Tag Archives: covid-19

She’s at the center of the covid lab leak controversy. Now she’s telling her story.

Some in the West agree. “I’m quite distressed by people throwing this kind of extremely serious allegation around,” Nancy Connell, a microbiologist and member of NIH’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, told me in February last year, when she was with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s highly irresponsible.”  But even if the […]

Can you spot the fake receptor? The coronavirus can’t either.

As covid-19 continues to evolve in the US, researchers are now developing the next generation of therapeutics, including a new approach that could help reduce the time it takes to recover from the disease. While existing treatments include antivirals, antibodies, and steroids, scientists in the US and Europe are now focusing on creating decoys of […]

How to talk to unvaccinated people

Even those who might seem to fit the stereotype at first glance may have more to their story. Steward, for example, is a Christian pastor living in rural South Carolina who leans conservative. But his hesitancy wasn’t because of his religion or politics; it was because he was trying to understand the FDA’s approval process […]

All together now: the most trustworthy covid-19 model is an ensemble

Every week, teams each submit not only a point forecast predicting a single number outcome (say, that in one week there will be 500 deaths). They also submit probabilistic predictions that quantify the uncertainty by estimating the likelihood of the number of cases or deaths at intervals, or ranges, that get narrower and narrower, targeting […]

Top researchers are calling for a real investigation into the origin of covid-19

The letter, which was organized by the Stanford University microbiologist David Relman and the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, takes aim at a recent joint study of covid origins undertaken by the World Health Organization and China, which concluded that a bat virus likely reached humans via an intermediate animal and that a lab […]