COVID-19 / SARS-CoV-2 / Coronavirus: SARS-CoV-2 / Covid-19 / Coronavirus

" “The field has moved forward since then,” Nancy Krieger, a social epidemiologist at Harvard told me. Epidemiology is rediscovering its social side, fueled by new generations of researchers who don’t come from traditional biomedical backgrounds. “When I started out in the mid-1980s, there were virtually no sessions [at academic conferences] about class, racism, and health in the U.S.” Krieger said. “Now they’re commonplace.” But these connections have yet to fully penetrate the wider zeitgeist, where they are still eclipsed by the rhetoric of personal choice: Eat better. Exercise more. Your health is in your hands.

This is the context in which today’s CDC operates, and against which its choices must be understood. The CDC represents a field that has only recently begun to rebalance itself after long being skewed toward individualism. And the CDC remains a public-health agency in one of the most individualistic countries in the world. Its mission exists in tension with its environment. Its choice to resist that tension or yield to it affects not only America’s fate, but also the soul of public health—what it is and what it stands for, whom it serves and whom it abandons."

"Don’t get me wrong—the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been extraordinary lifesavers in this pandemic, and we may well be heading into a new golden age of vaccine development. (This week, BioNTech started injections in an early trial for an mRNA vaccine for melanoma.) But even the best experts at predicting which drugs are going to be important get things wrong quite a bit, overestimating some treatments and underestimating others. Pharmaceuticals are generally a gamble.

But here’s what we know today, based on information that we have right now:  Among several wonderful options, the more old-school vaccine from Novavax combines ease of manufacture with high efficacy and lower side effects. For the moment, it’s the best COVID-19 vaccine we have."