Friday's Elk, September 2, 2022

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.