In February 2020, my editor at the New York Times let me know he would only be editing stories about Covid for the foreseeable future. If I wanted to pitch a story about Neanderthals or global warming, I'd need to talk to another editor. But if I had ideas for Covid stories, he wanted to hear them.

I figured I'd join the effort, since I had written about other viruses in the past. The Covid news started coming so fast that we all had to think about new ways of covering it. I put together a simple spreadsheet of all the vaccines in clinical trials, just to keep them straight in my head. My editor and I decided that could be the basis of a tracker to update with every important development. We launched it in June 2020, and soon after we launched a second tracker to keep up with news about Covid treatments.


On Wednesday, we decided it was time to stop updating them. After more than two years, the pace of news has slowed from the daily frenzy of mid-2020 to a more manageable pace. It's not that the development of vaccines and treatments has ground entirely to a halt. But it is true that a substantial fraction of efforts have either ended in success or failure, while others have simply stalled.

I shared some thoughts on Twitter on the long-term story that these trackers captured with their day-to-day updates. Scientific history was unquestionably made. Getting a new vaccine into people's arms typically takes over a decade. Pfizer and Moderna managed that feat in a year. And in the following year, a number of other effective vaccines reached the finish line as well. The chemistry involved in making a new antiviral can also stretch out over a decade or more. Pfizer scientists were able to create an effective pill for Covid, Paxlovid, in far less time than that.

But both efforts fell short in other respects. Once variants emerged in 2021, there should have been a new push for next-generation vaccines that could provide sustained protection against them. That push has yet to come. Meanwhile, the global distribution of vaccines is still limping along.

As for drugs, a lot of effort was wasted testing existing ones to see if they might work against Covid. Too often these trials were so small they couldn't reveal anything meaningful. The big ones struggled to find volunteers. As for new drugs, we shouldn't consider Paxlovid the end of the line, because the virus may evolve resistance to it. But there is no longer the same focused push towards new Covid drugs. It could be a very long time before any others get approved.

I'm grateful that I was able to work on these trackers with colleagues who were also eager to try out this new format, and who helped to keep up with developments around the world: Jonathan Corum, Katherine Wu, Matt Kristoffersen, Sui-Lee Wee, and Andrew Kramer.  Covid will remain part of my beat, but I will focus on writing articles rather than updating trackers. And there will be room for other subjects--research on other serious threats to our health, and research that is interesting simply for revealing something new about how the world works.

Over the past couple months I've been writing a mix of Covid and non-Covid stories. In case you missed them, here they are:

I wrote a story about a new treatment that can break down so-called "forever chemicals" quickly and cheaply.

Here's a story about fascinating research on whale songs, revealing how they're spreading around the world thanks to high-speed cultural evolution.

Why can some people digest milk? It's a classic case of human evolution, but some new research has led scientists to rethink the story.

In 1998, I published my first book, At the Water's Edge. I wrote about how life came on land, and later went back into the sea. One key case I described was how our fish ancestors evolved legs. In a new twist, scientists have found that one branch of vertebrates turned around right away and started swimming again.

And, finally, here's a story about the relatives of SARS-CoV-2 that are still in bats for now, and how they behave in human cells.

On a separate note: I'll be giving some talks in the months to come. I'll send updates in future emails. For now, here's a recent conversation I had about life as a science writer on the podcast Media Masters. 

That's all for now! Stay safe.
 

I was looking forward in this issue of Friday's Elk to sharing some recent work of mine that is blissfully far from Covid. The pandemic is, of course, far from over, and I have still been pitching in at the New York Times with Covid science coverage. But I have also been grateful to work on some stories not focused on that blasted SARS-CoV-2. They remind me of how much there is to learn about the world, and how much the pandemic has narrowed everyone's experiences.

I will write about them in this email. But first, here's a reminder I got on Tuesday that the virus does not care about what we want....

Yes, I have Covid for the second time in less than six months.

My first case in January was very mild and very mysterious. I can't tell where I got it from. After an initial positive PCR test, I tested negative on a series of antigen tests and a PCR test. I felt under the weather for a few days, and then had a low-grade persistent cough for a couple weeks. End of story.

I figured my experience demonstrated two things: just how good Omicron was at infecting people, and just how good vaccines are at keeping Covid from getting really dangerous. (Here's a graph of New York State hospitalizations over the past year: blue is for unvaccinated people, red for vaccinated.)


The Omicron wave was in the middle of a fall at the time, and it kept falling through the spring. As the weather warmed, it got easier to meet with people at sidewalk tables for dinner, for drinks on patios, or just bumping into each other on the sidewalk. I adjusted my risk budget, sometimes venturing inside restaurants or stores without my mask. But when I flew to West Virginia last month to give a talk, I masked from the moment I got in a taxi to the airport until I arrived in my hotel room. And in advance of the trip, I got my second booster--even if it was a vaccine designed in 2020, when nobody thought of Omicron as anything but a Greek letter.

That all worked fine, until last Friday. I won't say exactly where I was that evening, for the sake of the privacy of the people I was with, but suffice to say it was a small local business throwing an open house. And it was great. I caught up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in quite a while, thanks to the pandemic and to the damage the pandemic did to my social skills. I walked home with my wife thinking that this was precisely the sort of thing that I had missed since Covid showed up.

Saturday morning, our host informed us with regret that he woke up feeling ill and tested positive. We started testing ourselves, but came up negative. On Monday afternoon, I felt run down--so run down I had to take a nap. I still tested negative, making me think I might just have a bad cold. I had a night of aches and a 102 degree fever, and the next day I tested positive.

I stayed in bed for a day and a half, my fever and aches abating, leaving me with just a lot of fatigue. I binged some TV, did some reading for a new project, and got back to writing towards the end of the week. I feel fairly normal again now, but today's antigen test is comically aggressive. This is what it looked like a few SECONDS after I put the swab in the cartridge: the positive line was a deep burgundy banner while the control line was just starting to form.
The version of Omicron I got infected with in January--probably the subvariant BA.1--clearly didn't protect me against reinfection. I wouldn't be surprised if I got hit last week with BA.4 or BA.5, which are surging here in Connecticut and can evade immunity from earlier forms of the virus. There's no reason to rule out more subvariants--or some other variant entirely--evolving in the months to come and creating a new risk of reinfection.

Still, my combination of a previous infection and vaccinations dramatically reduced my odds of getting a severe case of Covid, and for that I'm grateful. But getting Covid a few times a year is not a prospect I relish. A Covid infection, even a mild one, brings with it a risk of long-running symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue. And some new research indicates that repeated infections raises the subsequent risk for a lot of bad outcomes like heart attacks and strokes. Dr. Bob Wachter of the University of California San Francisco summed up the current research the other day in this piece for the Washington Post.

The spring decline in the United States stalled in April, and we've climbed to a plateau of about 100,000 new reported cases every day. I'm sure that the real number is far higher, since at-home tests rarely get reported and the positivity rate is high pretty much everywhere. It would be nice, 2.5 years into the pandemic, for the country to do regular randomized covid surveys, so scientists could make good estimates of the fraction of people in the U.S. with an infection. The United Kingdom does this fairly well, and the results are striking. Officially, the U.K. is logging about 20,000 new cases a day. But 3.35% of people in the survey turn out to have covid, which means that about 1.8 million Brits are actually positive.

Things could well get worse in the fall, when people start heading inside, immunity from earlier vaccines wane, and new subvariants possibly arrive. The U.S. government is making moves to get more people boosted, but companies are only just starting to test vaccines tailored for BA.4 and BA.5. By the time they'd be ready in the fall, will we be dealing with BA.7?

Isolation while I'm infected is a drag, a stark contrast from the happy party where I got infected in the first place. And once I finally test clear of the virus, I will probably dial back my social interactions, paring down my risk budget. Which is not what I had expected to be doing in summer 2022. 

I wish you good luck in evading this virus and cobbling together a good summer in spite of it. And now, as promised at the top of the email, here are a few things to take your mind off the pandemic:

On Monday, I wrote about the first decade of CRISPR. I've been reporting on this genome-editing technology for years--in this 2015 piece for Quanta, for example, and at more length in She Has Her Mother's Laugh in 2018. Observing its development has been astonishing. It's important not to think of CRISPR as magic that has solved all our problems, or as a limitless power to do harm. But it's also important to recognize its progress. For example, ten years after CRISPR was first demonstrated as a potential tool, at least one company is on the verge of applying to the FDA to use it to reverse a hereditary disease.

Today, I look into a subject I explored last year in Life's Edge: how can we know if there's life on other planets? The James Webb Space Telescope, launched this Christmas, is just now starting to look at planets around other stars. It may be able to determine if they have atmospheres that could support life--the first step to the possible discovery of a biosignature. 

I also wrote this month about some weird tiny life here on Earth. First, a virus that has wiped out hundreds of millions of rabbits in Australia--and thereby serves as a warning that viruses do not necessarily evolve to be more benign. And giant bacteria, the size and shape of your eyebrows, hiding in plain sight all this time.

It's almost enough to make you forget you have Covid!

That’s all for now. Stay safe.

You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.

Geologists divide up Earth's history into eons, eons into eras, eras into periods. Someday, I imagine, cultural geologists will divide the history of the pandemic into time slices as well. But at the moment, in the late spring of 2022, the boundaries still seem too close to read in sharp detail. For now, each of us has to draw our own provisional stratigraphy. 

For me, January 2020 was the time of vague dread, followed by a February of preparing for the storm. March 2020 then arrived, bringing with it the horrible confirmation of just how bad the pandemic would be.

March 2020 to May 2021 was the age of hunkering down--and, for me, reporting like mad on vaccines and other scientific advances. May 2021 to July 2021 felt like the era of elation, followed by summer's disappointment of Delta. After an autumn lull, November marked start of the Omicron Period, which saw a giant spike of cases and deaths.

Geologists look for ways to divide one slice of time from another. A sprinkling of iridium, courtesy of an extinction-level asteroid impact 66 million years ago, marks the end of the Cretaceous Period and the start of the Eocene. It's hard to see any such dividing line marking the end of the Omicron Period. After peaking in January, cases in the United States dropped dramatically. But then they bumped up again in April, thanks to the evolution of some even fitter Omicron subvariants. The spring 2022 surge seems to have peaked. Strikingly, the rate of hospitalizations has remained far below that of the Omicron peak. Maybe the Omicron Period is over, but maybe not.

And if we are indeed entering a new chapter in pandemic history, we can't yet know what it is. Hopefully it won't be marked by the rise of a new, highly virulent strain. Instead, the coronavirus may just go circulating at a low level for a long time, repeatedly infecting us. Vaccines and previous immunity will reduce the damage that these repeated infections cause, but it's hard to say what it might mean for Long Covid. Millions of people already have it; how many millions more will join the ranks?

As for my own work, I feel as if I'm gliding into a new era. There's still plenty of Covid news to work on, and I have a couple stories in the works. But there's also enough bandwidth left over to take on some other subjects.

Not surprisingly, some of the stories I've worked on have been "Covid-adjacent." For example, here is a story I wrote about using machine learning to pinpoint animal viruses that might be especially prone to cause the next pandemic. I also wrote about how climate change is going to move animal hosts into new ranges, where their viruses will have the opportunity to hop into new hosts--raising the risk of even more new outbreaks.

But I've also had time to dive into some other subjects that I haven't really explored since the pandemic started. Here is a story I wrote about the discovery of a human-like tooth in a cave in Laos, dating back 150,000 years ago. It could potentially be key to understanding our enigmatic extinct cousins, the Denisovans. (I also took the opportunity in the piece to sing the praises of fossil teeth. They may not look as spectacular as a dinosaur femur, but every molar and incisor is an exquisite chronicle of evolution.)

I've also had a chance to read more books and even write a review. The book is by Frans de Waal, a primatologist who has done a lot in his research and books to change how we think about our fellow apes. His new book, Different, tackles the hot topic of gender. Although I have some reservations about parts of the book, overall I highly recommend it for a revelatory look at the roles of males and females in the world of primates.

I've even had some time to explore ideas for a new book--more about that later! Meanwhile, I had the honor of giving a lecture about Life's Edge for the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale.  You can watch the video--with lots of delicious details about death-defying water bears--here. 

In May, I received another honor: Poland's Smart Book of the Year Award for A Planet of Viruses. I gave a little thank-you speech at the virtual award ceremony (I turn up at about 25:35). That was followed by a longer interview as part of the Copernicus Festival, which you can watch here.

That’s all for now. Stay safe!

You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.

Greetings! I'm writing to you at yet another odd stage of the pandemic.

Here in the United States, at least, cases have dropped from their Omicron peak to lows we have not enjoyed since last summer. That's great, but we're also still waiting to see what the Omicron subvariant BA.2 has in store for us, now that it's become the dominant version of SARS-CoV-2 in the country. It's been doing all sorts of things in other countries: driving record spikes, creating middling plateaus, or barely registering as little bumps. Our relatively low rate of boosters among older folks does not bode well for us, but the epidemiologists I've been talking to still aren't ready to place their bets on what the rest of the spring looks like. Here's an updated explainer I put together about BA.2.

This spring has not seen an end to the coronavirus evolution-fest, with new forms of the virus popping up around the world. The viruses are recombining more and more--sometimes BA.1 and BA.2 are getting into the same cell; sometimes Omicron and Delta are mingling their genes. Here's a piece I wrote about why these hybrid viruses probably won't change the course of the pandemic, regardless of nicknames like "Deltacron" that sound titles for a science-fiction disaster movie.

Last month, Ben Mueller and I wrote about the question of Covid's origin. The occasion was a pair of preprints, whose authors argue that wild mammals sold in the Huanan market were the source of the pandemic. I followed up this month with a profile of one of the scientists, Edward Holmes, who has been studying the huge diversity of wildlife viruses for years and is continuing to document the threat that the wildlife trade poses to our health.

I've also been keeping the New York Times Covid treatment tracker up to date, as new drugs like Paxlovid go into use and old treatments like monoclonal antibodies become less effective against new variants. Two years into the pandemic, we are also finally getting some clarity from randomized clinical trials about treatments that have been the subject of fierce debate. Here's a story on a trial of Ivermectin, which failed to find any benefit for people sick with Covid.

Last year, I wrote about how the United Kingdom was leading the world in sequencing virus genomes and tracking new variants. Now, even as Britain is suffering from record high cases thanks to BA2 and Boris Johnson's "living with Covid" policies, the British government is cutting back on its surveys and tests. Here's a story I just wrote about how scientists fear that those moves may leave Britain depending on other countries for insights into the future evolution of the pandemic.

On the talk front:

I'll be at the University of Idaho on April 13 to talk about pandemic journalism. Details are here.

I also had a long chat with Lloyd Minor, the dean of Stanford Medical School, for his new podcast, the Minor Consult. We talked about all things Covid. You can watch it here.

That’s all for now. Stay safe!

(P.S. I created my new newsletter logo from an engraving of an Irish elk from Cassell's Natural History)

You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.

I'm delighted to relay the news that the paperback edition of Life's Edge is coming out next week. If you're curious about the book, you can read this review from Siddhartha Mukherjee in the the New York Times Book Review. Here's an interview I did with Book Review editor Pamela Paul on their podcast. And, finally, here's a video of a lecture I gave to the Royal Institution, drawing on the book: "Are Viruses Alive?" 

On the reporting front, my colleague Ben Mueller and I reported on the latest analysis about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Several lines of evidence point to the Huanan market in Wuhan as the place where the coronaviruses jumped from animals to humans--perhaps several times over the course of a few weeks in late 2019. Here's our piece.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.

After nearly two years of writing about Covid-19, I finally became part of the story.

When the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 arrived in the United States in early 2020, I fretted that it would find me and my family. After a year of hunkering down, vaccines let me relax a bit. By the summer of 2021, it became clear that the Delta variant could sometimes sneak past the vaccine's defenses, but a booster combined with masks and antigen tests gave me more confidence. Then Omicron came out of nowhere and slammed the United States with absolutely eye-popping numbers.

Yale, where I teach, offers PCR tests as part of their plan to keep their campus open. I took advantage of the opportunity to get tested once a week, regardless of my symptoms. (We would be collectively better off if we all could use such a service.) Some weeks I felt quite fine, and some weeks I felt a little run down or congested. But regardless of how I felt, I tested negative--until January 19.

On that day, as I drove to the test, I had a scratchy throat. I said to myself, "That can't be Covid." I thought it would be somehow more...dramatic. But Covid it was.

I was, ironically enough, working on a story about Omicron when I got an email informing me that I was harboring Omicron. My wife Grace (Covid-free) and I arranged the house so I could dive into isolation. My throat got a little scratchier, I developed a ticklish cough, and I began feeling a bit run down. But I had no fever, no shortness of breath, and no danger signs from a pulse oximeter. Mostly, I just kept working.

Having written about Covid testing, I was curious about how antigen tests would work on me now that I had Covid. They are less sensitive than PCR tests, but there's an upside to that: they're a good indicator of when you're actually infectious. PCR tests can come back positive very early in the disease, before people can spread the virus to others. They can also pick up bits of viral genes after the infectious window has closed.

Two days after my positive PCR test, I took an antigen test. It was negative. Intrigued, I tried the next day. Negative again! Same a day later. Puzzled, I arranged for a second PCR test. That was negative too.

I was happy that I got such a clear signal that, after five days of isolation, I was unlikely to be a threat to anyone. Now, a week later, I still have the remnants of mild cough, but it's nothing worse than I've experienced with colds and flus in the past. I am grateful that my vaccines (two shots of Pfizer and a Moderna boost) protected me from serious disease. But I'm also puzzled about how I got sick.

It's possible that my positive PCR test on January 19 was catching the tail end of a case of Covid. Back on January 8, Grace and I took our daughter to JFK to catch a flight, and we ended up sticking around for hours because she had to take a last-minute PCR test to get on the plane. While I kept a mask on the whole time, I was hanging around a big crowd of harried passengers waiting for test results.

Alternatively, the PCR test on January 19 may have caught the start of a very, very mild case of Covid. The virus multiplied enough to register on a PCR test, but my immune system crushed it so that it never reached levels high enough for antigen tests to catch. (My symptoms and the high rates of Omicron in Connecticut both make me discount the possibility of a false positive on my PCR test.)

One person's experiences with Omicron can't tell us all that much about it. But large-scale studies, such as one I wrote about in January, show that Omicron is sending a smaller fraction of its victims to the hospitals than Delta. One reason behind this differences is that some of its victims were vaccinated. Another reason may be that Omicron is intrinsically less likely to make people seriously sick--perhaps because it's poorly suited for invading the deep nooks and crannies of the lungs.

Paradoxically, though, this "mild" variant can be quite deadly. Over 2600 people are dying every day of Covid in the United States alone, and the majority of those cases are Omicron. The risk of dying from Omicron dramatically lowered by vaccines; boosters reduce the risk even further.

As soon as I learned about Omicron in November, it seemed very weird to me. It has a huge number of mutations. Its lineage appears to have split off from other SARS-CoV-2 lineages back in 2020, and yet it went missing till November 2021. As scientists look closer at Omicron, it remains deeply weird. A bunch of its mutations look like they should be lethal to the virus. But somehow, in combination, they've made it the most successful variant yet. I wrote about this perplexing evolution here. (The image at the top of this email was created for the story by the amazing NYT designer Jonathan Corum.)

Three months after it emerged, Omicron is still evolving. It consists of three lineages, called BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3. BA.1 got a head start and swamped the planet. But BA.2 turns out to grow faster than BA.1 and may be better at escaping vaccines. Fortunately, it doesn't look to be any more severe than BA.1. As I wrote a few days ago, BA.2 may slow down the ongoing fall in cases in countries like the United States but probably won't produce a new spike--and certainly won't strain hospitals more than BA.1 does.

That's all my Covid news (both personal and reportorial) for now. Here are two other things I'd like to draw your attention to:

I returned to the podcast Story Collider to tell a story about bats, Covid, and a search for inner balance in an unpredictable world. (In previous years, I've told stories for Story Collider about sleeping sickness and snapping turtles.)

Also, I'm delighted to report that Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive is a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. (She Has Her Mother's Laugh was also a finalist.)

That’s all for now. Stay safe!

You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.

Image courtesy Rommie Amaro Lab/UCSD

Normally I send out this newsletter on the first Friday of each month. Before writing this edition, I went back to look at my November newsletter to refresh my memory, only to discover that I never got around to sending one out. My apologies!

In hindsight, I'm not that surprised that I blanked. On the first Friday of November, I was in Charleston to speak at their book festival. To get there, I took my first plane in almost two years. And when I spoke in front of a wonderful crowd at the splendid Sottile Theater, it was my first live audience in almost two years as well. Those experiences, plus a lot of shrimp and grits, made it a heavenly journey.

I then came home to a November that zipped by in a blur: booster shot, Thanksgiving, and news. So. Much. News. It's now been over a year since I reported on the first results of Phase 3 clinical trials showing that a Covid-19 vaccine would actually work. I had a foolish sense that after this milestone, the work of science writers would start winding down. The political, cultural, and business reporters could handle the pandemic story from there. But I'm still writing as fast as I can about the science of Covid-19, even as 2021 comes to a close.

On the vaccine front, I followed CureVac to the bitter end--at least for now. Meanwhile, Novavax finally scored its first authorization, in Indonesia, with more countries likely to come. Boosters won authorization, including Johnson & Johnson, but mix and match studies suggested that people who got J&J might do well to switch. But an even bigger trial, comparing seven vaccines including J&J, suggests that most combinations will work just fine--except maybe if Omicron flips over the table. Ah, Omicron. And beyond Covid-19, I looked at how companies like Moderna now using mRNA vaccines to tackle influenza.

Meanwhile, there are more developments in the mystery of Covid-19's origin. New bat viruses offer new evolutionary clues, and a close look at the early days in Wuhan points towards a market as the source.

And then there's the coronavirus itself. Scientists still don't have answers to a lot of basic questions, like what happens to coronaviruses inside the tiny drops of water that carry them from one person to another. A 1.3-billion atom simulation may shed some light. Finally, in the good news department, the New York Times Book Review named Life's Edge a notable book of the year! Also, the Royal Institution has posted the video of a talk I gave based on part of the book, "Are Viruses Alive?" Watch it here.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.

 

Image courtesy of David Bustos

My latest book is Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Lots to relay in this issue of Friday's Elk, including news on two books. So let's dig in!

I've written a new edition of A Planet of Viruses, which has just come out. It has the same micro-format of the original edition a decade ago: twelve essays on twelve of my favorite viruses. But I've updated it throughout with new scientific research. Most significantly, I've written a chapter on Covid-19, drawing on my reporting for The New York Times over the past year.

The book also has a new look, courtesy of an old friend. When I turned ten, my family moved to the rural fringe of western New Jersey, where I didn't know a soul. Someone told my parents that a kid like me who was always writing stories and drawing comic strips should meet another ten-year old there named Ian Schoenherr, who drew pictures of Willy Wonka and such. We've been friends ever since. Ian has gone on to illustrate a long string of books, while I've been writing others. This is the first time he has illustrated a book of mine, and I couldn't be more pleased. You can order the third edition here.
 

Life's Edge: Podcasts and More

This weekend, the New York Times Book Review put Life's Edge on the cover, with a review from Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene. It's a career first for me, so I'm inexpressibly grateful.

The Washington Post reviewed Life's Edge as well, writing, "The pleasures of Life’s Edge derive from its willingness to sit with the ambiguities it introduces, instead of pretending to conclusively transform the senseless into the sensible.” 

I also had an hour-long conversation with Meghna Chakrabarti, host of National Public Radio's On Point. Listen here. Pamela Paul, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, hosted me on her podcast as well.

You can order the book here.
 

 Not Missing My Shot

After writing for months about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, it's weirdly elating to get their messenger RNA pumped in my shoulder. Looking forward to full immunization in mid-May. 

That's all for now. Stay safe!

You can find information and ordering links for my fourteen books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

Vaccines Versus Variants

Life Finding A Way

Brain Organoids as Evolutionary Time Machines

 

Biden Versus the Variants

The Vaccine: Conquering Covid

We’re getting down to the one-month-left mark before my new book comes out on March 9. It’s called Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means To Be Alive. 

The book is a travelogue across the familiar territory of life as we know it into the strange borderlands between the living and the non-living. It features a huge cast of characters, including slime molds that solve mazes, hibernating bats deep in graphite mines, hungry pythons, tardigrades abandoned on the moon, and the enigma that is Covid-19. Publisher’s Weekly calls Life’s Edge “a pop science tour de force.”

Goodreads is running a giveaway for Life’s Edge this month. Visit this page by March 1 and click the “Enter Giveaway” button for a chance to win one of fifteen finished hardcovers. (Only U.S. residents are eligible, I’m afraid.)

I’ll have more updates on radio appearances and other events for LIfe’s Edge that I’ll share in upcoming newsletters. In the meantime, you can pre-order it here.

 

 

The Vexing Variants

A year ago, we were just getting to know a single strain of coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2. Now its evolutionary tree has branched into thousands of lineages of variants. A few of them are now posing daunting challenges to the world’s efforts to get ahead of the pandemic. I spent a lot of the past month trying to keep up with this astonishing episode of evolution in action.

The variant that we know best was first found in England. Nicknamed “the UK variant” or the “Kent strain” by some, it officially goes by the name B.1.1.7. Jonathan Corum and I took it apart (visually at least) to show what we know about how its mutations turned it into a fast-spreading version of the coronavirus.

B.1.1.7 is still mutating, and scientists are worried that it may gain new mutations that will make it not only more contagious, but harder to control. In England, scientists have found samples of B.1.1.7 that have gained a new mutation that experiments suggest could make it harder to rein in with vaccines or treat with monoclonal antibodies.

It’s difficult to tell right away just how dangerous these new variants are. In California, for example, one lineage of coronaviruses has swiftly become more common in places like Los Angeles. Scientists are still figuring out if it has some biological features that makes it more contagious, rather than just getting spread more by chance. I’m keeping an eye on this variant, known as B.1.429, and will let you know if it’s a variant of serious concern.

Unfortunately, as these mutants zoom across the world, the United States and many other countries are not well-equipped to track them. We don’t have a federal mandate or a nationally organized system for getting coronavirus samples quickly sequenced and analyzed. We’re flying blind into a storm of variants. Fortunately, the new director of the CDC is ramping up more sequencing, but experts say we still need to do a better job.

Even as variants emerge, vaccines remain an essential weapon for fighting the pandemic. Experiments suggest that vaccines can work well against B.1.1.7. And Israel is offering some real-world support for that view. B.1.1.7 is already predominant there, but an aggressive vaccination campaign has led to marked declines in cases and hospitalizations among people over 60, the first group to get vaccinated.

But another variant first found in South Africa, called B.1.351, could prove more challenging. Johnson & Johnson and Novavax both found that the protection from their vaccines wasn’t quite as strong in South African trials than elsewhere.

It’s important to stop and marvel at the fact that in about a year, vaccine designers have demonstrated that eight different vaccines can protect people against Covid-19. The efficacy of the vaccines varies enormously, from about 50 percent to 95. But they’re all vastly better than zero.

The blazing success that scientists have experienced over the past year can make us complacent about how hard it is to make a vaccine. Johnson & Johnson has demonstrated their vaccine has an efficacy rate of 72 percent in the United States and is widely expected to get emergency authorization by the end of February. But it’s not clear yet how many doses they’ll be able to deliver right after that--at a moment when the country is desperate for as many doses as it can get.

We should also offer a tip of the hat to Merck, which abandoned not one but two vaccines after early clinical trials delivered disappointing results in January. Along with the University of Queensland and Sanofi’s failed attempts, that comes to four abandoned vaccines on the path out of the pandemic.

As more and more vaccines start getting injected into millions of people each day, Jonathan Corum and I have created a set of illustrations to show how they work.

While vaccines have the potential to rein in the pandemic, we desperately need better drugs to stop infections early--and will continue to need them in the months to come. A year after the pandemic started, the race for a potent antiviral has proven frustrating compared to the success of vaccines.

On the front page of last Sunday’s paper, I explored why the two lines of research have turned out so differently. It’s hard to make a new drug from scratch, and it can also be challenging to test existing drugs to see if they can be repurposed for Covid-19. But the struggle has been hampered by a lack of organization, leading to lots of small trials that often fail to recruit patients and a paucity of big, well-designed trials that can settle once and for all whether potentially promising drugs actually work. But some new initiatives from NIH and the FDA could spur the development of potent new drugs and the start of potent trials for old ones.

It was kind of crazy to look at last week's issues and see stories I had written or helped to write on the front page three days in a row. I will be quite happy to move deeper into the newspaper. That will be a sign that the pandemic is finally behind us all.

That's all for now. Stay safe!
 

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl