Author: Carl Zimmer
The New York Times, April 7, 2021 (with Sheryl Gay Stolberg)
A highly infectious variant of the coronavirus that was first identified in Britain has become the most common source of new infections in the United States, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday. The worrisome development comes as officials and scientists warn of a possible fourth surge of infections.
Continue reading “More Contagious Virus Variant Is Now Dominant in U.S., C.D.C. Chief Says”
The New York Times, April 5, 2021
A new vaccine for Covid-19 that is entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam could change how the world fights the pandemic. The vaccine, called NDV-HXP-S, is the first in clinical trials to use a new molecular design that is widely expected to create more potent antibodies than the current generation of vaccines. And the new vaccine could be far easier to make.
Existing vaccines from companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson must be produced in specialized factories using hard-to-acquire ingredients. In contrast, the new vaccine can be mass-produced in chicken eggs — the same eggs that produce billions of influenza vaccines every year in factories around the world.
If NDV-HXP-S proves safe and effective, flu vaccine manufacturers could potentially produce well over a billion doses of it a year. Low- and middle-income countries currently struggling to obtain vaccines from wealthier countries may be able to make NDV-HXP-S for themselves or acquire it at low cost from neighbors.
“That’s staggering — it would be a game-changer,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.
Continue reading “Researchers Are Hatching a Low-Cost Coronavirus Vaccine”
The New York Times, March 30, 2021
In January, Britain made a change to its vaccine guidelines that shocked many health experts: If the second dose of one vaccine wasn’t available, patients could be given a different one.
The new rule was based on sheer guesswork; there was no scientific data at the time demonstrating that mixing two coronavirus vaccines was safe and effective. But that may change soon.
Continue reading “Getting One Vaccine Is Good. How About Mix-and-Match?”
It’s very gratifying to read a review from someone who not only enjoyed the book but gets the ideas that propelled me through the writing of it. Here’s Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene, writing about Life’s Edge for the New York Times Book Review:
“Zimmer is an astute, engaging writer — inserting the atmospheric anecdote where applicable, drawing out a scientific story and bringing laboratory experiments to life. This book is not just about life, but about discovery itself. It is about error and hubris, but also about wonder and the reach of science. And it is bookended with the ultimate question: How do we define the thing that defines us?”
You can read the whole review here. If it inspires you to get the book, here are a host of options.
The New York Times, March 3, 2021 (with Keith Collins)
This week, Johnson & Johnson began delivering millions of doses of its coronavirus vaccine across the United States after receiving an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. Central to getting the green light was a trial that Johnson & Johnson ran to measure the vaccine’s efficacy.
Efficacy is a crucial concept in vaccine trials, but it’s also a tricky one. If a vaccine has an efficacy of, say, 95 percent, that doesn’t mean that 5 percent of people who receive that vaccine will get Covid-19. And just because one vaccine ends up with a higher efficacy estimate than another in trials doesn’t necessarily mean it’s superior. Here’s why.