After 2+ years, my colleagues & I are winding down the @nytimes trackers for Covid vaccines & treatments. We’ll keep them online but won't update them nytimes.com/interactive/20… & nytimes.com/interactive/20… Here's a 🧵 on the experience & the course of science in an emergency. 1/54 When Covid vaccine trials took off in early 2020, I was soon struggling to keep them all straight in my head. I cobbled together a spreadsheet with the basic information on each vaccine—platform, animal studies, clinical trial status, and so on. 2/54

Last installment of Omicron chronicles: A final negative test, this time with PCR. While grateful that I had a very mild experience, I'm still puzzling over it. A thread with crude drawings... 1/17 I am not a frontline worker. I mostly sit at my desk at home and write. I do my best to avoid covid--both for me and my family. No restaurants during this wave, for example. So the fact that I got Omicron is fascinating to me (and, to my family, pretty ironic). 2/17

A strange story about superbugs, hedgehogs, and evolution 1/9 You've probably heard of MRSA, a deadly kind of bacteria that's resistant to the antibiotic methicillin. Scientists have long thought that it evolved this resistance only in recent decades, once humans start bombing microbes with antibiotics on a regular basis. 2/9

I didn't think these fungi, which turn insects into zombies, could be any more remarkable. Turns out I was wrong. Some have gone through an astonishing evolutionary transformation, changing them from killers to essential parts of an insect's body. [1/15] (Image @joaofungo ) As I wrote in this 2019 article, spores of a fungus known as Ophiocordyceps invade insects and grow in their bodies. The ants go on with their lives as they fill with the fungus. nytimes.com/2019/10/24/sci… [2/15]

Efficacy ≠ effectiveness. Efficacy is a counterintuitive measurement, as explained in this recent @TheLancet piece. Say a vaccine has 95% efficacy. That does NOT mean that if 100,000 people get vaccinated, 5,000 people will get sick and 95,000 won't. 1/7 thelancet.com/journals/lanin… The author, Piero Olliaro of Oxford, notes that everyone does not all get infected at once. Instead, the virus moves from person to person. You might expect that, say, 1% of 100,000 unvaccinated people will get sick with covid-19 over the course of 3 months 2/7

Based on Covid-19 tests and genomes, scientists estimate that B.1.1.7 is doubling in the U.S. every 10 days. It could dominate by March. Public health measures and mass vaccination are crucial right now. Here’s my story for @nytimes nytimes.com/2021/02/07/hea… @nytimes Here’s the preprint on which the story is based: medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Today @CDCDirector announced ramping up of variant surveillance, aiming for 7,000 genomes a week. That’s an improvement, but less than it may seem 1/n nytimes.com/live/2021/02/0… @CDCDirector When I wrote about the lack of a national genome sequencing plan for Covid-19 last month, the US was sequencing less than 3,000 genomes a week. So, yes, 7,000 is better than 3,000! But… 2/n nytimes.com/2021/01/06/hea…

A few passages from Fauci’s new Q&A with Donald McNeil Jr. nytimes.com/2021/01/24/hea… "I would try to, you know, calmly explain that you find out if something works by doing an appropriate clinical trial; you get the information, you give it a peer review. And he’d say, 'Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this stuff really works.’" nytimes.com/2021/01/24/hea…

The scientific advisor for Operation Warp Speed floated the idea today of cutting the Moderna doses in half, from two 100 microgram doses to two 50 microgram doses. 1/n nytimes.com/live/2021/01/0… It appears that he’s relying on Phase 2 trial results, in which 200 people under 55 got 50 micrograms of Moderna and had comparable antibody responses to people who got 100 micrograms. 2/n

I've been working with @13pt on a series of brief visual explainers for how different leading vaccines work. Here's a thread of links, starting with Novavax nytimes.com/interactive/20… How the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine works nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Vaccines are essential to fighting back the coronavirus. If one gets authorized in the next few months, what will that mean for 2021? One expert put it this way to me: get ready for “complexity and chaos and confusion.” Here’s my preview for @nytimes nytimes.com/2020/10/12/hea… 1/9 The first vaccine may be mediocre. A superior one may still be in development. But the first vaccine’s authorization could immediately affect all the other vaccines still in Phase 3 trials—and could seriously hamper vaccines in earlier stages of research. 2/9

Thread: You may have heard of #COVID-19 vaccines in advanced clinical trials—Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and the like. But there’s a huge second wave of vaccines on their way. nytimes.com/2020/08/27/hea… [1/7] I recently decided to take a look at this second wave. I reached out to all the companies and universities I could find that have announced preclinical studies since the beginning of the pandemic. [2/7]

Big morning for updates to the @nytimes coronavirus vaccine tracker. In fact, I need a thread! nytimes.com/interactive/20… 1/9 #covid19 First up: Oxford scientists publish their first clinical trial paper on their chimp adenovirus vaccine, to be made by Astra Zeneca. Phase I/II trial indicates it’s safe (lots of mild side effects), produces some antibodies, some interferon. 2/9

My Twitter ramblings yesterday have crystallized into a short piece on #covid19 mutations: nytimes.com/2020/05/06/hea… Likewise, @edyong209 is on it theatlantic.com/health/archive…

A lot of us science writers realized at some point a while back that we were going to be full-time #covid19 writers for a while. Maybe a very long while. Still, this past week felt especially bizarre, story-wise. An ICYMI thread 1/8 This week I helped put together this infographic: "How Coronavirus Mutates and Spreads" nytimes.com/interactive/20… (En espanol nytimes.com/es/interactive… ) 2/8

Trump cuts U.S. research on bat-human virus transmission over China ties politi.co/2KETSuN via @politico @politico This type of research is literally how we know at all that this virus came from bats. And there are a lot more bat coronaviruses out there that have not been studied yet. They could become the Covid-20, Covid-21, Covid-22 and so on.

Dear Mr. President: It is important that you and everyone else understand the science of #covid19 because people’s lives depend on it. Let me correct the mistakes in your tweet. 1/7

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1249118778404765696

I explain in my article that this new coronavirus originated in China. 2/7

Here’s my update on the hunt for #covid19 antivirals: 69 drugs that hit proteins used by the virus, worth testing on cells, animals, and people. Some very familiar names… nytimes.com/2020/03/22/sci… Here is the preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Let me unpack this, because the evolution of new genes is very cool. 1/n

https://twitter.com/airenwang/status/1103807472156827648

Most of our genomes is not made of genes. A lot of it is “junk”—repetitive sequences with no function.

Woke up to the dubious honor of a namecheck in @WSJ. @FreemanWSJ uses my reporting to back the false assertion that @SenWarren's Native American ancestry is no different than that of average European Americans. For those interested in facts, a thread 1/ wsj.com/articles/did-e… Yesterday @senwarren released an analysis of her DNA that revealed five segments of DNA containing genetic markers indicating they originated in the people who first came to the Americas. I wrote about it for @nytimes nytimes.com/2018/10/15/sci… 2/