The first scientist to publish a sequence of the COVID-19 virus in China staged a sit-in protest outside his lab after authorities locked him out of the facility — a sign of Beijing’s continuing pressure on scientists conducting research on the coronavirus.
Zhang Yongzhen wrote in an online post Monday that he and his team had been suddenly notified they were being evicted from their lab, the latest in a series of setbacks, demotions and ousters since the virologist published the sequence in January 2020 without state approval.
When Zhang tried to go to the lab over the weekend, guards barred him from entering. In protest, he sat outside on flattened cardboard in drizzling rain, pictures from the scene posted online show. News of the protest spread widely on Chinese social media and Zhang told a colleague he slept outside the lab — but it was not clear Tuesday if he remained there.
“I won’t leave, I won’t quit, I am pursuing science and the truth!” he wrote in a post on Chinese social media platform Weibo that was later deleted.
In an online statement, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said that Zhang’s lab was being renovated and was closed for “safety reasons.” It added that it had provided Zhang’s team an alternative laboratory space.
But Zhang wrote online that his team wasn’t offered an alternative until after they were notified of their eviction, and that the lab offered didn’t meet safety standards for conducting their research, leaving his team in limbo.
Zhang’s latest difficulty reflects how China has sought to control information related to the virus: An Associated Press investigation found that the government froze meaningful domestic and international efforts to trace it from the first weeks of the outbreak. That pattern continues to this day, with labs closed, collaborations shattered, foreign scientists forced out and Chinese researchers barred from leaving the country.
When reached by phone on Tuesday, Zhang said it was “inconvenient” for him to speak, saying there were other people listening in. In an email Monday to collaborator Edward Holmes seen by AP, Zhang confirmed he was sleeping outside his lab after guards barred him from entering.
An AP reporter was blocked by a guard at an entrance to the compound housing Zhang’s lab. A staff member at the National Health Commission, China’s top health authority, said by phone that it was not the main department in charge and referred questions to the Shanghai government. The Shanghai government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Zhang’s ordeal started when he and his team decoded the virus on Jan. 5, 2020, and wrote an internal notice warning Chinese authorities of its potential to spread — but did not make the sequence public. The next day, Zhang’s lab was ordered temporarily shut by China’s top health official, and Zhang came under pressure by Chinese authorities.
Around the time, China had reported several dozen people were being treated for a respiratory illness in the central city of Wuhan. Possible cases of the same illness had been reported in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan involving recent travelers to the city.
Foreign scientists soon learned that Zhang and other Chinese scientists had deciphered the virus and called on China to release the sequence. Zhang published it on Jan. 11, 2020, despite a lack of government permission.
Sequencing a virus is key to the development of test kits, disease control measures and vaccinations. The virus eventually spread to every corner of the world, triggering a pandemic that disrupted lives and commerce, prompted widespread lockdowns and killed millions of people.
Zhang was later awarded prizes in recognition for his work.
But Zhang’s publication of the sequence also prompted additional scrutiny of his lab, according to Holmes, Zhang’s collaborator and a virologist at the University of Sydney. Zhang was removed from a post at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and barred from collaborating with some of his former partners, crippling his research.
“Ever since he defied the authorities by releasing the genome sequence of the virus that causes COVID-19 there has been a campaign against him,” Holmes said. “He’s been broken by this process and I’m amazed he has been able to work at all.”
The first scientist to publish a sequence of the COVID-19 virus in China said he was allowed back into his lab after he spent days locked outside, sitting in protest.
Zhang Yongzhen wrote in an online post on Wednesday, just past midnight, that the medical center that hosts his lab had “tentatively agreed” to allow him and his team to return and continue their research for the time being.
“Now, team members can enter and leave the laboratory freely,” Zhang wrote in a post on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform. He added that he is negotiating a plan to relocate the lab in a way that doesn’t disrupt his team’s work with the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, which hosts Zhang’s lab.
Zhang and his team were suddenly told they had to leave their lab for renovations on Thursday, setting off the dispute, he said in an earlier post that was later deleted. On Sunday, Zhang began a sit-in protest outside his lab after he found he was locked out, a sign of continuing pressure on Chinese scientists conducting research on the coronavirus.
Zhang sat outside on flattened cardboard in drizzling rain, and members of his team unfurled a banner that read “Resume normal scientific research work,” pictures posted online show. News of the protest spread widely on Chinese social media, putting pressure on local authorities.
In an online statement Monday, the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center said that Zhang’s lab was closed for “safety reasons” while being renovated. It added that it had provided Zhang’s team an alternative laboratory space.
But Zhang responded the same day his team wasn’t offered an alternative until after they were notified of their eviction, and the lab offered didn’t meet safety standards for conducting their research, leaving his team in limbo.
Zhang’s dispute with his host institution was the latest in a series of setbacks, demotions and ousters since the virologist published the sequence in January 2020 without state approval.
Zhang’s ordeal started when he and his team decoded the virus on Jan. 5, 2020, and wrote an internal notice warning Chinese authorities of its potential to spread — but did not make the sequence public. The next day, Zhang’s lab was ordered to close temporarily by China’s top health official, and Zhang came under pressure from the authorities.
Foreign scientists soon learned that Zhang and other Chinese scientists had deciphered the virus and called on China to release the sequence. Zhang published it on Jan. 11, 2020, despite a lack of permission from Chinese health officials.
Sequencing a virus is key to the development of test kits, disease control measures and vaccinations. The virus eventually spread to every corner of the world, triggering a pandemic that disrupted lives and commerce, prompted widespread lockdowns and killed millions of people.
Zhang was awarded prizes overseas in recognition for his work. But health officials removed him from a post at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and barred him from collaborating with some of his former partners, hindering his research.
Still, Zhang retains support from some in the government. Though some of Zhang’s online posts were deleted, his sit-in protest was reported widely in China’s state-controlled media, indicating divisions within the Chinese government on how to deal with Zhang and his team.
“Thank you to my online followers and people from all walks of life for your concern and strong support over the past few days!” Zhang wrote in his post Wednesday.
President Joe Biden’s administration will help 50 countries identify and respond to infectious diseases, with the goal of preventing pandemics like the COVID-19 outbreak that suddenly halted normal life around the globe in 2020.
U.S. government officials will work with the countries to develop better testing, surveillance, communication and preparedness for such outbreaks in those countries, according to a senior Biden administration official who briefed reporters Monday about the program on the condition of anonymity. The official did not share a list of countries that will participate in the program.
The U.S. program will rely on several government agencies — including the U.S. State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Health and Human Services and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID — to help countries refine their infectious disease response.
Congo is one country where work has already begun, the official told reporters. The U.S. government is helping Congo with its response to an mpox virus outbreak, including with immunizations. Mpox, a virus that’s in the same family as the one that causes smallpox, creates painful skin lesions. Last year, the World Health Organization declared mpox a global emergency, with more than 91,000 cases spanning across 100 countries to date.
The White House on Tuesday is releasing a website with the names of the countries that are participating in the program. Biden officials are seeking to get 100 countries signed onto the program by the end of the year.
The U.S. has devoting billions of dollars to the effort. Biden, a Democrat, is asking for $1.2 billion for global health safety efforts in his yearly budget proposal to Congress.
These monkeys — called “rhesus macaques” — were originally brought to Florida by the manager of a glass-bottom boat operation, who released six on an island in the Silver River to attract tourists.
However, the monkeys swam away from the island into the surrounding forest, breeding and increasing their numbers over the years.
While the population of monkeys in the Silver Springs State Park has reached as high as 400 at some points, trapping and removal efforts have kept them from getting out of hand. As of 2015, the FWC reported that there were around 190 inside the park.
Nowadays, these monkeys can be found throughout the state, though the FWC says that these sightings likely stem from the group of monkeys at Silver Springs.
Aside from environmental concerns, these monkeys pose a threat to public health, as rhesus macaques in Florida have tested positive for herpes B.
The CDC states that this viral infection is extremely rare, but it can lead to severe brain damage or even death. The virus can be transmitted by these monkeys through bites, scratches or contact with bodily fluids.
In addition, these monkeys may become aggressive when fed by people, so the FWC passed a rule in 2017 prohibiting locals from feeding any wild monkeys in the state.
According to the FWC’s rhesus monkey tracker, the following counties have had credible sightings of these monkeys outside of the core population:
The FWC provides these tips for rhesus macaque encounters:
Never approach or offer food to wild monkeysIf a monkey is encountered, keep children close and pets leashedDispose of uneaten food and garbage in closed trash containersIf bitten or scratched by a wild monkey, immediately wash the wound and seek medical attention. Call the National B Virus Resource Center for emergency information at (404) 413-6550.If you observe a wild monkey that poses a threat to people, call the FWC’s Wildlife Alert Hotline at (888) 404-3922Any rhesus macaque observations seen outside of the core population near Silver Springs should be reported by calling the Exotic Species Hotline at (888) 483-4681 or by clicking here
Tucked away inside the teachers lounge at a New Hampshire elementary school, Amber Warner was having her teeth checked out for the first time.
The 5-year-old sat back on what looked like a beach chair and wore a pair of dark sunglasses as certified public health dental hygienist Mary Davis surveyed Amber’s teeth and then with a tiny syringe applied traditional dental sealants, which had the consistency of nail gel.
“Close down and bite your teeth together, bite down like you are biting down on a hot dog or a cheeseburger,” Davis told Amber, to ensure the sealants were done properly. After that, Davis flossed all of the “popcorn and the chicken, pizza between your teeth.” The whole visit took 15 minutes.
“Look at you. You are a pro on your first dental visit. I am so proud of you,” Davis said to the kindergartener, who got up from the chair and was hugged by a teacher’s assistant.
The portable clinic is part of a cavity prevention program developed by NYU College of Dentistry and being rolled out in Concord and two other New Hampshire districts. CariedAway New Hampshire hopes to expand to Maine and Vermont — and eventually nationwide — as part of a growing effort to improve pediatric oral health, especially in children from lower-income families.
There isn’t a good national estimate of dental programs in schools but many larger school districts have them. Boston University’s program operates in 20 schools and 30 preschools in Boston and eight other cities in Massachusetts and covers 3,000 children from 6 months to 21 years. In New York City, 81,000 students across 820 schools — a little over half of all public schools — were treated last school year.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital has seen 1,700 children in central Ohio since 2021 with its roving school-based dental clinics, while Minnesota nonprofit Ready, Set, Smile is in 44 schools in the Twin Cities, serving 2,225 children.
“Dental care typically is looked at as an extra or an add-on,” said Terri Chandler, who is the founder and executive director of Future Smiles in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas and serves 7,500 kids in 75 schools. “It is not part of medical care.”
Intermittent dental care, if at all
Nearly half of all U.S. children don’t receive regular dental care, according to a 2022 report from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, which is a federal agency.
That can lead to cavities quickly: More than half of children ages 6 to 8 had a cavity in at least one baby tooth and more than half adolescents ages 12 to 19 have a cavity in at least one of the permanent teeth, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Too many children fail to see a dentist before they enter school — forcing them to go to the hospital to get treatment for a mouthful of cavities, Harvard School of Dental Medicine’s Catherine Hayes said.
“If their parents aren’t getting any kind of oral health education in the physician’s office, these kids develop extensive decay,” she said, noting it can take a month or more to fix. She added: “… It’s completely preventable. We know how to prevent it.”
At Boston Children’s Hospital, there’s a waiting list of eight to nine months for the dental clinic, said Man Wai Ng, the dentist-in-chief. Ng points in part to worsening dental care during the pandemic.
“I have patients who were going to bed without brushing their teeth. They ate and drank at all hours of the day because those normal daily routines weren’t there,” Ng said. “They weren’t able to get in for … preventive dental care. Kids were developing more dental disease without the ability to get timely care.”
Ruth Langwell struggled to find a dentist for her granddaughter Lola, a 10-year-old who has autism. She recently was able to get the girl into the clinic.
“She needs somebody who is very patient, obviously … We’ve tried two other dentist and they have been reluctant because of Lola’s challenges,” said Langwell, who added she wanted Lola to see a dentist at age 2, but didn’t until she was five.
Funding programs to build habits
The challenge for many programs, especially mobile and school-based clinics, is sustainability, said Richard Niederman, a professor of epidemiology and health promotion at NYU Dentistry and founder of CariedAway. That’s because school-based programs like Neiderman’s lean heavily on donations because they often serve low-income populations who are either uninsured or on Medicaid.
Niederman has spent two decades developing his program. Other ones he tried in the Bronx and Boston ended due to a lack of funding, but this time, Niederman has $1 million from Northeast Delta Dental, which ensures his New Hampshire program will remain in place for at least three years.
“It breaks my heart that kids don’t get effective care that they could get … and the system doesn’t support it,” he said.
But the picture for pediatric oral health is improving — even outside of school programs.
Untreated tooth decay in preschool children is down 50% since 2000, according to the federal dental research agency’s report. It pointed to an increased use of sealants, which prevent cavities.
Jane Grover, the senior director of the American Dental Association’s Council on Advocacy for Access and Prevention, said there has been “tremendous growth” of dental programs in community health centers, as well as efforts to deploy dental hygienists in pediatric offices.
Some states are also better coordinating pediatric and dental care. MassHealth, the Medicaid program in Massachusetts, started requiring physicians last year to ensure a child has two fluoride varnish applications and refer them to a dentist, Hayes said.
“I remember my first dental cleaning and and that left a lasting impression,” Grover said. “We want to have children understand that, but we want their families to understand that sugar-sweetened beverages all day on primary teeth where the enamel is a little thinner than it is on adult teeth, it doesn’t take long … to go from a potentially serious situation to a very serious situation.”
Neiderman’s team treated more than 60 students over a week at the Concord school. Among them was softspoken 10-year-old Evette Sesay, who dutifully detailed how she brushes twice a day and flosses.
She wondered aloud whether the treatment would “hurt,” only to be assured by Davis that it shouldn’t — but that she could raise a hand if she felt pain. Evette, who went to the clinic because she “wanted to check” on her teeth, never did.
She said it felt like a typical exam at her dentist’s office: “They cleaned my teeth very well. The bubble gum flavor was good, too.”
The drive to Bristol, Virginia, from Jacksonville, Florida, takes more than eight hours. It’s over 10 from Orlando and closer to 14 from Miami. Despite that distance, Bristol Women’s Health Center is preparing for an influx of women from Florida seeking abortions when a stricter ban kicks in next month.
For many people who otherwise would have obtained abortions in Florida, the clinic in southwest Virginia will become the closest practical option — as it already is for a swath of the South after a Florida policy change expected to resonate far beyond the state’s borders.
“The majority of the patients we do serve are coming from banned states,” said Karolina Ogorek, the clinic’s administrative director. “I think that Florida will just become another one of the states that we serve.”
On Monday, the Florida Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. That step allows another, stricter ban to take effect on May 1, making abortion illegal in the state after six weeks’ gestation — before many women realize they’re pregnant. The ban includes exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape, incest or human trafficking, or that threaten the life or physical health or the woman and for fatal fetal anomalies.
In a separate but closely related ruling, the court also allowed a referendum that will let the state’s voters decide in November whether they want an amendment to the state constitution allowing abortion until viability.
Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro, executive director of the Florida Access Network, which helps pay for abortion care for Florida women, said that the law coupled with a 24-hour waiting period for abortion will be a “total ban” in practical terms.
And getting to a provider elsewhere, she said, will drive the average cost of abortion — including transportation, lodging, meals, child care and clinic fees — to around $4,000, about twice what it is now. That will strain organizations like hers, which already often hits its budget limit well before the end of the month, as they shift to helping people get care elsewhere.
That could strand people who can’t get time off work, afford travel, arrange child care or lack documentation to travel, Piñeiro said.
“The people who are most marginalized are going to cotinine to not have access,” she said.
She said she expects some of the state’s clinics to close for lack of patients.
Currently, the average distance to a facility that provides abortion for Florida residents is 20 miles (32 kilometers), said Caitlin Myers, an economics professor at Middlebury College in Vermont who studies the impact of abortion bans. But when the new ban takes effect, the average distance to one that offers abortion after the first six weeks of pregnancy will be 584 miles (940 kilometers).
And that only gets patients to North Carolina, where two in-person visits are required 72 hours apart to receive an abortion — and only for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy in most cases.
It’s more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) farther to Virginia.
Some areas already have long drives to the nearest abortion providers — eight hours from San Antonio, Texas, to Santa Teresa, New Mexico, for instance, and nine from New Orleans to Carbondale, Illinois, or Houston to Wichita, Kansas. But the geography will make South Florida the most highly populated place in the U.S. that’s farthest from in-person abortion access past the first six weeks.
Georgia and South Carolina, which have bans that begin after about six weeks and Ohio, which had a similar one for a time, have seen in the neighborhood of half as many abortions with those policies in effect. Some people are able to obtain abortion close to home earlier in pregnancy rather than traveling.
It’s not only Florida residents who will be affected by the new ban.
“Florida is a really important state for Southern abortion access, and it has been a state that has experienced a surge in travelers from Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana who are traveling out of those states, avoiding near total or six-week bans to facilities,” Myers said.
Of the 84,000 abortions provided in Florida last year, about 7,700 were for people who live out of state. Now most of those patients will travel farther for access, too.
The total number of abortions in the country has been roughly stable since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended a nationwide right to abortion in 2022. But the details have changed.
Far more are provided by pills rather than surgery, with a major increase in prescriptions through telehealth — including to patients in states with bans from providers where laws seek to protect such prescriptions. But there could be legal tests of whether those protections are valid. And the U.S. Supreme Court is already considering an effort to roll back approvals for one of the two drugs usually used in combination for medication abortion.
Planned Parenthood centers in Florida have been preparing for the stricter ban to take effect. Laura Goodhue, executive director of the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, said they’ve implemented rapid blood tests to determine pregnancy earlier, increased education and contraception programs, and ramped up efforts to help people travel elsewhere for abortion.
“We’re doing what we can,” she said. “But we’ve as we’ve seen in other states, it’s still going to have a devastating impact on our public health system.”
Since states began enforcing bans after the 2022 ruling, the Bristol clinic has added appointment slots in afternoons, Saturdays and some Sundays — and has adjusted to the idea that patients could be late because of traffic jams as far away as Atlanta.
“In order for them to come to Virginia, there’s a lot of planning involved,” Ogorek said. “It’s not just taking a few hours off of work and driving 20 minutes”
