A Human Tsunami

"Migration of the displaced as an Anthropocene augury"

One in every 97 people in the world is now displaced, a refugee or migrant. At the same time, across Spain and Italy entire towns have been abandoned for lack of people.

 

Honduran migrants walk to the U.S. through Mexico.
(after Pedro Pardo / AFP/Getty Images)

Climate change and human population growth combine into a dilemma. There is an anticipated population downturn in many industrially overdeveloped countries by mid-century, but its speed won’t match that of the converging crises driven by earlier human expansion.

In 2018 and 2019, Afghanistan experienced its worst drought of the 21st century. It left more than 14 million people food insecure. The war had displaced 3.5 million Afghans from their homes and farms. After the fall of Kabul in 2021, more than half a million Afghans applied for asylum in Europe, adding to the already 2.6 million Afghan refugees around the world. In February 2022, the United States announced it had determined to permanently remove and give to charity the $9.5 billion it had impounded from the Afghan Central Bank in 2021. That crashed the banks, taking the life savings of millions of Afghans, and with the simultaneous suspension of billions in IMF, World Bank, and bilateral assistance, the lifeline of Afghans sheltering abroad and the salaries for hundreds of thousands of security and civil service employees and aid workers abruptly ended. This has led to a severe food and medical crisis, in which 8 million Afghans are now thrown onto the brink of famine and hospitals can no longer afford staff salaries or medical supplies amidst the Covid pandemic. It is a completely man-made crisis, done with the stroke of a pen.

It is expected that as many Afghans as can will leave their country and attempt to cross into Europe. England has determined that the Channel will become its moat, fortified at every port with razor wired walls and guard towers. Its strategy recalls Pharaoh Ramesses II in 1276 BCE. Faced with an onslaught of Palestinian and Syrian “sea people” escaping drought, rather than build tent cities to house them and employ their labor to build more pyramids, the Pharaoh simply trapped and sank their boats and sent his chariots to drive survivors back into the sea. The same tactics were used again by Ramesses III in 1200 BCE, raining flaming arrows on approaching ships then setting archers onto any survivors who made it to shore.

Can you imagine scenes like that in Brighton Beach or Camber Sands? What about South Miami Beach? Malibu? Byron Bay? Consider the size of the human tsunami. At least 100 million people, half of them children, have already fled their homes. Fully half the population of Ukraine — 22 million people — are now displaced. The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is funded entirely by donations. Since it can’t hope to transport, house, feed, medically attend to and gainfully employ that many people, it relies on the generosity of receiving nations, where increasingly the politics is souring on immigration.

By 2030, about 250 million people may experience high water stress in Africa, with up to 700 million people displaced as a result

— IPCC Working Group II, 2022.

During the Syrian War in 2015 and 2016, 1.2 million first-time asylum-seekers arrived in Europe. Sweden took in 156,110, Norway 30,470 and Denmark 20,825. In Sweden, they became 1.6% of the population. In Norway, bicycles piled up at Storskog because Russian rules prohibited border crossings on foot, so refugees crossed on cheap, one-way bikes — 5500 of them left behind there in a rusting pile. Germany received over one million first-time asylum applications.

Ranking of most common concerns in Germany 2010–2020,
courtesy Forschungsgruppe Wahlen: Politbarometer

By December 2018, 72 percent of those German asylum seekers were granted protection, gaining the right to work without restrictions. Another 17 percent still had pending claims with restricted work authorization. By that time there were 1.8 million people with a refugee background in Germany (including beneficiaries of international protection, asylum seekers, and those who had their request rejected). By the end of 2021, the integration of this population was impressive. On arrival, only about one percent declared having good or very good German language skills. By 2018, that figure had increased to 44 percent. While many were skeptical at first — in 2017, only 37 percent of Germans believed that most refugees could successfully integrate in the society — after five years fewer than one in ten Germans opposed taking in more.

In 2021, 190,800 asylum applications were submitted to Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. It was the calm before the storm. ClimateRefugees.org reported March 3, 2022:

Climate scientists point to climate change and an ongoing La Niña — a climate pattern resulting in dryer weather for the Horn of Africa — as the cause. Those same climate scientists also predict a 90% chance that the upcoming March, April, May rainy season in the Horn of Africa will be depressed resulting in a fourth consecutive failed rainy season for Somalia. With this information, the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Displacement Tracking Matrix analysis projects the current drought will go on to displace between 1,036,000 to 1,415,000 over the next six months.

Syrians in the Nordics

By 2015, the Syrian crisis had led thousands to attempt to cross the Mediterranean in ramshackle vessels. Many drowned. Some ended up in Greek or Italian detention centers or camped at Eastern European borders. Some managed to reach countries further north that were more accepting. The visual images displayed on print media and television were striking and heartbreaking. It led many in Europe to debate the need for compassion over concerns for economic stability and security. In the end the northernmost nations chose to invest in the migrants.

Prior to 2015, Sweden had taken a comparatively liberal approach to immigration and prized cultural diversity. Newcomers were given equal social rights to citizens. But the 2015 refugee crisis so overwhelmed Sweden that the immigration issue became politicized.

Sweden, Norway and Denmark, although accepting more than their share of the burden, tried to avoid appearing attractive to migrants and entered the European “race to the bottom,” with more restrictions on access to social services, education, work, and health care. While holding its foot above the brake, Sweden provided municipalities extra funds for housing projects and food aid. All municipalities were required to settle a certain number of the newcomers and coordinate their language and orientation programs. New regulations entitled migrants to permanent residency if they succeeded in obtaining work or otherwise became self-sufficient.

Denmark, long hawkish on immigration, clenched up even more. It cut migrants’ integration allowance. It passed a so-called “jewelry regulation, ” allowing police to confiscate refugees’ valuables without sentimental value exceeding €1340, in order to let them know they were expected to support themselves from work, not from sale of their heirlooms.

Seven hundred million people. For context the entire population of Africa is 1.4 billion. That means by 2030 half the continent of Africa could be displaced as a result of climate change.

— Mark Raulerson, Climate Refugees

Partly as a result of these reluctant resettlements, within five years the Swedish and Norwegian economies were booming. They were doing much better than countries with more restrictive immigration policies. They had wiped away the problem of an aging demographic and filled the ranks of the working class with energetic innovators who would pay into their welfare systems. In 2020–21, Sweden minted six new unicorns (private startups worth more than US$1 billion).

Instead of border forces, immigration control, and detention camps, the northern countries invested in migrant families to help them integrate smoothly into their new homes. They offered more than housing and work. They gave them language classes, buddy systems, health care, and child care. Not surprisingly, the impacts were hugely positive. The choice of compassion provided both economic stability and security.

Motivating Factors

Because of the fertility decline, Europe is estimated to soon be losing about 1.4 million working age people per year. 1.4 million per year is higher than the highest influx from Syria during the crisis. Arguably, they need those refugees in Europe. But Europeans are also looking over the horizon.

Beyond personal security and freedom from autocratic management, population density creates stresses to land, water, food supply, and ecosystem health. Climate change then becomes a force multiplier. And let’s be honest, it is not additive, it is multiplicative. The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land warned:

In some situations, exceeding the limits of adaptation can trigger escalating losses or result in undesirable transformational changes such as forced migration, conflicts or poverty. Examples of climate change induced land degradation that may exceed limits to adaptation include coastal erosion exacerbated by sea level rise where land disappears, thawing of permafrost affecting infrastructure and livelihoods, and extreme soil erosion causing loss of productive capacity.

The agency also said that areas with rapidly growing populations are at much higher risk than regions where populations are smaller and stable, something we are now seeing playing out from Central America to Eurasia and Northern Africa.

• UNHCR says there are over 4.1 million Iraqis in need of humanitarian assistance.
• The Bangladeshi government relocated Rohingya refugees to an island in the Bay of Bengal.
• About 4.6 million Venezuelans have become migrants as a result of shortages of food and medicine and lack of security.
• Unprecedented drought has created 2.3 million South Sudanese refugees, 80% women and children.
• The Democratic Republic of Congo is hosting over 500,000 refugees from nearby countries including Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. At the same time, it is estimated that 5 million people in DRC are internally displaced, and over 918,000 have fled to neighboring countries like Angola, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia.
• In November 2020, when armed conflict broke out in the northern region of Ethiopia known as Tigray, about 60,000 people fled to nearby Sudan but some 2 million are internally displaced and 4.5 million need assistance. The UNHCR reports that more than 3,000 people are leaving Tigray for Sudan every day.
• In the central Sahel, which includes Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, an estimated 13.4 million people, of which five million are children, are in need of assistance. Refugee outmigration has begun affecting neighboring Chad and Mauritania and coastal countries Benin, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Togo.
• At the end of 2021, more than 200,000 people in Central African Republic became displaced in less than two months.
• Somalia sent 750,000 refugees to Kenya, Yemen and Ethiopia but more than 2.6 million people are still internally displaced.
• The Burundi refugee crisis is the least funded in the world, with refugee camps in Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo overflowing since 2015.
• On top of all that, in the space of less than one month, more than half the population of Ukraine — 22 million — became displaced from their homes or in severe need.

Despite all of the above, Yemen is likely the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. More than 24 million people are in need. 3.6 million have become internally displaced. Almost two-thirds of the population is on the brink of famine.

If this seems like an onrushing tsunami, consider that last year China posted the lowest fertility rate it’s ever seen — 1.3 children per woman. That portends a crash in the population of China by about 730 million. China alone could absorb the present refugee crisis.

All of sub-Saharan Africa is responsible for less than two per cent of the carbon emissions currently heating the earth; the United States is responsible for twenty-five per cent.

— Bill McKibben, In a World on Fire

One in every 97 people in the world is now displaced. That number will grow. At the same time, fertility rates around the world are crashing very quickly. Many economists are warning that the overdeveloped world is in a population crisis of its own, about to default on promises of pensions and security for the elderly because of a shrinking working class to pay for them.

The time it took for the UK to reduce from 6 children per woman to 4.5 was 80 years. Rwanda recently did that in about five years. Iran dropped from about 4.5 to 2.1 in about 11 years. There is a reason we’re seeing a rapid acceleration in the declines in fertility. Global literacy increased from 40 to 80 percent between the 1960s and 2015. Women were the largest part of that. They took more control over their family planning.

Washing machines and kitchen appliances also mattered. Thanks in large part to distributed solar panels, some 650 million people in India got access to electricity for one sixth of the entire CO2 emissions footprint of the UK. That access to electricity between 1981 and 2011 translated directly into more girls becoming literate, which meant fewer children per woman in the next generation, and fewer still in the generation after that. That change came at a carbon cost of about one third of a ton CO2/year/person, which is not nothing, but it replaced oil and coal which were far worse and India gained a solar manufacturing and installation industry.

Some of the cultural issues swirling around migration may not be the same issues in the future as we saw in the past. We’ve been migrating at different parts of our history so consistently that migration is almost part of the definition of humans. Today it’s been politicized and weaponized and we’re very territorial and it’s all wrapped up in our national identities and things like that; tribal jealousy.

South Korea is demolishing schools because they have no children to teach. Germany is demolishing whole neighborhoods. In remote rural areas across Spain and Italy entire towns have been abandoned.

Mekondjo Zefelino, who, despite having a disability, crawled for 106 miles alone to reach Namibia in search of food.

— Mark Raulerson, Climate Refugees

Shall we watch the slow death of communities in wealthy countries, or would we rather be doing the right thing for migrants? Now that we’re moving out of the Holocene period, we don’t really know what the carrying capacity of Earth is for our kind. We know it will be less than it was. It will matter more how much each of us consumes than how many of us there are. There are graceful paths for that descent and there are brutal ones. Which we choose will dictate the kind of world we’ll create for our children and all who come after. “Kind” is the operative word in that sentence.

References:

Al Jazeera, Poland begins work on $400m Belarus border wall against refugees (Jan 22, 2022)

Behrens, P. “Population, Consumption & Climate Change,” Nick Breeze ClimateGenn (Feb 7, 2022)

Hagelund, A., After the refugee crisis: public discourse and policy change in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, Comparative Migration Studies 8:13 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-019-0169-8

Keita, S. and H. Dempster, Five Years Later, One Million Refugees Are Thriving in Germany, Center for Global Development (December 4, 2020)

Lee, R. A Humanitarian Emergency: The Collapse of Afghanistan’s Banking System, Center for Strategic and International Studies (Dec 17, 2021)

Taylor, D., Two-thirds of UK asylum seekers on small boats had hypothermia or injuries, The Guardian (Feb 14, 2022)

World Vision, The most urgent refugee crises around the world (Mar 06, 2021)

Zivardar, E., I have experienced Australia’s detention policy first-hand — it’s time to end it, The Guardian (Mon 14 Feb 2022)

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The Green Road

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Towns, villages and cities in the Ukraine are being bombed every day. As refugees pour out into the countryside, ​they must rest by day so they can travel by night. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. So far there are 66 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region. They are calling their project “The Green Road.”

The Green Road also wants to address the ongoing food crisis at the local level by helping people grow their own food, and they are raising money to acquire farm machinery, seed, and to erect greenhouses.

Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.

There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

 

The Green Road

"News from Ukraine's underground railroad"

Like most hippies, I was born with a congenital abnormality that expresses itself as profound aversion to war. We are the Peacenik Generation, with the bomber-inside-a-circle finger-painted on our foreheads in brilliant Day-Glo colors. I don’t really care who started the war in Ukraine, I just want it to end. 

Honestly though, it would likely end more quickly if the Western side listened more to the reasons given by the Eastern side instead of dismissing them as Parkinson’s disease or some other lame excuse. From the Urals south to Bessarabia and the Khanate of Crimea there lay a buffer zone between the ancient empires of the Caesars (Czars), Ottomans and Austrian Kings. It should not be surprising that here were built scores of ancient megacities 2000 years before Babylon, Egypt, India or China. As I look at old maps, the color lines of political boundaries seem much less important to me than the more obvious topographical features of foodsheds and watersheds, but I understand how threatening it can be to those in the East to have hostile armies setting up bases and missile batteries on those same features, directed at them.

As I write this there are emotional young Jewish and gypsy jihadists flocking to bombed-out children’s hospitals to take up arms beside OUN ex-Berkut (Ukrainian: Бе́ркут, "golden eagle") skinheads gang-inked with swastika tattoos whose Nazi-era flag is red and black—“Blut und Boden” (blood and earth). Such unity. There are noisy parades of beeping cars around the blue-and-yellow-lit Arc de Triomphe and the Brandenburg Gate. I prefer to sit quietly in a Japanese garden, watching cherry blossoms fall. Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to passions, every one.

There is something we ecovillagers and permies are doing about this war. Diligent students of design, we are accustomed to patterning the structure of a crisis and determining the best points of intervention to achieve lasting results. Right now our designs include drawing exit routes through or around cities under attack, identifying safe places of refuge both within and outside the region, planting vegetable gardens behind homes, and purchasing more time for desperate families until cooler heads prevail and passions subside. 

Global Ecovillage Network Ukraine, Permaculture Network Ukraine, Global Village Institute, Gaia University and Ecosystem Restoration Camps have come together to mobilize our ecovillages and permaculture farms to host displaced people fleeing the war zone and to grow extra provisions to share.

Thousands of Ukrainians are displaced and wandering. Like so many Yemenis under Saudi jets, their eastern and southern cities, towns and villages are being bombed every day. Being in locations situated mainly in the countryside, we are in a position to shelter families either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place, or to return to their homes if that becomes possible.

We’ve called our project the “Green Road.” We have 62 sites in Ukraine and 265 around the region, a northern road, a road through the cities and a southern road. These are something like the underground railroad, but with very few places to rest along the way, they might better be thought of as the Trail of Tears 2022. With tanks and artillery barrages at their heels, thousands are moving desperately by night and hiding by day. We pass out an instruction set that includes the rules of traveling, getting through or around checkpoints and advice for crossing the borders into different countries.

If you want to take a look, GEN-Ukraine has set up a landing page to solicit more sites, with the information on how the project can be supported through on-line donations, crypto, direct wires and other support. Those in the United States wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to PayPal.me/greenroad2022

So far we have collected and distributed around 10,000 euros. The collected money is being spent only for peaceful purposes: to improve the accommodations (often people are hosted in old empty houses without anything and it is winter now), to feed people and to transport them. Special attention is needed for children, the elderly and the sick.

I received this message from a friend in our network in Estonia, at Lilleoru ecovillage where I taught a permculture masterclass in 2019:

We took one Ukrainian woman with 9 cats (she started with 11 to Warsaw) to start with and we'll see if more people can be hosted in Lilleoru. She got the small house fully for herself and the cats, as this company needs some space :)

Yes, the conditions in Russia are getting more and more complicated. We have a member of Lilleoru there in Sankt Peterburg, all intl money transactions are blocked for them. I sent an official invitation letter, so he could come to our Spring retreat, but tourist visas are not given, so all documents were returned. 

And so on and so on...

We all had hoped that the war would end in several days or that we would manage this project with our own funds. Neither of those came true. As we start to think about the future and gardening season, we want to involve people in growing food. We would like to acquire additional farm machinery, seed, and be able to erect greenhouses. We need to counter the food crisis at the local level, as may you all in the days and months to come.

Another part of our project is resupplying the first aid kits of Ukrainian permaculturists who stayed in Ukraine to support vulnerable members in their communities or, forced into military service, have become paramedics. Our primary objective is to supply them with materials for wounds and trauma because civilians are suffering similar injuries to the military.

Those fortunate enough to find refuge in ecovillages, permaculture farms and ecosystem restoration camps are getting the best training possible for what is to come. Those kids who made it to places like Lilleoru are the one real hope we have for a better world. They are the real Green Road.

 

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The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone 
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features 
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity 
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 104: How the 2020 Pandemic will end

"So long as there are humans on the Earth there’s going to be Covid-19."

 

This short retrospective on the Pandemic began at week 100.

This week the latest CoV-2 variant, with all the lethality of Delta and several times the transmissible stickiness of Omicron scaled the Great Zero Tolerance Wall. At this writing it had reached 17 of China’s 31 provinces. After just six cases were reported in Xi’an, a northwestern city of 13 million people, the city locked 13,000 people in their homes. While it is still too soon soon to say, I doubt China will be able to contain the outbreak and will find out how effective their widely-adopted Sinopharm vaccines are against these newer variants.

Coronaviruses can infect many different mammalian and avian hosts so they’ve many potential avenues to reach humans. They mutate and recombine in different hosts, producing a steady stream of variants. They’re all over the world. There are thousands of species of bats, rodents, and small wild mammals. Dense populations of different species, roosting or nesting together, provide plenty of opportunity for viral exchange and recombination.

Evolution is real, nature is inventive, and we live at the indulgence of things we cannot see.

— Joel Achenbach, Washington Post Magazine

How this will end, and it may not be this year or next, is that Covid-19 is going to follow the path of the three previous coronaviruses that we have to deal with year in and year out. So long as there are humans on the Earth there’s going to be Covid-19. Covid will lose its ability to cause severe disease, not because the virus changes but because we gain immunity via vaccines or from prior infections, and that we’ll have ever-improving tools like antivirals and monoclonal antibodies. For the next couple of seasons Covid may still have an outsized influence but it’s increasingly going to be decoupled from hospitalizations and become more like the other coronaviruses.

As we move into this endemic phase we should focus on healthcare preparation, making sure that hospitals are able to deal with surges, because there may be hot spots that flare — like Hong Kong, South Korea and China today — and when that happens it gets particularly dangerous for front-line workers.

Governments should also educate people that this is not a virus that’s going to go away. This is going to be with us and so we each have to learn the principles of risk calculation and harm reduction — that if there are people that have very low risk tolerances they should continue to wear a mask, use rapid tests, be booster-vaccinated, and have antivirals at the ready. Others need to conduct themselves to protect the weakest and most vulnerable.

What Happens Next?

If the 10 richest people on the planet were to surrender 99 percent of the money they made just during the pandemic, “we would have enough money to vaccinate the world; we would have the money to invest in having universal health care,” Gabriela Bucher, the executive director of Oxfam International, told Yasmeen Serhan, a London-based staff writer for The Atlantic. Hanging on to just 1 percent of their pandemic gains would still leave the ten most deep-pocketed humans $8 billion better off than they were at the beginning of March 2020, Serhan discovered. This will not end while rich people get four or five doses of the vaccines and billions of poorer people cannot even get one.

Among USAnians ages 40 to 64, 1 in 300 Whites and Asians have died of Covid, compared to 1 in 240 Native Americans.

While it should have been seen as a last line of defense (after masking, distancing, testing, contact tracing and isolation), the US pushed vaccine development to the fore, insisting that universal vaccination should solve everything. In many ways, they produced a modern medical miracle, and is rightly celebrated. Unvaccinated individuals are 44 times more likely to require hospitalization. For those over 65, the risk is 49 times higher.

Up to half of unvaccinated children who require hospitalization go on to have long Covid.

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s I was oblivious to lead, which I was inhaling or ingesting from gasoline fumes and wall paint. Forty-five percent of children in my generation had brain damage from lead poisoning before the government finally woke up and acted. Today up to half of unvaccinated children who require hospitalization go on to have long Covid but long Covid is not the only thing they need to worry about. According to a March 6 study in Nature, Covid shrinks brain grey matter by 2% even in the most mild cases. It found that in addition to, or perhaps because of, shrinkage and brain tissue damage, there was an on-average larger cognitive decline.

… exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood stole a collective 824 million IQ points from more than 170 million Americans alive today, about half the population of the United States. — Duke University

Ninety percent of New Zealanders are vaccinated. That did not protect them from the latest Omicron wave. In the US, immunization rates are striking lower — below 50 percent in many localities, despite free vaccination. Reluctance to use masks, immunize children, and accept what was actually happening stems from mass-disinformation and the more general decline over decades of the public education system in the United States, and perhaps in no small measure from lead poisoning in baby boomers. Like everything else, public health divides into haves and have-nots; those with money and connections and those without — a self-propagating and perpetuating class system. But even beyond that, little did public health authorities grok the viral TikTok and Telegram appeal of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or the power of MAGA antivax memes. The pandemic was a preventable mental disease.

Just six nations — Canada, Germany, Kuwait, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Sweden — met or exceeded their fair-share commitments to the WHO’s 2020/21 ACT-Accelerator program budget, which includes the Covax vaccination effort that delivered more than 1 billion doses to low- and middle-income countries. The USA gave just 64% of what was asked of it. China gave just 3%. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, said what was asked of these countries would have been just a rounding error in their annual budgets. Of the $16.8 billion needed from wealthy countries for the 2022 global immunization program, only about $800 million has been raised so far. A former Director of Health Services at the WHO told Bloomberg: “If we don’t do a better job of raising immunity levels we will definitely get another variant.”

The Next Three Years

Lately the spread of the virus seems to be diminishing, but it could still become much worse. Imagine giving the job of handling the pandemic back to Cobblepot or one of his MAGA surrogates. As unlikely as that seems, it could be just three years away. 42 percent of Democrats say they are displeased with the job Biden is doing. That is an opening for the lead-poisoned MAGAdiots.

Who is in the White House may not matter all that much. Pfizer went to the government and revealed it had Paxlovid in trials. Five Pfizer pills per day for five days knocks out 90% of the viral infection (but also speeds up mutation rates). Did the White House Covid task force put in an order for hundreds of millions of doses? No. They decided to wait until it was FDA approved. Israel put in a large order. Merck and Roach now also have pills in clinical trials. They have not been ordered into production either. If Pfizer’s pill gets emergency approval by November, it will be another six months before it is generally available.

Just imagine, a dozen years from now, all those millions of new voters with permanent cognitive impairment from smaller brains.

This pandemic will end eventually. It might be in 2022. It might be in 2025. But it also might go on for 20 years. A lot of bats are leaving caves and biting the people cutting down their forests.

The crisis of public health will not end that quickly. The dysfunctionality that characterize US politics is mirrored in its public health policy. Will a President Romney or a President Cheney fare any better against future variants or new viruses? In the USA, those who died first and foremost were the vulnerable — those of color, those in poverty, the elderly, the prisoners, the infirm, the uninsured, the unprotected. They will all be forgotten by the next election cycle.

This was a national face-plant. The smart way for leaders to respond to a pandemic is to calculate the scope of the threat; communicate the dangers clearly to the general public; roll out tests to provide timely surveillance of the pathogen; track viral mutations through extensive genomic sequencing; share public health data seamlessly among local, state and federal agencies; find common strategies to contain the virus and mitigate the disease; and, finally, develop vaccines.

Well … we did develop vaccines.

— Joel Achenbach, Washington Post Magazine

All the Big Pharma companies have refused to release all or portions of their data from the human trials to the medical community for peer review. Thousands of epidemiological researchers around the world have asked for access and been denied. WHO, FDA, CDC and other regulators are apparently powerless to compel release, as are NIH, EU and other billion-dollar funders. That too may all be forgotten by the next election cycle.

Being prepared for the next outbreak, wherever in the world it comes, and rushing a special team there to knock it down before it spreads, is less likely now than it was 3 years ago.

A friend of mine in Denmark said she looks at the USA and wonders why they are so sick, and so crazy. I know why. They are sick because they are crazy.

“It’s a dumpster fire,” says Lisa Abbott, senior vice president of Lifespan, a Rhode Island health system with over 1,200 beds. “It’s a pandemic wrapped in a labor crisis. Omicron is the accelerant on the dumpster fire.”

“Hospitals are maxed out and near the breaking point.” says Doug White, a professor of critical care at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Across the country, he says, horrifying stories have been circulating within the medical community of patients found dead in their hospital room bathrooms after they took off their oxygen supply to get out of bed. “The alarms went off and there was no one there to take care of them,” White says.

— The New York Times 1/26/22

Widely held beliefs that are simply wrong:

• The Pandemic is almost over
• New variants will be progressively milder
• Young people are less at risk than adults
• Natural immunity after recovery protects against future infection, hospitalization and death
• Naturally acquired immunity is as good as vaccination

To summarize, the world is into its third year of the Covid pandemic. The virus is under no evolutionary pressure to become less virulent. There is no evidence that the latest editions — the three Omicron variants — are any less virulent than their predecessors. SARS-CoV-2 mutates every other time it passes from one host to another. As it gathers mutations some may produce a milder Covid while others may produce a stronger Covid. Some will evade earlier vaccines and acquired immunity.

Did the United States learn anything from its disastrous response to the outbreak? Probably not. If not, as many as one million lives will have been wasted for nothing. In pandemic scales this was a Category 4. But there is a foreshadowing to contemplate.

The world’s response to climate change is shaping up to be a much greater failure than the US response to Covid. Climate change is presently on track to extinguish all humans from the Earth and very little — almost nothing — has been done to awaken to that threat. If there is a silver lining here, maybe it will be that wake-up call.

---

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app

The Great Pause Week 103: Son of Covid

" The pandemic was a preventable mental disease."

This is the fourth in a multi part series that began here.

It would be difficult to blame the public health doctors in Hong Kong for thinking the pandemic was nearly over and they had won. Four waves of virus variants had been turned back by tight social distancing rules and aggressive contact tracing. Through much of 2021, the city recorded zero cases. Some 84 percent of people over age 11 had been vaccinated. In a city of 7.5 million people, most packed tightly together in tiny apartments, 36 million tests were administered. Hong Kong was winning the battle. Then the virus found a crack, and entered.

Two contagious local flight attendants returned from abroad in December and went unnoticed. A woman returning from Pakistan was infected while in hotel quarantine. The woman passed the virus to her husband, who spread it to a housecleaner who spread it to the very large housing development where she lived. More than 100 people there tested positive. By then it was too late to stop. It had spread to more than 20 senior centers. Omicron was loose in Hong Kong.

The New York Times warned February 16 that by this summer Omicron will have killed more than four times the number that have died of Covid in Hong Kong since the start of the pandemic. That is likely to be a significant underestimate. At this writing Hong Kong has 195,274 active cases and is averaging 135 deaths per day.

What this demonstrates is that no one is safe until everyone is safe. Cities are porous. Countries are porous. A flurry of new studies suggests that several parts of the immune system can mount a sustained, potent response to any coronavirus variant if a person has been vaccinated, yet many resist vaccines and many more cannot get them. The digital age has given all of us shorter attention spans. We are easily bored. Two years is enough for this pandemic. Let’s move on. But viruses, like Mother Nature, operate on their own timetable.

Modelers estimate that each Omicron-positive New Zealander is infecting an average of 4.64 other people — the highest rate among 180 countries analyzed. Experts believe that half the country could be infected within three months.

“We’re finally experiencing the difficult side of exponential growth,” said Dr. Wiles, the University of Auckland microbiologist. “I feel quite nervous about the rest of the year.”

— The New York Times

We should study history more diligently. A Russian flu in the late 1800s is said to have led to loss of taste and smell. The elderly seemed to be at higher risk but children were spared. We don’t know anything else about the virus because this flu came before our ability to preserve specimens.

The first case of SARS-CoV-2, arising in China, although not reported to WHO until December 31, 2019, was likely on November 17, but there is evidence CoV-2 was circulating in France in late December in airport workers, and in sewage in Northern Italy in early December. In any respiratory virus with a rapid transmission rate—R(0) value—it’s going to be widespread by the time you actually detect it. The spread from Hubei province to Western Europe may have taken months to years in earlier centuries, which is why the Russian flu never got far. Today a virus can travel the world in hours.

In 1960 a common cold virus was isolated from mucus and an electron-micrograph showed protrusions or “spikes,” hence the name “corona.” Many other coronaviruses were soon catalogued by the same means. We learned this viral family can infect many different animals and found at least two types that could infect humans, which we named alpha and beta. From these families emerged SARS and MERS. Coronaviruses tended to display a strong seasonality in winter and spring, or “respiratory viral season,” and be more common in children but more lethal in the elderly. They cause some 25 to 30 percent of common colds.

Then in 2009, the H1N1 flu reduced the average age of death from 72 to 37 years of age. There were 61 million cases, 274,000 people were hospitalized and 12,500 people died. But the health community didn't really heed the warnings of this. They thought they’d seen the worst. They neglected basic duties like genomic monitoring or replenishing the strategic national stockpile of N95 masks and respirators.

Having very simple RNA codes, coronaviruses make transcription mistakes that give birth to mutations. These can evolve to evade immunity. One bat-to-civet-to-human spillover, SARS-CoV-1 in 2003, should have been more of a learning experience than it was. CoV-1 caused 8000 cases and 800 deaths (10% mortality) before being successfully contained by contact trace, masking and distancing. It reached 29 countries but had only 8 cases in the US. It changed how people interacted with civet cats but not bats. Or camels. Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) was a 2012 coronavirus that crossed from bats to camels to people who kissed their camels and then to the populations of 26 countries, with a case fatality ratio of 30 to 35 percent. Fortunately MERS did not transmit easily and died out before developing faster spreading mutants. The last two cases were in 2014.

SARS-CoV-2 combined rapid transmission with low-to-moderate mortality, which conferred a longevity benefit. It will be with us until it is immunized out by vaccination or infection, which seems unlikely given its immunity-evading mutations. Likely it will be with us a while.

In the original Wuhan version there was a 14-day incubation period and symptoms appeared about day seven. With Delta and Omicron the incubation period shrunk and people got sick quicker. Hospitals were slower to catch up with treatment than the virus changed its attacks. They routinely administered antibacterial anti-inflammatories without recognizing that symbiotic bacteria in a person’s microbiome help fight viruses. Some, particularly in rural areas, still routinely administer these, even though Covid bacterial co-infections are uncommon. Corticosteroids, like dexamethasone, can dampen the cytokine over-response and improve oxygenation. Gilead Sciences’ polymerase inhibitor remdesivir can be administered after testing positive but before hospitalization. Three days coming to a clinic for an infusion shortens recovery time. Many clinicians saw reports saying remdesivir was ineffectual and should be discontinued. Like any antiviral, it is ineffectual after the time a patient is hospitalized. By then the virus has stopped reproducing anyway. Discontinuing remdesivir for early treatment was a mistake.

“One of the questions I often ask is what happened in the United States? Why do we have a million deaths? Why did we have all of these shutdowns? Why did we do so badly when the US was considered the most prepared nation for a pandemic? And I think it comes down to the fact that yes the US has a really great toolbox for pandemic preparedness but if you don't use those tools or you use them improperly it's not going to matter. And we have decades upon decades of neglect of public health. Public health agencies are never prioritized by government. They never have the ability to hire enough people. They can't contact trace. And that happened throughout this pandemic, even though it was a recognized shortcoming.”

— Amesh Adalja, M.D., Johns Hopkins

Hospitals made mistakes that cost lives. Critical care wards were reflexively intubating people that had high oxygen need because they did not want to deal with crash intubation and not only did that cause a shortage of ventilators but eventually we learned that it was harming people by forcing the virus deeper into the lung, causing pulmonary emboli and strokes. Nasal cannula patients can self-prone in the bed and improve their oxygenation that way, too. Some hospitals successfully switched to high flow nasal cannulas and stopped killing their patients but it took more than a year for the news to travel.

There's still a lot about Covid we don't understand. We don’t know how often transmission occurs at distances greater than six feet. We know that pre-symptomatic and non-symptomatic people are contagious but we don’t know by how much. We do not know the role of children and pets in spreading the virus. We are still calibrating the effective vaccine dose for the very young.

In December 2019 and January 2020 the US might have seen this coming. An efficiently spreading respiratory virus with an animal host cannot be eradicated, cannot be eliminated, and containment is not possible after it has gotten loose. The US could have had a two and a half month head start. It blew it.

When POTUS appointed John Bolton as his National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019, the human wrecking ball didn’t just scrap the Bush/Obama moratorium on arms sales to Ukraine, sparking Russian outrage and leading to the first of Cobblepot’s impeachments, he decided to close the NHC pandemic response office and reassign its staff to the Pentagon bioweapons branch.

Then came SARS-CoV-2. Without testing, people who had a sore throat or cough were contagious, but could go about their lives. That led to undiagnosed, untraced chains of transmission that bubbled over until it swamped the hospitals. When the vaccines arrived, the US closed testing clinics because there were not enough people to do both.

What is needed now, and could have been developed 10 years ago, is a vaccine that is effective against the SARS-CoV family of viruses, regardless of variant. All the vaccines we have today are directed to only one part of the genome, the spike protein. Once you have the broad neutralizing antibodies (“BNAB”s) drawn from patients’ pancreatic blood—and we have 15 groups of them now—you can make a BNAB vaccine. It could even be a pill or nasal spray. None of the Big Pharma companies seem to be pursuing this. Why not? They have learned how much more profitable it is to make an annual flu shot than to make one shot to immunize for all flus.

The United States makes the equipment that sequences genomes, and yet it is 30th in the world in genomic sequencing.

Data capture and analytics is so weak in the US that it is forced to rely on others—UK, Denmark or Israel—but US health officials don’t really accept the data because they are, well… foreign. So we sort of hear what they are learning about herd immunity in Sweden (it didn’t work), fourth boosters in Israel (didn’t stop Omicron), vaccine waning in UK (it's real), how Omicron went up like a rocket and down like a stone in South Africa, or how the Dutch are analyzing sewage to predict hot zones and spot new variants, but the US doesn’t do anything differently in response to this knowledge. It knew from the experience in Africa, repeated in Belgium and then the UK, that Omicron was coming and it was far more transmissible. The US public health community knew this a full month before it hit. There was infighting among the agencies about how this data should be interpreted and whether it could be trusted. They debated. They did nothing to prepare hospitals and their weary staffs for the crush—perhaps thinking it couldn’t happen?

When asked which ages should be vaccinated, NIH, HHS, FDA, CDC could not agree. Some governors issued orders to prevent vaccine or mask mandates for schools. Some demanded access to monoclonal treatments shown to be ineffective on the new variant. Some courts struck down mandates issued by the federal agencies or by executive order. Messaging was all over the map.

All of that was completely avoidable. In the US, Health and Human Services is the lead agency—the One Ring. It supervises and coordinates the health response of the federal government in any crisis. When Covid first struck, HHS could have spoken in an unwavering, firm, clear voice. The Secretary of Health has broad authority to resolve interagency conflict and issue uniform directives. Instead, Secretary Alex Azar was hamstrung by the daily Trump dog and pony show telling people that maybe bleach enemas might help and anyway it would all be over in a month.

I started this series within a series in Week 100 writing that “with nearly one million notches on the handle of his six-shooter, US Health Secretary Xavier Becerra is the deadliest gun in the saloon and has never had to slap leather.”

Some might say Becerra can be forgiven because he was withheld confirmation from January to March by Senate Republicans. But the confirmation delay ultimately didn’t matter. Since taking office he has been M.I.A.. Confirmation could have taken another year and it would have made no difference. Maybe he prefers to work from home in his pajamas. Any student intern could be composing his tweets. Becerra's main claim to fame before he was appointed as the senior health official in the Biden administration was Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus from 2013 to 2017 and before that Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. As California Attorney General his forte was attacking fraud. Now, in February 2022, he does nothing. Absolutely nothing. He is the fraud.

On January 27, 2022, the Government Accountability Office issued a stinging report. It said it had warned HHS about shortages of COVID-19 tests beginning in September 2020 and had recommended in January 2021 that HHS develop a comprehensive national testing strategy. HHS promised to provide that by May 2021. The Inspector General is still waiting.

HHS responded with this statement:

"We share GAO's focus and urgency in battling this once-in-a-century pandemic and desire to ensure we never again face a pandemic of this magnitude."

That from the people who are in charge of looking around the bend and spotting the next virus before it attacks. It has apparently concluded that we are done with pandemics of this scale for this century. After 2 years on the front lines, flying nearly totally blind, at HHS there is still no map and no pilot.

Delta and Omicron were far more formidable than the viruses the world dealt with in 2021. The virus evolved but the Biden Administration didn’t. It kept in place the crude vaccine apartheid policies of Cobblepot. Millions of doses expired while Haitian, Marshallese and Palestinians died. New variants bred freely.

After a year on the front lines, not a word has yet been heard from the White House that there is any plan to modernize its century-old data collection systems. Even a phone tree of volunteers, calling every hospital, would be better than what exists. What is needed, really, is an ARPA-H for public health, just like the DARPA that developed the internet. The convergence of big data, AI, wearables, microbionomics, and epigenetic testing is enlarging the epidemiologically, immunologically and therapeutically possible. Other countries are diving into this new frontier. Where virology is concerned, the US is still implanting wooden teeth and attaching leeches.

We’ll continue this postmortem next week, and search for a silver lining, with part five: How this will end.

 ***

The COVID-19 pandemic has destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed down climate change, which presents an existential threat to all life, humans included. The warnings could not be stronger: temperatures and fires are breaking records, greenhouse gas levels keep climbing, sea level is rising, and natural disasters are upsizing.

As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration #ReGeneration

“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”

— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.

Want to help make a difference while you shop in the Amazon app, at no extra cost to you? Simply follow the instructions below to select “Global Village Institute” as your charity and activate AmazonSmile in the app. They’ll donate a portion of your eligible purchases to us.

How it works:

1. Open the Amazon app on your phone
2. Select the main menu (=) & tap on “AmazonSmile” within Programs & Features
3. Select “Global Village Institute” as your charity
4. Follow the on-screen instructions to activate AmazonSmile in the mobile app