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: "Senate Republicans’ surprise move to repeal the requirement to have health insurance into their tax reform bill revealed numbers that few people had noted before. (The mandate says that everyone must have coverage or face a fine.) ""80 percent of the tax falls on those who make $50,000 a year or less,"" Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told Fox News Nov. 15. ""We’re taking a failed policy that punishes people with taxes -- low-income people. (We’re) taking that tax away, giving them tax relief there, and then ploughing that back into tax relief for middle-income families."" This was no throw-away line. Thune is the third-ranking Republican in the party’s Senate leadership, and his colleagues delivered similar versions of the talking point throughout the day. In 2016, the fine for not having insurance stood at $695 for adults. The formula has a few wrinkles that brought the maximum penalty to $2,085 for a family, or 2.5 percent of income, whichever was larger. Going forward, it rises with inflation (unless of course, Congress repeals it). Not everyone without insurance has to pay the fine. The list of exemptions is long. It includes a family with income under $20,800; people who have suffered domestic violence in the household; anyone who has suffered the death of a close family member; someone who has received a utility shut-off notice, and more. Thune’s office said he got his information from 2015 data from the Internal Revenue Service. In one key sense, Thune is correct. Out of all the tax returns sent to the IRS that included a payment of the fine, 79 percent came from households making $50,000 a year or less. (Technically, the income is adjusted gross income, which understates actual income. But on average, the adjustment makes little difference for this check.) However, Thune didn’t specify that he was talking about the number of people. His description of the tax could just as equally refer to the dollars paid. The government collected a little over $3 billion from about 6.6 million households. Of that, about $1.8 billion, 60 percent, came from households with incomes under $50,000. So in dollar terms, about 60 percent of the tax fell on people in that income range, not the 80 percent that Thune said. Thune’s communications staff told us he was talking about the number of people and the number of returns. We reached several health care and tax researchers, and none of them challenged the core numbers. Gordon Mermin with the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center ran the numbers and found that as a percentage of income, the tax fell heaviest on the $25,000 to $50,000 group. On average, that group paid 3.1 percent of income. Mermin told us households in this range are more likely to lack insurance, and due to their incomes, are less likely to be able to claim an exemption from the fine. ""People shouldn’t be surprised the $25,000 to $50,000 group is affected the most,"" Mermin said. But researchers found it odd that people making less than $25,000 had paid as much as they did. The $10,000 to $25,000 group accounted for 22 percent of the payments, and about 36 percent of the households. ""Folks are just making a mistake,"" said Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare and an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ""Given the exemptions, there is no way such low-income folks should be paying."" The IRS knows this has happened. It’s been sending out letters since 2015, telling filers ""it appears that you may have reported owing too much Health Care Shared Responsibility Payment,"" the penalty’s formal name. ""The IRS has reached out to some taxpayers to let them know they’ve overpaid the penalty, but they don’t have the capacity to do that in all cases,"" said Tara Straw at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank. Straw said the IRS targets people who automatically qualify for an exemption because of their income, a factor that is stronger in states that did not expand Medicaid to people making 138 percent of federal poverty. Where the IRS effort falls short, she said, relates to personal circumstances such as a death in the family or a utility service cut-off notice. Larry Levitt at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a neutral source of health care data, also agreed that ""there certainly appear to be some low-income people paying the penalty who could be claiming an exemption."" A just-released study from Kaiser suggests the number could be large. The report found that about 5 million uninsured people could get coverage for less than the cost of the penalty. Thanks to the subsidies in Obamacare, the lowest-level plans would be free to many of those people, or if not free, available at a very low cost. If  everyone took advantage of those subsidies, the 6.6 million households paying the penalty because they lack coverage would fall significantly. We don’t know how the numbers would shake out because about 4 million people neither paid the fine nor told the IRS that they had coverage. Republicans offer the repeal of the penalty as a boon to working Americans, and for some it would be. But the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan analytic arm of Congress, has found that removing the penalty makes it less likely that people will seek out insurance, even if it would be free or very affordable. Thune said that 80 percent of the individual mandate penalty falls on those who make $50,000 a year or less. In terms of the number of returns in which people paid the fine, that figure is correct. In terms of the dollars collected, it overshoots the mark. People in that income range account for about 60 percent of the payments. Still, an independent analysis showed that households in the $25,000 to 50,000 income range paid the highest percentage of income on the penalty. There’s strong evidence that many lower income people are paying the fine by mistake, and millions could both avoid it and gain health coverage for less than the cost of the fine. But as far as who is paying the fine." Claim: 80 percent of the (individual mandate) tax falls on those who make $50,000 a year or less.

SOLUTION: Thune said that 80 percent of the individual mandate penalty falls on those who make $50,000 a year or less. In terms of the number of returns in which people paid the fine, that figure is correct. In terms of the dollars collected, it overshoots the mark. People in that income range account for about 60 percent of the payments. Still, an independent analysis showed that households in the $25,000 to 50,000 income range paid the highest percentage of income on the penalty. There’s strong evidence that many lower income people are paying the fine by mistake, and millions could both avoid it and gain health coverage for less than the cost of the fine. But as far as who is paying the fine. 

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Researchers around the world are working to develop potential treatments or vaccines against the respiratory disease that has killed nearly 47,000 people and infected almost a million in just a few months. A team at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the United States said they were able to move quickly in developing a potential COVID-19 vaccine after working on other coronaviruses that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). “These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2 (the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic), teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus,” said Andrea Gambotto, an associate professor at Pittsburgh. “We knew exactly where to fight this new virus.”  When tested in mice, the prototype vaccine - which the researchers have called PittCoVacc - generated what they described as “a surge of antibodies” against the new coronavirus  within two weeks. The Pittsburgh researchers cautioned that because the animals have not been tracked for very long as yet, it is too early to say whether and for how long the immune response against COVID-19 lasts. But they said that in comparable tests in mice with their MERS experimental vaccine, a sufficient level of antibodies was produced to neutralize the virus for at least a year. So far, the antibody levels of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccinated animals seem to be following the same trend, they said in peer-reviewed study in the journal EBioMedicine. The team said they hope to start testing the vaccine candidate on people in clinical trials in the next few months. The potential vaccine uses a needle patch design, called a microneedle array, to increase its potential potency. This array is a fingertip-sized patch of 400 tiny needles made out of sugar and the spike protein, Gambotto explained. It is designed to deliver the spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is strongest. Claim: Potential COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in mouse study.

SOLUTION: Initial tests in mice of a potential COVID-19 vaccine delivered via a fingertip-sized patch have shown it can induce an immune response against the new coronavirus at levels that might prevent infection, U.S. scientists said on Thursday.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: "The story does not report how much treatment with Celexa costs, for the drug and medication management. Celexa itself is an expensive, highly marketed drug; it costs between $3 and $4 per daily dose. That’s about $1,300 per year. Generic, citalopram costs about a dollar per day but can be had at $10 for a 90-day supply. Further, the study shows it doesn’t work, which only increases the relevance of costs. Even at pennies per day, the money is wasted. The story does an adequate job quantifying most results. It describes the study’s size, population and duration. It reports that 33 percent of the treatment group and 34 percent of the placebo group had improvements. The report should have said more about how ""improvements"" were measured and helped readers understand them as concrete behaviors. On balance, however, the story deserves a ""satisfactory"" rating under this criterion. The story mentions side effects of Celexa but underplays them. The data show that nearly all children in the study who took Celexa had side effects, including increased energy levels, impulsiveness, decreased concentration, hyperactivity, diarrhea, insomnia and dry skin. The side effects also included stereotypy–repetitive behaviors. Which is to say: In some children, the drug caused the very symptoms it was supposed to treat. The story lists only ""insomnia and impulsivity"" as side effects. It says they were ""twice as common"" in the group taking Celexa, but it doesn’t say in absolute terms how many of them experienced side effects considered serious. The story does an unusually good job explaining the value of the type of evidence this study produced. It explains why a clinical trial that uses a placebo is so powerful, and why blinded, randomized trials are the gold standard. A reader comes away with a clear sense of why this study is authoritative, in a context where science is often sketchy, false claims are often made and the need for treatments so great. The reporter might have mentioned that with 149 participants, only 73 of them in the treatment group, the study is considered small. Further, the story fails to point out that the research question was very narrowly tailored: Did the drug reduce repetitive behaviors? The findings are silent on the value of Celexa and other SSRIs in treating other symptoms in the same patients. The reporter should have said so. Having said all that: On balance, thanks to its exemplary work illuminating the world of study quality, the story earns a ""satisfactory"" rating. The article does not exaggerate the prevalence or severity of autism spectrum disorders. For greater precision and public value, the story should have said that the conditions studied and related to autism include Asperger’s syndrome and other developmental disorders. The reporter quotes three sources: This is adequate sourcing. The reporter properly discloses the authors’ financial links to drug companies, including the maker of Celexa. The story mentions that the drug Risperidone is approved for some symptoms of autism. But it fails to say what the standard treatment is for controlling repetitive behaviors and similar behavioral symptoms of kids with autism and Asperger’s. Studies have shown ""early intensive behavioral interventions"" to have some efficacy. The story states that Celexa is taken by about a third of children diagnosed with autism. The novelty of the treatment is not in question. There is no evidence the reporter has drawn excessively on the press release." Claim: Study finds antidepressant doesn’t help autistic children

SOLUTION:
This story about the failure of Celexa (citalopram) to control repetitive behaviors in autistic children does one very important thing wonderfully right: It explains why the conclusions of this study, which compared a group that got the drug to a group that got a placebo, are therefore valuable. Given the fact that the results sharply contradict current clinical practice, that’s a great service to readers. It essentially says: This study matters and its conclusions can be trusted. The story also devotes some space to describing gold-standard clinical trials generally–something that’s particularly important for caretakers of kids with autism, who are faced with shams and scams constantly. For all this the reporter deserves a public service award of some sort. Having said that: The report falls short in three significant ways:   It does not report the cost of the drug. At a time of health care reform, when costs are central to the national discussion of care delivery, this piece of information is essential. In a case where a drug is expensive–and found ineffective–it’s even more important. It underplays the harms. When a study has negative findings on a treatment, it’s essential to explore harms. The story skids past them too quickly. The story here is not only that the drug doesn’t reduce repetitive behaviors, but that it raises the risk of other negative behaviors and side effects that may be worse. It doesn’t discuss treatment options. Once again, a study that finds a drug does not work immediately raises in a reader’s mind the question of what does work–or at least what other approaches are currently tried. Overall, the story scores solidly under our rating system and earns points for explaining the value of well-controlled clinical trails. But its failure to address three of the most important issues–costs, harm and treatment options–prevent it from fully serving readers’ needs.