Sentinel minutes for week #35/2024
Green-ish; monkeypox continues spreading, and although there is a coordinated global response, its procurement processes are slow.
Biological risks
Nearly 4,000 new monkeypox cases were reported in the past week alone. While not all of these cases were clade Ib, we are seeing the most growth in the DRC and Burundi, where human-to-human transmission of clade Ib is driving case growth. Cases are exploding in crowded border towns where many people lack access to necessities. One infectious disease specialist in Nigeria estimates that fewer than 40% of cases are being tested and are laboratory confirmed in the DRC.
Mpox cases in Africa are increasing superlinearly, and maybe exponentially; forecasters disagree or find it hard to tell, partly because data sources are noisy and lagging.
Bringing this outbreak under control will require a large, coordinated, international effort. In its absence, our forecasting team thinks clade Ib mpox cases will likely surge within Africa and spill over into other countries. Most of our team, but not all, think that cases will likely be controlled in wealthier countries, but it is hard to see how they will be contained in less wealthy countries.
The WHO has released a plan to stop the spread; the world needs to step up and support this plan financially and logistically as soon as possible. UNICEF, the WHO and other organizations have started a procurement process to provision more vaccines, but this process seems somewhat slow: “WHO is reviewing information submitted by manufacturers on Aug. 23, and expects to complete a review for an emergency use listing by mid-September.”
The first mpox vaccines are due to arrive in the DRC in the coming days but are approved only for adults, even though a large fraction of cases—and deaths—are in children. A Japanese mpox vaccine has been approved for use in children in Japan, and Japan plans to donate 2-3 million doses of the vaccine to the DRC, out of a total of 3 to 4 million doses pledged.
Deutsche Welle gives an overview on the different available vaccines:
Other biological risks
H5N1 bird flu continues to spread in dairy cattle in the US and to pose a pandemic risk. It has most recently been detected in a dairy herd in New Mexico and is suspected to have hit 3 dairy herds in California.
The number of people with a disability in the US has risen dramatically, by nearly 2 million people, since 2019, and this increase includes nearly a million people newly suffering from a cognitive disability. These increases are likely caused by Covid and are indicators of Covid's long-term risks to human health.
A man in New Hampshire in the US died of Eastern equine encephalitis.
The Guardian reports on a lung cancer vaccine with promising early trials.
Artificial Intelligence
The US AI Safety Institute has signed agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic on pre-deployment testing of their models.
OpenAI is reportedly reconsidering its corporate structure amid latest funding talks. “There has not yet been a final decision on whether to change OpenAI’s structure, but one option under consideration would be removing an existing cap on profits for investors in the for-profit subsidiary.” Nvidia has discussed joining the latest funding round.
The Information reports on OpenAI’s Project Strawberry, a method to improve model performance at a greater inference cost—see also a LessWrong summary.
Anthropic offered cautious support for California's AI safety bill following changes, whereas OpenAI opposed it. Elon Musk supported the bill, but Nancy Pelosi opposed it. The Bill passed the California legislature, but did not get a veto-proof majority, meaning that California Governor Gavin Newsom has to decide whether to sign or veto it, with a baserate for a veto being around 30%, and Manifold Markets sitting at 50/50. Top academic researchers, including AI godfathers Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton signed a letter in support of the bill.
OpenAI whistleblower Daniel Kokotajlo tells Fortune Magazine that nearly half of the AI safety researchers at OpenAI have left the company in recent months, including the previously unreported departures of Jan Hendrik Kirchner, Collin Burns, Jeffrey Wu, Jonathan Uesato, Steven Bills, Yuri Burda, and Todor Markov. Kokotajlo characterizes OpenAI’s recent behavior as a “betrayal of the plan”.
Biosecurity experts warned in a paper that AI could help engineer new pandemic-capable pathogens, and asked national governments to pass legislation and set rules to mitigate this risk.
Geopolitics
Russia-Ukraine
Belarus has been amassing forces on the border with Ukraine. It is not clear whether this is leading up to the opening of another front on the war on Ukraine.
Ukraine's President Zelensky dismissed its Air Force Commander after an F-16 fighter jet crashed, resulting in the death of one of the country's top pilots.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy announces that Poland will cooperate with Ukraine to return "Ukrainians who violated the law", traitors, and collaborators who illegally crossed the Poland–Ukraine border in order to evade conscription in the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announces that Ukraine has successfully tested a domestically-produced ballistic missile for the first time.
Ukraine banned the Russian Orthodox church.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces says Russia has lost 613,590 troops since Feb. 24, 2022
China
A Council on Foreign Relations article argues that Taiwan's new defense budget is too small and that this will cause its defenses to fall farther behind China's.
Taiwan's military assesses that China does not have the ability to launch a full-scale invasion of the island.
De-escalation between India and China over their Himalayan border dispute appears to continue.
China promises tighter control on precursors to fentanyl.
Middle-East
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said that recent airstrikes on Hezbollah's rocket sites are 'not the end of the story', but forecasters thought a ground invasion of Lebanon by the end of the year was now much less likely; for instance Polymarket is at 13% by November. Hezbollah, for its part, doesn't seem to want the situation to escalate, with its leader Nasrallah saying that its attack 'is over' and that its response to Israel's killing of commander Fuad Shukr was 'sufficient'.
Israel's military and Palestinian militant group Hamas have agreed to three separate, zoned three-day pauses in fighting in Gaza to allow for the first round of vaccination of 640,000 children against polio, a senior WHO official said.
Israeli forces assassinate Hamas commander in Jenin. Wissam Hazem was assassinated in the West Bank village of Al-Zababdeh, according to confirmation from the Israeli military. Hazem and two other people were killed after an Israeli drone attack struck the car he was riding in.
Israeli forces withdraw from parts of Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah in Gaza after mission completion.
The US targets IS in Iraq, killing 15.
The Pentagon reports that the MT Sounion appears to be leaking its 150,000 ton supply of oil into the Red Sea, and is still on fire since Houthi attacks on August 22. Efforts to salvage the tanker have been repelled by Houthi threats.
The Benghazi-based Libyan Government of National Stability says that it is suspending production at all oil fields and oil terminals that it controls until further notice amid a dispute with the central bank in Tripoli.
Other geopolitics
Brazil blocks Twitter after they ignore court orders relating to alleged misinformation about the 2023 Brazilian Congress attack on the platform. Twitter posted the reasoning for their noncompliance—particularly around their refusal to ban a Brazilian senator—on the platform.
Egypt is sending 10,000 troops to Somalia.
Over 1,000 were killed during anti-government protests in Bangladesh, says the new regime. Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz vows to rid Balochistan of terrorism "at all costs".
An Al Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for a devastating attack in Burkina Faso that resulted in nearly 300 deaths. The group stated that they targeted militia members linked to the army, while Burkina Faso authorities claimed that victims were civilians
Over 55,910 have been killed in Nigeria in 4 years with minimal security interventions, reports the Observatory of Religious Freedom in Africa (ORFA).
Photos have arised from a 2005 massacre of 24 people in Iraq by the US military.
Climate
Unexpectedly large amounts of rain are expected in the Sahara Desert.
Drought in Southern Africa is leaving 70 million people without enough food and water.
A study explores how IPCC estimates about how much the earth might warm could be too low. "Doubling the atmospheric CO2 levels could raise Earth’s average temperature by 7 to 14 degrees Celsius (13 to 25.2 degrees Fahrenheit), according to sediment analysis from the Pacific Ocean near California conducted by researchers from NIOZ and the Universities of Utrecht and Bristol. The results were recently published in the journal Nature Communications."
Exxon-Mobil forecasts that oil demand in 2050 will be the same as it is today - which means that they don't think Net Zero will be achieved by 2050.
The numbers of heat-related deaths in the US have been increasing over the past decade.
Particulate pollution in India has reduced life expectancy by an estimated 2.3 years.
More than 100 tons of dead fish have been collected in and around the port of Volos, central Greece, following a mass die-off linked to extreme climate fluctuations.
Cybersecurity
Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport, reported that, "One of the largest international freight forwarders in the United States, JAS Forwarding, has been taken out by a cyberattack this evening. The last time this happened to a major US forwarder, Expeditors International of Washington, Putin invaded Ukraine 3 days later."
An overseas swatting scheme made hundreds of fake bomb threats and fake ransom demands in the US.
North Korea exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Chrome browser engine to try to steal cryptocurrency, in one of its latest attempts to steal currency to finance the regime.