“Wear a mask!” I stopped running and wheeled around to face the voice. “Pardon me?” A middle-aged woman ambled towards me on DC’s Glover-Archibald hiking trail. She was alone and walked with a long stick. “Wear a mask!” she shouted again, closing to within five yards of me. My arm hairs went erect and my […]
If you thought controversies over masks and lab-leaks were fever pitched, just hold your hats until the COVID-19 vaccine is licensed for kids under 12 this fall. Nothing gets Americans lathered up like policies that affect the safety of their kids. The diversity of opinions on this matter is about to skyrocket because the cost-benefits […]
TL;DR: Everything is in place for the COVID-19 pandemic to end in America. The vaccines are working beautifully, even against new variants. But vaccine hesitancy remains a stubborn barrier to full normalcy, putting American on course to reach equilibrium, not eradication. Ahead of last summer I was telling everyone they were fools for declaring the […]
COVID-19 slashed red tape and poured in government funding to spark giant leaps forward in scientific innovation, most prominently in vaccinology but also behind-the-scenes in genetic sequencing to track a fast-evolving virus generating new variants. These developments set the stage for promising new strategies for a range of infectious disease threats, from malaria to influenza. […]
The World Health Organization’s recent probe into the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan has renewed interest in piecing together when, where, and how the virus jumped from animals to humans during the fall of 2019. The Wuhan Seafood Market outbreak appears to be a red herring, serving as an early amplifier of a simmering outbreak […]