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.
It’s been ten days since the publication of Life’s Edge. For the past couple weeks, I’ve taken a break from covering the pandemic for the New York Times to work on the book launch. Here are a few highlights so far: Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, March 19, 2021”
I don’t know what it’s like for you, but this March is giving me some hesitant hope. Maybe this has something to do with it:
There are four days left before the book comes out, but today–with a hard copy to clutch–feels like the day the book comes alive (forgive the pun).
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.