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: The confirmation hearing of Ronny Jackson, Trump’s White House doctor and a Navy rear admiral chosen to speed up improvements to the VA, is scheduled for next week. On Tuesday, he met privately with Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, as a part of visits this week to assure lawmakers he could effectively lead the government’s second-largest department. Tester said after the meeting that Jackson had committed to the same stance against privatization as David Shulkin, who pledged before his confirmation as VA secretary last year to continue strong investment in core VA programs and facilities while expanding access to private doctors. Shulkin was fired last month. “We talked extensively about why Shulkin got fired with the issues revolving around privatization and capacity building,” Tester said. He “seems to be somebody who doesn’t want to privatize the VA.” Asked if Jackson had pledged not to privatize VA, Tester said “yes.” “He said basically the same thing Shulkin said--that he wanted to build capacity at the VA,” Tester said. According to Tester, Jackson had not yet informed Trump of his views but would be doing so. Both Tester and Sen. Johnny Isakson, the Republican chairman of the veterans committee who met with Jackson Monday, have declined to endorse Jackson in advance of his confirmation hearing on April 25, saying they need to hear more about his plans to fix VA. Jackson is “certainly not an expert on VA,” Tester said. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a Senate committee member who also met Tuesday with Jackson, said she needed more assurances that Jackson would resist undue White House pressure to aggressively expand private care. Major veterans groups view VA medical centers as best suited to treat complex battlefield injuries, such as traumatic brain injury. “In our meeting today, I appreciated how strongly Dr. Jackson spoke against privatizing the VA, but I still need to know more about how he will stand up to ideological opponents of VA and remain fully committed to putting the needs of veterans first,” Murray said. The issue of privatizing VA has been a political hot button since the 2016 campaign, when Trump pledged to aggressively expand veterans’ access to private doctors outside the government-run VA system at taxpayers’ expense via the Veterans Choice program. Trump’s comments came in the wake of a 2014 scandal at the Phoenix VA medical center in which some veterans died while waiting months for medical appointments. After he was fired as VA secretary, Shulkin blamed “political forces” in the Trump administration that he says are bent on privatizing the agency and prioritizing “companies with profits” over the care of veterans. On Tuesday, the White House reiterated that there were “no discussions” about privatizing VA. “This administration has taken several unprecedented steps to transform and modernize the VA,” White House spokesman Raj Shah said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our work with Congress to reform and strengthen the VA Choice program to provide our veterans with more choice in their health care.” Several Democratic senators, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, have vowed to oppose Jackson’s nomination if it leads to greater privatization at the agency. Before he was confirmed last year as VA secretary, Shulkin, a holdover from the Obama administration, declared in advance that he wouldn’t “privatize” VA. “VA is a unique national resource that is worth saving, and I am committed to doing just that,” Shulkin said in February 2017. “There will be far greater accountability, dramatically improved access, responsiveness and expanded care options, but the Department of Veterans Affairs will not be privatized under my watch.” ___ Follow Hope Yen on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hopeyen1 Claim: Dem senator: Trump VA pick vows not to privatize vets care.

SOLUTION: President Donald Trump’s pick to be Veterans Affairs secretary is promising not to privatize the agency, a key Democratic senator said Tuesday, taking a stance on a politically charged issue that his predecessor says led to his firing.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: Roughly half of Yellowstone’s 4,600 bison are estimated to have been exposed to brucellosis, a bacterial infection that can sometimes cause cows and bison to miscarry. Worries that infected bison may endanger cattle in states such as Montana that border Yellowstone had prompted the powerful ranching lobby to endorse biobullets - absorbable projectiles packed with vaccine. They would cut disease rates among bison by as much as 35 percent over 30 years. The proposal was the latest decades-long efforts to ease conflicts between livestock interests and wildlife advocates over management of Yellowstone bison. Park officials said they decided against the remote vaccination program because of its $9 million price tag, questions about its effectiveness and the possible impact on the millions of visitors who flock to the park to view iconic Western wildlife like bison. The measure would have required shooting the animals once a year for three decades, raising questions about how increased human interaction could affect bison within the wild herd. “We have concerns about how that repeated contact might impact bison behavior and their visibility to park visitors,” said Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash. Nash said there was no documented case of wild bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle, which he said signifies the success of existing measures designed to separate the park’s herd from domestic livestock. Those practices include returning bison that leave the park, testing and vaccinating bison that leave Yellowstone, and slaughtering some infected animals. Errol Rice, executive vice president of the Montana Stockgrowers Association, said the threats posed by infected bison to Montana’s brucellosis-free certification, which protects the market value of cattle, warranted using biobullets. He said the program would have lessened the public outcry that erupts when wandering bison are corralled and shipped to slaughterhouses. “The capture and removal of bison has been a challenging issue for the park and Montana. Remote vaccination would have helped alleviate the public relations burden we have to deal with when bison migrate out of Yellowstone,” he said. Stephany Seay, spokeswoman for Buffalo Field Campaign, a bison advocacy group, applauded the park’s decision not to shoot bison with vaccine. “It was a mismanagement scheme based on a livestock model. We don’t vaccinate skunks against rabies or mosquitoes against West Nile virus,” she said. Claim: Yellowstone managers reject vaccinating bison with biobullets.

SOLUTION: Yellowstone National Park managers have rejected a plan to use air rifles to shoot the nation’s last herd of purebred bison with so-called biobullets containing a vaccine against a cattle disease, in a decision that has riled the U.S. livestock industry.

PROBLEM: Paragraph: On 18 March 2016, an image of an opossum was uploaded to Imgur with overlaid text reading as follows:  Given the frequently absurd nature of “amazing facts” memes, many viewers were rightly skeptical of the claim attached to that photograph. The image provided no citations to substantiate the information it presented, and the notion that opossums were a possible tool in the epidemiological battle against Lyme disease seemed implausible to some. As it turned out, there is at least some truth to the opossum-as-tick-slayer rumors. On 18 April 2014, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and NewsTimes published an article that focused on the role of opossums in the spread of Lyme disease with respect to their role in the ecosystem: [N]ow ecologists have learned something else about opossums. They’re a sort of magnet when it comes to riding the world of black-legged ticks, which spread Lyme disease. “Don’t hit opossums if they’ve playing dead in the road,” said Richard Ostfeld, of the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Ostfeld is forest ecologist and an expert on the environmental elements of infectious diseases like Lyme disease. Several years ago, scientists … tested six species — white-footed mice, chipmunks, squirrels, opossums and veerys and catbirds — by capturing and caging them, and then exposing each test subject to 100 ticks … [O]f the six, the opossums were remarkably good at getting rid of the ticks — much more so that any of the others. [A]mong other opossum traits, there is this: They groom themselves fastidiously, like cats. If they find a tick, they lick it off and swallow it … Extrapolating from their findings, Ostfeld said, the team estimated that in one season, an opossum can kill about 5,000 ticks … Some ticks end up getting their blood meal from the possum. But more than 90 percent of them ended up being groomed away and swallowed. “They’re net destroyers of ticks,” Ostfeld said. Ostfeld had previously discouraged disruption of opossum populations for this reason. In July 2012, he said in a podcast: Because many ticks try to feed on opossums and few of them survive the experience. Opossums are extraordinarily good groomers it turns out — we never would have thought that ahead of time — but they kill the vast majority — more than 95% percent of the ticks that try to feed on them. So these opossums are walking around the forest floor, hoovering up ticks right and left, killing over 90% of these things, and so they are really protecting our health. Ostfeld was also named as one author of a September 2009 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society which examined animal kingdom hosts “as ecological traps for the vector of Lyme disease” and asserted that: By subjecting field-caught hosts to parasitism by larval blacklegged ticks, we found that some host species (e.g. opossums, squirrels) that are abundantly parasitized in nature kill 83–96% of the ticks that attempt to attach and feed, while other species are more permissive of tick feeding. [T]he vast majority (96.5%) of larval ticks that encounter an opossum and attempt to feed are apparently consumed. Working backwards, [we calculate that] during any given week in the larval activity peak, each opossum must host more than 5500 larval ticks to produce 199 that successfully feed. By this logic, during the larval peak, each mouse encounters approximately 50 larval ticks per week, almost half of which feed to repletion and become nymphs. As far as “amazing facts” images go, the opossum/Lyme disease one was very well researched, with numbers that matched up with what ecologists have learned about opossums, deer ticks, and the spread of Lyme disease in recent years (although those studies surmised opossums kill approximately 5,000 ticks per season, not per week). Claim: Opossums kill thousands of ticks each week, inhibiting the spread of Lyme Disease to humans.

SOLUTION:
What's true: Some data indicate opossums eat thousands of deer ticks per season, reducing the number that can go on to spread Lyme Disease to humans. What's false: How much of an impact opossums' eating ticks has on Lyme Disease infection rates is indeterminate.