One Friday last month, I posted a map on Twitter. It drew immediate global attention, was seen by 8 million people, and has provoked strong responses and anger—and hopefully some soul-searching among those in governments and pharmaceutical companies.
“This is like having gold.”
COVID-19 has revealed the extraordinary possibilities that can manifest when global scientific know-how is trained on a single topic. The virus was fully sequenced in January and a Phase 3 vaccine clinical trial is finishing in the fall.
One of the biggest hurdles in COVID-19 vaccine distribution: getting people to take it. Consider Pakistan:
WHO advisors are meeting today to discuss deliberately infecting young, healthy volunteers with SARS-CoV-2 to hasten vaccine development—despite the promising vaccines already on the way. Pros: Faster results than conventional vaccine field trials…
A study of more than 100,000 pediatric patients confirms COVID-19 has mostly spared children the worst outcomes, but it “doesn’t attempt to explain” why,
The AstraZeneca/Oxford University COVID-19 vaccine has up to 90% efficacy against SARS-CoV-2—and would be easier to distribute than other promising candidates, according to interim results from a Phase 3 vaccine trial.
One of the biggest challenges of distributing a COVID-19 vaccine: cold storage—and one of the most promising vaccine candidates yet has particularly high maintenance requirements. Pfizer’s vaccine must be kept “colder than winter in Antarctica”: -70 degrees C to be exact…
It sounds like a scene in Ocean’s Eleven, but this real-life heist story had something perhaps more valuable than money at stake: vaccine supplies. In 1959, at the height of Montreal’s polio outbreak, masked gunmen stormed a University of Montreal research lab, stealing…
It’s well known that infants and elderly people are particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases—but what happens in between those age extremes?
