British scientists look at a way to boost vaccine effectiveness
Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine
The immune system becomes less efficient as people grow older, making it harder for the body to fight infections and respond fully to vaccines.
This gradual decline, known as immunosenescence, can increase vulnerability to age-related health problems and leave some older adults with weaker protection after vaccination.
New claims jump - Why This Matters
Eddie Exxe, Labor & Workers
26,700 Rhode Islanders were counted as unemployed in July,
and the state's jobless rate has climbed nearly two percentage points in a year
while running above New England's for ten straight quarters — meaning a harder
job hunt and thinner leverage for workers here than in neighboring states.
Here's the thing about a 400-job loss in a state with
510,300 payroll jobs: on its own, it's noise. It's eight hundredths of one
percent. If that were the only number in the July employment bulletin, nobody
would write about it.
But it isn't the only number.
The Department of Labor and Training's July figures show jobs at Rhode Island businesses fell by 400 from June, and the state's unemployment rate rose to 4.5 percent. Total nonfarm jobs came in at 510,300, down from a revised June figure of 510,700. Over the year, jobs are still up 6,200, or 1.2 percent. So far, so mixed.
Then look at the unemployment insurance claims.
Initial UI claims averaged 1,559 per week in July. In June,
that average was 825. That is close to a doubling in a single month, and it's
up 109 claims per week from July 2023. New claims are the closest thing the
state has to a real-time signal — people don't file for unemployment because a
statistical model told them to. They file because they just lost a job.
And the year-over-year comparison on the jobless rate is the
number that should stop you. In July 2023, Rhode Island's unemployment rate was
2.7 percent. It is now 4.5 percent. That's a jump of one and eight-tenths
percentage points in twelve months. There were 26,700 Rhode Islanders counted
as unemployed in July, up 1,200 over the month.
Charlestown unemployment is comparatively low:
“’Bombing boats’ to stop drugs isn’t just cruel and illegal—it’s futile,” said one expert.
Brad Reed for Common Dreams
The Washington Post reported on Monday that a Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) analysis has concluded that the boat-bombing campaign,
which many legal experts and human rights groups consider acts
of murder, has not “reduced the amount of cocaine entering”
the country.
“DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the
supply or price of cocaine in the United States,”
reported the Post, “and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats
and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming
close to coastlines, where US forces are less likely to open fire.”
The Post added that US Department of Defense (DOD) officials
last month gave a closed-door briefing toe members of Congress where they
acknowledged the strikes had not reduced the purity of cocaine entering the US
from Latin America.
In an interview with the Post, a DEA official said that drug
cartels had several options in addition to smuggling contraband by boats and
simply switched tactics to avoid being hit by US strikes, which so far have
killed at least 221 people.
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| This was posted by Donald Trump on his website Truth Social yesterday. Trump has just launched a $100,000 a month subscription service so banks and investors can get advance notices of his posts especially those that will manipulate the markets. |
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| Is he planning to attack Iran with Minutemen and fixed bayonets or by yelling at them? |
Choice facing Democrats in September 9 primary
By Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current
Yet the five-candidate contest for the seat currently occupied by Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos has received somewhat scant attention, WPRI 12 politics editor Ted Nesi remarked to four of the candidates shortly before the cameras rolled on a debate taped Friday morning at WPRI’s studios in East Providence.
As if to commemorate the occasion of their first televised debate, the TV station had recently purchased a new set of podiums with animated monitors on the front. Xay Khamsyvoravong, a Newport city councilor and former mayor of the City by the Sea, joked that the podiums were “custom designed for our respective heights.”
From behind those new podiums, the candidates — Matos, Khamsyvoravong, Providence City Councilor Sue AnderBois and former state Sen. Cindy Coyne — mostly stood on common ground.
The four Democrats unanimously supported the state’s new millionaires’ tax. All four said they preferred Rhode Island’s 2033 deadline for achieving 100% renewable electricity, rather than set a new deadline of 2050 as Gov. Dan McKee has suggested.
None offered an endorsement in the Providence mayoral race when asked.
And the quartet agreed McKee was right to sign the charter school moratorium.
The sharpest disagreement may have jutted out from the candidates’ different ideas about what a good relationship between governor and lieutenant governor should look like in a state where the two officeholders are elected separately.
This is what happens when you gut public health
That’s the concern of food safety leaders across the U.S. who are raising alarms over federal cuts they say have made it harder to detect and stop the spread of foodborne illnesses, such as the recent outbreaks of cyclospora, which has sickened thousands in dozens of states. And they’re especially worried the next pathogen will be much more deadly.
Food safety in the U.S. is monitored by a piecemeal system of state and federal agencies. That network is in charge of detecting, investigating, and stopping outbreaks of foodborne illnesses. Key to the system is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s FoodNet program, created after four children died from E. coli in hamburgers in the early 1990s. States participating in the program, officially called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, contact labs to get case data that can signal when a problem is emerging.
But in Donald Trump’s second term, his administration has slashed billions of dollars in public health funding and fired thousands of workers at federal health agencies. It has also curtailed FoodNet, stopping the program’s mandatory tracking of cyclospora and five other pathogens that together kill hundreds of people in the U.S. each year.
“You’re basically allowing for outbreaks to continue without being figured out. Invariably more people will get sick,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle-area food safety lawyer and advocate who has filed lawsuits against Taco Bell on behalf of people who allege they were sickened by cyclospora after eating there.
Dr. Oz says you don't need it anymore
Jake Johnson for Common Dreams
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
(CMS), headed by Mehmet Oz, announced “the conclusion of the Part D Premium
Stabilization Demonstration” for the coming year, just months before the start
of Medicare open enrollment. Oz characterized the
subsidy program as a “bailout”
for insurance companies and said that “premiums will go up by less than $10 for
most Medicare recipients.”
But The Wall Street Journal,
which reported the administration’s move ahead of the public
announcement, noted that nearly half of Medicare Part D plan enrollees would
likely see increases “largely in the $11 to $20 range a month.” The subsidy
program, established in the wake of the Biden-era Inflation
Reduction Act, cut the average Part D premium by more than 25% this year.
Trump and his allies in Congress apply "Death of a Thousand Cuts"
Let’s compare the words of the two presidents:
LBJ:
No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents.
It’s not possible for us to take care of… Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.
The comparison speaks volumes. One is a leader who
understood that the federal government has a crucial role in the protecting the
health and well-being of our most vulnerable citizens—including the poor,
disabled, and the elderly. The other is a president who claims to support
Medicare and then says that the federal government can’t afford it because
of his illegal war in Iran. So much for supporting Medicare.
But this goes deeper than Trump’s rhetoric. The Medicare
program, like Social
Security, is at a pivotal point in its history. The Part A hospital) trust fund must be fortified so that
it doesn’t run dry in the 2030s. (There are reasonable solutions that Congress
could enact without hurting seniors.) So far, though, we have heard no
constructive ideas from Trump.
More urgently, though, the Trump
administration is actively undermining the “traditional Medicare”
program that LBJ signed into law. The administration has begun a pilot program
to use AI bots to determine whether traditional Medicare
patients will be covered for procedures their doctors have ordered. This
appears to be an attempt to cut costs by erecting obstacles to medically
necessary care—with decisions made by bots instead of human beings.
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Priorities
By David
Dayen
Yesterday was the 61st anniversary of the signing of
Medicare and Medicaid, a promise by the government to at least care for the
oldest and most vulnerable people in our society. Today is the deadline for
public comment on a rule that could force severely ill patients with cancer,
HIV, and other ailments to get out of their hospital beds and go to work if
they want the government to keep that promise.
The new rule, which was spurred by cuts to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) but was not required in the text, adds a layer of bureaucracy for “medically frail” individuals who got a statutory exemption from the law’s new work requirements for health coverage.
Medical frailty has long been a concept in
Medicaid, giving patients suffering from serious conditions the ability to
access coverage. But the administration’s interim final rule published last
month said that not only would individuals have to exhibit one of the medically
frail conditions, but their condition would have to “significantly impair”
their ability to work.
“That’s not an existing standard, and there’s no data source
for that information,” said Jennifer Wagner with the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities (CBPP). This means that states, which are partners in
Medicaid, will have to establish an entire regime for verifying “significant
impairment” on the fly, and justify it to a federal government that is quick to
say that anything resembling expansion of assistance to the poor is actually
fraud. “There’s language in the [rule] that says ‘we will hold states
accountable’ if they don’t follow this unclear definition precisely,” Wagner
said.
So people with serious medical maladies—osteosarcoma
patients suffering severe bone weakness, for instance—will have to jump through
very undefined bureaucratic hoops to “prove” they cannot work 80 hours a month,
with the risk of a coverage loss if that’s denied. Even a temporary coverage
gap could be serious. “They will die, they will become sick,” said Carl Schmid,
executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute in Washington. “That’s
why we pushed so hard for the exemption, because we know the ramifications of
people losing access to health care.”
Schmid cited estimates that
145,000 Americans living with HIV could be affected by the change. About 40
percent of all Americans with HIV rely on Medicaid, according to Schmid.
Vaccine stupidity has a long history
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| A drawing published by the London Society for the Abolition of Compulsory Vaccination in the late 1800s. Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia |
As long as there have been vaccines, there have been people who doubted their science and safety.
Back in 19th-century England, people rioted against a mandatory smallpox vaccine, claiming that it violated civil rights and was an affront to human bodily integrity. In the United States, organizations dedicated to resisting vaccines have existed since the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brooklyn was established in 1894.
Researchers generally refer to people who do not follow the standard advice of health professionals about vaccines, by either refusing or delaying some or all vaccines, as vaccine hesitant. Today, vaccine hesitancy is most famously associated with the Make America Healthy Again movement and its standard-bearer, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Public health advocates and science communicators have largely tried to counter these ideas by offering accurate, factual information. But as a medical humanities researcher studying how groups that embrace vaccine hesitancy craft their message, I’ve learned that part of why vaccine hesitancy is so hard to combat is how these groups use storytelling to spread their views.
Vaccine-hesitant groups have fewer limitations than pro-vaccine groups on the kinds of stories they can tell about the development and impact of vaccines. While science-driven messaging that encourages vaccination has to be faithful to the complex and often uneventful reality of science, vaccine-skeptic stories tend to make more dynamic claims.
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Pencils are more expensive. So are notebooks, scissors, glue sticks — just about every back-to-school item that families will load into their literal or virtual carts this summer has gone up in price at a time when American families already feel crushed by rising costs.
According to one analysis of the 21 most common school supply items by the Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation, two progressive think tanks, prices are up about 7.7 percent with parents paying an average of $173.45 for their school supply haul. That’s an even bigger jump than last year. Add to that an 11 percent hike in prices for school lunch essentials — from the literal tons of blueberries needed to feed young children to apple juice — and costs balloon to nearly $4,000 a year to cover supplies and meals.
That data was first shared exclusively with The 19th. The analysis is based on weekly retail transaction data on millions of products collected by NielsenIQ from about 50,000 retailers.
With school supply costs outpacing inflation, many families — and especially the women who do the majority of purchases in American households — are going to feel the sticker shock, said Lindsay Owens, the president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative.
“Women in this country are rip-roaring mad about the price hikes that they're absorbing. They're trying to manage household finances and budgeting. They're trying to feed their kids healthy food,” Owens said. “The work is getting harder of providing for your family.”
Here are the school supplies with the biggest spikes in price:
On the lunch side:
Driving up some of these costs are tariffs and the war on Iran.
