offer that similar businesses arent offering? The competitive analysis contains the following components:

Direct competitors: What other companies are offering similar products and services? Which companies are your true competitors?

Competitor strengths and weaknesses: What is your competition good at? Where do they fall behind? Get insights to spot opportunities to excel where others are falling short.

Barriers to entry: What are the potential pitfalls of entering the Aesthetic Medicine market? Whats the cost of entry? Is it prohibitively high, or easy to enter?

The window of opportunity:Does your entry into the Aesthetic Medicine industry rely on time-sensitive technology? Do you need to enter early to take advantage of an emerging market?

4. ProjectionsLikewise, We offered thoughtful, not hockey-stick forecasting.

Market share:We have given the consumption behavior of users. When you know how much can your future customers spend, then only youll understand how much of the Aesthetic Medicine industry you have a chance to grab, and here we came up with real stats and numbers.

Impact Analysis of COVID-19:The complete version of the Report will include the impact of the COVID-19, and anticipated change on the future outlook of the industry, by taking into account the political, economic, social, and technological parameters.

Finally, It is one report that hasnt shied away from taking a critical look at the current status and future outlook for the consumption/sales of these products, by the end users and applications. Not forgetting the market share control and growth rate of the Aesthetic Medicine Industry, per application. Most noteworthy, this market analysis will help you find market blind spots.

About WMR

Worldwide Market Reports is your one-stop repository of detailed and in-depth market research reports compiled by an extensive list of publishers from across the globe. We offer reports across virtually all domains and an exhaustive list of sub-domains under the sun. The in-depth market analysis by some of the most vastly experienced analysts provide our diverse range of clients from across all industries with vital decision making insights to plan and align their market strategies in line with current market trends.

Mr. ShahWorldwide Market ReportsSeattle, WA 98154,U.S.Email: [emailprotected]

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Aesthetic Medicine Market: How Much Changes Will Need to Defeat COVID 19 Effect on Industry Allergan, Hologic, Johnson & Johnson - Daily Research...

Is laughter really the best medicine? – Health Report – ABC News

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Norman Swan: Over the last week the ABC has been focusing on your mental health and offering practical evidence-informed advice on what we can all do to get through this COVID-19 pandemic as best we can. So what role could laughter play? There is nothing new about the idea of using laughter as a mood booster. Even the King James Bible preaches that 'a merry heart doeth good like a medicine'. But can laughter therapies really help alleviate the stress, anxiety and depression that many of us are experiencing right now?

The Health Report's David Murray has been investigating.

David Murray: Chances are you probably don't feel much like laughing right now. But maybe in this moment, laughter is exactly what we need more of.

Dan Illic: Laugh at the pandemic, at the way we are all living due to the pandemic. If you don't, you actually might cry.

David Murray: Dan Illic is a satirist and comedy writer. If you got a chuckle out of watching Ray Martin on At Home Alone Together, well, you can thank Dan for bringing you that. And he reckons that right now people really want something to laugh at.

Dan Illic: I must have seen five or six live streams by comedians from their own living rooms. Some of them had audiences between 60 and 300 people on Zoom, and that's incredible. Also there is so much great comedy happening on Instagram and TikTok, incredibly funny stuff, impersonating world leaders, making fun of the restrictions. It ends up being able to dissolve tension, absorb much of the fear around the world we are living in in this pandemic land right now.

David Murray: Comedy is great, obviously, but sometimes it's just as likely to elicit a groan as it is a giggle. So what about laughter itself? We are often told it's the best medicine, but can it get us through this pandemic with our mental health intact?

This is a laughter therapy session. Usually it would be held in person, but just like everything else during the pandemic it has also gone online.

Ros Ben-Moshe: I felt very enlivened, a real elevation in my spirit.

David Murray: Ros Ben-Moshe is an adjunct lecturer in health promotion at La Trobe University. She also runs laughter well-being programs, sometimes called Laughter Yoga.

Ros Ben-Moshe: There are two different types of laughter therapy. There is a humour-based laughter therapy, so that's something that we would get from laughing together with friends or at a funny video, then there is non humour based laughter therapy which is where Laughter Yoga comes in.

David Murray: So, no jokes, no comedians, you just laugh.

Ros Ben-Moshe: The way that it works is the facilitator demonstrates a particular laughter exercise, so it might be a greeting laugh, like [laughs]. Initially that might seem a little silly or strange to people but people just lose themselves to laughter very, very soon.

David Murray: Basically this kind of Laughter Yoga relies on fake laughter, at least at the beginning. But studies have still linked it to the release of endorphins, the dilation of blood vessels, relaxing tense muscles, forcing you to breathe and kind of leaving you feeling like you've just done some exercise. It all sounds pretty good, but is this kind of laughter really the best medicine if you need a bit of help with your mental health?

Natalie van der Wal: I have to be honest, it started because I am a yoga teacher for many years.

David Murray: Natalie van der Wal is an Associate Professor in Cognitive and Social Psychology at Leeds University in the UK. Recently she has been looking into the research on laughter therapies and what the available studies actually say about laughter and its potential for alleviating stress, depression and anxiety. But she is the first to admit that when she started the project she wasn't exactly impartial.

Natalie van der Wal: A friend of mine, he's a Laughter Yoga leader, and I did a course with him to become a Laughter Yoga leader myself. So in the beginning I was little bit biased, but then my co-author, Robin Cok, he is actually super-critical, so my initial positive outlook got very realistic.

David Murray: Associate Professor van der Wal and her co-author collected 86 relevant studies across both humour and non humour based laughter therapies. I have to say that overall they weren't exactly impressed with the quality of the research. They say many studies didn't use control groups and relied on small sample sizes. Others showed a high risk of bias. And then there was the results on the efficacy of the therapy itself, which were, well, a bit mixed.

Natalie van der Wal: We found that laughter therapy significantly reduces your depression, that was the strongest outcome, but there were a little bit more mixed results for anxiety and stress. So there I cannot say as a scientist there is a real effect. It looks like it but I cannot say for 100% sure.

David Murray: Now, the reason for this comes down to statistics. I know, I know, stay with me here. Many of the studies included in this meta-analysis did conclude that laughter therapy helped reduce stress and anxiety. But according to Natalie van der Wal, when you look beyond the averages and include their confidence intervals (this is the range of values that you are fairly sure your true result lies in), then the positive effects for stress and anxiety potentially disappear.

Natalie van der Wal: You would really want to see that the complete confidence interval is below zero, and that is not the case for the majority of the studies.

David Murray: But here's the other interesting thing, while you might assume that natural organic laughter would be better for you, it was the non humour based therapies that had the greater effect on mental health. Ros Ben-Moshe says this could be because when you are not waiting for something to make you laugh, you actually laugh more. But does this really matter when the overall evaluation of laughter therapy studies was kind of disappointing? Well, Associate Professor van der Wal said we shouldn't be giving up on the idea of laughter as medicine just yet.

Natalie van der Wal: For me it's simple; if you laugh, you feel better. But if we have more research, like big large randomised control trial studies, then we can have a final say about it. At the moment we just don't have enough evidence.

David Murray: So in the meantime if laughing makes you feel better, go for it. While we can't say it's necessarily the best medicine, it certainly can't hurt.

Norman Swan: A bit of laughter there from the late southern gospel singer George Younce, finishing that report from David Murray.

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The 1975 Imagine Utopia in Their New Dont Worry Video – Rolling Stone

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

The 1975 have released the music video for Dont Worry, the latest visual from the Manchester quartets new albumNotes on a Conditional Form.

Done in the same CGI-rendered style as past videos like The Birthday Party, the simple, utopian Dont Worry clip shows a person walking through a shiny cityscape where buildings are surrounded by trees and sources of renewable energy (wind farms, solar panels, etc.). The passerby looks through the upper window of an apartment building and sees a dancer twirling around their plant-filled living room. The two characters eventually make eye contact, smiling and waving at each other at the songs end.

The 1975 releasedNotes on a Conditional Form this past May; the 22-track LP features the songs People, Frail State of Mind, Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America, Me and You Together Song, Guys, If Youre Too Shy (Let Me Know) and others.

In the weeks leading up to the new albums release, the band hosted listening parties for their first three albums every Friday on Twitter and Spotify, culminating in 2018s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships. Healy also hosted aspecial podcastin partnership withThe Facewhere he interviewed heroes like Stevie Nicks, Brian Eno and Mike Kinsella.

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The 1975 Imagine Utopia in Their New Dont Worry Video - Rolling Stone

Memo: Following death of inmate who tested positive, Sheriffs Office says no new known cases of coronavirus at jail – The Lens

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

In mid-June, the Orleans Parish Sheriffs Office sent out a press release announcing that there were no known cases of coronavirus at the New Orleans jail. A week later, Christian Freeman, an inmate at the jail died in custody. During the autopsy, it was revealed that he had been positive for the virus at the time of his death.

Freemans death on June 25 and subsequent positive test raised questions about whether the virus had in fact been spreading in the facility undetected. As of last week, the cause of Freemans death had not been determined, according to a spokesperson for the Orleans Parish Coroners Office, who did not immediately respond to a request for an update.

But on Monday, the compliance director for the New Orleans jail, Darnley Hodge, sent a memo to U.S. District Judge Lance Africk, who oversees the jails federal consent decree, claiming that there were no known changes regarding the COVID-19 status of staff and inmates at the jail.

According to the memo, in response to Freemans positive test, all 55 of the detainees being held in Freemans pod were tested for the virus. All came back negative, with the exception of one test that is still pending.

In addition, all the staff that worked in the pod have been tested, and all came back negative.

The memo also says that Freeman, who had been in custody since December, had previously tested negative for the virus. It does not specify when that test was done.

Hodge declined to comment through a spokesperson from the Sheriffs Office, and it is unclear whether the jail plans to test the rest of the inmates in the facility.

The Sheriffs Office, which had been regularly releasing updates about the number of coronavirus tests administered and cases detected among the jails inmates, has not put one out since the June 18 release that announced there were no known cases.

At the height of the outbreak at the facility there were over 90 positive inmates, but Hodge and Sheriff Marlin Gusman have touted the jails program of mass testing and quarantine in response to the virus as a successful effort to prevent further spread of the virus.

Freeman was the second person to die in custody at the jail since officials claimed it was free of the disease. The first, Desmond Guild, died on June 19. Guild was negative for coronavirus when he died, according to the coroners office.

The two deaths come as Gusman is attempting to convince a federal judge to allow him to retake control of the jail from Director Hodge. Initially, Gusman asked the judge to throw out the consent decree altogether, claiming that The two deaths come as Gusman is attempting to convince a federal judge to allow him to retake control of the jail from Hodge, an appointed official who controls day-to-day jail operations as part of a court order in the consent decree case. Initially, Gusman asked the judge to throw out the consent decree altogether, claiming that it sought a jail utopia, reflective of the Court appointed Monitors personal preferences and idealistic aspirations, but later agreed to walk it back.

Emily Washington, an attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center who represents the plaintiffs in the consent decree litigation against the Sheriffs Office, declined to comment.

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Memo: Following death of inmate who tested positive, Sheriffs Office says no new known cases of coronavirus at jail - The Lens

The Keynesian Revolution – Boston Review

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

John Maynard Keynes (center) with philosopher Bertrand Russell (left) and Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey (right). Image: PBS

A new biography reveals the full scope of John Maynard Keyness critique of unfettered capitalism, emphasizing the economists larger philosophical vision of the good life.

The Price of PeaceZachary CarterRandom House, $35 (cloth)

On September 9, 1938, John Maynard Keynes, fifty-five years old and the most famous economist in the world, read his essay My Early Beliefs to the Memoir Club, a circle of Bloomsbury Group friends who gathered occasionally to discuss the private reflections of its members. Keynes took the opportunity to revisit the philosophical principles of his confidants in the youthful exuberance of their twenties, our mental history in the dozen years before World War I. The rich, dazzling memoir, published posthumously at Keyness request (and subsequently included in his Essays in Biography), is well described by biographer Robert Skidelsky as a key document for understanding his lifes work.

The Keynes of My Early Beliefs was no longer a young man; recovering from a major heart attack, he read to the group reclining on a sofa to conserve his energy. Moreover, 1938 was not 1910; the intervening decades, shattering a long period of peace and prosperity, were characterized by war, disorder, and depression. Armed with this melancholy hindsight, Keynes would chastise his youthful cohort: as the years wore on towards 1914, the thinness and superficiality, as well as the falsity of our view of mans heart became, it now seems to me, more obvious. And as the Memoir Club assembled that evening, German troops were massed on the Czechoslovakian border, and Neville Chamberlain would soon climb aboard an airplane for the first time in his life, that he might reason with Adolph Hitler. This context surely informed Keyness retrospective lament, we were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust layered atop a cauldron of horrors simmering just below the surface.

Nevertheless, Keynes never wavered from the core principles of his early beliefs: this religion of ours . . . remains nearer to the truth than any other that I know, he wrote. His memoir articulated the central tenets of that shared philosophy: the commitment to a relentless interrogation of established norms and traditions, a rejection of shallow materialism, and a reverence for love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge.

For Keynes, economics mattered because it would ensure people need not organize their lives around the empty chase of money. It would free them, instead, to live wisely, agreeably and well.

The Price of Peace, Zachary Carters new biography of Keynes, is insightfully grounded in three touchstones of Keyness life that are neatly encapsulated by My Early Beliefs: the horrors of World War I, his intimate association with the Bloomsbury community of iconoclastic writers and artists (including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey), and the essential inseparability of economics from broader philosophical questions. The Great War shattered the illusion that civilization was secureand much of Keyness efforts in the three decades that followed were designed to save society from dystopias looming in the wings, particularly in the varied forms of authoritarian collectivism. Bloomsbury, to which The Price of Peace returns unfailingly throughout its narrative, properly situates both profound friendship, and, especially, a veneration of the arts, at the center of Keyness worldview. As for philosophy, Carters Keynes is the last of the enlightenment intellectuals who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. To approach Keyness economics innocent of such an understanding is to miss much, if not everything.

Across the first two-thirds of its pages, The Price of Peace is a breathtaking triumph. A renaissance man with a dizzying array of interests, pursuits, and accomplishments, Keynes sat prominently at so many diverse, rarified tables that just keeping up with him is an achievement, to say nothing of situating his lifereally his livesin broader context. Yet Carter does just that, in this smartly written, swiftly moving, well-researched, clear-eyed treatment of one of the most remarkable figures of the first half of the twentieth century.

Carter also has a good eye for spotting key contributions from Keyness vast writings, calling attention to essential essays including, among others, The End of Laissez-Faire, A Short View of Russia, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Can Lloyd George Do It? (all of which are reprinted in Keyness Essays in Persuasion), and, less well known but not to be underestimated, Art and the State and the innovative How to Pay for the War. In Economic Possibilities, Keynes touched the core of his understanding for why economists mattered: by solving the economic problem (the imperative to provide for adequate physical comfort and satisfactory necessities), people would no longer need to organize their lives around the empty chase of money, and instead have the freedom to pursue their varied, idiosyncratic interests that would allow them to live wisely, agreeably and well.

Short of that utopia, The End of Laissez-Faire (1926) heralded Keyness dramatic break with economic orthodoxy, signaled by his (then) heretical declaration, The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. This disenchantment would grow still more pointed in the depths of the Great Depression: laissez-faire capitalism, he declared, is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuousand it doesnt deliver the goods. Along with Am I a Liberal? and Poverty in Plenty: Is the Economic System Self Adjusting? the essay Laissez-Faire marks the steps on the road to the Keynesian revolution that would culminate with the publication of his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936. But that runs ahead of the story.

Keynes was raised in an environment of reasonable comfort, and, more important, implicit security. His father, Neville, was a successful professor and administrator at the University of Cambridge; his mother, Florence, was a remarkable figure, active in social causes and local politics (she would eventually serve as the mayor of Cambridge). Keynes flourished at the storied Eton prep school, winning rafts of academic prizes, and then again at Kings College, Cambridge. After graduation he entered the Civil Service, laboring briefly in the India Office before being lured back to Cambridge, where he would teach economics, serve as editor of the prestigious Economic Journal, and publish his first book, Indian Currency and Finance (1913). Yet at age thirty Keynes was still more promising than accomplished. Everything would change in 1914.

The mass slaughter of World War I was the defining trauma for a generation of Europeans; it was also, for Keynes, where abstract economic theory collided with reality. Rushing to contain the financial panic unleashed by the commencement of hostilities (and taken aback by the short-sighted behavior of the financial community), Keynes learned from this experience, Carter argues, that markets were social, not mathematical phenomena. The precariousness of financial sentiment, and the key role that psychology plays in shaping those instincts, would remain essential to Keyness writing throughout his career, a disposition likely honed by his principal responsibility serving in the Treasury Department during the warfinding ways to creatively scape the bottom of the barrel of British finance (and, increasingly, to manage its desperate economic dependence on the United States).

The mass slaughter of World War I was the defining trauma for a generation of Europeans; it was also, for Keynes, where abstract economic theory collided with reality.

After the war Keynes was attached to the British delegation in Paris, ultimately resigning in protest over the Treaty of Versailles, which he cogently argued would prove a disaster. His polemic against the treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), would unexpectedly bring him world fame; no one anticipated that a technocrats dissent would sell over 100,000 copies and find translation into a dozen languages. The bookdescribed by Carter as a landmark of political theory and one of the most emotionally compelling works of economic literature ever writtenis also, to this day, misunderstood. Moreover, for all its purportedly enormous (and in some circles, nefarious) influence, it was patently unsuccessful in bringing about the policies that its author was passionately advocating. Mostly remembered now for arguing that the reparations imposed on Germany were too high, Economic Consequences was primarily concerned with what the treaty failed to do: attend to the shattered economic heart of Europe. Without addressing the urgent problems wrought by years of total war, the inevitable economic chaos that would follow would in turn lead to political upheaval. Men will not always die quietly, Keynes warned, and in their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself.

Keynes proposed, at the conference and in print, a grand scheme that included modest reparations, the cancellation of inter-allied debt, and large new U.S. loans to Europe. The plan was, from a political perspective, nave at best. Yet, as Carter notes, after a half decade of economic and political disarray, the U.S.-sponsored Dawes plan of 1924 was essentially a delayed, expensive caricature of the system Keynes had urged at Paris.

In the 1920s Keynes held no official government positions (those bridges had been torched), but he was now a prominent figure active on many fronts, producing two important scholarly books, numerous political pamphlets, reams of journalism, and advocating for the positions of the Liberal Party. A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) is distinguished by Keyness attack on the barbarous relic of the gold standard, which he argued was inherently deflationary. (Casual critics of Keynes often hand-wavingly label him an inflationist, but in fact Keynes was quite anxious about inflation, which he thought would undermine faith in the legitimacy of the capitalist order. His position was simply, and quite rightly, that in those circumstances when forced to choose, in practice deflation was typically the greater evil.)

Keyness concerns along these lines were more explicitly articulated in yet another polemic, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill, written after Keynes had failed to personally dissuade the then chancellor of the exchequer from returning the pound to the gold standard in 1925 at its long-standing pre-war value. The decision was a triumph of the interests of finance over industry, but one that would, as Economic Consequences predicted, prove disastrous for the British economy. These struggles informed the central concern of Keyness massive, sprawling, two-volume Treatise on Money (1930), namely, how to balance the goals of domestic monetary policy autonomy and international monetary stability. Carter makes the case that the contributions (and intellectual influence) of the Treatise are generally underappreciated today. And there may be something to thatlegend holds that when Joseph Schumpeter read the book, he literally burned the manuscript on monetary theory he had been laboring on, concluding that it had been rendered obsolete. But with the deepening of the Great Depression, Keynes was already racing ahead, developing what would emerge as The General Theory.

The Price of Peace is somewhat less sure-handed in its treatment of The General Theory, which, despite bringing about a fundamental transformation of our understanding of economics, is a difficult book. Keynes follows several strands of complex argumentation without pausing to guide the reader through the thicket, and his prose is uncharacteristically workmanlike. Nevertheless, The General Theory was a sensation, initially dividing the profession along ideological and especially generational lines. Within fifteen years its influence had reshaped the profession.

Laissez-faire capitalism, Keynes declared during the Great Depression, is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuousand it doesnt deliver the goods.

Once again, Carter is spot on in emphasizing the essential role of psychology, and especially the role of the collective sentiment of investors, for Keyness thinking. (Entrepreneurs were not driven by cold calculation but by animal spirits, Keynes wrote, and investors were not rewarded for calculating the underlying value of an asset, but for their ability to divine what other market players would find attractive. This in turn meant that the financial sector, left to its own devices, was unstable and prone to crisis.) And Carter is exactly right to emphasize that Keyness urgent, underlying motives remained largely conservative: he wanted to save capitalism from itself. Unfettered capitalismunfair, unjust, ugly, vacuous of social purpose, and ultimately inefficientwould bring about its own ruin. Worse still, left unreformed, it would likely unleash things that were much, much worse. Keynes, from the very start, was under no illusions about the horrors of fascism (unlike many of the British right, who were content to avert their eyes), and he had no taste, fashionable in many left-leaning Western circles of the day, for the Soviet experimentthe inherent brutality of which he saw through ten years before the show trials of the 1930s.

But to unpack the economics of the Keynesian Revolution readers should pay close attention to chapter twelve of The General Theory (The State of Long Term Expectation) and Keyness 1937 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, The General Theory of Employment, his response to leading academic critics of the book. Especially in the latter it is unambiguously clear that the Keyness breakthrough was founded on two fundamental departures from orthodoxy. First, an economy, once stuck in a rut, could remain in a rut. And second, actors in the economy made decisions in an environment characterized not by risk (where the underlying probabilities of future events are properly understood and generally shared), but uncertainty (a setting where the future is inherently unknowable). The orthodox theory assumes that we have a knowledge of the future of a kind quite different from that which we actually possess, Keynes explained. This hypothesis of a calculable future leads to a wrong interpretation of the principles of behavior . . . and to an underestimation of the concealed factors of utter doubt, precariousness, hope and fear.

Across the long arc of its narrative, The Price of Peace devotes considerable attention to events in the United States (and Keyness attempts to influence and encourage President Roosevelt and aspects of the New Deal), strands which tie together most naturally during the 1940s. Keynes would devote the final years of his short lifehe suffered from serious heart diseaseto once again representing his government on matters related to the financing of a world war and its aftermath. This required regular travel to the United States from 1941 (when Keynes led negotiations over the terms of lend-lease aid) through 1946 (with the culmination of a series of exhausting multilateral conferences that led to the creation of the Keynes-inflected International Monetary Fund and World Bank). Over these years Keynes essentially worked himself to death in the service of his country. A major heart attack on a train bound for Washington in March 1946 preceded the one that would take his life, at home, one month later.

Entrepreneurs were not driven by cold calculation but by animal spirits, Keynes wrote. This in turn meant that the financial sector, left to its own devices, was unstable and prone to crisis.

Across the decades, from the teens through the forties, Carters facility in bringing Keynes to life is impressive. The only false note struck in this rich, nuanced, multifaceted portrait is the eagerness of The Price of Peace to recast Keynes as a protectionist, a claim asserted repeatedly throughout the volume. It is certainly true that in the early 1930s, first in a reaction to the pressures on Britains balance of payments intensified by the asphyxiating gold standard and then with the complete collapse of international economic cooperation in the depths of the Great Depression, Keynes wrote in favor of some protectionist measures. That Keynes would dare even to sample such forbidden fruit testified, once again, to his relentless pragmatism and bracing unwillingness to be bound by thoughtless devotion to received doctrine. But such flirtations were always qualified and faded over time. Even in his strongest moment of advocacy for such measures, in 1932, Keynes still paused to observe, among other gestures at debunking protectionist myths, Nine times out of ten [the free trader] is speaking forth the words of wisdom and simple truth. And in 1944, when the prospects for the international economy were quite different, Keynes had this to say in the House of Lords: The expansion of our export industries which is so vital to us would be much easier if obstacles to trade can be diminished or done away with all together.

Still, despite the misstep on protectionism (and it is an occupational hazard for biographers of Keynes to see a version of the man through the lens of the authors personal proclivities), it is hard to imagine improving on Carters final measure of his subject, which is worth quoting at length:

It is a disappointment that the last third of the book, which weaves it way through seven decades, does not meet the remarkable standard established in its preceding pages. It is hard to argue with the implicit subtext of these chapters: that the practice of postwar public policy in the United States, at times under the banner of Keynesianism, was in fact, from the start, a long, tragic retreat from the wisdom of Keynes. (Essentially, mainstream postwar Keynesianism was a tamed and housebroken interpretation of selected parts of the General Theory. For Keynes the free market was often dysfunctional, and the economy an unpredictable and occasionally dangerous beast, necessitating guidance by adroit improvisation. As domesticated by postwar economists, Keynesianism instead assumed highly functional markets that were more like automotive engines that benefited from occasional fine-tuning, which could be accomplished by a deploying a few standard, reliable tools.) But the execution of this agenda is idiosyncratic, uneven, and at times even clumsy, as if the book itself never recovers from the loss of Keynes.

Most unfortunate is the extent to which the balance of The Price of Peace is anchored in a peculiar fixation on the Canadian-American economist and paragon of American liberalism John Kenneth Galbraithwhich is not a slight against Galbraith, a figure of uncommon achievement. But the justification for settling on a thinker whose peculiar brand of Keynesianism was a sharp departure from the master as the protagonist in the final chapters of this biography is never established. Yet he takes on Zelig-like quality, popping up constantly, often in the oddest of places. To take a minor example, did Nixon really harbor a special hatred for Galbraith? This seems unlikely. Nixon was a legendary hater, and a cursory glance at a half-dozen good books on the brooding, paranoid President yields little more than a few perfunctory mentions of Galbraith, and none with the seething vituperation reserved for assorted enemies like, say, talk show host Dick Cavett. This is a consequential diversion, because it muddies a key strand of argument Carter is pursuing: that Keyness legacy fell into the wrong hands.

For Keynes, unfettered capitalismunfair, unjust, ugly, vacuous of social purpose, and ultimately inefficientwould bring about its own ruin. Worse still, left unreformed, it would likely unleash things much worse.

Paul Samuelson would emerge as perhaps the most influential (and representative) of a new generation of postwar Keynesian economists; he developed mathematical models of economics that derived directly from Newtonian physics. Keynes would likely have been aghast. The pseudo-analogy with the physical sciences leads directly counter to the habit of mind which is most important for an economist to acquire, he wrote to Roy Harrod in 1938. The young Americans were building on John Hickss earlier attempt to simplify the Keynesian revolution, and reconcile it with elements of the old orthodoxy. As Carter observes, however, Keynes had in fact presented a conceptual framework totally incompatible with Hicks project. Keyness student Joan Robinson labeled such efforts bastard Keynesianism. But the bastards won.

Following this line more purposefully could have disciplined the closing arguments of The Price of Peace, as there is a straight line to be drawn from the blunders of American Keynesianism in the 1960s to the rise of more conservatively oriented economic theories in the 1980s and subsequently a broad consensus in macroeconomic theory that was permissive of the catastrophic anti-Keynesian liberation of finance that followed. Instead, Carter reveals a preference for picking partisan fights that often obscure important subtleties, as seen in the strawmanning of Paul Volcker, and the conflating of New Classical Macroeconomics with Milton Friedmans monetarism (though political bedfellows, their economic theories were miles apart). And the notion that Vietnam underscored just how little Keynes had achieved at Bretton Woods is simply not coherent.

Finally, The Price of Peace stumbles with its treatment of the crucial Clinton years, burying the Keynesian lede by focusing extensively on tradethe North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organizationbefore finally turning to the great sin against Keynes: financial deregulation. It is unlikely that Keynes would have been much moved by U.S. trade deals of the 1990s; his lifes work was that of a monetary economist and a macroeconomist, and he did not generally dissent from what we now call microeconomic theory (the allocation of goods through the price mechanism).

The trade deals of the 1990s were not the final, tragic destination of anti-Keynesianism. Keynes would have likely seen opportunities in the WTO and shrugged at NAFTA. (Though he surely would have sharply criticized the abject failure of U.S. public policy to compensate those who would inevitably lose from such agreements.) But he would have been apoplectic at the great American financial deregulation project. For Keynes, in The Treatise, The General Theory, and at Bretton Woods, the mortal threat to his economic vision came from finance, not trade. In 1941, looking back at the ruins of the depression and towards an imagined future, he wrote, Nothing is more certain than that the movement of capital . . . must be regulated. Unregulated finance was inefficient, and prone to crisis; additionally, the notion that the financial sector would metastasize into something other than a simple facilitator of real economic activity was, for Keynes, a caricature of the ugly, rapacious capitalism that would lead to its own ruin, as it nearly did in the 1930s. And perhaps will again.

The Wing: how the ‘feminist utopia’ got it so wrong – Evening Standard

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

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The membership of The Wing reads like a Whos Who of the worlds most influential women Alexa Chung, Kerry Washington and Gloria Steinem have all endorsed the female-only club.

When its London branch opened in Fitzrovia last September, it felt like the start of a new movement. It was the first Wing outside of America, where there are 11 clubs, and the event was marked with an evening celebrating the power of women at the ICA. Founder Audrey Gelman, Lena Dunhams best friend who used to work for Hillary Clinton, flew in from New York while heavily pregnant and delivered a speech to a room of women about why she set up the club in the wake of Trumps 2016 election as an antidote to the presidents politics and old boys networks. Gelman wanted the co-working space to be a utopia for women of all definitions, with a library just for womens books and regular talks from female role-models. In the US, speakers included Jennifer Lopez and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The London clubhouse is based in a five-storey Edwardian townhouse, decked out in Oliver Bonas-style pastels with millennial pink walls, a checkerboard roof terrace, Peloton bikes and portraits of feminist pin-ups Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Amal Clooney and Michelle Obama on the walls. The annual membership fee is 1,836 (triple that of womens club AllBright in nearby Bloomsbury and more than Soho House), but there are scholarships for those who struggle to afford the fee.

Gelman assembled a crack team to make the London branch a hub. General manager Lucy Harrison was thrilled to be called up. I was besotted by the idea of The Wing, it was full of feminist energy, she says. She has worked in hospitality for 15 years and got the job after a 12-stage interview process.

The Wing: inside London's newest members' club for women

Less than a year later, The Wing is under scrutiny and women in London and the US are cancelling their memberships. There have been claims of misgendering and racism at the club, focusing on a donation that The Wing made to Black Lives Matter that contradicted the way staff felt they had been treated. As these allegations swirled, last month, Gelman resigned, saying it was the right thing for the business and the best way to bring The Wing along into a long overdue era of change. So what has happened at what was supposed to be a feminist utopia?

An Instagram account called Flew the Coup is a window into what some former members of the club and ex-staff feel went wrong. One post on the US operation reads: Our general manager would constantly ask for massages from our Spanish-speaking staff, most of whom spoke very little English. I went to the staff room and found our GM on the floor with her sweatshirt lifted up, no bra, with a Latina worker giving her a massage. There are also posts about the subsidised memberships. One says: I was talked down to by rich white members. One member told another scholarship recipient and myself that we didnt deserve to be there ... she said: I paid for you to be here. Another post raises faux-wokeness, where staff felt unable to raise issues of gender and race.

Among Flew the Coups calls to action is a petition calling for The Wing to match its $200,000 donation made to Black Lives Matter and give it to workers laid off due to Covid, many of whom felt they had been victims of racism. And US staffers claims have sent ripples across the Atlantic. In London, six managers and 30 staff on hourly rates say they have been made redundant and there is uncertainty over when the club will reopen. Since then, many have spoken out about their mistreatment on a mass Slack channel created to replace The Wing apps chat function, which has been paused. Claims include staff feeling bullied, non-English-speaking employees being spoken down to and workers being berated in public.

Gina Martin, who campaigned to make upskirting illegal, was invited to be a founder member of the club but has since asked to have her membership terminated. She never witnessed any mistreatment, but acknowledges it was an exclusive space used primarily by women with money, privilege and a certain level of power, so has every reason to believe those who came forward. She adds: For me, this is a classic example of what happens when you mix feminism (and a type which only benefits white women) and capitalism. It doesnt mix. I didnt want to be part of that anymore. Martin says shes not comfortable with a club claiming to be liberating and championing women if its not all women and marginalised people. You cant just cater to the top echelons and say youre changing the world.

The rooftop of the London outpost of The Wing (The Wing)

The Wing denies all claims against it and a representative says: No one has ever been fired for raising issues of race or pay doing so would be illegal and it has never happened. We have made several public statements about the impact that Covid has had on our business and the resulting layoffs while the company has had no incoming revenue. It says it is addressing issues as a company because it is necessary and overdue. For each of its London employees, The Wing has pre-paid 48 sessions of mental healthcare through Talkspace, an online therapy provider, and every person who has worked there can withdraw a $500 grant if they did not receive one during the earlier round.

We need to reinvent the business in a way that reconciles the real tension between intersectional feminism and capitalism, and reimagine what The Wing looks like in a post-Covid future, a spokeswoman for the company said in a detailed email. We fundamentally believe in The Wings mission even if we havent yet achieved it. We believe we can be a force for anti-racism. We are grateful for the role our team and our members have played in pushing us in that direction.

The email explains that The Wing has a culture code, aimed at creating an inclusive space and dialogue, and the company is elevating leadership from within to create a newly formed office of the CEO, composed of co-founder Lauren Kassan, Celestine Maddy, and Ashley Peterson. The Wing will go on, but we need to tear down the foundations, evolve, and rebuild the way forward ... We are committed to doing this work in order to rebuild The Wing as something that serves not one kind of us, but all of us.

When The Wing launched in 2016, Gelmans mission was clear. We really feel the most powerful way to advance women is to gather them together, she said, telling the story of how she had the idea when she was working in public relations and needed a place to charge her phone between meetings. At the opening of The Wings flagship in New York, she and Kassan hosted a sleepover with pillow fights and a complimentary beauty bar. The application form for The Wing asks prospective members who call each other Wing women or Winglets to describe how they have promoted or supported the advancement of women, then to answer what they think is the biggest challenge facing women today. The organisation quickly gained a paid-up community of 12,000 across seven international outposts thanks to investors including WeWork and AirBnb, and its members duly became the standard-bearers for millennial feminism. There were plans to open a second London outpost, two more in New York and one in Paris.

The Wing co-founder, Audrey Gelman (in pink, centre) with (L - R) Rachel Racusen, Laetitia Gorra, Lucy Harrison, Marianna Martinelli, Zara Rahim, Brittany Halldorson and Giovanna Gray Lockhart (Dave Benett/Getty Images for The Wing)

I think they had the best intentions, says Harrison, who met Gelman and Kassan on Zoom when she was being interviewed. And the media often rushes to blame female founders, but they tried to do too much, too fast. The problem wasnt with them. You need depth and support structures for staff under appearances and The Wing didnt have that, so when problems arose there was no way of dealing with them.

One former London staffer, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that tensions emerged with management early on. I was completely unsupported and had zero contact with line managers or bosses before opening, she says. I was bullied by my boss, despite never having had a warning in my career. The professionalism and procedures just were not there. It feels like Ive been chewed up and spat out after working there. And there was a shroud of secrecy around the allegations that were coming out of the US.

You could definitely sense that there was a hierarchy, says another former member, a Croatian brand strategist, remembering how management staff ignored and spoke down to non-English-speaking cleaners. It felt like you had these tier-A women trying to make the world a different place, and then you still had your staff who are people like my auntie, Croatian, cleaning your toilets. Those two worlds dont match fully.

Founding member Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a social justice advocate, says the US allegations were unsurprising to anyone who paid attention to the class and racial dynamics at the club, while an American member of the London club says The Wings predominantly white management managing people of colour made her feel uncomfortable. The clubs management was restructured six months ago, with five white women put in charge.

The American member says: In the States its really common to have a white front-of-house and a back-of-house thats people of colour, mostly Hispanic, and its absolutely unacceptable. One of the reasons I like living [in London] is that you rarely see that, but at The Wing it felt like I was going back home in a bad way. She recalls staff being berated in public.

Its sad, the Croatian member adds, because The Wing was ultimately a great idea. Women need spaces where they can meet and build connections and grow. The problem is this was built on a completely f***ed up premise of profit and hierarchy and classism. The feminist branding that it tapped into, that all of us are equal, you cant fulfil that if you dont live that. In the end they hurt a lot of people.

Shell be surprised if the club doesnt close. Covid-aside, theres too much damage. None of the London members shes spoken to have had emails since the doors closed in March. Everything was just about the US. I think thats extremely f***ed up, especially if youre building a brand based on membership and this plug of were in it together. At the end of the day it was a tier one, white American experience that they tried to cash in on. I took the bite, but Im out of it.

Though staff and members hope that The Wings overriding mission continues. Audrey Gelman is not excused but what she was trying to do was still admirable, says one. The execution failed. I hope they find a way to make it up to the staff they have wronged.

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The Wing: how the 'feminist utopia' got it so wrong - Evening Standard

Instead of Fighting COVID, the White House Is Attacking Anthony Fauci

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Rather than addressing a deepening health crisis, the Trump Administration has chosen to come out against top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci.

The coronavirus pandemic is veering out of control in many parts of the United States. Florida has officially a dubious national record, with 15,300 new cases in a single day.

And the White House, rather than addressing the deepening health crisis, has decided to attack its top infectious disease expert. As The Washington Post reported over the weekend, Trump administration staffers are claiming that Fauci has repeatedly misled the public and has been unjustifiably critical of the President.

Just last week, Trump himself said Fauci was “a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity.

A White House official even released a statement claiming “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things,” according to the Post.

The administration is also targeting Fauci for “public reassurances” made in “late February,” when he allegedly downplayed the severity and risks of community transmission of the virus.

It is true that Fauci has changed his tune — but he’s done so in line with scientists’ understanding of the pandemic, which has drastically changed over the last five months.

The numbers paint a damning picture of the US response. More than 3.3 million Americans have been infected so far, according to the latest numbers, with at least 134,900 deaths. Even adjusted for population, the nation outranks most other countries in the world in terms of confirmed cases and deaths.

The US is still very much riding the first wave of the pandemic, as Fauci warned earlier this month — and the numbers, particularly in the South, are still sharply on the rise.

“What worries me is the slope of the curve,” Fauci told the Financial Times last week. “It still looks like it’s exponential.”

“As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great,” Fauci said during a podcast interview with FiveThirtyEight last week. “I mean, we’re just not.”

Hospitals are getting overwhelmed with COVID-19 positive patients — while states are opening up again. Shelter in place orders specifically designed to stop this exact thing from happening have long been lifted in many parts of the country.

“The situation, the best I can describe it is dire and it’s getting worse, it seems like, every day,” Harris Health System CEO Esmail Porsa told MSNBC this morning.

Houston’s Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital has officially run out of hospital beds. Its ICU is at 113 percent capacity, according to Porsa. 75 percent are COVID-19 positive.

Despite the numbers and repeated warnings, the Trump administration’s response has only rarely heeded Fauci’s advice. Case in point: The first time Trump wore a face mask in public was this weekend.

In fact, the administration seems to be actively trying to downplay Fauci’s role. Officials cancelled Fauci’s scheduled appearances after his remarks last week, the Post reports.

In other words, relations between the top infectious disease specialist and the administration are at an all-time low. Fauci even told Financial Times that the last time he spoke to president Trump was on June 2, over two months ago.

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Instead of Fighting COVID, the White House Is Attacking Anthony Fauci

Physicists Say This Is the Smallest Unit of Time That Could Exist

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

If there's a fundamental unit of time at the tiniest scales of the universe, it's too small to measure. But scientists found what its upper limit must be.

Micro Time

One of the fundamental mysteries surrounding the concept of time is whether it’s continuous and our chronological measurements are just a way of making the sense of the world, or if it actually breaks down into discrete “ticks” at the teeniest scales.

Assuming the latter is true — Live Science reports that our technology isn’t yet nearly sensitive enough to find out for sure — a team of physicists from Penn State has now theorized the absolute maximum amount of time that a universal oscillation could take.

Don’t Blink

The number is bafflingly small. The largest possible value this fundamental unit of time could be is one thousandth of a quectosecond, according to research published last month in the journal Physical Review Letters. That’s ten to the -33rd power or, as Live Science helpfully put it, just one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

And that’s just the upper limit, based on the performance of the best atomic clocks we have. In the abstract world of mathematical theory, Live Science reports the absolute smallest unit of time could be yet another 100 billion times shorter.

Syncing Up

The best atomic clocks can measure down to a tenth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, or ten to the -19th power, Live Science reports. If the fundamental unit of time were any larger, it would eventually make our atomic clocks fall out of sync.

But this is all theory. As atomic clocks improve, scientists may find themselves exploring smaller and smaller units of time before they ever hit a wall — and time may be truly continuous, rather than discrete.

READ MORE: The universe’s clock might have bigger ticks than we imagine [Live Science]

More on time: Astrophysicist Says He Knows How to Build a Time Machine

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Physicists Say This Is the Smallest Unit of Time That Could Exist

Here Are The Most Amazing Shots of the NEOWISE Comet

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

Comet NEOWISE has been visible to the naked eye over the weekend. The rare event was captured on camera by amateurs and professionals alike.

Comet C/2020 F3 — better known as NEOWISE, for the Near Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope that first discovered it — has came so close to Earth over the weekend that it’s visible to the naked eye, blazing brightly over Northern skies. The rare event was captured on camera by amateurs and professionals alike from around the globe — and the results are dazzling.

For instance, just check out this short video from the International Space Station.

Comet NEOWISE from ISS, July 5th pic.twitter.com/qDjDGdmgfe
— TheSpaceAcademy.org (@ThespaceAcad) July 11, 2020

The space rock was about 194 million miles from the Sun when first discovered in March, making it far too faint to see with the naked eye. But over the last few months, the comet has become far brighter as it’s approached.

this morning looking north over Lake Superior as the comet skimmed the horizon a little over 1°, the aurora made a brief appearance #comet #neowise pic.twitter.com/ryKiLsE1SX
— Lake Superior Photo (@LAKSuperiorFoto) July 13, 2020

On July 3, it was only 27.3 million miles (44 million km) from the Sun. To put that into perspective, the closest flyby of the Sun by an artificial object was NASA’s Parker Solar Probe back in January, passing by our star at a mere 18.7 million kilometers.

In fact, the solar probe was able to get its own look at the comet on July 5, according to NASA.

Astronomers were concerned the comet would not survive such a close encounter, but as evidenced by this weekend’s sightings, it seems to be doing fine.

Comet NEOWISE over Stonehenge, UK pic.twitter.com/75SsVvSDF5
— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) July 13, 2020

Its “tail” or “coma” is extremely visible, making it stand out against its predecessors, ATLAS and SWAN, as Space.com reports, which only had very faint paths of condensed heat following their paths.

C/2020 F3 (Neowise) 2020 july 12 UT 21.30, mountain location, 3 panels Tele f-135/2.8 and CCD filter blue,
tail >20° large https://t.co/lOCLdVvutT
Michael Jäger pic.twitter.com/up4FsWs2q7
— Michael Jäger (@Komet123Jager) July 13, 2020

While astronomers discover hundreds of comets every single year, every once in a while a “great” comet passes by our planet and appears considerably brighter. According to Space.com, the last comet that was of a comparable brightness was Comet Hale-Bopp in 1997.

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What an awe inspiring experience. A celestial visitor that has been around since the beginning of our universe. What stories it could tell, what sights it has beheld. How this cosmic being has brought humankind together. Regardless of race, color, sex, creed, age, profession, or any other distinguishing characteristics, we cannot help but gaze towards the heavens and become lost in its beauty. Take a minute to forget everything else going on right now. Just breathe, feel, love. We are all one world, never forget that. . . . Shot on the @sonyalpha A7RIV with the @sigmaphoto 105mm f/1.4 and 50mm f/1.4 Art lenses. . . #lestertsaiphotography #neowise #cometneowise #discoverwithalpha #sonyalpha #sonya7riv #sigmaart #mykgw #bbcearth #nationalgeographic #koin6news #fox12news #pnwphotographer #mthoodterritory #oregonexplored #pnwisbeautiful #pnwonderland #pnwadventurers #mthood #pnwphotography #portlandphotographer #pdxphotographer #pdxphotography #portlandphotography #comet #nightsky #myplanetdaily #earthfocus #keepportlandweird
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More on comets: NASA: Something Is Off About This Interstellar Comet

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Here Are The Most Amazing Shots of the NEOWISE Comet

Noise Cancelling Window Gadget Can “Mute” Street Sounds

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

A team of researchers have developed a special wall-mounted, noise-cancelling technology that can keep out the noise — even when windows are open.

Shhh

A team of researchers in Singapore have developed a window-mounted noise-cancelling technology that they say can keep the indoors quiet — even when windows are open to let cool air in, The New York Times reports.

The gadget is based on the same kind of tech you’d find in a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. An array of small speakers release sound waves sculpted with a computer and a microphone to cancel out sound from traffic, trains or even airplanes coming in from outside.

“In places like Singapore, we want to keep the windows open as much as possible,” inventor Bhan Lam, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and author of the paper published in Scientific Reports last week, told the Times.

Quietude

The idea is to cut down on the use of air conditioning and to prevent stale air from building up by keeping windows open.

“If you sit in the room, you get that same feeling like when you flick on the switch of noise-canceling earphones,” Lam added.

Tech still struggles to contain loud one-off sounds like car horns. It’s also limited to frequencies between 300 and 1,000 hertz — meaning it can’t mute human voices.

READ MORE: Scientists Say You Can Cancel the Noise but Keep Your Window Open [The New York Times]

More on noise cancelling: Noise-Cancelling Windows Are Perfect For People Already Rich Enough To Find Quiet in the City

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Noise Cancelling Window Gadget Can “Mute” Street Sounds

Tomorrow’s Mars Mission Could Explain the Red Planet’s Ferocious Dust Storms

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Danzig

The UAE's upcoming weather satellite launch could help explain what's going on with Mars' bizarre, planet-consuming dust storms.

Liftoff

On Tuesday, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will launch the nation’s first mission to Mars. If all goes well, it could help us understand the planet’s bizarre, violent weather.

The Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) will send an orbital satellite named Hope to Mars that will study its weather and atmosphere, The Verge reports. Once it’s in orbit, it could give scientists a better understanding of the Red Planet’s planet-sized dust storms — like the one ended the Opportunity mission in 2018.

Storm Chasers

Once it reaches Mars, Hope’s elliptical orbit will bring it close to the surface of the planet roughly once every two Earth days, The Verge reports, during which it will scan the atmosphere using infrared, ultraviolet, and visible light-recording instruments.

“You’re able to cover all local times, all areas of Mars, and that gives us the consistency that we require to be able to come and say that we do cover the day-to-night cycle for Mars,” Sarah bint Yousif Al Amiri, minister of State for Advanced Sciences in the UAE, told The Verge.

Space Race

The EMM is just one of three set to launch this month: China and the U.S. will also be sending spacecraft to Mars in the coming week. That’s because Mars and the Earth are in a position that makes the jump particularly easy — but that also means its crunch time for all three countries.

“There was a real risk that, after six years of work, we could end up missing our launch window,” EMM project manager Omran Sharaf told The Verge.

READ MORE: The UAE’s first interplanetary mission to Mars set for launch [The Verge]

More on Mars missions: Three Separate Countries Are Launching Mars Missions This Month

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Tomorrow’s Mars Mission Could Explain the Red Planet’s Ferocious Dust Storms