1. More than 400 universities in America have instituted vaccine mandates. But the rules were devised with domestic students in mind who have access to the three vaccines available in the US. What about international students who can't get those vaccines?nytimes.com/2021/06/03/us/…
2. In the US, students are considered vaccinated if they received the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Most universities are telling international students they will accept those three plus any others vetted by the WHO. That leaves out students like Milloni Doshi:
3. Milloni is from Mumbai and is due to start her masters at Columbia this fall. She's been vaccinated with Covaxin, which is not WHO approved. Columbia and many other colleges in the US are telling students like her that they will need to be revaccinated once they come on campus
4. The idea that a student would need to be revaccinated with Vaccine B after having already gotten Vaccine A has created a logistical and a medical conundrum. In an email to me, the CDC said there is no data available on whether it is safe to combine different vaccines:
5. The CDC is recommending a waiting period of at least 28 days between vaccines from different companies. Colleges across the country told me that they plan to accommodate foreign students as they are revaccinated. Some will need to isolate in dorm rooms attending class via zoom
6. Most affected are students in India, which sends some 200,000 students to the US every yea, and those in Russia. That's because the Covaxin vaccine available in India and the Sputnik vaccine made in Russia are not among those vetted by the WHO: nytimes.com/interactive/20…
7. Indian students are also struggling because of the acute vaccine shortage. @sudhikaushik dropped out of his MBA last year to run @NAAISORG which is trying to help. He told me students headed to the US are so desperate to get vaccines they've resorted to the black market:
8. In the last week alone, six regional governments in India have announced vaccine clinics specifically to vaccinate students heading to US colleges, after pressure from groups like @naaisorg
9. Even students who have succeeded in getting a WHO-vetted vaccine face uncertainty. I spoke to another Columbia student Gadha Raj who made a two-day trip to a clinic to get Covishield, approved by Columbia. But the second dose can't be administered for 84 days:
10. That's right when she needs to leave for New York for her studies so she's unsure if she'll succeed in getting the second dose of the approved vaccine. If she fails to get it will she be considered unvaccinated & need to begin a new vaccine cycle once she arrives at Columbia?
11. The uncertainty and stress caused by that wait time has prompted @priyankac19, a member of India's parliament to write to the government requesting a shortening of the wait period between the first and second dose in order to accommodate students heading to American campuses:
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1. More than 400 universities have announced students will not be able to enroll next fall if they haven't been vaccinated for Covid-19. A look at a map of where they are located shows that 92% of these colleges are in states that voted for Biden: nytimes.com/2021/05/22/us/…
2. A tracker compiled by @chronicle, which is updated every day, shows that just 34 colleges out of 404 are in states that voted for Donald Trump in the last election: chronicle.com/blogs/live-cor…
3. The electoral map serves as a near exact proxy of which colleges have imposed the vaccine requirement, speaking to our divided politics and to how politicized the pandemic has become. To understand what was happening I interviewed 2 dozen university leaders, like Katie Conboy
1/ Three million. That's the estimate of how many children have dropped out of school as a result of the pandemic. To see in slow motion what it's like when a child falls behind, @tamirbenkalifa & I spent a week with 11-year-old Jordyn as he tried to learn nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/…
2/ Jordyn's single mom, Precious, earns $12-an-hour as a security guard at a casino in Tunica, Miss. She is just below the cutoff for government assistance, and on her salary all she can afford is a $400-a-month apartment. It has no stove, no fridge - and crucially, no internet
3/ What does that mean for Jordyn in the age of remote learning? It means that he needs to wait for his mom to get home from work in order to use her cellphone to log into his virtual class. We sat next to him on this couch as he struggled to do math class on this phone:
In Year 2 of the pandemic, more colleges than not are doing some version of an in-person commencement, albeit with restrictions. That has sown frustration at the minority of schools sticking to a virtual-only ceremony: nytimes.com/2021/04/30/us/…
At the University of Tampa, a group of seniors took matters into their own hands. @allilark11_ turned to Instagram to ask classmates: If we were to put on our own in-person event, would you attend? Overwhelmed by the support, they rented a convention center for a DIY graduation:
3. And at the University of Michigan - home to the largest stadium in the country - parents stood on the streets of Ann Arbor hoisting placards demanding an in-person graduation for their children:
1. Last night, a juror in the Breonna Taylor case who claims the attorney general mischaracterized the panel’s deliberation came forward via his attorney. It’s the latest ripple in this complicated case which has left the community in Louisville frayed: nytimes.com/2020/09/28/us/…
2. The juror, who remains unidentified, is asking in a court motion to be allowed to speak publicly in order to set the record straight. He’s also asking for the attorney general to release the transcripts of last week’s proceedings so that the public can judge for themselves
3. Yesterday evening, less than an hour after the juror’s complaint was filed with the court, @nytimes was the first to sit down with the juror’s attorney to understand what happened. The juror came to him Friday, two days after the panel disbanded. He was confused & “in turmoil”
1. Big news out of Canada: Abu Huzayfah has been arrested on a terrorist “hoax” charge. The narrative tension of our podcast “Caliphate” is the question of whether his account is true. In Chapter 6 we explain the conflicting strands of his story, and what we can and can’t confirm
2. Below is a link to Chapter 6, which exposes both what we know he lied about, explores the conundrum of what to do when you discover that a source has lied, and lays out for readers what we know to be fact and equally the many things we still don’t know nytimes.com/2018/09/20/pod…
3. Among my enduring questions - the question that we ended the podcast with - is the puzzle of why the Canadian government never charged him? I could never get a straight answer from the RCMP or CSIS. The fact that he was radicalized and pro-ISIS is all over his social media.
1. Curfew has just been announced in Louisville. Alert came screaming across my phone. A few dozen protestors have taken refuge inside a church. Streets are surrounded by police. Demonstrators rolled a dump truck in front of church:
2. Last night, two officers were shot by a protestor, one in stomach, one in thigh. News outlet covered the shooting. Perhaps for that reason mood tonight is different. Last night media was welcomed inside church. Tonight reporters told “you’re telling the wrong narrative”
3. Reporters are scattered across parking lot and side streets while protestors with bullhorns are on First Unitarian church property, where church leaders are offering water and food. Helicopter whirring overhead. Assembly has been declared unlawful by Louisville police.