On January 8 I asked The edgeThe scientific team must monitor the first reports of a new virus that had recently emerged in China. When I launched an article about that new virus The Washington Post On Slack, someone joked that 2020 got off to a good start, which clearly deceives the whole year for the rest of humanity. Whoops
Jokes aside, this past decade, yearSix and a half months has presented a disturbing flood of terrible, horrible, not good, very bad news. In more than half a year and not only do we not know when all this will end, we are also seeing a tsunami of new cases in the US and record hospitalizations.
There is so much that we don’t know yet, but we do know that this will continue for a long, long time. We have to keep up if we are going to make it. That’s why we started with a weekly format for this column instead of bombarding it with a daily dose of news. Hopefully, we can give you context for the big headlines and help you track our collective scientific progress as we move into the future. It is still an experiment, but here are a few things to watch out for:
- Investigation – What we are learning about the virus itself: how it spreads and what it does in the human body.
- Developing – Notable news from the vaccine and treatment fronts: We won’t link to all articles, but will track overall progress and major milestones as they emerge.
- COVID perspectives This is a disease that has deeply shaken, ended and shattered lives. Looking at the overwhelming numbers, we can sometimes forget that each case and death was a human being. These stories remind us that there is more to the numbers.
We might as well throw out some non-coronavirus news just to remind you that there are other things going on in the world. Let us begin.
Investigation
- “Of all the viruses and outbreaks I have been involved with for the past four decades, I have never seen a virus in which the spectrum of seriousness is so extreme. This disease goes from nothing to death! That really surprised me, “said Anthony Fauci in an interview on The New York Times this week. By context, some of the viruses Fauci has faced include HIV, Ebola, and Zika. (Jennifer Senior / The New York Times)
- What scientists are learning about how long immunity to Covid-19 lasts: If you want to delve into the current state of immunity research six months after the pandemic, our colleagues at Vox you’ve covered There’s still a lot to learn, but there’s also a lot of progress. (Brian Resnick and Umair Irfan / Vox)
Development
- Studies Give Insight into Efficacy of Oxford-AstraZeneca and CanSino Covid-19 Vaccines: One of the main candidates for the COVID-19 vaccine produced a strong immune response and it did not produce serious side effects, according to a study published in the medical journal The lancet. The study focused on a candidate vaccine made by the University of Oxford and Astra-Zeneca and involved nearly 1,000 patients. Another study, also published in The lancetThey found that a vaccine produced by the Chinese company CanSino Biologics produced an immune response but was not as effective in people older than 65 years. Both drugs will now have to complete phase three trials and be tested on hundreds, if not thousands, of others. (Matthew Herper, Damian Garde and Helen Branswell / Stat)
- Some vaccine manufacturers say they plan to benefit from the coronavirus vaccine: Executives from pharmaceutical companies testified before Congress Tuesday and four of them were optimistic that the world would have a vaccine in late 2020 or early 2021. Two, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, said they would produce the vaccine at cost. Two others, Moderna Therapeutics and Pfizer, did not. (Katherine J. Wu / The New York Times)
- In related news: In On Wednesday, Pfizer and the German company BioNTech announced that they would jointly receive $ 1.95 billion from the United States government to develop 600 million doses of a vaccine. They join other companies that have already received federal funding commitments. Moderna receives $ 483 million, Johnson and Johnson receives $ 456 million, and AstraZeneca receives $ 1 billion.
- Caution Notes While most executives set an optimistic timeline before Congress, other experts are more skeptical. Fauci told him The New York Times that families did not see a vaccine until next year. “I think it will be sometime in 2021. I don’t know if it will be the first quarter of 2021, the first half, it’s hard to say,” Fauci said.
Immunology experts have also been cautious, as have other pharmaceutical executives. “I think when people tell the public that there will be a vaccine by the end of 2020, they are doing the public badly bad service,” Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier said in an interview organized by Harvard Business School last week. “I think at the end of the day, we don’t want to rush the vaccine before we have done rigorous science.”
- Cheat Sheet for Vaccine Development – Here is a May summary of the four main different vaccine development strategies in progress. (Nicole Wetsman / The Verge)
Do you want to help researchers find a vaccine? The National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a new network called the COVID-19 Prevention Trials Network (COVPN) that will help connect volunteers to some of the large clinical trials that are needed to test potential coronavirus vaccines.
“Each of the phase 3 clinical trials to be conducted by COVPN will require thousands of volunteers,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement. “Community participation, particularly with communities most vulnerable to the serious results of COVID-19, will be critical to the success of this research effort.”
If you want to volunteer, you will be asked to complete a short survey of personal questions, including where you live. If you are a good candidate for one of the many ongoing studies across the country, a researcher will contact you and give you more information about the study. Then you can decide if you want to participate.
COVID perspectives
López drives to his fourth stop of the day, with a body on his back and a cigarette in his hand. He is pondering the virus and how the calls to collect bodies began to come suddenly, one after another. He takes his job personally. “It could be one of my family members, it could be a friend of mine.”
Shannon Najmabadi and Miguel Gutiérrez Jr. report to Texas grandstand on what it’s like to be one of the “last to respond” in the Rio Grande Valley, where deaths and the number of cases remain high.
More than numbers
For the more than 15,762,392 people around the world who tested positive, make your journey to recovery easy.
For the families and friends of the 640,278 people who have died worldwide, 145,556 of those living in the United States, their loved ones are not forgotten.
Stay safe, everyone.
