THE TIMES-DELPHIC The weekly student newspaper of Drake University Vol. 141 | No. 1 | Sept. 1, 2021 FEATURES
SPORTS
COMMENTARY
Morgan Coleman is the first Black woman to serve as Drake’s student body president.
The women’s tennis team is excited to compete in fall tournaments this fall after a standout spring season.
Determination is in the air as Virgo season begins and the summer comes to an end.
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Drake offers incentives to encourage vaccination
FOURTH-YEAR PHARMACY STUDENT Caroline Gander administers the Pfizer vaccine into the arm of Drake student Hannah Clark. PHOTO BY ANDREW KENNARD Andrew Kennard News Editor andrew.kennard@drake.edu
As the Delta variant surges in Polk County, Drake University is trying new methods to encourage students to get vaccinated against COVID-19, including vaccination clinics in Hubbell dining hall and prize drawings. The Polk County Health Department said on Aug. 24 that COVID-19 hospitalizations increased by 175 percent and cases by 87 percent over the previous three weeks. In the statement, Polk County medical examiner Joshua Akers said that more young people are being hospitalized with COVID-19. “If people don’t get the vaccine, they are likely to get COVID. Because it’s here, now. It seems like it’s endemic,” Drake provost and epidemiologist Sue Mattison said. “So it would be helpful, but we are not able to mandate it, so we are working on education, and encouragement,
and making the vaccine easily available.” According to Drake’s Aug. 27 COVID-19 update, 67 percent of all students and 71 percent of students who attend at least one class in-person have reported that they have been vaccinated. Drake’s COVID-19 updates show a sharp increase in vaccination reports throughout August. This may be due in part to a series of prize drawings that has awarded $250 VISA gift cards and free parking passes to vaccinated students. Mattison said vaccination numbers “went up quite a bit” after the university publicized its plan to draw for 20 $2,500 onetime scholarships if four-fifths of in-person students are fully vaccinated by Sept. 24. “And so I think people didn’t see the point of telling us that they had been vaccinated, but when the numbers get high enough, it will certainly have an impact on what we’re able to do on campus, and if we don’t get
up to those numbers, that will also have an impact on what we’re able to do on campus,” Mattison said. Mattison said that students who study abroad are required to get the vaccine, but an Iowa state law passed over the summer prevents Drake from mandating the vaccine for all students without losing state grant money. This includes the Iowa Tuition Grant, which provides students from Iowa who attend private institutions in the state up to $6,800 in grant money each year, according to the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “And so 30 percent of our undergraduate students are from the state, and for a lot of students that’s the difference between being able to afford to come to a private institution or going to a public institution,” Mattison said. Students on their way to and from lunch at Hubbell have the opportunity to receive
both the Pfizer COVID-19 and influenza (flu) vaccines without an appointment at a series of clinics staffed by the students and faculty of Drake’s College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences (CPHS). “I was going to get [the vaccine] at home, but my mom is one of those anti-vaccine people, so I waited until I got here,” Drake student Hannah Clark said while waiting in Hubbell to get her shot. A new CDC recommendation for the 2021 flu season allows influenza and COVID-19 vaccines to be administered at the same time. Nora Stelter, a Drake associate professor of pharmacy practice who has been involved with running the clinics, said she is excited to offer the flu vaccine to Drake students regularly for the first time. “Like last year, we had the big push that was, ‘We don’t want people sick with flu in the hospital,’ because our hospitals—at that point, we
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were expecting them to be very full last year with COVID patients,” Stelter said. “So the same thing again, we want to keep people out of the hospital with influenza illness for the same reasons. So it’s important to get your flu shot again this year.” According to Stelter, the students and faculty of CPHS will also run influenza and COVID-19 vaccination clinics at the Harkin Center on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons from Sept. 13 to mid-October. As part of Drake’s vaccination campaign, Stelter provided answers to common concerns about the vaccine. She said students who are hesitant about taking the vaccine should reach out to her team at the vaccination clinic. “Obviously, our team is constantly reading the new literature that comes out every day,” Stelter said. “So, very informed. We have a lot of information we can share to those who have any concerns.”
the end of the forever-war: the united states leaves afghanistan
13 U.S. SERVICE MEMBERS and many Afghan citizens were killed by ISIS-K’s suicide bombing
attack in Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Madeleine Leigh Staff Writer madeleine.leigh@drake.edu
The country’s longest war is now over, as the final U.S. military planes left Afghanistan on Tuesday, Aug. 31. This is despite several twists and turns in the last month, including the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan in the wake of U.S. troop withdrawals and terrorist group ISISK’s suicide bombing of the evacuation site at the Kabul airport. The attack killed 13 U.S. service members and as many as 170 Afghans and prompted U.S. airstrikes in retaliation,
according to the New York Times. After 20 years of conflict, the war in Afghanistan is the longest in the U.S.’s history, despite Congress never formally declaring war at its inception or any point since. Now, many Americans are wondering whether the U.S. won or lost. President Joe Biden said that the U.S.’s goals in invading Afghanistan have been met and it’s long past time U.S. forces went home. “We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals: get those who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001, and make sure al Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base from which to attack us again,” Biden
said in an address on Aug. 16. “We did that.” Biden also said that responsibility for the fall of Afghanistan’s government to the Taliban after ousted President Ashraf Ghani fled Afghanistan on Aug. 15 does not fall at the U.S.’s feet, but at Afghanistan’s. “We gave them [Afghans] every chance to determine their own future,” Biden said. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.” It is true that the original stated purpose of the U.S.’s invasion of Afghanistan was to disrupt terrorist networks there and roust al-Qaeda after its attack on the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. In his speech announcing
the U.S.’s opening salvo on Oct. 7, 2001, former President George W. Bush said the U.S. was attacking for exactly this reason. “These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime,” Bush said. However, during a speech on April 17, 2002, Bush articulated that his administration’s goals in Afghanistan, in addition to military action against terrorist networks, also included nation building. “We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations. Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government,” Bush said. “Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan train and develop its own national army. And peace will be achieved through an education system for boys and girls which works.” If the criteria Americans use to judge whether the U.S. has won or lost in Afghanistan are the ones Bush laid out in 2002, then some may say the U.S. has lost. According to political science professor David Skidmore, Afghanistan is not the first time this has happened. Skidmore, who studies
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international political economy, American foreign policy and international relations theory, said that there are more than a few instances in U.S. history of trying—and failing— to rebuild failed states like Afghanistan through military occupation. “We tried that in Vietnam; it didn’t work. We tried it in Iraq; it didn’t work very well,” Skidmore said. “It utterly failed in Afghanistan.” Skidmore also noted explicit parallels between the U.S.’s failure in Vietnam in the 1970s and the U.S.’s failure in Afghanistan in 2021. “In both cases, the United States went in and created states that were totally dependent on our military presence and our aid,” Skidmore said. “By sending in so much aid, we created perfect conditions for massive levels of corruption. By making them dependent upon our military, we created a situation where once that military was withdrawn their own military was unable to provide security.” After the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in March 1973, the South Vietnamese government it had been supporting lasted until April 1975 when North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, its capital. “In the case of Afghanistan, they didn’t even make it to the end of summer,” Skidmore said.