Vox: The incredibly frustrating reason there’s no Lyme disease vaccine

LYMErix wasn’t a perfect vaccine, as Gregory Poland, a Mayo Clinic vaccine researcher, explained in a 2011 retrospective in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. It required three doses over the course of the year, and was not approved for people under age 15. It was optional, and doctors had a hard time assessing whom to recommend it to (there were few maps of Lyme-carrying ticks’ range at the time). And the vaccine only protected against the North American strain of Lyme. Finally, it was somewhat expensive at $50 a dose, and it was not universally covered by health insurance.

But it was effective, preventing Lyme in up to 90 percent of the people who were vaccinated will all three doses, with few side effects. And at first, the vaccine was pretty popular; about 1.5 million doses were injected before 2000.   [...]

LYMErix had the misfortune of being approved the same year some people were becoming suspicious of vaccines in the United States. In 1998, the journal Lancet published a now-retracted study that (falsely) claimed the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR) was linked to autism, and the modern anti-vax movement was born. [...]

As Julia Belluz reported at Vox, Lyme cases tripled between 2004 and 2016, spread by an increased number of infected ticks. It’s now the most common vector-borne (i.e., transmitted by an insect or animal) disease in the United States. And climate change seems to be partly to blame: As temperatures warm, a greater proportion of the US becomes hospitable to the ticks. Overall, vector-spread diseases like chikungunya, Zika, and West Nile are spreading faster than ever.

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Quartz: Baby boomers are divorcing for surprisingly old-fashioned reasons

Kathy experienced a mid-life or what is also known as a ‘grey divorce.’ A grey divorce is simply a divorce that occurs at or after the age of 50. Even though the divorce rate across all age groups has stabilized, the number of grey divorces in the United States has recently dramatically increased. Currently, about one out of every four divorces is grey.

What has caused this dramatic surge in grey divorces? First has simply been the ageing of the Baby Boomer generation. In 1990, there were only 63.5 million Americans aged 50 and older, but by 2010, there were 99 million in this same age group. By 2050, the US Census Bureau predicts that there will be 158.5 million individuals aged 50 and over. In addition to the growth in absolute numbers of such individuals, life expectancy has mostly continued to tick upwards. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 1950, men could be expected to live, on average, 65.6 years, while women could be expected to live 71.1 years, on average. By 2016, these ages had increased to 76.1 and 81.1, respectively. Both of these factors have worked to expose ever-greater numbers of couples to the possibility of a grey divorce. [...]

For the Baby Boomers I interviewed who grew up during the 1960s, one might guess that most divorces would happen because they were no longer personally fulfilled, but that was generally not the case. While some men and women identified growing apart in interests as the central reason for their split, all of the others, surprisingly, pointed to reasons related to violations of binding responsibilities that they felt were the key foundations of a healthy marriage. [...]

Overall, then, the motivations behind those seeking a grey divorce do not have a lot to do with couples simply wanting to spread their wings because they are no longer fulfilled, or ‘hippies gone wild’. Instead, this mid-life population takes splitting up very seriously and, more often than not, considers whether their promised binding responsibilities to each other have been violated when they file for divorce. And as their numbers continue to climb upward, soon we will all be saying to those seeking a divorce after 50: we know why you did it; welcome to the club.

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Jacobin Magazine: Macron’s Anniversary

It might seem odd for a democratic leader to refer to “people who are nothing,” but from the beginning of his presidency Macron has embraced this arrogant posture. His muscular liberalism adopts a tough “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” line. In similar recent provocations he has called public-sector workers “slackers” and told students missing their studies for protests that they could not expect easy “chocolate-coated exams.”[...]

Twenty-five universities have been occupied in protest at the reforms, fearing the eventual creation of an American or British-style system in which the student-consumer takes out a massive debt as an “investment” in their education and future career. The occupiers fear that students will become a bit like a start-upper at Station F, not the recipient of a public service but a private entrepreneur selling themselves as a product. [...]

6.6 million French citizens are either unemployed or chronically underemployed. This figure has fallen slightly since 2017 but remains above pre-crisis levels. Alienation from the old parties has hardly won such voters to Macron, whose agenda entrenches the very processes that caused the disaster of ex-industrial France. Nor do Macron’s plans for European reform seem likely to survive contact with German opposition. [...]

The Front National remains beyond the pale for large swathes of the population. This toxic, xenophobic force was Macron’s ideal opposition as he sought to rally the Left to his “open,” neoliberal project. However, an IPSOS study after last May’s election found that just 16 percent of his vote owed to agreement to his program, 33 percent to “political renewal” and 43 percent to opposition to Le Pen.

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Social Europe: Renzi’s Last Call

“Within proportional electoral systems,” household-name Law professor Gustavo Zagrebelsky told the anti-Renzi Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper, “everyone is called into play to try and win, even against all odds. In the end, of course, you can go into opposition if you’ve failed to negotiate. But [opposition] is not the default choice.”  [...]

Parallels with Spain are in fact multiple. Five Star share with Podemos a powerful anti-establishment rhetoric: the old system is portrayed as a caste of self-interested politicians. These are set against the general interests of ordinary individuals – society at large. According to this narrative, both socialists and conservatives are responsible, in equal measure, for the political and economic crises in Italy and Spain: Podemos and Five Star want to surpass what they define as the “fictional differences” between left and right. The real chasm lies – here they are in unison with UKIP’s Nigel Farage, their Strasbourg allies, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of euros from the EU – between the “people” and the “establishment.” [...]

So, maybe there is a slim chance for PD to regroup, from the high-backed opposition benches or not. Those PD deputies around outgoing prime minister Paolo Gentiloni are in favour of negotiating, but they’re in the minority. Although Gentiloni was always a “Renziano” himself, belonging to a certain current does not involve, on this specific issue, following or rejecting Renzi’s view by default. It’ll be a personal choice. Regrouping, after this, may thus commence on an individual basis. The sheer force of dialogue could restart a centre-left party that, after 11 years, is going through a middle-age crisis (politicians are still fairly old in Italy, but organisations are very young indeed).

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Business Insider: Theresa May's cabinet in chaos as Boris Johnson calls her Brexit plans 'crazy'

"If the EU decides to impose punitive tariffs on something the U.K. wants to bring in cheaply, there’s nothing you can do. That’s not taking back control of your trade policy, it’s not taking back control of your laws, it’s not taking back control of your borders and it’s actually not taking back control of your money either, because tariffs would get paid centrally back to Brussels. [...]

Johnson's preferred alternative of creating a new 'maximum facilitation' system would involve a new 'trusted trader' system, but would also produce border checks in Northern Ireland, which politicians from all side have warned would be a serious risk to the peace process in the province.

Both options would take up to five years to implement and have already been ruled out by EU officials as "magical thinking," with the Irish government threatening to veto any deal that does not retain current loose customs relations between Northern Ireland and the Republic. [...]

However, his public denouncement of plans being personally pushed by the prime minister is the clearest public test of her authority yet by a senior member of her cabinet and is likely to prompt a public response from May's spokesman when he appears before journalists on Tuesday lunchtime.

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