Zero Deaths in Vietnam, the Prison Pandemic, and the Return of Rebekah Jones
A roundup of stories we’re reading about the coronavirus today
Published in
2 min readJun 12, 2020
- Over 421,000 people worldwide have died from Covid-19, but none of those people died in Vietnam, according to the nation’s data. As Dave Lawler at Axios reports, the communist country may be the rare “winner” in this pandemic: Not only is its death count zero (and there’s no evidence of a cover-up), but its government predicts its economy will grow 5% this year — in the middle of a global recession. A number of factors play a role, not least of which is the government’s use of far-reaching surveillance.
- In Arkansas, prisoners have tested positive in four different state prisons, including the Cummins Unit, a facility with a long legacy of scandal that now has one of the worst prison outbreaks in the country. As Anna Stitt reports in the final installment of a three-part series on Arkansas prisons for an NPR affiliate in Little Rock, a coalition of prisoner advocacy groups recently delivered a list of demands to the governor, but he has not yet responded. In the meantime, he has praised the state’s response to controlling the pandemic in its prisons.
- To make a Covid-19 vaccine that’s guaranteed to be safe, it must first be tested on humans — a fraught condition, seeing as the experimental vaccines may have harmful effects. Just look at Ian Haydon, the Seattle resident who was one of the first to volunteer to test Moderna’s…
