Testing will remain crucial to this effort, and screening programs are starting to ramp up at re-opening schools and offices, the story states. Testing also will be important to determining how well the COVID-19 vaccines protect against variants of SARS-CoV-2, according to a University of Wisconsin, Madison, virologist quoted in the piece.
These factors make Wisconsin well-prepared for the next phase of its immunization campaign, as the challenge of insufficient supply gives way to issues of access and vaccine hesitancy, said Jonathan Temte, associate dean for public health and community engagement at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. That’s because a robust network of small and midsized providers allows tailored outreach to vulnerable or resistant groups.
Beth Olson, an associate professor and extension specialist in the nutritional sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said another emphasis of the guidelines that were released in December is choosing nutrient-dense food to ensure we’re getting what we need and trimming off excess.
UW epidemiologist Ajay Sethi calls the potential eligibility of 12- to 15-year-olds “a very important step to increase immunity to the virus in our community.” But he said it may take time to get some parents on board. Some, he said, will probably wait and see if the virus is under control in terms of infection rates before making a decision, and some may decide to vaccinate their children after more is known about the disease.
Yesterday, President Joe Biden unveiled a massive, two trillion dollar plan to improve the nation’s infrastructure. For more on what the plan entails, and what it means for Wisconsinites, WORT Producer Jonah Chester spoke with Greg Nemet, a Professor of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Basically, capital and investment are the main ingredients in economic growth, said Charles Engel, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But capital and investment can only take you so far. Simeon Alder, a visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said exponential economic growth requires exponential new ideas, as new ideas are the fundamental engine of growth. (Think about the economic growth and improvement in standards of living that occurred during and since the Industrial Revolution.)
“The challenge with that is the more ideas you already have, the more new ideas you need to create in order to sustain that growth rate,” he said. “To get these extra ideas, you just need more and more people as sort of a general result.”
Quoted: When a national tour of the musical came to Madison, Wisconsin, in 2019, Lori Kido Lopez — a media and cultural studies professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison — protested outside of the theater. As she told TODAY over Zoom, “Miss Saigon” embodies “the classic story of the self-sacrificing Asian woman.”
Kim, the protagonist, is a sex worker who falls passionately in love with an American GI — a romance that is, as Lopez pointed out, “already extremely uncomfortable because there’s a power dynamic where he’s paying her for sex.” He promises to take her back to the states; she promptly becomes pregnant. But the plan fails, leaving her languishing in war-torn Vietnam with a child to raise on her own.
Quoted: Dr. Jerlando F.L. Jackson described mentoring as “the sharing of information and guidance that helps demystify a pathway, whether that’s a pathway to and through a graduate program or a career pathway.” He’s the chair of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a Vilas Distinguished Professor.
For him, a meaningful mentee-mentor relationship means the two “walk together through one’s journey,” sharing successes and concerns.
Noted: Jumping worms were first identified in Wisconsin in 2013 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. Just eight years later, the worms have been reported just about everywhere in the state and are highlighted as an invasive species by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
“They are, if not in every county, close to it,” said Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the UW Arboretum.
University of Wisconsin School of Nursing Associate Professor Pamela McGranahan saw this crisis firsthand through working in the field. “We don’t talk enough about Black moms doing as well either,” McGranahan said in reference to Black women’s experience with pregnancy. “But at one point, Black women had four times more poor outcomes than white women.”
Quoted: “They didn’t give these news outlets a chance to engage this ethical reasoning, and I think that’s a problem,” said Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin. “But I can see how this person thought it was not a problem” because such journalistic standards are not widely understood by the public.
Quoted: Buying products with racial equity in mind can make some people feel absolved from doing harder anti-racism work, like attending protests or advocating in their workplaces, says Aziza Jones, an incoming business professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But Jones says other people respond differently. “Other people will see what they’ve done, this purchase of a product from a Black-owned business and take that as a signal to themselves, as a symbolic signal, of how important this cause is to them,” she says.
Quoted: “We’re going to miss the excitement with this batch,” University of Wisconsin entomologist PJ Liesch said. “If Wisconsinites really wanted to see these, you could drive a couple hours and get to parts of Indiana or Illinois and be able to see them, but it’s going to miss us here.”
Quoted: Moses Altsech, an expert in consumer behavior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Business, said if the price increases are small enough, some consumers might not even notice.
Altsech added that the company might also not have to worry about their customers buying different products because Kimberly-Clark’s competitors might take the opportunity to increase their prices, too.
“If commodity prices are the reason, the same reason that hurt Kimberly-Clark hurt its competitors, too,” Altsech said. “So everybody’s motivated to increase.”
Quoted: Gerrymandered districts are “the most important driver of election outcomes,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Although there are improvements to be made in the campaign finance system and in other election rules and practices,” he said, “the configuration of districts has proved to be the most powerful determinant of state legislative election results.”
In the wake of yesterday’s announcement that all adults in Wisconsin will be eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine starting next week, WORT producer Jade Iseri-Ramos hosts a discussion of vaccine allocation ethics with Paul Kelleher, professor of bioethics and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Quoted: The lack of data on queer BIPOC farmers is also prevalent in academia, said Jaclyn Wypler, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies queer and transgender sustainable farmers in conservative rural communities. Wypler was recently hired as the Northeast project manager of the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network at the National Young Farmers Coalition.
“There is discrimination for BIPOC folks and queer folks within academia, including within the environmental and rural and agricultural departments,” Wypler said. As a result, research studies that highlight their experiences are difficult to adequately fund.
Quoted: “This is part of a broader process of the Thai state attempting to make the potential cost of dissent too high,” said Tyrell Haberkorn, a professor of Southeast Asian studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said legal harassment and violence may succeed in fostering fear, “but the blatant display of injustice” could backfire by eliciting more sympathy for the protesters.
Quoted: The known benefits of directly protecting vulnerable people outweigh those of indirectly protecting them through immunizing less at-risk community members, said R. Alta Charo, professor emerita of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “While the data is showing good signs of reduced spread by vaccinated individuals, that data is still not as robust as the data demonstrating personal protection from being vaccinated,” she wrote in an email. Meanwhile, for high-risk individuals — “until they are vaccinated, they have limited ways to protect themselves.”
Quoted: For University of Wisconsin, Madison Elections Research Center Director Barry Burden, the final bill text for Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” could be bipartisan, especially given the return of earmarks. Earmarks permit lawmakers to sneak funding for nonprofit projects in their states or districts into certain measures.
“Many Republican legislators will want a piece of the package to claim credit for in their districts,” Burden said. “At least for some Republican legislators, the spending is an essential part of both national security at ports and borders and economic competitiveness with China.”
A newly-created master’s degree program at UW-Madison will study how psychoactive chemicals like psilocybin — found in so-called “magic mushrooms” — can treat conditions like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. We hear more about it from the program’s director.
Quoted: Sarah Botham teaches agriculture and life sciences marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said the Cheeselandia campaign is a successful example of the way that agriculture is trying to “market smarter” and with a new customer in mind.
“They are reaching, first of all, people who are really interested in Wisconsin cheese and secondly people who are of a younger demographic,” Botham said. “That generation is interested in not just eating but in understanding where their food comes from, in experiencing the food and sharing it with friends.”
Noted: Taken together, while vaccine supply is still limited, if vaccine passports are widely used not only for travel but for other social events such as concerts, broadway shows, nightclubs, it would “double privilege” people got vaccinated early on, said Christine Whelan, clinical professor in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison.
Quoted: Given that most kids are at low risk for complications from COVID, the need for a pediatric vaccine for the disease may not seem pressing. But scientists say the pandemic may never be fully controlled until kids are inoculated. When we only vaccinate adults, we leave vulnerable “an enormous, immunologically naive population,” says James H. Conway, a pediatrician and associate director for health sciences at the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Without a pediatric vaccine, “the disease, even if our kids don’t get super sick with it, is going to be there and continue to circulate routinely.”
Jennifer Gaddis, Assistant Professor of Civil Society & Community Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Before the pandemic, a growing number of schools were employing cafeteria staff to cook nutritious meals from scratch, and implementing farm-to-school programs and other practicesto improve jobs, local economies and the environment.
Due to fewer kids eating school meals during the pandemic and the increased costs associated with COVID-19 safety protocols, these positive changes may stall, or even be reversed.
My research suggests these reforms are needed to transform the school lunch experience and maximize the ability of school meals to improve public health and contribute to a post-pandemic economic recovery.
Quoted: “The pace that led to the incredible generation of knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 has put enormous demands on the people who are expected to generate that knowledge,” says David O’Connor, a viral sequencing expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who has been tracking the spread of the virus, doing Zoom Q&A sessions with the vaccine hesitant, and helping neighborhood schools set up diagnostic testing. “This is a terrible time and we should all do what we can to help. But is it going to be sustainable?”
Quoted: “It’s like looking at the sky at night, and seeing one star,” Francis L. Halzen, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the director of IceCube, said in a telephone interview, describing the current state of the hunt for the ghostly particles.
Join Sheinelle Jones and Dylan Dreyer as they chat with experts, parents and stars of “Punky Brewster” Soleil Moon Frye and Cherie Johnson on parenting during the pandemic. (With Christine Whelan)
But then, in 1956, Shapira popped up again — on the front page, no less — when The Times reported that Menahem Mansoor, a respected scholar at the University of Wisconsin, was reopening the case.
After layoffs, morale tanks and turnover increases. As Charlie Trevor, a professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, previously told HuffPost, how layoffs are handled can tell “a survivor a great deal about the company’s priorities and about the type of treatment one might expect moving forward.”
Dr Proud and Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, report the event in a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
It wasn’t until 2003, when Dr. Richard Davidson, founder and director of The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania, that Jha once again woke up to the benefits of mindfulness.
Quoted: The warming of the lake could also result in changes in the amount of snow seen around the lake, said Michael Notaro, the associate director of the Nelson Institute Center for Climate Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The warming lake waters and declining lake ice cover support enhanced lake evaporation and lake-effect precipitation during the cold season. As the lakes warm in the cold season, the temperature difference between the water and overlying air increases, supporting greater turbulent fluxes of heat and moisture from the lake to the atmosphere,” he said in an email. “That favors more vertical atmospheric motion that can support cloud and precipitation formation in the cold season.”
Quoted: Implementing a two-way tracking system would increase transparency, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It likely would attract support from both parties.
“I think Democrats liked them, because their main worries are about ballots not being received or returned, and a voter being disenfranchised,” he said. “For Republicans, I think it provides some security about the integrity of the election. … If the election official ever thought that someone was fraudulently stealing ballots out of mailboxes and sending them, they could simply check the online tracking system, and the voter could do that as well.”
Meanwhile, UW-Madison experts disagreed during an online forum Wednesday about when the state might reach herd immunity, typically defined as a 60%-90% vaccination rate or combined rate of vaccination and natural immunity from recent infection. The state health department has been aiming for a 80% vaccination rate, saying it could be reached by June if enough people seek injections.
The study has “really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the analysis but reviewed a draft of the paper.
The language that develops in the immediate aftermath of a shooting becomes the predominant narrative among citizens, said LiLi Johnson, an assistant professor of gender & women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Even dictionary definitions of the term [massage parlor] associate it with sex work,” she said in an email. “Given the fact that Asian and Asian American women are already sexualized in United States culture, uncritical use of the term ’massage parlor’ can reinforce those associations.”
As machines improved, the impact was felt mainly in university labs, which had relied on a process called Sanger sequencing, developed in the mid-1970s by the Nobel laureate Frederick Sanger. This laborious technique, which involved running DNA samples through baths of electrically charged gels, was what the scientists at Oxford had depended upon in the mid-1990s; it was also what Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was using in the early 2000s, as he and his lab partner, Tom Friedrich, tracked virus mutations. “The H.I.V. genome has about 10,000 letters,” O’Connor told me, which makes it simpler than the human genome (at three billion letters) or the SARS-CoV-2 genome (at about 30,000). “In an H.I.V. genome, when we first started doing it, we would be able to look at a couple hundred letters at a time.” But O’Connor says his work changed with the advent of new sequencing machines. By around 2010, he and Friedrich could decode 500,000 letters in a day. A few years later, it was five million.
The study has “really profound implications, especially if others can replicate it,” said David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the analysis but reviewed a draft of the paper. As the pandemic enters its second year, he said, “We want to start using more sophisticated modeling and probably economic theory to inform what an optimal testing program would look like.”
Corbett Grainger, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of environmental economics, said he wasn’t surprised to see a hole in the monitoring network in Memphi
Steve Deller, ag economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he agrees that many traditional lenders like banks and credit unions have remained conservative about investing in new projects since the Great Recession.
David L. DeMets, a University of Wisconsin at Madison biostatistics expert, said that while he has no specific information on what occurred in this case, his experience serving on data safety and monitoring committees for nearly half a century was that it would be “very uncommon” for those experts to challenge a company or scientists on the content of a news release.
One common myth claims that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, like the ones from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, may cause infertility. The Dear Pandemic group received so many queries on this topic that its co-founder Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Applied Population Laboratory, posted a video explicitly calling out the theory as a “scare tactic”: “I just want to call it what it is: it’s a fabrication meant to play on our emotions,” she said.
As such, the northern lights can be spotted in northern U.S. states such as Wisconsin and Alaska, but also Pennsylvania. They have also been known to appear in states including Illinois, Oregon, Maine, Washington and Montana. According to a blog post by professor Jerry Zhu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, some northern states can see a few shows of aurora borealis each year.
Home economists “saw that women could and should do more, but the way to get people to accept them was to do it in the domestic sphere,” says Rima Apple, historian at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology. “What the home economists did was they took this sphere and they pushed it and pushed it out of the private and into the public,” she explains. “There were many leaders of the movement who thought this was a way to open a larger world for women but realized the social limitations and thought they could only do so much in one generation.”
Choosing which communities to target for additional vaccine outreach is just one of many steps including building relationships with community organizations, local leaders and talking to individuals, says Ajay Sethi, a University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist and associate professor in the Department of Population Health Sciences.
In many cases, $70 per hour isn’t enough to cover overhead when attorneys are paying for their office space, supplies, insurance and more, said John Gross of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law. This year, the base rate for private attorneys who take on federal defendants is $155 per hour, he said.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services has reported zero deaths from the seasonal flu among kids since October, and a massive reduction in flu cases. University of Wisconsin-Madison pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Greg Demuri said respiratory syncytial virus, a common illness in infants and toddlers that’s one of the leading causes of hospitalizations in children, has all but disappeared this year.
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin, said those situations aren’t comparable.
“It might be wise for us to take this out of the context of Fox News and ask whether the weather personality on our local station should be calling for the arrest of our mayor,” she said. “I think that would make people profoundly uncomfortable and justifiably so.”
Quoted: And opening eligibility doesn’t necessarily mean administration is going efficiently, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison. In some cases, states are reaching the limits of vaccine acceptance.
For those still waiting to get it, he said, just knowing they’re eligible can make an emotional difference. “Sometimes people feel better standing in line than not having any line at all,” Sethi said Thursday. “Once a few states do it, other states decide to do it as well, especially if leaders are finding that they don’t want to hit the wall, they want to keep the momentum, they might as well open up the eligibility criteria.”
Quoted: “Telogen effluvium is commonly triggered by stress, and COVID-19 has definitely contributed to a lot of stress these days,” says Apple Bodemer, MD, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Department of Dermatology. “I am seeing a significant increase in this type of hair loss.”
Quoted: Trump complained about mail-in voting early in 2020 and never stopped. Despite all the suspicions, the 2020 election still had a record turnout.
That’s why Barry Burden, political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, isn’t convinced voting reform bills in battleground states is about restoring voter confidence.
“They were confident. They participated at extremely high rates,” he said.
Quoted: “It has been infuriating to see how this racist and sexist killing spree has been handled by U.S. media outlets,” communications professor Lori Kido Lopez, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Asian American Studies Program, told The Daily Beast. “It is also infuriating to see the news media taking seriously the idea that ‘sexual addiction’ is relevant here. There is a long history of sexual predators using this kind of faux medical diagnosis as a way of escaping responsibility.
“It was particularly insulting and offensive to see headlines repeating the suspect’s description that he was having ‘a bad day.’ That is such a callous statement that minimizes the massive loss of life, but also the way that this kind of terrorism radiates fear and pain throughout the entire community.”
Quoted: “We think the true biodiversity of fungi is somewhere between one million and six million species,” says Anne Pringle, a University of Wisconsin-Madison mycologist—as fungus experts are called—and a National Geographic explorer. Yet despite their global prevalence, fungi have historically been left out of conservation initiatives.
Quoted: Lawmakers in the U.S. have for years debated how to track poverty, and child poverty in particular. Now, in the midst of a pandemic, when the country is caught in a deep recession that has forced families deeper into financial difficulty amid widening inequalities, “it’s not surprising” that politicians have found renewed interest in curbing this hardship, said Rebecca Blank, a macroeconomist who worked on anti-poverty policy for the the Clinton and Obama administrations and now serves as chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
At its meeting tomorrow night, the Dane County Board of Supervisors will consider a resolution condemning hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.
The vote comes as lawmakers across the country are speaking out against hate crimes against Asian Americans after a series of shootings yesterday in Georgia left eight people — six of whom were Asian — dead.
But do those resolutions and condemnations go far enough?
For more, our producer Jonah Chester spoke with Doctor Cindy Cheng, a Professor of History and Asian American studies at UW-Madison.
For that reason, requiring a vaccine passport to travel internationally could soon become a reality, according to a UW-Madison professor emerita of law and bioethics, Alta Charro.
So how is inflation even measured? Well, “there’s as many measures of inflation as there are economists studying it,” said Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But the inflation rates we hear about most often do include health care, energy and food. Economists will sometimes look at a number called “core” inflation that takes out food and energy prices because they can fluctuate quite a bit.
Another main measure is the personal consumption expenditures price index, or the PCE. This measure, run by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, updates how items are weighted in its formula to better reflect consumer behavior, said Menzie Chinn, professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Because of this, the PCE is in some sense more representative of the costs consumers face, Chinn said.
“She presents herself very diplomatically. We haven’t seen her yelling at people in public or firing people in public. But she is a very shrewd politician,” said Aikande Kwayu, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States.
Quoted: The clinical trials for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine were done later, when the virus may have been more widespread, and in different countries with different populations, said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Graham said the same.
“People should not shun the J&J vaccine,” she said.
