WORLD Radio Rewind

LEIGH JONES: This is WORLD Radio Rewind: a 10-minute review of some of our news coverage and features from the past week on WORLD Radio. I’m managing editor Leigh Jones.

First up: storm recovery. Earlier this week, Kim Henderson traveled to southeast Louisiana to talk to residents picking up the pieces after last weekend’s devastating hurricane. She reported on her visit on Thursday’s program.

KIM HENDERSON, CORRESPONDENT: When Hurricane Ida slammed the Gulf Coast with 150-mph winds, residents of Greensburg—one of Louisiana’s oldest towns—felt the full force of her wrath.

SHOVAKA: Man, it was very powerful. It was like the wind was howling . . . It was very scary, like, you know, like a horror movie like you know, something you see on TV . . .

Tangipahoa—60 miles north of the coast—felt it, too. It’s about an hour east of Baton Rouge and an hour and a half northwest of New Orleans.

As power lines snapped and giant oak trees uprooted, Rachel Prichard had one thing on her mind. Her children. They were at her mother’s house, usually a 15-minute drive away.

PRICHARD: It took me six hours to get to my kids and not knowing if they was alive or dead . . .

In nearby Amite, the Red Cross opened a shelter at the high school gym, a 100-year-old brick building that emerged unscathed.

KRUEGER: We rode through the hurricane in a hunkered down position in the hallway . . .

That’s Sue Krueger. Starting Saturday, she and six other staffers doled out cots and MREs to 66 guests seeking refuge. With no electricity, temps inside the building are making their stay uncomfortable.

KRUEGER: We have one generator that is powering an air conditioning unit.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kim Henderson in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana.

LJ: Up next, vaccinations versus natural immunity. Some people who’ve had COVID-19 say they don’t need a vaccine because they have natural antibodies. But do they provide the same protection as a vaccine-induced immune response? Researchers aren’t sure. And on Tuesday’s program, Sarah Schweinsberg reported on their sometimes contradictory studies.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: A few weeks ago, Rashago Kemp began to feel sick. After a couple of days the 37-year-old’s symptoms worsened.

KEMP: Everything just hurt… you had these weird temperature changes where you'd feel really hot, and you'd feel really cold and you feel really hot. Like my appetite went to almost nothing.

He got tested. Positive for COVID-19. Kemp got tested for two reasons. He wanted to be responsible, and he wanted documentation that he had the virus. Kemp wants to prove he has natural immunity.

KEMP: I believe that, you know, natural immunity, especially in people that are young and healthy, like myself, is robust.

So far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t want to give people credit for natural immunity. The agency recommends COVID-19 vaccines as the best way to protect against the virus… whether you’ve had it or not.

Dr. Amesh Adalja is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. He says despite reduced protection against the Delta variant, vaccines are still doing their most important job.

ADALJA: What we know is that our vaccines are holding up against the Delta variant when it comes to what matters: serious disease, hospitalization, and death.

But Dr. Adalja believes natural immunity is worth something. But officials here haven’t made documenting natural immunity a priority. Doug Badger is a public policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

BADGER: So CDC has never encouraged, for example, a doctor to give a recovered patient, a note or some certification or a local public health agency to give the certification that John Doe recovered from COVID as of June 4, 2021.

That makes it more difficult for schools, hospitals, and businesses to figure out who falls into what categories: never-infected, recovered, and vaccinated.

But recovered COVID-19 patients like Rashago Kemp and experts like Dr. Amesh Adalja at Johns Hopkins say it would be a system worth figuring out.

ADALJA: If the goal is to protect people against COVID-19, I think that this should be something that we incorporate into guidance…If you have natural immunity, one dose of vaccine. If you don't have natural immunity, two doses of vaccine. If you're immunosuppressed, three doses of vaccine.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

LJ: For our third story, we go back to Thursday’s program. If you paid attention in American government classes, you’ll remember that Congress alone has the authority to declare war. But as Caleb Bailey reported, lawmakers have used that power sparingly …. despite the number of times U.S. troops have gone into battle.

CALEB BAILEY, REPORTER: Cully Stimson manages the National Security Law program at the Heritage Foundation.

STIMSON: Remember, Article One, Section Eight, Clause 11 of the Constitution is the Declare War Clause. And Congress, and Congress alone, under our constitutional framework, has the authority to declare war. And so Congress has declared war five times, in our nation's history. And they've authorized the use of military force over 40 times.

Those 40 authorizations have included some historic military conflicts. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. For all of those engagements, the president has used what is supposed to be a much more limited authority to order troops overseas.

But by 1973, Congress decided the executive branch had too much power to involve the country in unnecessary conflicts. That year, lawmakers passed the War Powers Resolution. It requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of sending U.S. forces into hostilities. Congress then has 60 days to approve the operation or … the president must order the troops to stand down.

But Cully Stimson says in nearly 50 years, Congress has never refused to back a president’s use of force.

STIMSON: Congress has the power of the purse, as it's called. And so Congress can withdraw, on a going forward basis, financial support for ongoing military operations, but that's politically risky for them, and so they have not done it.

Critics say that has thrown the balance of power way out of whack. The War Powers reform legislation proposed in July aims to correct that imbalance.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Caleb Bailey.

LJ: And finally, we end today with a special class for veterans. Many service members return from fighting with mental and emotional scars, as well as physical ones. On Thursday’s program, Grace Snell reported on the healing power of music.

GRACE SNELL, INTERN: Juan Martinez Jr. is a retired staff sergeant. He deployed to Afghanistan in 20-13.

MARTINEZ: The thing about being deployed is that you have a job to do, and if you don't do your job, things can go wrong, because other people are depending on you.

Between missions, he wrote poetry to cope with the stress. Martinez poured his heart into one poem especially: “Joyless Reflections.”

MARTINEZ: Streams of conflicting emotions race through my troubled head/ Sometimes not knowing if living alive, I may be found dead…

Poetry helped Martinez survive deployment. But even after he returned home nine months later, memories of war still haunted him.

Then, a friend told him about The Veteran’s Guitar Project.

With help, Martinez set the poems he wrote in Afghanistan to music. Now the group plays them together. Martinez’s voice teacher Chrissy sings with them.

MUSIC: JOYLESS REFLECTIONS

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Smith-Henry co-founded the group and serves as chaplain. He says music helps veterans cope with wounds from their past.

SMITH-HENRY: This context is a healing context, you know, music is healing. We have talked about this many, many times, right.

“Joyless Reflections” is a hard song to sing, but the veterans keep doing it week after week. Smith-Henry appreciates writers like Martinez.

SMITH-HENRY: What they express that some of us can't, who don't write songs, they express the same things that we feel and they do it for us.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Grace Snell in Austin, Texas.

LJ: That’s it for this edition of WORLD Radio Rewind.

We’ve posted links to each of the stories we highlighted today in our transcript. You can find that on our website.

Next week, we’ll focus on remembering 9/11. It’s been 20 years since terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon … killing more than 3,000 Americans. Are we better prepared now to detect a future attack? And what about the War on Terror? Is it over, or only getting started? Those are just some of the questions we’ll answer in our coverage next week.

For the latest news, features, and commentary from WORLD News Group, visit wng.org. For WORLD Radio, I’m Managing Editor Leigh Jones.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.