--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, December 10th. I'm Shamita Basu. And I'm Duarte Giraldino. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: 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: Today, an advisory group decides whether to recommend that the FDA grant emergency authorization to Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine in the United States. That means the first person in the U.S. could get the shot in the next few days.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You have to give the scientists who got us to this point an extraordinary amount of respect. In just 11 months, they delivered what's widely considered a game-changing vaccine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's because, as the Washington Post explains, though unpopular and often disregarded, this research has been going on in the background for years. Right. The vaccine wasn't developed in a single eureka moment. This took decades of smaller, quieter discoveries.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Mini Eurekas spread across many teams of scientists. And for years, they've been pursuing two ideas. One, that messenger RNA or mRNA could be a major key to developing vaccines. And two, that teaching the immune system to recognize coronavirus spike proteins would be an important step in vaccine development.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But it took a long time for these ideas to gain traction in the wider scientific community. These scientists couldn't secure funding, journals wouldn't publish their research until there was more interest in the field in 2017.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But their early dedication to the work turned out to be crucial. It kick-started the search for a vaccine this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Shamita, I want to point out, mRNA vaccines don't work the same way as conventional vaccines. Instead of injecting dead or distinctive bits of a virus into your arm in order to train your immune system, mRNA gives your cells instructions.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And then those cells produce a harmless piece of the coronavirus. Now, mRNA is almost too fragile to work with. So these scientists found ways to protect mRNA to make it durable enough to work with these vaccines.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's actually part of the reason this type of vaccine needs to be kept in such cold temperatures.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Barney Graham is one of the scientists who worked on the vaccine. And when he learned back in November that the Pfizer vaccine not only worked but was more than 90% effective...
--:-- Shamita Basu: That when it hit him After years of research 65 million infections and more than one and a half million COVID-19 deaths around the world, his team's genetic technology was the key to the vaccine.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He told the Post he was so stunned, so bowled over by emotions, he just let it all go and cried.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay, take a guess. Which U.S. state has the largest medical marijuana market per capita?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: No, it's not California. It's not Colorado. It's Oklahoma, a very red state with a history of tough laws for drug offenses.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oklahoma, it seems, has created the only free market weed industry in the country. And Politico magazine explains how it happened.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Oklahomans voted to legalize medical marijuana in 2018. It's now the 30th state where, with permission, you can legally roll up.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But unlike most other states, Oklahoma doesn't limit the number of business licenses it issues, and they're fairly cheap to get.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That combination makes the state's cannabis industry more accessible. And did you know, right now, Oklahoma has more than 9,000 licensed medical marijuana businesses, including nearly 2,000 dispensaries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For context, Colorado, which has almost twice as many residents as Oklahoma, only has about half as many dispensaries.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And even though marijuana still isn't for sale recreationally, the state imposes almost no restrictions on residents who want to get a medical card.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Politico reports one out of every 10 Oklahomans have one of these cards.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: As Politico points out, you just wouldn't expect this from a conservative place like Oklahoma. This state puts more people behind bars per capita than almost any other state, and in many cases for nonviolent drug offenses.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The ACLU crunched FBI data from 2018 and found that black people in Oklahoma were more than four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white residents.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Politico explains over the past few years it became clear that some of these state laws were out of step with public opinion In 2016 voters passed a ballot measure making drug possession a misdemeanor instead of a felony.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And with the opioid crisis many people in the state were open to alternative approaches to managing pain.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And what a difference time has made. Two years after voters legalized medical marijuana, pot is boosting the state's economy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Since 2018, the sale of weed and its related products surpassed $1 billion. And so far this year, the industry contributed more than $105 million to the state's tax revenue.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And some advocates are now arguing for full legalization, expanding to include recreational marijuana too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At least one Republican state lawmaker is on board with this. He says Oklahomans have proven that they'll use weed no matter what, so the goal should be to eliminate the illegal market.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Plus, it's estimated that recreational sales could bring in another $200 to $300 million annually.
--:-- Shamita Basu: With all those COVID stay-at-home orders, people are playing more video games than ever. Sales skyrocketed.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So it's logical to think this is a great year for major video game studios to release their next big blockbuster. Except, so far, it hasn't happened.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal reports, like so many parts of the economy, the gaming industry has seen a major slowdown in new releases.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That is, until today. Cyberpunk 2077 is being released.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Test of a person's true value. Death. Facing, staring it down. Johnny! I got you.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's Keanu Reeves playing Johnny Silverhand.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If it's been a minute since you played video games, today's games have plot lines that are way more advanced and even some big name actors.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Wall Street Journal describes Reeves' character as a futuristic outlaw trying to find a digital artifact that could unlock the secret to immortality.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Making just one of these video games is a huge undertaking Cyberpunk 2077 has an $1 million budget.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Production began way back in 2012 and was slated for release this April But of course then came the coronavirus Production got delayed by almost seven months.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Cyberpunk 2077 is going to wind up being the only major video game release this holiday season Major video game studios including Activision and Electronic Arts had to postpone their scheduled releases.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Like so many of us, developers of these games are also working remotely, and that's putting a strain on production.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The maker of Cyberpunk 2077 is CD Projekt, and one of the founders tells the journal, just trying to do minor things like changing where a character stands in a scene. That can now take hours instead of minutes because developers are transferring these huge files back and forth to one another.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But it looks like Cyberpunk 2077's sprint to get out before the holidays is going to pay off. At 60 bucks a pop, industry watchers expect people to buy between 18 and 25 million copies of this game in the first month alone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hanukkah begins tonight, and the White House parties were yesterday.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: President Trump, by the way, is only the third U.S. president to host official White House Hanukkah events.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Jonathan DeSarna is a historian of American Jewish life, and he writes in The Washington Post that for most of American history, the White House only recognized Christmas.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The first Christmas party at the White House was in the year 1800. It was thrown by President John Adams and First Lady Abigail Adams.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A U.S. president didn't officially recognize Hanukkah until 1979. That's when Jimmy Carter lit the National Menorah in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And in his annual Christmas message, he acknowledged not everyone in the United States celebrates the Christian holiday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It wasn't until 1989 that Hanukkah first made its way into the White House under President George H.W. Bush. He displayed a menorah.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And his son, President George W. Bush, was the first president to host an official White House Hanukkah party in 2001, which has been a tradition ever since then, carried out by Presidents Obama and Trump.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more on the Apple News app. Plus, keep listening to hear narrated articles from our News Plus partners.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Goodbye for now.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Goodbye.
