U.S. Announces Sanctions Against 10 Hamas Members and Financial Network Over Attack on Israel

WASHINGTON — The U.S. announced sanctions on Wednesday against a group of 10 Hamas members and the Palestinian militant organization’s financial network across Gaza, Sudan, Turkey, Algeria and Qatar as it responds to the surprise attack on Israel that left more than 1,000 people dead or kidnapped.

Targeted for sanctions by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control are members who manage a Hamas investment portfolio, a Qatar-based financial facilitator with close ties to the Iranian regime, a key Hamas commander and a Gaza-based virtual currency exchange. Iran is Hamas’ main sponsor.

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the U.S. “is taking swift and decisive action to target Hamas’s financiers and facilitators following its brutal and unconscionable massacre of Israeli civilians, including children.”

“The U.S. Treasury has a long history of effectively disrupting terror finance and we will not hesitate to use our tools against Hamas,” she said in an emailed statement.

Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo told reporters on Wednesday that Treasury officials will be traveling to the region in the coming days to further their sanctions work.

President Joe Biden, who arrived in the Middle East early Wednesday to show support for Israel, has tried to tamp down tensions in the escalating war between Israel and Hamas, but those efforts have faced massive setbacks, including an explosion at a Gaza hospital that killed about 500 people.

Brian Nelson, U.S. Treasury’s under secretary for terrorism and illicit finance, said at a Deloitte anti-money laundering conference on Tuesday that the U.S. is renewing its plans to pursue Hamas funding streams and made a call for American allies and the private sector to do the same or “be prepared to suffer the consequences.”

“We cannot, and we will not, tolerate money flowing through the international system for Hamas’ terrorist activity,” Nelson said.

“We want to partner with all willing countries and financial entities to stop Hamas financing,” he said “but to the extent that any institution or jurisdiction fails to take appropriate action, they should then be prepared to suffer the consequences.”

The shadowy leader of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, said the Oct. 7 assault on Israel was in response to the 16-year blockade of Gaza, Israeli raids inside West Bank cities over the past year, increasing attacks by settlers on Palestinians and the growth of settlements, among other reasons.

“Enough is enough,” Deif, who does not appear in public, said in the recorded message. He said the attack was only the start of what he called Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, and he called on Palestinians from east Jerusalem to northern Israel to join the fight.

source https://time.com/6325430/u-s-announces-sanctions-against-a-group-hamas-members/

Anatomy of a Fall Is an Elegantly Constructed Thriller Anchored by a Riveting Performance

Women often learn to get along in the world by smiling. It’s what you do to put someone else at ease, to let them know you’re not a threat. Whether it’s a subconscious habit or a choice, so many of us do it that it’s no wonder men often—infuriatingly—expect us to supply one on command. But there’s a type of woman who doesn’t move through the world this way. Her smile is so rare, reserved only for occasions of her choosing, that you can’t always tell what she’s thinking. She can be a little off-putting, unapproachable; you’re never fully sure what to make of her. And if she happens to be a murder suspect, her Sphinxlike reserve may make you more inclined to believe she’s guilty.

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That’s the kind of woman Sandra Hüller plays in French director Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall; you could subtitle it The Ballad of the Unsmiling Woman. Hüller plays Sandra, a successful novelist and translator, German-born but living with her French husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), and their 10-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), in a woodsy house in the French Alps. Daniel, who is blind, is out walking with his dog when he discovers his father’s lifeless body in the snow, just a few yards from the family home, his head bloodied from a wound; it appears he’s fallen from an upper-story window. Sandra was, or claims to have been, taking a nap when the accident—if it was indeed an accident—occurred.

Read more: The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades

Earlier in the day, she’d been forced to truncate an interview with a graduate student, an encounter that had become mildly flirtatious as she’d sipped from a goblet of wine. Samuel, while doing some construction work on an upper floor, was blasting music so loudly Sandra couldn’t hear her interviewer’s questions. (His banger of choice is a steel-drum cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.,” and it’s played so often throughout Anatomy that it becomes the movie’s unofficial theme song, carrying with it both comedic and sinister undertones.) Was Samuel playing his noisy music with the express purpose of disrupting Sandra’s interview? Did he know she was semi-flirting with this graduate student downstairs? Those questions point to a bigger one: Did Samuel fall from the window, did he jump, or was he pushed? When the cause of death is ruled inconclusive, Sandra is put on trial.

Anatomy of a Fall—which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last May—is both a murder mystery and a courtroom procedural, a muted, elegantly constructed thriller that gives nothing away easily; even at the end, you may not feel 100 percent certain you know what happened, but that seems to be by design. (The script was cowritten by Triet and Arthur Harari.) Triet slips between tense courtroom scenes and flashbacks of Sandra’s family life at home. We learn there were tensions within the household. Bits of this family’s history are scattered before us like breadcrumbs: Both parents harbored some guilt over the accident that had caused Daniel’s blindness at age four, though one parent seems to feel it more acutely. We learn that Sandra has had an affair, and that Samuel—also a writer, though a struggling one—had been trying to wean himself off antidepressants. Daniel, a smart, sensitive kid—with a loyal, adorable dog named Snoop, who, it should be noted, meets with no lasting harm in the story—is caught in the middle, as kids so often are. In court, some of the witnesses glare at Sandra with outright hostility. She shows so little emotion; she must have murdered her husband. Right?

Read more: The 35 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2023

Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. It could all be a little too hushed and antiseptic—but Hüller’s performance gives the movie the vitality it needs. This is really less a whodunit than a character study of a woman who isn’t immediately knowable. Sandra shows flashes of warmth and vulnerability with her lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), who’s earnestly trying to help her. (He’s an old friend, and he confesses that he was once in love with her, which seems both believable and wholly surprising given the alternating current of “come closer” and “go away” that animates her.) But more people seem to be put off by Sandra, and sometimes we are too. She’s affectionate with her son, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Samuel’s death. But it’s clear that Daniel was closer to his father. We start to wonder: is she really what we’d commonly call a “good” mother? And if her husband committed suicide, might her coldness have been at least a small factor?

Hüller answers all those questions quietly, often nonverbally; her performance is a marvel. At one point Sandra explains, matter-of-factly, why she felt it was so important not to cling to any guilt over Daniel’s accident, and suddenly we feel we’ve been given a key to her way of thinking. Sandra doesn’t smile at the world freely; she doesn’t put on a happy face to open doors. But her intensity is by itself a kind of thoughtfulness, and her emotions run as deep as anyone’s—she just refuses to parade them on the surface. Hüller’s Sandra, with her focused gaze, her manner of answering a question directly instead of dancing around it, is the movie’s uncompromising heart. She smiles like she means it, and only when she means it. It’s like a new language, stripped of complicated syntax and flowery adjectives, and it’s our job to learn how to read it.

source https://time.com/6323274/anatomy-of-a-fall-review/

What Britney Spears Reveals About Her Conservatorship in The Woman in Me

Nearly two years after Britney Spears’ conservatorship was officially terminated, the pop icon is revealing new details about the legal guardianship that controlled her life for 13 years.

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At age 26, Britney was originally placed under the conservatorship in 2008 following a series of public incidents, including shaving her head and attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella, that raised concerns about her mental welfare. The court-approved arrangement gave Britney’s father, Jamie Spears, and an attorney control over her finances and many facets of her personal life, with filings claiming Britney suffered from an undisclosed mental illness and substance abuse.

In her memoir, The Woman in Me—an excerpt of which was published by People on Tuesday ahead of the book’s Oct. 24 release—Spears details how Jamie abused his position of power over her.

“If I thought getting criticized about my body in the press was bad, it hurt even more from my own father. He repeatedly told me I looked fat and that I was going to have to do something about it,” she writes. “Feeling like you’re never good enough is a soul-crushing state of being for a child. He’d drummed that message into me as a girl, and even after I’d accomplished so much, he was continuing to do that to me.”

Britney goes on to explain how the conservatorship robbed her of the opportunity to come into her own as an adult.

“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child,” she writes. “I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me. If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out.”

While under the conservatorship, Britney recorded and released four hit albums and headlined her “Piece of Me” Las Vegas residency show, which grossed $138 million over the course of its four-year run.

“I sometimes thought that it was almost funny how I won those awards for the album I made while I was supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled by my family,” she writes of the success of her 2008 album Circus. “The truth was, though, when I stopped to think about it for very long, it wasn’t funny at all.”

The expectations put on her to be “wild” while performing and robotic the rest of time were oppressive, Britney says.

“I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life—those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human,” she writes. “They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist.”

After her conservatorship was terminated on. November 12, 2021, Britney says that it took her a long time to feel ready to tell her story to the world.

“Since I’ve been free, I’ve had to construct a whole different identity,” she writes. “I’ve had to say, ‘Wait a second, this is who I was—someone passive and pleasing. A girl. And this is who I am now—someone strong and confident. A woman.'”

source https://time.com/6324615/the-woman-in-me-britney-spears-conservatorship/

TIME Launches FAST Channel on Amazon Freevee in Latest Push into New Platforms and Audience Growth

Powered by TIME’s Premium Digital Video Division, TIME’s FAST Channel Will Debut on October 17

Today, the global media brand TIME announced the launch of its FAST channel on Amazon Freevee in its latest expansion into new video platforms. 

Powered by TIME’s trusted, award-winning journalism and premium digital video division, the new channel will showcase news coverage, profiles, interviews, documentaries and more, including content from TIME’s globally recognized franchises and events, such as the TIME100, Person of the Year, Women of the Year, TIME100 Talks and others. TIME’s journalists and producers will cover global news topics for TIME’s growing audience of 120 million worldwide. 

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Debuting ahead of the TIME100 Next Gala in NYC on October 24, the TIME channel will also feature exclusive red carpet reporting and event content from the annual gala celebrating the 100 rising stars who are defining the next generation of leadership in business, entertainment, sports, politics, health, science, activism and more.

The TIME channel launches with a slate of new programming including: 

• TIME Reports: TIME’s signature news magazine series featuring stories about the people, places, and news events that are shaping our lives, hosted by TIME journalists.
• TIME Docs: Short documentaries highlighting a variety of important topics from the world’s leading filmmakers.
• Profiles in TIME: Interviews with the most influential people in the world, from Bill Gates to Taylor Swift to Angelina Jolie. 
• World News: Breaking news and analysis of the major global events of the day.
• Politics & Ideas: Stories about politics, public policy, elections, social justice, and civil rights—featuring the voices and perspectives of newsmakers and thought leaders from around the world.
• TIME for Health & Science: Stories about innovations and breakthroughs in science, health, technology, and climate.
• TIME Off: Stories about pop culture, entertainment industry news, and viral moments.  
• World News, Politics and Ideas: Daily coverage of world news, politics, and impactful ideas. 
• TIME Documentaries and Film: Select feature-length films and series from TIME Studios.

“TIME’s new FAST channel advances our mission to provide trusted coverage of the people, events, and issues that impact the world,” said TIME Digital GM Jeff Li. “The channel will be the 24/7 home for TIME’s video content, providing an in-depth look at the world through the lens of TIME’s respected journalists and events and offering TV audiences access to our deep archive of documentaries and profiles.”

“TIME has been a leader in the digital video space for many years and we are dedicated to creating best-in-class news and documentary reports to help our viewers understand and connect with what is happening in their world,” said Executive Producer of TIME Video Justine Simons, “Our collection of profiles and interviews give our audience new insights into the most well known people on the planet as well introduce them to up-and-coming superstars, innovators, and leaders. Our goal is to entertain, inform and engage and we think a FAST channel is an exciting new way to share our journalism as widely as possible.” 

Amazon Freevee is a streaming video service with thousands of premium movies and TV shows, including Originals and FAST channels, available anytime, for free. TIME’s free streaming channel can be accessed through the Freevee app, as well as within Fire TV and Prime Video.

The 24/7 TIME channel is managed through a partnership with media technology leader Amagi.

“Our collaboration with TIME marks the next chapter in its century-long history of storytelling excellence. We are super stoked to bring timeless TIME content to the CTV audience and assist TIME in exploring new revenue paths through FAST,” said Srinivasan KA, Co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer, Amagi. 

Today, in addition to its iconic magazine and digital platforms, TIME also includes the Emmy Award®-winning film and television division TIME Studios, its global live events business, the award-winning branded content studio Red Border Studios, the sustainability and climate action platform TIME CO2, the e-commerce and content platform TIME Stamped, and more.

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About TIME:

TIME is the 100-year-old global media brand that reaches a combined audience of over 120 million around the world through its iconic magazine and digital platforms. With unparalleled access to the world’s most influential people, the trust of consumers and partners globally, and an unrivaled power to convene, TIME’s mission is to tell the essential stories of the people and ideas that shape and improve the world. Today, TIME also includes the Emmy Award®-winning film and television division TIME Studios; a significantly expanded live events business built on the powerful TIME100 and Person of the Year franchises and custom experiences; TIME for Kids, which provides trusted news with a focus on news literacy for kids and valuable resources for teachers and families; the award-winning branded content studio Red Border Studios; an industry-leading web3 division; the website-building platform TIME Sites; the sustainability and climate action platform TIME CO2; the new e-commerce and content platform TIME Stamped, and more.

About Amagi: 

Amagi is a next-generation media technology company that provides cloud broadcast and targeted advertising solutions to broadcast TV and streaming TV platforms. Amagi enables content owners to launch, distribute and monetize live linear channels on Free Ad-supported streaming TV and video services platforms. Amagi also offers 24×7 cloud-managed services bringing simplicity, advanced automation, and transparency to the entire broadcast operations. Overall, Amagi supports 700+ content brands, 800+ playout chains, and over 2,100 channel deliveries on its platform in over 40 countries. Amagi has a presence in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Melbourne, Seoul, Singapore, and broadcast operations in New Delhi, and an innovation center in Bangalore.

source https://time.com/6324650/time-launches-fast-channel-on-amazon-freevee/

Greta Thunberg Among Climate Activists Detained For Disrupting A Major Oil Conference

(LONDON) — Greta Thunberg was detained by British police on Tuesday alongside other climate activists who gathered outside a central London hotel to disrupt a meeting of oil and gas company executives.

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Thunberg was among dozens of protesters who chanted “oily money out” and attempted to block access to the InterContinental Hotel on Park Lane, which is hosting the Energy Intelligence Forum. The conference is hosting speakers, including the chief executives of Saudi Arabia’s Aramco and Norway’s Equinor, as well as the U.K.’s energy security minister.

An Associated Press photographer saw Thunberg being led away by officers and taken into a police vehicle, along with about 10 other activists.

Earlier Tuesday, London’s Metropolitan Police said five people were arrested on suspicion of obstructing a highway during the protest.

Protesters attempted to block access to the conference venue by sitting on the sidewalk by the entrance. They held aloft banners and chanted “oily money out” and “cancel the conference,” while some lit yellow and pink smoke flares.

Greenpeace activists abseiled down from the roof of the hotel to unfurl a banner reading “make big oil pay.”

Read more: Greta Thunberg: Saving the Climate Means Changing How We Live

The protesters accuse fossil fuel companies of deliberately slowing the global energy transition to renewables in order to make more profit.

“The world is drowning in fossil fuels. Our hopes and dreams and lives are being washed away by a flood of greenwashing and lies,” Thunberg told reporters before she was detained. “It has been clear for decades that the fossil fuel industries were well aware of the consequences of their business models, and yet they have done nothing.”

“We cannot let this continue. The elite of the oil and money conference, they have no intention of transition,” she added. “We have no other option but to put our bodies outside this conference and to physically disrupt. And we have to do that every time, we have to continue showing them that they are not going to get away with this.”

Police said those detained were taken into custody and that officers remained on site.

Environmental groups say they will continue to protest throughout the planned forum, which is expected to last three days.

Thunberg inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to fight climate change after staging weekly protests outside the Swedish Parliament starting in 2018. She was recently fined by a Swedish court for disobeying police during an environmental protest in Sweden.

source https://time.com/6324629/climate-activists-greta-thunberg-detained-protesting-oil-conference/

For Gazans, There Are No Safe Havens

Since the Israeli military issued an order last week for the 1.1 million Palestinians living in northern Gaza to flee south, in an apparent prelude to its anticipated ground invasion, a mass exodus has ensued. While those with enough fuel have made the journey by car or truck, others have hitched rides on trailers and donkey carts. Some have even resorted to making the perilous journey on foot.

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“We have seen a huge shift of people going south, which we’re very happy with,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Peter Lerner tells TIME, noting that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the north have heeded their warnings despite calls by Hamas for residents to “remain steadfast in your homes.” Lerner also says that the IDF has seen evidence of Hamas “establishing checkpoints to physically prevent people from leaving.”

This kind of mass relocation of civilians amid regular airstrikes was never going to be easy. Both the United Nations and the medical charity Doctors Without Borders dubbed the task “impossible,” citing the logistical nightmare of relocating half of Gaza’s population—among them women, children, and the elderly—without any guarantees for their safety. Indeed, there have been reports by the Financial Times and others of at least one designated safe route out of northern Gaza being subject to an airstrike resulting in as many as 70 deaths. Hamas blames Israel for the attack—a charge that the IDF denies. (The FT report says that “analysis of the video footage rules out most explanations aside from an Israeli strike.”)

“What’s being done doesn’t meet the legal standards for what an evacuation should entail,” Shaina Low, a communications adviser at the Norwegian Refugee Council, tells TIME from the NEC’s office in East Jerusalem. “It should be orderly; there should be safety.” Indeed, while Israel may order an evacuation for imperative military reasons or to protect civilians, international law requires that it provides those being displaced with adequate shelter, hygiene, health, safety, and nutrition.

In Gaza, all of these things have been in short supply since Israel began its bombardment of the densely-populated Strip in retaliation for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, in which militants killed at least 1,400 Israelis. Since then, Gaza has been under complete siege, cut off from food, water, and electricity. Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 2,670 people, roughly a quarter of them children. While the fiercest bombing is currently taking place in northern Gaza, where Israel is said to be targeting Hamas leaders and operatives in Gaza City especially, the enclave’s southern half has also proven dangerous.

Read More: How to Help Victims of Israel-Hamas War

In the southern city of Khan Younis, to which many Palestinians from the north have headed, rescue workers continue to search for survivors amid the rubble of homes destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. Local doctors are warning of imminent catastrophe if their hospitals run out of fuel and water. Although Israel has since bowed to U.S. pressure to resume water supplies to southern Gaza, the lack of electricity has made it all but impossible for it to be pumped into people’s homes. “Everyone here in Khan Younis is in survivor mode,” says Yousef Hammash, an NRC advocacy officer based in Gaza. “It’s a horrible situation here—it’s really horrible. I saw people who sleep in the streets. We never had homeless people before in Gaza. Now half of the population is homeless.”

But not everyone in northern Gaza has fled. Of the 1.1 million living in northern Gaza, just 400,000 are estimated to have left, leaving roughly 700,000 there. While some are physically unable to flee on account of being too injured or weak to make the journey, others are reluctant because they don’t have anywhere in the south to go. “The Israeli military has called for all of these people to leave the north, but aren’t doing anything to guarantee their safety once they arrive where they’re being told to flee to,” Low says. To this, Lerner concedes that Palestinians aren’t being directed to any one particular location, noting that “the whole Gaza Strip beyond Wadi Gaza is the location we’ve sent them towards.” On the humanitarian situation awaiting them, Lerner says that there are basic needs, including food supplies, “for several weeks,” though this contradicts most all accounts coming out of the besieged enclave, including those by the World Health Organization and the U.N., which on Monday reported “severely limited access to clean drinking water” and “worsening food insecurity.”

“There’s a tough humanitarian condition,” Lerner says, “but we faced a barbaric attack and we are very determined to change that situation.”

Another reason that is keeping Palestinians from fleeing south are concerns that their displacement could be made permanent. The majority of the Palestinians who live in Gaza today are descended from refugees who were violently expelled from their homes and native villages in what is modern-day Israel amid the war that resulted in the state’s creation in 1948, which Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” That collective memory “is cognizant in people’s minds,” Low says. And not just theirs. Both Egypt (which has kept its border with Gaza closed and has long opposed any effort to resettle Palestinians in its bordering Sinai Peninsula, which has also been ruled out by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) and Jordan have warned against any actions that risk Palestinians being forced off their land.

But regardless of whether Palestinians choose to leave or stay, Low adds, that doesn’t make them legitimate targets. “They are not combatants,” she says. “They are still civilians and must be protected under international humanitarian law. They cannot lawfully be targeted just because they chose to stay or they were forced to stay.”

source https://time.com/6324602/gazans-evacuation-israel-egypt/

Why Do Infants Seem to Avoid Severe COVID-19?

With COVID-19 rates rising around the country, and an updated vaccine now available, researchers are still trying to understand how immunity to COVID-19 works, and the best ways to build and sustain it.

One of the possibly richest areas of research might be infections among the very young, who tend to be spared from more serious COVID-19 disease. Hospitalization rates for infants four years old or under dropped to under 1 per 100,000 earlier this year, and have recently inched up slightly to 2 per 100,000 in the middle of September, compared to rates for people over 65 years old, which hit a low of 6 per 100,000 earlier this year and climbed up to 17.6 in September.

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In a study published recently in the journal Cell, researchers led by Bali Pulendran, a professor of pathology, microbiology, and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, report some key differences in how infants and adults experience COVID-19 infections, which could lead to new ways of generating stronger and more durable immunity in the future.

Read more: Most Kids Do Not Get Severe COVID-19, Large Study Confirms

Pulendran and his team took advantage of samples collected from children at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in 2020, before COVID-19 vaccines were available. Doctors took weekly nasal samples from the infants, who ranged in age from one month to nearly four years old, and some developed COVID-19 infections, so the researchers captured immune cell activity in the nasal passages before, during, and after infection. They found that unlike in adults, infants, especially the youngest babies, produce strong antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2, and these antibodies remained at relatively high levels throughout the study period of nearly a year.

“In the case of COVID-19, this is certainly unique and new,” says Pulendran. “We hadn’t expected to see this in infants. When adults get infected, they see an increase in the antibody response in the months following the infection, and then a sharp decay in that level. But in the babies, we didn’t see that happening. In fact, in some babies, the antibodies kept rising, and in others they plateaued, but they did not decline.”

The scientists also discovered another key difference in the way babies responded to the COVID-19 virus. While adults develop a strong inflammatory response in the blood soon after infection, as the virus triggers a flood of cytokines and other compounds that can cause complications associated with serious COVID-19 disease, infants did not develop this same reaction in the blood. In fact, in their blood, levels of these inflammatory markers did not increase appreciably.

However, these factors were abundant in the nasal passages of the babies, suggesting that for them, the battle between the immune system and the virus was occurring primarily in the mucosal tissues of the nose and upper respiratory tract, and not throughout the body in the bloodstream. The mucous membranes of these babies were flooded with interferon in particular, which is a potent immune hormone that can control how much a virus replicates. “It’s as if in infants the virus infects the upper respiratory tract but this infection is nipped in the bud there,” says Pulendran.

The reason that the antibodies generated by babies last so much longer than those generated by adults isn’t clear, but could have to do with the fact that infants may be relying on a type of immune response known as the innate response. It’s a first line of defense, and doesn’t involve educating immune cells like antibodies and T cells by exposing them to pathogens first. Because the immune systems in babies are still developing, it’s possible that they are more reliant on this more rudimentary, innate immune response and that could explain the longer lasting protection they have. But, says Pulendran, “it’s one of the great mysteries in immunology why in some cases like measles and chickenpox, you only need to have one infection during childhood and you are protected for your entire life, because the half life of the antibodies against them lasts years and years, but with other infections like flu and COVID-19, the half life of antibodies is more on the order of a few hundred days.”

Read more: The Coronavirus Seems to Spare Most Kids From Illness, but Its Effect on Their Mental Health Is Deepening

There are tradeoffs to the infants’ immune responses, however. The scientists found that the antibodies the babies generated, while abundant and durable, were more specifically targeted to the virus that had caused their infections, meaning that if they were infected with another variant, these antibodies might not be as potent. In addition, the babies’ T cell responses, which in adults is responsible for protecting against serious disease, was somewhat muted as well. It’s not clear yet whether the other advantages of the infants’ response is enough to offset these other limitations.

Still, the results of the study point to some intriguing new strategies for generating stronger, and longer-lasting immune responses to the COVID-19 virus. Scientists are currently developing nasal vaccines, for example, which rely on generating mucosal immunity, and in the case of COVID-19, that may produce more durable immunity than injected vaccines. “These infants may be teaching us a lesson that certain pathways to immunity can be triggered by nasal vaccines that mimic the response we see in babies,” says Pulendran. “If only we can make a vaccine that mimics these same pathways, then we might be onto something.”

source https://time.com/6323721/infant-covid-19-protection/