Science Friday - Medieval Bones, Vaccine Rollout, Florida Panthers. Jan 29, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

A Skeletal Record Of Medieval England Society If you’ve ever fractured a bone, that skeletal trauma stays with you forever, even after it heals. So researchers across the pond are using bones from medieval times to put together a picture of what life was like. The bones in the study came from ordinary people in medieval Cambridge in the United Kingdom, from between the 10th and 14th century. The researchers found that you can often guess who was working class, and who had more money based on what their bones looked like. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks to Jenna Dittmar, a research fellow in osteoarchaeology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, about this new research. Deploying President Biden’s ‘Wartime’ COVID-19 Plan On his first day in office, President Biden released the national COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness plan. Announced on January 21, the strategy introduces a newly created advisor, the COVID-19 Response Coordinator, and the Defense Production Act, which aims to ramp up vaccine production. The goal is to administer 100 million vaccine doses in 100 days—a vaccination plan that the Biden Administration declares a “wartime effort.” Public health experts Thomas Bollyky of the Council on Foreign Relations and Amesh Adalja of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Health Security discuss what steps will be needed to deploy the federal plan. They also look to the future and evaluate how we can better plan for pandemics, reframe our approach, and budget for public health campaigns.  Lack Of Enforcement Threatens The Endangered Species Act It’s been nearly 50 years since the Endangered Species Act passed. The 1973 legislation, designed to give government agencies tools to protect species threatened by development or other economic activity, still enjoys high amounts of public support. But, as investigative reporter Jimmy Tobias writes for The Intercept and Type Investigations this week, one of the main government agencies tasked with enforcing the Act seems to be increasingly hesitant to use its power to block development, a trend that’s stretched back at least since the Clinton administration. Tobias writes about how this lack of enforcement threatens the survival of one particular animal, the Florida panther—whose Southwest Florida habitat, and roughly 150 remaining members, are at risk from a major proposed development.  Ira talks to Tobias about the panther, the ESA, and what conservationists think needs to change.  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 I Refleto. Whether you like it or not, a record of your life is constantly being recorded, and no, I'm not talking about social media. But through your bones, every time you fracture a bone, even after it heals, that skeletal trauma, that scar, stays with you forever. Researchers in Scotland are using bones from medieval times to put together a picture of what life was like. Here to tell us more about it is Cy-Frize Kathleen Davis. Hi, Kathleen. Hey there, Ira. Okay, so why are these bones so special?

Well, they're special because they actually came from ordinary people in medieval Cambridge in the U.K. So we're talking about people who lived sometime between the 10th and the 14th centuries. And these researchers found that you can often guess who was working class and who had money back then based on what their bones looked like. Really? How did the bones tell that to them? Well, that's what I wanted to find out. So I spoke to Dr. Jenna Dittmar, a research fellow in osteoarchiology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, who is the lead researcher of this study. And I started by asking her just this. What can we learn from bones? So this study analyzed human skeletons that were excavated from three different cemeteries in Cambridge, England.

By comparing individuals that were buried in different locations within a town, we can begin to investigate the lived experiences of these people and what types of spheres they could have occupied within medieval society. So for this study, for example, we looked at the skeletons of inmates from a charitable institution, which was a hospital, members of the clergy, specifically of an Augustinian friary, a number of wealthier individuals that were buried within a religious institution and a number of what we call ordinary working members of the population. So by looking at people from multiple different walks of life, we're able to look at the differences that could have existed between these groups, but we're also able to get a better picture of the living conditions

within the town because this sample is broadly representative of what medieval society would have looked like as a whole. So from this, we can begin to identify. the hazards of daily life that were experienced by everyone, as well as those that were unique to specific groups of people that we can tell based on their burial location within this town. So back then, it seems like where you were buried actually said a lot about what kind of person you were. Absolutely. And it also told us a lot about where you fit within the social hierarchy of medieval England. So tell me a little bit about what you actually learned from studying these bones about what life was like back then. What was it like to be a person living in medieval

Cambridge? So the economy in medieval England was largely based on agriculture. And the vast majority of people would have been directly involved in agricultural activities and pursuits and would have spent most of their days working in the fields, plowing or herding or something like that. But there were actually a number of occupations that people could have had. So, Cambridge was a medium-sized market town that had a population of about 2,500 to about 4,000 people during the mid-13th century, and we know that close to 50 different trades would have been practiced. These included construction workers, which included carpenters, tylers, stone masons, and thatchers, in addition to artisans like shoemakers and tailors.

Most of the specialized occupations were dominated by men, but we know that women also worked and received wages in this time. They could work brewing ale, for example, or washing clothes or pursuits like weaving. So another major subgroup of people that existed during the medieval period were members of religious institutions, such as friaries. And in the case of Cambridge, the university colleges. So people in this group had a highly specialized lifestyle that was governed by the specific institutional rules, and they varied greatly by the particular order that an individual belonged to.

So the University of Cambridge existed back then? Absolutely. It was founded about 1208. Wow. So you mentioned that there were some people who were a little wealthier in this community. What did those people do with their days, as far as you can tell? Typically, people that were considered wealthier at this time. And when we're talking about wealth here, we're certainly not talking about members of the ruling class.

All of the individuals within this study would have been what we would colloquially term as peasants. But even within that very large band of what we call the peasantry, there was quite a lot of differentiation in the kind of wealth that an individual could have. Some of the workers within this sample certainly would have been tied to a piece of land and they would have worked for a lord, for example, plowing and doing these kinds of activities. But there would have been others that would have been involved in trading or they would have been merchants and they could have had a very different lifestyle to what we're thinking of as medieval peasants nowadays.

Were there any specimens as you were going through these bones that stuck out to you in terms of what they probably went through in life? So in general, we found a lot of evidence for skeletal injuries. About 32% of the sample that we looked at had one or more fractures. But some individuals certainly stood out as having more severe injuries than others. One individual, who was actually a friar, had very severe traumatic injuries. Both of his femurs were broken as well as his neck. And these were, yeah, these were. These were. perimortem injuries as well. So what that means is that these bones didn't have time to heal before this person would have died. And given the extent of the injuries, you know, both of his legs and his neck would have been broken, we expect that he died from whatever kind of accident that he was involved in. The injuries that he has are most similar to what pedestrians today experience when they're hit by a car. So you said that about

30% of these specimens that you studied had maybe not as extreme as this example, but had some type of fracture that you could look at and say, okay, that's skeletal trauma. I mean, it seems shocking to me that so many people had this kind of trauma back then. I mean, was life just really hard back then? I mean, in general, I think yes, it definitely was. There have been a number of studies that have reported fracture prevalence rates from archaeological sites all over medieval England that report very similar numbers of fractures to what we found in Cambridge. And all of this research, including ours, suggest that people, especially those that were involved in routine manual labor, were at a high risk of being injured no matter where they lived in the country,

which really isn't that surprising. We kind of expected to find this. But you have to remember that a Family survival during the medieval period was based on their ability to work for a living. And a severe injury of a family member could result in the starvation of an entire family. That's what this research really is trying to drive home. It's the lived experiences of these individuals. The Black Plague happened around this time period, if I understand this correctly. Can you see the impacts of that on the bones of the people that you study or in the remains? That is actually one of the research.

questions that the larger project that I'm involved in is working towards. So I'm a post-doctoral researcher working for a project called After the Plague, Health and History in medieval Cambridge. And our main research goal is to really try to identify the biological consequences of the bubonic plague epidemic, also known as the Black Death. So we have found evidence of Yersinia Pestis in a number of individuals from medieval Cambridge so far. And we're working to process the data to try to figure out exactly what consequences the Black Death had on this population. I want to shift gears for a second. I know that you're originally from the states, so you may be able to relate to this. But every time I travel outside of the country, it strikes me that everything is

so old. I mean, you have in many countries modern buildings that are built on top of centuries old ruins. I mean, there are buildings from medieval times that are still standing in the UK and in Europe. does being surrounded by old things as a researcher who studies this time period change how you look at the research? I mean, living in a city like Cambridge where there are so many spectacular medieval buildings does help you get into the mindset of what it must have been like for normal, everyday working folk to come into a place such as Cambridge, especially during the later medieval period when some of these buildings would have been constructed,

because you're still able to walk in the streets that the medieval people would have also walked, and you can go to the locations where these people lived, and you can see the places where they died. And it's a great privilege to be able to do this. Medicine has changed a lot, obviously, since the Middle Ages. But I'm wondering if you think it could be possible to do the kind of research that you're doing now

on these people who lived, you know, back several centuries, if it would be possible potentially to do an analysis on our bones in, you know, say, 500 years? This is a really interesting question. And I think certainly before we can answer a question like this, we need to consider how burial practices in modern times are different to those during the medieval period. So there was no such thing as embalming during the medieval period. the bodies weren't preserved in the same way that bodies are now. Another way that burial practices have changed quite drastically in modern times is the increase

in the number of individuals that choose to be cremated. And a study like this wouldn't be possible looking at cremated remains in the same way that it would be with remains that were buried traditionally in a coffin. But on the other hand, I really hope that it is. Looking at the medical advances and the way that fractures are now approached by modern medicine, you know, the inclusion of things like pins or plates could, in 500 years' time, could tell you a lot about the types of medicine that was practiced during this time. We do this in the past as well, actually.

You know, we find sometimes wooden dentures buried with individuals or prosthetic limbs. I mean, one of the very first prostheses actually came from ancient Egypt, and it was a prosthetic big toe that was placed on the foot of a mummy. So, I mean, we can learn a lot about a society by the types of medical interventions that they had at the time. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much, Dr. Dittmer, for taking time to chat with us today. Yes, thank you very much. Dr. Jenna Dittmar is a research fellow in osteoarchology at the University of

Aberdeen in Aberdeen, Scotland. For Science Friday, I'm Kathleen Davis. Interesting story. We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, a look at President Biden's wartime effort to combat the pandemic and what kind of armament we need to fight it. This is Science Friday. I'm I Refleto. President Biden has released an ambitious national COVID-19 response and pandemic preparedness plan. It includes a newly created position. of a COVID-19 response coordinator. It includes using the Defense Production Act to ramp up vaccine production.

This week, President Biden said the U.S. would purchase 600 million doses enough to vaccinate virtually every American. I've said before, this is a wartime effort. When I say that, people ask wartime, I say, yeah, more than 400,000 Americans have already died. I think it's 411 or 12, have died in one year of this pandemic. More than all the people who died in all the Americans who died in World War II.

This is a wartime undertaking. It's not hyperbole. If we're going to fight COVID like a war, shouldn't we fight it with the same intensity? We've spent a fortune on military planes, ships, hospitals, soldiers, and weaponry. So how do we plan and put all the resources we need towards, this battle and future pandemics. That's what we'll be talking about with my guests. Let me introduce them. Thomas Boyke, Director of Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's based in Washington, D.C. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. And Dr. Amish, Adalgia, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Health

Security based in Baltimore, Maryland. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Thomas, let me Again, this is a sprawling plan. What stands out to you in this plan? Well, I think the war analogy is appropriate in some ways, although it has some limits. So what stands out in the plan from the president is that very much it understands that this will be a sustained effort to fight this pandemic and with vaccination, something that really will last for the bulk of this year, the broader effort for longer, and it requires an active government response in the economy, both to prop up that economy, but to mobilize all the resources we need for this vaccination campaign. I was also pleased to see that it's a bit of a shift from what we saw in the past administration,

where there is heavy focus on the supply constraints on vaccination. How do we develop vaccines and line up the manufacturing? we need to produce them and the logistics of that supply, but very little on the administration constraints. How do we actually get vaccine doses into the arms of the most vulnerable people who need them? And then also how do we address demand problems? How do we convince people who might be reluctant to take vaccines to take them? The one part where I think there's a limit to this war analogy is war gets people thinking from a nationalist perspective. And one challenge we've seen around vaccines is that is very much what we're seeing globally. And I'm not sure that's the best way

to end this pandemic. You wrote a piece in the New York Times where you said we should treat COVID-19 less like the flu and more like an act of bioterrorism. That's right. So in the case of the flu, seasonal influenza, you know, we're largely talking about scheduled appointments for vaccination that occur through your clinical health practices and that pharmacies. In order to reach the goal that the president has laid out, a minimum of a million or a hundred million people vaccinated in 100 days, we need to see a much more robust vaccination plan. We actually have these plans. We developed them after 9-11. We developed them because there was a greater appreciation at that point that public help was a matter of national security. and part of that preparedness had to take into account the risk of bioterrorism, release potential of smallpox or, you know, a repeat of the anthrax attacks on a much larger scale.

What would we do in that case to try to vaccinate a potentially exposed population within 48 hours? That's what those plans do. oddly, with all the effort that went into planning the R&D and the development of these vaccines and the supplies that we needed, very little has been done to tap those plans from the past about how we actually administer them on short notice. So together with colleagues, Jennifer Nozo at Johns Hopkins and Sid Backham at IEM, we did this piece looking at what that actually would require in terms of sites, vaccinators, how many you would need, what kinds of shifts they would need to run based on these

plans that we had developed in the past. Amos, you work for the Center for Health Security. How is a pandemic and health a security risk? Do we need to change our perspective on public health? You're seeing it right now. I think this is what many of us in the field have been arguing that public health and infectious disease emergencies are inextricably linked to national security. The most obvious case, as mentioned earlier, biosecurity, bioterrorism, such as the anthrax attacks, but you can see what happens to a country that lets an infectious disease run rampant. It basically disrupts the entire economy. It basically takes the government from focusing on traditional national security threats to spending a lot of resources in time trying to stop an infectious

disease outbreak. In our own country, we had our president infected with this virus and hospitalized. We had the Joint Chiefs of Staff under quarantine because of exposures. I mean, that really has very clear national security implications. So I do think what we have to take from national security is that there are parts of our public health that need to be thought of that way, that we need to build an infrastructure that doesn't go through these cycles of boom and bust or panic and neglect, where when things are in the headlines, there's funding, there's interest, then when they receive from the headlines like the anthrax attacks did, all of that dries up because we are going to be faced with more infectious disease emergencies, whether or not

their pandemic scale or maybe more on the scale of Zika or Ebola, and we want to be able to be resilient to them. So I do think that we have to fix, there's a window of opportunity right now to fix this to get pandemic preparedness the attention it deserves so that it is sustainable, so that it is funded more the way the Department of Defense funds budgets. If you think about how much money we spend on pandemic preparedness compared to how much we spend on an F-35 fighter plane, you can't even compare the two. And look what's happened with this pandemic. It's been said that if you stopped this pandemic a month earlier, we'll save half a trillion dollars. Well, let's talk about preparing for it because there's a lot of talk of using the Defense Production Act to help

ramp up production of vaccines. Amish, tell us what the Act does. Can the government start directing companies to produce vaccines? How does this work? So the Defense Production Act has lots of different sections to it and lots of different aspects to it. And I'm not a lawyer, so I'm going to give you my understanding of how it applies in an infectious disease emergency. What it does is it allows the president to have companies prioritize orders from the U.S.

government, say that might be a vaccine, it might be syringes, it might be some ingredient that's needed in masks, for example, and it allows things to happen much quicker. Those contracts get prioritized. some of the red tape disappears, and it just gives a lot of power to the president to direct resources towards what is deemed a national security emergency. And it's been invoked before by President Trump, and it's been invoked for other things in the past as well. But what I don't think, what I think we have to think about is that it's not going to be a magic bullet. And the fact that we're actually getting to the DPA for masks, for example, this far

into the pandemic tells you that there's been a lot of failures that the DPA needs to be put into place. Because remember, after 2009 H1N1, the strategic national stockpile was not repleted of N95 masks. We have no one to blame for the fact that we need the DPA now, but ourselves. Thomas, we're relying then on private companies to create these vaccines that don't give up their trade secrets very easily. Is that an issue? Yeah. So I wanted to build on a couple of things that Mish said and then answer that question. So one thing to appreciate is not only did H1N1 people's expectations of what a pandemic might look like at this country, we had done all this investment after 9-11, particularly between 2004 and 2007, and we were hit by the financial

crisis. And that's really where you saw states and localities and to some extent the federal government start to cut funding to that preparedness programs. Because the easiest thing to do, of course, is always to cut for capacity that you hope you'll never need to use. And H1N1 reinforced that impulse, but it was really the combination of those two things that hurt us in the past. So in terms of the DPA, it certainly creates a potential vehicle for the president to provide economic incentives to try to mobilize domestic. industrial capabilities to meet a national security crisis like this one. In terms of vaccines, so far, we actually haven't had as much of a challenge in terms of mobilizing that supply and

having companies provide it, certainly not in comparison to some other nations, even the European Union is having some struggles getting their vaccines on time. But it's definitely something in the background that can be used if needed to move forward those supplies. The problem really has been in terms of mobilizing the capacity more so in some other areas like Amish mentioned around PPP. To be a year into this crisis and to not have solved, that challenge is really disappointing to say to police and obviously has had a tremendous health cost, particularly at a time where we may need better mass, particularly given more contagious variants that are starting to circulate. Are you saying that the mobilization of the Defense Act will not put more people on the ground,

as they like to say in the military boots on the ground, to be able to distribute the vaccine, to get it into maybe planes that need to fly to certain places, to have soldiers who are qualified, to be able to dispense it. I've already seen soldiers on the ground and in parking lots giving out the injections. Are you saying that won't help that? DPA is more around production and supply of the actual vaccines. We are seeing mobilization of vaccinators. So through FEMA, you're seeing a ramp up of the availability of vaccinators and starting to reach out to broader populations and provide the training you would need to have them be vaccinators. I think the big issue on vaccine capacity and manufacturing is, are we going to be able to convince companies, rather, that have failed candidates

to provide their manufacturing capacity to the successful candidates? And we're starting to see that. Sinoffi announced, I think it was last week, that they would be manufacturing the Pfizer vaccine. Mirk recently announced that its candidate failed. That's another source of potential manufacturing capacity that you could bring to bear. But what people need to understand is as exciting as the stories were in the early days of this pandemic of machinists and companies that had never built a ventilator trying to build one on the fly, mobilizing new companies to make anything from toilet paper to PPE. That's harder to do in the vaccine manufacturing companies. context. Vaccine manufacturing is one of the most complex manufacturing challenges in the world. It's

part of the reason why so few countries can actually do it. The fastest way to increase our supply is to get existing manufacturers, particularly those that don't have a successful candidate to manufacture the successful products. We're starting to see that. I have hope that we'll see more of that moving forward. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. The National Plan talks about mass vaccination campaigns, turning stadiums into places where you can vaccinate hundreds in a day. Do you actually see that happening? And is that the right way to go? It is one of, it's a component of the right way to go. And it's certainly what we advocate for in that New York Times piece. If we're going to hit the targets that we need to hit to sustain

1 million vaccinations per day for 100 days. And I should point out here, we have seen a ramp up of vaccinations in the U.S. over the last week and a half. But we're still averaging since December 14th when the rollout began. We're still averaging just a little over 500,000 per day. So sustaining this for 100 days, even at 1 million a day would be a feat. The president has said you want to reach one and a half million a day. To hit these targets, you need a component that involves mass vaccination, ideally of a population where they're eligibility for vaccination, because their priority population is easier to identify. So something like people over 65 where you're really just looking at driver's license or other documentation to show that they qualify. You cannot just do that,

though. And this is the important part I want to emphasize. You need to pair that with an effort to make sure you're reaching vulnerable populations. So think essential workers in meatpacking facilities or vulnerable populations with high health risks at federally qualified health centers. And to do that, you also need to pair what you're doing on the mass vaccination side with mobile clinics that can reach those more vulnerable populations. But how do you get the messaging to be single and national-led? I mean, we're hearing, you know, the face-masking messaging, the keeping kids home from school or not messaging. Is there any way to nationalize that or is that not a good idea? Well, at the end, it's going to be state and county health departments and local physicians and pharmacists and others that are putting the vaccine into people's arms. But what we need to do is have the federal government talk to states, think about where they're faltering. How can you help you? each state. It might be different in different states and then see where the federal government can help

with the coordinating function. And what we saw, and this is very similar to what happened with the testing problem, is that it was left to the states and the federal government sort of washed their hands from it. We're seeing kind of a turnaround in that rhetoric now in the Biden administration where they're recognizing that they can't allow the states to fail at this. So I really think you're going to have to have each of the 50 governors, each of the 50 health secretaries, meet with the federal government and see what their needs are and what they can and how the federal government can help them meet these challenges. The same thing probably has to happen at the county level with states because we're already hearing about discord between county governments and state governments. So this is

really a cascading failure and it is exactly reminiscent of what happened during 2009 H1N1 with the vaccine rollout where there was a lot of opacity and what was coming to you when, where it was coming, how much of it was coming. The same type of thing was happening then. And this was all in all the afteraction reports from 2009 H1N1. But again, like many, things in our field. It's gathering dust in some drawer and nobody actually ever read it or actually wanted to implement the recommendations for how to do a vaccination program at this scale. We need to take a short break, and when we come back, we'll be talking more about how to battle COVID-19 and future pandemics. My guests are Thomas Boyke, Director of Global Health at the

Council on Foreign Relations, and Dr. Amish Adalja, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. We'll be right back after this short break. This is Science Friday. I'm Irafledo. We've been talking about President Biden's ambitious national COVID-19 plan, how that might roll out, how we can plan for future pandemics. My guests are Thomas Boyke, Director of Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Dr. Amish Adalgia, an infectious disease doctor and senior scholar

at Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. There are two main issues here, as I see it. One, creating the vaccine and making enough, but the second is actually getting it into people's arms. Is this an infrastructure issue, or is it just a money and funding issue? I think the two are inextricably tied together, because you have to remember that who is doing this vaccination program,

they're the state health departments, and these state health departments are chronically underfunded. undervalued, and they at the same time are setting up vaccine clinics. They're also doing testing sites. They're also doing case investigations and contact tracing. The same is true for the hospitals that are doing this. There's nobody that was a COVID vaccinator in 2019. That wasn't a job title. So these are people that are getting pulled from other parts of the hospital, and many of these hospitals have been dealing with record numbers of admissions for COVID. So there's just not a lot of manpower to do this. And I think what you have to think about is,

if you're going to do something on this scale, the biggest vaccination program or public health endeavor in the history of this country, you have to fund it appropriately. And operational warp speed was a smashing success at developing vaccines quickly and getting them out the door. But this last mile of vaccination, of turning a vaccine into a vaccination, that's sort of where they abdicated. And when the funding came over Christmas weekend, that's way too late. This needed to have been done months and months ago. And you can see that states that did well, West Virginia, North Dakota, they were proactive. They didn't wait for the federal government. They didn't join the CBS Walgreens compact. They did it on their own. That's what has to happen is that you, in the absence of federal leadership, states had to do it their own and they're not very good at doing it. So I do think what we have to do is really use all federal resources in order to get vaccine into people's arms. And that includes mobilizing FEMA, using the National Guard, trying to get as many people who are trained to vaccinate to be able to do that. So for example, using dentists, even using veterinarians. That all has to be, in the plan now because the longer this continues, the slower this pace is, the faster this virus

is going to spread, the longer this is going to take, the more variants we're going to have. So we have a tool in hand. We just have to now implement it. Amish and Thomas, I have one last question for both of you, and it's the same one. And let me ask Amish first. How will we know what metric is there to know if this new plan, of all these new plans are successful? How will we measure success that we have turned this giant ship around? There are a couple of things. So it's important to remember that the first indications that we're going to see that this is successful is getting through this phase one A priority group, including nursing home residents, because nursing home residents still really constitute a large proportion of those individuals who are getting

hospitalized and those who are dying. So we will get a respite in our hospitals. And remember that flattening the curve is largely about preserving hospital. capacity, keeping cases to a level that's manageable. And that's the first thing I'm going to look at is our hospitals decanting, is our death rate going down? That tells you the vaccine is getting to the most vulnerable that it's working. Over time, we're going to start to see decreasing transmission. Case counts are going to go down. People's risk perception will start to change because there will be not that fear of getting deadly disease. And you'll see us approach herd immunity, probably in the summer. But the first thing I'm going to look at, and that's what I've been concerned about from the very

beginning is hospital capacity and trying to give hospitals the ability to take care of other patients and to not be worrying about their capacity, their personal protective equipment, their staffing on a day-to-day basis. Tom, your reaction? So I really like what Amish said in terms of focusing on outcomes. One challenge that we have at this goal of vaccinating 100 million people in 100 days is that it's on inputs. It's good to have goals. But the goal here, of course, is reducing case counts and preventing unnecessary death. So I really like to focus on what we're seeing around hospitalizations, what we're seeing in terms of reported deaths from the virus. I have to admit, I am a little less optimistic about how soon we will be hitting herd immunity through this

vaccine. To me, particularly for the next several months, I really view the primary goal with these vaccines is protecting vulnerable populations. You know, we may, as we get more vaccine, hopefully maintain or adoption of the kinds of practices beyond vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions, you know, social distancing, mask wearing, and so forth, managed to drive down case counts and hopefully get this pandemic under control. But given the challenges we've had in the past to vaccinating adults, I really think, think what we need to be focusing on is to make sure that we walk and chew gum at the same time,

get our numbers up, but also protect those vulnerable populations that are really driving hospitalization and unfortunately all the high number of deaths that we've seen in this country. Thomas, how do you view the future, hopeful? I do view it hopefully. I mean, I watched this week or just yesterday the press conference. with the new head of the CDC, the COVID-19 coordinator, and their team. And honestly, it was a breath of fresh air, detailed, transparent, honest. You seem to see a much more robust effort to tackle these challenges and communicate clearly where we are.

That's a good start. I'm more optimistic than I've been in a while. area where I'm not as optimistic in the near term is internationally. Right now, out of the 59 countries that are administering vaccines, just two, are either in low-income countries or lower-middle-income countries, just two. So that gives you a sense of the disparity. I don't think we're that close to solving that problem. So domestically, I'm hopeful.

Internationally, I'm concerned. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today, a lot to think about, and I'm glad you've sent us down that road to talk about it. Let me thank my guest, Dr. Amish Adalgia, infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, Thomas Boyke, Director of Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Once again, thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you for having me. It's been nearly 50 years since the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, designed to protect species threatened by development or other consequences of economic growth.

But how well is it working as we stared down the world's sixth great mass extinction? Investigative reporter Jimmy Tobias looked at the Endangered Species Act through the lens of one struggling Big Cat, the endangered Florida Panther. He's a contributing writer for the nation and the Guardian. He's also a 2021 Alicia Patterson fellow, and his reporting on the Florida Panther appears in The Intercept this week. Welcome, Jimmy. Thanks for having me. You're quite welcome.

Tell us more about the Florida Panther first. How endangered are they? Sure, yeah. The Florida Panther is a subspecies of the once abundant cougar. It's now the last of its kind along the eastern seaboard. And it's facing all sorts of threats as a big cat. It needs large landscapes to survive, but its habitat is getting gobbled up by development. Panthers are regularly run over on the roads.

In South Florida faces competition from invasive species and a number of genetic maladies. One of the sources I spoke to for my story, who's a renowned National Park Service biologist, told me there's about 150 left in the world. That's it. In the whole world, 150? And now developers are after some of their last habitat. What's going on there? Well, Florida has a booming population and lots of development, and it's constantly encroaching on Florida Panther habitat. And right now, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which is our country's most important wildlife conservation agency, it enforces the Endangered Species Act,

it is considering a plan from a group of landowners in South Florida, a plan that would, if approved, allow them to build a string of new residential and commercial developments in Panther Habitat in South Florida. And how big a piece of real estate are we talking about here? Well, if the plans approved is currently written, it would allow for development in roughly 45,000 acres of Panther habitat. And, you know, the plan does have some conservation benefits. It would set aside lands for preservation. But opponents of this plan are very concerned that the development will push the panther towards extinction, that it could jeopardize the survival and recovery of this endangered subspecies.

Because they would be adding like, what, hundreds of thousands of people in that area? Yeah, an analysis by the conservationist opponents of the plan found that it could bring hundreds of thousands of new people to the area as well as cars. And roadkill is a leading cause of death for panthers. So that's a major concern, the impact of new cars in the area, the impact of new people, and just the loss of habitat from development. A recent paper in the journal Plus One by scientists in Florida found that, you know, the Panther is restricted to something like 5% of its historic range in one population

and that it can't afford to lose any more of its core habitat if it's going to survive and thrive in the future. And so that's the real concern. And this species is really struggling and it can't afford habitat loss. That's what the science says and that's what conservationists are saying. I started out talking about the Endangered Species Act. Let's get into that a bit. What does that act require in a case like this? Sure.

Well, the Endanger Species Act is one of our most powerful environmental laws. It was passed overwhelmingly by Congress. And it gives the United States a great deal of authority to block developments that endanger species. Basically, the message of that law is that no one has the right to send a species to the brink of extinction or towards extinction. And so under the law, the Fish and Wildlife Service has the authority to block a great deal of development from infrastructure projects to any kind of development that has any sort of federal permit. But it almost never does. The agency almost never blocks projects. And that's been an ongoing trend, a bipartisan trend, for many years now.

that has put species like the panther in a pretty tough bind. Do we think this might be different in this case with the panther? Is there hope that it might actually block it? You know, most of the sources I talked to former Fish and Wildlife Service officials in Florida, conservationists, very few of them are optimistic that the agency is going to block this plan. And in fact, the Fish and Wildlife Service has permitted the destruction of tens of thousands of acres of Panther habitat in Florida over the last couple of decades. So its track record on this issue is not great. Does this mean that the Endangered Species Act really isn't being enforced right now, or are there other rules through which it can still

have teeth? Many people feel who closely observe the Fish and Wildlife Service that it is not adequately enforcing this law, that it too often bends to pressure from political interests, from corporate interests, you know, that it doesn't have the resources it needs or the political support it needs to aggressively enforce this law. And this law is immensely popular with the American Public. A poll in 2018 found that something like 80% of the American public support the ESA. So there's a great deal of support among the people. It's just that the government doesn't have the gumption or the resources and suffers from pressures that undermine the enforcement of this very popular law. So why would the Fish and Wildlife Service not be stepping in to protect endangered?

species to the degree that the science says they need. Is it what you're saying? They don't have the will? Well, you know, the rank and file of the Fish and Wildlife Service by and large is very committed to the conservation of species and wants to do the right thing in many cases. But what I've been told by the sources I've talked to, and I've talked to many Fish and Wildlife Service, retirees especially, is that the upper management too often is willing to bend to political pressures, you know, out of careerist intentions or out of just an unwillingness to

engage in conflict or to take that tough stand. And so that's part of the problem. There's a cultural problem, I think, within the upper echelons of the agency. And yes, also the agency is underfunded. That's many, many people believe that. And it just doesn't have the political air cover from Congress and the White House that it needs to really enforce this law to the full extent. I can understand that because there's a lot of money. involved here, especially when developers come in and want to build for hundreds of thousands of people. That's right. And there's also, you know, a lot of pressure from kind of conservative pressure groups, industry groups that are constantly suing the agency to block stronger protections

and things along those lines. It's a very complicated situation. But, you know, the bottom line message is that this law that so many people love is not really being allowed to fulfill its true potential. This is Science Friday from WNYC, Stu. videos. Let's talk about how many other species might this trend of in action be putting in danger. The science says that we're living through this sixth grade extinction. A UN-backed panel two years ago found that as many as one million species face the threat of extinction in the coming decades or beyond. And that's happening right here at home. You know, there are many, many species in the United States from Panthers to right whales.

to sage grouse, to salmon, that face a very bleak future. And unless this agency can really get this act together, you know, there's not a lot of hope right now. And so, you know, it's definitely imperative upon the public to put pressure on this agency, I think, to do the right thing, and this new administration. Speaking of administration, can you recall an administration thinking back that really believed strongly in enforcing these rules? You know, when I speak to Fish and Wildlife Service people, they often look back on the era of, the Clinton era, when Molly Beatty was the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service as a really high point for the agency. But since then, there seems to be a trend where it has become ever weaker.

And so people, I think, are clamoring and hoping for new leadership that can really revitalize an agency that is full of great scientists and great people who want to, you know, conserve the floor and the fauna of this country. Well, we hear that Joe Biden and his administration is, you know, the new environmental president. I guess we'll have to wait and see how this moves through his administration. Yes, the jury's definitely out. And, you know, I think we will see how this administration handles the Endangered Species Act, whether they take a different attack from the Obama era, where people feel, I think, Fish and Wildlife Service people and outside conservation groups feel that the Obama administration

didn't quite fully embrace this law. Thank you, Jimmy, for taking time to talk with us. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. You're welcome. Jimmy Tobias, an investigative reporter who contributes to the Guardian and the nation. His latest story about the Florida Panthers and the development of their habitat appeared on The Intercept this week. Oh, one last thing before we go. We've got one more event all about the short stories in our fall book club pick, New Sun's original speculative fiction by people of color.

This time we'll discuss mood-altering brain implants. Wow, the intersection of art and science and lots more with author Anil Menon and neuroscientist Suzanne Dicker. Go to ScienceFriday.com slash events to RSVP on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash events. That's about all the time we have today. If you missed any part of this program, you'd like to hear it again. subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Have a great weekend.