Monday dawned warm and rainless. Aurelio Escovar, a dentist without a degree, opened his office at six. When he had a handful of instruments arranged on the table, he sat down to polish the false teeth. He seemed not to be thinking about what he was doing, but worked steadily.

The sharp voice of his eleven-year-old son interrupted his concentration.

“Papa”

“What?”

“The Mayor wants to know if you'll pull his tooth”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

He was polishing a gold tooth. He held it at arm's length, and examined it with his eyes half closed. His son shouted again from the little waiting room.

“He says you are, too, because he can hear you”

The dentist kept examining the tooth. Only when he had put it on the table with the finished work did he say, "So much the better. He took several pieces of a bridge out of a cardboard box where he kept the things he still had to do and began to polish the gold.

“Papa”

“What? “ He still hadn't changed his expression

"He says if you don't take out his tooth, he'll shoot you.”

Without hurrying, with an extremely calm movement, he stopped his work and pulled the lower drawer of the table all the way out. There was a revolver(左轮手枪).”OK, ”   he said . “Tell   him to come and shoot me." He rolled the chair over opposite the door, his hand resting on the edge of the drawer.

The Mayor appeared at the door. He had shaved the left side of his face, but the other side swollen and in pain, had a five-day-old beard

The dentist saw many nights of desperation in his dull eyes. He closed the drawer with his finer tips and said softly, “Sit down”

“Good morning, "said the Mayor.

“Morning,” said the dentist.

While the instruments were boiling, the Mayor leaned his head on the headrest of the chair and felt better. His breath was icy. When he felt the dentist approach, the Mayor held his breath and opened his mouth.

Aurelio Escovar turned his head toward the light. After inspecting the infected tooth, he closed the Mayor's jaw with a cautious pressure of his fingers. "It has to be without anesthesia(麻醉).

"Why?“”

‘Because you have an abscess(脓肿).”

The Mayor looked him in the eye. "All right, he said, and tried to smile

The dentist did not return the smile. He did all the preparation work without looking at the Mayor.

It was a lower wisdom tooth. The dentist spread his feet and grasped the tooth with the hot forceps(钳子). The Mayor seized the arms of the chair with all his strength. The dentist moved only his wrist. Without rancor(怨恨), rather with a bitter tenderness, he said , “Now you will pay for our twenty dead men.”.

The Mayor felt the great pain in his jaw, and his eyes filled with tears. But he didn't breathe until he felt the tooth come out. Then he saw it through his tears. It seemed so foreign to his pain that he failed to understand his torture of the five previous nights.

The dentist gave him a clean cloth. "Dry your tears, "he said.

The Mayor did. He was trembling. While the dentist washed his hands, he saw the shabby ceiling and a dusty spider web with spider's eggs and dead insects.

The dentist returned, drying his hands.”Go to bed,” he said, “and gargle(漱口)”with salt water.

The Mayor stood up, said goodbye with a casual military salute, and walked toward the door, stretching his legs.

“Send the bill, ” he said.

“ To you or the town?

The Mayor didn’t look at him. He closed the door and said through the screen,” __70__”

Michael J. Fox became famous all over the world after starring as Marty McFly in Back to the Future in 1985. Six years later, aged 29, he developed Parkinson’s disease. Since then, Fox—who is now 60 years old—has helped raise over $1.5 billion to help find a cure for the progressive nervous system disorder.

As the world’s largest non-profit (非盈利) organization that provides money for Parkinson’s research, The Michael J. Fox Foundation focuses on speeding up a cure for Parkinson’s disease and improved treatments for those living with the condition—which influences about seven to ten million people worldwide. The Michael J. Fox Foundation tries to achieve its goals through a highly aimed research program coupled with active worldwide efforts of scientists, Parkinson’s patients, business leaders, persons taking part in clinical trial (临床试验), and volunteers. Raising over $1.5 billion in research so far, the non-profit has basically changed the path of progress toward a cure.

The Canadian actor said that these treatments have already helped huge numbers of people, including himself. He said, “I enjoy life more. I’m more comfortable in my skin than I was 20 years ago. I can sit down and not be nervous. I couldn’t do that 25 years ago.”

Recently Fox told of his hope that biomarkers (生物指标) will be the next big stop towards treating and perhaps even stopping the disease. “If we can find ways to discover the condition before it’s obvious, if we could take a piece of hair and find it, then we could treat it preventively and then maybe you don’t get it,” he explained.

One thing Fox is sure of: He won’t stop fighting until there’s a cure.

Covid-19 vaccines (疫苗) began saving lives in clinical trials. But a new study, based in part on The Economist’s estimate of the pandemic’s true death toll (伤亡人数), attempts to model just how many lives have been spared since vaccines became widely available to the public.

The study—published on June 23rd in Lancet Infectious Diseases—found that in the first year of vaccines that were invented and introduced to the public, jabs (注射疫苗) saved the lives of people between 19.1 million and 20.4 million. Without vaccines, the study estimates, roughly three times as many people would have died from Covid-19 in 2021 alone. And 6.8 million — 7.7millon of the prevented deaths were in countries covered by COVAX ( Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access), an initiative created to ensure vaccines were sent to poorer countries. Still, a lack of vaccines in some parts of the world still led to avoidable deaths. Around 100 countries failed to reach the World Health Organization’s (WHO) goal of vaccinating 40% of their qualified populations by the end of 2021. The researchers estimate that this cost around 600,000 lives.

To arrive at these estimates, the researchers, Oliver J. Watson, Gregory Barnsley and their colleagues at Imperial College London, began with an existing transmission model used to track the spread of Covid-19 infections. They then combined this model with The Economist’s estimate of the pandemic’s true death toll to estimate how deadly the pandemic would have been without vaccines.

As for the study, every coin has two sides. It relies on assumptions about the share of estimated infections that led to death, for instance. Some small countries, which have limited reliable data, were not included in the analysis. That means the total number of actual avoided deaths will be even higher. On the other hand, the researchers did not attempt to model how people or governments might have changed their behavior to limit infections in the absence of vaccines. For all that, it is the most definitive answer yet to how many people owe their lives to the jabs.