Given a paragraph and a claim, classify it this way: If the claim contradicts the evidence present in the paragraph, classify the claim as '0'. If the claim has multiple supporting *AND* contradicting evidences, classify the claim as '1'. If the claim has supporting evidence and the paragraph is in overall favor of the claim, then classify the claim as '2'.
--------
Question: Paragraph: Anti-smoking groups hailed the ban, which restricts sale and consumption of flavored vaping products immediately and does the same for menthol cigarettes starting June 1, 2020. “The Massachusetts law is a major milestone in the fight to reverse the worsening e-cigarette epidemic and stop tobacco companies from targeting and addicting kids with flavored products,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. But the New England Convenience Store and Energy Marketers Association, which opposed the legislation, said it’s exploring challenging the new law in court, or seeking other ways to change it. “Public health and safety has been dealt a blow by anti-tobacco crusaders exploiting a youth vaping crisis, and by lawmakers bypassing prudent policy-making,” the group said in a statement. In recent months, Massachusetts and other states, including Michigan, Montana, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington, have temporarily banned or restricted the sale of vaping products. But Massachusetts is now the first with a broad, permanent ban in place on all flavored tobacco or nicotine vaping products, anti-smoking groups say. The new law specifically restricts sale of the products to licensed smoking bars such as cigar bars and hookah lounges, where they’ll only be allowed to be consumed on-site. The restriction extends to menthol cigarettes and flavored e-cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco and chewing tobacco. It also places a 75% excise tax on nicotine vaping products, gives public health officials new authority to regulate the products and requires health insurers cover tobacco cessation counseling. Baker said he hopes other states adopt similar restrictions but argued that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are the only ones that can address the issue comprehensively for the nation. “Sometimes someone has to go first,” he said. “It’s pretty clear there isn’t going to be a federal policy on this anytime soon. So, in the absence of that, we had to act.” President Donald Trump has promised for months to approve a national ban on most flavored e-cigarettes. But in recent weeks his administration has walked back that promise, cancelling a planned announcement of a ban in favor of private meetings with the vaping industry and medical professionals. Massachusetts’ decision to extend the ban to menthols is unique. The mint flavor has typically been exempt from such restrictions because it’s long been one of the most popular flavors. Menthols were omitted from legislation passed by the New York City Council on Tuesday after advocates, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, argued their inclusion could lead to harsh police enforcement in the black community. Studies have shown menthol cigarettes are consumed disproportionately by young people and minorities, and anti-tobacco groups and health experts have argued menthol has been marketed to African Americans. But there have been recent signs that reluctance to address menthols is waning. Boston health officials earlier this week prohibited the sale of menthols in convenience stores, and dozens of other communities in Massachusetts and California have taken steps to restrict menthols and other flavored cigarettes. State Attorney General Maura Healey and other supporters said that restricting menthols and other flavored tobacco products is critical because they’ve contributed to growth in the traditional smoking market, which in turn prompted the creation of flavored vaping products targeted at youths. The American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network said it hoped the new law sends a message to the industry. “More than 80% of teens who have ever used a tobacco product started with a flavored product, and the tobacco industry knows this,” the organization said in an emailed statement. The legislation responds to growing concern about the health effects of vaping products, including deaths whose exact cause is still being investigated. Massachusetts health officials say there have been more than 200 suspected cases of vaping-related lung injury and three confirmed deaths in the state. In September, Baker declared a public health emergency and ordered a temporary ban on the sale of all vaping products — flavored and unflavored. Baker said Wednesday he’ll lift that ban a few weeks early on Dec. 11, when state health officials are expected to roll out additional regulations. The Tobacco Merchants Association, an industry group, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. But the Vapor Technology Association, which has challenged Massachusetts’ temporary vaping ban in state court, said a better strategy than the ban would be raising the age to purchase tobacco and nicotine vapor products to 21 and to impose stricter marketing standards on companies. “A ban will drive people back to combustible cigarettes, the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the U.S., or lead to illegal sales with a new and larger black market,” the organization said in a statement. __ Associated Press editor William J. Kole contributed to this report. Claim: No more menthol cigarettes: New ban on tobacco, vape flavors.

Answer: 2


Question: Paragraph: "A startling Obamacare claim swept from blog to blog last week: ""SHOCKING: Obamacare Provision Will Allow ‘Forced’ Home Inspections."" One blogger used a photo of armed officers entering a cottage, with the overline, ""We’re from the government and we’re here to raid your home."" Another said ""this is why the IRS has been training with AR-15s."" A reader sent us a post from BenSwann.com, ""Obamacare provision: ‘Forced’ home inspections."" He wondered if it were true. So did we. South Carolina’s concern ""Forced home inspections""? Um, no. The flurry originated with BenSwann.com blogger Joshua Cook on Aug. 13. He picked up the phrase ""forced home inspections"" from a state lawmaker in South Carolina. Back in March, as a group of state legislators discussed a bill to fight the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Rick Quinn offered a specific example of something in the law that worried him: ""The forced home inspections that I’ve heard about."" Cook was there. And the comment nagged him. He noticed people weren’t really writing about the issue. ""It's just been bothering me,"" he told PolitiFact. So he wrote about it last week, talking with an attorney who spoke at the committee hearing and posting a video clip of Quinn’s comment. ""The point is South Carolina legislators believe it, and are convinced this is going to happen,"" Cook told us. Quinn, indeed, had added an amendment to the South Carolina Freedom of Health Care Protection Act to prevent state workers from conducting any ""involuntary … in-home visitation."" It passed the House, but the Senate didn’t have a chance to vote. Cook says lawmakers hope to revive the legislation in the next session. But that Obamacare program that worries Quinn? It already is — by statute — voluntary. There’s literally nothing to suggest raids or weapons. Home visiting programs Concerned bloggers pointed to an Obamacare-funded grant program for ""maternal, infant and early childhood home visiting."" In 2011, the government announced $224 million in funding. Most of those grants are going to health departments — none, so far, in South Carolina. The idea: fund visits from nurses and social workers to high-risk families to help them develop skills to keep kids healthy, get them ready for school, and prevent child abuse and neglect. Home-visit programs already existed in 40 states. But to Kent Masterson Brown, a health care litigator invited by South Carolina lawmakers to help them avoid implementing Obamacare, the programs suggest overzealous nonprofits telling parents how to raise their children without their consent. Brown raises the specter of a home-schooling family subject to ""intervention"" for school readiness, their children forced into schools and onto medications and vaccines. ""The federal government will now set the standards for raising children and will enforce them by home visits,"" he wrote about the law. But consent is built into the program. A home visitor could no more compel a family to vaccinate kids than a pediatrician could, said Kay Johnson, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School who’s one of the nation’s experts on state home visiting policy. Here’s what the Affordable Care Act says: Home-visiting programs must assure they’ll have procedures that ensure ""the participation of each eligible family in the program is voluntary."" Here’s how that might work, according to Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University, who supports such programs. A low-income mom gets her prenatal care at a community health center. Her doctor asks if she would like visits from a nurse after the baby comes to offer tips and answer questions. Mom could say yes — or no. It’s like the old days of health care, Rosenbaum said, when nurses would visit families to show how to breastfeed, sterilize bottles, care for babies and cope when you’re exhausted. ""It's real health education in the home, is the purpose of it,"" she said. Such programs have a long history backed by peer-reviewed research, she said. They work. ""They make sure that you don't go home to nothing. It's done to help families, not to police them."" A classic randomized trial in Elmira, N.Y., showed nurse visits to families of newborns reduced child abuse and neglect, even years later. They also reduced government spending for low-income unmarried women. Brown, the lawyer, says he’s concerned families have no protection from social workers. He’s concerned workers won’t be well-trained and will overstep families’ rights. Nobody should knock on your door without a badge, he said. ""What I see in this is a monster, frankly. And you can quote me on that,"" he said. That’s the fear. The law, however, specifies that programs be voluntary, their staffs trained and supervised, and the home-visiting models they follow based on strong research. Any ""forced home inspection"" wouldn’t be under the law — it would be in direct opposition to it. And if a family welcomed help but later decided it made them uncomfortable? Samantha Miller, a spokeswoman for the U.S. agency administering the program, said families could stop accepting services ""without consequence at any time and for any reason."" Our ruling Bloggers passed around a claim last week that a provision of the new health care law will allow ""forced"" home inspections by government agents. But the program they pointed to provides grants for voluntary help to at-risk families from trained staff like nurses and social workers. What bloggers describe would be an egregious abuse of the law — not what’s allowed by it." Claim: "Obamacare provision will allow ""forced home inspections"" by government agents."

Answer: 0


Question: Paragraph: The story does discuss costs, but the framing is problematic. The story, based on a conversation with one source, the study’s lead investigator, says, “It’s difficult at this point to predict costs. However, he expects costs will not approach those for Provenge, the pricey treatment vaccine for prostate cancer approved by the FDA in 2010. Provenge costs $93,000 for the one-month, three-dose treatment. Medicare covers it.” This tells readers that, no matter what the drug costs, Medicare likely will cover it. We appreciate the effort to bring cost information into the story, but this type of information is misleading. The story does explain that only one patient remains cancer free following the study. It then details how for most of the patients cancer continued to progress after 2 months. It says that the median overall survival in both the breast cancer and ovarian cancer patients was less than 16 months. But the story is framed in such a way to highlight the one potentially positive outcome of the study and to downplay the negative. We read more sooner about the one patient who may have responded well to the vaccine than we do about the 25 other patients who did not. The story mentions side effects in a satisfactory way. Technically, the story provides readers with much of the information they would need to assess the validity of the study, but it comes out in bits and pieces. For example, we only find out near the end of the story that “The woman, who remains disease-free, had a previous treatment with a different treatment vaccine. ‘That might have primed her immune system,’ Gulley speculates. She also had only one regimen of chemotherapy, perhaps keeping her immune system stronger.” This casts much doubt on the study’s design, and it would have been nice to have seen some outside expertise brought in to either discuss those design problems or to torpedo the story altogether. Again, the story deserves high marks for being very specific in the lead and throughout the story. It says, that the vaccine is “for breast and ovarian cancer that has spread to other parts of the body” in the lead and later details the particular circumstances of the study cohort. It says, “The patients had already undergone a variety of treatments but the cancer was progressing. Twenty one of the 26 had undergone three or more chemotherapy regimens.” This is the root of the story’s main shortcoming. Almost all of the information in the story comes from one source: Dr. James Gulley, who oversaw the study. Gulley is quite enthusiastic about this vaccine, despite the evidence, and the story needed more perspectives to put this vaccine into a broader context. At the very end, there are a few comments from Dr. Vincent K. Tuohy, who also is working on a breast cancer vaccine. Because of his competing research, he seems to have a conflict, but even putting that aside, his comments were not used to their best effect. There was no comparison in the story to existing alternatives. The median survival, for example, is presented without the context of how long these patients might have lived had they been undergoing standard chemotherapy and radiation treatments. We give high marks to the story for saying right in the lead that the findings are from “a preliminary study in 26 patients.” That tells readers both that the findings need to be interpreted with caution and that the treatment is not available to most people. The concept of vaccines for breast/ovarian cancer is indeed novel, and the story acknowledges that other vaccines are being studied. The story does not rely on a news release. Claim: Study: Vaccine for Breast, Ovarian Cancer Has Potential

Answer:
2