A Wheel
Atul Gawande at The New Yorker, The Cost of Defunding Harvard:
Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to find ways to better control the disease. It is now the beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has supported work involving some sixty people across fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was previously believed impossible. The team had been conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine developed by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.
But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
Clayton Dalton, Letter from Gaza: Hospitals In Ruins:
In the pediatrics ward, a cramped space that had cartoon characters painted on the walls, a nine-year-old named Mariam cried softly as another of my colleagues examined her. Her hair was neatly braided and tied with a yellow scrunchie. Mariam had lost an arm to amputation after an air strike, and shrapnel had slashed a hole between her bladder and her rectum. She had already undergone five surgeries. On a bed next to her lay a three-year-old boy, who had needed surgery after he was injured in an air strike; his five-year-old brother was killed in the attack. The boy was suffering from an infected surgical wound. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Saleem told me later. “How can something so horrible be real?”
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Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during the Second World War. More than fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed.
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I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work. Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children, another said. He paused, then added, “It is strange that the world has allowed this to happen to us.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP, Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles, her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her body. Her belly was slit open with a knife like those used “in splitting hogs.” Her “unborn babe” fell to the ground and gave “two feeble cries.” Its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel to hide any evidence of what had happened, the crowd then shot hundreds of bullets into Turner’s body. Mary Turner was cut down and buried with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle marking the grave. The Atlanta Constitution published an article with the subheadline: “Fury of the People Is Unrestrained.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
