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Opinion | The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable | Zeynep Tufekci. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/13/opinion/thepoint#measles-outbreak-vaccine

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The Increase in Measles Cases Is Utterly Avoidable

The World Health Organization has reported a “staggering” increase in the number of measles cases and deaths around the world. Millions of these victims are in poor countries and war zones, where vaccination programs have faltered because of the pandemic, violence or a lack of resources. In 2022, there were an estimated nine million measles cases globally, with 136,000 deaths.

Increasingly, measles outbreaks have been taking place in wealthier countries, largely because of vaccine refusal. This is a dangerous situation — and not just for the willfully unvaccinated.

Measles is airborne, wildly contagious and deadly. While the measles vaccine is greatly protective, losing herd immunity against the disease would result in many victims, and not just those who are willfully unvaccinated.

A small percentage of fully vaccinated people will develop breakthrough measles infections if exposed to the disease. While their cases may be mild, they can transmit the disease to others. That’s how measles will spread to infants too young to be vaccinated, older people and the immunocompromised. (In the United States, babies get vaccinated against measles between 12 and 15 months of age.) Because the vaccinated can have few to no symptoms, vaccinated breakthrough cases are easy to miss — until that potentially deadly transmission.

Some Republican politicians and state legislatures have toyed with removing or weakening vaccine mandates against measles, mumps and rubella in children. The number of Republicans who believe parents should be able to forgo vaccines for their children — even if that choice increases the risk of disease to others — is now up to 42 percent. That’s more than double the number before the pandemic, when the percentages were similar between the parties.

Make no mistake: If efforts to remove these mandates succeed, there will be more outbreaks. Many unvaccinated children will die horrible deaths, while the vaccinated will be largely spared. But many babies, grandparents and immunocompromised patients will get sick and die, too.

In a sane world, our country would allocate the resources to get vaccines to those in poorer countries and conflict zones and would refuse to budge on compulsory childhood vaccines. The alternative should be unthinkable.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Vaccination

Amnesty International accuses Israeli forces of killing Palestinians in the West Bank with impunity. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news/amnesty-international-accuses-israeli-forces-of-killing-palestinians-in-the

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Amnesty International said on Monday that Israeli forces were killing Palestinians in the West Bank with “near total impunity” as the world’s attention focused on Gaza, demanding in a new report that the International Criminal Court step up its investigation into Israel’s conduct in the Israeli-occupied area.

In the West Bank, Israeli forces have used live fire to disperse Palestinian protests, attacked people trying to help the injured and carried out deadly arrest raids that have spread fear throughout Palestinian communities, Amnesty International said in its report. It said the Israeli forces’ actions added to the country’s “well-documented track record of using excessive and often lethal force to stifle dissent and enforce its system of apartheid against Palestinians.”

The human rights organization said that Israel’s use of unlawful force in the West Bank had sharply escalated since Oct. 7, when a Hamas-led attack from Gaza killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, according to Israeli authorities. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to health officials there.

The Israeli military has described its actions in the West Bank as counterterrorism efforts necessary to prevent further attacks. Israel has strongly denied prior accusations that it has committed the crime of apartheid.

Israeli military operations have raised alarms from several human rights groups, including the United Nations human rights office, which called in December for Israel to “end unlawful killings” of Palestinians in the West Bank and to immediately stop the use of “military weapons and means during law enforcement operations.”

Since Oct. 7, Israeli forces in the West Bank have killed at least 360 Palestinians and injured 4,270, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Sunday. Last year was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since the office began recording casualties in 2005, and about 70 percent of those killings were reported during Israeli military operations, O.C.H.A. has said.

Amnesty’s report detailed its investigations into four incidents that it said were emblematic of the recent escalation, and renewed its call for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, to take action. In 2021, the I.C.C. opened an investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian militant groups in Israeli-occupied areas, but many Palestinian groups have criticized the pace and focus of the inquiry.

Amnesty’s director for global research and policy, Erika Guevara-Rosas, called for Mr. Khan to investigate the killings in the West Bank as possible war crimes, saying in the report that “an international justice system worth its salt must step in.”

#Palestine #Cisjordanie #Amnesty_international

Opinion | Boeing Is Missing Much More Than Four Door Bolts - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/opinion/thepoint#boeing-door-bolts

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Cette affaire Boeing est un révbélateur de la manière dont le capitalisme néolibéral est devenu une manière de singer dans tous les domaines les pratiques du capitalisme numérique. Go fast and break things, soyez agiles, on apprend des erreurs... Une bascule radicale de la culture des ingénieurs vers les pratiques des auditeurs et des commerciaux.

There it is, the probable answer to why the exit door plug on the Boeing 737 Max Alaska Airlines flight blew out in the air. A National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report on the incident, released today, says that four bolts on the door plug were missing.

Those four bolts, which prevent the door from sliding up, are removed on purpose when mechanics have to take the door off for maintenance or inspection, as was done last September, according to the report. But somehow, when the installation was over, they weren’t there. No bolts — nothing to stop the door from sliding up and then off.

Preliminary N.T.S.B. reports like this one focus on establishing facts rather than spelling out who was at fault, which will wait for the final report. But this plane was practically new, and the Boeing chief executive, David Calhoun, has already acknowledged that it was a “quality escape” that caused the blowout.

Everything so far indicates that Boeing is a company plagued by shoddy quality control. Just yesterday, it disclosed that a supplier had found “two holes may not have been drilled exactly to our requirements” on about 50 unfinished Boeing 737 Max planes, requiring more work on the planes and delaying their delivery.

How could all this happen?

This morning, before heading to Capitol Hill to testify before the House Transportation Committee, the F.A.A. administrator Mike Whitaker stopped by CNBC to discuss everything the agency has done to try to get ahead of this: slowing Boeing production lines, revoking certain exemptions, getting more inspectors on the ground, etc.

But he also said something that really goes to the heart of the matter. Pressed by the host about the root causes, Whitaker said, “The system is designed really as an audit system, and I think that hasn’t worked well enough.”

Our airline safety system assumes that airplane manufacturers are also deeply invested in upholding safety standards, so the F.A.A. oversight focuses on identifying new problems, improving existing systems and auditing to make sure existing standards are properly upheld.

What happens if a company instead focuses more on what it could get away with in terms of cost-cutting?

That’s how we get to a world where audits alone will not have “worked well enough.” The missing bolts may have caused the door to blow out, but it’s the missing corporate ethos that we should examine to understand the root cause.

#Boeing #Zeynep_Tufekci