Friday's Elk, September 5, 2020

September greetings! It's bizarre to think it's been six months since I joined the huge ranks of full-time Covid-19 reporters. At the time, I found it hard to believe that for the foreseeable future I'd be writing about just one virus. But SARS-CoV-2 has blasted reporters with a firehose of news unlike anything we've encountered before. There is simply too much about this virus to write about.

Here's what I did manage to write since the previous issue of Friday's Elk. Recently, I looked back at the start of the American epidemic. I wrote about a group of researchers who have closely studied how the virus arrived in Boston in February. They found that a single meeting at the end of that month may have led to tens of thousands of infections around the city and far beyond. It's likely that many other superspreading events also spread the virus in equally explosive ways.

I've also continued to track the global effort to find a Covid-19 vaccine. For months, I was aware that there were lots of vaccines still in preclinical research, and recently I decided to sit down and check every project I could find, confirming which ones were still in the works. So far, I've confirmed 92 active preclinical vaccine studies, 69 of which are slated to go into clinical trials between this fall and the end of 2021. This search allowed me to update the New York Times vaccine tracker to include all of these preclinical studies.

I then started calling some of these vaccine developers to find out why they're still pushing ahead, despite the fact that there are 37 vaccines already in clinical trials--8 of which are already in the final stage of Phase 3 testing. Here's what I learned about the second wave of vaccines. They might be even better than the first wave--more potent, less expensive, or both.

The first wave, meanwhile, is getting closer to potential approval. By next month, for example, Pfizer says it may know whether its vaccine works. Working with my colleague Katie Thomas, I answered some questions about what we may expect over the next few months.

Meanwhile in Russia, researchers are starting to share some preliminary details about the vaccine Putin celebrated last month. We don't know if it's safe and effective yet--but that's true of all the vaccines in the works. And, unfortunately, it's very hard to determine which vaccine is best because researchers are not testing them according to the same standards. One vaccine expert summed up the problem in this succinct complaint: "We have long been suffering from the apples-versus-oranges scenario, but now we’re into fruit salad territory, and it drives me bananas trying to figure it all out."

Switching gears: here is a rundown of some recent talks I gave that you can listen to, as well as some other talks I will be giving--

I talked with Steven Johnson on his podcast, Fighting Coronavirus, about the vaccine scramble.

Here's my conversation with the writer Samanth Subramanian about his biography of the great biologist JBS Haldane, A Dominant Character.

And here's 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.

Looking ahead, I'll be taking part in a discussion on Friday, September 11, at 2 pm ET called "Preprints and Peer Review in a Pandemic." We'll be talking about how science is changing as a result of Covid-19--and how science journalists are changing the way we write about it. I'll be joining Howard Bauchner, MD, the Editor-in-Chief, the Journal of the American Medical Association (who has an excellent covid podcast, by the way); Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the co-founder of Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium, which offers fast reviews of new research on the virus; and Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine who founded the preprint service Medrxiv. You can find more details and register here.

On September 16 at 7 pm, I'll be speaking about A Planet of Viruses at the American Chemical Society. I will talk about some of the big messages of the book, and my work towards a third edition, which will be coming out in the spring. You can register here.

On September 24 at 1 pm ET I'll be taking part in another discussion, called "Science Journalism During a Pandemic and Beyond." I'll be joining Buzzfeed's Azeen Ghorayashi, 538's Maggie Koerth, and British journalist and author Angela Saini. The event is a celebration of the 75th year of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards, which the four of us have received. Register here.

On October 2 at 7 pm ET, I'll be giving a talk called, "Can Science Save Us from Covid-19?" It's part of Oregon State University's Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology Seminar Series. You can join the zoom session here. The entire line-up looks great, starting with David Quammen on September 25. You can download a pdf of the whole series here.

On October 5 at 4 pm ET, I'll be speaking at One Day University. The title of my talk will be "Understanding Heredity: What We Know, And What We Don’t." (Membership required.)

On October 27 at 6 p.m., I'll be in conversation with David Rand, a cognitive scientist at MIT, about fake pandemic news and the science of misinformation. Our talk will be hosted by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale. I'll send out details in the next email, or you can check my web site.

On November 2, I'll be speaking with author Mark Honigsbaum about his book The Pandemic Century. (Here's my review of the book in the New York Times Book Review.) The talk will be hosted by the Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival. Again, I'll send out details in the next email, or you can check my web site.

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