Vox: All Posts by Daniel A. Grosshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2021-12-05T08:00:00-05:00https://www.vox.com/authors/daniel-gross/rss2021-12-05T08:00:00-05:002021-12-05T08:00:00-05:00Antarctica was once a rainforest. Could it be again?
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<figcaption>An artist’s rendering of the rainforest that grew in Antarctica during a “supergreenhouse” period about 90 million years ago, by University of Leeds paleoartist James McKay. The painting was created based on evidence in a drill core recovered near the South Pole. | Alfred Wegener Institute/James McKay (CC-BY 4.0)</figcaption>
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<p>The coldest continent on Earth used to be as warm as Italy. Here’s how we know.</p> <p id="C89uCp"></p>
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<p id="fnJvI1">Not far from the South Pole, more than half a mile below the ocean in a region that was once covered by ice, a layer of ancient fossils tells a surprising story about the coldest continent on Earth. Today, the South Pole records average winter temperatures of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/01/south-pole-coldest-winter-record/">78 degrees Fahrenheit below zero</a>. But roughly 90 million years ago, the fossils suggest, Antarctica was as warm as Italy and covered by a green expanse of rainforest. </p>
<p id="VZwfzR">“That was an exciting time for Antarctica,” Johann P. Klages, a marine geologist who helped unearth the fossils, told Vox. “It was basically the last time the whole continent was covered by vegetation and probably also wildlife — dinosaurs, and all that.”</p>
<p id="X19bgM">Intrepid polar scientists like Klages, who works at the <a href="https://www.awi.de/en/">Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research</a> in Bremerhaven, Germany, are revealing new sides of the Antarctica we know today. In the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2148-5">April 2020 issue of the journal <em>Nature</em></a>, he and 39 colleagues described networks of fossilized tree roots that they pulled up from the seafloor in 2017. They’re a sign of just how much the polar climate has changed since the “supergreenhouse” of the Cretaceous period — and perhaps how much the climate could change again.</p>
<p id="orqMSF">Even since that paper, the Antarctic surprises have kept coming. In October, a Brazilian research team announced that it found <a href="https://polarresearch.net/index.php/polar/article/view/5487">75-million-year-old pieces of charcoal</a> on James Ross Island, hundreds of miles south of South America. In the journal <em>Polar Research</em>, the researchers concluded that “paleofires,” which were common in the rest of the prehistoric world, also scorched the Antarctic Peninsula. “That’s exciting work,” Klages said. “It’s the first evidence for these wildfires.”</p>
<p id="zZjimk">As climate change warms Antarctica and shrinks its enormous ice sheet, many scientists are wondering whether history could repeat itself. But relatively few research teams have the tools to work in a place where Titanic-sized icebergs pepper the ocean.</p>
<p id="ZwRceL">I sat down with Klages at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin to talk about how his team conducted research from the RV Polarstern, a research icebreaker that translates “North Star” and regularly carries around 50 scientists and 50 crew members to the Arctic and Antarctic. He told me about the place where his team drilled into the seafloor — an area where geology somehow brought layers of 90-million-year-old sediment, or “strata,” within reach of their enormous and powerful drill. </p>
<p id="Je2QUC">The layers, he said, are like the pages in a book. “You walk along the pages; you walk along history,” he said. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.</p>
<h4 id="0qLPmn">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="M4284y">Can you tell me a little bit about the 2017 voyage itself?</p>
<h4 id="u3fAxX">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="WtVZvh">All Antarctic expeditions I’ve been a part of are extremely exciting because everywhere you go, usually, it’s for the first time. It’s like this white spot on the map. Every time we go there we discover new things.</p>
<p id="L8dedt">Polarstern is one of the largest research icebreakers in the world — it can break through thick ice. That makes it possible to reach locations that are usually not reachable for other ships. In the Northern Hemisphere summer, it’s usually in the Arctic, and in the Southern Hemisphere summer, it’s usually in the Antarctic.</p>
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<cite>Courtesy of Johann Klages/AWI</cite>
<figcaption>Johann Klages stands aboard the research icebreaker RV Polarstern in inner Pine Island Bay, West Antarctica, in February 2017.</figcaption>
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<p id="pwvKwc">This particular cruise was exciting because we tried this special seafloor drill rig for the first time. It’s huge. It’s almost 10 tons. It needs seven 20-foot containers of equipment to be shipped. There are only two of them available on the planet right now. They were developed and built in Bremen, Germany, at the <a href="https://www.marum.de/en/index.html">Center for Marine Environmental Sciences</a> (MARUM).</p>
<p id="L8sQdS">For this drill rig, you need special conditions. It sits on the seafloor and it’s connected with a long cable, in this case about 1,000 meters, for power supply and a glass fiber cable that ensures the communication. We have [eight] HD cameras that are observing each step. We the scientists are standing behind the technicians, because they are the specialists, in the communication container with all the screens that show you what’s going on.</p>
<h4 id="r4Wfka">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="40XnXm">It must look like a cockpit of an airplane.</p>
<h4 id="P9qUtm">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="uwRL0Y">Yeah, or like in Houston when rockets go up. It’s very exciting. We know, when we drill, that no one has seen this material before.</p>
<p id="xEHxEW">It’s also extremely exciting because sea ice drifting toward the ship would be the end of the cable. Canceling the drill takes five to six hours. Therefore, we have a joint collaboration with the German aerospace center, and every day we get high-resolution imagery of the particular location where we drill. Then we have two helicopters on board. We fly around the ship to make sure there is no sea ice. </p>
<p id="cX5SAN">You need around 30 to 50 hours of operation time on one particular location. So for this time window, you have to make sure that everything runs relatively smoothly. </p>
<p id="yEGq1z">We had to drill through 25 meters [82 feet] of sandstone, which is always the worst to drill, especially when there’s water involved, because it crumbles and falls apart. It’s really annoying. The drilling crew wanted to cancel the drill because of the sandstone and because ice was coming. We had to decide. I think the ice was eight or nine hours away.</p>
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<cite>T.A. Ronge/AWI</cite>
<figcaption>From a container that serves as a control room, two technicians control the drill rig that sits below the ship on the seafloor.</figcaption>
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<h4 id="P6sUIl">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="LfXLtq">Why did you drill there?</p>
<h4 id="Y4lGBb">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="QsNjex">Because during past expeditions, with geophysical methods looking deep into the seafloor, we saw that the geological strata were kind of tilted. </p>
<h4 id="WiJdB9">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="SLrb9s">And that signals just how old it is.</p>
<h4 id="tVIo4z">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="guZxs1">Exactly. If you have tilted strata, some kind of bigger tectonic process brought it up. Then the ice eroded into it, so that these strata are so close to the surface — just a few meters below the surface.</p>
<h4 id="XbXw6B">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="nLRCXu">Is the drill sort of like a straw, in that it holds the sediment in place as it drills down?</p>
<h4 id="ogPYY7">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="wIa9zJ">Yeah, you have an inner and outer barrel. At the bottom, you have a diamond drill head. </p>
<p id="c3QEOB">The seafloor drill rig has two magazines in it — one with empty barrels and one with filled barrels. You pull out the inner barrel every 3.5 meters. We then go and get the material from the technicians. That was the first moment we realized we have something very special because it had a color that we never saw before in Antarctica. Very dark brown, and very fine-grained. </p>
<p id="uduzyD">At the surface, every once in a while, you could see these black spots. We were all wondering, what are these black spots about? Must be something organic. </p>
<p id="QTqZ4k">We decided to drill one more section, which means 3.5 meters, and then go away. And in those 3.5 meters, there were those exciting strata. If we hadn’t, there would have been nothing exciting, really. That made the difference.</p>
<p id="csMaxC">It’s always a combination of knowledge and good conditions, but then there are two more things: luck and intuition. If you don’t follow them, you shouldn’t go there in the first place.</p>
<p id="JjRXbM">We came home. The cores came home a couple of weeks later, shipped home on Polarstern. Then we decided to go to a hospital we have a collaboration with that has these human computed tomography (CT) scanners. When we first saw the CT data, that was the moment we realized we have something very special. It was this interconnected network of fossil roots. </p>
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<cite>Alfred Wegener Institute</cite>
<figcaption>This CT scan shows the fossilized tree roots that Klages and his colleagues found more than 80 feet below the seafloor in Antarctica. The yellow portion is the bottom of a layer of sandstone and the green portion shows the roots.</figcaption>
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<h4 id="oHy310">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="yVZWVG">Was there evidence of plant life in Antartica before you came along?</p>
<h4 id="UN5MfA">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="cNxFpl">Yes, but all of that evidence is 1,000 to 1,500 kilometers [about 600 to 900 miles] farther north. There was no evidence from near the South Pole. We reconstructed this environment only 900 kilometers away from the South Pole. </p>
<p id="xIgYtQ">No one really knew what the climate was like during the “supergreenhouse” period near the South Pole. But this is actually what you need when you want to know the severity of a particular climate in Earth’s past. [The poles are currently warming much more quickly than the rest of the planet, and as polar ice melts, global warming accelerates.] This is what we could reveal with this study. </p>
<p id="t3bP91">The problem in Antarctica is, right now, is the ice sheet. The particular site where we drilled was covered by grounded ice for millions of years, but since we are in an interglacial period right now, the ice retreated to a point that it just made it possible to get to it and drill into it.</p>
<h4 id="7ht7xl">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="hwVjE7">Could you describe what was happening in the atmosphere at the time that could have created these conditions?</p>
<h4 id="6eqY5e">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="6hQWQA">That was the final question we asked ourselves. Such a diverse environment with such mild temperatures — temperatures that today you have in northern Italy, for example. What is necessary to maintain that for a long stretch of time 90 million years ago? </p>
<p id="8MOGph">Therefore, we invited some climate modelers into our team. They came up with [a carbon dioxide concentration of] at least 1,100 parts per million CO2, which is four<strong> </strong>times preindustrial [the CO2 concentration before the Industrial Revolution]. This was needed, at least, to meet the conditions we reconstructed. </p>
<p id="cSLa6P">We knew this period was the warmest in the last 145 million years. Now we had much better numbers on the CO2 content.</p>
<p id="mdbzxn">The model still has a problem: It can’t really simulate well enough the gradient between lower latitudes and high latitudes. We now know that the gradient was very shallow.</p>
<h4 id="RtBEeW">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="TqjDA0">So it’s likely that the climate was hotter but more even at the time.</p>
<h4 id="WENW8P">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="NW0r0E">Yeah! This is something that models can’t do right now properly — to simulate this gradient. So there is a bug with the modeling.</p>
<p id="Z7iHie">This is now what brings it to the significance for the future of the climate, if we drift into a high-CO2 future. We are doing that right now. We are 420 parts per million CO2, something around that. If we go to this high-CO2 future, we know that models struggle. This is a chance to use moments in Earth’s past to calibrate those models, to improve their predictive capabilities for tomorrow.</p>
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<cite>T.A. Ronge/AWI</cite>
<figcaption>The view from RV Polarstern as the ship cruised through sea-ice fields in inner Pine Island Bay in 2017. During the Antarctic summer, the sun doesn’t set for months.</figcaption>
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<h4 id="5bDSlj">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="tdFxma">And the predictions your colleagues are starting to make suggest that it’s very concerning — but the presence of the ice sheet itself could protect us?</p>
<h4 id="aQRDQw">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="Prwbnn">Yes. We are quite lucky now that we have ice, and that two big areas of our planet are covered by permanent ice mass: Greenland and Antarctica. You have this self-cooling process. You have a gigantic mirror that sends short-wave radiation that comes in, back into space. If this is gone, this is transformed into heat. </p>
<p id="I2asqk">This is something that we should not take for granted. Ice is vanishing. Every year we go there, we see. [We think] “Oh my gosh — it’s really going quickly now.” The rapid changes going on are unprecedented, as far as we know so far from the geological past.</p>
<p id="KVhEP1">We are doing a big experiment right now. We take fossil fuels from the Earth’s crust that were deposited over millions of years, and usually would have been released back to the atmosphere over millions of years — but we did it within 150 years. Boom. That has never happened before. That has a massive impact. </p>
<p id="k8mlBa">This is something we need to incorporate when we talk about the future — to start learning what the planet already went through in its history. It’s the only chance we have. It’s not about environmental protection — it’s about human protection. It’s about us. </p>
<h4 id="I1GD5W">Daniel Gross</h4>
<p id="h4KJpf">When you set out to become a marine geologist, did you ever think you’d end up researching something so pressing — the future of our climate?</p>
<h4 id="95qdg4">Johann Klages</h4>
<p id="oqdRCa">No. You drift into things. I was just fascinated by the planet and by its history. We are lucky to be part of it. But this particular discovery — if someone would have told me the story like three years ago, I would have laughed. I never thought it would have such an impact.</p>
<p id="J22Ta6"><strong>Correction, December 6, 11:30 am:</strong> Klages told Vox after publication that his team used eight HD cameras to monitor the drill rig on the RV Polarstern, not 20.</p>
<p id="6umkbc"><strong>Correction, December 7, 10:30 am: </strong>A previous version of this story misnamed the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences. </p>
https://www.vox.com/22797395/antarctica-was-once-a-rainforest-could-it-be-againDaniel A. Gross2021-11-17T13:35:00-05:002021-11-17T13:35:00-05:00One of the billionaire scientists behind the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on what’s next
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<figcaption>Turkish-German scientist Özlem Türeci, who founded BioNTech with her husband Uğur Şahin, was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in March for work developing the BioNTech/Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. | Abdulhamid Hosbas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>BioNTech’s Özlem Türeci talks about the scientific process, the state of the pandemic, and the global vaccine gap.</p> <p id="gZRHQO"></p>
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<p id="P14wQY">When the novel coronavirus first reached Europe, the married scientists Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci were working in the small town of Mainz, Germany, at the helm of a biotech company that relatively few people had heard of. The couple founded BioNTech in 2008 to develop individualized vaccines for cancer patients. But the company specialized in a type of genetic material, messenger RNA, that had also shown promise for other diseases — including viral infections.</p>
<p id="Qtc7Xf">So when Şahin read an article about Covid-19 in January 2020, he and Türeci both recognized that their company’s mRNA technology might have something powerful to contribute. Türeci, BioNTech’s chief medical officer, led a team that rapidly whittled down 20 vaccine candidates to just one: BNT162b2, which could be described as the shot that changed the world. BioNTech partnered with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and in July 2020, the US placed a $1.95 billion order. A few months later, the German government gave BioNTech <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-germany-vaccine/biontech-wins-445-million-german-grant-for-covid-19-vaccine-idUSKBN2661KP">a $445 million grant</a> to speed up research and production. </p>
<p id="4nSJVL">The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was the world’s first approved Covid-19 vaccine, and it has helped protect more than a billion people from the coronavirus. The mRNA inside the shot instructs human cells to produce a protein that Türeci compares to a wanted poster. The protein warns the immune system to watch out for the coronavirus. </p>
<p id="pOINIl">Meanwhile, Şahin and Türeci became famous almost overnight. “We are incredibly proud to have such researchers in our country,” Angela Merkel, then-chancellor of Germany and a chemist by training, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-incredibly-proud-of-biontech-founders/a-55971775">said</a> in December 2020. In March, they were awarded one of <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/biontech-founders-receive-one-of-germanys-highest-honors/a-56716311">the nation’s highest honors</a>, the Knight Commander’s Cross of the Federal Order of Merit. Though Şahin and Türeci <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/business/biontech-covid-vaccine.html">are now billionaires</a>, they are known for living modestly, commuting to work by bicycle and working long hours in the lab. </p>
<p id="EzWVQs">But the company’s ascent has also come with new scrutiny. When I sat down with Türeci at the <a href="https://falling-walls.com/science-summit-2021/">Falling Walls Science Summit</a> in early November, BioNTech, its partner Pfizer, and its competitor Moderna had been drawing fierce criticism for huge, persistent gaps in access to Covid-19 vaccines. The vast majority of Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine doses have gone to a small minority of people — <a href="https://falling-walls.com/science-summit-2021/">roughly 16 percent</a> of the world’s population — who live in high-income countries.</p>
<aside id="2iga5V"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"Why are rich countries still monopolizing Covid-19 vaccines?","url":"https://www.vox.com/22759707/covid-19-vaccine-gap-covax-rich-poor-countries-boosters"}]}'></div></aside><p id="6j7ZLk">“It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions of dollars in profit every single hour, while just 2.5 percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus,” said Maaza Seyoum of the People’s Vaccine Alliance, which has joined the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-africa/african-union-backs-call-to-waive-intellectual-property-rights-on-covid-19-drugs-idUSKBN2AP1CP">African Union</a>, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01224-3">India, and the US government</a> in calling<strong> </strong>on vaccine producers to waive their patents so more countries and companies can produce them. “Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna have used their monopolies to prioritize the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving low-income countries out in the cold.”</p>
<p id="bKc4Y8">I asked Türeci about what BioNTech can do about vaccine inequity, and the company also provided a statement to Vox. “As a Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer we see it as our responsibility to support the worldwide supply of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by continuously increasing our manufacturing capacities,” a spokesperson said, adding that the companies are in the process of doubling their production capacity and plan to make more than 3 billion doses in 2022. “We are fully committed to supplying our vaccine to people around the world in all countries and across all income levels.”</p>
<p id="ButUck">Türeci also discussed the scientific process, the state of the pandemic, and what the past two years have been like. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.</p>
<p id="eaPPsD"><strong>Can you tell me about the first moment you realized that you and your team could play a big role in fighting Covid-19?</strong></p>
<p id="5u6cpq">It was the last weekend in January 2020, and my husband — who is with me the founder of the company — read about the virus. The pattern that was described made it very clear that we were already in the midst of a pandemic. It was very clear that a vaccine would be needed as fast as possible. And our technology, which we had optimized for moving fast from a known genetic sequence to vaccine design to manufacturing — it was very clear that it would contribute in this situation. This was the epiphany.</p>
<p id="NBx2B3"><strong>Your team had been working on mRNA vaccines for many years, and your company had recently sold shares to the public and received some major investments. BioNTech was in the right place at the right time — but, of course, this wasn’t by accident. What have you learned about preparing for the </strong><em><strong>next </strong></em><strong>problem that humans haven’t encountered yet?</strong></p>
<p id="EzMxik">Even though it might have seemed that way, this was not something which was developed overnight, as an immediate reaction. We started in the mid-1990s to experiment with mRNA. In 2012, we treated our first patient. These were long years of preparation. </p>
<p id="sK2i2F">The next threats are already there — but a sense of urgency is not there yet. It is very important, without already seeing the clear threat, to have a vision which can serve as a North Star. And with this perseverance and grit, to work toward actualizing the potential of the technology and trusting in the science to solve it.</p>
<p id="aawhO6">The second most important thing is to understand that we are a global community. We are scientists. It wasn’t too clear to us what nonscientific challenges — geopolitical ones, global ethical ones, societal ones — had to be overcome to make all this feasible. Understanding that those are major hurdles, and starting to fix them early on, is important.</p>
<p id="1boaI7"><strong>Your insight is that we have to treat future problems with the urgency of the present day. We can’t wait for them to emerge, but we should move forward as though they are already here.</strong></p>
<p id="i42dEp">Yes. And this is an anthropological thing. Our ancestors have been prepared by evolution to feel alerted and react to anything that is immediately there. We still have this in us. Even though we can visualize what will happen — take the climate, for example — we push it aside.</p>
<p id="kxEAZW"><strong>What do you wish you had done differently?</strong></p>
<p id="wsNVm7">There is actually nothing I wish I had done differently. It is difficult to reverse-engineer what would have been different with a different action. So the way we did it was the right one.</p>
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<cite>Burak Akbulut/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci answer questions from the audience at a public event in Oviedo, Spain, on October 23, the day after receiving the Princess of Asturias Award for their work developing the Covid-19 vaccine.</figcaption>
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<p id="1axDfM"><strong>What do you think the near future holds for the Covid-19 pandemic? What are you concerned about, and what gives you hope?</strong></p>
<p id="yQsMUs">What I think is important is that we continue to vaccinate. Infection rates and disease rates are rising again. These are not primarily in the vaccinated but rather the unvaccinated. So we need to reach them.</p>
<p id="NShCJJ">Equality of distribution is obviously a topic. We are trying to do our share by even further increasing our production and going to all those underserved regions for production facilities.</p>
<p id="CpvUMU">We have to continue to be alert and test each and every emerging variant to understand when the signal is there to adapt the vaccine to a potential escape variant — and not act prematurely or preemptively. </p>
<p id="295XV8">We have to also see what has been achieved. More than a billion humans have been vaccinated [with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine]. Several vaccines are available. So it’s also important to see the positive side of this.</p>
<p id="ELwgHz"><strong>How do you stay optimistic when cases rise? For example, right now, in Europe and here in Germany, cases are near record highs — after the rollout of this very effective vaccine.</strong></p>
<p id="eJ31gt">The same way that scientists always do: to focus on solutions which can help. For the current situation, this includes continuing with production and delivery, informing the public about the need for a third booster dose, and providing the data very transparently to the authorities.</p>
<p id="qCi80h"><strong>You mentioned </strong><a href="https://www.vox.com/22759707/covid-19-vaccine-gap-covax-rich-poor-countries-boosters"><strong>inequity across the world in distribution</strong></a><strong>. In wealthy countries, around 70 percent of people are vaccinated, but in low-income countries like Haiti or Tanzania, the rate is often under 10 percent. What else can governments and vaccine producers do to close that really large gap?</strong></p>
<p id="qZ0uJY">I think there is not much we can add on top other than what we are already doing as developers and also companies and institutions. <a href="https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22440986/covax-challenges-covid-19-vaccines-global-inequity">Covax</a>, for example, has to facilitate what is not so easy — to deliver to those countries. </p>
<p id="qA893y">I think also it is important to ensure the high quality of vaccines going to those countries, and therefore I don’t like this discussion about <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01242-1">patent waivers</a>. In those countries, there is some vaccine hesitancy. People want to be sure that the vaccine they get has the same high quality as we have here in the Western world, where regulatory authorities ensure that, and the manufacturers are qualified to produce the vaccine. It’s important that we keep vaccine quality on the same standard and continue to educate and inform the public there.</p>
<p id="KFMq1M"><em>[After speaking with Türeci, I asked advocates whether patent waivers could lead to the production of lower-quality vaccines. Anna Marriott, health policy manager at Oxfam — a member of the People’s Vaccine Alliance — said in a statement that it’s “nonsense” to claim that “the experience and expertise to develop and manufacture lifesaving medicines and vaccines does not exist in developing countries. This is just a false excuse that pharmaceutical companies are hiding behind to protect their astronomical profits.”]</em></p>
<p id="M1rQrI"><strong>Are you troubled by the low numbers of doses that are delivered to low-income countries?</strong></p>
<p id="8pztgg">Actually, I don’t think that low numbers in terms of input is a real problem. For example, 40 percent of what we have delivered — and this will continue — have gone to low- and middle-income countries. [<em>Vox asked BioNTech for data supporting that figure, but the company didn’t provide it and we were unable to independently verify the claim.</em>]</p>
<p id="DsGtsE">In the beginning, getting the framework right, from a geopolitical and logistical and distribution perspective, was a hurdle — and we have overcome that as a global society. Not fully, but important steps have been made, and this has to continue.</p>
<p id="QZNLnb"><strong>What advice would you give to the generation of scientists that may have to respond to the next pandemic?</strong></p>
<p id="Elmb36">One needs to be courageous to do things that are risky. On the other side, it’s very important to have humility. Threats of this unprecedented scale and of a global dimension — you can only overcome them with science if you get support from all involved. That needs an interaction which is based on humility and also on trust.</p>
<p id="1TdhYV"><strong>In the past year and a half, you [and your husband] have been extremely busy. Have you found any time for yourself?</strong></p>
<p id="oTRHB7">We<strong> </strong>are not really those who distinguish between life and work. We are blessed that what we do is what we love to do. So it’s not really about time for something special. What we do is already fulfilling.</p>
https://www.vox.com/22778144/pfizer-biontech-covid-19-vaccine-gap-ozlem-tureciDaniel A. Gross2021-09-02T13:45:00-04:002021-09-02T13:45:00-04:00How to think about hurricane recovery, according to 3 experts
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<figcaption>Destroyed homes and businesses are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida on Grand Isle, Louisiana, on August 31. | Gerald Herbert/AP</figcaption>
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<p>The history of hurricanes like Katrina and Ida says a lot about America’s future.</p> <p id="Dd4lZ1">The remnants of <a href="https://www.vox.com/22648189/hurricane-ida-new-orleans-louisiana-flood-climate-change-covid">Hurricane Ida </a>reached the New York City area on Wednesday, battering the region with record rainfall that flooded streets, subways, and basements. New York and New Jersey declared states of emergency, and officials in the Northeast had reported <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/ida-batters-new-york-city-region-flood-emergency-issued-first-n1278336">more than two dozen deaths</a> as of Thursday afternoon. Ida, which made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday, tied for the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/hurricane-ida-115ff1a54e18d9eee61a81afa8df9fad">fifth-strongest</a> hurricane in US history and has been blamed for deaths <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/09/02/deadly-flooding-new-york-new-jersey-hurricane-ida-louisiana/5692877001/">across seven states</a>. The toll is likely to rise as surveys of the damage continue.</p>
<p id="8RXWPj">Ida is one of a slew of summer disasters — among them <a href="https://www.vox.com/22538401/heat-wave-record-temperature-extreme-climate-change-drought">deadly heat waves</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/22527757/wildfires-heat-wave-drought-california-arizona-utah-colorado-climate">catastrophic fires</a> — reminding Americans that the climate crisis is already here. “We face some really challenging questions in Louisiana and across the United States,” Andy Horowitz, a Tulane University historian who wrote <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971714"><em>Katrina: A History, 1915-2015</em></a>, told Vox on Monday, the day after the storm swept through his home city of New Orleans. “I think that should, basically, scare the shit out of us.”</p>
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<cite>Spencer Platt/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Highways, roads, and the New York City subway closed due to heavy wind and rain from the remnants of Hurricane Ida.</figcaption>
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<p id="8VdsHw">Coastal communities urgently need to shore up infrastructure, from levees to sea walls to subway systems, and some will need to consider the much more drastic step of relocation, Horowitz said. In a time of worsening storms and sea-level rise, these conversations can’t be restricted to the Gulf Coast. “We’re talking about Staten Island as well,” he said. “We’re talking about the New Jersey coast. We’re talking about basically anyone who can drive to the water.”</p>
<p id="s6dWHg">The history of disasters like Hurricane Katrina, Horowitz said, can help us understand America’s possible future — both its vulnerabilities and its path to recovery. He said the policy responses, from lifesaving <a href="https://www.vox.com/22598883/infrastructure-deal-bipartisan-bill-biden-manchin">investments in infrastructure</a> to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/hurricane-ida-climate-change.html">ambitious climate policies</a> that could eventually stabilize global temperatures, should be sweeping and swift. </p>
<p id="7qK7FT">In the age of climate change, a livable future will depend not only on physical infrastructure but on social support systems and a disaster recovery process that is democratic and relentlessly focused on equity, experts told Vox. In the view of Khalil Shahyd, a Louisiana native and a senior policy adviser for equity and environment at the Natural Resources Defense Council, this process should prioritize people over property. </p>
<h3 id="IUFvON">Human choices have created a baseline of vulnerability</h3>
<p id="TKlmRn">Two days before Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana, Horowitz taught a class called “The Climate Crisis.” Over video chat from his home in New Orleans, he asked his students to close their eyes and think about what the climate crisis meant to them.</p>
<p id="EG3Xbb">The exercise was supposed to be theoretical, but Horowitz found himself thinking about how his shirt was wet with sweat: He had spent the morning moving pieces of patio furniture so Hurricane Ida wouldn’t turn them into projectiles. He also thought about what he would be doing that afternoon: picking up his two young children, evacuating the city, and driving to a rental apartment in Birmingham, Alabama.</p>
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<cite>Gerald Herbert/AP</cite>
<figcaption>Homes, businesses, and roads are flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in LaPlace, Louisiana.</figcaption>
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<p id="g6CLMt">The Gulf Coast of the US is vulnerable to deadly hurricanes like Katrina and Ida for a host of reasons, many of them man-made, as my colleagues Umair Irfan and Benji Jones <a href="https://www.vox.com/22648189/hurricane-ida-new-orleans-louisiana-flood-climate-change-covid">reported this week</a>. Ocean and air temperatures are rising because humans are burning fossil fuels, and rising temperatures can infuse storms with more energy and water vapor. The state’s oil and gas industry has contributed to a boom in low-lying waterfront construction, even as rising seas wash away parts of Louisiana’s coastline. Communities of color are often on the front lines.</p>
<p id="sZ1vmH">“There’s nothing natural or inevitable about those vulnerabilities,” Horowitz told Vox. Hurricanes should draw our attention to human choices, he said: our decisions about where to build, which communities can settle on high ground or behind levees, who should control shared resources such as power grids. (Louisiana’s private electricity provider, Entergy, suffered “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/us/new-orleans-power-outage.html">catastrophic transmission damage</a>” during Hurricane Ida that left a million people without power during a heat advisory; the company’s backup gas power plant, which was rammed through a local approval process <a href="https://thelensnola.org/2018/05/10/entergy-says-a-public-relations-firm-hired-people-to-speak-on-behalf-of-its-new-power-plant/">with help from paid actors</a>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/business/energy-environment/hurricane-ida-entergy-power-outage.html">did not come to the rescue</a>.)</p>
<p id="8IFEly">As Shahyd watched the news last week that Hurricane Ida would strike New Orleans, he had flashbacks to watching from afar as Hurricane Katrina approached the city. “You just get this dread,” he said from Washington, DC. “Am I going to have to watch my city drown again?” </p>
<p id="ez0ukj">Most of Shahyd’s family evacuated for Hurricane Ida, but one of his uncles stayed behind in a Morgan City mobile home, and one of his brothers stayed in Metairie because of another ongoing disaster — the Covid-19 pandemic. The brother quarantined at home because he worried that his son, who is 12 and vaccinated for Covid-19, had a breakthrough infection. “It could not have been worse timing for them,” Shahyd told me. “My brother was saying that he had never seen that much rain before in his life.”</p>
<p id="xfC2Hx">National disasters like Covid-19 and Hurricane Ida are “compounding crises,” said Allison Plyer, chief demographer at the Louisiana nonprofit The Data Center. “This is compounding trauma.” The difficulties are both psychological and practical: For many, 2021 has been another year of financial instability, Plyer added.</p>
<p id="Vuw20L">Disasters are especially catastrophic when they’re mapped onto poverty and inequality, as was true for both Katrina and Ida. “The most important thing to being resilient in a disaster is some savings in the bank, so you can put gas in your car and maybe pay for a hotel room,” Plyer said. But one out of every five households in New Orleans does not have access to a vehicle, she added, making evacuation extremely difficult.</p>
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<cite>Mario Tama/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>New Orleans’s largest housing project, B.W. Cooper (bottom), was demolished after Hurricane Katrina and replaced with Marrero Commons, a mixed-income community with two-story, townhouse-style buildings.</figcaption>
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<p id="d5kXzc">New Orleans was an unequal place before Hurricane Katrina. But more than a decade after the hurricane, <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2015/8/27/new_orleans_after_katrina_inequality_soars">the problem had worsened</a>. Twenty-six percent of New Orleans households — and more than a third of Black households — had <a href="https://prosperitynow.org/files/PDFs/profiles/Racial_Wealth_Divide_in_New_Orleans_RWDI.pdf">zero net worth</a>, according to a 2016 report by the nonprofit Prosperity Now. The same report showed that the unemployment rate for Black households was three times the rate for white households. More than 31 percent of Black households earned below the poverty line — six times the rate for white households.</p>
<p id="zzVseJ">Worsening inequity results in large part from nationwide policy choices, Plyer pointed out. “What drives inequity is federal policies, not local policies,” she said. “That acceleration of inequity, post-Katrina, was within a national context of accelerating inequity.”</p>
<p id="zGpVql">In a majority-Black city like New Orleans, inequity is closely linked to structural racism, Shahyd said. “The persistence, the maintenance, and the sustaining of poverty is the most egregious impact of racism,” with the exception of police killings, he said. “There’s no better representation of that fact than the city of New Orleans — a city that is so celebrated, a city that is so loved, a city that produces so much value, economically, spiritually, culturally. It’s dependent on the impoverishment of a great many of its people.”</p>
<h3 id="xjfxeA">Disaster recovery is climate policy</h3>
<p id="QUe6Ng">Hurricane Katrina helped reveal a pattern to American catastrophes: “Disasters accelerate pre-existing trends, and they also accelerate inequity,” Plyer said. Covid-19 has followed this trend, she said, and this summer’s disasters like Hurricane Ida probably will too — unless we collectively do something about it.</p>
<p id="0F5uAX">In 2006, about a year after Hurricane Katrina, four researchers published a perspective in Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences that considered <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/103/40/14653">60 years of New Orleans history</a>, ending with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In New Orleans, the storm sped up population and income declines, the paper concluded — not least because federal support was devastatingly slow to arrive, and local recovery policies were mismanaged.</p>
<p id="qa0cQs">The relief that did come was not shared equally. Post-Katrina policies supported homeowners, even though renters — who tend to be lower-income — made up half of New Orleans residents. “Missing from rapid recovery has been adequate attention to the needs of evacuees who lived in rental housing, especially public housing,” the 2006 study said. </p>
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<cite>Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency as Ida, downgraded to a tropical storm, caused flooding and power outages throughout the state.</figcaption>
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<p id="ZBQHAv">Shahyd added that developers and property owners had an outsized influence over the rebuilding of New Orleans: “If you’re not an owner of property, then you have no stake in or claim to much of the investments and resources that go into a post-disaster recovery.” He worries that this pattern could repeat itself after Hurricane Ida. </p>
<p id="f5D8l3">“I think what I most fear will be similar is that again, we have this sort of forced evacuation and depopulation of the city,” Shahyd said. “While many of us are going to be thinking about recovery and restoration, and getting home, other people are going to see that rapid, forced depopulation as an opportunity to reimagine urban space.”</p>
<p id="Yp1K2C">Climate policy should be an integral part of recovery, he added. “Support for oil and gas is a bipartisan issue in Louisiana,” Shahyd pointed out. Democratic Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has pledged reductions in fossil-fuel pollution, but he <a href="https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-climate-climate-change-john-bel-edwards-gulf-of-mexico-9fd12aa0235073580c846582f7f43117">has also resisted</a> some of President Biden’s climate policies and <a href="https://www.vox.com/22543816/offshore-oil-gulf-mexico-democrats-climate-change">taken steps to protect fossil fuel industries</a>. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)</p>
<p id="6Mdof3">“Louisiana will continue to get hit with bigger and more frequent storms, and then require federal emergency declarations, and all these federal resources — all the while we’re still continuing to pump the oil, refine the gas, burn the fossil fuels as the dominant sector of our economy,” Shahyd said. “The state has to begin to take more responsibility.”</p>
<p id="12hCGT">When it comes to climate change, Horowitz added, “There is no policy solution under serious consideration in the US right now that risks being too big for the challenge.”</p>
<h3 id="7k4MQB">Investing in a safer and more livable world</h3>
<p id="H3SKVG">Plyer lives in Louisiana, but she spent the week following the news of the storm from her sister’s house in New Jersey. On Wednesday, Ida reached her all the way from the Gulf of Mexico, and she spent the night mopping water out of a neighbor’s basement. At least one person died in the county where her sister lives. </p>
<p id="uDADmX">“The good news is that we have the technology now to really see these hurricanes coming,” Plyer said. “The bad news is that we haven’t made the investments in infrastructure and equity to ensure that our communities can be resilient in the face of these disasters.”</p>
<p id="wV3X5L">For all the reasons for pessimism in American history, Plyer said, she did find one reason to be hopeful: “There’s a few examples of places hit by disasters that broke from their historical paths.”</p>
<p id="9jDNy9">This process of changing the future depends on three things, she went on. First, communities should use the interruption in the status quo to transform key institutions. Second, they should take advantage of large recovery investments to strengthen those institutions. And third, they should capitalize on new opportunities, such as renewable energy. </p>
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<cite>Brontë Wittpenn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Due to the threat of encroaching wildfire flames from the Caldor Fire, evacuation orders were issued for all of South Lake Tahoe, California, on August 30.</figcaption>
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<p id="bx8Ska">As disasters affect more of the US, from California to Louisiana to New Jersey, more places will grapple with climate change and try to recover from shocks in ways that build resilience. “The future is here,” Plyer said. “We have to prepare for climate change, and have the infrastructure and housing and systems of support that we need to adapt.”</p>
<p id="79MGFC">And as communities prepare for the worst and do their best to recover from disasters, they should empower local residents to make decisions themselves, Shahyd and Horowitz said.</p>
<p id="Tq7ef6">The value of a city like New Orleans, Shahyd said, “is not based on its real estate, but its people.” Recovering communities should elevate the voices of the most vulnerable residents, he said, and allow them to choose whether to return and rebuild or relocate. “If we organize people, then they will represent themselves.”</p>
<p id="TpOu1T">“It seems most important to me that we have a relentless focus on the legitimacy of a democratic process that brings about those decisions,” Horowitz said. “People have to feel collective authorship of these decisions.”</p>
<p id="iGZmVC">Disaster recovery and climate adaptation sound daunting, Horowitz went on, but they can also be hopeful. “When you think about what the solutions might be, they’re often phrased in frightening terms about displacement or retreat or people losing their jobs,” he said. “But in fact, the solution, the redress to the climate crisis, would build a more safe, secure, viable, livable, humane world.”</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2021/9/2/22652426/hurricane-ida-disaster-recovery-climate-change-policyDaniel A. Gross