ABSTRACT
In 2020, anti-Asian racism re-emerged during the coronavirus pandemic in Germany and elsewhere, manifesting in media narratives, and evoking different forms of violence and exclusion, especially in public space. Racialisation as an everyday process creates "counter-frames” by racialised groups. They are constructed in relation to institutionalised interpellation as "the other.” Building on Feagin's concept of "white framing” and "counter-framing” and Löw's concept of space, this paper discusses the effects of racialisation, coping and anti-racist resistance strategies as developed by the Asian diaspora. Social change regarding racism will be analysed through Foroutan's concept of "postmigrant society.” We based this study on a convenience sample of people with Asian heritage which we conducted in 2020 in Germany. In addition, we included a diary study for which a subset has been sampled. We argue that the pandemic influenced the formation of counter-frames against anti-Asian racism in the specific context of Berlin. © The Author(s) 2023.
ABSTRACT
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, international access to COVID-19 vaccines and other health technologies has remained highly asymmetric. This inequity has had a particularly deleterious impact on low- and middle-income countries, engaging concerns about the human rights to health and to the equal enjoyment of the benefits of scientific progress enshrined under articles 12 and 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. In response, the relationship between intellectual property rights and public health has reemerged as a subject of global interest. In October 2020, a wholesale waiver of the copyright, patent, industrial design, and undisclosed information sections of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS Agreement) was proposed by India and South Africa as a legal mechanism to increase access to affordable COVID-19 medical products. Here, we identify and evaluate the TRIPS waiver positions of World Trade Organization (WTO) members and other key stakeholders throughout the waiver's 20-month period of negotiation at the WTO. In doing so, we find that most stakeholders declined to explicitly contextualize the TRIPS waiver within the human right to health and that historical stakeholder divisions on the relationship between intellectual property and access to medicines appear largely unchanged since the early 2000s HIV/AIDS crisis. Given the WTO's consensus-based decision-making process, this illuminates key challenges faced by policy makers seeking to leverage the international trading system to improve equitable access to health technologies.
ABSTRACT
The CRyogenic InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph (CRIRES) Upgrade project CRIRES+ extended the capabilities of CRIRES. It transformed this VLT instrument into a cross-dispersed spectrograph to increase the wavelength range that is covered simultaneously by up to a factor of ten. In addition, a new detector focal plane array of three Hawaii 2RG detectors with a 5.3 μm cutoff wavelength replaced the existing detectors. Amongst many other improvements, a new spectropolarimetric unit was added and the calibration system has been enhanced. The instrument was installed at the VLT on Unit Telescope 3 at the beginning of 2020 and successfully commissioned and verified for science operations during 2021, partly remotely from Europe due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The instrument was subsequently offered to the community from October 2021 onwards. This article describes the performance and capabilities of the upgraded instrument and presents on sky results. © 2023 The Author(s).
ABSTRACT
We describe the fifth edition of the CheckThat! lab, part of the 2022 Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). The lab evaluates technology supporting tasks related to factuality in multiple languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, German, Spanish, and Turkish. Task 1 asks to identify relevant claims in tweets in terms of check-worthiness, verifiability, harmfullness, and attention-worthiness. Task 2 asks to detect previously fact-checked claims that could be relevant to fact-check a new claim. It targets both tweets and political debates/speeches. Task 3 asks to predict the veracity of the main claim in a news article. CheckThat! was the most popular lab at CLEF-2022 in terms of team registrations: 137 teams. More than one-third (37%) of them actually participated: 18, 7, and 26 teams submitted 210, 37, and 126 official runs for tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The global pandemic of the coronavirus 2019 disease (COVID-19) is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In addition to respiratory failures, COVID-19 patients exhibited cardiac complications. Studies observed the direct infection and replication of SARS-CoV2 in human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) accompanied by cytopathic effects. However, the underlying mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-mediated CM death remain poorly understood. In addition, the therapeutic potential of remdesivir (RDV) on CMs has yet to be answered. Methods and Results: We confirmed that SARS-CoV-2 is infectious to and effectively replicates in hPSC-CMs and is cytopathic to hPSC-CMs. We also found that RDV effectively inhibited viral replication at a concentration of 50 nM. RNA-seq analyses demonstrated that expression of immune responsive genes was elevated in SARS-CoV-2 infected hPSC-CMs. Immunostaining and an ELISA assay further revealed formation of inflammasomes and secretion of inflammasome-mediated cytokines, such as IL-1β, IL-18, and IL-6 in SARS-CoV-2 infected hPSC-CMs. RNA-seq analyses showed gene profile changes in SARS-CoV-2 infected hPSC-CMs corroborating with activation of inflammatory signals and cell death pathways. While gene profiles of 0.1 μM RDV-treated SARS-CoV-2-infected hPSC-CMs showed reversal of such changes, a high dose (10 μM) RDV-treated CoV-2-infected hPSC-CMs showed changes in 44% of genes expressed compared to non-RDVtreated CoV2-infected hPSC-CMs. Among those, expression of protein stability related genes, such as genes associated with autophagy and protein ubiquitination increased while expression of antiviral responsive genes decreased. In addition, a high dose of RDV inhibited expression of mitochondrial genes, particularly MitoComplex I and V compositions, which are related to energy production. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that SARS-CoV2 induced inflammasome in hPSC-CMs, which can underlie cardiac damage in addition to direct cytopathic effects. In addition, RDV can reduce inflammasome when introduced early after SARS-CoV2 infection while a high-dose can aggravate cytopathic effects by potential toxicity to mitochondria.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored deficits in global cooperation in public health and exacerbated trends of protectionism, nationalism and xenophobia, presenting clear dangers to the hope of global solidarity in public health. Global cooperation is critical to making gains against the coronavirus;defection will create losses. The World Health Organization (WHO), arguably the international organization best placed to coordinate global cooperation, has lost traction as a global health leader. Even though the WHO has undertaken a number of laudable initiatives during this pandemic, it has also shown its limitations. The urgent need for global cooperation in public health is discussed in relation to the race to discover a COVID-19 vaccine and the complexity of deploying vaccines equitably. Given the need for leadership here, Canada is well positioned to fill in the political vacuum and assume a critical role as an advocate for global cooperation in public health. © 2021 Longwoods Publishing Corp.. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has exposed weaknesses in global health, and the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines has brought the importance of global cooperation to the forefront of the pandemic. Since its writing, I have rethought the vision I advanced in my lead paper (Kohler 2021b), as recently Canada has shown its preference for a “my nation first” approach in turning to COVAX to secure vaccines for Canadians, undercutting its moral leadership and commitment to global health. We remain without a strong global public health leader who is able to ensure that public health cooperation advances during this pandemic. While the authors of the commentaries differ on where and how the WHO requires changes, there is agreement on the critical need for its institutional reform. If global health goals are to be achieved, a genuine commitment to global health equity and global health coordination is urgently needed. © 2021 Longwoods Publishing Corp.. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Polymers play versatile roles in the pandemic. They range from personal protective equipment with goggles and visors made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polycarbonate (PC), to mouth-nose coverings with inner layers of fine, melt-blown polypropylene fleece, and finally to swabs made of polystyrene and nylon or viscose that are used in diagnostics. BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA vaccines, which were the first to be approved as corona vaccines in Europe, are based on sequence-defined polyanions, which can easily and rapidly be produced and adapted to occurring virus mutations. Consequently, there will be no quick end to the pandemic without the use of polymers. Polymers are not only indispensable in this pandemic in personal protective equipment, diagnostics and ultimately in therapy. The research in antiviral materials that was spurred during the COVID-19 pandemic may position us well for future pandemics. Self-sterilizing masks are already commercially available and, because they are reusable, have the advantage of requiring far fewer masks to be procured than is the case with disposable masks. This could avoid future mask shortages. Antiviral surface coatings, which can be activated by external stimuli such as sunlight, can help to reduce the viral load on frequently touched surfaces and help to prevent virus transmission. In addition, peptide-polymer conjugates offer the opportunity to further optimize mRNA vaccines. Because these conjugates can be tailored to target immune cells, they reduce the risk of allergic reactions and side effects, which in turn could result in greater acceptance in the population and increase the willingness to get vaccinated.
ABSTRACT
As stated in the framework provided by the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model (Bakker and Demerouti, 2008), the demand dimension corresponds to the constraints imposed by the organization such as work pressure and the resource dimension corresponds to the advantages offered by the organization such as autonomy or social support. These two dimensions of demands and resources thus counterbalance each other and define the level of work commitment and finally its consequences in terms of performance. In the context of telework, which was the rule during the period of containment due to the COVID crisis, our qualitative field survey (involving more than 80 people) revealed numerous human risks such as demotivation, difficulties in resting on clear work instructions or a loss of meaning at middle management level had a direct effect on human reliability (Dhillon, 2013) and generally on work engagement. The problem is that the risk of a decline in work commitment is not something visible to the organization. We therefore propose to combine the JD-R model with the Bow-Tie method (Khakzad et al., 2012). Thus, the event becomes the work engagement, the threats, the demands (here we add the confinement) and the resources and the consequences correspond to the performance. This model is illustrated for the case of student recruitment and shows that a series of preventive controls must be put in place upfront. ©ESREL2020-PSAM15 Organizers.Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.