Month: April 2022

“In Guam, even the dead are dying,” Chamorro author and activist Julian Aguon writes in his new book The Properties of Perpetual Light.

Aguon, a human rights lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, has watched with anguish as his home island, along with the rest of the Marianas archipelago, has been environmentally degraded due to growing militarization. Known as Guåhan to its residents, Guam has been a US territory since 1898, and today, the Department of Defense occupies roughly 30 percent of its land — a share that’s only growing.

Most recently, the Pentagon decided to relocate roughly 5,000 Marines from Japan to Guam as part of a larger realignment of US military forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the ongoing construction of the newest US Marine base, Camp Blaz, is nearing completion, despite major opposition from the island’s local residents. Further aggravating Guam’s native Chamorro people, military officials last summer found human remains and cultural artifacts dating back to the island’s pre-colonial Latte period during the excavation of the land, as they seemingly broke ground on ancient villages.

Guam’s pristine northern coastline has also recently been impacted by the construction of a massive firing range complex, which is an extension of the Marine base. It not only sits atop numerous historical sites, but it’s also dangerously near the island’s primary source of drinking water and would gravely damage the island’s natural resources and biodiversity — including more than 1,000 acres of native limestone forest and species, such as Guam’s slender-toed gecko.

On top of this, and in concert with a pandemic that’s taken the lives of hundreds of native Pacific Islanders, Aguon’s book comes at a time when Indigenous Chamorro people face growing erasure. Many Americans still don’t know that people born on the island are US citizens — citizens who enlist in and die serving the military at a higher rate per capita than anyone in the country yet cannot vote in US elections. In fact, earlier this month, QAnon espouser Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Guam a “foreign country” that shouldn’t receive American tax dollars.

As such, Pacific Islander authors and their perspectives in literature are hard to come by, which Aguon hopes to change by inspiring future generations to challenge the dominant framework that centers white experiences and make their own art to take up space. While Aguon does not settle on one structure in The Properties of Perpetual Light — going from prose to poetry to political commentary — the common thread is grief, which he uses to talk about climate change; the colonial history and rampant US militarization of the Pacific Islands; and the generational trauma that’s been passed down for centuries. But he also finds power in hope.

“There’s so much beauty,” Aguon told Vox. “And as I say in the end [of the book], ‘A human being is here to be enjoyed, like a sunset or tangerine. We’re not oxen, we’re not here to endlessly plow the earth.’ We’re more than our suffering.”

As someone born and raised in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory just north of Guam, I talked to Aguon about home, his new book, and the need for more Pacific Islander representation in the literary world and beyond. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Rachel Ramirez

First, I want to talk about the title, The Properties of Perpetual Light. In the book, which at its core is about loss, you reference the prayer we say for the dead during rosaries in the islands: “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord — and let perpetual light shine upon them.” Then later you write, “Perpetual Light is the Ancient Beauty.” Tell me more about what “perpetual light” means to you.

Julian Aguon

The whole book is really a process of interrogation, really interrogating the language that we use. The Catholic prayer for the dead — as I say in the introduction, I’ve recited those words thousands of times. But it is only in compiling this manuscript that I really reflected on their meaning. As kids on Guam, we’re always coming back from somebody’s rosary. It’s so common. We memorize these things, but we don’t necessarily really dive deep or interrogate the meaning of those words.

In the same way that the earth metals have different properties, what about their spiritual counterparts? I thought of hope and faith, but this idea of perpetual light has always spoken to me. We know from the Bible, the only thing to perceive light is love, and I was like, wow, that’s such a powerful idea. Our love brings things into being. To me, when we’re saying this prayer, we are sort of offering up the only thing we have, which is our love to light the way of the people we’ve lost, and this book has a lot of loss in it.

Rachel Ramirez

Being from the Mariana Islands myself, I know how rare it is to find a book written by a Chamorro author, or even a native Pacific Islander author, or even a book about the islands. Why was writing this book so significant to you as an Indigenous activist, lawyer, and author?

Julian Aguon

We need artists more than we believe we do, especially in hard times. 2020 was exceedingly difficult for so many of us. Here on Guam, the pain and trauma of living in the reality of a militarized colony really became very clear in an almost palpable way — you could feel it in the air that we breathe. For example, US military personnel last March came off of these ships, came into the community, infecting the community, violating numerous executive orders, local ordinances, running around — and I was just like wow, this is really symbolic of a larger thing that’s happening. All of these really deep, longstanding, entrenched inequalities were really laid bare for the whole world to see, and it really made us realize so much of what we think is an illusion.

I’ve been influenced by so many writers with different writing traditions. In the islands, we take so much information, but we don’t have enough of our own locally produced literature. I want this book to burn our illusion about certain things, and really dive deep into the pain, and to really explore, walk around, and fill the walls of the cave. As a community, I really feel like we were avoiding these really painful conversations. I want this book to blow all of that wide open.

Rachel Ramirez

Relatedly, I want to touch on invisibility. As a kid growing up on Saipan, I never saw our home islands as something largely unnoticed by the world, nor did I realize that not many people knew we were US citizens. It wasn’t until I moved to the mainland US that I really started to understand that there were misconceptions and a dearth of knowledge. Can you speak to this invisibility, particularly the indigeneity of Pacific Islanders who often don’t see themselves represented in literature?

Julian Aguon

With this book, in some ways, I was trying to cultivate in the reader a sense of respect for small things. What Arundhati Roy would call the “the whisper and scurry of small lives” — that’s partly what gets rendered invisible so often.

When I wrote the chapter “Yugu Means Yoke,” I had just lost my father from pancreatic cancer. My nuclear family was falling spectacularly apart. And I was just alone on a red dirt mountain, and I had to find my way in the world with so little guidance in that particular moment. In some ways, you could say I learned empathy from insects. I was just curious about these small lives. I was wondering if these snails could ever evade their predators. I was paying attention to how slowly they moved and really wanting them to move swiftly enough to save their own lives — and wanting the same thing for myself, even without knowing that. I was a young child growing up and would soon be struggling with being Indigenous and queer and questing or searching for oneself.

Diving into and understanding literature, I found that good books are lighthouses, that they light the way when we’re alone. I want this book to be that little lighthouse for the young readers who are also navigating really difficult terrain. Books are lighthouses, but they’re also mirrors in which our faces do or do not appear. I wanted young people from the Marianas or even the wider Micronesian islands to be able to read this book and see a piece of themselves in it, and also inspire them to write their own books or call out the art that’s just latent in them.

Rachel Ramirez

The way you used grief and trauma throughout the book as a theme to highlight issues that haunt native Pacific Islanders and the islands is profound. There’s your dad’s passing as you mentioned, but also human remains that were found during the military buildup excavation. Was this approach something that was intentional from the beginning before you started putting together the book?

Julian Aguon

I would actually be lying if I said that it was premeditated. The book sort of revealed itself to me while I was writing it because I didn’t really have an agenda or a plan. With all the noise of 2020 and isolation and suffering in every corner, I was just writing because I couldn’t not write. I was thinking about loss and processing it and I thought about how it all started with my first major loss, which is the loss of my father.

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Most people use or handle grief in such a way that has an isolating effect. It cuts us off from other people. This book does exactly the opposite: It uses grief, but it tries to bring it into the heart of the village. It brings people together. I tried to use grief, in some ways, in an Islander way. Our funerals back home are deeply sad like everyone else’s, you know this, but they’re also oddly celebratory. They’re like parties. We’re celebrating the life that one has lived, and the only way to grieve the enormity of certain kinds of loss is to grieve it together. This book is an invitation to do that, and that’s the one aspect of it that made it quite special to me.

Rachel Ramirez

I’m really curious about how you didn’t settle with just one structure in the book. You used prose, poetry, political commentary, as the chapter changes. For me, it allowed room for processing and understanding what all that grief meant. In one chapter you talk about the time Guam made headlines because of the threat from North Korea, the next you talk about something personal about your father, then you get into a poem. What inspired you to write it that way?

Julian Aguon

A good book can be like a record or like a music album with different notes — and you’re hitting the listener in different places. They do range in form like prose and poetry, but they also range in occasions. There’s eulogies marking an actual death versus commencement speeches to young people who are about to step into the world as it actually is, not as they wish it to be. It’s almost like a kaleidoscope of life experiences. I tried to meet readers where they’re actually at no matter where that is in the spectrum of life. What you’re getting into with the switching up of the medium or the styles, is that it’s in some ways like this collage, right? It’s like a lovely mess, but life is a lovely mess. Part of my playing around with some of the structure was about that, and on the other hand, playing around with the structure is also because I think you can only say certain things in certain ways. Poetry does something that the other styles can’t.

At the end, for example, I’ve just said many things, and I ended with this poem, which was about a flower. It’s just a simple poem about a flower, but about our respect for strength, as opposed to power. I feel like that is such a theme in the book, and I wanted to leave the reader with this impossibly gentle image of this flower, thriving in such rugged and hostile territory. Not only because it’s about an appreciation of beauty, or an announcement of the presence of the beautiful, but also because it’s primarily about an insistence on it, paying attention to small things. The book is not prescriptive. I’m not prescribing the answer. I’m not answering a question. Rather, I’m just enlarging the question.

Rachel Ramirez

I remember attending a panel of UN delegates from Guåhan at New York University in 2019, and the panelists asked the room something to the effect of, “When you hear Guam, what do you think of?” Then immediately there was a chorus of the words “island” and “military.” What can you say about this outside perception, which in a sense conceals the growing issue of climate or militarization in Micronesia?

Julian Aguon

I think it has something to do with what Toni Morrison would have described as writing beyond the white gaze — and in my book, I was trying to stretch that analogy and write beyond the colonial gaze, not what outsiders see. There’s so much beauty, and as I say in the end, “A human being is here to be enjoyed, like a sunset or tangerine. We’re not oxen, we’re not here to endlessly plow the earth.” We’re more than our suffering.

Part of what happens is this standard narrative gets cast and that account shows we’re suffering and we’re fighting this largest military buildup in recent history — all of that is true; we are on course to becoming one of the most militarized places on earth — but it is also true that we come from wayfinders, that we have such rich, spiritual and intellectual sources or knowledge to draw upon. Our homeland is so beautiful. I mean, it’s arresting. So it also is important to highlight what we’re fighting for — the beauty and the richness and the diversity.

Rachel Ramirez

Speaking of beauty, you also center and highlight women a lot — from the chapter “My Mother’s Bamboo Bracelets,” where you told a story about a group of women weaving their hair together to build a giant net to save the island from being eaten by a giant fish, to “Fighting Words,” about your grandmother surviving a traumatic event. Why was deploying that feminist insight such an important theme?

Julian Aguon

There are definitely several feminist currents swimming throughout the book. There’s “the personal is political,” which is a quintessential feminist insight. There’s also the beautiful celebration of defiant people and writers who swam so squarely against the tide. And I have been nourished by Black feminism and other theories of liberation, which have clearly impacted me and my work.

That’s also where we come from in Guam and in many of our Micronesian islands. We are matrilineal. Originally, for example, the land tenure was passed on the mother’s side or that Chamorro women didn’t use to take their husband’s name. We organized our society based along those lines. That’s naturally where I gravitate to. And in my personal life, my father died very early so my mother raised me, along with random amazing women, mostly women of color, who showed up in my life and nourished me and nurtured me and taught me and instructed me as my life progressed.

Rachel Ramirez

I want to close with what’s probably the most basic question. Even though grief is an overarching theme of your book, you also talk about light and hope. Where do you find hope?

Julian Aguon

I don’t think the two — grief and hope — are really disconnected. I think we need to have a deeper understanding of hope. Hope is earned. You have to put in the work. On the ground, when you’re in community with other people and you’re trying to build power, there is nothing like that. That it’s a high that can barely be explained because you’re all together and you realize you’re moved by your shared fate. You realize that our fates are intertwined.

I’ve never felt more robustly alive than when I’m in community with other people who believe that they can change the world. Solidarity and community-building and building power in and across our communities is the work we have to do.

Officials in Japan say a successful coronavirus vaccination drive is vital to the country’s ability to host the delayed 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo this summer. Yet the country has been far slower than many of its peers to begin rolling out vaccines, only approving its first one this past weekend.

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Now, with just five months to go before the games are scheduled to take place, Japan’s government is racing against time to get its population vaccinated.

In November, the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and the German biotech firm BioNTech reported the results of the phase 3 trial of their Covid-19 vaccine, which found it to be more than 90 percent effective at preventing infection. Within weeks, several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, issued emergency use authorizations for the drug.

But Japan didn’t accept the results of the Pfizer study. Instead, it asked Pfizer to do additional trials with Japanese participants. Japan’s request was meant to help alleviate concerns that not enough Asian, and particularly Japanese, candidates had been included in Pfizer’s trial.

Finally, on February 14, Japan approved Pfizer’s vaccine, two months after the US and the UK began their campaigns. While some have argued that the additional wait time, which only led to testing 160 Japanese participants, wasn’t worth the trouble, Japan’s vaccination point person Taro Kono defended the delay at a press conference on Tuesday.

“It was more important for the government to show the Japanese people that everything was done” to get everyone on board with getting vaccinated, Kono said.

Kono’s comment underscores the importance of gaining public trust in Japan, a country ranked among the lowest in the world for vaccine confidence.

And right now in Japan, confidence in the vaccine is seriously needed.

Last month, Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide declared a state of emergency for 11 areas including the cities of Tokyo and Osaka as the number of cases in those places reached their highest levels of the pandemic.

At the time, Suga stated his unwavering commitment to safely holding the Olympic Games. “I am determined to hold safe and secure games by taking all possible measures against the infection,” he said.

As of February 16, Japan has recorded more than 400,000 coronavirus cases and 7,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic. Tokyo, where the games are to be held, has been the epicenter of those deaths.

When the Olympics were first postponed in March 2020, then-Prime Minister Abe Shinzo said the rescheduled games would be a celebration of humankind’s victory over the coronavirus.

Suga, who took over after Abe stepped down in September, continues to echo that sentiment. “I am determined to realize a safe and secure Tokyo Games as proof that mankind will have overcome the virus,” Suga told his country’s parliament on Friday, according to the Washington Post.

But with just over 150 days left before the Olympic Games are supposed to begin on July 23, the coronavirus still raging in the country, and the government only now starting its vaccine rollout, victory seems distant.

Japan has a complicated recent history with vaccines

Suga’s government has faced intense criticism over the perceived slowness of his coronavirus response. According to a poll by Japan’s Asahi newspaper, the approval rating for Suga’s cabinet plummeted to 33 percent in January, down from 65 percent when Suga took office in September.

But when it comes to the delay in approving the Pfizer vaccine, it seems the Japanese government chose to move slowly on purpose, in order to help overcome vaccine skepticism in the country.

According to a September study in the Lancet medical journal, Japan ranks among the countries with the least vaccine confidence in the world. An opinion poll conducted in January by the Japanese public broadcaster NHK found only half of the respondents wanted the vaccine, while 38 percent said they did not want it.

The Lancet paper points to two events in Japan’s recent history that contributed to this public mistrust of vaccines, particularly foreign-made ones.

In 1993, the country banned the three-shot MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine when surprisingly high rates of a type of meningitis commonly associated with a strain of the mumps were reported in those who had taken the vaccine. Many children were also left reeling from adverse effects as serious as blindness. Eight children died.

After public outcry, the Japanese government stopped mandating shots for children in 1994. But the damage to public opinion of vaccines was already done. Since the vaccine was banned, several outbreaks of rubella have happened in Japan.

More recently, in 2013, the Japanese government suspended recommendations for the HPV vaccine following frenzied media reports of adverse effects. The HPV vaccine remains suspended in Japan despite a local investigation that found no link between the mysterious ailments and the HPV vaccine. Untreated HPV can cause cervical cancer, which kills 3,000 Japanese women each year. But if administered at the right time, the HPV vaccine can prevent most cases of cervical cancer.

The MMR and HPV cases did serious damage to public trust in the government’s approval of vaccines. That mistrust now poses a big challenge to Japan’s coronavirus vaccination drive.

“I am concerned about weak health communication in Japan,” Dr. Kazuki Shimizu, a public health researcher at London School of Economics and Political Science, told me, referring to the risk that misinformation could get in the way of Japan’s coronavirus rollout.

“As the preparedness for vaccine deployment is insufficient, I expect that many reactogenicity symptoms (adverse effects) will be reported, which may lead to suspension of the vaccine campaigns in the future,” he said. He added that he hopes reports of side effects don’t get in the way of Japan’s vaccine drive.

Beyond skepticism, Japan faces other logistical hurdles in rolling out the vaccine

Japan began its vaccination drive Wednesday at the Tokyo Medical Center. Dr. Araki Kazuhiro, the center’s director, was the first to receive the shot.

Under the rollout plan, 40,000 health care workers from 100 government-run hospitals will be the first to receive the vaccine. Half of those workers are participating in a study, waiting a week after receiving each shot to see if there are any side effects to the vaccine. After that, 3.7 million additional hospital workers will become eligible.

By April, 36 million people 65 or older will become eligible. People suffering from conditions like heart disease that can complicate the virus will be next, with vaccination of the greater public expected to happen in July.

So far, Japan has signed contracts to get 344 million total vaccine doses for vaccinating its population of roughly 127 million people. Of that total, 144 million doses came from Pfizer.

The Japanese government secured 120 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and 50 million doses from Moderna. Japan expects to have enough doses for its entire population by late June.

But there are already some troubling signs for Japan’s vaccination drive. So far, the country has failed to secure enough of the special syringes that can get six shots out of each Pfizer vaccine vial. The regular syringes, which the Japanese government has stocked up on, can only get five shots, wasting an inoculation shot in each vial.

Reuters reported on Monday that a Japanese health official and Pfizer Japan representative didn’t comment on if the 144 million doses slated to arrive by the end of the year were based on five or six doses per vial. If the 144 million is based on six shots per vial and the Japanese government can’t get the special syringes fast enough to meet the demand, a lot of doses could go to waste.

For now, Japan’s vaccination efforts largely rest on successful inoculation using Pfizer’s vaccine while other vaccines await testing and approval. On January 21, Moderna started its clinical trials in Japan with a group of 200 people over the age of 20. The approval process for the AstraZeneca vaccine began earlier this month. Although Japan is a pharmaceutical giant, its homegrown vaccine, AnGes, won’t enter trials until later this year.

And no matter how many vaccines are available — or where they’re made — health experts have repeatedly emphasized that additional, “non-pharmaceutical interventions” like testing, contact tracing, and social distancing will still be needed for years to keep the coronavirus in check.

The Covid-19 pandemic will not be over until every country has access to vaccines, which will take time, yet there’s a misconception that the vaccine will make ending the pandemic possible in a year.

“There has been an over-reliance on Covid-19 vaccines for ending the pandemic in Japan, especially among the government and several scientific advisers to the government,” Shimizu, the public health researcher, told me.

Being too positive in communication about the vaccine could actually have a negative impact on public faith among Japanese citizens in the long run. If adverse effects of the vaccines appear in the news, as they did in the case of the HPV vaccine, the Japanese government could have a tougher time convincing the public that everything’s okay.

To effectively roll out the vaccine and end the pandemic requires “openness and transparency, and sharing both positive and negative facts is warranted,” Shimizu said.

When it comes to the delayed Tokyo Olympics, the same couldn’t be more true.

The Biden administration has officially committed to Covax, the global effort to fund and deliver Covid-19 vaccines around the world, including to lower-income countries.

The administration will commit $4 billion to Covax, releasing the first $2 billion immediately to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which is one of the partners in this effort along with the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Another $2 billion will follow over the next two years, an effort to spur other countries to contribute more money.

The announcement came during President Joe Biden’s attendance at the Group of Seven (G7) meeting of the world’s biggest economies, where the pandemic is at the top of the agenda and where others, including the United Kingdom, have made similar commitments to help global vaccination efforts.

The Biden administration had announced last month that it would join Covax, another example of the White House’s larger recommitment to international cooperation. President Donald Trump had declined to join, one of a few notable holdouts in an initiative that now has more than 190 countries participating.

Congress, however, had set aside $4 billion for Gavi in its December spending bill, which is the money Biden is using for this announcement.

The US announcement also came on the heels of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledging to donate the UK’s surplus vaccines. The president of the European Commission (the European Union’s executive branch) also said Friday that the EU is doubling its Covax contribution to $1 billion.

All of these commitments are welcome news, and will make up for real funding shortfalls in the purchase of vaccine doses. At the same time, though, many of these wealthier countries are also racing to inoculate their own populations, securing doses for their citizens at all costs and purchasing far more doses than they need, while the rest of the world, especially lower-income countries, lags very far behind.

About one-quarter of the world’s population, mostly in lower- and middle-income countries, may not have access to vaccinations until 2022 — a precarious situation that could give new variants a chance to emerge and that could extend the pandemic for everyone.

This is a good first step, but “vaccine nationalism” is still the order of the day

The COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility, or Covax, was designed as a financing instrument to ensure all countries — wealthy and less-wealthy alike — have equitable access to a vaccine. Higher-income countries contribute to the fund, pooling their resources to invest in several different vaccine candidates and fund free vaccine doses to 92 lower-income countries.

The perk for higher- and middle-income countries is that they increase their odds of landing a successful vaccine; these collective investments would also ideally lower the cost of doses. And, of course, priority groups like health care workers and the elderly would get early access to the vaccine in lower-income countries, easing the worst toll of the pandemic.

The idea was born out of the lessons learned from the 2009 swine flu pandemic, when rich countries bought up all the vaccines and immunized their populations, and only then donated to other countries, at which point the worst of the pandemic had passed.

A version of this is happening now, just on a more dramatic scale. In January, more than 80 million Covid-19 vaccine doses had been distributed around the world, while only 55 doses had gone to people in low-income countries. The pace has picked up since then, but vaccinations have only started in 87 countries, the bulk of them happening in higher- and middle-income countries.

Even though many rich countries joined Covax and pledged funds, most still made individual pre-purchase agreements with pharmaceutical companies to bet on promising vaccines and secure their own doses.

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Rich countries — with 14 percent of the world’s population — have bought up more than 53 percent of the vaccines most likely to be successful. An analysis from ONE campaign, an international anti-poverty group, said the United States has an estimated 453 million excess Covid-19 vaccine doses, or what would be left over after every eligible person in the US has at least two shots.

But that doesn’t mean the US or any other country has millions of doses just hanging around; right now, demand still exceeds supply. Richer countries, because of these procurement deals, are very often at the front of the line, and their ability to make huge purchases also can drive up the cost of doses.

All of this has meant that lower-income countries are struggling to even begin vaccination campaigns, if they’ve started at all. Covax has set the goal of delivering 2 billion vaccines to poor countries by the end of 2021, with deliveries happening in the first quarter of this year, most of which will begin in March.

An estimate by the Economist Intelligence Unit suggests some lower-income countries won’t really be able to achieve widespread vaccination coverage until about 2023. In the United States, by comparison, it may be this summer.

Additional funds for Covax are important, as it will allow Covax to enter into more agreements with vaccine makers and deliver more doses. But as Vox’s Julia Belluz reported last month, the bilateral vaccine deals have already undermined Covax.

Rich countries “want to have it both ways,” Georgetown global health law professor Lawrence Gostin told Belluz. “They join Covax so they could proclaim to be good global citizens, and at the same time rob Covax of its lifeblood, which is vaccine doses.”

The United Nations has called on richer countries to donate vaccine supplies, but other than Norway, few have said whether they’d do it while still trying to inoculate populations at home. The United Kingdom has said it would donate surplus supply, but didn’t give a timeline. According to CNN, the Biden administration is looking to donate doses once “there is sufficient supply in the US.”

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a recent interview with the Financial Times that the EU and the US should set aside 5 percent of their current Covid-19 vaccine supplies and get them to poorer countries “very fast, so that people on the ground see it happening.”

But neither the EU — which recently took dramatic steps to try to secure more vaccine doses for its own struggling campaign — nor the US seems ready to make those moves, despite rivals like China and Russia making a show of “vaccine diplomacy” by sending their own doses to countries in Africa and Latin America.

Beyond delivering doses, rich countries could also do more to build up manufacturing and production capacity in lower-income countries and to pressure pharmaceutical companies to potentially waive intellectual property rights to better share knowledge and technology.

The United States and its allies putting leadership and money behind such efforts is a public health necessity. The globe can’t recover from the pandemic, or the economic crisis it created, unless the rest of the world joins richer countries in getting closer to herd immunity.

The United States and its partners making greater commitments to Covax and other global vaccine efforts is a real and important step toward these efforts. But it’s just the first.

Facebook’s sudden move on Wednesday to cut Australians off from the news (and the rest of the world from Australian news) was as surprising as it was draconian. It blocked Australians from sharing any news links, Australian news publications from hosting their content on the platform, and the rest of us from sharing links to Australian news sites. It also may be a preview of how the platform will respond to the almost-certain future attempts to regulate its business — not just in Australia, but all over the world.

Now that we’ve had a few days to see how it’s played out, it seems like the general consensus from media experts is that no one is a winner here, but Facebook at least has a point. Many experts also just don’t like the proposed Australian law that inspired Facebook’s move. So while Facebook was right to balk at the law, the way it went about registering its objection was too abrupt, clumsy, and potentially harmful.

By also demonstrating the sizable role the platform plays in keeping users informed, Facebook is taking what could be a huge gamble. On one hand, it could prompt the Australian government to come up with a law that Facebook prefers so that it’ll reverse the news block — the outcome Facebook almost certainly prefers, other than there being no new law at all. But the situation could just as easily prove just how much market power Facebook has. This, in turn, might make the case for regulations to check Facebook’s power that much stronger.

The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code — which is currently making its way through the Australian parliament and will likely pass before its session ends on February 25 — will require Facebook and Google to negotiate payment agreements with news organizations if they allow users to share news content on their respective platforms. If they don’t, an arbiter will figure out a payment agreement for them. Google and Facebook initially threatened to pull their services from the country if the law were to pass, but, as that passage looked more and more likely, their responses were very different. Google started making deals with publications. Facebook, “with a heavy heart,” cut the country off at the knees by banning news outlets altogether.

Australians suddenly found themselves unable to share news links on their timelines, and publications found their pages essentially wiped of content. There was a global impact as well: Australians couldn’t share international news links, as international news publications were blocked in the country just like the native ones.

The ban didn’t just affect the news, however. While Facebook told Recode that it intended to take “a broad definition in order to respect the law as drafted,” the company appears to have been overzealous in its banning. Facebook blocked a lot of pages and links that weren’t news, including charities, bike trails, Facebook itself, and government agencies, including health sites, as the country prepares to begin its Covid-19 vaccine rollout. Either Facebook’s block was hasty and careless, or it was spiteful — or it was a combination of both. In any case, it wasn’t a good look.

“Facebook managed to turn attention away from a flawed piece of legislation and on to its own reckless, opaque power,” wrote Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. “Even for a company that specializes in public relations disasters, this was quite an achievement.”

Techdirt founder and media analyst Mike Masnick, on the other hand, thought Facebook was perfectly within its rights to do what it did. He even argued that the news ban is in the best interests of a “free and open internet,” as the Australian law will force Google and Facebook to pay a “link tax” that he feels is “inherently problematic.”

“A bunch of lazy newspaper execs who failed to adapt and to figure out better internet business models not only want the traffic, they also want to get paid for it,” Masnick wrote. “This is like saying that not only should NBC have to run an advertisement for Techdirt, but it should have to pay me for it. If that seems totally nonsensical, that’s because it is. The link tax makes no sense.”

Many of those who criticize the new Australian law point out that Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp dominates Australian media, likely stands to gain the most from it. After all, when enacted, the law would require Google and Facebook to pay Murdoch, who used his considerable influence on the Australian government to push for legislation like this for years. Case in point: News Corp has already made a multi-year, multi-million-dollar deal with Google (Facebook’s ban was announced and implemented just hours after the Google-News Corp deal was announced). Australia’s other media giants, Seven West Media and Nine Entertainment, also worked out big deals with Google. But it remains to be seen how the law — or the threat of it — would benefit smaller publishers that don’t have the same resources or power to negotiate deals with one of the biggest companies in the world.

Among those who have a problem with the law itself, many agree with the motivation behind it: Google and Facebook have benefited from the news industry. The platforms get traffic from users who are reading and sharing the news, but more importantly, they dominate the digital ad industry. Because most news outlets rely heavily on digital ads for revenue, they’re almost forced to agree to Facebook’s and Google’s terms and prices. So the tech giants get a nice cut from those ads, while news publications have effectively lost their business model.

That dominance — and the media’s decline — is why the law was the recommendation of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which has been looking into Google and Facebook for years. Commissioner Rod Sims has said that he believes the two have too much market power, and the law is needed for media companies to have a chance at a fair deal for a cut of the profits those platforms have made off of their content.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison strongly urged Facebook to reconsider and “friend us again,” saying that the block was “not a good move” and may well have ramifications for the company beyond Australia’s borders. Canada, France, and the European Union are believed to be considering similar laws, and the United States is pursuing antitrust actions against Facebook, Google, and other Big Tech companies, both on state and federal levels.

“There is a lot of world interest in what Australia is doing,” Morrison told the Associated Press. “That’s why I invite, as we did with Google, Facebook to constructively engage because they know that what Australia will do here is likely to be followed by many other Western jurisdictions.”

Morrison added: “It’s not okay to unfriend Australia because Australia is very friendly.”

But some of Australia’s 13 million Facebook users were not feeling very friendly in the aftermath of the block. A number of them told Recode that they saw Facebook’s move as an abuse of power, and feared they would now miss out on important news or emergencies, or that the news vacuum caused by the block would be filled with more misinformation. But one Recode reader had a different view: He hoped people would seek the news out on their own, rather than only reading whatever headlines were shared by friends.

“I would be much more comfortable if all Aussies got their news direct from the source,” he said. “I think this would be best for quality journalism and the strength of our democracy.”

It looks like some Australians are trying to do just that: The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s app was the most downloaded app in Australia’s App Store in the days following the ban.

We’ll see how things progress. And if you live in Australia, you’ll have to go directly to your favorite news website for updates.

Rebecca Heilweil contributed reporting to this story.

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

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Myanmar saw its largest nationwide protests since the military coup earlier this month, with hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets and businesses shutting down across the country.

Monday’s protests are the latest in a nearly month-long civil disobedience campaign that erupted in response to the February 1 takeover by Myanmar’s military that saw the country’s civilian leaders detained and ended the country’s decade-long experiment with quasi-democratic governance.

Since then, mass demonstrations have taken place across the country and citizens have engaged in acts of resistance, from lying across train tracks at a station in Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, to work stoppages that now threaten Myanmar’s economy.

Monday’s demonstrations — which some are calling the five twos, or the “22222 uprising” — saw hundreds of thousands of protesters take to the streets of Myanmar’s cities; stores, banks, and fast food chains shut down in solidarity. Protesters chose the date because it echoes the August 8, 1988 (8/8/88) protests against military rule, which the military suppressed in a bloody crackdown.

Monday’s action went forward despite the military’s threats that mass resistance would lead to “a confrontation path where [people] will suffer the loss of life.”

In cities like Yangon, authorities set up barricades and parked armored vehicles to try to block the mass gatherings, but the protesters were undeterred. The demonstrations were largely peaceful, though there were sporadic reports of violence and arrests, particularly in the capital of Naypyidaw.

But at least three people have died in confrontations with police since the protests began, including two protesters who were killed in Mandalay when police fired live and rubber bullets into a crowd of striking workers. The first protester to die — a 20-year-old woman who was hit by a bullet at a Naypyidaw protest — has helped galvanize the movement, despite fears of an even more aggressive crackdown from the military rulers.

The military junta continues to impose internet and communication blackouts, an attempt to prevent people from organizing. Activists also worry that the blackouts may give authorities cover to try to arrest protesters and other political organizers. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma), a Thailand-based human rights organization, 684 people have been arrested, charged, or sentenced since the February 1 coup, and 637 people are still in detention or face outstanding warrants.

The protesters are proof the Myanmar coup is not going as planned

The protesters are demanding the end of the military junta and the restoration of the democratically elected civilian government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi. Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy, won overwhelmingly in elections in November.

But just as the new government was set to be sworn in, the military interceded and insisted the election results were invalid because of widespread voter fraud. Neither the country’s Union Election Commission nor international observers found evidence of widespread irregularities that would have changed the outcome of the vote. Still, the military has claimed that it will retain control until it can host new elections in a year.

The military retained a degree of control even after the country undertook democratic reforms about a decade ago, but the February coup dispensed with even a nominal democratic government. The ousted Suu Kyi was detained and eventually charged with allegedly importing illegal walkie-talkies. Another charge — of meeting with a large crowd in defiance of Covid-19 public health measures — was announced last week as the leader’s trial began in secret.

But Myanmar’s civilians have met the military’s actions with sustained resistance, pulling from a wide swath of Myanmarese, including students, teachers, doctors, bankers, and laborers. Members of Myanmar’s persecuted ethnic and religious minority groups — who still faced repression under Suu Kyi’s leadership — have also joined in the uprisings.

Protesters have also called out the military’s repression of the Rohingya and other minority groups with signs during the demonstrations, a remarkable show of solidarity.

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Activists inside and outside Myanmar continue to worry that the military will lose patience and decisively try to crack down on the movement; at the same time, the pro-democracy resistance is strengthening despite the junta’s warnings and attempts to cut off communications.

The international community has also condemned the Myanmar coup. The Biden administration is sanctioning military members who orchestrated the coup, preventing them from accessing about $1 billion in the United States. It represents one of the first international tests for the White House, though its options are limited in how much pressure it can place on Myanmar. Still, the administration has made clear that it is closely watching as the uprisings unfold.

“The United States will continue to take firm action against those who perpetrate violence against the people of Burma as they demand the restoration of their democratically elected government,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement Sunday night. “We stand with the people of Burma.”

The Biden administration has begun allowing tens of thousands of asylum seekers who were forced to wait in Mexico for a chance to obtain protection in the United States under a Trump-era program to cross the border.

Some 28,000 asylum seekers — primarily Cubans, Hondurans, and Guatemalans — have active cases in former President Donald Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which became known as the “Remain in Mexico” program. It is one of many interlocking Trump-era policies that, together, have made obtaining asylum and other humanitarian protections in the US next to impossible.

On Friday, the Homeland Security Department announced that it had allowed 25 of those asylum seekers to cross the US-Mexico border at the San Ysidro port of entry, which connects the city of Tijuana with San Diego, California. International organizations, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), had registered the asylum seekers in advance and given them an appointment to show up at the border during which they verified their eligibility to enter the country on a US Customs and Border Protection mobile app and tested negative for Covid-19.

“Today, we took the first step to start safely, efficiently, and humanely processing eligible individuals at the border,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement on Friday. “It is important to underscore that this process will take time, that we are ensuring public health and safety, and that individuals should register virtually to determine if they are eligible for processing under this program.”

Another 25 asylum seekers arrived at the port of entry on Monday to be processed.

DHS has said that the asylum seekers, once admitted to the US, will be placed in “alternatives to detention” programs, under which they are released into the US but monitored, usually by a social worker, in an effort to encourage them to show up for their immigration court dates. Such programs are humane and relatively low cost compared to immigration detention.

Ports of entry in El Paso and Brownsville, Texas — which is directly across the border from one of the largest encampments of asylum seekers in Matamoros — were expected to start processing people subject to MPP this week, but CBP said Monday that certain “operational considerations” specific to those ports could delay that plan.

They will start by processing 25 migrants daily and eventually ramp up to 300 per day, but DHS has yet to publicly commit to a date when that will occur.

“Many of them are now going to be in dignity with their families here in the US as they await their cases to be heard,” said Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-CA), who was scheduled to meet with border officials at San Ysidro and nonprofits aiding migrants on both sides of the border on Monday.

Many asylum seekers are still anxiously awaiting an appointment to cross the border

Asylum seekers who have not yet been given an appointment to be processed at the border say that they remain “anxious and worried” about ensuring that they get a spot in line.

While waiting in Mexican border cities, they remain at risk of extortion, kidnapping, and rape at the hands of cartels and other criminal entities. Some have found housing in shelters, hotels, or rooms for rent. But for others, only colorful tents and tarps stand between them and the elements. They continue to rely on volunteers for basic necessities and medical care.

An online platform created by UNHCR that allows migrants subject to MPP to register for an appointment at the border has been a source of confusion. Migrants have to fill out a four-page virtual form, including information from their court documents, that UN officials will use to identify which migrants are most vulnerable and should be prioritized for processing. Among other factors, they will take into consideration a migrant’s age and health, as well as whether they are victims of crimes or trauma or single mothers with children.

The Monitor’s Valerie Gonzalez reported that the site went live at noon on Friday, but migrants quickly encountered difficulty registering due to “weak internet reception, an inundation of web traffic, and unaccommodated disabilities.” On Monday, migrants in Matamoros said they had been unable to access the site since 10 pm on Sunday night, and the UNHCR phone line was continuously busy.

MPP is one of many barriers to asylum erected under Trump

More than 71,000 migrants have been subject to MPP over the lifetime of the program as of the end of January, according to new data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The vast majority are not being represented by a lawyer, and less than 2 percent of those whose cases have been completed have received some form of protection in the US.

Before the pandemic, asylum seekers would often have to wait months for a hearing. But last March, the Trump administration suspended all their hearings indefinitely.

Faced with the prospect of waiting many months in Mexico to be called in for their court dates in the US, many migrants who were enrolled in MPP decided to return to their home countries and were ordered deported in their absence. Biden administration officials have signaled that they also intend to identify those people and admit them to the US for a chance to seek protection.

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President Biden announced last month that the US would stop enrolling people in MPP, but he stopped short of ending it entirely. He had also promised on the campaign trail to “surge humanitarian resources” to the border, including asylum officers who could conduct an initial screening of migrants’ claims for protection, and ensure that US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ asylum division takes the lead on processing their cases in order to ease the burden on the immigration courts.

Biden’s decision to start processing asylum seekers subject to MPP signals that he is taking a more compassionate approach to the border. But some immigrant advocates have argued that he isn’t acting quickly enough to reverse Trump’s policies, including a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order that has allowed the US to turn away the vast majority of migrants arriving at the border on pandemic-related grounds. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has said the CDC order will remain in place for now.

The dire warning implicit in President Joe Biden’s more than $2 trillion American Jobs Plan — which promises to rebuild American infrastructure, create union jobs, and jump-start manufacturing — is that if it fails to become law, China will outcompete the United States for decades to come.

Biden has been saying that China is “eating our lunch” for months, promising his plan would “put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.”

“This is not part of my speech,” he said during April 7 remarks to sell his plan, “but I promise you, you’re all going to be reporting over the next six to eight months how China and the rest of the world is racing ahead of us in the investments they have in the future, attempting to own the future.”

Mentioning China so often when talking about a domestic infrastructure plan might seem odd. But it makes sense if you realize that Biden’s signature domestic economic policy plan is also a critical element of a broader foreign policy strategy to thwart China’s growing power and global influence.

“When [Biden’s] thinking about the infrastructure investments necessary, a lot of it is in contraposition to what he is seeing China doing in terms of strategic investments,” National Economic Council director Brian Deese recently told the New York Times’s Ezra Klein.