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Daily briefing: European regulator links AstraZeneca vaccine to rare blood clots
The benefits of the Oxford–AstraZeneca vaccine still outweigh the risks, but rare side effects are something to be aware of. Plus, the science of sex in sport and a call for clearer rules on science espionage in the US.
US universities say they need more clarity on how to implement a long-awaited set of rules designed to protect the country’s science from theft by foreign spies. The National Institutes of Health is the first US agency to act on research security guidelines that were published by the previous presidential administration. Universities also want guidance on addressing concerns over how these rules could exacerbate racial profiling of scientists of Chinese descent.
Physicians say a controversial podcast by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has further exposed a seam of racism that runs through medicine and medical publishing. The recording, in which two white JAMA editors discussed structural racism, has led to the journal’s editor-in-chief being put on administrative leave. “A lot of the ways people talk about racism are abstract. This podcast made it very concrete,” says anthropologist Clarence Gravlee, who wrote an in-depth analysis of the episode’s issues. “You hear all of the ways white people misunderstand racism, and you hear it all in just 15 minutes.”
The highest ever daily average of atmospheric CO2 was recorded on Saturday at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has been recording since 1958. (The Washington Post (paywall) | 6 min read)
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has concluded that the Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine should carry a warning that blood clots, accompanied by low levels of blood platelets, are very rare side effects of the vaccine. The agency reviewed 86 cases of blood clots, 18 of which were fatal, among 25 million people in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom who had received the vaccine. The vaccine’s benefits still outweigh the risks, says the EMA. But vaccinated people and health-care providers should be aware of blood-clot symptoms — such as shortness of breath, chest pain, leg swelling and persistent abdominal pain — to ensure prompt treatment.
A senior US government official reveals that contractual restrictions are hindering the country’s nascent desire to become a leader in producing and sharing COVID-19 vaccines with other countries. (Vanity Fair | 13 min read)
Sport has a long history of policing who can participate in women’s categories. But as attempts at sex testing became ever more sophisticated, they served only to reveal the difficulty — if not impossibility — of defining a hard boundary between female and male. Some sporting bodies moved on to testosterone measurements, but the evidence linking the hormone to an unfair sporting advantage is unclear. More broadly, the process of sorting athletes by their sex has raised difficult questions around medical ethics and human rights that are a long way from being answered.
A proportion of the United Kingdom’s research budget should be dedicated to global challenges, and this should not count against aid spending, argue sustainability researchers Chris Foulds, Aled Jones and Zareen Pervez Bharucha. Double-counting research and aid budgets has put major projects on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals at risk, they write.
Notwithstanding its large burden and costs, burnout remains an elusive concept, write physician-scientists Christiaan Vinkers and Frederieke Schaafsma. Research into burnout is patchy, there are no agreed diagnostic criteria and some countries don’t even recognize it as a disease. The authors call for an integrated scientific framework to recognize, prevent and treat burnout.Read more: Pandemic burnout is rampant in academia (Nature | 9 min read)
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Janelle Shane, an optics research scientist and science writer, trained the artificial intelligence GPT-3 to write pick-up lines. (AI Weirdness blog | 5 min read)