Vaccines and Immigration

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are attempting to silence migrant women who alleged abuse by a Georgia gynecologist at an immigration detention center, covers Colorlines.

The Trump administration already deported six of Dr. Mahendra Amin’s former patients, and now lawyers say at least seven more women at the Irwin County Detention Center have been told they’ll soon be deported too.

A September story from Colorlines outlines the watchdog report that a nurse working for ICE issued, citing “questionable hysterectomies” performed on nonconsenting detainees.

Over the past three years, Donald Trump has worked to dismantle the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Joe Biden has pledged to restore this protection, and his election win has given some relief to the 650,000 undocumented immigrants protected under it.

The Progressive reports Biden can restore DACA without Congressional approval, alongside over 400 of Trump’s anti-immigration executive actions. More challenging for this presidential term will be creating a roadmap to citizenship for the nearly eleven million people Biden’s campaign says have been “living in and strengthening our country for years.”

But the Biden administration will need to do far more than revert immigration policy to its pre-Trump status to improve the punitive and deplorable conditions facing migrants and asylum seekers.

A nearly thirty-year-old ceasefire has ended in occupied Western Sahara—what many consider to be Africa’s last colony.

Democracy Now! reports Fighting has erupted in several areas between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement seeking independence, after the Moroccan military broke into a no-go buffer zone in southern Western Sahara.

For the past three weeks, Sahrawi civilian protesters had blocked a Morocco-built road in the area that Sahrawis consider to be illegal. The peaceful blockade blocked traffic and trade between Morocco and Mauritania to the south.

On Monday, the American biotechnology company Moderna announced that a late-stage trial shows its experimental coronavirus vaccine is 94.5% effective. The news, following similar news from Pfizer, has prompted a wave of demands that Big Pharma giants and policymakers worldwide ensure any COVID-19 vaccine is safe, free, and available to all.

Common Dreams reports Moderna plans to apply for emergency use authorization with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) “in the coming weeks” and hopes to have 20 million doses ready by the end of the year, then manufacture 500 to one billion doses in 2021.

Campaigners pointed out on Monday that many of Moderna’s doses have already been claimed by wealthy countries, comprising 78% of the billion doses the company says it can produce by the endo of next year.

This summer, antigen tests promised cheap coronavirus testing that could rapidly identify infectious people and allow healthy Americans to return to schools, offices, and restaurants.

By September, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had purchased more than 150 million tests for nursing homes and schools, spending over $760 million. But it became clear that antigen testing can only detect samples with a higher viral load, resulting in more false negatives and false positives.

As these issues emerged, officials were slow to acknowledge the evidence. ProPublica details types of COVID-19 tests alongside the need for and problems surrounding rapid testing.

Joe Biden’s campaign messaging ended with climate change and its impact on farmers. To deliver on campaign rhetoric, public health researchers and organizers working with agricultural communities say the Biden administration must protect the air, water, land, and health of rural communities overrun by factory farms.

Truthout reports industrial agriculture generates 10 to 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions and produces pollutants that disproportionately sicken low-income communities and communities of color through exposure to toxic chemicals including ammonia and nitrate.

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) create especially egregious conditions: these industrial operations confine over 1,000 cattle, pigs, or chickens for more than 45 consecutive days with no access to pasture. The concentrated animal waste and further industrialization needed for slaughterhouses decimates the “health and social fabric of a community.”