�������ýҕ�l

In April of last year, I along with my entire family — my husband, my three children, in-laws and at least one of our four home health aides — came down with Covid-19. The domino effect of household transmission was like a spark that set our house on fire. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life — and I am an infectious disease epidemiologist who responded to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. I am facing a new challenge at home and at my job, helping lead the pandemic response for New York City’s public hospitals: vaccine hesitancy, especially among health care workers. (Syra Madad, 5/28)

COVID vaccines hesitancy will likely further decrease as outreach continues, more people see family and friends choosing vaccination and more “perks” — from free doughnuts and beer to going maskless in public places and seeing sports teams in person — are offered to the vaccinated. But hesitancy will not disappear. Because some Americans consistently report not wanting to be vaccinated, questions are mounting whether employers should make vaccination mandatory. Already, more than 100 colleges and universities have announced that students must be vaccinated (or receive an exemption) to return to campus this fall, with some mandating for faculty and staff as well. Employers — from K-12 schools to office-based companies — are considering the same. And there is public support for this. Not only does the majority of the U.S. population want to get vaccinated; the majority say they want their employers to mandate vaccination for all employees for them to return to work. (Ruth Faden and Nancy Kass, 5/28)

Although the term “vaccine hesitancy” has gained momentum in recent months, it fails to capture the greater problem of vaccine access and lack of trust in public health institutions, especially among groups and communities that historically have been underserved and mistreated or even abused by the public health and medical care systems. We should rephrase it to “vaccine equity. ”The COVID-19 pandemic undeniably hit communities of color the hardest. Disparities in testing, infection rates, rates of hospitalization and death in communities of color have been well-documented since the onset of the pandemic. And yet, according to the latest data available, the rate of vaccination within these groups lags well behind that of white individuals nationally, and Texas is no exception. (Octavio N. Martinez, Jr., 5/28)

“Bad news wrapped up in protein.” That’s how the late Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar and his wife and collaborator, Jean Medawar, once described viruses. In the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, that “bad news” was an unprecedented pandemic leading to more than 3 million deaths so far. The virus causing this global crisis is surprisingly simple: just 29 proteins wrapped around a single strand of RNA. Its entire RNA sequence can be typed on about 13 sheets of paper totaling, just 7.5 kilobytes of data. Compare that to the human genome which, at more than 3 billion letters long, is equivalent to a stack of 1,000 King James Bibles or about 725 megabytes of data. (Stephen Ferguson, 5/28)

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden called for an inquiry by US intelligence agencies into the true origins of Covid-19. If this probe reveals new information, it could offer insight into the validity of the hotly-debated theory that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The scientific research facility was known to have been conducting research on coronaviruses. The "lab leak" explanation, which was panned and dismissed by a number of analysts, gained new life after the Wall Street Journal reported on a previously undisclosed US intelligence report revealing that three researchers from the Wuhan lab became so sick with Covid-19-like symptoms in November 2019 -- before official reports of the first outbreak -- that they had to seek hospital care. (Lanhee J. Chen, 5/27)