--:-- Duarte Giralino: Good morning. It's Tuesday, December 22nd. I'm Duarte Giralino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Congress passed a massive bill yesterday, $2.3 trillion in total to fund the government, $900 billion in pandemic relief, and all sorts of interesting tax cuts. It came in at more than 5,000 pages. Aids were using dollies to wheel in copies of the bill. NBC News did the math, and they say that lawmakers would have had to have read, Shemitah, 560 pages an hour just to finish by midnight. And this thing is so dense, each copy weighs about 50 pounds. and lawmakers only got the final draft hours before they had to vote.
--:-- Duarte Giralino: Yeah, it's got a real Frankenstein of a name, too. It's called the House Amendment to the Senate Amendment to H.R. 133. Yesterday on the show, we talked about the big ticket items in the pandemic relief part of the bill, stimulus checks, an extension of unemployment benefits, funding for small businesses, transportation and education. But there is a lot more buried deep in those 5,500 or so pages.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some of the provisions this time include things like tax breaks for owners of racehorses and a change to allow corporations to deduct 100 percent of business meals. That's the so-called three martini lunch. There's also something in the bill that establishes two new Smithsonian museums, one for women's history and one on American Latinos. There's another provision in there that would make illegal streaming of things like movies or music a felony offense.
--:-- Duarte Giralino: On the other hand, this bill also repealed a few things that were criminal offenses, like people who misuse the image of Smokey the Bear will no longer face jail time. It's not uncommon for lots of little things to get tucked into big spending bills. It's the way Washington works. But given the size and speed at which all this came together, a lot of lawmakers in both parties are frustrated that both they and the American public, were given so little time to review it before lawmakers had to cast their vote.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you watched videos or saw images of the very first person who got vaccinated in the United States for COVID you might remember it was a nurse in New York. Her name is Sandra Lindsay. She's Black. The doctor who administered her vaccine is another Black woman, Dr. Michelle Chester. Writing for The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb says the significance of that moment and the race of these two women cannot be overstated.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: If the U.S. is going to get a hold on this virus, it's going to need to convince black Americans to get vaccinated. But three key facts make this challenging. Black people are still getting infected and dying at higher rates. They make up a disproportionate share of the essential workforce, which means on average, they come into contact with more people. and Black Americans have a history of being medically mistreated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As Cobb writes, just one example of that, the Tuskegee experiment that ran from the 1930s to the 1970s. Nearly 400 Black men with syphilis were told they were being treated by doctors, when instead they were being studied to track the free progression of the disease. Or the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancerous cells were harvested and sold for research without her knowledge or consent.
--:-- Jelani Cobb: The U.S. medical system is still letting black people down. A report this year from the National Academy of Medicine found people of color tend to get poorer quality health care than white patients, regardless of income or insurance coverage. And now some groups are specifically looking to weaponize black trauma.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Vice News reports on a group known for spreading vaccine misinformation. It recently held a conference in Atlanta to try to convince black people to be skeptical of the vaccine. Right. So what is the plan to combat distrust in the Black community?
--:-- Jelani Cobb: ProPublica took a close look at the vaccine distribution plans in the states that have the highest number of Black residents in the country. And it found many of them have no specific strategy laid out for reaching Black communities. The ones that do are doing things like holding virtual town halls for communities of color or hosting webinars for Black religious leaders.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Cobb writes, Black churches are taking an active role, trying to spread the message that vaccines are safe. Last week, the Reverend Matthew Watley, a senior pastor at a church in Maryland moderated an online forum What we clear about is that there are huge amounts of misinformation And misinformation plus fear creates a deadly cocktail
--:-- Jelani Cobb: One public health expert told ProPublica, Dr. Fauci is great and all, but every state needs to find their own public health official who represents the diversity in their own population.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A little more than a year ago, you probably hadn't even heard of the term COVID-19. Now scientists are on their way to stopping this virus from wreaking havoc on all of our lives. Ed Young wrote a multi-chapter cover story for The Atlantic about this, and he's been one of the most insightful and prolific reporters on COVID stories.
--:-- Ed Young: In his most recent piece, he lays out this year's scientific progress and what it means for the future. First, Yang puts into perspective just how much scientific attention was devoted to COVID-19 this year. He says the biomedical library PubMed has more than 74,000 COVID-related papers. That's more than twice the number of papers for diseases that have been around for centuries, like polio and the measles.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to Yang, no other disease in history has received so much attention in such a short amount of time. And all of this attention means we have made serious leaps. The U.S. and the U.K. approved a vaccine in record time. And scientists hope this suggests future vaccines could be produced even more efficiently through these speedy new pipelines.
--:-- Ed Young: Young says COVID-19 also exposed how much of a disconnect there is between science and social order. When the pandemic first started, many political and public health leaders were calling it the great equalizer, only to realize that, of course, it wasn't equal at all. This disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Young argues more work needs to be done to examine how poverty, privilege and living conditions impact health outcomes. He also points out, for all the scientific advancements this moment has brought, and there are many, there were also some drawbacks. All the energy and resources that went into COVID-19 means other studies like on climate change and other infectious diseases, they all got put on the back burner.
--:-- Ed Young: It also exposed an overemphasis on so silver bullet medical breakthroughs rather than on mask wearing and social distancing Two of the things we know today are our best tools to combat this virus But as you sit down and think back on this past year it incredible to realize how much we've all learned about vaccines, diseases, contagion, and public health. And that is Young's point. This year, for all of its woes, has brought us leaps and bounds forward when it comes to scientific knowledge.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, Duarte, when I was growing up, we didn't celebrate Christmas in my family, but we did decorate a tree. I don't know. My mom just liked the look of it. She really loves string lights. And I'm sure that we're not the only non-Christian household that did this.
--:-- Duarte Giralino: One historian told National Geographic the Christmas tree was intended to be religiously neutral, and it spread throughout Europe and eventually around the world.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I grew up Christian and we always had these trees, but they were always a little Charlie Brownish. So anytime someone sings fa-la-la-la-la, I'm thinking timber. National Geographic looks at all the variations on the Christmas tree at different points in history.
--:-- Duarte Giralino: For example, in Greece, people used to decorate Christmas boats, not trees. This was to honor St. Nicholas, who, among other things, was also considered the patron saint of sailors. In Catalonia, there is a tradition of painting a hollow log with a bright red and white face, and they call it Tio de Nadal. And children are supposed to take care of the log, wrap it in a blanket, leave it food and water at night.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then on Christmas Day, you're supposed to beat it with a stick and presents fall out of its butt. I'm not kidding. This is exactly how it's supposed to go. There's even a song for it. And centuries ago in Sweden, people would decorate their trees with cookies and other sweets for kids. Then on what was known as St. Knut's Day, 20 days after Christmas, kids would raid the tree for all the goodies.
--:-- Duarte Giralino: And then the tree would be ceremoniously tossed out the door or thrown into the fireplace. You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And tomorrow will be our final show of the year. so we'll be bringing you some of our favorite good news stories from 2020. Yeah, we can't wait to share some of this year's highlights.
