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.

[Q]: Paragraph: While Vice President Mike Pence runs the White House coronavirus task force, his wife is leading a parallel effort to help people deal with anxiety and other unsettling emotions brought on by the pandemic. Two months into the crisis, millions of Americans are struggling to cope with the fallout, whether it’s losing loved ones, losing a job or staying at home more than they ever have. “This is something we’re all going through together, and it’s not like anything we’ve ever gone through before,” Karen Pence told The Associated Press in a recent interview. She is lead ambassador for the PREVENTS task force, an acronym for the President’s Roadmap to Empower Veterans and End the National Tragedy of Suicide. It was created in 2019 to focus on veterans’ suicides but recently launched a social media campaign called “More Than Ever Before” to help reach Americans before they get to “the end of their rope,” she said. “We want them to know there’s help out there, and there are things that we can do to prevent some of the effects that this is having on our mental health as a nation,” Mrs. Pence said. She joined the PREVENTS effort early this year, before the extent of the coronavirus threat in the U.S. became clear. A majority of Americans say they have felt at least one negative emotional reaction in the last seven days, according to a new poll  conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Data Foundation. At least a third of Americans reported feeling nervous, depressed, lonely or hopeless at least one day in the past week. But taken together, 61% of Americans say they have felt at least one of those emotions at one point throughout the week. Nine percent also reported having a physical reaction, such as sweating, nausea or hyperventilating, when thinking about their experience with the pandemic on one or more days. The new poll, conducted last week, is the second wave of the COVID-19 Household Impact Survey. Thirty-eight percent of Americans say they felt lonely at least one of the last seven days. Sixteen percent said they felt that way on three or more days. And 38% said they felt hopeless about the future at least once, with 14% saying they felt that way on three or more days. Those patterns are similar for feelings of anxiety and depression. Mrs. Pence says there are four basic things people can do to help them cope with the situation, beginning with a daily “check in” with themselves to gauge how they’re feeling and then reach out to a friend or other individual if they need someone to hear them out. They should also figure out what puts them at ease, whether it’s reading, cooking or another activity, and schedule time for it. Mrs. Pence, a watercolor artist, said she’s been working on a painting of a friend’s house and is designing her family’s Christmas card. People should also talk about their struggles and successes and include children in those conversations. And if they’re concerned about themselves or someone else, they should feel comfortable calling the national suicide prevention lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. “It’s OK to not be OK,” said Mrs. Pence. She posts tips and information about available resources on her Twitter page. Among those grappling with the new dynamics is Jody Garrison, who works from her Milwaukee home, turning old books into journals and selling them online. It’s the rare trip to the grocery store — or to the auto mechanic shop later this week to pick up her car after a repair — that brings on the anxiety. “You worry about, ‘Am I going to catch something from touching something?’ so I truly don’t go out in public much at all,” she said by telephone. Being retired helps, as Garrison had long settled into a routine. The 68-year-old plays with her grandchildren online and meets friends there, and is exercising and reading more, too. “I think what’s kept my sanity is that I’ve tried really hard to stay focused on things that kept me happy in the past to sustain the thought of being alone,” she said. “I’m trying to stay focused on the positive, and when you do that, it doesn’t seem quite so bad.” Anxious to see the U.S. economy humming again, President Donald Trump has pushed back against those who warn that coronavirus cases will spike after state lockdowns are lifted. He says more people will die from suicide and substance abuse the longer schools, businesses and workplaces remain closed and people stay at home. Experts say rates of suicide and substance abuse were rising before the pandemic, but it’s too soon to know how much they may have increased during the outbreak. Suicide prevention and mental health advocates said they welcome the PREVENTS effort but would like to see more spending on a more coordinated effort to reduce deaths caused by despair. “You don’t have to be a mental health expert to know we’re in deep trouble,” said former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., co-chair of a new public-private effort to respond to mental health and suicide prevention needs both during and after the coronavirus. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., with 48,000 deaths reported in 2018, said Jerry Reed, who serves with Kennedy on the executive committee of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, which is separate from the virus-related initiative. Reed, a longtime suicide prevention advocate, said he’d like to see the same amount of effort that went into combating the coronavirus put into responding to mental health needs. “I like the fact that we all came together to flatten the physical curve of the virus,” Reed said. “I would suggest we all come together to flatten the mental health curve.” ___ Associated Press writers Tammy Webber in Chicago and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap ___ This story has been corrected to show that Kennedy represented Rhode Island, not Massachusetts. Claim: Karen Pence: ‘It’s OK to not be OK’ during pandemic.
[A]: Karen Pence says it’s OK to not be OK during the coronavirus pandemic.


[Q]: Paragraph: Older adults who underwent a brief course of brain exercises saw improvements in reasoning skills and processing speed that could be detected as long as 10 years after the course ended, according to results from the largest study ever on cognitive training. The findings, published on Monday in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, offer welcome news in the search for ways to keep the mind sharp as 76 million baby boomers in the United States advance into old age. The federally sponsored trial of almost 3,000 older adults, called the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly study, or ACTIVE, looked at how three brain training programs - focusing on processing speed, memory and reasoning ability - affected cognitively normal adults as they aged. People in the study had an average age of 74 when they started the training, which involved 10 to 12 sessions lasting 60 to 75 minutes each. After five years, researchers found, those with the training performed better than their untrained counterparts in all three measures. Although gains in memory seen at the study’s five-year mark appeared to drop off over the next five years, gains in reasoning ability and processing speed persisted 10 years after the training. “What we found was pretty astounding. Ten years after the training, there was evidence the effects were durable for the reasoning and the speed training,” said George Rebok, an expert on aging and a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the study. Participants in all three training groups also reported that they had an easier time with daily activities such as managing their medications, cooking meals or handling their finances than did participants who did not get the training. But standard tests of these activities showed no differences between the groups. “The speed-of-processing results are very encouraging,” said study co-author Jonathan King, program director for cognitive aging in the Division of Behavioral and Social Research at the National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the research. King said the self-reported improvements in daily function were interesting, but added, “We do not yet know whether they would truly allow older people to live independently longer.”  However, researchers said even a small gain would be likely to ease the burden on caregivers and healthcare providers. “If we delay the onset of difficulties in daily activities even by a small amount, that can have major public health implications in terms of helping to curb healthcare costs, delaying entry into institutions and hospitals,” Rebok said. The training course was designed to bolster specific cognitive abilities that begin to slip as people age. It does not aim to prevent dementia caused by underlying disease such as Alzheimer’s. At the start of the study, all 2,832 participants were cognitively normal. The study included four groups: three training groups plus a control group of volunteers who came in for regular testing to see how they were faring with age. People were trained in small groups over a period of several weeks and then were tested immediately after the training and again one, two, three, five and 10 years later. About 60 percent of the volunteers who underwent training also got booster training sessions, which enhanced the initial benefits. At the end of the trial, all groups showed declines compared with their initial baseline tests in memory, reasoning and processing speed, but those who got training in reasoning and processing speed experienced less decline. Among those given training in reasoning strategies, 73.6 percent were still performing above their pre-trial baseline level, compared with 61.7 percent of those who received no training and were only benefiting from practice on the test. The effect was even greater in processing speed. Among the training group, 70.7 percent of participants were performing at or above their baseline level, compared with 48.8 percent of those in the control group. There was no difference in memory performance between the memory group and the control group after 10 years. Two of the three training programs - the memory and the reasoning strategies - were done with paper and pencil, while the processing speed training was done on a computer. The programs, developed by the researchers, were focused largely on teaching strategies to improve cognitive performance. For example, the memory training taught people how to remember word lists, sequences and main ideas, while the reasoning training focused on things like recognizing number patterns. In the processing speed training, people were asked to focus on the main object in a computer screen while also trying to quickly recognize and identify objects on the periphery of the screen. Such training can help older drivers with things like recognizing road signs while driving. A version of the speed training program developed for this trial is now commercially available through the brain fitness company Posit Science, but the researchers are working on making other types of training available as well. Rebok’s team just got a grant from the National Institute on Aging to make a computerized version of the memory test, with the hope that repeated training can improve the results. The study was not designed to explain why cognitive training can have such a lasting effect. Rebok said it may be that people take the strategies they learn and practice them over time. As they age, trained individuals can rely on these strategies to compensate for their declines. Whether this training actually strengthened the brain in the way that exercising builds muscle is not clear, but the government intends to study this, too. Last week, NIA put out a request for proposals that would study whether cognitive training causes physical changes in the brain. Claim: Brain training helped older adults stay sharp for years: study.
[A]: A brief course of brain exercises helped older adults hold on to improvements in reasoning skills and processing speed for 10 years after the course ended, according to results from the largest study ever done on cognitive training.


[Q]: Paragraph: This article addresses the narrow claim that the U.S. House of Representatives ordered an investigation into whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks or insects as biological weapons. This claim is true: As first reported by Roll Call on July 15, 2019, the stipulation was added in an amendment to the 2020 Defense Authorization Act and approved with a voice vote on July 11: The amendment is an attempt to confirm or deny reports that Pentagon researchers — at places such as Fort Detrick in Maryland and Plum Island in New York — implanted diseases into insects to learn about the effects of biological weapons and also looked into using such insects to disseminate biological agents. To understand the rationale for such a move, a brief history of U.S. biological weapons research (and its associated controversies) is required. The United States began biological weapons testing during World War I, when the U.S. investigated — but did not use — ricin as a potential weapon. Though President Richard Nixon banned offensive biological weapons research and development in 1969, the period following World War II saw significant experimentation with the use of germs in warfare, primarily as a way to potentially disrupt enemy agriculture, as described by the non-partisan Nuclear Threat Initiative: A September 1945 memo to the Secretary of War detailed the program’s accomplishments: the United States had used pilot plants to mass produce, among other pathogens, Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) and Brucella melitensis (brucellosis); had developed and field tested a new cluster bomb; and had constructed facilities for the large-scale production of several pathogens, including anti-crop agents. [Biological Warfare]-related R&D largely took place at Camp (later Fort) Detrick in Maryland. Plum Island, also mentioned in Smith’s amendment, played a role in the U.S. biological weapons research as well. An island off the eastern end of the coast of Long Island fully owned by the U.S. government, Plum Island has been under civilian control as a Department of Agriculture research station since 1954. In 1993, reports surfaced that some biological weapons research had occurred on Plum Island in the past, as reported in a 1998 New York Times story: For decades, officials denied rumors of biological warfare experiments. But in 1993, Newsday unearthed previously classified documents on plans to disrupt the Soviet economy by spreading diseases to kill its pigs, cattle and horses. Most of the diseases studied, like African swine fever and rinderpest, affect only livestock. But one, Rift Valley fever, also occurs in humans. The warfare plans ended long ago, officials say, and now the laboratory focuses exclusively on preventing diseases. To satisfy their own concerns, Russian scientists inspected the center in 1994. Among the most extreme claims related to U.S. biological weapons research are those that suggest that outbreaks of the tick-borne Lyme disease in the late 60s and early 70s — the first widespread appearances of the condition — and its subsequent spread across much of the nation were the result of the United States government, either intentionally or accidentally. Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium that can live inside ticks and spread to animals and humans. This argument was most recently made in the book “Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons” by science writer Kris Newby. Though the idea predates this book, U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) has cited “Bitten” as a significant inspiration for the amendment. What that book says it “brings to light is that the U.S. military has conducted thousands of experiments exploring the use of ticks and tick-borne diseases as biological weapons, and in some cases, these agents escaped into the environment.” The book also suggests “there was a deliberate release or an accident” involving biological weapons experimentation with “unintended consequences to the environment.” Newby suggests a “release” of ticks with a transmittable disease in them could have introduced Lyme disease into America. She also suggests that the medically controversial condition of chronic or persistent Lyme disease could be elucidated by records exposing what kind of testing may have been conducted on this bacterial agent. Ultimately, “Bitten” rests on three assertions. First, that U.S. researchers injected transmittable diseases into ticks and other insects. Second, that the first major outbreak of what we now call Lyme Disease in the late ’60s and ’70s happened after the release of infected ticks into the general population. And third, that the agent being experimented with was — or was related to — the bacterial agent now known to cause Lyme Disease: Borrelia burgdorferi. Evidence for each of these pillars comes for the most part from a single source — the U.S. National Institutes of Health scientist for whom that bacterial species is named: William Burgdorfer. Interpreting a video recording of a 2013 interview made of Burgdorfer for a film, Newby writes: [Burgdorfer] seemed to be saying that Lyme wasn’t a naturally occurring germ, one that may have gotten loose and been spread by global warming, an explosion of deer, and other environmental changes. It had been created in a military bioweapons lab for the specific purpose of harming human beings. And somehow it had gotten out. These claims are controversial, and the testimony of Burgdorfer collected by Newby — at the end of his life as he was suffering from Parkinson’s and diabetes — is inconclusive, as conceded by Newby herself in the book’s epilogue: After five years of research, I wasn’t able to find verifiable documents confirming [an alleged release of deer ticks in Long Island]. I’m not sure why Willy [Burgdorfer] refused to fully disclose the details before his death. With his passing, the only way to know the truth is for a whistle-blower to step forward or for a classified report to be released. The primary problem with the notion that Lyme disease was not “a naturally occurring germ” is that the occurrence of Borrelia bacteria living inside ticks goes back to a time at least millions of years before humans existed to insert the bacteria into ticks. In 2014, for example, scientists found a 15-million-year-old tick fossil found in a chunk of amber from the Dominican Republic that showed evidence of being infected with Borrelia bacteria. The existence of Borrelia bacteria in the northeast United States, similarly, predates the U.S. biological weapons program. A study conducted by Yale researchers, who compared B. burgdorferi genomes from different areas collected over a 30-year period, calculated that the bacterium has been in North America longer than humans — at least 60,000 years. This lends support to the more scientifically accepted view about the emergence of Lyme disease: that it had long been dormant in the United States until ecological and economic changes produced conditions that allowed its spread to flourish, as explained in a Yale School of Public Health report on that research effort: [These] findings clarify that the bacterium is not a recent invader. Diverse lineages of B. burgdorferi have long existed in North America and the current Lyme disease epidemic is the result of ecological changes that have allowed deer, ticks and, finally, bacterium to invade. The explosion of deer in the twentieth century into suburban landscapes, free of wolf predators and with strict hunting restrictions, allowed deer ticks to rapidly invade throughout much of New England and the Midwest. Climate change has also contributed. Warmer winters accelerate ticks’ life cycles and allow them to survive an estimated 28 miles further north each year. Ticks expanded into suburbanized landscapes—full of animals like white-footed mice and robins, excellent hosts for B. burgdorferi. The expansion of ticks into habitats with ideal hosts allowed the bacterium to spread. The broader question of whether the United States ever “experimented” on ticks in general, however, has independent support outside of Burgdorfer’s vague claims. In a 2016 interview with the academic journal American Entomologist, Georgia State University entomologist James H. Oliver, who served at Fort Detrick in the ’50s working on biological weapons, stated: They put me in the entomology branch […] so that’s where I started working on ticks and mosquitoes — how to produce a lot of them. Drop them out of airplanes. Everything was very hushhush, very secret. I’m still leery talking about it, because I think they might put me in jail because I’m delivering secrets. It was a crazy time. … We would run all kinds of distribution tests on where these things go when you release them and what were the factors that would cause the migration. Can we drop them out of airplanes and how do we get the bugs to the enemy? As reported in Roll Call, Smith’s amendment would require a report on this topic from the Department of Defense Inspector General: The amendment … says the inspector general “shall conduct a review of whether the Department of Defense experimented with ticks and other insects regarding use as a biological weapon between the years of 1950 and 1975.” If the answer is yes, then the IG must provide the House and Senate Armed Services committees with a report on the experiments’ scope and “whether any ticks or insects used in such experiments were released outside of any laboratory by accident or experiment design.” Claim: The U.S. House of Representatives voted to compel the Department of Defense to disclose if it ever used ticks as part of a biological weapons program.
[A]:
The next step for Smith’s initiative is to reconcile the House version of the 2020 Defense Authorization with the Senate version, which does not presently contain such an amendment.