Science Friday - James Webb Space Telescope, Vaccination And Church, Maine Puffins. Dec 17, 2021, Part 1

Episode Date: December 17, 2021

A Spike In Winter COVID Cases Begins The United States reached a grim milestone this week: 800,000 total deaths from COVID-19. A winter spike in COVID cases is beginning across the country. And Omicron is making up an increasing share of new cases. Early data shows that the new variant is likely more transmissible than previous ones. Joining guest host John Dankosky to discuss this and other science news this week is Rachel Feltman, Executive Editor of Popular Science and host of the podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. They also discuss cracks in the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica and a new species of millipede with 1,036 legs.   The Webb Telescope Is Counting Down To Liftoff If current plans hold, the James Webb Space Telescope may launch from French Guiana late next week, no earlier than December 24. After the launch, the telescope must travel for over a month and a million miles to reach its final destination, an orbit at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point. There, it will try to stay in the same position relative to the Earth and Sun, and position the telescope’s heat shield to block out unwanted infrared signals. The mission has been over 20 years in the making. In 1996, astronomers first proposed a next-generation space telescope capable of observing the universe in infrared light, which would be more capable of seeing through dust and gas clouds. The project has been plagued by a series of delays and shifting timelines—but at long last, the telescope is at its launch site, on top of an European Space Agency rocket, and awaiting liftoff. Dr. Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Deputy Project Scientist for James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications, joins John Dankosky to talk about the upcoming launch and why the new telescope has astronomers excited.   Black Protestant Clergy Are Effectively Encouraging Vaccines For many people in or adjacent to the Christian faith, Christmas is one of the only times of year they go to church. But even though attendance has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people in the U.S. still attend church in person or virtually at least once a month. Research from the Pew Research Center has found that some of these regular church attendees are much more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19, compared to people who only attend a few times a year. The study found that this was the case in historically Black Protestant churches—in large part because clergy members in these churches are much more likely to encourage members to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Joining guest host John Dankosky to talk through this data, and the role historically Black Protestant churches play in public health education, is Greg Smith, associate director of religion research at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C, and pastor Gil Monrose, leader of the Historic Mount Zion Church of God in Brooklyn, New York.   What Is Causing Maine’s Puffins To Physically Shrink? The ocean islands off the coast of Maine are home to the Atlantic puffin, a peculiar and charismatic bird. This cold-weather species loves to hang out on rocky shores, chomping down on little fish. But like many species, these puffins are threatened by climate change. Rapid warming in the Gulf of Maine has changed the food available in their habitat, creating a bizarre problem of “micro-puffins”: members of the species 40 to 50% smaller than normal, due to malnutrition. Joining guest host John Dankosky to discuss the long history of oscillating puffin populations, and what’s being done to get them back to a healthy size, is Fred Bever, reporter at Maine Public Radio in Portland, Maine. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski sitting in for Ira Flato. Coming up in just a bit, a look ahead to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. But first, this week, we have reached a grim milestone in the United States. 800,000 total deaths from COVID-19. We're already starting to see the beginning of a winter spike in COVID cases across the country, and Omicron is making up an increasing share of these new cases. Early data show the new variant is likely more transmissible than previous ones. Here with some details and some other news of the week is Rachel Feldman,

executive editor of Popular Science and the host of the podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned this week. She's joining us from Jersey City, New Jersey. Rachel, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Don. So in the past couple weeks, we've seen a dramatic uptick in COVID cases and hospitalizations. Nearly 70,000 COVID patients are currently hospitalized nationwide. That's up about 21% from just two weeks ago.

Now, we saw a winter wave coming. for sure, but did we expect it to be this severe so soon? Yeah, you know, I think, unfortunately, there are a lot of public health experts who are not surprised to see a variant as transmissible as Omicron, but of course this is not what we were hoping for with the availability of a vaccination. And as you said, there is evidence that Amacron is more transmissible than Delta. Right now in the U.S., We have Omicron and Delta both leading this surge, both driving it. But it does seem like Omicron may overtake Delta. Because according to public health experts in the UK, for example, if Omicron gets into a household,

it's three times more likely to spread within members of that household than Delta was. And Delta was already more transmissible than the initial coronavirus variant that caused the outbreak. So it's very transmissible, and that's leading to this increase in hospitalizations. But we do have some new research out from South Africa. It's showing that there's actually a lower hospitalization rate from this variant. So is there some thought that even though it's much more transmissible, that it's landing people in the hospital just a little bit less? Yeah, that's precisely it. So in South Africa, which was the first country to sound the alarm on Omicron, due to their really rigorous testing, They're finding that hospitalization rates are much lower than they were for that nation's last wave with Delta.

But scientists have cautioned that other countries may have a different experience. South Africa's population is quite young compared with many developed nations. And between 70% and 80% of citizens there are thought to have had a prior COVID-19 infection based on antibody surveys. So that may not be the model that a country like the U.S. is going to follow. Initial evidence does suggest that most people who are vaccinated will have more mild COVID with Omicron than they would have in that initial wave of the pandemic where no one was vaccinated. But I think, you know, with that high transmission, what's important to remember is that in all likelihood, by the time you realize you have COVID, you will have given it to several other

people. And we are not entirely out of the woods at all when it comes to severe illness, especially when you factor in how little we know about long-haul symptoms. So there's still a lot that we don't know, but there has been some new data, at least preliminary data, about vaccine efficacy against Omicron. So what is the latest this week? Sure. So the latest this week is South African scientists have said that two doses of the Pfizer vaccine are 33% effective against Omicron. So that is down from protection against previous strains. It used to be 80% protection. But it also offers 70% protection against death and hospitalization down from 95% for previous

strains. So something that I saw from a few public health experts that I find really helpful, is that you should kind of mentally remove one dose from your vaccine regimen. So if you previously were what we would have called fully vaccinated with two doses, you now have about as much protection against Omicron as you did when you had one dose of the vaccine. And if you're boosted, you have about as much protection as you did when you were, quote, unquote, fully vaccinated. So that does mean that the definition of fully vaccinated is probably going to change from a regulatory standpoint, though it hasn't yet.

And it means you absolutely should get boosted. And of course, if you haven't been vaccinated yet, you really, really should. But it really does mean that those boosters are so very important. You know, there's some other vaccine news this week, though. And it's something that you've been reporting on. And it's pretty good news, actually. A Canadian biotech company called Mediago and a British pharmaceutical company that we know well, GlaxoSmithKline, have developed a new COVID vaccine that's in the final stages of clinical trials.

It's made from plants, and it could actually really help. Maybe you can tell us more about it. Yeah, so Philip Kiefer at Popsai reported on this for us. And this vaccine has been through a phase three trial successfully. And it's made from plants, which we just think is so cool. Like so many other successful vaccines on the market, the idea is to make SARS-CoV-2 like proteins without the virus itself. So you're giving the immune system something it can be trained to recognize. without actually having something dangerous to fight off.

MRNA vaccines use the human body's, you know, cellular machinery to build those proteins. And in this vaccine, instead, it's plants that do that protein building work. You start with something called an agrobacterium, which is a bacterium that can transfer DNA to plant cells. And you give them a genetic sequence that creates the COVID spike protein. then you kind of make like a slurry and you literally sort of bathe this plant, which is this tobacco-like species that has a very weak immune system, leaves it very vulnerable to this agro-bacterium. And as you let the leaves soak up the bacteria, it takes in these instructions and starts producing the protein. So after some amount of time, they're able to harvest this. they have to sort of clean it up to get it ready for a vaccine. It's not like it goes directly from the plant

bacteria goo into your arm. But it produces a pretty stable vaccine that can be stored at refrigerator temperatures. And of course, vaccines like that are very important for getting COVID shots and other vaccines in the future into, you know, more rural areas, more disparate areas, et cetera. Yeah, the vaccine problem around the world, that cold chain problem is such a big one. This could really help. Well, let's turn from some news about COVID to some, I guess I have to say some pretty scary news again about the climate. Scientists have found more cracks on the ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. And that's the glacier that has been referred to as the Doomsday Glacier. Maybe you can just explain what's going on, how concerned we should be about the effect of sea level rise here.

Yeah, so this is based on new satellite imagery. And experts are saying that the ice shelf that keeps the Thwait's close, glacier together may be falling apart. And the Thwaits glacier is known as a doomsday glacier because it's around the size of the state of Florida. And it already shed something like 50 billion tons of ice every year. So even without crumbling to pieces, it already causes about 4% of the annual global sea level rise. And if it completely crumbled into the sea, it could raise water levels by several feet. So on the one hand, this isn't surprising. You know, warming water is, you know, warming waters are causing lots of ice shelves to crack. We're seeing lots of cleaving of big ice shelves

and glaciers. And there's really nothing we can do to stop it at this point. It is a geological process that is out of our hands. But the good news, if there is any, is that this won't be like a day after tomorrow style doomsday scenario. The results will be relatively slow moving from a human perspective. It will take decades for the resulting sea level rise to happen. But in geological terms, this is a fast-moving disaster. We're watching this happen in a way that would not be possible without human climate change. But of course, one of the things that we need to do to stop that human climate change is to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. And we actually have some good news this week about how when we do reduce our use of fossil fuels, there's actually some good impacts.

This story, Rachel, doesn't necessarily have to do with climate change, but it does have to do with human health. What can you tell us? Yeah, so Kate Bagley reported on this for us at Popsie. And I like it because it's kind of hard to wrap your head around, you know, this glacier that we can't do anything about in the next few decades will drastically change the Earth's landscape. It's easier to wrap your head around. Cars pollute the air, and that makes the air dirty. And when the air is cleaner, humans are healthier. So scientists calculated the excess deaths in the U.S. due to air pollution from cars, trucks, and other vehicles. And they found it fell from nearly 30,000 excess deaths in 2008 to just under 20,000 in 2017. They also found that had the per mile vehicle emissions stayed the same during that period, the excess deaths in 2017 would have actually been much higher than they were in 2008. They might have hit nearly 50,000. that's due to an aging population that's more vulnerable to pollution's effects, as well as a rise in SUVs and pickup trucks. So we've got to make sure we get to some weird animal news this week.

And this, Rachel, counts as the weirdest thing I learned this week, right? So scientists have discovered a new species of millipede, and it has 1,306 legs. It's the first millipede to actually live up to its name. Maybe you can tell us about this creature and where they found it. Yeah, the first two millipede. For listeners who don't know, the name comes from Latin for thousand feet, and until now, the largest one, the legiest one ever found, alive or extinct, had just around 750. So this new species is called eumelipus Persephone, named after the queen of the underworld, which is very appropriate because it was found in Australia living 200

feet underground, which was surprisingly deep for a milipede. A few experts were like, wow, I guess we need to be looking even deeper than we thought for these leggy millipedes. And while the largest specimen collected was just four inches long, she did have that record-breaking number of legs. That was 1,306. And because many millipedes shed their skin and grow new body segments as they age, it's actually very likely that older, longer members of the species exist somewhere down below, and we just have to keep looking for them. Keep looking for them in all of their legs. Yes.

That's all the time we have. I want to thank my guest, Rachel Feldman, executive editor of popular science and host of the podcast, the weirdest thing I learned this week. Thanks so much, Rachel. Thanks for having me. After the break, it's just a few short days away. No, not Christmas, but it's the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, and we've got a preview. It's coming up right after this. This is Science Friday.

I'm John Dankowski. It's been over 20 years in the making. first proposed back in the 1990s as the next-generation space telescope. Now it's known as the James Webb Space Telescope, but all the cool kids call it JWST. And if all goes according to plan, it's set to launch next week from French Guiana. From there, it's set to take a month-long,

million-mile trip to its orbit. But why are astronomers so excited about it? What's the goal beyond just a Hubble successor? Joining me now to help us peer into the JWST is Dr. Amber Strawn. She's an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and she serves as Deputy Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications. And if you watch her TikTok videos, you will know she's very excited about Webb getting up there. Welcome to Science Friday, Doctor. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. It's great to be here. So for those of us who haven't been following too closely, you just describe what exactly the web is and what the status is right now? Sure. So you already sort of hinted at it. So JWST is built to be the scientific successor to Hubble. We have designed it to answer some of the biggest questions in astronomy today that Hubble just can't quite answer.

And some of those big questions include things like, what were the first galaxies like? What are the atmospheres of exoplanets like? and we hope to learn more about objects within our own solar system, as well as things like star formation and planet formation. It's really sort of the whole universe that we hope to learn more about with this awesome new telescope. As of right now, we're hoping for a launch sometime late next week, but it's been delayed again. This has all been a long time coming. Maybe you can talk us through some of the delays, some of the anticipation that you've had. Sure, yeah.

So I have worked on this telescope project for sort of formally for about 12 or 13 years at NASA and informally for a couple of years more. So yeah, it's been a long road. But you know what? This is the largest, most complex telescope that NASA has ever sent into space. It is groundbreaking from an engineering sense in so many different ways. In hindsight, the fact that. we have had delays is not really that surprising because we're building something that is sort of pushing the edge of what's possible in an engineering sense.

And obviously, they're going to be delays. What have these delays been about? I mean, is it something technical having to do with the telescope itself? Is it having something having to do with the launch? What can you tell us about the delays? Well, this last most recent delay, a couple of day delay, was the last big thing that happened down at the launch site just a few days ago, the telescope was installed onto the rocket, right? That's a huge deal, huge milestone. So it's been installed onto the rocket. And then

the next step in integration would be putting the rocket faring on the telescope. So like the nose cone of the rocket, we have to install that. So that's the next step. But before we can do that, we have to make sure that the spacecraft is communicating with the launch. vehicle. And there's a communications issue right now between the spacecraft and the launch vehicle system. And that's what the team's working on right now. And you say it's strapped to a rocket right now. In French, Guyana, explain why it's there. Right. So this telescope is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. So it's a worldwide effort. And one of the things that ISA is providing us is the launch vehicle.

So we're launching on an Arion 5 rocket, and their launch port, it's down in French Kiana in South America. Okay, so once it finally launches, hopefully very soon, it's still got about a month to go to get to its orbit. Why is it going so far away? What's special at this particular orbit? So we're putting JWST at what's called the second Lagrange Point. So Lagrange points are these really cool, it's kind of a cool gravitational trick.

that the sun and the Earth system play. So there ends up being these sort of stable points in the whole Earth Sun gravity system. And one of them happens to be at this, you know, approximately million mile away point called the second Lagrange point L2. So that point is about a million miles from Earth, about four times further away than the moon to give you a sense of scale there. So we can basically put spacecraft there and they sort of will. hang around there and it will orbit the sun along with the earth. So you can kind of think of it like

the earth is sort of dragging it along in its orbit. Another way you can think about it is it will sort of always be in the midnight sky. It's sort of always, you know, straight out, which it's good to put spacecraft there because we can easily communicate with them. But it was necessary for JWST for to be very, very cold. The spacecraft has to be super cold. And so that's why we're putting it out into deep space. Now, it has to be cold because it's an infrared telescope. So whereas Hubble sees the universe primarily in optical, visible light that your eyes see, we've designed JWST to see the universe in infrared light. And everything glows in infrared. And spacecraft glow too. And so since we're trying to detect faint infrared signals from the distant universe, our spacecraft has to be

very, very cold so it's not sort of glowing and seeing itself. So that's why we're putting it out into deep space. That's very cool. So a completely different technology, I mean, when you talked about this being the successor to the Hubble, you're not talking about Hubble 2.0, just a better type of Hubble. This is an entirely different technology that's going to allow you to see in a different way. Absolutely. Yes. It's a successor to Hubble really only in a scientific sense. From an engineering sense, it is completely different. I mean, if you go look at pictures of the telescope, you'll see it doesn't look like what we normally conceptualize as a telescope. So yeah, it's very different in that sense,

in the sense that it will observe infrared light instead of visible light. It's also huge. It is, the mirror is about six times bigger than Hubble's mirror. And it has a sunshield about the size of a tennis court. It stands over three stories tall. So it is way, way bigger than Hubble. And of course, its detectors are more advanced and all of that. And so if you sort of combine all of those things together, it gives us a telescope that'll be, we think about a hundred times more powerful than Hubble kind of all together. You described it a little bit, but there's a kind of a honeycomb like a hexagonal design of the telescope. Why does it look like that? Yeah. So this also goes back to the fact that it's just so big. It's a huge telescope. The mirror is

about six and a half meters across, about 21 and a half feet across. And that is bigger than any rocket that we have to put it in fully deployed. So we have to fold the entire telescope up, the mirror and this tennis court-sized sunshield. We have to fold it all up in order to fit into the rocket. And then it unfolds in space. And the reason we chose the hexagons is because you can sort of efficiently pack hexagons together. And then we can, you can sort of efficiently pack hexagons together. And then we can again, fold the, there's sort of three mirrors on the sides that we fold backwards to get it stowed inside the rocket. And then they'll deploy unfold once they're in space. Very cool. So you were talking about what you're going to be able to see with this. And maybe we can

talk through that a little bit. First of all, just to give us an understanding, we've seen the amazing images that have come from Hubble. If you aimed this at some of the same targets, we've already seen Hubble pictures of, how would it be different? Would it just be higher resolution? What would be different? The pictures will look different because they will be infrared and sort of a related question I often get is, will they be pretty? You know, because Hubble images are obviously, you know, stunningly beautiful. And the answer is absolutely yes. They will be gorgeous, beautiful images. Hubble, people often think of the pillars of creation, the Eagle Nebula. And Hubble has a teeny little bit of capability in the near infrared. And so if you go look at the near infrared image from Hubble

of the Pillars of Creation, you'll get a teeny little hint of what the images from JWST will look like, only much, much better. Of course, we have Spitzer Space Telescope, which also observed in the infrared, much smaller. Spitzer's a much smaller telescope. So we have some, you know, kind of examples of what infrared images look like. And they will be beautiful. But this telescope, again, since it's so big, the images will be much higher resolution than the infrared images that we've seen before. So higher resolution, but what else will this be able to do that previous telescopes haven't been able to do? Like, if you're describing just the very coolest thing about, this telescope, what do you tell people? Well, I mean, oh, there's so many.

cool things. But to get down to the science, this telescope was designed, you know, very early on. The primary science driver for the telescope was to be able to detect those first galaxies that were born after the Big Bang. So we're talking about looking back in time over 13.5 billion years into the past to see the very first galaxies light up in the early universe. So that's a part of space that we've never seen at all. You know, Hubble has been able to look back into pretty, pretty distant space to see some pretty distant galaxies. But we know that the furthest we've seen with Hubble, we know those aren't the first galaxies that were born. And so we know that in order to see those first galaxies, we have to use infrared light. So the light from those galaxies, the galaxies are so far away.

the expansion of space time has caused their light to be redshifted all the way into the infrared part of the spectrum. And so we have to have an infrared telescope to detect them. So that's one example of, I think, you know, groundbreaking science that we'll be able to learn from this telescope because that's how the universe got started, right, is the first galaxies and we don't know anything about them. Of course, the beginning of the universe is something that all scientists and probably all people should be really interested in. But I'm going to guess that the things that most lay people will be most excited about is exoplanet research. I mean, we always are thinking about what are the other planets that might be like Earth. So why is this

particular telescope going to be better than the others we have for searching out life elsewhere or planets elsewhere? Yeah. So when we first start when we, this was before I was an astronomer, but when astronomers first started, you know, conceptualizing this new telescope, started thinking about it even before Hubble was launched. So at that time, you know, we didn't even know about exoplanets or we thought they were there, but we certainly didn't know what we knew today, which is that exoplanets are everywhere. And so it's just, it just so happened, you know, we got lucky in a way that a lot of the really interesting chemical signatures in exoplanet atmospheres happen to be in the infrared part of the

spectrum. So things like water vapor and carbon dioxide and methane, you know, all those things that we think about being the building blocks to life. All of those are in the infrared part of the spectrum. And so JWST is going to revolutionize, I think, our study of exoplanets. So my own area of research is galaxy evolution. I'm interested in how galaxies change over time, how they form their stars in black holes. And so exoplanets is pretty far from my own area of research. But I think that the exoplanet science that J.R.T. is going to be able to do is going to be some of the most impressive, some of the coolest stock. So the Hubble was notoriously known for being a bit blurry when it was first launched, and that certainly had an awful lot of scientists

scared. How soon after this launch will you know whether or not, you know, everything's fine, everything's okay and working properly? Well, we do have a very long commissioning period, you know, relatively speaking. So once we launch the telescope, it takes about two weeks to unfold. So that whole intricate, complicated deployment process takes two weeks. And then it's a couple more weeks to get out to that million mile point L2. And then we haven't got five more months of what we call commissioning of bringing the telescope up to working order. So that includes things like, first of all, just letting the telescope cool down. So it doesn't cool instantly. You know, it takes a while for it to cool. And then we have four science instruments on board that we have

to sort of bring up to working order, you know, one at a time. And that process of getting the mirrors aligned take several months. So every individual mirror segment, all 18 mirror segments, have an individual motor on the back where we can move it and tweak each mirror. And so we'll spend several months taking an image of a single star and then tweaking the mirror to make sure all the mirrors line up. So we're fairly certain we're not going to have a Hubble problem because we can fix the mirrors in real time in space. And that's part of, of the commissioning process. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

I'm talking with Dr. Amber Strawn. She's an astrophysicist. She's at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and she's part of the big launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, which we're talking about. It's coming up very soon. Given the excitement around this, I can only imagine there are just a lot of scientists who are waiting to use this.

How do you even decide who gets time on this telescope? So it's actually a pretty, it's a pretty cool process because it's sort of a democratic process. So anyone in the world that has a great idea can write a proposal to use the telescope. And this is how it works with Hubble 2. So once a year, astronomers from around the world write their proposals. And then they submit those proposals and then another team of astronomers gets together. And this is actually all anonymized as of just the last few years. Other astronomers get together. and review them and select which ones they think are going to be great. And that's how,

that's how we decide who gets to use a telescope. So it's kind of, anyone can compete for time. That's really cool. So I don't know, Hubble's been in the, in the sky for 30 years now. How long is Webb supposed to operate? So we have a minimum mission lifetime requirement of five and a half years. But we fully expect it to last 10 years, maybe longer. Our last. Our life is, Life limiting factor is fuel. So when we're out at that L2 point, so L2 is actually a semi-stable point. So we have to use fuel to keep the telescope sort of in, in an orbit around L2. So we use fuel for that. And when we run out of fuel, that's when the mission will end. And if we get a super efficient launch, you know, we could last, you know, more than 10 years, 12, 15, who knows. It all sort of

depends on the fuel situation. But we fully expect 10 years. I just have to ask you before I let you go. I mean, your job is looking so incredibly far into the past using these telescopes. Is it ever hard for you as just a human with our own limitations to wait for this work to come to its fruition? Because you've been working at this for such a long time. You've got to wait for the next telescope to go up to do more of your work. That's got to be a little, I don't know, frustrating. Well, yeah, you know, I guess us astronomers would always love it if we could, you know, launch a huge telescope.

every few years, that would be great. But that's not our situation, and that's okay. And, you know, I mean, technology development takes a lot of time. The technology that we use in these telescopes really is, if it was easy to do, we would be doing it a lot faster. But yeah, the waiting does get a little tiresome, you know, but you know what? It's going to be worth it. It's going to be worth the weight. Dr. Amber Strawn is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She serves as a Deputy Project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope Science Communications. Thanks so much for talking with me today. Good luck with this upcoming lunch. Thank you so much. Very excited about it.

Yeah, you can watch the TikTok videos. As I said, she's very excited about it. We have to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the overlap between churchgoers and COVID-19 vaccination rates. Stay with us. Hey, Ira here with an exciting message. Science Friday currently has a dollar for dollar donation match in effect. This means that any donation made through December 31st will be doubled, including yours. Now, I don't have to tell you that the need for

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This is Science Friday. I'm John Denkoster. It's the most wonderful time of the year. Yes, the holiday season. But the truth is, for a lot of Christians, Christmas time is one of the only times of the year that they go to church. Pastors, of course, wish this wasn't the case, but now we're learning something interesting about regular church attendance that might be connected to health. In historically black Protestant churches, regular attendees are much more likely to be vaccinated than people who show up to church a few times a year. Here to help me break down this data about religion and vaccination is my guest.

Greg Smith is Associate Director of Religion Research at the Pew Research Center based in Washington, D.C. Greg, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Why don't you walk us through this data about religion and COVID vaccines? What did you find? Well, I think maybe the first thing to note is that there are differences across religious groups in rates of vaccine uptake. At the low end, we have white evangelical Protestants, they are less likely than people in many other religious traditions to have been vaccinated. At least that's what we found in a survey we conducted in August. Fewer than six and ten white evangelicals, in fact, in that study said they had received at least one dose of the vaccine. By contrast, among Catholics, among those in the black Protestant

tradition, among people who say they have no religion, religiously unaffiliated, among all those groups, we found vaccine uptake at seven and ten or more. So there are. religiously based differences in vaccine reception for sure. And this idea of regular attendance in church is actually a really important piece of this. How exactly did you determine who was a regular attendee and not? What we see is that among members of the historically black Protestant tradition, people who say they attend religious services regularly, that is to say at least once or twice a month, they are actually more likely than other members of the historically black Protestant tradition to have been vaccinated. In fact, among members of the historically black tradition who

attend religious services at least monthly, eight and ten have been vaccinated compared with just six and ten members of that tradition who attend religious services less often. That finding, that connection between higher rates of religious attendance and higher rates of vaccination is really only evident within the historically black Protestant tradition. We don't see that in evangelical churches or mainline Protestant churches or Catholic churches. Does the data give you any hints as to why these historically black Protestant churches are different in this regard? We can't say for sure, but there are hints. I think chief among those hints is that people in the historically black Protestant tradition say that their clergy have been encouraging people to get vaccinated at

higher rates than what we see in other religious traditions. In fact, two-thirds of church-going members of the historically black Protestant tradition say their clergy have encouraged people to get vaccinated. And we see far lower levels of clergy encouragement with respect to vaccination among other religious groups. So I think that's one key hint to what's going on. And are you learning anything else about that? I mean, is it because their pastors are just so convincing that this is something that they could, they should do? There's a couple things we can. point to one is that people express high levels of trust in their clergy to provide this kind of information among all American churchgoers, not just those in the historically black Protestant

tradition, among all American churchgoers, six and ten people say that they have at least a fair amount of confidence in their clergy to provide guidance about what to do with respect to the vaccine. Now, that's lower than the share who have a lot of confidence in their primary care doctor, but it's on par with the share who say they're confident in public health officials, like those at the CDC. And it's higher than the share of churchgoers who say they have a lot of confidence in local elected officials or state elected officials or even the news media. So that's part of it. Clergy are looked to as a source of guidance on these matters. I think another factor here with Black Protestants in particular is that if we look back to surveys we did earlier in the pandemic,

we were seeing that black Protestants were a little bit slower to return to in-person religious attendance compared with other groups, even though on average black Protestants are a highly religious group, more religious on average than members of many other religious traditions. And I think that in turn was consistent with other surveys that showed that racial and ethnic minorities were being hit harder by the pandemic than other groups. So I think all of these things come into play. Greg Smith is Associate Director of Religion Research at the Pew Research Center based in Washington, D.C. Greg, thank you so much for your time and all of this great data.

Thank you again for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. As we heard from Greg, part of what sets historically black Protestant churches apart is that pastors are likely to encourage churchgoers to get vaccinated. One of those pastors is my next guest. Pastor Gil Monroe is leader of the historic Mount Zion Church of God in Brooklyn, New York. Pastor Gill, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be on. So what role do you play for your parishioners when it comes to COVID-19 education? Yes, I think that for us, it's also not just a theological question, but also a conscious question. So my role is to give confidence to let folks know that if your conscience dictates one or the other,

the church is here to stand with you. But also you have to consider your family, your medical choices, and how do you see yourself in a larger context of health in the way you live and to make the decision based on, again, your conscience. And so our role is to make sure that we can guide them through their process. So tell me about your strategies for encouraging vaccination for people who may be hesitant, who may come to you and say, I don't believe that I should be vaccinated. Yeah. So, you know, you have to walk it with a fine line. What I've said is that, you know, I'm vaccinated and I think that we have been taking vaccinations all of our lives.

And so this is, to me, I was like, this is nothing new to the experience of health. And so therefore, you can be rest assured that, you know, it is something that you're making a decision that could improve your health, right? And so don't feel that you are doing something that is so detriment to yourself, to your body, that physically you feel that you're doing something wrong. So our encouragement and my encouragement to those who are hesitant is that, you know, we need to take a look at how in history we have been taking vaccines before and it's nothing new to us. So you're giving people a bit of a history lesson, but you're also asking them to follow their conscience. It sounds to me, Pastor, that in the end, if they were to ask you, what should I do, Pastor Gill myself, you would tell them, follow your conscience, but get a vaccine.

For the most part, yeah, you can follow your conscience, but at the same time, I think the vaccine is something that, because there's no medical procedure of medicine that we know of that is totally perfect. But we know for sure that it has its benefits. And so I would say to them to make sure that, yes, if your conscience is really leaning, I am here to help walk you through those feelings. Because don't forget that someone's spiritual journey doesn't really come to a climax overnight. and our role as state leaders is to deal with the peoples or that individual faith, not necessarily in medical procedure. The data that we've been talking about here, was it surprising to you that regular church attendees were more likely to be vaccinated

than those who attend church only once in a while? Yeah, I thought that that was very striking. But also on the flip side, when I was thinking about it again, we have seen that even people who wanted to come back to fellowship and to worship, And I think that that was one of the driving forces. It was being said, the quicker you get vaccinated, the more that you can rejoin in fellowship and in worship. Because really and truly, God did not make us to be separated like this.

And so all throughout the Holy Scriptures, we see there's a touching, there's a hugging. There's just an embrace. And so I think that people wanted to get back into worship. So I am thinking that it would make sense knowing that information. So that's really interesting. people who are more inclined to come to church more often feel that that's a big part of their lives, that that community is a big part of who they are. And so the vaccination in that way is a way for them to get back to that communion. Yeah, yeah. And to me, that's what it is. People

wanted to get back to worship with God. People wanted to connect with family and friends. The church really is about people, as I'm speaking exclusively about that, it's about people. And people, again, wanted to be in touch, wanted to be back again into the live music, back again into the worship, back again hearing the clapping and the tambourine and the music, and hearing the preacher, live and direct.

And so that was definitely a draw to get the vaccination. This kind of public health education that you're providing, is it part of a larger tradition within black churches? So I think for us is that we're always looking for equality across the board. And when you had looked at initially, looking at the numbers, you saw that the affluent communities were receiving the vaccination quicker than the poor communities. And so as a church, we always have to be mindful on its faith community and the black church that we wanted to fight for equity. That the same information that was given to those in a different zip code is the same information that would be given to the people in which we serve. Pastor Gilman Rose is leader of the historic Mount Zion Church of God in Brooklyn, New York.

Pastor, thank you so much for sharing some of your time with us, and please have a wonderful holiday. Thank you and stay healthy. The ocean islands off of the coast of Maine are home to a peculiar and charismatic bird, the Atlantic puffin. This cold weather species loves to hang out on rocky shores, chomping down on little fish. But like many creatures, they're threatened by climate change. The puffins in their plight are the subject of a new video. from Science Friday, which can be seen at Science Friday.com slash puffins. Joining me now to talk about how Maine's puffin population has changed, is my guest.

Fred Beaver is a reporter for Maine Public Radio. He's based in Portland, Maine. Fred, welcome back to Science Friday. Good to be here, John. Now, Fred, you've been doing reporting on Maine's puffin population for many years. How is it doing? How are the puffins doing right now? It's up and down, John. Recent history of Atlantic puffins in the U.S. waters is this amazing seesaw drama of decline, recovery, and now new perils brought by climate change. Maine's always been at the southern edge of their range, and in the 1800s, sailors looking for food and feathers pretty much wiped them out of the Gulf of Maine, and the islands became these semi-barren,

mostly uninhabited outposts. So no people, but there are still puffins there. So the puffins must have come back. Yes, and volunteers. They came back thanks to this guy named Stephen Kress. He's this saw-spoken ornithologist with the Audubon Society. And back in the 70s, he had this idea that he could re-establish the birds off Maine's coast by relocating hatchlings from Canada's maritime provinces where the puffin population is still pretty robust. Crescent volunteers provided handmade nesting burrows. They set up decoys. They broadcast recorded bird calls up into the air, all in an effort to tempt the puffins to nest back here once they matured. And this all worked. It worked. In peak years, more than 400 are nesting on Eastern Egg Rock. That's the island highlighted in the new sci-fri video and a few thousand more have established colonies on other U.S. islands as well. And 10 other bird species that had abandoned the islands, including the endangered rosy at turn. They followed the puffins to the islands. Puffins are pretty quiet birds. They don't make much noise outside of their burrows. But the other birds, they more than make up for that.

I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Fred Bever about the plight of the Atlantic Puffin. Yeah, and we've talked on the program about this food web in the Gulf of Maine, how it's warming faster than almost any other body of water. Yeah, that's right. It is due to its underwater topology and water currents and climate change was changing all of those dynamics. I think if it is kind of a test lab for what the rest of the world's oceans are about to go through,

so dynamic, with southerly species making new inroads into the Gulf, more northerly species, numbers dropping off, then a return to normalcy, and the last decade saw a series of what scientists are calling marine heat waves, which have proven to be really, really disruptive. So how did that big heat wave in 2012 affect the puffins? It was a very bad year for the puffins 2012. They're forage feeders. They're dependent on small schooling fish like herring to nourish themselves, and they're young. And in the summer nesting season of 2012, the herring pretty much did not show up. And other potential prey fish did, including butterfish. That's a more southerly species. We usually don't see much around here. The problem is they have this kind of wide saucer-shaped profile

that the chicks can't get down their gullets. So a lot of them starved. And that was the case with other puffing colonies in the area as well. The winter, that winter, the waters continue to be warm. And the trend continued. There were other effects of this heat wave, though, I can imagine. 2012 kind of upended the entire coastal ecosystem around here. That was the year that saw the collapse of a prized local shrimp fishery, main shrimp, a northern Atlantic species that, like the puffins, is at the southern extreme of its range here. Recent science suggests that warmer waters encouraged an incursion of longfin squid from like the Rhode Island area, voracious shrimp eaters that like butterfish are usually seen more in the south. And with several more

heatways, since then, we've seen a drop-off in the abundance of a tiny crustacean, it's called Kalanus Finn Marchecus. It's the favorite prey of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales. Many of the whales have been heading up to Canadian waters to forage instead. That's a change in habit, which may have contributed to more of them getting hit by ships north of the border. Wow. So how have the puffins been doing since that heat wave we've been talking about? now almost 10 years on. They've had some better and worse years since, but the trend can be pretty disheartening, particularly for the scientists and volunteers who work closely with them.

Like Linda Welch, she's a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist I spoke with after the most recent nesting season. Many of the chicks that we classified as sledging, you know, reaching the age where they leave their burrow and go to sea, the birds were 40 to 50 percent smaller than we know. normally see. And I've never seen that before. You know, we were calling the micro-puffins. That's a new word in the vocabulary, micro-puffins. She's never seen so many emaciated young birds. On one of the islands, barely 10 percent of the nesting adults managed to raise a chick to the fledging stage. In normal years, it's like 75 percent. It's important to keep in mind,

though, that puffins, they're quite long-lived. They can lay eggs and raise chicks into their 30s. That's what keeps Donald Lyons. He's the new director of Audubon's Project puffin on a more optimistic track. We actually had in hand this summer, one of the original puffins that was brought down from Newfoundland. That bird's now 32 years old. Every puffin that gets out there that reaches adulthood is kind of an insurance policy for the next two or three decades.

Lions thinks fisheries policy and management can help too. And he told me something else I thought was really cool, Sean. He sees the puffins as kind of unparalleled field reasons. researchers. They head out to sea every day and bring back to the scientists a constant stream of samples. It's now decades of data that are documenting a time of enormous change in our oceans. Fred Beaver's been charting that change for Maine Public Radio in Portland, Maine. Fred, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. My pleasure, John. And if you want to watch a video about some of the work being done to conserve these

charming little birds, go to sciencefriiday.com slash puffins. Here's Kyle, Mary, Viterbo with some of the folks who helped us put on this week's show. Nahima Ahmed is our manager of impact strategy. Diana Montano is our outreach manager. Ira Flato is our executive producer and host. Valissa Mayors is our office manager, and I'm engagement producer Kyle Marion Viterbo. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much, Kyle.

And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, what was your favorite read of 2021? Yeah, we'll be talking about some of the best science books that came out this year. in an upcoming show, and we'd like to hear from you. Go to the Science Friday Voxpop app. It's wherever you get your apps. Ira's back next week. I'm John Dankoski.