Day: November 20, 2021

This was supposed to be the Christmas in Europe where family and friends could once again embrace holiday festivities and one another. Instead, the continent is the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic as cases soar to record levels in many countries.

With infections spiking again despite nearly two years of restrictions, the health crisis increasingly is pitting citizen against citizen — the vaccinated against the unvaccinated.

Governments desperate to shield overburdened health care systems are imposing rules that limit choices for the unvaccinated in the hope that doing so will drive up rates of vaccinations.

Austria on Friday went a step further, making vaccinations mandatory as of Feb. 1.

“For a long time, maybe too long, I and others thought that it must be possible to convince people in Austria, to convince them to get vaccinated voluntarily,” Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said.

He called the move “our only way to break out of this vicious cycle of viral waves and lockdown discussions for good.”

While Austria so far stands alone in the European Union in making vaccinations mandatory, more and more governments are clamping down.

Starting Monday, Slovakia is banning people who haven’t been vaccinated from all nonessential stores and shopping malls. They also will not be allowed to attend any public event or gathering and will be required to test twice a week just to go to work.

“A merry Christmas does not mean a Christmas without COVID-19,” warned Prime Minister Eduard Heger. “For that to happen, Slovakia would need to have a completely different vaccination rate.”

He called the measures “a lockdown for the unvaccinated.”

Slovakia, where just 45.3% of the 5.5 million population is fully vaccinated, reported a record 8,342 new virus cases Tuesday.

It is not only nations of central and eastern Europe that are suffering anew. Wealthy nations in the west also are being hit hard and imposing restrictions on their populations once again.

“It is really, absolutely, time to take action,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday. With a vaccination rate of 67.5%, her nation is now considering mandatory vaccinations for many health professionals.

Greece, too, is targeting the unvaccinated. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced a battery of new restrictions late Thursday for the unvaccinated, keeping them out of venues including bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums and gyms, even if they have tested negative.

“It is an immediate act of protection and, of course, an indirect urge to be vaccinated,” Mitsotakis said.

The restrictions enrage Clare Daly, an Irish EU legislator who is a member of the European parliament’s civil liberties and justice committee. She argues that nations are trampling individual rights.

“In a whole number of cases, member states are excluding people from their ability to go to work,” Daly said, calling Austria’s restrictions on the unvaccinated that preceded its decision Friday to impose a full lockdown “a frightening scenario.”

Even in Ireland, where 75.9% of the population is fully vaccinated, she feels a backlash against holdouts.

“There’s almost a sort of hate speech being whipped up against the unvaccinated,” she said.

The world has had a history of mandatory vaccines in many nations for diseases such as smallpox and polio. Yet despite a global COVID-19 death toll exceeding 5 million, despite overwhelming medical evidence that vaccines highly protect against death or serious illness from COVID-19 and slow the pandemic’s spread, opposition to vaccinations remains stubbornly strong among parts of the population.

Some 10,000 people, chanting “freedom, freedom,” gathered in Prague this week to protest Czech government restrictions imposed on the unvaccinated.

“No single individual freedom is absolute,” countered professor Paul De Grauwe of the London School of Economics. “The freedom not to be vaccinated needs to be limited to guarantee the freedom of others to enjoy good health,” he wrote for the liberal think tank Liberales.

That principle is now turning friends away from each other and splitting families across European nations.

Birgitte Schoenmakers, a general practitioner and professor at Leuven University, sees it on an almost daily basis.

“It has turned into a battle between the people,” she said.

She sees political conflicts whipped up by people willfully spreading conspiracy theories, but also intensely human stories. One of her patients has been locked out of the home of her parents because she dreads being vaccinated.

Schoemakers said that while authorities had long baulked at the idea of mandatory vaccinations, the highly infectious delta variant is changing minds.

“To make a U-turn on this is incredibly difficult,” she said.

Spiking infections and measures to rein them in are combining to usher in a second straight grim holiday season in Europe.

Leuven has already canceled its Christmas market, while in nearby Brussels a 60-foot Christmas tree was placed in the center of the city’s stunning Grand Place on Thursday but a decision on whether the Belgian capital’s festive market can go ahead will depend on the development of the virus surge.

Paul Vierendeels, who donated the tree, hopes for a return to a semblance of a traditional Christmas.

“We are glad to see they are making the effort to put up the tree, decorate it. It is a start,” he said. “After almost two difficult years, I think it is a good thing that some things, more normal in life, are taking place again.” 

 
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A chemical that babies give off from their heads calms men but makes women more aggressive, according to new research in the journal Science Advances.

It could be a chemical defense system we inherited from our animal ancestors, the authors speculate, making women more likely to defend their babies and men less likely to kill them.

Odors affect behavior in the animal world in plenty of ways. A rabbit mom will attack her pups if they smell like another female rabbit. Mice whose sense of smell is damaged don’t attack other mice intruding on their territory.

We humans like to think we are above all that. But scientists are increasingly finding that odors affect us more than we think.

In the latest study, scientists tested how people responded to a chemical called hexadecanal, or HEX.

HEX is found in body odor and breath. It’s also found in feces, and raising babies is “the one social setting where humans have extensive exposure” to poo, the authors note. They also discovered that HEX is the most abundant of the many chemicals babies’ heads give off.

The study tested people’s responses to HEX using rigged games designed to aggravate the player. In one game, when the aggravated player is allowed to win, he or she gets to blast the opponent with a loud noise. The louder the noise, the higher the scientists rated the player’s aggression level.

When players sniffed HEX before playing, women’s blasts were louder and men’s were quieter. The effect was somewhat subtle. On a six-point scale, the differences were, on average, roughly between half a point and less than a point in either direction.

The first time he saw the results, they “made absolutely no sense to me,” co-author Noam Sobel, head of the neurobiology department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, said in an interview. “I personally did not see any possible ecological reason for a molecule to increase aggression in women and decrease it in men.”

‘Eureka moment’

But lead author Eva Mishor, who was studying signals of aggression for her doctorate at the Weizmann Institute, noted that in animals, female aggression is usually aimed at defending their young, while male aggression is often directed at the offspring themselves.

“This was totally 100% Eva’s eureka moment,” Sobel said. “If you’re an offspring, you have a vested interest in emitting a molecule that will make women more aggressive and men less aggressive.”

“I said, ‘OK, it’s plausible,’ ” he added. ” ‘But I want to see it again.’ ”

So they did another experiment, this time testing subjects’ reactions while in a brain scanner.

The results were the same. And they saw that HEX activated a part of the brain involved in judging social interactions. This region seemed to turn connections to brain regions that control aggression up or down, depending on the subject’s gender.

There are still plenty of questions to answer. The study did not test babies directly. And the authors noted that they didn’t know if the amount of HEX their subjects smelled was the same as what they would get from sniffing babies’ heads.

“In the beginning, I found it a little bit far-fetched,” said neuroscientist Jessica Freiherr at Friedrich-Alexander University, who was not involved with the research. But “it makes sense,” she said in an interview.

Smelling sweat from angry people made others anxious, according to research by Freiherr and her colleagues. Other studies have found that subjects identified fear in faces faster when they smelled sweat collected from people who were afraid. And women’s tears lowered testosterone and sexual arousal in men, another study from Sobel’s lab found.

“We still are those animals,” Freiherr said. “Maybe not having our nose on the floor all the time, but we can still sniff out those signals.”
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