England's discriminatory COVID-19 travel rules and Asia's progressing vaccination drives
We hope you had a great week. In this issue of The Checklist, we take a look at how England's COVID-19 travel rules have been denounced as discriminatory for refusing to recognise vaccines administered in other parts of the world.
In Africa, the pandemic has pushed sex workers online and they are increasingly becoming victims of digital abuse. We bring you Reuters coverage of challenges faced by the sex workers community while treading the online space. On a positive note, we bring you an update on the progress made in ramping up COVID-19 vaccination drives in Asia, which used to lag behind western nations.
Do read highlights from our blog posts on the launch of FACT CHAMP, a much awaited collaborative project to counter misinformation, and our team member's experience of presenting our paper on claim matching at The Association for Computational Linguistics conference (ACL) 2021.
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From our blog
FACT-CHAMP
New project to increase collaboration between fact-checkers, academics, and community leaders to counter misinformation onlineMeedan; the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania and its FactCheck.org project; the University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Connecticut, and Rutgers University; and AuCoDe, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence to detect and analyze disinformation. have received a 12-month, $750k grant from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator to create a new platform to narrow the gap between research into misinformation and responses designed to curb it.
The latest top stories
England’s Covid travel rules spark outrage around the world (The Guardian)
England’s Covid travel rules and refusal to recognise vaccines administered across huge swaths of the world have sparked outrage and bewilderment across Latin America, Africa and south Asia, with critics denouncing what they called an illogical and discriminatory policy.
“How can a Pfizer or Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccine that is administered [in Latin America] not be sufficient for someone to be allowed in? I just don’t see how this can be acceptable.” — A Latin American diplomat.
"I can’t see any health criteria to justify this. I can’t see any reason other than a racial issue, a xenophobia issue." — Maiara Folly, a UK-based Brazilian academic who runs who runs the thinktank Plataforma Cipó
African sex workers face digital abuse as pandemic pushes them online (Reuters)
Sex worker groups in Africa have reported an increase in complaints from members who are increasingly becoming victims of online abuse. As sex workers switch to websites, apps and video calls in response to restrictions such as lockdowns and curfews related to the Covid-19 pandemic, incidents such as non-consensual pornography and blackmail, where sexually graphic material is posted online by their clients without their agreement are becoming more common.
"Sex workers in Africa have learned how to keep themselves safe with clients in the real world. They know precautions to take, like to inform peers of their movements and to check in at regular times. But in the virtual world, most have no idea. It is a relatively new space for them. They don't understand the risks and how to be safe and there is no information available to sex workers about digital security and data protection" — Grace Kamau, coordinator for the African Sex Workers Alliance
How Asia, Once a Vaccination Laggard, Is Revving Up Inoculations (The New York Times)
As the United States and Europe ramped up their Covid-19 vaccination programs, the Asia-Pacific region, once lauded for its pandemic response, struggled to get them off the ground. Now, many of those laggards are speeding ahead, lifting hopes of a return to normality in nations resigned to repeated lockdowns and onerous restrictions.
"In a contrast with the United States, vaccines were never a polarizing issue in Asia-Pacific. Although each country has had to contend with its own anti-vaccine movements, they have been relatively small. They have never benefited from an ecosystem — sympathetic media, advocacy groups and politicians — that has allowed misinformation to influence the populace. Overall, most Asians have trusted their governments to do the right thing, and they were willing to put the needs of the community over their individual freedoms." — Sui-Lee Wee, Damien Cave and Ben Dooley
What’s new at Meedan
From ACL 2021 with love: How I learned to stop worrying and love the BERT By Ashkan Kazemi
The Association for Computational Linguistics conference (ACL) 2021, a top publication venue and event for research in natural language processing (NLP), happened virtually from August 1-6, and I was fortunate to present our own paper at the conference: “Claim Matching Beyond English to Scale Global Fact-Checking”.