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When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine?

WHEN will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Public-facing scientists such as the UK’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, and his US counterpart, Anthony Fauci, keep repeating that it won’t be before 12 to 18 months. But other voices – including some of those in the race to create a vaccine themselves – have suggested that it could be as early as June. Who is right…?

This story first appeared in The Observer on 12 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.

Scientists make ethical decisions too

SOMETIMES the parallels between this pandemic and previous ones are uncanny.

Take hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that regulatory agencies all over the world are now hastily authorising for the treatment of hospitalised Covid-19 patients. Outside hospitals, Donald Trump and the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, have expressed enthusiasm for the drug, people are breaking social distancing rules to get it, and there have been cases of poisoning due to inappropriate self-medication…

This article first appeared in The Guardian on 5 April 2020. To continue reading, click here.

Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?

WHERE did the virus causing the current pandemic come from? How did it get to a food market in Wuhan, China, from where it is thought to have spilled over into humans? The answers to these questions are gradually being pieced together, and the story they tell makes for uncomfortable reading…

This article first appeared in The Observer on 28 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.

 

The state transformed: Singapore

SINGAPORE is a small country and an island nation to boot. But it is also a major commercial, tourism and transport hub that receives more than three times its population in visitors each year. So it is remarkable that at the time of writing it has recorded just 558 cases of Covid-19 and two deaths, with limited community transmission. The city state’s containment of the outbreak has become a global model. “The short-term costs of containment look high, but they’re much lower than the long-term costs of non-containment,” says Annelies Wilder-Smith of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine…

This article first appeared in the New Statesman on 25 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.

Outbreaks of all kinds: The Rules of Contagion review

DID you notice? There was a moment when something shifted, and all topics of conversation besides Covid-19 started to sound trivial. Things will surely shift again, as people realise that the self-confinement could last and escapism becomes our collective goal, but for now Adam Kucharski’s The Rules of Contagion is the book you might want to reach for. Not least – given that the present pandemic is very much in the ascendant – for its subtitle: Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop

This article first appeared in The Guardian on 25 March 2020. To continue reading, click here.