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Meredith WadmanThe natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.

Israel covid-19 vaccine infection

Unethical? Unnecessary? The COVID-19 vaccine booster debate intensifies

The greater infectiousness of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has scientists and governments debating whether booster shots of COVID-19 vaccines are needed in some countries given limited vaccine supplies elsewhere. By Gretchen VogelAs the extraordinarily infectious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread around the world, vaccines’ powers are showing their limits.

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Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine—but no infection parties, please

Meredith WadmanThe natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-COV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label.

Israel covid-19 vaccine infection

Amid pandemic disruptions, grad students push to unionize

Katie LanginFor graduate students at the University of New Mexico (UNM), the pandemic was a turning point. After their petition to extend graduation timelines and funding was unsuccessful, a group of graduate students spent the past year amassing signatures to form a union and fighting a dispute with the university over the legality of its efforts.

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Russia’s Sputnik V protects against severe COVID-19 from Delta variant, study shows

Olga DobrovidovaRussia’s Sputnik V vaccine is holding up well against the Delta variant, a paper posted yesterday on the preprint server medRxiv shows. The study of nearly 14,000 people showed the two-dose vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 by 81% and helped prevent severe lung injury.Surges of COVID-19 in many countries and an increasing number of “breakthrough” cases in vaccinated people have raised concerns that vaccines don’t protect as well against Delta as against earlier strains, or that vaccines’ protection may be short-lived.

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New SARS-CoV-2 variants have changed the pandemic. What will the virus do next?

Kai KupferschmidtEach dot above represents a virus isolated from a COVID-19 patient in this family tree of SARS-CoV-2, which shows a tiny subset of the more than 2 million viruses sequenced so far. The World Health Organization currently recognizes four variants of concern and four variants of interest.Edward Holmes does not like making predictions, but last year he hazarded a few.

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COVID-19 vaccines may trigger superimmunity in people who had SARS long ago

Jon CohenAlmost 20 years before SARS-CoV-2, a related and even more lethal coronavirus sowed panic, killing nearly 10% of the 8000 people who became infected. But the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) may have left some survivors with a gift.

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U.S. chimp sanctuary is poised to give its primates a COVID-19 vaccine—will others follow its lead?

Alex ViverosAs the COVID-19 vaccine rollout has continued in the United States, a parallel vaccination effort has taken place in some U.S. zoos to protect their animals, particularly great apes.

Usa Georgia covid-19 vaccine infection

‘It absolutely wrecked me.’ How a lab came back from the pandemic

David GrimmPHILADELPHIA—The main door of Sunny Shin’s lab is plastered with pictures of happier times: Shin photoshopped onto the cover of a Wheaties box, grad students chomping on corn cobs, a group photo on the lawn of a beach house. “We used to do a yearly retreat to the Jersey Shore,” says Shin, a midcareer microbial immunologist here at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).

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COVID-19 vaccinemaker Novavax faces manufacturing setback

Meredith WadmanNovavax, the small, Maryland-based company that has been struggling for months to bring its promising protein-based COVID-19 vaccine to market, announced a setback yesterday in its quest for an emergency use authorization (EUA) in the United States, sending its share prices tumbling today. The U.S.

Usa state Maryland covid-19 vaccine Government

A giant trial of COVID-19 treatments is restarting. Here are the drugs it’s betting on

Kai KupferschmidtAfter months in the doldrums, one of the world’s largest trials of COVID-19 treatments is finally restarting. Solidarity, a global study led by the World Health Organization (WHO), will test three new drugs in hospitalized COVID-19 patients: the cancer drug imatinib, an antibody named infliximab that is used to treat autoimmune diseases, and artesunate, an antimalarial.The medicines have been shipped to Finland, the first country to have all approvals in place, says John-Arne Røttingen of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, who chairs the study’s executive group.

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What does the Delta variant have in store for the U.S? We asked coronavirus experts

Meredith WadmanThe United States is standing at a dire inflection point, with pandemic coronavirus cases surging and only 50% of the population fully vaccinated. Driving the latest wave is the highly contagious Delta variant, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) caused between 80% and 87% of all U.S.

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Obesity doesn’t always mean ill health. Here’s what scientists are learning

Jennifer Couzin-FrankelThey rose to fame as the world’s fattest mice. At about 130 grams, the rodents were “the equivalent of 600 pounds in humans,” says diabetes researcher Philipp Scherer.

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Transplant patients’ higher rate of COVID-19 breakthroughs boosts case for booster vaccines

Rachel FrittsTransplant physicians have worried for months that their patients might not be getting the protection they need from COVID-19 vaccines. Studies have already shown that many organ recipients don’t produce coronavirus-fighting antibodies even after two doses of the highly effective messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines—an indication their bodies are unable to mount a strong defense against SARS-CoV-2.

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When will COVID-19 vaccines be fully approved—and does it matter if they are?

Rachel FrittsIn many U.S. regions, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has caused the COVID-19 pandemic to surge once again.

Usa hospital covid-19 vaccine Health

How COVID-19 has transformed scientific fieldwork

Elizabeth PennisiJust before dawn in the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve, a patch of Ecuador’s lush coastal forest, Abhimanyu Lele unfurls a tall net between two poles, then retreats out of sight. A half-hour later, he and a local assistant reappear and smile: Their catch—10 birds that collided with the net and tumbled into a pocket along its length—was a good one.

city Chicago Ecuador covid-19 pandemic vaccine

WHO chief sharpens call for China to further help probe into origin of pandemic

Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.In a sharp tightening of the diplomatic screws, the director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is urging China to increase its transparency about the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and allow greater access to its labs to help resolve the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Tedros, as he prefers to be called, also says WHO will create a new body to conduct the next phase of studies into the emergence of the virus, an unexpected move that concerns some scientists, including at least one member of an existing mission that the agency organized to study COVID-19’s origin.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus China covid-19 pandemic

Science after COVID-19, and a landslide that became a flood

alter the scientific enterprise and they look back at how pandemics have catalyzed change throughout history.Next, Dan Shugar, associate professor of geoscience and director of the environmental science program at the University of Calgary, talks with producer Joel Goldberg about a deadly rock and ice avalanche in northern India this year and why closely monitoring steep mountain slopes is so important for averting future catastrophes.This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.Listen to previous podcasts.About the Science PodcastDownload a transcript (PDF).

Joel Goldberg India covid-19 pandemic

Will COVID-19 change science? Past pandemics offer clues

Jennifer Couzin-FrankelScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.Sixteen pandemic months have felt disorienting and arduous—but along the arc of human history, COVID-19 marks just another inflection point. Epidemics have punctuated humanity’s timeline for centuries, sowing panic and killing millions, whether the culprit was plague, smallpox, or influenza.

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‘Too good to be true’: Doubts swirl around trial that saw 77% reduction in COVID-19 mortality

Robert F. ServiceScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.It would be the best news by far in COVID-19 treatment: According to a preprint published on 22 June, an experimental prostate cancer drug named proxalutamide reduced deaths in hospitalized COVID-19 patients by 77% in a clinical trial in Brazil.

Jair Bolsonaro Robert F.Servicescience Brazil hospital covid-19 patient

COVID-19 affects men and women differently. So why don’t clinical trials report gender data?

Cathleen O’GradyScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.COVID-19 doesn’t strike the sexes equally. Globally, for every 10 COVID-19 intensive care unit admissions among women, there are 18 for men; for every 10 women who die of COVID-19, 15 men die.

Usa covid-19 vaccine Health

Scientists quit journal board, protesting ‘grossly irresponsible’ study claiming COVID-19 vaccines kill

Meredith WadmanScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.Several reputed virologists and vaccinologists have resigned as editors of the journal Vaccines to protest its 24 June publication of a peer-reviewed article that misuses data to conclude that “for three deaths prevented by [COVID-19] vaccination, we have to accept two inflicted by vaccination.”Since Friday, at least six scientists have resigned positions as associate or section editors with Vaccines, including Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Katie Ewer, an immunologist at the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford who was on the team that developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

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Can immune responses alone reveal which COVID-19 vaccines work best?

Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.First two graphsgo here.More text goes here.The immune system figures out how to use all the weapons at its disposal.Rest of the story goes here.

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Claim that Chinese team hid early SARS-CoV-2 sequences to stymie origin hunt sparks furor

Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.In a world starved for any fresh data to help clarify the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, a study claiming to have unearthed early sequences of SARS-CoV-2 that were deliberately hidden was bound to ignite a sizzling debate. The unreviewed paper, by evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, asserts that a team of Chinese researchers sampled viruses from some of the earliest COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, posted the viral sequences to a widely used U.S.

Jesse Bloom China city Wuhan, China virus covid-19 information

Delta variant triggers dangerous new phase in the pandemic

Kai Kupferschmidt, Meredith WadmanScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.When the coronavirus variant now called Delta first appeared in December 2020, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, it did not seem all that remarkable. But when it descended on New Delhi a few months later, its impact was devastating, with almost 30,000 cases reported daily in late April.

Kai Kupferschmidt city New Delhi India hospital virus vaccine

What went wrong with CureVac’s highly anticipated new mRNA vaccine for COVID-19?

Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.The startlingly poor performance revealed this week for a COVID-19 vaccine made by the German company CureVac isn’t just a disappointment, it’s a scientific puzzle. The company blames the rapidly changing pandemic virus.

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‘It’s a tipping point’: Flood of COVID-19 vaccine donations buoys mood at WHO

Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.GENEVA—Just a few weeks ago, the mood here at the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) was still decidedly somber. WHO had pushed hard for equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, yet a “grotesque” gap had formed between rich and poor nations, said WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Bruce Aylward covid-19 vaccine donates

‘This gives hope’: A third COVID-19 vaccine dose can boost protection for organ transplant recipients

Jennifer Couzin-FrankelScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.A few months ago, transplant surgeon Dorry Segev was despondent about how COVID-19 vaccines were performing in patients like his, who have a donated organ and take powerful drugs to suppress their immune system. After one dose of a highly effective messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, for example, just 17% of those patients churned out protective antibodies against the pandemic coronavirus, and after the standard two doses, only 54% did.

covid-19 vaccine patient

Powerful new COVID-19 vaccine shows 90% efficacy, could boost world's supply

Meredith WadmanScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.The dark-horse vaccine company Novavax announced strong results today from a pivotal, 30,000-person trial of its pandemic coronavirus vaccine in the United States and Mexico. The vaccine, which uses a different technology than the COVID-19 vaccines authorized so far, delivered 90.4% overall efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 infections, and 100% protection against moderate and severe disease.

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Brazil gives Russian COVID-19 vaccine a chance, approving the import of limited doses

Sofia MoutinhoScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.Despite safety concerns, the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) reversed itself last week and voted to allow a trickle of Sputnik V, the Russian-made COVID-19 vaccine, into the country. Only 928,000 doses will be imported—just a fraction of the total requested by a group of state governors—and the agency imposed stringent measures to reduce supposed health risks and monitor the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.In April, with Brazil facing a massive COVID-19 surge and a scarcity of vaccine, Anvisa vetoed a previous import request, citing concerns that the vaccine contains adenoviruses that could replicate and harm vaccinated people.

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Japanese scientists warn that Tokyo Olympics could help spread COVID-19

Dennis NormileScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.A group of Japanese scientists, including some of the nation’s most senior advisers on the COVID-19 pandemic, are warning that allowing spectators at the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics will help the virus spread domestically and internationally.

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Mixing COVID-19 vaccines appears to boost immune responses

Gretchen VogelScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.Faced with short supplies of COVID-19 vaccines and unforeseen side effects, some countries have adopted an unproven strategy: switching shots midstream. Most authorized vaccines require two doses administered weeks or months apart, but Canada and several European countries are now recommending a different vaccine for the second dose in some patients.

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A ‘landmark’ trial to test mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 in Africa can’t get the coveted shots

Jon CohenScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.The questions are urgent, and the funding is in place. But a highly anticipated, $130 million clinical trial, meant to test the efficacy of the novel messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines for COVID-19 against a key variant of the pandemic coronavirus as well as in people living with HIV and pregnant women, is stalled.

Anthony Fauci South Africa covid-19 vaccine Government

Would you have your DNA tested to predict how hard COVID-19 would strike? Should you?

Jocelyn KaiserScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.For people not yet vaccinated against COVID-19 or still nervous about venturing into crowds, the sales pitch may be alluring: Drool into a tube to provide your DNA and mail it off to see how likely you are to be among the 10% to 15% of people who will end up in the hospital or die from a SARS-CoV-2 infection. That’s the promise of a test an Australian company launched last week in the United States.

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Tragic spring surge leads India to crank up coronavirus vaccine effort

Joel GoldbergIn March, Science Staff Writer Jon Cohen traveled to India to get an up-close look at the country’s response to COVID-19—and its plans to help vaccinate the world. But by the time he got there, India had entered the early stages of what would become one of the world’s largest coronavirus surges, reaching a tragic peak of more than 400,000 cases per day in early May and 4500 daily deaths several weeks later.

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Brazilian town experiment shows mass vaccination can wipe out COVID-19

Sofia MoutinhoScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.A small commuter town surrounded by sugarcane fields in southeastern Brazil, one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19, has shown that even a vaccine that had low efficacy in some clinical trials can dramatically control the pandemic virus.As part of an unusual experiment to track the real-world effectiveness of CoronaVac, a COVID-19 vaccine made by a Chinese company, almost all adult residents of Serrana, in the state of São Paulo, received the required two shots between February and April, long before most would otherwise have become eligible for the vaccine. The results were dramatic.

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Israel reports link between rare cases of heart inflammation and COVID-19 vaccination in young men

Gretchen Vogel, Jennifer Couzin-FrankelScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.The COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech appears to put young men at elevated risk of developing a heart muscle inflammation called myocarditis, researchers in Israel say. In a report submitted today to the Israeli Ministry of Health, they conclude that between one in 3000 and one in 6000 men ages 16 to 24 who received the vaccine developed the rare condition.

Gretchen Vogel Israel covid-19 vaccine

As plan for new U.S. health agency to speed treatments takes shape, doubts remain

Francis Collins, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, speaks during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on 26 May, 2021.

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Scientists rally around misconduct consultant facing legal threat after challenging COVID-19 drug researcher

Cathleen O’GradyMore than 1000 researchers have signed an open letter in support of Elisabeth Bik, a scientific integrity consultant who is being accused of harassment and blackmail by a lawyer representing Didier Raoult, a controversial microbiologist at the Hospital Institute of Marseille (IHU) Mediterranean Infection in France. Last year, Raoult popularized the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment.

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Biden adds voice to calls for further investigation into origins of pandemic virus

John TravisScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.President Joe Biden today joined a growing chorus of voices calling, yet again, for a fuller, more transparent investigation into whether the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Biden outlined steps the United States would take to try to resolve the question, apparently even if China declines to allow a more thorough investigation of the scenario than a World Health Organization (WHO) team conducted earlier this year.

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Rich countries cornered COVID-19 vaccine doses. Four strategies to right a ‘scandalous inequity’

Jon Cohen, Kai KupferschmidtReporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.In January, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issued a blunt warning. The world was “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure,” he said.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus Jon Cohen covid-19 pandemic vaccine

I’m subject NL002-0060 and I’m dropping out of my COVID-19 vaccine trial

Martin EnserinkScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.I’ve been wrestling with a dilemma the past few weeks: Do I stay in the COVID-19 vaccine trial I’ve been enrolled in for 4 months—and which I very much hope will be successful—or do I drop out, take an already proven vaccine, and protect myself sooner? It’s a question thousands of trial participants have faced over the past 6 months but that you don’t hear much about.I knew I might face this dilemma since 21 January, the day I drove to a behemoth academic center in the southeastern part of Amsterdam, my hometown, to enroll in the HERALD study, a large efficacy trial of a candidate COVID-19 vaccine produced by the company CureVac.

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Why is the world’s largest COVID-19 vaccine campaign faltering?

Jon CohenReporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.MUMBAI, VELLORE, AND NEW DELHI, INDIA—On a Sunday morning in early April, as Mumbai was in a daze from the first weeks of a surge of COVID-19 and had instituted nighttime curfews, Baliram Boomkar asked his neighbors in the city’s Kaula Bandar slum whether they wanted a vaccine to protect them or had received one. Some said they had but only because their employers required it. One man said he’d get vaccinated if his company gave him time off to recover from side effects.

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China overhauls its public health bureaucracy

Dennis NormileThe Chinese government, roundly criticized at home and abroad for its initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, appears to have taken some lessons from that crisis. On 13 May, it announced an overhaul of its public health bureaucracy, centered on the creation of a new national agency that will report directly to China’s State Council.

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Forget throat swabs: Dutch company claims its breathalyzer can help sniff out COVID-19

Jop de VriezeScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.People seeking to get tested for COVID-19 by Amsterdam’s Public Health Service (GGD) in February were pioneers: They were the first in the world to be tested using a “breathalyzer” that can sniff out the disease based on a mix of chemical components exhaled by the patient.The approach promises to be faster and less unpleasant than a nose or throat swab, and cheaper. But soon after its premiere, 25 people who tested negative turned out to have COVID-19 after all, and Amsterdam halted its use.

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Human tissue preserved since World War I yields new clues about 1918 pandemic

Kai KupferschmidtOn 27 June 1918, two young German soldiers—one age 18, the other 17—died in Berlin from a new influenza strain that had emerged earlier that year. Their lungs ended up in the collection of the Berlin Museum of Medical History, where they rested, fixed in formalin, for 100 years.

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Scientists tracking coronavirus variants struggle with global blind spots

Meredith WadmanScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.Last month, Gytis Dudas was tracking a concerning new coronavirus variant that had triggered an outbreak of COVID-19 in his native Lithuania and appeared sporadically elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Exploring an international database of coronavirus genomes, Dudas found a crucial clue: One sample of the new variant came from a person who had recently flown to France from Cameroon.

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The pandemic surge at home is threatening an Indian vaccinemaker’s bid to protect the world

The 20-hectare original campus of the Serum Institute of India (above) now abuts its equally large biotech park, which has vastly expanded the company’s vaccine production capabilities. By Jon CohenReporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.PUNE, INDIA—In a world of have and have-nots, Adar Poonawalla is most decidedly a have, with both abundant personal wealth and a corner on what promises to be a massive supply of one of the world’s most desperately sought commodities: COVID-19 vaccines.

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United States	Cases: 46 252 513 Deaths: 750 423 Recovered: 0
India	Cases: 34 321 025 Deaths: 459 652 Recovered: 0
Brazil	Cases: 21 835 785 Deaths: 608 235 Recovered: 0
United Kingdom	Cases: 9 215 683 Deaths: 141 607 Recovered: 0
Russia	Cases: 8 494 589 Deaths: 237 619 Recovered: 0

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