Commentary

Stop and reflect on the success of the coronavirus vaccines. While most vaccines take five to 10 years to develop and manufacture, the remarkable mRNA shots appeared in less than a year. They were safe, efficacious, free, and dramatically reduced serious illness and death, one of the great biomedical achievements of all time. Yet their results could have been even better. A study by Oliver J. Watson and colleagues at the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, published June 23 in the Lancet, sheds light on the scope of the achievement.

One Friday evening last November, a man stepped out of a minivan on President Street and beat a young squeegee worker bloody with a small wooden bat. Brandon Mead, a Baltimore attorney, witnessed the attack. “Clearly, this guy was ready for it,” Mead told me, referring to the white, middle-aged driver of the van, which had Pennsylvania plates. Mead heard the man yell. He saw him get out of the van and raise the bat against a Black teenage boy. The boy raised a squeegee in defense, but his attacker swung the club, broke the squeegee, then struck the boy in the face. The boy went down in front of Mead’s car.

As a lawyer with a physical disability who also has experienced depression, I’m disappointed at the tenor of how our society discusses a disease of millions of Americans – mental illness. Each tragic occurrence of a mass shooting results in the specter of mental health disability blamed as a factor. Most people both with physical and invisible disabilities, however, are doing their best merely to exist much less to thrive. It does these citizens a profound disservice to equate them as the problem to be solved through catchy-sounding legislation.

The Chesapeake Bay has an overabundance of invasive blue catfish, but the region’s watermen and seafood wholesalers are missing out on a potentially huge national market for them. There are two reasons — a federal regulation that gives a big advantage to the catfish farming industry in the Mississippi Delta and the lack of a major processor to handle a much larger harvest in Maryland.

After New York State’s “proper cause” standard for carrying a firearm outside the home was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Tuesday directed the State Police to stop using the “good and substantial reason” standard in deciding whether citizens could carry a gun. Governor Hogan’s decision, supported by the state’s Attorney General’s Office, may make it easier for citizens to carry a gun, however, it should not make it easier for citizens to carry concealed guns.

Can the Environmental Protection Agency actually protect the environment? The Supreme Court’s decision on West Virginia v. EPA will make it very difficult for the U.S. to meet its pledge to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, which is essential if we are to avoid surpassing global warming of 1.5 degrees Centigrade.

Elder abuse and exploitation is a silent crisis affecting every corner of our country. Whether it is mistreatment at an assisted living facility or a parent exploited by an adult child, elder injustice is happening more often than you might think. Each year in the United States, hundreds of thousands of adults older than 60 are physically or psychologically abused, neglected or financially exploited, and 1 out of every 10 older adults experience elder abuse.

So there I was, reclined on my couch, watching the Orioles play the Twins, when this commercial comes on about Dan Cox, Republican candidate for governor of Maryland. It has menacing movie music, the sounds of clanging steel and kabooms. Definitely gets my attention. Suddenly there’s a thumbs-up picture of the former president, Donald Trump, with Cox, standing in what appears to be the Oval Office. The narrator says Cox is Trump’s “hand-picked candidate for Maryland governor.”