TASK DEFINITION: Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
PROBLEM: "U.S. President Donald Trump’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic was under heavy scrutiny on Sept. 9, 2020, as excerpts from reporter Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” started to circulate on social media. One of the most arresting passages in that book was highlighted by CNN reporter Daniel Dale, who wrote that Trump continued to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic in public by likening it to the flu even though Trump had acknowledged to Woodward on Feb. 7, 2020, that COVID-19 was deadlier than even the most strenuous strains of influenza:  These are both genuine quotes. The first quote comes from Woodward’s new book “Rage.” Woodward, one of the reporters who broke the “Watergate” scandal story during U.S. President Richard Nixon’s administration, conducted 18 on-the-record interviews with Trump between December 2019 and July 2020. In addition to Woodward’s reporting, there are also audio recordings of these conversations. During the Feb. 7 interview, Trump acknowledged that the virus was airborne and that COVID-19 was deadlier than even the most strenuous strains of the flu. In new tapes, President Trump admits to Bob Woodward he concealed critical details he knew about the coronavirus. ""I wanted to always play it down."" https://t.co/eICaAx70mY pic.twitter.com/zXNOZtIBx7 — CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) September 9, 2020  Despite acknowledging that COVID-19 was deadlier than the flu in early February 2020, Trump continued to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic in public by repeatedly likening COVID-19 to the flu. As Dale noted, Trump said that COVID-19 was “like the flu” during a Feb. 27 press conference. The official White House transcript shows that Trump was explaining how COVID-19 was different than Ebola when he made this comment. Here’s the full quote: They listened to a lot. Well, because this is a much different problem than Ebola. Ebola, you disintegrated, especially at the beginning. They’ve made a lot of progress now on Ebola. But with Ebola — we were talking about it before — you disintegrated. If you got Ebola, that was it. This one is different. Much different. This is a flu. This is like a flu. And this is a much different situation than Ebola."

SOLUTION: "U.S. President Trump acknowledged that COVID-19 is deadlier than the flu in early February 2020, but continued to downplay the pandemic as ""like the flu"" in public. "

PROBLEM: The public-private partnership includes the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank, among others. The funding announcement was made after a meeting of GAVI’s board. GAVI said the investment, which it called an estimate, will be provided between now and 2025. Since the current outbreak in eastern Congo was identified last August, health officials have immunized more than 255,000 people with a recently licensed vaccine made by Merck. To date there have been nearly 3,200 confirmed Ebola cases, including more than 2,200 deaths, in what has become the second deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, chair of Gavi’s board, called the creation of the Ebola vaccine stockpile a “historic milestone in humanity’s fight against this horrific disease.” GAVI said “a coordinating mechanism” to decide how and when vaccines will be used will be established with partner organizations. There are similar stockpiles for vaccines against yellow fever, meningitis and cholera. Those limited shots are doled out to developing countries by WHO, UNICEF, the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders after receiving technical advice from others. The Ebola vaccine stockpile will be available to all countries, but only developing countries will be able to get vaccines for free in addition to support for the logistical costs of mounting vaccination campaigns. Jason Nickerson, a humanitarian affairs adviser at Doctors Without Borders, said the new stockpile would change how officials respond to future Ebola outbreaks. “Knowing how many doses of the vaccine exist in the world, and then being able to get a supply of them to high-risk countries in a very quick way, gives us another tool to respond to these outbreaks,” he said. Earlier this year, the medical charity publicly called for an independent committee to oversee Ebola vaccination efforts in Congo, saying WHO sometimes used arbitrary criteria to determine who would get immunized. It said the fact that Ebola was continuing to spread despite the large number of people vaccinated was a damning assessment of the response. Containing this outbreak has been complicated by violence and misunderstandings in a part of Congo that had never reported an Ebola case before. Last week, response activities were suspended after attacks killed four Ebola responders, including a member of a vaccination team. Multiple rebel groups operate in eastern Congo and the region has been described as a war zone. WHO has warned continued attacks on health workers and Ebola clinics could undermine attempts to curb Ebola and prompt a resurgence of the disease.

SOLUTION: Vaccine group announces creation of Ebola vaccine stockpile.

PROBLEM: According to two studies published on Wednesday, DNA from these pre-modern humans may play a role in the appearance of hair and skin as well as the risk of certain diseases. Although Neanderthals became extinct 28,000 years ago in Europe, as much as one-fifth of their DNA has survived in human genomes due to interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago, one of the studies found, although any one individual has only about 2 percent of caveman DNA. “The 2 percent of your Neanderthal DNA might be different than my 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA, and it’s found at different places in the genome,” said geneticist Joshua Akey, who led one of the studies. Put it all together in a study of hundreds of people, and “you can recover a substantial proportion of the Neanderthal genome.”  Both studies confirmed earlier findings that the genomes of east Asians harbor more Neanderthal DNA than those of Europeans. This could be 21 percent more, according to an analysis by Akey and Benjamin Vernot, published online in the journal Science. Still, “more” is a relative term. According to the paper by geneticists at Harvard Medical School, published in Nature, about 1.4 percent of the genomes of Han Chinese in Beijing and south China, as well as Japanese in Tokyo come from Neanderthals, compared to 1.1 percent of the genomes of Europeans. Anthropologists expressed caution about the findings. Fewer than half a dozen Neanderthal fossils have yielded genetic material, said Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in  St. Louis, one of the world’s leading experts on early humans. Using this small sample to infer how much Neanderthal DNA persists in today’s genome is therefore questionable, he said. As expected, since Neanderthals never existed in Africa, Africans and those who trace their ancestry to that continent have almost no Neanderthal DNA, the Harvard team found. Human ancestors began migrating out of humanity’s natal continent as early as 1 million years ago, paleoanthropologists infer from fossil evidence, and between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago evolved into the robust, large-browed Homo neanderthalensis in Western Europe. Ever since scientists extracted DNA from the remains of Neanderthals, they have known that people today carry snippets of cavemen genes, in the amounts of 2 percent to 3 percent. That clinched the case that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, probably 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, soon after the latter arrived in Europe from Africa. The new studies add details about how much DNA and of what kind we inherited. “The story of early human evolution is captivating in itself, yet it also has far-reaching implications for understanding the organization of the modern human genome,” Irene Eckstrand of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which partially funded the research, said in a statement. “Every piece of this story that we uncover tells us more about our ancestors’ genetic contributions to modern human health and disease.”  The Harvard team used a novel genetic algorithm to estimate the probability that a particular genetic variant arose from Neanderthals. Basically, they started with the genome of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal, and determined whether pieces of it also appeared in some non-Africans but not in sub-Saharan Africans. The algorithm identified remnants of Neanderthal DNA, called alleles, in genes associated with type 2 diabetes, Crohn’s disease, lupus, biliary cirrhosis and smoking behavior. “But we can’t tell if the Neanderthal alleles are contributing to disease,” said Harvard’s Sriram Sankararaman, lead author of the paper in Nature. Areas “with increased Neanderthal ancestry tend to be higher the farther away you go from genes,” sitting, instead, in regions of the genome that do not actually produce the proteins, enzymes and other working molecules of the body. Neanderthal DNA does sit within some genes, however, such as those for keratin, a fibrous protein that makes skin, hair and nails tough and can be beneficial in colder environments by providing thicker insulation. The endurance of this Neanderthal DNA suggests that our caveman inheritance was adaptive, picked by natural selection to persist in our genome, generation after generation, because it conferred a survival advantage in individuals who carried it. The Harvard team analyzed the genomes of 1,004 people to estimate which populations got more or fewer Neanderthal DNA. Confirming a 2013 study, they found more in the genomes of east Asians than in Europeans. But they also dug deeper. Puerto Ricans and Spaniards have the least Neanderthal DNA, 1.05 percent and 1.07 percent respectively. That is curious because Neanderthals made their last stand on the Iberian peninsula, finally dying out there 28,000 years ago. Across all populations, Neanderthal DNA is conspicuously low in regions of the X chromosome and in testes-specific genes. The paucity of Neanderthal genes among those active in the testes suggests that interbreeding wasn’t a resounding success: It produced viable children, but the males were infertile. Although as much as 20 percent of Neanderthal DNA persists in modern genomes, according to the Washington scientists, vast regions of the latter are Neanderthal deserts. Among them is a region of chromosome 7 that includes a gene called FOXP2. “FOXP2 has previously been implicated in speech and language and may be an example of a gene that influences a uniquely human trait, which is why we find no Neanderthal sequences in these regions,” said Akey.

SOLUTION:
Modern humans more Neanderthal than once thought, studies suggest.