SUPERSTAR KOA OKUI. THIS WILL BE THE LAST PLAY BEFORE THE TWO MINUTE TIMEOUT THROWN DOWNFIELD. IT’S PICKED OFF AND IT’S. KOHAKU AGAIN. HIS THIRD OF THE SEASON AND HIS FIFTH TURNOVER. HE’S RESPONSIBLE FOR IN 2025. HE WORKED IN THE DARK FOR A LOT OF YEARS AND NOW YOU KNOW HIS IT’S COMING TO LIGHT. IT’S BEEN A BREAKOUT YEAR FOR SACRAMENTO STATE’S JUNIOR SAFETY KOA OKUI. IN ORDER TO EXCEED OR MAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL, I GOT TO PUT IN MORE THAN WHATEVER IT IS LIKE, I KNOW, LIKE WE ALL A TEAM, BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY, WE COMPETING, YOU KNOW? AND WITH THAT, I’M COMPETING WITH THE WHOLE COUNTRY. SO I’M TRYING TO MAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL. THE FORMER WALK ON FROM HAWAII HAS CERTAINLY LEVELED UP HIS GAME WITH FIVE TAKEAWAYS IN FOUR GAMES, INCLUDING A FORCED FUMBLE, A FUMBLE RECOVERY AND THREE INTERCEPTIONS. READING THE FIELD WATCHING FILM, PUTTING IN WORK TO SEE WHAT THE OFFENSE IS DOING. I THINK THAT REALLY SLOWED DOWN THE GAME FOR ME, JUST READING THE QUARTERBACKS, READING THE ROUTES, SEEING THE CONCEPTS WE BROUGHT IN A LOT OF PLAYERS HERE THAT WERE FOUR STARS. FIVE STARS STARTED AT THIS SCHOOL AND HE BEAT THEM ALL OUT AND HE BEAT THEM EVERY DAY IN WORKOUTS, AND HE BEAT THEM IN THE FILM ROOM. WORK ETHIC IS STILL A TALENT, AND WHILE HIS SKILLS STAND OUT ON THE FIELD, HIS SOFT SPOKEN VOICE OFF THE FIELD IS BEING PUT TO THE TEST THIS SEASON AS HE’S BEEN NAMED A CAPTAIN. YOU KNOW, I’M NOT REALLY A GUY WITH, LIKE, THE VOICE, IF THAT MAKES SENSE. YOU KNOW, I’M MORE OF LIKE LEAD BY EXAMPLE. BUT THESE COACHES HAVE TRIED TO PUSH ME MORE TO USE MY VOICE AND STUFF, AND I’VE JUST BEEN, YOU KNOW, REPORTING TO THE JOB. I GUESS THAT’S MY GUY. I AIN’T GONNA LIE. HE A BALL HAWK. HE DEFINITELY. HE WORK HARD. THAT’S ONE THING I CAN SAY. I FEEL LIKE HE WORK HARDER THAN ANYBODY I EVER SAW. OF COURSE HE’S MY BROTHER FOR LIFE. YOU SEE THIS CORE? YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS IN SACRAMENTO MICHELLE DAPPER KCRA 3 NEWS KOA AND THE HORNETS HOST CAL POLY THIS WEEKEND WITH HOPES
Sacramento State’s Koa Akui shines on and off the football field
Sacramento State junior safety Koa Akui is having a breakout year, emerging from years of hard work to become a standout football player and team captain.”In order to exceed or make it to the next level, I got to put in more than whatever it is,” Akui said. “I know we’re all a team, but at the end of the day, we compete, you know? And with that, I’m familiar with the whole country, so I’m trying to make it to the next level.”The former walk-on from Hawaii has significantly elevated his game, recording five takeaways in four games, including a forced fumble, a fumble recovery, and three interceptions. His dedication to reading the field, watching film, and understanding offensive strategies has helped slow down the game for him. “Reading the field, watching film, putting in like work to see what the offense is doing. And I think that really slowed down the game for me, just reading the quarterbacks, reading the routes, seeing the concepts,” Akui said.Sacramento State has brought in many highly rated players, but Akui has consistently outperformed them in workouts and the film room. “We brought in a lot of players here that were four stars, five stars, started at this school, and he beat them all out. And he beat them every day in workouts, and he beat them in the film room. Work ethic is still a talent,” head coach Brennan Marion said.While Akui’s skills are evident on the field, his leadership is being tested off the field as he takes on the role of team captain. “I’m not really a guy with, like, the voice, if that makes sense. You know, I’m more of, like, lead by example. But these coaches have tried to push me more to use my voice and stuff, and I’ve just been, you know, reporting to the job,” Akui said.His teammate expressed admiration for Akui’s work ethic and dedication. “I feel like he work harder than anybody I ever saw,” Rodney Hammond Jr. said. “That’s my brother for life.”See more coverage of top California stories here | Download our app | Subscribe to our morning newsletter | Find us on YouTube here and subscribe to our channel
Sacramento State junior safety Koa Akui is having a breakout year, emerging from years of hard work to become a standout football player and team captain.
“In order to exceed or make it to the next level, I got to put in more than whatever it is,” Akui said. “I know we’re all a team, but at the end of the day, we compete, you know? And with that, I’m familiar with the whole country, so I’m trying to make it to the next level.”
The former walk-on from Hawaii has significantly elevated his game, recording five takeaways in four games, including a forced fumble, a fumble recovery, and three interceptions.
His dedication to reading the field, watching film, and understanding offensive strategies has helped slow down the game for him.
“Reading the field, watching film, putting in like work to see what the offense is doing. And I think that really slowed down the game for me, just reading the quarterbacks, reading the routes, seeing the concepts,” Akui said.
Sacramento State has brought in many highly rated players, but Akui has consistently outperformed them in workouts and the film room.
“We brought in a lot of players here that were four stars, five stars, started at this school, and he beat them all out. And he beat them every day in workouts, and he beat them in the film room. Work ethic is still a talent,” head coach Brennan Marion said.
While Akui’s skills are evident on the field, his leadership is being tested off the field as he takes on the role of team captain.
“I’m not really a guy with, like, the voice, if that makes sense. You know, I’m more of, like, lead by example. But these coaches have tried to push me more to use my voice and stuff, and I’ve just been, you know, reporting to the job,” Akui said.
His teammate expressed admiration for Akui’s work ethic and dedication.
“I feel like he work harder than anybody I ever saw,” Rodney Hammond Jr. said. “That’s my brother for life.”
On Sunday evening, I fed a bowl of salmon, broccoli, and rice to my eight-month-old son. Or rather, I attempted to. The fish went flying; greens and grains splattered across the walls. Half an hour later, bedtime drew near, and he hadn’t eaten a thing. Exasperated, I handed him a baby-food pouch—and he inhaled every last drop of apple-raspberry-squash-carrot mush.
For harried parents like myself, baby pouches are a lifeline. These disposable plastic packets are sort of like Capri-Suns filled with blends of pureed fruits and vegetables: A screw-top cap makes for easy slurping, potentially even making supervision unnecessary. The sheer ease of baby pouches has made them hyper-popular—and not just for parents with infants who can’t yet eat table food. They are commonly fed to toddlers; even adults sometimes eat baby pouches.
But after my son slurped up all the goo and quickly went to sleep, I felt more guilty than relieved. Giving him a pouch felt like giving up, or taking a shortcut. No parent has the time or energy to make healthy, homemade food all the time, but that doesn’t stop Americans from still thinking “they need to try harder,” Susan Persky, a behavioral scientist at the NIH who has studied parental guilt, told me. That can leave parents stuck between a pouch and a hard place.
Baby pouches have practically become their own food group. These shelf-stable time-savers debuted in 2008, and now come in a staggering range of blends: Gerber sells a carrot, apple, and coriander version; another, from Sprout Organics, contains sweet potato, white bean, and cinnamon. Containing basically just fruits and veggies, pouches are generally seen as a “healthy” option for kids. A 2019 report found that the product accounts for roughly a quarter of baby-food sales. Around the same time, a report on children attending day care showed that pouches are included in more than a quarter of lunch boxes, and some kids get more than half their lunchtime nutrition from them.
But pouches should be just a “sometimes food,” Courtney Byrd-Williams, a professor at the University of Texas’s Houston School of Public Health, told me. When you stack up their drawbacks, relying on them can really start to feel dispiriting. Although pouches are generally produce-based, they tend to have less iron than fortified cereal does and more added sugars than jarred baby food. Excess sweetness may encourage kids to eat more than necessary and could promote a sweet tooth that could later contribute to diet-related chronic disease.
If consumed in excess, pouches may also get in the way of kids learning how to eat real food. Unlike jarred baby food, which tends to contain a single vegetable or several, pouches usually include fruit to mask the bitter with the sweet. “If we’re only giving them pouches,” Byrd-Williams said, “are they learning to like the vegetable taste?” And because the purees are slurped, they don’t give infants the opportunity to practice chewing, potentially delaying development. In 2019, the German Society for Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine went so far as to issue a statement against baby pouches, warning that eating them may delay eating with a spoon or fingers.
And then, the scariest scenario: Earlier this month, the CDC reported that hundreds of kids may have lead poisoning from pouches containing contaminated applesauce. Perhaps more troubling, a recent analysis by Consumer Reports found that even certain pouches on the market that weren’t implicated in the contamination scandal also contain unusually high levels of lead.
Naturally, these concerns can make parents anxious. Online, caregivers fret that their reliance on the products might leave their child malnourished. Some worry that their kid will never learn how to eat solid food or figure out how to chew. Pouches, to be clear, are hardly a terrible thing to feed your kid. They can be a reliable way to get fruits and vegetables into picky kids, offering a convenience that is unrivaled.
But pouch guilt doesn’t stem entirely from health concerns. By making parenting easier, they also are a reminder of what expectations parents aren’t meeting. I wanted to be the kind of mom who would consistently make my son home-cooked food and persevere through a tough meal, but on Sunday, I was just too exhausted. Guilt is a fact of life for many parents. Virtually anything can trigger it: going to work, staying at home, spending too much time on your phone, not buying supersoft bamboo baby clothes. If parents can have unrealistic standards about it, it’s fair game. “There’s just a lot of guilt about what parents should be doing,” Byrd-Williams said.
But feeding children is especially fraught. Parents are often told what they should feed their children—breast milk, fresh produce—but never how to do so; they’re left to figure that out on their own. About 80 percent of mothers and fathers experience guilt around feeding, Persky told me—about giving their kids sugary or ultra-processed foods or caving to requests for junk. Guilt might be an impetus for better food choices, but Persky said she has found the opposite: Parents who are made to feel guilty about the way they feed their kids end up choosing less healthy foods. “It’s hard to parent when you’re struggling with self-worth,” she said.
Pouch guilt has less to do with the products themselves and more to do with what they represent: convenience, ease, a moment of respite. Asking for a break conflicts with the core expectations of American parenthood, particularly motherhood. At every turn, parents are pressured to do more for their kids; on social media, momfluencers tout home-cooked baby food and meticulously styled birthday parties. The American mentality is that the “moral and correct way to do things is to have infinite willpower,” Persky said, and in this worldview, “shortcuts seem like an inherently bad thing.” Raising children is supposed to be about hard work and self-sacrifice—about pureeing carrots at home instead of buying them in a plastic packet. But when parents are constantly short on time, sometimes the best they can do is scrape together as much as they can, one squeeze pouch after another.
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Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner.
Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment.
That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a large notebook. It was on a flight like this, he told me, where he sketched out his 10 “truths”:
God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
“I just wrote down things that are true,” he said flatly. “It took me about 15 minutes.”
Ramaswamy doesn’t consider himself a culture warrior; he insists that he is merely speaking the truth. He presents his ideas as self-evident, eternal truths. I asked him if he believes that truths can change over time. For instance, what did he make of the fact that most white Americans used to view it as a “truth” that Black people were genetically inferior—that they weren’t fully human?
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“It is true,” I said. “That’s partly what justified slavery.”
“But it was a justification; it wasn’t a belief,” he said. “Look at emperors—Septimius Severus in Rome. He was Black. He had dark skin. They viewed dark skin as the way we view dark eyes.”
This is how a debate with Ramaswamy unfolds. He’ll engage with your question, but, when needed, he’ll expand its parameters. If that fails, he’ll pivot to thoughts on the existence of a higher power. “I don’t think that human beings ever accepted that Black people were not created equal in the eyes of God,” he said. (His favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, believed exactly that.)
Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’’s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.
Ramaswamy radiates confidence: steady eye contact, knowing nod, satisfied smile. He campaigns for up to 18 hours a day. He mostly keeps to a uniform of black pants, black T-shirt, and a black blazer. He operates in a world of declarative statements and punctuates his sentences with “right?” and “actually,” like a tech bro. He’s currently in third place in most national polls. At last month’s Turning Point USA conference, in Florida, Ramaswamy had a breakout moment when 51 percent of straw-poll respondents said he was their second choice for president. “Pretty remarkable how far he’s come in a very short amount of time,” Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, tweeted.
Last week, leaked documents designed to inform Ron DeSantis’s strategy at Wednesday’s first presidential debate portrayed Ramaswamy as the candidate to beat. The Florida governor’s super PAC advised him to “take a sledgehammer” to the 38-year-old outsider. Many potential voters will likely be intrigued when they hear Ramaswamy speak his truths onstage this Wednesday. He is living a life they can only dream about: Start a company or two, make half a billion dollars, say whatever you want. And then, naturally, run for president.
The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on his phone after a taping of the PBS political talk show Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.
A colossal American flag hangs on the outside of Ramaswamy’s spare-no-expense campaign headquarters in Columbus. The property is a former barn; the word TRUTH is plastered everywhere. One communal work area, for phone banking, is roughly the size of a basketball court. He has his choice of two production studios from which to record his never-ending stream of cable-news hits, podcast appearances, and social-media videos.
During my visit, John Schnatter—a.k.a. Papa John—flew in from Kentucky via private helicopter to speak his truth on Ramaswamy’s own nascent podcast, The Vivek Show.
Papa John told the candidate how he became very rich—how his single pizza shop grew into a chain of over 5,000 stores—then turned to a long, complicated story about his downfall. He claims that he was set up by a PR firm that goaded him into saying a racial slur during a private coaching session and that this firm is connected to Hillary Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the PR firm referred me to a recent partial summary judgment against Schnatter in the firm’s favor.) He used the words “demonic” and “satanic” to describe the American left. At one point, the conversation veered toward Russia and Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I don’t know why the Creator put me through this,” Papa John said.
All the while, Ramaswamy nodded, smiled, or, when applicable, shook his head in disbelief. This was his media-forward candidacy, distilled: a morning behind the mic inside a posh podcast setup chatting with a fellow entrepreneur about the perils of woke capitalism. When the episode aired, he’d have a cautionary tale for listeners, a potentially viral clip that would get him in front of new voters.
The night before, I watched Ramaswamy speak to a couple hundred young conservatives at the Forge Leadership Summit. He looked around the room and preached that “hardship is not a choice, but victimhood is a choice.” It’s one of his favorite lines, and a nod to his second book, Nation of Victims. The crowd that night was almost exclusively white, and Ramaswamy’s inflection was temporarily suffused with twang.
“We’re starved for purpose and meaning and identity at a time in our national history when the things that used to fill our void—faith, patriotism, hard work, family—these things have disappeared,” he said. He rattled off a list of “poisons” that have filled the void, pausing for dramatic beats between each one: “Wokeism. Transgenderism. Climatism. COVIDism. Globalism. Depression. Anxiety. Fentanyl. Suicide.” The crowd murmured.
He kept rolling. He said that Russia’s war against Ukraine is “really just a battle between two thugs on the other side of Eastern Europe.” He warned that incremental change within American institutions is impossible.
Right now, he said, we have reached a “1776 moment” in this country.
“Do we stand on the side of reform?” he asked. “Or do we stand on the side of revolution?”
When he finished, half the people in the room jumped to their feet.
Vivek Ramaswamy with his son, Karthik, before speaking at a house party and fundraiser in Hubbard, Iowa.
Ramaswamy hurried out and ducked into an SUV: He feared he’d be late for his prime-time interview on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show. During the ride, he revisited one of the more challenging audience questions. A woman had asked if, as president, he would commit to making abortion illegal at the federal level. He told her that he is “unapologetically pro-life,” but a strict constitutionalist—an originalist. He said he viewed recent state-level abortion restrictions as victories for federalism. The woman seemed unsatisfied.
Ramaswamy knew that abortion questions would keep coming up. “I do feel like I’m being bullied a little bit on this issue,” he told his aides. They ran through his options. A video? A public address? Suddenly the subject seemed fraught. “Eh, probably an abortion speech isn’t a good idea, to be honest with you,” he said.
After the Cuomo interview, we drove to Ramaswamy’s house. It’s bright and white with giant ceilings—suburban palatial. One of the family’s two nannies appeared and started putting together a spread: chili, kale, watermelon salad, tofu tacos.
Throughout his professional life, Ramaswamy has aimed to be perceived as an American traditionalist who is simultaneously ahead of the curve. He is the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. As a high-school student at St. Xavier, a Jesuit prep school in Cincinnati, he quickly got up to speed on all things Bible. On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes spirituality, and his message has the feel of old-school Christianity.
Growing up, he loved hip-hop, especially Eminem, and his own performances under his alter-ego “Da Vek” as a Harvard student landed him in The Crimson. He still occasionally leans into it. The day we met, he had just freestyled on Fox News. Earlier this month, he grabbed the mic and did an Eminem impression at the Iowa State Fair.
Though now running as a Republican, he long identified as a libertarian. He cast his first vote, when he was a 19-year-old, in the 2004 election, supporting the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. (He sat out every subsequent presidential election until 2020, when he voted for Trump.)
Ramaswamy told me a story about how in eighth grade, he was pushed down a flight of stairs at his public school. Though he underwent hip surgery afterward, he was careful not to portray himself as a victim. Instead, he described the event as the catalyst for his arrival at St. Xavier.
I asked him about coming of age in the post-9/11 world, when many ignorant Americans assumed that anyone with brown skin might be a terrorist. He told me about the experience of being singled out and questioned while flying to Israel—that unique sensation of being the last passenger permitted to board. “I didn’t chafe at that, though, because, honestly, in some ways it was data-driven,” he said. I asked if he considered the action itself to be racist. “No, I think racism has to involve some level of animus, actually,” he said. “I have experienced racism, to be clear. But that’s not—I don’t think that entails animus. So it doesn’t qualify as racism to me.”
He told me he doesn’t believe his race will negatively affect his electability in 2024. He said that among most GOP voters, the No. 1 political problem is “not, like, Arabs right now.” He spoke of what he saw as other underlying American anxieties, such as “the feeling of being victimized right here at home,” he said. “Forces that are different than Mohamed Atta,” he added, alluding to one of the 9/11 hijackers.
The entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, which featured 13 Republican presidential hopefuls including former President Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy’s wife, Apoorva, was leaning on the kitchen island, listening to our conversation. After her husband slipped away to hop on a Zoom call with “a bunch of people from Silicon Valley,” she joined me at the table. She was fighting a cold but nonetheless happy to make time for a stranger in her home at nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight. Besides, she said, she wanted to wait up for Vivek when he was done for the day.
The couple met at a house party in 2011, when they were both graduate students at Yale. They struck up conversation, realizing they were neighbors. Apoorva was following in her father’s footsteps, studying medicine, while Vivek was pursuing a law degree after a few years working in finance in New York. “He just seemed awesome, like someone who was interesting and someone who was full of life,” she said. “I was pretty sure pretty early on that I was going to probably end up marrying him.”
Apoorva, like her future husband, grew up a practicing Hindu. The couple is now raising their two toddlers, Karthik and Arjun, in the faith. Apoorva’s parents also came to the United States from India. “I think, as a child of immigrants, we defaulted toward being Democrats insofar as we thought about it at all, which was honestly not very much,” she said. In recent years, she told me, her mom and dad had become Trump supporters. “They chose this country—they love this country more than any country in the world, and they believe in it,” she said. “And it was cool” for them “to see someone who was unapologetic about it.”
I asked Apoorva if she could recall the first time Vivek told her he wanted to become president.
“I think that, like, on a serious level, it was …” she paused for a long moment. “This December.” Vivek, she said, saw the presidency as one of “the different options open to him.” Other young, rich men unsure of what to do next with their life have bought a yacht or a big-city newspaper, or run for governor of Texas. Ramaswamy chose the presidency.
Apoorva is a head-and-neck-cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University. I asked her if, as a physician, she supported vaccines. She told me that she and her entire family had received COVID shots, but like her husband, she endorses the idea of personal choice over government mandates. This libertarian approach permeates many aspects of their life. Instead of sending their kids to public school, they have “some educators who come to the house.” (She pointed to the special relationship between Alexander the Great and his private tutor, Aristotle, as a model.) Like Vivek, she’s ambitious and career-driven. She told me she doesn’t necessarily plan to give up her job at OSU even if her family moves into the White House. “I think Jill Biden did show that it is possible to be a spouse who is working,” she said.
“This is a totally new world for me, and the concept of being a political spouse is not, like, the fifth thing I would call myself,” she said. “It’s, you know, this is the thing we’re doing, for sure. And I’m proud to support my husband in it. But I think this is about him and his vision. This is not about me.”
The next day, in Des Moines, Ramaswamy periodically stepped away from our interview aboard his campaign bus to play with his older son, Karthik, who had come along for the trip. I asked Ramaswamy if his friends and family were surprised when he told them he was running for president.
“Not shocked, but a combination of excited and personally concerned for me, actually—just knowing how dirty this is,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising. And I think most people have an impression that politics is a dirty sport where you have to, you know, be compromised.”
I brought up something Papa John had told him: This wasn’t a knife fight, but a gunfight.
“I mean, I would phrase it differently, but I would say you need a spine of steel to play this sport, for sure,” Ramaswamy said. “Some people who have been coddled in their siloed kingdoms, mini kingdoms they’ve created for themselves, have not been ready for when they’ve shown up for the real thing. I think it was an advantage not to be surrounded by people who heaped false praise on me in one of the 50 states of the union—I think that’s a trap that certain governors almost every cycle have fallen into.”
He smiled, making it clear that he was going out of his way not to invoke his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by name.
While DeSantis spent the first stretch of his campaign blackballing the mainstream media, Ramaswamy has taken a different approach. His presidential candidacy was preceded by a profile in The New Yorker, and though he himself is perpetually on cable news, he said he hardly ever tunes in. With one exception: “I think Tucker Carlson was great, actually. I really enjoyed watching him.”
“I think Tucker had something to say,” he said. “We’re not slaves to a partisan orthodoxy. I don’t have a particular affinity for the Republican Party apparatus, and I think neither does Tucker.”
He told me he admired how Carlson wasn’t a “delivery mechanism” for something that showed up on the teleprompter. I asked if he had read any of the evidence that came out in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, the case that ultimately led to Carlson leaving the network. “I really didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “It didn’t strike me as super interesting because it seemed like a lot of inside baseball.” I told him that Carlson had been saying certain things on air and, in some cases, texting the direct opposite to his producer. For instance: He said he hates Trump. “Did he say that?” Ramaswamy asked.
For a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised.
The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a live event with Elon Musk and David Sacks on X Spaces (formerly known as Twitter).
“Most people have barely heard of me,” Ramaswamy admitted to Elon Musk. He was pacing barefoot around his 30th-floor downtown–Des Moines hotel room, doing a live Twitter (X) Spaces broadcast. It was late Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Lincoln Dinner. Half-eaten takeout was idling in clamshell containers. Ramaswamy had been going nonstop but didn’t seem remotely tired.
Musk and his Silicon Valley friend David Sacks had been trying to make the social network’s shaky audio platform a virtual destination on the 2024 campaign trail, with intermittent success. I could hear Musk’s voice through Ramaswamy’s earbuds. Over and over again, he’d interrupt the candidate. If Ramaswamy was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. After having watched several of his media hits in a row, I noticed how Ramaswamy had developed an array of tricks to wrangle attention, such as when he brought up “our mutual friend Peter,” as in Thiel. He told Musk how much he “loved” the Twitter Files. By the end of the broadcast, he seemed to have made a new fan. Last week, Musk called him “a very promising candidate.”
He continues to find support among a group of very online iconoclasts. “That Vivek guy is very interesting,” Joe Rogan said recently. “He’s very rational and very smart.” Jordan Peterson has praised him as “hard to corner in the best way.” Andrew Yang, who ran as a freethinking businessman in the 2020 Democratic primary, told me he believes that people are just waiting for others to rally behind Ramaswamy. “Vivek’s going to have his moment. There’s going to be a wind at his back. And then when that wind hits, I think people will be stunned at how quickly his support grows.”
At the Iowa Events Center, more than 1,000 people listened politely as 13 Republican candidates (pretty much the entire field except Chris Christie) each made a 10-minute case for themselves. DeSantis announced that “The time for excuses is over!” before clomping away in his heeled boots. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina preached the value of hard work, telling the room that President Joe Biden and the left were selling “a narcotic of despair.” Former Vice President Mike Pence trudged through his speech and received hardly any applause when endorsing the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Just after 8 p.m., Ramaswamy was waiting offstage, looking over his notes. He bounded up the steps to the sounds of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America.”
“It’s good to be here, back in Iowa. I feel like I live here now!” Ramaswamy told the crowd.
He was speaking slower than usual, and he had ditched the twang from the previous night. He seemed utterly at ease. He talked about securing our southern border “and our northern border too.” He received lively applause after saying he would shut down scores of three-letter government agencies. He cycled through his list of poisons and his 10 truths. The clapping waxed and waned. His line about “two genders” was a hit, as was his finale about the Constitution. All in all, he received one of the strongest responses of the night: When the speech concluded, he was treated to a partial standing ovation. He paused for a few extra moments to take it all in, waving at the crowd with both hands.
Downstairs, Ramaswamy glowed in his after-party suite. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a series of country songs blared from speakers. He told the few dozen people before him that he was prepared not only to win the nomination but to deliver a Ronald Reagan–style landslide victory. Some seemed convinced.
The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy leaves American Dream Machines after he and his son, Karthik, visited the vintage-car shop between campaign events. Ramaswamy’s son joined the candidate on the two-day campaign trip to Iowa.
The next morning, as his campaign bus lumbered to rural Hubbard, I asked Ramaswamy if he had heard what his fellow Republican Will Hurd had said at the event. Hurd, a former Texas congressman, was booed off the stage after telling the Lincoln Dinner crowd “the truth”: that Trump was running only to stay out of prison. “I know the truth,” Hurd said. (Loud boos.) “The truth is hard.” (Louder boos.)
Ramaswamy waved away Hurd’s assertion. He told me that if Trump weren’t running, “they” wouldn’t be prosecuting him. With each passing month, with each new indictment, Ramaswamy has doubled down on his public promise to pardon Trump if elected. He told me that he believes doing so would be “the right thing for the country.” He said the indictments, so far, were “obviously politically motivated.”
During one of his “truth” monologues at the Lincoln Dinner, Ramaswamy told the crowd, “We can handle the truth about what really happened on January 6.” As the bus rolled north, I asked him: What is the truth about January 6?
“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” he said. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”
Then, suddenly, he was talking about 9/11.
“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to. Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he said. “‘Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.’ What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”
I pressed him on the comparison, and suddenly, the bold teller of truths was just asking questions. “Oh yeah, I don’t think they belong in the same conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. But I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the January 6 commission.”
But is he actually confused about who was behind the 9/11 attacks? It was hard to get a straight answer from him. “I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11,” he said. “I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.” Some truths, it seems, can be proudly affirmed; others are more elusive. (Asked to clarify Ramaswamy’s views on 9/11, his spokesperson pointed me to a 1,042-word tweet from the candidate, in which he suggested that the U.S. government covered up involvement by Saudi intelligence officials in planning the attacks.)
Ramaswamy told me he’s not interested in being Trump’s vice president, or serving in Trump’s Cabinet. “Reporting in to somebody is not something I’m wired to do well,” he said. “I’m not in this to be a politician. I think there’s a chance to lead a national revival, cultural revival, that touches the next generation of Americans. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to do that if I’m in an administrative role.”
Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy has signed the “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual GOP nominee—a prerequisite for participation in the debate. He also told me that he would commit to accepting the results of the election. So far, the closest he’s come to ever actually criticizing Trump is saying that 30 percent of the country became “psychiatrically ill” when he was in office. Throughout our discussions, it was clear that Ramaswamy seemed to view Trumpism as something he could tap into. He told me that his path to winning involved recognizing and celebrating Trump’s accomplishments, and promising to build on them.
“I believe with a high degree of conviction that I will win this election,” he said.
If, for whatever reason, that didn’t come to pass, he told me he would “probably just go back to what I was doing”—business, writing books, hanging out with his family. “And I might take a look at the future.”
During our final conversation, I asked Ramaswamy if he felt understood or misunderstood as a candidate. He didn’t hesitate to answer.
“Mostly misunderstood.”
What do you think people misunderstand about you?
“My motivations,” he said.
“I’m not aggrieved by that. I’m patient. But I hope that by the end of this, actually—it’s a deep question—but I think I would rather be properly understood and lose because people decided that the real me is not who they want, than to lose because people never got to know who I really am. That would bother me. And it would be hard to reconcile myself with that. But if people across this country really know just who I am and what I stand for, and then that’s not what they want in a leader, I am 100 percent at peace with that. I have no problem. So that’s kind of my goal in this process.”
The bus pulled onto a sprawling private property in the middle of nowhere. Ramaswamy and his aides hopped off. The millionaire outsider candidate, beholden to no one, was preparing to speak his truth before a wealthy Iowa donor and his friends.
While her wife was pregnant with their son, Aimee MacDonald took an unusual step of preparing her own body for the baby’s arrival. First she began taking hormones, and then for six weeks straight, she pumped her breasts day and night every two to three hours. This process tricked her body into a pregnant and then postpartum state so she could make breast milk. By the time the couple’s son arrived, she was pumping 27 ounces a day—enough to feed a baby—all without actually getting pregnant or giving birth.
And so, after a 38-hour labor and emergency C-section, MacDonald’s wife could do what many mothers who just gave birth might desperately want to but cannot: rest, sleep, and recover from surgery. Meanwhile, MacDonald tried nursing their baby. She held him to her breast, and he latched right away. Over the next 15 months, the two mothers co-nursed their son, switching back and forth, trading feedings in the middle of the night. MacDonald had breastfed her older daughter the usual way—as in, by herself—a decade earlier, and she remembered the bone-deep exhaustion. She did not want that for her wife. Inducing lactation meant they could share in the ups and the downs of breastfeeding together.
MacDonald, who lives in a small town in Nova Scotia, had never met anyone who had tried this before. People she told were routinely shocked to learn that induced lactation—making milk without pregnancy—is biologically possible. They had so many questions: Was it safe? Did she have side effects? How did it even work? But when she described how she and her wife shared nursing duties, many women told her, “I wish I had had that.”
Induced lactation wasn’t initially developed for co-nursing. Mothers who wanted to breastfeed their adoptive babies were the first to experiment with hormones and pumping. But over time, the few experts who specialize in induced lactation told me, that has given way to more queer couples who want to share or swap nursing duties. Early in her career, Alyssa Schnell, a lactation consultant in St. Louis who herself breastfed her adopted daughter 17 years ago, found that when she suggested to same-sex couples that the non-birthing partner might try nursing, “they would be horrified.” The idea that a woman would nurse a baby she did not give birth to—common in the era of wet nurses—had become strange in our era of off-the-shelf formula. Now parents are coming to her asking to induce lactation, and more of them are interested in co-nursing.
About a quarter of all babies in the U.S. are breastfed exclusively for six months; more than half are breastfed at least some of the time. The statistics don’t say by whom, but that’s because they don’t need to. We can assume it’s virtually always their birthing mother. Even with the help of formula, the pressure around or preference for breastfeeding means that, in many families, the work of feeding falls disproportionately on one parent. But induced lactation decouples breastfeeding from birth. By manipulating biology, parents who co-nurse are testing the limits of just how equal a relationship can truly be.
Breastfeeding is hard work, even when it’s “natural.” Adding induced lactation is harder work still. MacDonald was putting herself on a newborn schedule weeks before her baby was even born. She pumped at home. She pumped at work. She even pumped while her wife was in labor, because skipping sessions can cause milk supply to drop. As Diane Spatz, a lactation expert at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, puts it, “You have to start pumping like a wild person.”
MacDonald followed a version of the Newman-Goldfarb protocol, named after a pediatrician and an adoptive mother who documented and shared the process in 2000. In addition to pumping, the protocol includes birth control, which causes a surge of progesterone and estrogen akin to pregnancy hormones, and a drug called domperidone, which boosts the milk hormone prolactin. Together they biochemically prime the body for milk production. It’s unusual, Schnell told me, for a woman inducing lactation to make enough milk to feed a baby all on her own—unless she’s breastfed before, like MacDonald had—but it’s also unusual to make no milk at all.
In the U.S., getting domperidone can be a challenge. Though the drug is widely available in Canada, Australia, and Europe, the FDA has banned it in the United States, citing the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and even death. But these heart problems have shown up only in the elderly, foreign experts have noted, and Australian scientists concluded in a 2019 review that domperidone is safe for lactation, as long as women are screened for heart conditions. But in the U.S., parents usually aren’t taking it under the supervision of a doctor. They might buy pills with a prescription at a Canadian pharmacy or surreptitiously order the drug online through overseas pharmacies. “There was a brief moment when you could only buy it in Bitcoin,” says Lauren Vallone, whose partner, Robin Berryman, induced lactation so that they could co-nurse their daughter, who was born in 2020.
Inducing lactation felt like a DIY project to Vallone and Berryman. As a queer couple trying to start a family, though, they were also used to doing things a different way. They eventually reached out to Schnell for guidance, but they also swapped tips in a Facebook support group that had a wealth of anecdotal advice. Not that most doctors would have been helpful. Even the idea that one can breastfeed without having been pregnant isn’t widely known, Spatz told me. “Nurses are surprised about that,” she said. “Physicians don’t know that.”
Vallone and Berryman planned to divide nursing duties 50/50, but they didn’t know exactly what that would look like. Would they trade off every other feeding? Would one nurse while the other pumped? What about when one parent went back to work? “There’s stories of people who have induced lactation, but then there’s no, like, ‘Well, what does your day look like?’” Vallone told me. They had no script to follow, so they could write their own. They envisioned giving themselves equal roles from the start, much like how many same-sex couples share a more equal division of labor, because they do not come in with the gender baggage of a heterosexual relationship.
What Vallone and Berryman did not want was to lapse into the roles that they watched their friends fall into, where the birthing parent becomes the breastfeeding parent becomes the default parent. The arrival of a new baby is a delicate time in any relationship—for many reasons, but in no small part because it disrupts whatever division of labor was previously agreed upon. Here is a tiny helpless human, along with a mountain of new tasks necessary to keep them alive. If the baby is breastfed, now a large share of that labor can be done by only one parent. In her case against breastfeeding in The Atlantic in 2009, Hanna Rosin described how that initial inequality persists and festers over the years: “She alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick, and so on.” But what if—under very specific circumstances at least—breastfeeding did not fall solely on one parent? What if instead of parenthood starting off on unequal footing, it could be perfectly equal from the very beginning?
For a while, Vallone and Berryman did trade off feedings, and both continued to pump, because they worried that their milk supplies would drop. They tracked every ounce in a shared spreadsheet. (This careful data logging actually allowed Schnell to write a case study about the couple.) The pumping eventually became too much—they couldn’t sleep if they were pumping!—but they have kept co-nursing for two years now.
From the early days, they saw that nursing not only nourished their baby but also soothed her when she cried, made her sleepy when she was tired but fussy. So the work of not just feeding but all-round caregiving fell on them more equally. In the morning, they could alternate one person waking up early with the baby, the other sleeping in. At night, one parent could go out with friends without racing home for bedtime or pumping a bottle of breast milk for the other to feed. Because they could each provide everything their baby wanted, they were also each freer. Breastfeeding simultaneously deepened their relationships with their baby and allowed them a life outside of that. “You really get a sense of how radical it is to have caretaking split so evenly,” Vallone said. The couple is now trying for their second child, which Berryman plans to carry. They plan to co-nurse again.
Vallone and Berryman did, however, run into an unexpected obstacle to their co-nursing: their baby. She at one point refused to nurse on Vallone, the birthing parent, and wanted to nurse only on Berryman. Any parent is probably familiar with how babies can develop seemingly arbitrary preferences: breast over bottle, left breast over right breast, even. As they get older, toddlers, too, go through periods of wanting only one parent or another to feed, clothe, bathe, or comfort them. In this case—as in many cases—Vallone and Berryman had to be deliberate about returning to a more even state. At its most intense, Berryman would sleep away from the baby in another room; it got better over time, but it also sometimes got worse. Equality did not come easily even with two nursing parents, which perhaps isn’t surprising. The advent of formula did not magically render all marriages equal. Vallone and Berryman still had to work toward keeping their co-nursing relationship as balanced as possible. Dividing work is also, well, work.
Not all couples who induce lactation end up splitting breastfeeding evenly. Some are not able to, and some don’t even want to. For example, one parent might choose to carry the baby while the other takes on breastfeeding. Some of the women I spoke with were primarily motivated to induce lactation to pass along their antibodies in breast milk, or to physically bond with a baby they did not carry. Even for those who never made more than a few of the roughly 25 ounces a baby typically needs every day, being able to comfort nurse—when a baby sucks more for soothing than for nourishment—was meaningful. They could nurse their baby to sleep or calm them when upset. It brought the parents closer together too: Although inducing lactation is not equivalent to pregnancy, both parents felt like their bodies were preparing for a baby together. And later, they could troubleshoot a bad latch or clogged duct together. Breastfeeding can be an isolating experience when one parent is attached to a baby eight times a day and the other looks on a bit helplessly; co-nursing made it less so.
Because induced lactation has flown under the radar of mainstream science for so long, a lot remains unknown. A couple ofsmall studies suggest that the protein and sugar content of induced breast milk is in the normal range, but detailed experiments into, for example, the mix of antibodies have never been done. And why are some women inducing lactation able to produce more than others? Schnell has noticed that those who have struggled with infertility or hormonal balances usually make less milk. She has worked with trans women, too, who are able to make milk, though usually not in large amounts. Men, theoretically, could lactate as well; early studies into domperidone actually noted this as a side effect. There are anecdotal reports of menbreastfeeding infants, but there’s virtually no research into the phenomenon.
One mother I interviewed, Morgan Lage, told me that her experience inducing lactation to breastfeed her daughter inspired her to train as a lactation consultant, and she hopes now to fill in some of the many unknowns. The Newman-Goldfarb protocol is widely used as the template for anyone attempting induced lactation, but no one has rigorously studied the optimal time to initiate pumping or birth control. Lage started pumping earlier than the protocol suggested, and she wonders if that’s why she was able to have a full milk supply despite never having breastfed before. She loved nursing her daughter. She loved feeling “just as important and needed” in the fleeting, precious period of infancy.
I know what Lage means about feeling needed, though perhaps because I breastfed solo—as most mothers do—I did not always love it. Still, I remember staring at my baby’s eyelashes and toes, marveling at how nearly every molecule in her body came from mine. We did supplement with formula, too, in part because we wanted my husband to be involved in her feeding. Although the bottle satisfied her hunger, it did not always satisfy some primal need for comfort. During her most inconsolable nights, my husband would spend hours trying to soothe her with every trick in the book, only for her to fall quiet and asleep the minute I nursed her. This frustrated us both. To be needed this way was a burden and a joy. I was sorry, for both of us, that we could not share it.
Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue. What they found, as The Atlantic first reported on Thursday, bolsters the case for the pandemic having purely natural roots: The genetic data suggest that live mammals illegally for sale at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market—among them, raccoon dogs, a foxlike species known to be susceptible to the virus—may have been carrying the coronavirus at the end of 2019.
But what might otherwise have been a straightforward story on new evidence has rapidly morphed into a mystery centered on the origins debate’s data gaps. Within a day or so of nabbing the sequences off a database called GISAID, the researchers told me, they reached out to the Chinese scientists who had uploaded the data to share some preliminary results. The next day, public access to the sequences was locked—according to GISAID, at the request of the Chinese researchers, who had previously analyzed the data and drawn distinctly different conclusions about what they contained.
Yesterday evening, the international team behind the new Huanan-market analysis released a report on its findings—but did not post the underlying data. The write-up confirms that genetic material from raccoon dogs and several other mammals was found in some of the same spots at the wet market, as were bits of SARS-CoV-2’s genome around the time the outbreak began. Some of that animal genetic material, which was collected just days or weeks after the market was shut down, appears to be RNA—a particularly fast-degrading molecule. That strongly suggests that the mammals were present at the market not long before the samples were collected, making them a plausible channel for the virus to travel on its way to us. “I think we’re moving toward more and more evidence that this was an animal spillover at the market,” says Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the new research. “A year and a half ago, my confidence in the animal origin was 80 percent, something like that. Now it’s 95 percent or above.”
For now, the report is just that: a report, not yet formally reviewed by other scientists or even submitted for publication to the journal—and that will remain the case as long as this team continues to leave space for the researchers who originally collected the market samples, many of them based at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to prepare a paper of their own. And still missing are the raw sequence files that sparked the reanalysis in the first place—before vanishing from the public eye.
Every researcher I asked emphasized just how important the release of that evidence is to the origins investigation: Without data, there’s no base-level proof—nothing for the broader scientific community to independently scrutinize to confirm or refute the international team’s results. Absent raw data, “some people will say that this isn’t real,” says Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis. Data that flicker on and off publicly accessible parts of the internet also raise questions about other clues on the pandemic’s origins. Still more evidence might be out there, yet undisclosed.
Transparency is always an essential facet of research, but all the more so when the stakes are so high. SARS-CoV-2 has already killed nearly 7 million people, at least, and saddled countless people with chronic illness; it will kill and debilitate many more in the decades to come. Every investigation into how it began to spread among humans must be “conducted as openly as possible,” says Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis.
The team behind the reanalysis still has copies of the genetic sequences its members downloaded earlier this month. But they’ve decided that they won’t be the ones to share them, several of them told me. For one, they don’t have sequences from the complete set of samples that the Chinese team collected in early 2020—just the fraction that they spotted and grabbed off GISAID. Even if they did have all of the data, the researchers contend that it’s not their place to post them publicly. That’s up to the China CDC team that originally collected and generated the data.
Part of the international team’s reasoning is rooted in academic decorum. There isn’t a set-in-stone guidebook among scientists, but adhering to unofficial rules on etiquette smooths successful collaborations across disciplines and international borders—especially during a global crisis such as this one. Releasing someone else’s data, the product of another team’s hard work, is a faux pas. It risks misattribution of credit, and opens the door to the Chinese researchers’ findings getting scooped before they publish a high-profile paper in a prestigious journal. “It isn’t right to share the original authors’ data without their consent,” says Niema Moshiri, a computational biologist at UC San Diego and one of the authors of the new report. “They produced the data, so it’s their data to share with the world.”
If the international team released what data it has, it could potentially stoke the fracas in other ways. The World Health Organization has publicly indicated that the data should come from the researchers who collected them first: On Friday, at a press briefing, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, admonished the Chinese researchers for keeping their data under wraps for so long, and called on them to release the sequences again. “These data could have and should have been shared three years ago,” he said. And the fact that it wasn’t is “disturbing,” given just how much it might have aided investigations early on, says Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense expert at George Mason University, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis.
Publishing the current report has already gotten the researchers into trouble with GISAID, the database where they found the genetic sequences. During the pandemic, the database has been a crucial hub for researchers sharing viral genome data; founded to provide open access to avian influenza genomes, it is also where researchers from the China CDC published the first whole-genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2, back in January 2020. A few days after the researchers downloaded the sequences, they told me, several of them were contacted by a GISAID administrator who chastised them about not being sufficiently collaborative with the China CDC team and warned them against publishing a paper using the China CDC data. They were in danger, the email said, of violating the site’s terms of use and would risk getting their database access revoked. Distributing the data to any non-GISAID users—including the broader research community—would also be a breach.
This morning, hours after the researchers released their report online, many of them found that they could no longer log in to GISAID—they received an error message when they input their username and password. “They may indeed be accusing us of having violated their terms,” Moshiri told me, though he can’t be sure. The ban was instated with absolutely no warning. Moshiri and his colleagues maintain that they did act in good faith and haven’t violated any of the database’s terms—that, contrary to GISAID’s accusations, they reached out multiple times with offers to collaborate with the China CDC, which has “thus far declined,” per the international team’s report.
GISAID didn’t respond when I reached out about the data’s disappearing act, its emails to the international team, and the group-wide ban. But in a statement released shortly after I contacted the database—one that echoes language in the emails sent to researchers—GISAID doubled down on accusing the international team of violating its terms of use by posting “an analysis report in direct contravention of the terms they agreed to as a condition to accessing the data, and despite having knowledge that the data generators are undergoing peer review assessment of their own publication.”
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, told me that she’s learned that the China CDC researchers recently provided a fuller data set to GISAID—more complete than the one the international team downloaded earlier this month. “It’s ready to go,” she told me. GISAID just needs permission, she said, from the Chinese researchers to make the sequences publicly available. “I reach out to them every day, asking them for a status update,” she added, but she hasn’t yet heard back on a definitive timeline. In its statement, GISAID also “strongly” suggested “that the complete and updated dataset will be made available as soon as possible,” but gave no timeline. I asked Van Kerkhove if there was a hypothetical deadline for the China CDC team to restore access, at which point the international team might be asked to publicize the data instead. “This hypothetical deadline you’re talking about? We’re way past that,” she said, though she didn’t comment specifically on whether the international team would be asked to step in. “Data has been uploaded. It is available. It just needs to be accessible, immediately.”
Why, exactly, the sequences were first made public only so recently, and why they have yet to reappear publicly, remain unclear. In a recent statement, the WHO said that access to the data was withdrawn “apparently to allow further data updates by China CDC” to its original analysis on the market samples, which went under review for publication at the journal Nature last week. There’s no clarity, however, on what will happen if the paper is not published at all. When I reached out to three of the Chinese researchers—George Gao, William Liu, and Guizhen Wu—to ask about their intentions for the data, I didn’t receive a response.
“We want the data to come out more than anybody,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University and one of the authors on the new analysis. Until then, the international team will be fielding accusations, already flooding in, that it falsified its analyses and overstated its conclusions.
Researchers around the world have been raising questions about these particular genetic sequences for at least a year. In February 2022, the Chinese researchers and their close collaborators released their analysis of the same market samples probed in the new report, as well as other bits of genetic data that haven’t yet been made public. But their interpretations deviate pretty drastically from the international team’s. The Chinese team contended that any shreds of virus found at the market had most likely been brought in by infected humans. “No animal host of SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced,” the researchers asserted at the time. Although the market had perhaps been an “amplifier” of the outbreak, their analysis read, “more work involving international coordination” would be needed to determine the “real origins of SARS-CoV-2.” When reached by Jon Cohen of Science magazine last week, Gao described the sequences that fleetingly appeared on GISAID as “[n]othing new. It had been known there was illegal animal dealing and this is why the market was immediately shut down.”
There is, then, a clear divergence between the two reports. Gao’s assessment indicates that finding animal genetic material in the market swabs merely confirms that live mammals were being illegally traded at the venue prior to January 2020. The researchers behind the new report insist that the narrative can now go a step further—they suggest not just that the animals were there, but that the animals, several of which are already known to be vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2, were there, in parts of the market where the virus was also found. That proximity, coupled with the virus’s inability to persist without a viable host, points to the possibility of an existing infection among animals, which could spark several more.
The Chinese researchers used this same logic of location—multiple types of genetic material pulled out of the same swab—to conclude that humans were carrying around the virus at Huanan. The reanalysis confirms that there probably were infected people at the market at some point before it closed. But they were unlikely to be the virus’s only chauffeurs: Across several samples, the amount of raccoon-dog genetic material dwarfs that of humans. At one stall in particular—located in the sector of the market where the most virus-positive swabs were found—the researchers discovered at least one sample that contained SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and was also overflowing with raccoon-dog genetic material, while containing very little DNA or RNA material matching the human genome. That same stall was photographically documented housing raccoon dogs in 2014. The case is not a slam dunk: No one has yet, for instance, identified a viral sample taken from a live animal that was swabbed at the market in 2019 before the venue was closed. Still, JHU’s Gronvall told me, the situation feels clearer than ever. “All of the science is pointed” in the direction of Huanan being the pandemic’s epicenter, she said.
To further untangle the significance of the sequences will require—you guessed it—the now-vanished genetic data. Some researchers are still withholding their judgment on the significance of the new analysis, because they haven’t gotten their hands on the genetic sequences themselves. “That’s the whole scientific process,” Van Kerkhove told me: data transparency that allows analyses to be “done and redone.”
Van Kerkhove and others are also wondering whether more data could yet emerge, given how long this particular set went unshared. “This is an indication to me in recent days that there is more data that exists,” she said. Which means that she and her colleagues haven’t yet gotten the fullest picture of the pandemic’s early days that they could—and that they won’t be able to deliver much of a verdict until more information emerges. The new analysis does bolster the case for market animals acting as a conduit for the virus between bats (SARS-CoV-2’s likeliest original host, based on several studies on this coronavirus and others) and people; it doesn’t, however, “tell us that the other hypotheses didn’t happen. We can’t remove any of them,” Van Kerkhove told me.
More surveillance for the virus needs to be done in wild-animal populations, she said. Having the data from the market swabs could help with that, perhaps leading back to a population of mammals that might have caught the virus from bats or another intermediary in a particular part of China. At the same time, to further investigate the idea that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged out of a laboratory mishap, officials need to conduct intensive audits and investigations of virology laboratories in Wuhan and elsewhere. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy ruled that such an accident was the likelier catalyst of the coronavirus outbreak than a natural spillover from wild animals to humans. The ruling echoed earlier judgments from the FBI and a Senate minority report. But it contrasted with the views of four other agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, and it was made with “low confidence” and based on “new” evidence that has yet to be declassified.
The longer the investigation into the virus’s origins drags on, and the more distant the autumn of 2019 grows in our rearview, “the harder it becomes,” Van Kerkhove told me. Many in the research community were surprised that new information from market samples collected in early 2020 emerged at all, three years later. Settling the squabbles over SARS-CoV-2 will be especially tough because the Huanan market was so swiftly shut down after the outbreak began, and the traded animals at the venue rapidly culled, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and one of the researchers behind the new analysis. Raccoon dogs, one of the most prominent potential hosts to have emerged from the new analysis, are not even known to have been sampled live at the market. “That evidence is gone now,” if it ever existed, Koblentz, of George Mason University, told me. For months, Chinese officials were even adamant that no mammals were being illegally sold at the region’s wet markets at all.
So researchers continue to work with what they have: swabs from surfaces that can, at the very least, point to a susceptible animal being in the right place, at the right time, with the virus potentially inside it. “Right now, to the best of my knowledge, this data is the only way that we can actually look,” Rasmussen told me. It may never be enough to fully settle this debate. But right now, the world doesn’t even know the extent of the evidence available—or what could, or should, still emerge.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When we think about feeling “pressured,” the immediate connotation is usually a negative one. Understandably so — if given a choice, many would opt not to feel pressure in any situation; it’s not an exceptionally comfortable emotion. Nonetheless, it can be helpful in all facets of life, especially regarding your career journey.
Historian Thomas Carlyle famously said, “no pressure, no diamonds,” indicating that coal cannot achieve its true potential of becoming a diamond without it. Similarly, the correct dose of pressure will help you achieve your goals when you know how to wield it and handle it in a healthy way that doesn’t detract from your overall well-being.
To an extent, it is a choice. You can go through life prioritizing short-term comfort and avoiding situations that bring a high level of pressure. Still, it probably won’t be a very fulfilling experience. It’s natural to prefer easy and comfortable situations — it’s only human. Unfortunately, you’ll have to endure and welcome the more challenging experiences to spur character development and growth.
Without the moments that push us, we stay stagnant, and forcing yourself to work through the discomfort does your future self an excellent service. Think back on an outstanding achievement — a widely-known, historical example or something personal that has happened in your own life. To the best of your knowledge, would that goal have been attained or that milestone reached without a level of discomfort and pressure?
When I think about the moments in my life where I’ve felt most proud of myself or come to the most rewarding outcome, not one of them was able to happen without hard work leading up to it. I’ve never regretted putting myself in a position under pressure, and I will continue to do so whenever the opportunity arises.
As with so many things, working through pressure gets easier with practice. It’s like a muscle or a skill — you have to train it to strengthen it. No one is walking into the weight room for the first time and squatting with 400 pounds, nor would it be recommended. Without training, you’re only going to hurt yourself.
There’s a reason Lionel Messi is consistently chosen to take penalty kicks; he’s taken so many before and has found a way to be comfortable and successful through what’s arguably the most pressure-inducing moment of the game. He’s been put in the situation before and risen to the challenge repeatedly in a way other players haven’t mastered yet.
If you can find a way to embrace the moments when it feels like the pressure is closing in, it will get easier the more often it happens. Continually putting yourself in an uncomfortable position will only serve you in the long run, particularly because as you progress and grow, so will the frequency of those moments. It’s a cliché, but a true one: with great reward comes great responsibility, and as you achieve more or attain success, you’ll need that strengthened muscle to deal with times of heightened pressure.
If you are someone who experiences a high level of pressure regularly, chances are that you’re also consistently trying to do better in most facets of life — the two tend to go hand-in-hand. Even when you lean into the positive side of it, you’ll still need to find a way of managing that pressure.
Different people have different strategies, but something I’ve found crucial is recognizing the adrenaline that comes with the feeling of pressure. On a physical level, the fear you might feel during those moments is not all that different from the feeling you get when you’re excited, like climbing the highest point of a rollercoaster. The trick is channeling that adrenaline towards the latter and using it to fuel excitement rather than fear. Think about what could go right rather than what could go wrong, or if that proves too difficult, let yourself think about what could go wrong and walk yourself through it anyway to feel more prepared.
One strategy could be tapping into a friend with complementary strengths. I could be asked to jump out of a plane tomorrow and not think twice about it, but if you asked me to strap on an oxygen tank and go scuba diving, the “yes” isn’t going to come to me as quickly. Having a friend who might be terrified of heights but feels at home in the water would be the perfect match because we can push each other and relieve some of the pressure the other might be feeling.
Inevitably, the best way to manage pressure is to become comfortable with the physical feelings it invokes, but these strategies can be of tremendous help before you get there.
If you’re having trouble reaching a true feeling of comfort, viewing pressure through the lens of privilege can be incredibly helpful. Billie Jean King wrote an entire book on the subject where she said, “Pressure is a privilege—it only comes to those who earn it.” The privilege and opportunity of feeling the pressure to compete and perform is not one that everybody experiences. That fact alone can, at times, make it easier to handle. When advancing feels difficult, know that it’s supposed to feel that way, but it doesn’t have to stop you from using every tool in your arsenal. If you can take command of the situations that cause that good pressure rather than shy away from it, you will ultimately find success in a way that feels even more rewarding.
“Erica from America” is about a spunky character who wants to show the world how to dream big and then go about achieving those dreams.
Press Release –
Oct 18, 2016
New York City, New York , October 18, 2016 (Newswire.com)
– Marriah Publishing Announces New Children’s Book released and being promoted for the upcoming holidays!
Marriah Publishing is proud to introduce new children’s book: Erica from America: Swimming from Europe to Africa, which tells the story of Erica, who, as a child grew up wanting to do everything, and later decided to swim the Strait of Gibraltar. Her friends think she is crazy but Erica is determined (even if a little nervous) and decides she is going to swim from Europe to Africa no matter what. But when she gets to Spain, her plans are interrupted by the winds and another group of swimmers, who befriend her and ask her to swim with them. But ultimately, she and the other swimmers are all set to swim. They reach their goal to swim from Europe to Africa but not without a lot of activity during the swim!
Erica has written an incredible story for children of all ages (and adults!)…it’s a story of inspiration and perseverance and proves that you can accomplish your dreams if you only believe in yourself and be dedicated to your goals. As a fellow swimmer I was touched by this heart warming story.
Rowdy Gaines, IV, Olympic Hall of Fame Member, 3 time Olympic Gold medalist, ESPN and NBC Commentator
About the author:
Erica L. Moffett is an award-winning author and she also works as Managing Director at Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. When she is not writing or working, she can be found swimming in the pools, rivers, or oceans. Erica from America is her first children’s book and is based on her first big open water swim from Europe to Africa. Subsequently, she has gone on to complete the Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming, which consists of the English Channel, the Catalina Channel, and the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim. She received a B.A. in music from Rhodes College and an M.B.A. from Yale University School of Management and divides her time between New York City and Fort Lauderdale.
Erica is an extraordinary person who has an amazing spirit and has been on many adventures which she shares through her writing. She is also working on a memoir about her adoption experiences, a section of which was first published on Woman Around Town (www.womanaroundtown.com) and which can now be seen on her website, www.ericafromamerica.com. She is also hoping to adopt a baby of her own.
about the illustrator:
Martin Russocki is a celebrated and accomplished artist and illustrator. He has invented several board games. Martin lives in Manhattan and his work can be seen at MartinRussocki.com
