TASK DEFINITION: Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
PROBLEM: Paragraph: Amid increasing concern over the United States Postal Service’s efficiency leading up to the 2020 U.S. elections, a CBS News host’s tweet warned voters seeking to take part by mail.“USPS says you should give mail in ballots at least 14 days round trip,” Tony Dokoupil wrote on July 26 2020. “No guarantees. So if you plan to vote by mail, election day isn’t November 3rd. It’s October 20th. Or sooner. Don’t be one of the *tens of thousands* of people whose vote wasn’t counted in 2016.”. @USPS says you should give mail in ballots at least 14 days round trip. No guarantees.So if you plan to vote by mail, election day isn’t November 3rd.It’s October 20th.Or sooner.Don’t be one of the *tens of thousands* of people whose vote wasn’t counted in 2016.— Tony Dokoupil (@tonydokoupil) July 24, 2020The postal service has in fact made that statement to not only Dokoupil but other news organizations and reporters; the advisory appeared in a Washington Post story published on July 15 2020:Local elections offices are hiring temporary workers to process absentee ballots, and some local elections boards are adding options for voters to do curbside drop-offs of their mail ballots on Election Day.The Postal Service is also recommending that voters request their ballots at least 15 days before Election Day and mail their completed ballots at least one week before the due date.The advisory was also mentioned in a story republished on news sites for local Fox TV network affiliates on July 27 2020:“We recommend that jurisdictions immediately communicate and advise voters to request ballots at the earliest point allowable but no later than 15 days prior to election date,” USPS told FOX via email. “The Postal Service also recommends that voters contact local election officials for information about deadlines.”Dokoupil himself reported on the potential problem for mail-in ballots in a story for CBS This Morning; CBS created two batches of 100 mock mail-in ballots apiece from around several zip codes in Philadelphia and sent them to the same local P.O. box, which served as a stand-in for an actual election office.A week after sending his mock ballots from mailboxes around the city, Dokoupil went to retrieve them at the P.O. box to find that most of them were not inside. Postal staff later retrieved several of them, telling him that “they had them somewhere else.”However, Dokoupil did note that official mail-in ballots carry an official logo differentiating them from the regular mail CBS used for its reporting. According to the story:Out of the initial batch mailed a week earlier, 97 out of 100 votes had arrived. Three simulated persons, or 3 percent of voters, were effectively disenfranchised by mail by giving their ballots a week to arrive. In a close election, 3 percent could be pivotal.Four days after mailing the second batch of mock ballots, 21 percent of the votes hadn’t arrived.According to Postal Service recommendations, “voters should mail their return ballots at least one week prior to the due date.”However, nearly half of all states still allow voters to request ballots less than a week before the election.A USPS spokesperson, Martha Johnson, told us that the agency is asking both voters and election officials to be mindful of how long it takes postal workers to transport, process and deliver ballots as well as “the time that it takes for voters to consider and prepare their ballots, and the time that it takes for a ballot to be transported, processed, and delivered back to the election official.” The agency’s delivery standards, she said, have not changed. She also reiterated the agency’s guidance for requesting mail-in ballots:We recommend that customers who opt to vote through the U.S. Mail must understand their local jurisdiction’s requirements for timely submission of absentee ballots, including postmarking requirements. Voters must use First-Class Mail or an expedited level of service to return their completed ballots. In order to allow sufficient time for voters to receive, complete and return ballots via the mail, and to facilitate timely receipt of completed ballots by election officials, we strongly recommend that jurisdictions immediately communicate and advise voters to request ballots at the earliest point allowable but no later than 15 days prior to the election date. The Postal Service recommends that domestic, non-military voters mail their completed ballots back to the election officials at least one week prior to their state’s due date. The Postal Service also recommends that voters contact local election officials for information about deadlines.Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor for the advocacy group Democracy Fund, told CBS that her group estimated that between 80 million and 100 million United States voters would receive their ballots via mail in 2020. Prior to joining the non-profit organization, Patrick served on the Commissioner on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration under Barack Obama’s presidential administration.“States like Ohio, you can request your ballot on Saturday up until noon for Tuesday’s election,” said Patrick, who has also served as a former federal compliance officer for the elections department in Maricopa County, Arizona. “That is the worst possible thing. You are setting up the voters with false expectations, and you’re setting them up to fail.”A separate analysis published by NPR in July 2020 found that 65,000 absentee or mail-in ballots cast in primary elections until that point had been rejected because they arrived after the deadline.“That’s the sort of thing that makes me wary about what’s going to happen in November when we get an even larger influx of people who haven’t voted, or haven’t voted by mail in the past,” said Charles Stewart, a political scientist at the at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Obama himself added to the discussion about mail-in voting on July 28 2020, when he tweeted a graphic supplied by another group, Vote Save America, displaying the state-by-state deadlines for requesting a ballot. According to that graphic, the deadline for every state not exclusively voting by mail falls after the fifteen-day advisory issued by the U.S. Postal Service:The USPS told CBS in a statement:We employ a robust and proven process to ensure proper handling of all Election Mail, including ballots. This includes close coordination and partnerships with election officials at the local and state levels. As we anticipate that many voters may choose to use the mail to participate in the upcoming elections due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are conducting and will continue to proactively conduct outreach with state and local election officials and Secretaries of State so that they can make informed decisions and educate the public about what they can expect when using the mail to vote. As part of these outreach efforts, we will discuss our delivery processes and will consult with election officials about how they can design their mailings in a manner that comports with postal regulations, improves mailpiece visibility, and ensures efficient and cost-effective processing and delivery.Dokoupil’s story also followed reported concerns over the appointment of Louis DeJoy — a businessman and fundraiser for U.S. President Donald Trump — to oversee the USPS as Postmaster General in June 2020.“On the surface, there’s a real worry about cronyism and patronage and whether someone is being put into place to carry out an agenda,” American Postal Workers Union president Mark Dimondstein told the Post. “We hope that’s not the case.”The newspaper also reported:DeJoy told employees to leave mail behind at distribution centers if it delayed letter carriers from their routes, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” according to a document titled, “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan.” Traditionally, postal workers are trained not to leave letters behind and to make multiple delivery trips to ensure timely distribution of letters and parcels.Trump himself has repeatedly claimed — falsely — that voting by mail is inherently suspect and vulnerable to fraud, to the point that Twitter flagged two of his tweets on the issue in May 2020 for containing “potentially misleading information.”Update, July 29 2020 9:19 a.m. PST: Updated with comment from the US Postal Service.Comments Claim: The U.S. Postal Service has advised people hoping to vote by mail to request the required envelopes by October 20 2020.

SOLUTION: Did the United States Postal Service Urge Mail-In Voters to Request Envelopes by October 20th?

PROBLEM: Paragraph: A GlaxoSmithKline logo is seen outside one of its buildings in west London, February 6, 2008. REUTERS/Toby Melville The GlaxoSmithKline Plc vaccine Rotarix fights infection with the rotavirus, which causes about 55,000 hospitalizations in U.S. children each year and kills more than 600,000 children worldwide, mostly in developing countries. Rotarix already is approved in more than 100 other countries throughout the world. The vaccine competes with Merck & Co Inc’s rotavirus vaccine called RotaTeq. Without vaccination, nearly every child in the United States likely would be infected at least once with rotavirus by age five, the Food and Drug Administration said. In studies of more than 24,000 infants, Rotarix prevented severe and mild cases of rotavirus-caused diarrhea and vomiting during the first two years of life. “This vaccine provides another option to combat and reduce a potentially severe illness that affects so many children,” Dr. Jesse Goodman, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement announcing the Rotarix approval. The most common reactions reported during clinical trials were fussiness, irritability, cough, runny nose, fever, loss of appetite and vomiting, the FDA said. An earlier oral rotavirus vaccine sold by Wyeth was pulled from the market in 1999 after it was linked to a rare, life-threatening type of bowel obstruction known as intussusception. In a Glaxo study of more than 63,000 infants, there was no increase in the problem compared with a placebo. Higher rates of convulsion and pneumonia-related deaths were seen in Rotarix patients in that study but not in other Glaxo trials. “Although the FDA has concluded that the available data do not establish that these events are related to the vaccine, the agency has requested the manufacturer to conduct post-marketing safety studies involving more than 40,000 infants to provide additional safety information,” the FDA said. Glaxo said Rotarix “will offer protection against the most commonly circulating rotavirus types in the U.S. and allow infants to complete the vaccination series by four months of age.”   Rotarix, which is a liquid, is given in two doses to infants from six to 24 weeks of age, the FDA said. Merck’s RotaTeq vaccine is administered in three doses from ages six weeks to 32 weeks. Sales of Rotarix were $182 million in 2007 and are expected to rise with approval in the large U.S. market. The vaccine will be commercially available in the United States in the second half of the year, Glaxo said. Also on Thursday, researchers reported that Rotarix provided protection for up to two years in a study of infants from 10 Latin American countries. The Glaxo-funded trial of more than 15,000 infants found severe diarrhea from rotavirus in 0.4 percent of children given the vaccine, compared with 2.3 percent in the placebo group. Results were published in the Lancet medical journal. The arrival of a new generation of oral vaccines against the disease has been welcomed by health-care workers, but some experts caution against assuming the vaccines will work equally well in all countries. In a commentary in the Lancet, Australian pediatric experts Keith Grimwood and Carl Kirkwood noted Rotarix was more effective in European trials than in middle-income Latin American countries. The World Health Organization “is awaiting efficacy data from low-income countries of Africa and Asia, where much greater strain diversity exists and where 413,000 deaths occur every year compared with 15,000 in Latin America and 200 in Europe,” Grimwood and Kirkwood wrote. Claim: Glaxo wins FDA clearance for rotavirus vaccine.

SOLUTION: A second oral vaccine to prevent a leading cause of severe diarrhea in infants won approval from U.S. health officials on Thursday.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: After its first two-day meeting in Geneva, the WHO panel of gene editing experts - which was established in December after a Chinese scientist said he had edited the genes of twin babies - said it had agreed a framework for setting future standards. It said a central registry of all human genome editing research was needed “in order to create an open and transparent database of ongoing work”, and asked the WHO to start setting up such a registry immediately. “The committee will develop essential tools and guidance for all those working on this new technology to ensure maximum benefit and minimal risk to human health,” Soumya Swamanathan, the WHO’s chief scientist, said in a statement. A Chinese scientist last year claimed to have edited the genes of twin baby girls. News of the births prompted global condemnation, in part because it raised the ethical specter of so-called “designer babies” - in which embryos can be genetically modified to produce children with desirable traits. Top scientists and ethicists from seven countries called last week for a global moratorium on gene editing of human eggs, sperm or embryos that would result in such genetically-altered babies - saying this “could have permanent and possibly harmful effects on the species”. The WHO panel’s statement said any human gene editing work should be done for research only, should not be done in human clinical trials, and should be conducted transparently. “It is irresponsible at this time for anyone to proceed with clinical applications of human germline genome editing.”  The WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, welcomed the panel’s initial plans. “Gene editing holds incredible promise for health, but it also poses some risks, both ethically and medically,” he said in a statement. The committee said it aims over the next two years to produce “a comprehensive governance framework” for national, local and international authorities to ensure human genome editing science progresses within agreed ethical boundaries. Claim: WHO panel calls for registry of all human gene editing research.

SOLUTION:
It would be irresponsible for any scientist to conduct human gene-editing studies in people, and a central registry of research plans should be set up to ensure transparency, World Health Organization experts said on Tuesday.