Friday's Elk, August 12, 20121

I discovered over the past week that there's something special about a hurricane blackout in the middle of a pandemic. Your friends can offer you Wifi and an extension cord, but you have to stay outside on the porch, so that no viruses jump from host to host.

Aside from the weather, things still feel oddly stable in Connecticut. Since last month's email, our daily cases have remained relatively low. Right now the seven-day average of daily new cases is 72. We're averaging 1 death a day. That's good compared to Florida, with 6440 daily new cases and 160 deaths a day.

When I wrote last month, the United States was seeing an overall surge in cases but not in deaths. Some people touted that as a sign that things were getting better. In reality, it was just the result of the lag between diagnosis and death. Now the situation has flipped: the nationwide total of cases has dropped slightly (although 53,730 new cases a day is still terrifyingly high compared to other countries). Meanwhile, the death rate has more than doubled since its lowest level in July, with over a thousand people dying on an average day.

School and cooler weather are coming, and with them the risk of things getting even worse. But we could get this pandemic under control--as many other countries have already--and we could do it in a matter of weeks, if we acted with organization and resolve. The New York Times Editorial Board lays out a plan here.

Over the past month, I've been working with the science desk at the New York Times to report on scientific advances in the fight against the coronavirus. The vaccine work has been, frankly, extraordinary. Never in history have so many vaccines moved so fast into advanced trials.

We've kept up with the progress on the vaccine tracker I helped launch in June. There are now seven covid-19 vaccines in Phase III large-scale clinical trials (plus other vaccines against other diseases being investigated to see if they offer protection against covid, too). Meanwhile, a wave of new vaccines have moved from studies on animals into safety trials in humans. The teams who are developing them are not just in the United States and Europe, but China, India, Russia, Taiwan, Singapore, and other countries.

Over the past few months, I followed one team closely--a group of researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center and at Johnson & Johnson. They have been creating a vaccine based on a virus that normally causes a mild cold. They had no idea in January what exactly they were getting themselves into--helping to bring a global catastrophe to an end. Now they're starting clinical trials.

These new trials include vaccines that are based on a wide range of platforms. Katie Thomas and I wrote last week about encouraging results from the first clinical trials on a protein-based vaccine. While no one has yet shown that a vaccine is effective in humans, I wrote about two vaccines that have had good results in challenge trials in which monkeys were vaccinated and then deliberately infected.

All these vaccines still need careful testing before they can be used on entire countries. But yesterday, Putin announced the approval of a Russian vaccine before any large-scale testing. I found that vaccine experts were universally alarmed at the recklessness of the move. "This is all beyond stupid," one expert told me.

For those who get sick, doctors don't have a lot of effective treatments. But a huge number of drugs and devices are under investigation. Working with Katie Wu and Jonathan Corum, I helped create a second tracker, this one for treatments. We're following some exciting developments with monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, and other ways to fight the coronavirus. But we're also keeping track of treatments that are proving to be disappointing, and others that are actually not treatments at all but things to be avoided. Like the vaccine tracker, we'll be keeping it up to date in months to come.

This past month, I also wrote about some intriguing new discoveries about Covid-19. For example, the evidence is leaning away from blood type being a risk factor for getting sick. While the blood type gene may not matter, another chunk of DNA now looks to plays a part in people's risk of getting severely ill. And that chunk was inherited from Neanderthals.

While I'm grateful to be able to do all this reporting on covid, it can get exhausting. I took a break this past month to write about a fascinating genetic study hinting that Polynesians may have reached South America.

Finally, looking forward: If you have a little free time this month, I hope you'll join me for conversations with two great authors.

On Thursday August 13 (tomorrow), I'll be speaking to the writer Samanth Subramanian about his wonderful biography of the great biologist JBS Haldane, A Dominant Character. You can register here to watch.

Then, on Monday, August 24, Harvard Book Store is hosting a talk between me and Emily Anthes about her latest book, The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. You can register to join us here.

I'll have more talks to share next month. But 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