A few days after Tedros’s press conference, in response to mounting international pressure, the Biden administration pledged 20 million doses from its stash of Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines to COVAX. This represented a significant shift in policy: it was the first time the US was donating doses that could have been used domestically. (The administration has also committed to donate 60 million doses of AstraZeneca to COVAX but has yet to do so.)
Glenn Cohen, a law professor who directs Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, says that the pledge of 20 million doses is “a good first step” for a country that cannot get enough of its own people to use up its vaccine supply quickly enough.
But, he adds, it does not negate the ethical murkinessof having American cities and states offer, or consider offering, vaccines to visitors as official policy. Cohen, who has written a book on medical tourism, says vaccines were meant to go first to “those who are most in need” and not to “people who are able to travel, who have visas, who are able-bodied.”
To put it another way, he says: it’s as if “someone loans you their car to take your mother to the hospital, and then you decide to take that car and instead of giving it back to the person—or taking other people to the hospital—you run it as an Uber.”
Outsourcing ethical quandaries
Robert Amler, the dean of New York Medical College’s school of health science and practice, says that encouraging travelers to fly to the United States from places with low vaccination rates—and potentially higher levels of infection—may itself be bad for public health.
“Any risk of ‘importing’ covid infections will depend on the volume of incoming travelers and the percent of travelers arriving who already have covid infection,” says Amler, a former chief medical officer at the CDC. “We also can’t predict with certitude the city’s ability to manage their numbers if they become excessive.”
To combat this danger, some people who are traveling to get vaccinated are taking their own precautions to avoid becoming unwitting vectors for the virus—or causing other kinds of harm.
“Michael” (also a pseudonym) and his wife flew from Quito, Ecuador, to New Orleans for a five-day trip in mid-May, during which he received the J&J shot and she got her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
Michael’s family in Canada have yet to meet the couple’s twin boys, who were born in January 2020. By going to Louisiana for their shots, he estimates that they’ve sped up their vaccination status—and therefore their family reunion—by six to nine months.
Still, the couple wanted to make sure they were not taking vaccines that could have gone to someone else. “Our first thought was to go to a red state, because we knew supply outstripped demand,” he explains.
They took extra precautions before and during their trip, too. Having both contracted covid much earlier in the pandemic, they got antibody tests before flying. Then they kept to themselves to limit their exposure.
“The question is really about what states are doing with their resources and which countries are continuing to use them [vaccines] for their own advantage. Globally, that’s really wrong.”
Nicole Hassoun, Binghamton University
By taking the initiative, they may have dampened the potential negative impact from their trip, but this highlights another problem of vaccine tourism as policy—and of much of the world’s covid-19 response in general. Difficult ethical decisions that could have—or, some argue, should have—been matters of policy are instead being pushed onto individuals.
“The city is the one who sets the queue,” says Pamela Hieronymi, a philosopher at the University of California, Los Angeles. So if you have an issue with vaccine tourists in, say, New York, “it seems your complaint should be made to the city, not to the person using the line offered to them.”
Nicole Hassoun, a philosophy professor at Binghamton University and the head of its Global Health Impact Project, also argues that while vaccine tourists may grapple with their choice, the real ethical issue is not at the individual level. “I think the question is really about what states are doing with their resources and which countries are continuing to use them [vaccines] for their own advantage,” she says. “Globally, that’s really wrong.”
There may also be second-order effects like exacerbating local inequality, says Yadurshini Raveendran, a graduate of the Duke Global Health Institute, who points out that richer individuals in low-income countries—those who travel internationally and are thus more likely to take advantage of vaccine tourism—already have better access to health care than poorer people in those countries. Israel has the highest vaccination rates in the world, she notes, but Palestine has administered one dose to just 5% of the population.
The Frost nails its uncanny, disconcerting vibe in its first few shots. Vast icy mountains, a makeshift camp of military-style tents, a group of people huddled around a fire, barking dogs. It’s familiar stuff, yet weird enough to plant a growing seed of dread. There’s something wrong here.
Welcome to the unsettling world of AI moviemaking. The Frost is a 12-minute movie from Detroit-based video creation company Waymark in which every shot is generated by an image-making AI. It’s one of the most impressive—and bizarre—examples yet of this strange new genre. Read the full story, and take an exclusive look at the movie.
—Will Douglas Heaven
Microplastics are everywhere. What does that mean for our immune systems?
Microplastics are pretty much everywhere you look. These tiny pieces of plastic pollution, less than five millimeters across, have been found in human blood, breast milk, and placentas. They’re even in our drinking water and the air we breathe.
Given their ubiquity, it’s worth considering what we know about microplastics. What are they doing to us?
The short answer is: we don’t really know. But scientists have begun to build a picture of their potential effects from early studies in animals and clumps of cells, and new research suggests that they could affect not only the health of our body tissues, but our immune systems more generally. Read the full story.
Here, bits of plastic can end up collecting various types of bacteria, which cling to their surfaces. Seabirds that ingest them not only end up with a stomach full of plastic—which can end up starving them—but also get introduced to types of bacteria that they wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It seems to disturb their gut microbiomes.
There are similar concerns for humans. These tiny bits of plastic, floating and flying all over the world, could act as a “Trojan horse,” introducing harmful drug-resistant bacteria and their genes, as some researchers put it.
It’s a deeply unsettling thought. As research plows on, hopefully we’ll learn not only what microplastics are doing to us, but how we might tackle the problem.
Read more from Tech Review’s archive
It is too simplistic to say we should ban all plastic. But we could do with revolutionizing the way we recycle it, as my colleague Casey Crownhart pointed out in an article published last year.
We can use sewage to track the rise of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria, as I wrote in a previous edition of the Checkup. At this point, we need all the help we can get …
… which is partly why scientists are also exploring the possibility of using tiny viruses to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. Phages were discovered around 100 years ago and are due a comeback!
Our immune systems are incredibly complicated. And sex matters: there are important differences between the immune systems of men and women, as Sandeep Ravindran wrote in this feature, which ran in our magazine issue on gender.
Artists are often the first to experiment with new technology. But the immediate future of generative video is being shaped by the advertising industry.Waymark made The Frost to explore how generative AI could be built into its products. The company makes video creation tools for businesses looking for a fast and cheap way to make commercials. Waymark is one of several startups, alongside firms such as Softcube and Vedia AI, that offer bespoke video ads for clients with just a few clicks.
Waymark’s current tech, launched at the start of the year, pulls together several different AI techniques, including large language models, image recognition, and speech synthesis, to generate a video ad on the fly. Waymark also drew on its large data set of non-AI-generated commercials created for previous customers. “We have hundreds of thousands of videos,” says CEO Alex Persky-Stern. “We’ve pulled the best of those and trained it on what a good video looks like.”
To use Waymark’s tool, which it offers as part of a tiered subscription service starting at $25 a month, users supply the web address or social media accounts for their business, and it goes off and gathers all the text and images it can find. It then uses that data to generate a commercial, using OpenAI’s GPT-3 to write a script that is read aloud by a synthesized voice over selected images that highlight the business. A slick minute-long commercial can be generated in seconds. Users can edit the result if they wish, tweaking the script, editing images, choosing a different voice, and so on. Waymark says that more than 100,000 people have used its tool so far.
The trouble is that not every business has a website or images to draw from, says Parker. “An accountant or a therapist might have no assets at all,” he says.
Waymark’s next idea is to use generative AI to create images and video for businesses that don’t yet have any—or don’t want to use the ones they have. “That’s the thrust behind making The Frost,” says Parker. “Create a world, a vibe.”
The Frost has a vibe, for sure. But it is also janky. “It’s not a perfect medium yet by any means,” says Rubin. “It was a bit of a struggle to get certain things from DALL-E, like emotional responses in faces. But at other times, it delighted us. We’d be like, ‘Oh my God, this is magic happening before our eyes.’”
This hit-and-miss process will improve as the technology gets better. DALL-E 2, which Waymark used to make The Frost, was released just a year ago. Video generation tools that generate short clips have only been around for a few months.
The most revolutionary aspect of the technology is being able to generate new shots whenever you want them, says Rubin: “With 15 minutes of trial and error, you get that shot you wanted that fits perfectly into a sequence.” He remembers cutting the film together and needing particular shots, like a close-up of a boot on a mountainside. With DALL-E, he could just call it up. “It’s mind-blowing,” he says. “That’s when it started to be a real eye-opening experience as a filmmaker.”
