Page 489 – Cherwell

Washington’s two Cold Wars

Opinion

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16th September 2020

In early August, President Trump snapped. Having stewed for months over its security implications, he finally signed an executive order all but banning Chinese-owned app TikTok from American soil. The US will take “aggressive action” to ensure its swift expulsion.

TikTok is the latest, but not the first, casualty in a new kind of conflict. Shortly before the President’s declaration, Britain summarily banned the Beijing-controlled telecoms firm Huawei from its 5G infrastructure. Under pressure to secure post-Brexit trade, London was following the rest of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence community in seeking a wholesale review of Sino-Western relations. China is no longer to be treated as a competitor, but as an adversary.

Beijing is doing little to shake that image. The National Security Law foisted upon Hong Kong is eradicating the last remnants of civil liberty in what was once an oasis from the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The ongoing Uighur genocide underscores the atrocious depths of the regime’s inhumanity if left unchecked. Make no mistake, China may not be the victim in this dispute, but Washington isn’t blameless either. Intensifying military exercises in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Beijing’s claims to the region “unlawful”. What’s more, the abrupt closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, underlines the administration’s unwillingness to negotiate. Both sides have made a deliberate effort to freeze out the other.

Have we seen this all before? The New York Times certainly think so. Warning starkly that “a new geopolitical era is dawning”, they pinpoint an “ideological spiral” reminiscent of the opening years of the Cold War. The Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison even speculated that an armed conflict between the two superpowers is no longer inconceivable, fuelling worry that a catastrophic repeat of the Cold War may be upon us.

Pompeo’s track record does nothing to ease these fears. The United States top diplomat has spent his tenure attempting to carve the grooves of the Cold War into Sino-American relations. Antagonising Beijing had become his pet project, with his ‘Clean Network’ initiative spearheading the assaults on Huawei and TikTok. It was also him that declared China’s maritime claims in the South China Sea unlawful.

Nowhere was the Secretary of State’s belligerence clearer than in a speech delivered at the Nixon Presidential Library in late July. Quoting the landmark’s namesake, he proclaimed: “The world cannot be safe until China changes…our goal should be to induce change,” The message was clear: the US must wage an ideological conflict against the CCP, with Pompeo at the helm. The irony of his address could not be more glaring. Nixon sought to “induce change” through a cautious unlocking of relations suspended since the Chinese Civil War, but Pompeo seeks to do so through reckless provocation of the kind Nixon knew to be defunct. While Nixon’s ‘Ping Pong Diplomacy’ opened China to the world, Pompeo’s ‘TikTok Diplomacy’ threatens to shut it.

His intransigence risks triggering a cataclysmic confrontation. Earlier this year, the US assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, widely considered to be Iran’s second most powerful official. Soleimani’s death triggered uproar in Tehran and an outpouring of national grief which, ironically, strengthened the ailing theocracy. Any progress made by the Obama administration’s nuclear deal in warming relations between the two states was undone with the push of a button.

And it was Pompeo who led the charge, urging Trump to order the assassination with little regard for the President’s misgivings at his previous attempts to provoke Tehran. With an anonymous senior official divulging “Mike is the one leading it in the cabinet”, Pompeo’s ideological vice on Trump’s foreign policy looks secure. Left unchecked, it is a matter of time until he begets disaster, this time with a far more powerful foe.

However, there is method in his apparent madness. For one, there can be little doubt of Pompeo’s genuine concern for the victims of Beijing’s authoritarianism. His frustration at previous administrations’ inability to counter the CCP’s tightening grip on both its own citizens and the world was made clear with his steering through fresh sanctions. Pompeo is also conscious of the consequences of neglecting China’s strategy to extend its influence through foreign investment. In the UN Human Rights Council, 53 states defied Washington to support the draconian Hong Kong National Security Law. Keen to check Beijing’s growing influence, it was Pompeo, not Trump, who flew to London to meet with the Conservative Party’s anti-CCP caucus, the ‘China Research Group’. From his perspective, relations with China are steeped in moral imperatives.

The same cannot be said of the President. Without the shackles of Pompeo’s convictions, the leader of the free world treats China as a corporate rival rather than an ideological nemesis. Notably, Trump has imposed punitive tariffs on Chinese goods designed to protect American manufacturing. Trump is taking diplomacy straight from the boardroom, even demanding a cut of Microsoft’s potential purchase of TikTok, which Chinese state media dismissed as “theft”.

The repercussions of this game of business cannot be downplayed. The average American family has lost $1,000 a year to higher prices since the imposition of Trump’s tariffs. What’s more, the president’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement has left a vacuum of economic leadership in Asia which China has filled, costing Americans billions in lost trade.

Trump’s actions don’t just harm the nation he heads. Where Pompeo’s approach seeks to coerce American allies into line, Trump’s threatens to leave the world’s democracies undermined not only economically, but morally too. Through contemptuously flouting the rule of law, the president leaves the ground fertile for Chinese (and of course, Russian) authoritarianism to seize the mantle of global leadership, and the results of such a paradigm shift I could not bear conceiving.

The dissonance in the West Wing is palpable, and it crystallises in the TikTok ban. While his Secretary of State’s ‘Clean Network’ campaign fronted the decision, Trump signed off on it for entirely non-ideological reasons. He did so to ensure American technological supremacy, not the downfall of Chinese communism. Where the President seeks to follow a corporate agenda, Pompeo seeks to drag him into an ideological quagmire.

That is not to lambast the Secretary of State’s moral convictions. The genocidal atrocities Beijing is committing in Xinjiang serve as a constant reminder of the pressing need for a coordinated international response. The CCP is unequivocally not the victim of this dispute.

Yet that does not licence such brash and incoherent policy. Both Trump and Pompeo’s approaches imperil not only the US, but the entire democratic world. One threatens to abandon America’s allies in pursuit of a small-minded nationalism, while the other threatens a disastrous reversal of all the progress made since Nixon, and a return to the darkest years of the Cold War. But we are not there yet. For now, two very different Cold Wars are brewing.

My Dog and Its Owner

Edward McLaren

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16th September 2020

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My dog had lost its collar in a cave,
Whereto, through chasing night, astray it ran
After my whistle panicked in its ears.

It felt its neck pulled onward by a lead,
Not of the twine that it had started with,
To bark to find an exit where it stood.

Till then, that pet of mine began to kneel
And sniff depressingly the moist, old smells
That marked the absence of a mastered foot.

An echo came with scent of something else
That made the coward march from where it lay
Into the definite hardness of a wall.

It wailed despairing as it broke its jaw
And lost the power to whisper, mouth agape
Inside of which my dog would wander on.

Escaping through the pitch, it heard its name
But did not turn to meet who called it by it,
Lest he should be a kind man and not me.

There was a stony passageway that span
Each time my dog remained on granite squares
That could repel a friend, if following.

It churned a breed of cat it once had met
Which could not tell the safer rocks from traps,
That now my dog passed by, on with its work.

Which path it claimed to shake its tail along
There was another that its nose knew well
For the right way out, though in a blindness closed.

When with a prideful yelp my dog chose one
And felt the blood retreat within its snout,
Its sideway eyes perceived a light in front.

It was the lantern that I had not lost,
But left from me upon its own accord;
To be returned, now that my dog could grasp.

It used its mouth to tow the beacon on,
Warning its ward from where it could not go
Yet further in to find itself beyond.

Depth out of route, they watched me lying by
Another stone as darkened by my head,
In patience to confirm the very worst.

We went on from then, but did not cease
Appointing paths to follow and to lose;
So long as it always found me, I was there.

Squandering my fingers in my mouth,
I’d blow a noise and it would free its throat
If there was no more torchlight left to swallow.

I called my dog; retiringly, he came
For me to collar and with lantern lead
Into the night, away from sheltering.

Oxford resumes COVID-19 vaccine trials after pause

Claire Ion

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15th September 2020

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Oxford resumes COVID-19 vaccine trials after pause

Clinical trials for the COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University are set to resume, after they were halted on September 6th following concerns about a UK participant who developed a possible neurological illness.

The pause in the study had raised public concerns about the Oxford vaccine’s viability, although it was described by a spokesperson of biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca as a “routine pause” which was sparked by an “unexplained illness”. The trials will be resumed as soon as possible following a confirmation that it is safe to do so by the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

The nature of the participant’s illness remains unknown, although they are expected to recover, according to Stat News. During the pause, an independent safety review was conducted to determine whether the participant’s illness was linked to the vaccine. The Chief Executive Officer of AstraZeneca, Pascal Soriot, referred to a suspected diagnosis of a condition called transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome affecting the spinal cord that can be caused by viral infections.

However, Oxford said that further medical information could not be disclosed due to participant confidentiality: “We are committed to the safety of our participants and the highest standards of conduct in our studies and will continue to monitor safety closely.” AstraZeneca has also pledged, along with eight other biopharmaceutical firms, to uphold the highest possible ethical and scientific standards in developing the vaccine.

The development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is being closely watched globally. Its position as a strong contender in the expedited race towards a vaccine has lent itself to hopes of its emergence in the market soon. Soriot said on Thursday that the vaccine could still be available by the end of this year.

Temporary halts in vaccine trials are fairly common. Oxford says it was “expected” that some participants would fall ill in the trialling process, now underway in many parts of the world. So far, some 18,000 people have already received the vaccine. Reports of its successful Phase 1 and 2 testing and its subsequent move to Phase 3 testing in recent weeks heralded a new aim for the expansion of its participant pool to include 30,000 US volunteers. This includes participants with underlying medical conditions.

Oxford’s Vaccine Research website explains that Phase 3 tests are conducted on thousands of people for “efficacy and safety”. This is to observe whether the experimental vaccine “is safe, leads to a strong immune response, and provides effective protection against the virus”.

The process of human trialling for AZD1222, previously known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, began on April 23rd this year. The initial testing of 1,100 volunteers advanced to a study on a much larger scale of more than 10,000 individuals, including those over 55 years of age, across the UK. Though it was more difficult to test the effectiveness of the vaccine due to falling infection rates in May, new confirmed COVID-19 cases have been steadily climbing in the country once again.

The news that the trials are now safe to continue has been welcomed by UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who stated: “This pause shows we will always put safety first. We will back our scientists to deliver an effective vaccine as soon as safely possible.”

Both Oxford and AstraZeneca’s statements did not refer to the vaccine tests happening outside the UK. The trialling also included thousands of participants in the US, Brazil, South Africa, and India, all of which were stopped during the temporary pause this week.

The AZD1222 vaccine candidate itself is created from the ChAdOx1 virus, a weakened adenovirus or form of the common cold that causes infections in chimpanzees. It has been genetically changed so that it is unable to grow in humans, making it safe to use on a very wide range of subjects. Because the vaccine contains the genetic sequence of the coronavirus protein, it is able to produce that same protein when it enters humans to produce an effective immune response against it.

The results of the successful Phase I/II showed increased levels of protective neutralising antibodies and immune T-cells targeting and destroying infected cells, without any serious adverse side-effects. After this, Oxford researchers pressed on with trialing two doses of the vaccine after some volunteers showed stronger responses to it. It remains unclear whether the participant who fell ill received one or two doses, however.

Image credit to CDC/ Unsplash.

Opinion – veganism is not yet fully accessible

Lucy Betts

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14th September 2020

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Opinion – veganism is not yet fully accessible

What do you envision when you think of a vegan? Do any specific words come to mind? I’ll throw out a few, feel free to disagree: “hipster”, “activist”, “hippy”, “middle class”…”annoying”. This image is out there, publicised, non-controversial and acceptable to routinely spout on TV. Like all groups who attempt to break away from anything previously considered to be social norms, vegans are villainised. They are vigilantes holding ideologies which lie far left of society’s interests but will, ultimately, one day vote Tory. An unbearably high maintenance lifestyle (centring on health, cleansing, spirituality and animal welfare) is the illusion a great deal of people are under.

This is problematic, not only for the image of the movement, but for the ecocide environmentalists are desperately attempting to prevent. Creating an aura of exclusivity around a philosophy which can, realistically, only be elevated above the status of a social statement to become genuinely impactful with mass participation, is entirely counter intuitive. Exclusivity is generated through selectively broadcasting a specific image and consumer choice driving faster deployment of more expensive products. Despite this portrayal, veganism is on the rise, with the Vegan Society’s latest research indicating around 600,000 vegans reside in Great Britain. In light of this, a critical question is then brought to the forefront: what makes someone more susceptible to veganism? As with all things remotely political, social class and wealth are inextricably tied in.

Citizens of the UK are under the illusion that food security has been achieved. In turn, this indignance to greed and overconsumption threatens a vengeful insecurity. Malnutrition is something that is ignored. The general public have not been galvanised by the Environmental Audit Committee’s latest report, which states that undernourishment is “significant and growing in the UK, with levels among the worst in Europe, especially for children”. Shockingly, in a nation viewed as distinctly developed, people’s diets remain depauperate and their nutrition poor. Members of the general public send their children to school on empty stomachs and ideologies clash amongst the politically inclined who argue for reform. These issues are entirely distinct from those surrounding diet choice; they are issues of food insecurity where individuals are stripped of all choice. They should not be confounded with a reluctance to adopt veganism. There is little ground to stand on when insisting that persistent low income (estimated to be approximately 22% of the UK population) prevents a significant chunk of the public from turning their backs on beef. Only 1.6% of the population identify as vegan. Do the remaining 80% of people considered to be financially stable also feel tofu to be an unjustifiably expensive commodity?

Whilst the average middle class shopper might be able to nip into their local Waitrose, it’s a different story for the shopper living in a low income area with 3 hungry (fussy) kids to feed on a budget. Picking up an overpriced vegan ready meal on a busy night is out of the question. Yes, it’s achievable to go vegan on a budget, but people want convenience. They have lives to contend with, personal endeavours to pursue, personal tastes which have already developed. At the end of the day, most people prefer to be left alone to enjoy their 99p cheeseburger in peace and quiet. Planning for a week of vegan meals requires forethought, knowing how to cook in a way your mother or father didn’t (or knowing how to cook at all), adapting your tastes and exiting your comfort zone. As a student this is relatively simple; as a household with a mish-mash of diet preferences, it’s most certainly not. Removing a class divide from a vegan ideology would entail better marketing of vegan options in popular food outlets beyond Holland and Barrett. It would require lower prices of non-threatening vegan foods which don’t take hours to cook and actually taste good (sorry Tesco, your ‘cheese’ is disgusting). Ideally, this would be supplemented by effective education surrounding the food system and the importance of sustainability. I don’t contest that certain groups need to try a whole lot harder than others to cut out meat. I do contest that this is the major driving force preventing radical diet shifts. Paying £2.50 for a pack of Tesco Plant chef Breaded Goujons can really add up when you normally pay only £2.00 for their plain old chicken ones. £2.00 for a kg of lentils on the other hand could make more than enough Dahl to feed a family. At its core, the reluctance to support veganism is rooted in something far more universally entrenched than finances.

When delving into the depths of vegan culture, it’s important to assess where the motives for such a radical diet change might stem from. People live in their own bubbles of like-minded companions which are far less accessible than they might like to think. Research conducted by Ofcom concludes that social media users today are less likely than in 2016 to see views they disagree with online. Those who begin to pay attention to where their food comes from, how it’s made and the environmental impacts of its production are likely to find themselves on a downward spiral deep into the depths of YouTube documentaries. This is a fairly niche topic of interest to jump into out of the blue. Even more so when your top video suggestions are ‘Ryan’s Toys Reviews’ and your traditional British family life revolves around a Sunday roast.

Being influenced by your social and cultural environment is part of being human. Perhaps, then, it’s not shocking to hear that several studies have resolved that “across Western societies, women are twice as likely as men to be vegan or vegetarian”. Considering the marked prevalence of admired female celebrities who publicly adopt a vegan diet (Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and Ellen DeGeneres to name a few), this is a given. It’s hard to be taken seriously in your prolific cult of masculinity trading up a bacon sandwich for hummus and crudites (especially whilst Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson endorses chowing down on a dozen eggs a day). Clearly veganism appeals to a specific demographic.

It seems they are in a deadlock, the herbivores and omnivores. They have found themselves in a political war waged through publicity stunts and protesting, supplemented with a healthy dose of social network sparring. Mass media has managed to sculpt a particular perception of veganism, zoning in on a snapshot of the culture. This snapshot captures a minority self-righteous cult of entitled ‘snowflakes’ who like to purchase expensive sustainable fashion on daddy’s credit card. Vegans, instinctively, have sought to fight back. With the popularization of Greta Thunberg, organisations such as Extinction Rebellion being thrust into the limelight and the general growing discomfort surrounding the idea of a climate crisis, the frost towards veganism is starting to thaw.

Alongside this thawing, inaccessible logic trapped within the ice has begun leaking out. This logic is making its way gradually into the theatre of fast-food outlets which are now being forced to play ball. Though perhaps not the best way to conserve biodiversity (considering simultaneous attempts to battle an obesity epidemic), it does alleviate issues associated with food accessibility for vegans. As KFC and McDonald’s pioneer in accessible vegan junk food, Greggs flaunt their instantaneously infamous vegan sausage roll. Though responses have been overwhelmingly positive, these new product lines have proven divisive. With one subtle menu addition, the ‘vegan resistance’ was stubbornly declared by Piers Morgan in a tweet against those ‘PC ravaged clowns’ at Greggs. If vegans are not being publicly thwarted, they’re being passive-aggressively ‘integrated’ into society in the most patronizing of ways. Even at the hands of the more ‘nonpartisan’ BBC, the movement is belittled. Vegans are made into caricatures to be humoured in good faith. ‘The Food Chain’ podcast’s newest release “how to date a vegan” has attempted to render abstaining from animal produce devoid of all deeper meaning, presenting vegans as nothing more than fussy eaters. I greatly anticipate their upcoming release, “how to date a feminist”.

Continually, society fails to recognise that justifications for going vegan extend far beyond the traditional “meat is murder!” sentiment. Personally, I actively contest this emotional aspect; humanity’s critical downfall in many endeavours is an inability to distinguish between routes which are both moral yet pragmatic, and routes which are selfish but satisfying. This is perhaps why the legal system favours revenge over reform or why Starbucks doesn’t really pay its taxes and no one cares. Veganism being inaccessible boils down to a culmination of misinformation, comfort in conformity and personal problems more immediate than the more ultimate problems the planet faces. Though a share of these problems are indisputably financial, deciding that you aren’t going to participate in institutionalised abuse and environmental destruction is not as simple as a random change of heart. People make it pretty damn difficult. You need to make a concerted effort to get informed. You need to know what you believe and have the strength to stand by it. This takes effort, motivation and a willingness to care. Pivotally, it also takes a collection of like-minded peers, some healthy debate and exposure to certain forms of media beyond your Facebook feed and daytime TV.

An organist’s view on a crisis in church music

Music

Stanley Godfrey

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14th September 2020

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An organist’s view on a crisis in church music

Over the last ten years of my life, I’ve been fortunate enough to work in the music department of a small parish church in rural Lincolnshire. From my first days as a chorister in 2010, to taking up the organ a few years later, and now having become their Assistant Director of Music, it would be fair to say that the world of sacred music has become a fairly integral part of my life – until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Before the pandemic, the longest gap I had ever gone without practicing on the organ was around three weeks (and this was around five years ago). Yet after playing my final service pre-lockdown on the 15^th March, little did I know at the time that I would not play a service again until the start of August – a service with an array of Government-defined protocols and restrictions.

But though churches are now returning to the practice of worship in some capacity (whether that be wholly online, in-person, or a combination of both), for many this has exacerbated problems which have long existed within the world of liturgical music. With declining congregation numbers and a growing percentage of the population not professing any religious beliefs, many choirs are now struggling to fill their ranks with new singing talent, whether young or young-at-heart.

Whilst I am fortunate in my church work in Oxford that we have been largely unaffected by these issues, the same cannot be said for my local church back in Lincolnshire, where this is by no means a new issue. I was part of the last large intake of young choral scholars back in 2010 and, ten years on, I am the last of that intake to still be involved with any regularity.

Of course, this is not entirely the fault of the church or of the music department itself. We were all admitted at the age of around eight or nine and, as such, we are all now university students or graduates – put simply, we are now carving out our own lives and, for some of my fellow choral scholars, continued participation in the life of the church is not part of that path forward. That may be for a variety of reasons – not being in the local area; no longer being as ‘musically active’; not professing the same religious beliefs as 10-years ago – but it all comes back to the same bottom-line: the church has lost someone who, at the point of admission, was deemed musically-able to continue the musical traditions of a community which, in the case of my particular church, has existed for almost 900 years.

So, if we are to tackle these issues, what can be done? Much has been said by Directors of Music in recent years of attempting to diversify the musical content of services, so as to hopefully attract younger singers who might be put off by the largely ‘classical’ repertoire. In attempting this style of endeavour, a particular anecdote springs to mind from around five years ago, where the introduction of a more modern hymn book (aptly named ‘Hymns Old and New’) led to a rather elderly congregation being introduced to such wonderful and high-brow Gesamtkunstwerken as ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ – a piece whose name alone strikes fear into the deepest recesses of every organist’s heart. Needless to say, the hymn book was only in use for a few weeks before we reverted to the older tome.

But perhaps this experiment was indicative of the resilience of the church towards modernisation and reinvention. Even as a religious movement whose very origins came from (in simple terms) wanting to modernise part of the Catholic Church without the issues of papal supremacy, the Church of England and its members have routinely held back from any radical change until being forced to succumb to intense pressure and lobbying – whether that be on larger-scale issues, such as allowing women to be consecrated as bishops or allowing homosexual couples to be married by a priest in a church, to much smaller-scale issues, such as using a more modern hymn-book or deciding for which religious festivals it’s appropriate to light the chandelier.

So, if the church is to come back from this pandemic ‘stronger than ever’ (as seems to be the new mantra these days), perhaps it is time to truly reconsider how we as an institution connect with young people and with our congregations. After all, as has been said on many occasions, even if our congregations are our present, young people are our future.

St Anne’s Principal swims in open water for coronavirus support fund

News

Abigail Howe

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13th September 2020

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St Anne’s Principal swims in open water for coronavirus support fund

Helen King, the Principal of St Anne’s College, has swum 5 kilometres in Queenford Lake to raise money for the College’s COVID-19 support fund.

The swim, as well as being a sponsorship opportunity, was also part of the Queenford Challenge, set up by the Oxfordshire Queenford Lakes, a nearby open water swimming facility.

In a statement publicising the Covid-19 fund, Helen King said: “We are all facing an unprecedented challenge as individuals, a nation, a University and a College. At St Anne’s we are doing all we can to help our students through this incredibly difficult time. Your support will help our students and those in the greatest need.”

St Anne’s has also taken its largest ever cohort of state-educated students, 75%, as well as taking a first-year intake which is 12% larger than usual.

On 6 September 2020, Helen King embarked on her swim, completing the journey in a speedy 1 hour and 49 minutes.

In a series of tweets, she thanked donors for their support, saying that she was “glad to report I’m back on dry land”, continuing that donations would provide “additional teaching, accommodation & welfare support”.

King has been Principal of St Anne’s since April 2017. She was previously an Assistant Commissioner for the Metropolitan Police Service and originally studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at St Anne’s College.

After the event, the Queenford Lakes team praised the “amazing” response to the challenge and reminded swimmers that “there are more of those amazing sunrises and sunsets to come still” over the lake.

Speed or Safety? Science publishing in the time of COVID-19

Science & Technology

Robbi Sher

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12th September 2020

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Speed or Safety? Science publishing in the time of COVID-19

Global pandemics demand fast, evidence-based responses. This poses a conundrum. Communication of scientific research is deliberately and excruciatingly slow. After an article is submitted to a journal of choice, rejected, and re-submitted several times, it is sent to a group of peer reviewers, where it probably sits untouched on a desk for a number of weeks before being evaluated. The full submission-to-publication timescale is about nine months – clearly, this is not an option in the current climate. Science must be rapidly disseminated to guide our response to the outbreak. And although preprint servers – platforms where scientists can post full drafts of papers (preprints) that skip the formal peer-review process – have been endorsed as a solution, there are concerns about their communication to non-scientific audiences that need to be addressed.

Preprints make research available at least three months prior to journal publication. They are becoming increasingly popular; in the four months following the first COVID-19 case, at least 37.5% of all COVID-19 related articles were hosted by bioRxiv and medRxiv, the two preprint servers for biomedical research.

At first glance, this can only be beneficial. Preprint servers host a remarkable diversity of institutions. By allowing research groups to access and build upon one another’s preliminary results, they ensure that the scientific community is using its resources effectively, and avoiding simultaneous duplication of work. These global collaborations are the only way research can keep up with the virus – but also remain neutral, objective and statistically valid, in compliance with the standards of the scientific method.

Problems arise when preprints are prematurely broadcast outside the scientific community. Scientists consider themselves to be writing for other scientists, who treat preprints as what they are; unfinished products (in the sense that they have not been checked outside of the research group). But preprints are available to all. And in a pandemic, the audience of scientific articles grows dramatically – COVID-19 preprints are accessed and distributed at least 15 times more than non-COVID-19 preprints. Open access has hundreds of benefits; dropping paywalls increases scientific participation in developing countries, for example. However, making a draft freely available is dangerous. It allows politicians and the media to irresponsibly overhype information which is, on the whole, speculative. And it risks damaging public trust in scientists when they inevitably get things wrong.

In January, a preprint by scientists in Delhi appeared on bioRxiv, discussing resemblances between the coronavirus and HIV (the virus that causes AIDS). The ambiguous phrasing of its abstract, though (“uncanny similarity … unlikely to be fortuitous”), suggested that the coronavirus had somehow been engineered by humans – and fuelled a spread of Twitter conspiracy theories that COVID-19 was a laboratory accident or, worse, a bioweapon. Luckily, the study was withdrawn before any news outlet could cover it – since the world of preprints is relatively new, and many are still sceptical, the retraction of faulty work is fast. But these responses cannot be relied upon indefinitely.

So, it is the overhyping of preprints, not the existence of them, that has the potential to influence behaviour and endanger public health. How can this be avoided? A small yellow banner on the screen reminding readers that preprints aren’t conclusive is not enough; neither is a comments section, which journalists and communicators almost certainly do not read. Either preprints should be available only to scientists, or their use should be made safer for non-scientific audiences. One route could be to require authors to include a plain-language summary, addressing the specific limitations of their research, as part of the preprint submission process. This way, we would see the collaborative benefits of preprints without misleading the public.

However, just because a study has been peer-reviewed doesn’t necessarily mean it should form the basis of public policy. Peer-review has its own problems; aside from being slow, it’s often skimpy, and authors can have competing interests. Indeed – most retractions of COVID-19 papers have been from not preprint servers, but high-profile medical journals – with severe consequences.

The Trump administration’s decision not to accept COVID-19 testing kits from overseas in March was based on a single, unreplicated study which claimed that “50 percent or 47 percent” of positives were false. This would have been bad enough, but the study had actually been retracted, for unknown reasons, just a few days after its publication in a Chinese journal. In other words – at a critical time in the early development of the pandemic, an entire continent may have been denied access to World Health Organisation-approved tests, because of findings that weren’t even trusted enough to remain in the scientific literature.

Another paper published in Annals of Internal Medicine in April concluded, alarmingly, that neither surgical nor cotton masks were effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Before it was retracted, this study was cited by over 100 news outlets, almost 10,000 Twitter users, and the World Health Organisation. Not only did it only have four participants, it actually went on to describe an 80.4% reduction in viral emission by cotton masks (how this was classed as “ineffective” is baffling, given that even N95 respirators block out 95% of the virus).

It is evident, from the fact that formally peer-reviewed studies could be this misleading, that the main issue with the COVID-19 publishing landscape is not peer-review status, but fast and careless distribution – an issue that is not unique to preprints.

Even in the face of a pandemic, we cannot lose sight of the fundamental aim of scientific research: to lower uncertainty and provide healthcare systems, policy-makers and the public with the necessary information to improve individual and public health. The collective effect of too much hasty, unvetted research is that science loses its credibility. Herbert Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science, begs scientists to underpromise and overdeliver – to structure COVID-19 papers with a larger and more diverse audience in mind, and be clearer about the limitations of their work. We are moving towards an open-access, preprint-first world, and effective communication would ensure we all benefit from it.

Artwork by Arpita Chatterjee

‘The knack of living’: Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

Joseph Turner

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12th September 2020

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‘The knack of living’: Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

‘What are days for?’, the poet Philip Larkin once asked. That question has felt particularly pertinent these last few months. Claire-Louise Bennett’s strange and brilliant Pond (Fitzcarraldo, 2015) might be read as offering an answer in keeping with Larkin’s, both profoundly straightforward and infinitely complex: ‘Days are where we live’.

In a series of twenty relatively short chapters, Pond records infrequently minute detail the psychological condition and quotidian experience of a young woman living alone in a coastal cottage in the west of Ireland. The work, formally balanced somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories, distinguishes itself by its attention to the various things that go on in days, both mighty and trivial: eating, sleeping, talking; loving, thinking, cooking; reading, walking, confronting.

One section, entitled ‘Stir-fry’, describes the disposal of a meal in concise and brutal detail: ‘I just threw my dinner in the bin’ — ‘I put in it all the things I never want to see again’. One of the bracing pleasures of reading Pond is Bennett’s recognition that homes, like novels, are rarely wholly confining or wholly comfortable, but rather spaces of powerfully mixed feeling. The warmth of morning coffee rubs up against a reflection on ‘the essential brutality of love’. Bennett’s narrator knows that, in the blink of an eye, a home can flip from being a place of refuge to one of pain and decay, like the bananas she eats for breakfast which ‘don’t, in fact, take well at all to being forgotten about’: ‘They wizen and stink of putrid and go almost black’. It is in such moments of tonal unpredictability that Pond is at its most exciting, and its most real, because it rejects the spurious consolations of cosiness in favour of a narrative that is by turns fragmentary, aimless, languid, and fierce — and stubbornly loyal to the complicated reality of the feelings it describes.

One of the most striking aspects of the book is Bennett’s distinctive prose style. At once chatty and finely wrought, it moves deftly between the establishment of familiar intimacy and the piercing deflation of expectations. Snatches of the confessional first-person voice are juxtaposed with passages of stark impersonality: ‘Thinks of twilight, privet hedges, and a bookcase falling forward.’ Another chapter delivers a raptured address to tomato purée in all its ‘kitsch and concentrated splendour’.

Obsessively turning single words — cantilevered; ottoman; chopping — over and over, as if to try and catch something of their essential character, Bennett revels in the little details of which sentences, homes, and lives are made up. Pond is the exemplary proof that ‘the knack of living’ lies in attending to such ‘small matters’ as the number of spoonfuls of sugar added to a cup of coffee, or the sight of a leaf falling through a bathroom window in the middle of a storm.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, from whom Bennett takes one of her epigraphs, wrote that ‘an entire past comes to dwell in a new house’. Pond is wonderfully attuned to the ways in which domestic spaces both accommodate and shape human personality and of which we are often only half-aware. In one of the book’s most memorable stretches, the narrator describes her filthy kitchen and reflects on ‘attempts to arrange one’s awareness upon the immediate surfaces always and not let it drop into the ravines of smeared disarray everywhere between things’. Efforts to suppress or sanitise the messiness of domestic life (we might think of the trend for ‘decluttering’ in interior design) spring from the false conviction that such disarray can be meaningfully separated from the business of living. Pond, by contrast, finds its very narrative energy in those ravines, and revels in their heady mixture of ‘goose fat and unrefined sea salt’.

Bennett’s title encapsulates the concerns of the book: in its primary meaning, it refers to a strictly circumscribed and small body of water, reminding us of the small compass of the novel’s geography, wherein much life is nevertheless concentrated. But in its verbal form, ‘to pond’ can also mean to collect or accumulate, to restrict the flow of water, and, most dramatically, to throw somebody into a pond. Our experience of the work is apt to its title: the reader is plunged into a tightly defined space whose depths are not at first discernible, and, like being pushed into a pond, it has the potential to be either suffocating or enlivening (or both). The initial shock of the plunge soon gives way to the imaginative richness of being immersed in another world, however momentarily. Throw yourself in.

Oxford archaeologists help achieve access to satellite images of Israel and the Palestinian territories

Ellen Hendry

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11th September 2020

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Oxford archaeologists help achieve access to satellite images of Israel and the Palestinian territories

Two Oxford archaeologists have contributed to the declassification of satellite images of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, with “huge implications” for visual access to the areas.

A 24-year-old US prohibition has restricted access to these high-resolution images. While most international satellite imaging is available to a resolution of 0.4-0.7 meters per pixel, the Kyl-Bingham Amendment (KBA) meant that US companies could not share – commercially or privately – images more detailed than 2 meters per pixel.

This is the difference between being able to make out the blurry outline of a block of flats to seeing clearly the people walking next to it. This has limited the detail in which archaeologists, climate experts, humanitarian groups, politicians, and Google Maps users can view these areas.

Two Oxford archaeologists – Dr Michael Fradley and Dr Andrea Zerbini – headed the pressure movement to overcome this. Their main argument was that the KBA should have been dropped already as companies like the French Airbus were already producing high-quality images, making the KBA invalid. Despite this, no moves were made to amend the KBA until Fradley and Zerbini’s research paper was published, limiting research due to US predominance in the field.

Fradley and Zerbini were involved in the Endangered Archaeology of the Middle East and North Africa Project. But the potential for the declassified images stretches beyond archaeology. Dr Fradley has called this development “a big win for science”, as it will affect many areas outside his own research.

Climate studies can monitor crop change, desertification, soil conditions, erosion, water tables, and pollution. Cultural heritage professional can assess looting, urban development, preserve heritage, and map sites. Politicians and humanitarians can monitor potential human rights abuses.

The original impetus for the KBA came after images of an Israeli nuclear ‘research’ plant, suspected by some to be a weapon-manufacturing plant, were released in 1995. Senator Kyl, a co-author of the KBA, said that instances like this could be used by “enemies of Israel… to target Israel for long-range attacks or assaults by terrorists”.

The head of Israel’s Defence Ministry, Amnon Harai, told Israeli media that their government is looking into “what exactly the intentions are” are the loosening of restrictions: “We would always prefer to be photographer at the lowest resolution possible. It’s always preferable to be seen blurred, rather than precisely.”

Reuters reports that Israel is worried about how Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas militants could “plan rocket strikes on key civilian and military infrastructure” using commercial satellite imagery.

Zena Agha writes in Foreign Policy that the enhanced quality of the satellite images means Israel “can’t hide evidence of its occupation anymore”. Agha says that the restrictions were “implemented under the guise of protecting Israel’s national security”, but were actually “more an act of censorship”. Dr Michael Fradley tweeted his support of Agha’s article.

Dr Zerbini passed away from a rare form of cancer in July last year, before finding out that the restrictions had been lifted.

Image Credit to Axelspace Corporation / Wikimedia Commons. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Tracing apps effective at reducing deaths even with low uptake, Oxford researchers find

Dania Kamal Aryf

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11th September 2020

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Tracing apps effective at reducing deaths even with low uptake, Oxford researchers find

Epidemiologists have suggested that contact tracing apps could reduce the transmission of infections, even with low levels of app uptake. Modelling by Google Research and Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Medicine showed that infections could be reduced by 8% and deaths by 6%, with just 15% of a population using the app.

These findings were based on a combination of Oxford’s epidemiological model, OpenABM-Covid19, and data from a study conducted in Washington State which engaged in the usage of the Exposure Notification Systems contact-tracing application. Real-world data taken from the three largest counties in the state – King, Pierce, and Snohomish – were used as sources for this study.

The study shows that a higher number of Exposure Notification Systems regular app users led to greater reductions in the number of COVID-19 transmissions. The study includes different scenarios and outcomes which allow policymakers to anticipate phased re-openings and the loosening of COVID-19 social restrictions, while still attempting to keep the pandemic within control.

Professor Christophe Fraser, scientific advisor to the UK Government Test & Trace Programme and Group Leader in Pathogen Dynamics at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, said: “We’ve been exploring different digital contact tracing uptake levels for some time in the UK. We see that all levels of exposure notification uptake levels in the UK and the USA have the potential to meaningfully reduce the number of coronavirus cases, hospitalisations and deaths across the population.”

He also adds that contract-tracing apps should not be standalone initiatives, but should be integrated with other preventative measures such as social distancing and restricted travel.

Similarly, Dr David Bonsall, scientific advisor to the UK Government Test & Trace Programme and senior researcher at Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, stated: “Lockdowns and travel restrictions are damaging to society so we need smarter, more efficient systems that notify only the people at risk and keep the rest of us moving freely.”

In regards to cross-border collaboration and contact-tracing interoperability, senior researcher Dr Robert Hinch, from Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Medicine, said: “We’d like to gather further evidence to assess to what extent coordinated deployments of digital exposure notification applications and public health policies result in the more effective COVID-19 infection control, and continue to find ways to ensure the maximum impact for often limited testing, tracing and isolation resources.”

Image credit to Card Mapr/ Unsplash.

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