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David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
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5 Dec, 5 tweets, 1 min read
"The virus could mutate at any time. We don’t know how long it’s going to take this virus to escape immunity. But we do know that we have effectively created one vaccine — all of these vaccines are identical." (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"We are putting so much ecological pressure on this one virus with these vaccines. And all it takes is one virus out of the quadrillions of viruses that are being produced across the globe right now in people’s bodies..."
"All it takes is for one of those viruses to say, you know what? I want to figure out how to evade this person’s immune response. It’s astounding to me that this isn’t, like, considered a crisis."
"Now, I believe very firmly that these vaccines will work, but I am extremely cautious about being so flagrant in assuming that there’s no chance that mutation is going to happen."
"Given the gravity of this situation, why the heck are we not making contingency plans for new vaccines as well?" (x/x)

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More from @dwallacewells

David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
7 Dec
The most promising of the vaccines was fully designed before the first confirmed American case and was manufactured for testing before the first American death. How much faster could we have moved to deliver it? How many lives might've been saved? (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"To start, this is—as the country and the world are rightly celebrating—the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic, which has killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it."
"That a vaccine was available for the entire brutal duration may be, to future generations trying to draw lessons from our death and suffering, the most tragic, and ironic, feature of this plague."
Read 27 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
29 Nov
“If one is to believe recent IPCC reports, then gone are the days when the world could resolve the
climate crisis merely by reducing emissions.” @wim_carton is exceptionally incisive about the hype of negative emissions. (1/x, with thanks to @Peters_Glen) researchgate.net/publication/34…
“Avoiding global warming in excess of 2°C/1.5°C now also
involves a rather more interventionist enterprise: to remove vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere, amounts that only increase the longer emissions refuse to fall.”
“The basic problem with
this idea is that the technologies supposed to deliver these ‘negative emissions’ currently do not exist
at any meaningful scale.”
Read 18 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
12 Sep
"What can be done?" The California fires are now almost twice as destructive as those of 2018, which set records. The fire season is far from over. This is climate change, but climate action isn't enough to stop it. We must adapt, too. A thread (1/x). nymag.com/intelligencer/…
The great fires of California’s past marked time generation by generation, horrors lingering in memory for decades before they were surpassed. In recent years, the procession has been annual, horrors arriving nearly every fall. This year, this week, it was day by day...
...the fires blurring into one another from the vantage of anyone far enough away to be following by social media rather than rear-view mirror.
Read 34 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
17 Aug
"The official U.S. death toll from coronavirus is now 170,000, and is likely to grow to 227,000 by November. The global toll is 750,000. But those figures may massively underestimate the ultimate public-health trauma." Chronic covid, a thread (1/x): nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"In the spring, our picture of the disease was dominated by hospitalizations, deaths, and recoveries; most Americans following things closely probably understood the full course of illness to last about a month, start to finish."
"Over the last few months, however, we’ve heard more and more stories about coronavirus “long-haulers,” but I don’t think our collective understanding of the disease has properly incorporated those stories, in part because most accounts have been, to this point, anecdotal."
Read 24 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
15 Aug
In early May, I wrote about how poorly the U.S. had protected its elderly, particularly in nursing homes, which it could have done easily and cheaply, slicing the pandemic's death toll in half. A clearer picture of that failure emerged this week... (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
In Politico, a great piece by @MaggieSeverns looked at one set of nursing homes where things were done right: those run by the California Department of Veterans Affairs. politico.com/news/2020/08/1…
"An average nursing home patient in California is 31 times more likely to die from the coronavirus than a resident of a CalVet home," she wrote—31 times more likely. Meaning the common-sense procedures and protocols of the CalVet homes reduced lethality 31-fold.
Read 15 tweets
David Wallace-Wells Profile picture
24 Jul
On Wednesday, I spoke to @SenSanders about the brutal hole the pandemic has put the country in and what must be done about it. The suffering is truly eye-popping, and staggering, and yet I don't think most Americans appreciate it. A thread... (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
The suffering is much, much bigger, much broader, and will likely be longer-lasting than the pandemic, but let's start with the disease itself. There are almost 180,000 dead, according to a new "excess mortality" calculation. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The best coronavirus modeler suggests roughly 80,000 more deaths from the disease by November. covid19-projections.com/us
Read 26 tweets

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