Science

Katalin Karikó never intended to make vaccines. For years before the pandemic, the Hungarian-American biochemist had been working to realize the therapeutic potential of mRNA—first trying to create a synthetic version of the messenger molecule that wouldn’t trigger the body’s inflammatory response, and then, once she and colleague Drew Weissman had achieved that goal, trying to get the medical and scientific community to pay attention.

In early February 2016, after reading an article featuring a couple of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were studying how the brain reacts to music, a woman felt inclined to email them. “I have an interesting brain,” she told them.

So-called "natural immunity" against COVID-19 has always been a dodgy argument for avoiding vaccination during the pandemic. But amid omicron, natural immunity is clearly rubbish.

The World Health Organization on Thursday pushed back against the consistent chatter that the ultra-transmissible omicron coronavirus is "mild," noting that the variant is causing a "tsunami of cases" that is "overwhelming health systems around the world."

"While omicron does appear to be less severe compared to delta—especially in those vaccinated—it does not mean it should be categorized as 'mild,'" WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press briefing Thursday. "Just like previous variants, omicron is hospitalizing people, and it is killing people."

An altered microbiome has been associated with—and thereby either implicitly or explicitly implicated as a partial cause of—a wide range of human maladies. These include immune disorders like celiac disease, asthma, and diabetes; obesity; cancers; psychiatric disorders like depression and Alzheimer’s disease; and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).

It has been said countless times by public health figures and politicians, and by magazines like this one, that Covid-19 is now a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The line is easy to write, because it’s true. Breakthrough infections among the vaccinated are an issue, the virus lapping at the edges of our collective immunity. But severe illness and death is almost entirely concentrated among those who haven’t yet gotten the shot.

We've tended to treat the RNA-based vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech as functionally equivalent. They take an identical approach to producing immunity and have a very similar set of ingredients. Clinical trial data suggested they had very similar efficacy—both in the area of 95 percent.

In the middle of June, staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent out a bulletin to state health departments and health care providers, something they call a Health Advisory—meaning, more or less, that it contains information that’s important but not urgent enough to require immediate action. (”Health Alerts” are the urgent ones.)

Two dreaded coronavirus variants are swiftly overthrowing the previously most-dreaded variant in the US. Their ascendance is making experts worry that the country could see continued outbreaks and resurgences of COVID-19 unless the current sluggish pace of vaccination quickens.

The US Food and Drug Administration has authorized the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents between the ages of 12 to 15, the agency announced Monday evening.

In the announcement, acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock called the authorization “a significant step in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic” that will bring the country “closer to returning to a sense of normalcy and to ending the pandemic.”