Should kids go back to school? 

One South Korean contact-tracing study suggests that is a bad idea. In analyzing 5,706 COVID-19 patients and their 59,073 contacts, it concluded – albeit with a significant caveat – that 10- to 19-year-olds were the most contagious age group within their household.

A study out of Iceland, meanwhile, found that children under 10 are less likely to get infected and less likely than adults to become ill if they are infected. Coauthor Kári Stefánsson, who is CEO of a genetics company tracking the disease’s spread, said the study didn’t find a single instance of a child infecting a parent.

So when leaders explain their decision on whether to send kids back to school by saying they’re “following the science,” citizens could be forgiven for asking what science they’re referring to exactly – and how sure they are that it’s right. 

But it’s become difficult to ask such questions amid the highly polarized debate around pandemic policies. While areas of consensus have emerged since the pandemic first hit the United States in March, significant gaps remain. Those uncertainties have opened the door for contrarians to gain traction in popular thought.

Some Americans see them as playing a crucial role, challenging a fear-driven groupthink that is inhibiting scientific inquiry, driving unconstitutional restrictions on individual freedom and enterprise, and failing to grapple with the full societal cost of shutting down businesses, churches, and schools. Public health experts who see shutdowns as crucial to saving lives are critical of such actors, due in part to fears that they are abetting right-wing resistance to government restrictions. They have also voiced criticism that some contrarians appear driven by profit or political motives more than genuine concern about public health.

The deluge of studies and competing interpretations have left citizens in a tough spot, especially when data or conclusions are shared on Twitter or TV without full context – like a handful of puzzle pieces thrown in your face, absent any box top picture to help you fit them together. 

“You can’t expect the public to go through all the science, so you rely on people of authority, someone whom you trust, to parse that for you,” says Aleszu Bajak, a science and data journalist who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston. “But now you have more than just the scientists in their ivory tower throwing out all of this information. You have competing pundits, with different incentives, drawing on different science of varying quality.”

The uncertainties have also posed a challenge for policymakers, who haven’t had the luxury of waiting for the full arc of scientific inquiry to be completed.

“The fact is, science, like everything else, is uncertain – particularly when it comes to predictions,” says John Holdren, who served as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for the duration of President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure. “I think seasoned, experienced decision-makers understand that. They understand that there will be uncertainties, even in the scientific inputs to their decision-making process, and they have to take those into account and they have to seek approaches that are resilient to uncertain outcomes.” 

Some say that in an effort to reassure citizens that shutdowns were implemented based on scientific input, policymakers weren’t transparent enough about the underlying uncertainties. 

“We’ve heard constantly that politicians are following the science. That’s good, of course, but ... especially at the beginning, science is tentative, it changes, it’s evolving fast, it’s uncertain,” Prof. Sir Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, recently told a British Parliament committee. One of the founding partners of his independent institute is Imperial College, whose researchers’ conclusions were a leading driver of U.S. and British government shutdowns. 

“You can’t just have a single top line saying we’re following science,” he adds. “It has to be more dealing with what we know about the science and what we don’t.” 

Rick Bowmer/AP

Granite School District teachers join others gathered at the Granite School District Office on Aug. 4, 2020, in Salt Lake City, to protest the district's plans for reopening. Teachers showed up in numbers to make sure the district's school board knew their concerns.

A focus on uncertainty

One scientist who talks a lot about unknowns is John Ioannidis, a highly cited professor of medicine, epidemiology, and population health at Stanford University in California.

Dr. Ioannidis, who has made a career out of poking holes in his colleagues’ research, agrees that masks and social distancing are effective but says there are open questions about how best to implement them. He has also persistently questioned just how deadly COVID-19 is and to what extent shutdowns are affecting mental health, household transmission to older family members, and the well-being of those with non-COVID-19-related conditions.

It’s very difficult, he says, to do randomized trials for things like how to reopen, and different countries and U.S. states have done things in different ways.

“For each one of these decisions, action plans – people said we’re using the best science,” he says. “But how can it be that they’re all using the best science when they’re so different?”

Many scientists say they and their colleagues have been open about the uncertainties, despite a highly polarized debate around the pandemic and the 2020 election season ramping up. 

“One of the remarkable things about this pandemic is the extent to which many people in the scientific community are explicit about what’s uncertain,” says Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who is working on a study about how biases can affect COVID-19 research. “There has been a sort of hard core of scientists, even with different policy predispositions, who have been insistent on that.”

“In some ways the politicized nature has made people more aware of the uncertainties,” adds Professor Lipsitch, who says Twitter skeptics push him and his colleagues to strengthen their arguments. “That’s a good voice to have in the back of your head.” 

For the Harvard doctor, Alex Berenson is not that voice. But a growing number of frustrated Americans have gravitated toward the former New York Times reporter's brash, unapologetic challenging of prevailing narratives. His following on Twitter has grown from around 10,000 to more than 182,000 and counting. 

Mr. Berenson, who investigated big business before leaving The New York Times in 2010 to write spy novels, dives into government data, quotes from scientific studies, and takes to Twitter daily to rail against what he sees as a dangerous overreaction driven by irrational fear and abetted by a liberal media agenda and corporate interests – particularly tech companies, whose earnings have soared during the shutdowns. He refers satirically to those advocating government restrictions as “Team Apocalypse.”

Dr. Lipsitch says that while public health experts pushing for lockdown like himself could be considered hawks while contrarians like Mr. Berenson could be considered doves, his “name-calling” doesn’t take into account the fact that most scientists have at least a degree of nuance. “It’s really sort of unsophisticated to say there are two camps, but it serves some people’s interest to demonize the other side,” he says.

Mr. Berenson, the author of a controversial 2019 book arguing that marijuana increases the risk of mental illness and violence, has been accused of cherry-picking data and conflating correlation and causation. Amazon initially blocked publication of his booklet “Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1” until Elon Musk got wind of it and called out the tech giant on Twitter. Mr. Berenson prevailed and recently released Part 2 on the platform, which has already become Amazon’s No. 1 best-seller among history of science and medicine e-books.

He strives to broaden the public's contextual understanding of fatality rates, emphasizing that the vast majority of deaths occur among the elderly; in Italy, for instance, the median age of people who died is 81. He calls into question the reliability of COVID-19 death tolls, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can be categorized as such even without a positive test if the disease is assumed to have caused or even contributed to a death.

Earlier this spring, when a prominent model was forecasting overwhelmed hospitals in New York, he pointed out that their projection was quadruple that of the actual need. 

“Nobody had the guts or brains to ask – why is your model off by a factor of four today, and you made it last week?” says Mr. Berenson, referring to the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projection in early April and expressing disappointment that his former colleagues in the media are not taking a harder look at such questions. “I think unfortunately people have been blinded by ideology.”

Politicization of science

Amid a sense of urgency, fear, and frustration with Americans who refuse to fall in line with government restrictions as readily as their European or especially Asian counterparts, Mr. Berenson and Dr. Ioannidis have faced blowback for airing questions about those restrictions and the science behind them.

Mr. Berenson’s book installments have prompted criticism that he’s looking for profits at the expense of public health, which he has denied. Dr. Ioannidis’ involvement in an April antibodies study in Santa Clara, California, which purported to show that COVID-19 is much less deadly than was widely believed was discredited by other scientists due to questions about the accuracy of the test used and a BuzzFeed report that it was partially funded by JetBlue Airways’ cofounder. Dr. Ioannidis says those questions were fully addressed within two weeks in a revised version that showed with far more extensive data that the test was accurate, and adds he had been unaware of the $5,000 donation, which came through the Stanford development office and was anonymized.

The dismay grew when BuzzFeed News reported in July that a month before the Santa Clara study, he had offered to convene a small group of world-renowned scientists to meet with President Donald Trump and help him solve the pandemic “by intensifying efforts to understand the denominator of infected people (much larger than what is documented to-date)” and developing a more targeted, data-driven approach than long-term shutdowns, which he said would “jeopardiz[e] so many lives,” according to emails obtained by BuzzFeed. 

While the right has seized on Dr. Ioannidis’ views and some scientists say it’s hard not to conclude that his work is driven by a political agenda, the Greek doctor maintains that partisanship is antithetical to the scientific method, which requires healthy skepticism, among other things.

“Even the word ‘science’ has been politicized. It’s very sad,” he says, observing that in the current environment, scientific conclusions are used to shame, smear, and “cancel” the opposite view. “I think it’s very unfortunate to use science as a silencer of dissent.”

The average citizen, he adds, is filtering COVID-19 debates through their belief systems, media sources, and political ideology, which can leave science at a disadvantage in the public square. “Science hasn’t been trained to deal with these kinds of powerful companions that are far more vocal and better armed to penetrate into social discourse,” says Dr. Ioannidis.

The polarization has been fueled in part by absolutist pundits. In a recent week, “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC daily hammered home the rising rate in cases, trumpeted the daily death toll, and quoted Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, while “The Tucker Carlson Show” on Fox News did not once mention government data, featuring instead anecdotes from business owners who have been affected by the shutdowns and calling into question the authority of unelected figures such as Dr. Fauci.

Fed on different media diets, it’s not surprising that partisan views on the severity of the pandemic have diverged further in recent months, with 85% of Democrats seeing it as a major threat – nearly double the percent of Republicans, according to a Pew Research poll from mid-July. And in a related division that predates the pandemic, another Pew poll from February showed that Republicans are less likely to support scientists taking an active role in social policy matters – just 43% compared with 73% for Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

“If you have more of a populist type of worldview, where you are concerned that elites and scientists and officials act in their own interests first, it becomes very easy to make assumptions that they are doing something to control the population,” says Prof. Asheley Landrum, a psychologist at Texas Tech University who specializes in science communication.

Beyond following the science

Determining what exactly “the science” says is only one part of the equation; figuring out precisely how to “follow” it poses another set of challenges for policymakers on questions like whether to send students back to school.

“Even if you had all the science pinned down, there are still some tough value judgments about the dangers of multiplying the pandemic or the dangers of keeping kids at home,” says Dr. Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, an engineer and physicist who now co-directs the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard Kennedy School.

Dr. Lipsitch echoes that point and offers an example of two schools that both have a 10% risk of an outbreak. In one, where there are older students from high-income families who are more capable of learning remotely, leaders may decide that the 10% risk isn’t worth reopening. But in another school with the same assessed risk, where the students are younger and many depend on free and reduced lunch, a district may decide the risk is a trade-off they’re willing to make in support of the students’ education and well-being.

“Following the science just isn’t enough,” says Dr. Lipsitch. “It’s incumbent on responsible leaders to use science to do the reasoning about how to do the best thing given your values, but it’s not an answer.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, we have removed our paywall for all pandemic-related stories.

This is a story about the coronavirus vaccine. But not about the vaccine itself. (It doesn’t exist.) Nor whether it will be efficacious. (We simply don’t know yet.)

It’s about how the quest for a vaccine is getting caught up in a political tangle at the heart of the world’s response to the pandemic: the tension between the obviously international scope of COVID-19’s public-health challenge, and national governments’ urge to prioritize their own agendas and their own citizens.

This struggle – a kind of vaccine war – is playing out in real time. Its resolution could go a long way to determining who actually gets a vaccine, if and when a safe and effective one does emerge.

At least so far, it’s the nationalists, not those pushing for a coordinated international plan, who seem to be winning.

A host of countries with major economic clout, sophisticated vaccine labs, or both – including the United States, Britain, European Union countries, Japan, India, China, and Russia – have been pouring billions of dollars into research on a range of possible vaccines and pre-purchasing many hundreds of millions of doses.

But people in the poorer countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with vulnerable populations and overtaxed public health systems, could find themselves last in line, or simply ignored.

There lies the potential peril of the “vaccine nationalism” that the World Health Organization warned of last week.

Baby steps toward cooperation

There have been some signs of internationalism. Scientists and researchers across the globe have been in unprecedentedly close contact in the search for ways to limit the spread of the virus. A number of the companies developing potential vaccines have pledged to supply less developed countries. Even some of the countries rushing to pre-pay for their own stocks have devoted at least some funds for that cause. 

Central to that effort has been a 20-year-old organization called Gavi. It’s a partnership among bodies like the United Nations, the WHO, and the World Bank, national governments, private businesses, and philanthropists, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A Gavi “virtual summit” hosted earlier this summer by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson launched a fund, initially worth $500 million, to purchase COVID-19 vaccines for developing countries. The major U.K.-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca pledged to participate by providing doses of the vaccine it has been working on with Oxford University.

Just last Friday, the Gates Foundation gave $150 million to the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, to produce 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine for less-developed countries.

Yet all of this falls short of a coherent international plan for how COVID-19 vaccines might best be bulk-purchased, produced, bottled, verified as safe and effective, and then distributed worldwide – in both wealthy nations and poorer ones.

The argument in favor of such a plan would seem strong. While scientists are working on some 160 candidate vaccines around the world, and subjecting a few to advanced testing, there’s no way of knowing yet how effective, or safe, any of them will prove, or whether there will be an adequate supply.

There will also be a need for billions of high-standard vials, mainly produced in European countries and China – giving those countries potential leverage if, for instance, an eventually successful vaccine were produced somewhere else and a free-for-all to get hold of it broke out.

Gonzalo Fuentes/AP

French President Emmanuel Macron, (r.), listens as he attends an international videoconference on vaccination on May 4, 2020. Wealthy governments that can afford to pre-purchase promising vaccines, or fund their own laboratories to meet their own needs, risk crowding out developing countries.

Politics prevail, for now

Some degree of “vaccine nationalism” is inevitable and understandable. But the assertive, at times virulent, brand of nationalism in today’s world, and growing tension between its key powers, are making international coordination difficult.

That’s particularly true of the United States. U.S. leadership has been critical to past responses to worldwide public health challenges.

The Trump administration has effectively ruled out pandemic response cooperation with the world’s second-largest power, China, blaming Beijing for the spread of the coronavirus. Far from signaling a readiness to participate in an internationally coordinated plan, President Donald Trump recently announced his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the WHO.

He has also held out the hope of a successful vaccine becoming available to Americans by Election Day on November 3.

Both China and Russia – with domestic political imperatives of their own – are pushing to develop early vaccines. Russia this week actually became the first country formally to approve its vaccine, even before it had completed clinical trials. India is sprinting ahead as well. To the public alarm of health experts there, the government has accelerated normal testing procedures and said it can start rolling out a vaccine by August 15, the country’s Independence Day.

The concern for organizations like the WHO and Gavi is that, since early supplies of any effective vaccine will be insufficient to meet global demand, wealthy states will spend whatever they can afford to buy doses of apparently promising candidates, making them unavailable to the rest of the world.

Proponents of a coordinated international response hope to convince decision-makers – in governments, as well as in pharmaceutical companies – that a far greater degree of international cooperation is a matter of simple enlightened self-interest.

However much national governments have been spending on candidate vaccines, after all, a large number may end up failing. National competition could also snarl global supply chains of vials and other items, not to mention stymie the reopening of borders and reinvigoration of trade if not all countries are equipped to suppress the virus.

Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, made the point at its recent summit. “One thing that has been made all too clear over the past few months is that this [pandemic] does not respect borders,” he said. “This global problem requires a global solution.”

In the early morning hours in the eastern Beirut neighborhood of Gemmayze, hit hard by the mammoth explosion that rocked the Lebanese capital a week ago, hundreds of volunteers are already on the streets with food parcels and brooms flung over their shoulders.

They are offering help where a widely despised government fears to tread.

Perched near a large pile of rubble, an elderly woman watches the volunteers move in and out of buildings to inspect or clean them up; others open boxes and distribute donated food and water.

“I can’t explain why I am still alive, here, talking to you,” Roula, her face etched with both grief and disbelief, says about the blast that shattered the windows and tore through the walls of her first-floor apartment.

Another source of wonder? The absence of any official support from a ruling class that many Lebanese blame for corruption and negligence, leaving 2,750 tons of volatile ammonium nitrate at the Beirut port in the heart of the city. That stock triggered one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, wrecking large swaths of the capital, killing at least 171 people, and injuring 6,000.

“I cry when I think of all the work the Lebanese people are doing to help one another. Even strangers feel like family,” says Roula, who gave only her first name, holding back tears. “But then I think of how the government let this happen. This was a massacre, and the blood is on their hands.”

Even if government support was forthcoming, she says, “they’re not welcome here.”

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Demonstrators wave Lebanese flags during protests near the site of a blast at Beirut's port area on Aug. 11, 2020.

While Lebanese protesters and analysts alike say the explosion has brought the crisis-ridden nation to a turning point, they are wondering how the hundreds of millions of dollars in aid that international donors have pledged can be safely funneled to those who need it most, keeping it out of what they consider the predatory claws of a largely corrupt ruling elite.

“The question is: How do you distribute the money? How do you prioritize it?” asks Rami Khouri, a professor of journalism and the director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut.

“Those decisions cannot be done by the government. You can’t ignore the government either, you can’t de-sovereignize the government,” he says. “But neither can you allow it to keep doing corrupt work, and not doing its work.”

For maximum efficiency, he proposes a consortium that includes “clean” officials, relief agencies, and professionals to ensure the integrity of the cash flow between donors and the NGOs and the United Nations, which will implement the relief work.

“A new mechanism has to be set up,” says Professor Khouri. “Donors have to be used as leverage to force the government to get out of the way.”

International donors pledged $300 million at a conference Sunday convened by President Emmanuel Macron of France, Lebanon’s former colonial power. They stipulated that the assistance should be “directly delivered to the Lebanese population, with utmost efficiency and transparency.”

How that will be achieved is not yet clear, as street protests against a corrupt, incompetent, and sectarian ruling class – which first erupted nationwide last October – have reignited in recent days with renewed venom.

Hannah McKay/Reuters

A man stands next to graffiti on Aug. 11, 2020, outside Beirut's damaged port, in the aftermath of the massive explosion that damaged much of Lebanon's capital.

Demonstrators have rigged up gallows, calling for vengeance in slogans such as, “Hang the authorities first.”

Monday night, the government resigned en masse – the second cabinet to be toppled by popular anger in nine months – further complicating any chain of command for relief distribution.

“I discovered that the system of corruption was bigger than the state and that the state is bound by this system, and that it is not possible to confront it or get rid of it,” said Prime Minister Hassan Diab, who blamed entrenched interests when announcing his resignation. Analysts and protesters point to the sectarian distribution of power – and the same top players for decades – as the source of much of Lebanon’s corruption.

Even as protesters have implored donors not to channel funds through the hands of state institutions that they deem untrustworthy, the scale of the damage – estimated at as much as $15 billion – will require a coordinated repair effort.

For a relatively small grassroots relief organization like Shaabemasouleyati (My people, my responsibility), which got its start last December assisting families in need during an economic crisis, the pivot to post-explosion support has been natural but daunting.

The group is one of the many civil society organizations that have mobilized thousands of Lebanese citizens to clear debris and restore a minimal degree of normalcy. It has done everything from sending nurses and paramedics to check up on elderly residents or tend to the injured in the Mar Mikhael neighborhood, to deploying its engineers to conduct preliminary assessments of damaged buildings.

Their reports are being logged in a database of damaged houses and streets so as to speed the process of repairs.

“The government has not taken responsibility for the explosion, nor for what happened after the explosion,” says founder and director Afif Ayad. Help came “purely because the people were there from every corner of the country,” he says.

Donor funds, he insists, should be sent with “utmost transparency and with trusted NGOs actually giving the money to the people in need, [which] would be one big step in the right direction.”

That view is echoed by Bujar Hoxha, the CARE country director for Lebanon, who notes that a “triple crisis” was already afflicting the Lebanese – economic collapse, political instability, and the coronavirus – even before the explosion.

“It’s critical that we agree on an approach and mechanism with other NGOs, in order to have massive funds flow without any doubts and concerns,” says Mr. Hoxha.

Since the explosion a number of NGOs have sprung up, including several diaspora groups that have “created a coalition amongst themselves,” raised millions of dollars, and made their own judgments about needs, says Maha Yahya, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

“That’s good, at that scale, but when we are talking about huge money like $300 million, you do need a coherent and cohesive needs assessment, that everyone uses ... and this is something the government needs to be involved with,” she says.

Hussein Malla/AP

People watch the moment of the massive explosion on a giant screen as they gather Aug. 11, 2020, in honor of the victims at the scene of last week's explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, that killed more than 170 people.

International and local authorities have the experience of the aftermath of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Ms. Yahya points out. That 34-day conflict destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs.

Back then, a multi-donor emergency fund was created, funneling funds through the United Nations, but “there was an excess of funds in de-mining, and far too little funding in [other] vital sectors,” Ms. Yahya recalls.

But the key instruments today are NGOs on the ground, “providing the oversight, [which] will then make sure that the money is not falling into the wrong hands,” she says.

Meanwhile, Lebanese will continue piecemeal efforts to help in any way they can, such as a new hotline to reach engineers and architects set up by the American University of Beirut, which dispatches teams to inspect damaged houses and apartments and rule whether they are safe enough to return to.

The initiative is still small-scale, and has resulted in the inspection of some 100 houses so far, says George Saad, an associate professor in AUB’s environmental engineering department, who set up the hotline and is creating a database.

He says he is glad that international donors seem intent on disbursing their money through NGOs, rather than the government, but only as long as they work together.

A coordinating committee will be critical to “ensure that NGOs are not crossing each other while helping people,” he says. His database of damage could “create and build transparency,” a precursor, he hopes, “that leads to the structure that can support millions in aid.”

Courtesy of Bongie Moyo-Bango

The Rev. Purity Malinga, the first woman elected to be the presiding bishop of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, speaks in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa.

Growing up, Purity Malinga’s faith taught her that God was perfect.

But the people who believed in Him, she soon realized, were not. 

This, after all, was apartheid South Africa, and no matter how equally God saw her, she was still a Black woman in a world where both her race and her gender were strikes against her.

So when she took the pulpit last September as the first woman elected to lead the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, she addressed members bluntly.

“The humanity of women is diminished every day in our society and in churches,” the presiding bishop-elect said. “If indeed we believe as a church we are called to proclaim the gospel that heals and transforms, it is time to act.”

Over the last three centuries, churches have played a complicated role in South African history, as they have nearly everywhere in the world. At times, they have been the engines of colonialism and segregation, giving a biblical mandate to human bigotry. But they have also been the instruments of its undoing. The Methodist Church, for instance, was banned in part of the country in the 1970s for its opposition to apartheid. It counted among its members some of the most forceful voices for racial equality, including Nelson Mandela. 

But in recent years, the Methodist Church here has faced a new reckoning, as its female leadership tries to break the stained-glass ceiling – a struggle mirrored in many other faiths. Like many religious institutions in South Africa after apartheid, the church has struggled to reconcile its lofty ideals around justice and equality with its treatment of women.

Now, a generation of women leaders in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) is making a forceful argument. The church must be the change it wants to see in the world.

“Religion has to be a moving vehicle for social change,” says the Rev. Mantima Thekiso, a young Black minister in Johannesburg. “Otherwise, it loses its relevance.”

Theory vs. practice

For Bishop Malinga, the church’s inner battle was part of its identity for as long as she could remember. As a child growing up in a rural community, she says, her all-Black Methodist congregation was mostly made up of women, and she never second-guessed the idea that they were its natural leaders. Outside those walls, however, MCSA wrestled with whether to ordain women, allowing it only in 1976.

In church, she was told that Methodists believed all people were equal. In 1958, the church had become one of the first denominations to forcefully reject apartheid countrywide, promising it would never segregate its churches, because they were “one and undivided” by race. But as a young seminarian, “I came to realize there were still white churches and Black churches, and that in the white churches, I was made to know I was an outsider,” she says. “I’ve always managed that contradiction by trying to differentiate between human frailty and the perfection of God.” 

But godly ideals and human failings frequently crashed head-on in apartheid South Africa. In her early days as a minister in the 1980s, Ms. Malinga says, male colleagues – Black and white – told her outright that she shouldn’t be there. They quoted biblical verses saying that women should be seen and not heard. In ministry, they assigned her to “women’s tasks” like teaching children.

“It was only when I went to study [for my master’s] at Harvard that I was exposed to a feminist theology,” she says. “It made me realize – it’s not me who is crazy, it is the church that’s crazy.”

And being at Harvard also taught her something else – that racism was not a uniquely South African affliction.

“After growing up under apartheid, I was so excited to experience what it was like to be in a democratic country where I would be seen as a full human being,” she says. But if Boston’s racism was more subtle than South Africa’s, it was no less stinging. “You feel it in the way people talk to you, in the condescending way things are explained to you – that you’re not wanted here.”

When she returned home in 1992, however, the South Africa she had known before was giving way to something new. Two years earlier, Mr. Mandela had been released from prison after 27 years, and the country was preparing for its first democratic election. The Methodist Church, too, was trying to find its footing.

Schalk van Zuydam/AP/File

People sing after praying for former South African President Nelson Mandela, inside the Methodist church that he attended as a child, in Mqhekezweni, South Africa, Dec. 11, 2013.

The church had begun trying to integrate its churches – sending Black ministers to largely white congregations, and white ministers to Black ones. But for women, little changed.

In 1999, Ms. Malinga was appointed bishop for a region along South Africa’s east coast. But as the church’s only female bishop, she says she struggled to make her voice heard. “It’s an experience I wouldn’t wish for any woman,” she says. “The men I worked with felt sorry for me. They didn’t take me as their equal. There was no expectation that I would be listened to and respected like any other leader in the church.” She left the post in 2008.

“As a woman minister, you sometimes feel like a token,” says Ms. Thekiso. “You’re the example of what female excellence looks like.  But if you fail, women as a whole fail too.”

Sudden momentum

By 2016, only 17% of Methodist ministers were women, and they made up just 4% of the regional leaders. But a vocal campaign was underway to elect more female leaders, led by a group within the church called Women in Ministry. “I challenge the [Methodist Church of Southern Africa] to be true to its words,” urged the Rev. Libuseng Lebaka-Ketshabile, another Black female minister, at the church’s annual conference in 2016. “How long shall the church renege on its responsibility of affirming women?”

Momentum might have kept building quietly, were it not for a sudden scandal that thrust the issue into the public eye. In January 2019, the Rev. Vukile Mehana, an influential leader with close ties to the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress, was caught on tape dismissing the idea that a man could ever be ordained by a female minister.

“I do not care whether you call that patriarchy or whatever rubbish you want to call it, but … this should not be allowed in the church,” he said.

The uproar – in and outside the church – was massive.

“There was absolute horror within the church. We had to contend with the fact that this is us,” says Dion Forster, a Methodist minister and theologian at Stellenbosch University. “This is one of our most prominent members, who is socially progressive, politically progressive, and this is how he speaks about his female colleagues.”

The reaction was swift. Later last year, MCSA elected Ms. Malinga to be its presiding bishop – the church’s highest office – and appointed three other women as regional bishops.

For Ms. Malinga and other women, it was a step in the right direction, and a big one at that. But it was far from all that was needed. So when she prepared her first speech as presiding bishop-elect, Ms. Malinga decided she wouldn’t let anyone off the hook.

“I wanted to talk about the things that are a disgrace to this church – how we preach change and talk about transformation in society, when in truth transformation is taking a long time in the church itself,” she says. “This was my time to call for the Methodist Church to be true to itself.”

A video posted on the New England Aquarium’s Facebook page shows a group of penguins waddling around the rocks in the Boston aquarium’s giant ocean tank. Seemingly indifferent to the crowd noises, they follow their beloved routine – sliding off the wet rocks into the pool, emerging, shivering the water off their bodies, and plunging back into the pool – all set to the rhythm of treats tossed into their vivid orange beaks. 

But something is different. There are no actual visitors.

As the pandemic filled the aquarium with unusual silence, biologists had to get creative. To help the animals transition in and out of the lockdown smoothly, they played recordings of crowds from portable speakers.

Globally, more than 700 million people visit zoos and aquariums each year. But when the pandemic put the world on pause, animals used to daily human presence were deprived of visitors. Amid the eerie silence, say animal keepers, some animals were disturbed, others appeased. 

Animals at zoos and aquariums are having their own lockdowns and tentative reopenings, and, thanks to our shared evolutionary heritage, their experiences might be more like ours than we think, says Leigh Clayton, vice president of animal care and welfare at the New England Aquarium. Like their human counterparts, animals, too, showed resilience and adaptability in unprecedented times. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

An intern feeds a turtle in the main tank exhibit at the New England Aquarium on July 31, 2020, in Boston.

“At heart, we’re all animals,” Dr. Clayton says. “We’re all capable of learning. We are all capable of responding to change.”

Teaching resilience

Wild animals tend to be more resilient, says Brian Aucone, senior vice president for animal sciences at the Denver Zoo. They deal with variation daily and adapt to unexpected changes in routine. For captive animals, whose routine is dictated by regular feedings and cleanings of their cages or tanks, things are different. 

Just as otters can be trained, captive animals can build resilience, too. To prepare captive animals to deal with and handle changes, Mr. Aucone says, animal keepers in zoos across the world regularly work to build resilience in animals born or raised in captivity. 

“We don’t want them to be afraid. We want them to go with the flow like they would naturally,” Mr. Aucone says. “And so we actually work through that with our animals as well. So we try and prepare them for the unexpected, so that when it happens, they just go with it.”

By slowly introducing new elements into captive animals’ routine, they can easily adapt. 

Dr. Clayton and the team at the New England Aquarium understood that. There, the animal keepers worked to spread out that transition, by adjusting the lighting in tanks gradually, keeping feeding and cleaning schedules the same, and slowly increasing staff presence before reopening.

At the aquarium, they played sounds of crowds to desensitize the birds. At the Denver Zoo, staffers would spend extra time keeping an emu or a giraffe company. At the Stone Zoo, in Stoneham, Massachusetts, the staff gave a bubble machine to the gibbons. During their coffee breaks, animal keepers sat with Dunkin, a North American river otter who seemed to miss attention from visitors. Just like many humans, animals needed an extra hand transitioning in and out of the lockdown. 

But whether they needed a few bubbles or an extra wave from staff, the animals adapted a lot better than Americans did, says Pete Costello, assistant curator at Stone Zoo.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

People visit the New England Aquarium on July 31, 2020, in Boston.

In Colorado, Mr. Aucone echoes that thought. “We try and control what happens around us,” he says. “The animals just deal with it.”

Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University who has written extensively about animal emotions, suggests that some animals may have benefited from the absence of crowds. Citing reports that some animals have begun mating or taking over their enclosures during the lockdown, he suggests that some zoos and aquariums might do well with a crowd-free day each week.

“The zoos have probably learned a little bit from this whole pandemic that many animals do very well without the public,” he says. “And so giving them that option, I think, is important.”

“Here for each other” 

It’s 10 a.m. at the New England Aquarium. Two weeks after reopening, only a handful of visitors are approaching the main entrance, waiting under the sun to get in line.

“Walk like a penguin,” a sign advises visitors as they enter, encouraging them to follow the one-way traffic and respect social distancing. Before the pandemic, during a normal summer day, the aquarium could welcome 1,600 visitors in an hour. Now, that’s the maximum number of visitors coming through in an entire day.

Michael Cutter from Rockport, Massachusetts, and Michelle Wright from Beverly, Massachusetts, haven’t been to the aquarium in 40 years. So for them, the aquarium feels different in many ways. 

“We’re happy it’s open, and we’re happy there are not a huge amount of crowds,” Mr. Cutter says. “People aren’t on top of you,” he adds, relieved to see the safety procedures in place. 

“You can’t have that when it’s crowded,” Mr. Cutter says, pointing to the tank filled with colorful fish he was looking at, no other visitors surrounding him. 

But the relative quiet also means less business. 

“I believe in supporting the aquarium,” he says, adding that now is the perfect opportunity to support museums, zoos, aquariums, and the city as the pandemic ravaged the economy. 

As zoos and aquariums across the country were forced to close mid-March, at the beginning of the busiest season, administrators have been forced to trim budgets through layoffs and pay cuts. 

“We’re very excited to have guests back. And it’s been a struggle at times. But most zoos and aquariums continue to struggle with the limited numbers and such,” Mr. Aucone says. 

As the day advances at the aquarium, visitors slowly start to congregate around the tank of the penguins, unfazed by the groups of mask-wearing families staring down at them. A 3-year-old named Mateo points to the penguins playing in the pool. “Hi, penguins!” he says.

If the pandemic brought humans closer to each other, it might have reinforced the bond between humans and animals as well.

“Knowing we’re kind of here for each other, as much as the animals benefited from our care, I think we benefited from them, too,” Mr. Costello says.

Reuters

Demonstrators in Minsk set up a barricade during an Aug. 10 rally following the presidential election in Belarus.

Earlier this year, the new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, proclaimed that Europe must do more in managing crises near its borders. It must “step up” and be “more assertive in the world.” This week, her words finally met their match in Belarus, a country at the center of Eastern Europe.

A flawed election in Belarus on Sunday has led to mass protests in a number of cities and violent crackdowns by special forces. To her credit, Ms. von der Leyen has called on the country’s longtime dictator, President Alexander Lukashenko, to publish accurate poll results. And she added, “Harassment and violent repression of peaceful protesters has no place in Europe.”

A special European Union meeting will be held Friday to discuss the crisis. Lithuania is caring for the safety of the election’s main opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who was forced into exile. And Germany, which stated that there was “absolutely no sign” of a free election in Belarus, has demanded that “peaceful protesters” in detention be released.

Is this Europe’s moment to step up and safeguard democracy in the world, perhaps leading instead of following the United States in that role? The coming days will tell if the EU sees itself as something more than a trade union with minimal engagement in promoting democracy.

The democratic revolution underway in Belarus is one of the unfinished pieces in the restructuring of Europe after the collapse of communism in 1989. With the U.S. largely preoccupied with a presidential election and deciding its role in the world, the EU has an opportunity to support the expansion of its values on the continent. Given the size of the crowds coming out for Ms. Tikhanovskaya during the campaign, Belarus is ripe for a transition. The country is considered the last Soviet-style dictatorship in Europe.

Germany has called for sanctions against the leaders of Belarus, not only for the rigged election but also for the brutality against demonstrators. Such actions would show the EU, despite its own current problems, is stepping up in the world. The first step is right in its backyard. The people of Belarus have clearly made a choice for democracy. Now the EU can, too.