Soon COVID-19 vaccine makers will release early data from large clinical trials, and the results could be ambiguous.
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Sarah ZhangI wrote about what to expect from vaccine trials over the next couple of months. A guide to making sense of the drip drip of incremental news
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NASA’s new lavatory is a symbol of the agency’s growing recognition of women astronauts’ needs.
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Sarah Zhangomg please read @marinakoren on the new space toilet that finally lets astronauts pee and poop at the same time, or as NASA calls it, "perform dual ops"
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Trump has found his latest silver bullet: antibody therapy.
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Sarah ZhangNow that hydroxychloroquine clearly doesn't work and vaccines won't be available until after the election, Trump is touting yet another silver bullet: monoclonal antibodies.
Here's what we actually know about them and why they will be hard to get
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The COVID-19 vaccines furthest along in clinical trials are the fastest to make, but they are also the hardest to deploy.
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Sarah ZhangThe COVID-19 vaccine is going to need "the largest, most complex vaccination program ever attempted in history." I wrote about what that's going to look like
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Fertility Fraud - Rise of Use of Ancestry.com, 23 and Me Home DNA Kits Revealing Widespread Fertility Doctor Abuses
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Sarah ZhangTwo more lawsuits filed against fertility doctors accused of using their own sperm. These are just the tip of the iceberg—many of these cases never become public and/or are settled
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Between 1918 and 1919, an outbreak of influenza spread rapidly across the world, and killed more than 50 million—and possibly as many as 100 million—people within 15 months.
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Sarah ZhangI keep thinking about this 1918 flu photo essay @TheAtlantic ran in 2018. I remembered looking at the photos of cloth masks & outdoor classes and thinking, "How quaint!"
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COVID-19 vaccines need to be tested in primates, but U.S. researchers are scrambling to find enough after China stopped exporting them.
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Sarah ZhangBack in 2018, scientists discussed a "strategic monkey reserve" for the precise problem of running out of research animals during a pandemic. Well, that never happened
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Sarah ZhangMy latest: The U.S. is running low on monkeys for research.
At the same time there has been extraordinary demand for COVID-19 studies, China, a major supplier of monkeys, has shut off all exports
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Sarah ZhangThis coronavirus is probably going to be with us forever now.
I wrote about what the future could look like and why it's actually not as dire as it may sound!
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Sarah ZhangICYMI, I wrote about why the coronavirus is probably never going away and why that's not as scary as it sounds at first
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Companies are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security.
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Sarah ZhangBack in March, I talked to a bunch of companies that do "deep cleanings" and one guy said to me, hey we keep talking about cleaning surfaces but this virus spreads through the air.
And here we still are. Read @DKThomp on our coronavirus hygiene theater
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So much hope is riding on a breakthrough, but a vaccine is only the beginning of the end.
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Sarah ZhangI know we all want vaccines to bail us out from COVID-19, but so many things still need to go perfectly. I wrote about why a vaccine will not immediately end the pandemic 1/
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Since 2000, a strange new type of song in white-throated sparrows has spread across the continent at stunning speed.
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Sarah ZhangAround 2000, scientists first noticed a strange new song among white-throated sparrows in western Canada. Then, they realized it was spreading.
This new song type is taking over the entire country!
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We know that people who don’t feel sick can spread COVID-19—but very little about how reliable COVID-19 tests are for these cases.
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Sarah ZhangWe know that people who feel healthy can spread COVID-19. We don't know how how well COVID-19 tests actually work in people who feel healthy.
My latest on the dilemma of a negative COVID-19 test
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It is likely we’ll eventually have a coronavirus vaccine — but perhaps not as quickly as some expect. From development, to clinical trials and distribution, ProPublica reporter Caroline Chen explains the tremendous challenges that lie ahead.
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Sarah ZhangAn extremely helpful primer on what to expect from a COVID-19 vaccine, by @CarolineYLChen
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In a Boston ICU, staff members orchestrate goodbyes over Zoom and comfort patients who would otherwise die alone.
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Sarah ZhangThis small detail about the iPads for families to say goodbye to dying patients gutted me.
It's so hard to hold the plastic-wrapped iPad so that everything is in the camera frame. An intimate and sacred moment, made almost absurd by tech difficulties.
theatlantic.com/health/archive…pic.twitter.com/XyH0Ry0c8r
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Sarah ZhangEver since the pandemic began, I've been haunted by stories of coronavirus patients dying alone.
I spoke to a palliative care team caring for these patients in a Boston ICU. They were often the last ones—the only ones—in the room when a patient died.
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