Most states have opted for three hours of classes during the day, while in states such as Karnataka students can attend classes twice or thrice a week.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi receives a COVID-19 vaccination shot by doctor Brian Monahan, attending physician Congress of the United States in her office on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on December 18, 2020.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
A number of US officials have shared images of themselves receiving the first doses of their coronavirus vaccine, just one week after the US Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech two-shot vaccine for emergency use.
While it is up to state governments to determine how to distribute the vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended it first got to healthcare workers and at-risk people, like nursing home residents.
Lawmakers and other officials have early access as part of "continuity of government" protocols and have shared their experiences receiving the vaccine, hoping to instill trust in it.
Vice President Mike Pence and Surgeon General Jerome Adams were vaccinated on Friday in an event that was broadcast by major news outlets and live-streamed by the White House.
Vice President Mike Pence on Friday received the first of the two-part COVID-19 vaccine, developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, in a public event that was live-streamed by the White House and carried by major news outlets.
His wife, Second Lady Karen Pence, and US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, also publicly received their first dose of the vaccine on Friday. Their public vaccinations marked an attempt by the White House to convince Americans that the vaccine is safe amid baseless conspiracy theories and other fears surrounding it.
While experts have said the vaccine for COVID-19 will not be widely available until later next year, a number of lawmakers and other officials moved to the front of the line to get publicly vaccinated as part of "continuity of government" protocols. Though, as RollCall reported, it's unclear from which supply these vaccines are coming.
Many lawmakers and officials, like Pence on Friday, have since shared photos of themselves receiving the shots as a means of instilling public trust in the vaccine, which was authorized last week by the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency usage.
The vaccine rollout comes during a nationwide surge in COVID-19 cases, which has killed more than 315,000 people in the US, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Here are lawmakers and officials who have shared news of their vaccinations.
Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence were vaccinated in Washington, DC, on Friday morning in an event that was live-streamed by the White House and broadcast by major news networks.
US Vice President Mike Pence receives the COVID-19 vaccine on December 18, 2020.
SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images
US Surgeon General Jerome Adams also received a vaccine during the live-streamed event Friday.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams receives a COVID-19 vaccine to promote the safety and efficacy of the vaccine at the White House on December, 18, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, said he took the vaccine on Friday, tweeting: "It's time for Congress to do its job and finish what our bipartisan group started by passing emergency COVID relief."
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said he received the vaccination for COVID-19 on Friday.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, tweeted a photo of himself receiving the vaccine Saturday, and said, "if enough of us take it, we will get back to normal lives."
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on Saturday tweeted photos of him receiving the vaccine for COVID-19.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, also received the first of the two-shot Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Friday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi receives a COVID-19 vaccination shot by doctor Brian Monahan, attending physician Congress of the United States in her office on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on December 18, 2020.
ANNA MONEYMAKER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, on Saturday shared her experience getting vaccinated, telling her followers: "I'd *never* ask you to do something I wasn't willing to do myself."
In a photo posted to Twitter, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed her receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, said he was vaccinated on Friday, adding that he hoped "that every American over the age of 16 will get vaccinated as soon as they are able."
Majority Whip James Clyburn received the COVID-19 vaccination on Friday, he said.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also said he received the vaccine on Friday and said "vaccines are how we beat this virus."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell received the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Friday.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, said she received the first shot on Saturday, adding "the vaccine is safe, effective, and will save lives."
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren shared a photo Saturday of her receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.
Other officials who have said they have been vaccinated for COVID-19 include Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., talks during an interview with MSNBC in the Russell Rotunda in Washington on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020.
Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Tech companies built social media networks to connect us and search engines to give us better information about the world, yet Americans are becoming more divided than ever.
The tech industry isn't entirely to blame for polarization, but there are influential economic, psychological, technological, and political forces that explain why it has played such a significant role.
Business Insider asked 11 experts on everything from conspiracies to digital ethnography to psychology to help explain some of the visible and invisible forces at work in our digital lives.
They revealed that Americans' online worlds are much more polarized than our offline ones, and that learning more about how the internet works may help us reach some common ground.
Americans are becoming increasingly intolerant of those with opposing views, and our increasingly digital lives are part of the problem.
Between 1975 and 2017, animosity between Democrats and Republicans nearly doubled, according to researchers from Stanford University. And that survey was conducted before most of Donald Trump's presidency, before the COVID-19 pandemic, before George Floyd's death, and before the 2020 US presidential election.
But polarization is a complicated topic, and the ways that technology influences our politics and democracy aren't as simple as we're often led to believe. There are multiple ways to measure polarization, for example, with each explaining a different way we're divided. And "filter bubbles" vastly oversimplify the forces that shape how we interact online.
Documentaries like "The Social Dilemma" and "The Great Hack" have awakened many Americans to some of the powerful ways tech companies can, intentionally or unintentionally, influence our behavior in the "real" world. Yet these explain only some of the economic, psychological, technological, and political forces at play.
Of course, the tech industry is only partly to blame - we play a significant role as users, consumers, and citizens as well. But that requires a deeper understanding of how the internet is designed so that we can navigate both our online and offline worlds in ways that humanize others, make us better informed, and help us find common ground.
To pull back the curtain on some of the internet's invisible hands, Business Insider spoke with 11 experts whose backgrounds include, among other things, ethnography, misinformation, political science, cognitive psychology, media, and mental health.
Here's what they had to say:
Individuals, communities, and the digital village
Jolynna Sinanan, University of Sydney
Jolynna Sinanan
Jolynna Sinanan, University of Sydney
So far, that conversation has been "all about the technology, according to Jolynna Sinanan, a digital ethnographer at the University of Sydney in Australia, "whereas it should be the other way around." The internet and social media have only become widely used in the past decade or so, meaning we're just beginning to establish norms around how people should or shouldn't behave online.
Instead, she said, we should be asking "what does being a person in a community mean?"
In Trinidad, where Sinanan has spent the last few years researching social media usage, there are stronger desires to fit in with one's community, while in America there is a stronger sense of individualism. Those values play out in people's online behavior, she said.
"All the sorts of extremes we've seen this year [in America] is very much the externalization of the 'I matter as an individual," she said, adding that Americans' tendency to engage in political conversations with complete strangers or share conspiracy theories is partly because they place more value in their individual identity.
Interestingly, young people, Sinanan said, are "the first group to figure out" how social and cultural norms map to online spaces like TikTok and Snapchat, and "they learn about privacy, community, and the village, and how to negotiate that very, very early on."
The internet, it turns out, may just need to grow up a bit.
Economic incentives
Samantha Bradshaw, Stanford University
Samantha Bradshaw
Samantha Bradshaw, Stanford University
No conversation about social media's impact on our politics and democracy is complete without talking about their business models.
"One of the main tensions," according to Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher at Stanford who studies that exact intersection, "is this tension between the economic incentives of platforms, and then democracy."
When Facebook designs its news feed, Twitter identifies trending topics, and YouTube recommends videos, their first goal is keeping us online longer because it helps them sell more ads and make more money, Bradshaw said, which can "conflict with more democratic design choices."
As criticism of that business model has grown, companies have reframed that goal slightly. Instead of prioritizing content that keeps us online longer, they're now boosting posts and videos that drive "engagement," or in Facebook's case, "spark conversations" and lead to "meaningful social interactions."
However, as Bradshaw pointed out: "things that are meaningful for conversation and for Facebook might not actually be meaningful for democracy."
Research shows that people are more likely to engage with content when they're angry and scared, and as a result, Bradshaw said, prioritizing engaging content reinforces "affective polarization."
Affective polarization
Dr. Karin Tamerius, Smart Politics
Karin Tamerius
Dr. Karin Tamerius, Smart Politics
The word "polarized" probably makes many Americans think about political polarization — that is, a wide gap between our political beliefs and preferences.
But in the US, it's not our policy preferences that are growing farther apart, according to Dr. Karin Tamerius, a political and social psychologist who started Smart Politics, a progressive group focused on changing how people talk about politics.
"It's emotional polarization, it's what political scientists call 'affective polarization,'" she said. "Most of all, it's negative feelings about each other, so people on the left don't like people on the right and people on the right don't like people on the left, even though they're not actually that much farther apart on policy than they were in the past."
Social media has helped fuel that animosity by creating a space without a "clear set of norms," which has in turn brought out people's worst behavior, Tamerius said. As hard as it is to have political conversations with people offline, she added, having them online without those norms "can really explode."
"And if that's the only interaction that people have with someone who thinks differently from them, it's going to feed these perceptions that the other is bad or evil in some way," she said.
Shades of gray
Joel Benenson, Benenson Strategy Group
Benenson Strategy Group
Joel Benenson, Benenson Strategy Group
Joel Benenson, a pollster who consulted for Barack Obama's presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 as well as Hillary Clinton's in 2016, said that surveys his polling firm has conducted support the idea that Americans' political beliefs actually haven't shifted that dramatically in the past decade.
While those nuances often get lost on social media, Benenson said that's one advantage of the survey methods that pollsters use — including online surveys, phone calls, text, and in-person focus groups — to learn about people's beliefs and attitudes.
"What you have to do is continually ask questions that are provocative in ways that allow you to look at the answers not always as black-and-white questions," he said, because "there are few attitudes or values that people bring to the table that don't have shades of gray… they are not absolutist."
Cognitive echo chambers
Moshen Mosleh, MIT
Mohsen Mosleh
Mohsen Mosleh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
One dimension where Americans are particularly divided, at least in terms of their social media habits, is their personality traits.
Mohsen Mosleh, a data scientist and cognitive psychologist at MIT, said that his research has identified "cognitive echo chambers."
"People who rely more on their intuitions," Mosleh said, tend to follow more promotional accounts and get-rich-quick scams. "Those who are analytical thinkers tend to avoid" those types of accounts, he said, instead favoring weightier topics such as politics.
Personality traits, like the "big five" (often referred to as OCEAN), are often more predictive of how we use social media than our political ideologies, Mosleh said.
Perceptual filtering
David Sabin-Miller, Northwestern University
David Sabin-Miller
David Sabin-Miller, Northwestern University
People may perceive the same political content differently based on how they view the world to begin with, and that can shift how they react to it.
David Sabin-Miller, a graduate student at Northwestern University, built a mathematical model to help explain how those subjective responses — a psychological phenomenon known as "perceptual filtering" — can fuel polarization online.
"Perceptual filtering is how we're all participating in constructing our own distribution of content that is either comfortable to us or enticingly uncomfortable," Sabin-Miller said, referring to content we disagree with but may enjoy consuming because it gives us a "sense of righteousness."
As a result, even if society itself isn't becoming more polarized, Sabin-Miller said, "individuals have a sort of feedback with the environment where they can push themselves farther and farther to one side of the other just because they're fed different information."
Conspiracy entrepreneurs
Russell Muirhead, Dartmouth University
Eli Burakian
Russell Muirhead, Dartmouth University
Before social media, most Americans got the bulk of their news from a handful of cable news stations, radio shows, and print newspapers or magazines. For economic reasons, those outlets often catered their content to broad audiences, meaning there was a larger common set of facts on which people based their opinions.
But social media platforms have created "information flows that fit our preferences pretty precisely," according to Russell Muirhead, a political science professor at Dartmouth University.
In doing so, he said, they've created "conspiracy entrepreneurs."
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made it possible for creators to make money by attracting a much smaller number of people to their page or channel, even if they're peddling dubious ideas or products, Muirhead said.
"If people can sell QAnon to a fairly narrow audience, they can make money doing that," he said. "That didn't used to exist, there was no occasion for that kind of entrepreneurial activity."
Selective thinking
Helen Lee Bouygues, Reboot Foundation
Reboot Foundation
Helen Lee Bouygues, Reboot Foundation
Fake news and misinformation has undeniably been on the rise in recent years. But our susceptibility to it is, in part, actually a symptom of a lack of critical thinking skills suitable for the digital age, argues Helen Lee Bouygues, who launched her organization, Reboot Foundation, to tackle that exact problem.
Social media platforms and search engines use algorithms and design choices that promote "selective thinking" — where we gravitate toward information that confirms our existing beliefs — rather than critical thinking, Bouygues said.
For example, Facebook makes it difficult to distinguish between a link from a reliable news source or government agency versus a random blogger, while Google surfaces sites you've viewed in the past and designs its results page so people rarely make it past the first few results.
Bouygues said we need more tools and skills to help us "fight against the challenges of digital learning and gathering information through visual media."
"One of the biggest liberties is liberty of thinking," she said. "If we can't do our own metacognition and thinking about our own thinking, which is what critical thinking helps you do, then we're just a little bit like the number in 'Men In Black.'"
User-driven filter bubbles
Francesca Tripodi, University of North Carolina
Francesca Tripodi
Francesca Tripodi, University of North Carolina
Algorithms don't just influence us, however, we also influence them.
"Users drive these filter bubbles as well," according to Francesca Tripodi, a professor of sociology and media at the University of North Carolina.
Many people think of Google — which accounts for 90% of all online searches — and other search engines as neutral providers of information, but really they're designed to return the results that are most relevant based on our search queries, Tripodi said.
"The keywords that we enter are driven by us, not by the search engine that we choose," she said, giving the example of how searching for "undocumented workers" versus "illegal aliens" will return wildly different results about the topic of immigration.
"Because we come to these search engines with such drastically different ways of seeing the world," Tripodi said, we're essentially "keeping ourselves bubbled in information that only reaffirms what we already think we know about a topic."
There's a lot of focus on assessing the bias or credibility of an information source, but we also need to assess our starting point, Tripodi said.
Performative activism
Tina Harris, Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University
Tina Harris, Louisiana State University
After George Floyd's killing sparked nationwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism in America, social media became a major outlet for people to express their views on the topics.
That has exposed a lot of explicit racism, but also subtler — and sometimes more harmful — racism, according to Tina Harris, a professor of race, media, and literacy at Louisiana State University.
Harris described a phenomenon of "performative activism," where people say they support social justice on public social media profiles, but their words and actions in their private, social, and professional lives at times have the opposite impact.
"'It's not just, what are they presenting on social media, but what happens when the camera is away," she said. "Their public face and their private face — do they actually match up?"
Harris said the Kardashians come to mind as one example of this because, while they've used their social media followings to push for things like prison reform and protest hate speech, they've also engaged in lots of cultural appropriation.
Offline recovery
Jonathan Jenkins, Massachusetts General Hospital
Jonathan Jenkins
Dr. Jonathan Jenkins, Massachusetts General Hospital
There's a growing body of research showing how social media networks exploit our psychology and emotions to keep us online longer. But just as important is what that keeps us from doing instead.
Jenkins, who helps everyone from athletes to first responders to executives develop mental strategies to cope with stress and anxiety, said that a key focus of his coaching is mental and physical recovery. Addiction to social media, he said, can also keep us from recovering properly.
"It takes away time that people could be resting and recovering and building their mental health or their emotional health and resilience," he said. An hour on social media could be spent meditating, taking a nap, reconnecting with family and friends, planning for the next day so it's not so stressful, or just relaxing.
Fortunately, Jenkins added, "you don't need it as much as you think you do. You existed completely in a healthy way before social media."
Governments need to set a framework before we can exercise our own rights.
Kiyoshi Hijiki/Getty Images
Individual rights and state power aren't opposites, political theorist Martha Ackelsberg says — in fact, government policies create a framework for us to exercise our rights.
She believes the federal and state governments failed to guide us through the pandemic, forcing many of people to confront personal choices — such as when and how they could leave their homes.
Ackelsberg explains goals cannot be achieved by individual actions, so governments can and should mandate rules that help us exercise our individual rights.
I've been thinking a lot, recently, about the tension between demanding "individual rights" - in the sense of deciding whether or not to wear a mask - and calling for more action on the part of our government to protect us from the coronavirus pandemic.
I'm a political theorist, which means I study how communities are organized, how power is exercised and how people relate to one another in and between communities. I've realized - through talking to friends, and thinking about the protests against COVID-19-related restrictions that have taken place around the country - that many people do not understand that individual rights and state power are not really opposites.
The laws and policies that governments enact set the framework for the exercise of our rights. So, inaction on the part of government does not necessarily empower citizens. It can, effectively, take away our power, leaving us less able to act to address our needs.
Those goals cannot be pursued individually without governments to help create the conditions necessary for collective life. As Thomas Hobbes recognized almost four centuries ago, if everyone just does what they please, no one can trust anyone. We end up with chaos, uncertainty and a "war of all against all."
Rights become worthless.
This paradox - of the need for government to enable the effective pursuit of individual aims - is particularly extreme in the situation of COVID-19 and its attendant economic crisis. Amid a rampaging pandemic, people have rights to do many things, but are they really free to exercise them?
It may not feel like you can enjoy the benefits of your individual rights when you have to be engaged in a continuous process of risk-assessment: Is it safe to leave my house? To go to work? To send my child to school? To visit my loved ones?
Even more, people confront those questions from very different perspectives: "Essential" workers have had to make decisions about whether to go to work and risk disease or death, or to stay home to protect themselves and their families and risk hunger and homelessness. Those who are unsafe in their homes, because they live with abusive parents or partners must choose between the danger of staying in and the dangers of leaving. Even those who work remotely make an assessment of risk every time they leave home, especially now that infections have surged, given the absence of clear, shared norms about social distancing, mask-wearing and other precautions against the spread of disease.
The only way to assure that everyone will be wearing a mask - understood as an act of community and collective care, an action taken to protect others, as well as ourselves - is for the government to require mask-wearing because it is needed for the protection of life.
Of course - and here is where questions about individual rights come up against the need for government policy - in the absence of government economic support for individuals and families, for example, the costs of actions taken to protect others fall unequally.
If businesses close to slow the spread of disease, they protect both workers and consumers. But without government aid, they and their workers are the ones who bear the financial burdens of these actions as individuals.
Interdependence and mutual responsibility
That is why the CARES Act, which provided income for those who lost jobs and loans or grants to those who kept their workers on payroll, was critical.
It was government policy that recognized that collective caring behavior cannot be sustained without communal support. The CARES Act articulated, through a series of government programs, the idea that no one should be forced to be a martyr - say, to lose their livelihood - for the benefit of others.
Government policy of this sort (such as the relief bills now being considered by Congress) aims to ensure that those who forego work to protect others - or go to work to protect others, like essential workers - will not have to pay a personal price.
The ability to exercise the rights to work, to shop, or to go to school depends upon having a relatively safe public space in which to operate. In turn, that requires all of us to attend to the rights and safety of others, as well as of ourselves.
Government is the means by which such attending - caring - is expressed and accomplished. It is only when people can count on others to be concerned for one another that they can truly be free to act, and exercise their rights, in the public arena.
Let's get one thing clear: when it comes to public service, business experience is not at all a bad thing.
As President-elect Joe Biden fills senior positions in his administration, there are loud calls on the left for a ban on anyone who spent even part of their career at a corporation. While they might not succeed in getting all executives excluded from appointments in this administration, their attacks certainly serve to dissuade many from considering public service.
This is a big problem. The country, especially at this moment, needs people in government who bring a variety of skills, including experience running big companies. Additionally, the deep divisions and economic difficulties of the moment make governing inclusively an absolute imperative.
Corporate experience shouldn't be off limits
Corporate America has been a popular political target for years, so it's no surprise that former executives are again getting targeted
Both parties use Wall Street as a convenient punching bag when they are trying to drum up support. There certainly is no shortage of cases where banks and behemoths of business abused their power in the past. Nonetheless, there are far more examples of CEOs and the companies they lead investing in communities and people. This past year has put on full display the variety of ways that they can and do make significant contributions, especially during crises.
Amazon provided $100 million for food banks in the early days of the pandemic. Johnson & Johnson put up $50 million to support frontline healthcare workers. 3M also contributed $20 million in financial assistance to healthcare workers. This has come on top of the substantial in kind donations, matching grants, and public information campaigns large companies funded.
The skeptics will say, "Sure, but big firms have also seen stock prices soar as millions lost their jobs." Their contributions are dismissed as insufficient and intended as only to provide cover for corporate greed. The thinking goes that these firms have too often profited at the expense of workers or the public. That argument either belies a major misunderstanding of economics or a willing disregard for the facts. In fact, companies have acted faster and farther than many government initiatives in the past year.
I ran President Obama's global entrepreneurship programs and considered myself then to be a pretty savvy public official when it came to business matters. But my own perspective completely changed when I launched a startup. When I became the one who had to make each month's payroll and spent days navigating through complex government regulations, I realized there were a slew of pressure points I had missed while in government. There are a lot of things I would do differently, were I to go back into the public sector.
Corporate leaders can bring valuable experience
A return to public service is not in fact in my future. But, I do believe we desperately need those who know how to do more than tax and spend dollars.
Some will read those words and interpret my ideological perspective as being conservative or at least centrist. The fact of the matter is, I also strongly believe in a lot of the same social programs being advanced by my Democratic colleagues. At the same time, we have to build them back better than we have done in the past. This requires embracing, not rejecting those who know firsthand how to grow our economy.
And growing the economy is imperative during the Biden administration. Not only is the country trying to recover from a devastating pandemic, but Donald Trump is clearly not planning like his predecessors on taking a dignified retirement from public life. He will undoubtedly complain constantly about the Biden administration harming "his" economy. Retaining the confidence of business leaders and working with the private sector to boost growth will help to prove the former occupant of the Oval Office and his diehard supporters wrong.
Joe Biden has a lot of jobs to fill in the coming months. Liberal activists will continue to pressure him and his cabinet to apply a purity test to potential candidates. If they want to get the economy moving again, not to mention avoid heavy losses in 2024, these efforts need to be roundly and rapidly rejected by most Democratic leaders.
Trump thrived on labeling and dividing people. To be successful for those who most need the help these days, the next administration needs to focus on building back, with better bridges - including to business.
