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Pfizer CEO says third Covid vaccine dose likely needed within 12 months

Pfizer CEO says third Covid vaccine dose likely needed within 12 months

CNBC reports: Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said people will “likely” need a third dose of a Covid-19 vaccine within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated. His comments were made public Thursday but were taped April 1. Bourla said it’s possible people will need to get vaccinated against the coronavirus annually. “We need to see what would be the sequence, and for how often we need to do that, that remains to be seen,” he told CNBC’s Bertha Coombs during an…

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‘I never thought China could ever be this dark’

‘I never thought China could ever be this dark’

Melissa Chan writes: On a summer afternoon nearly four years ago, Maryam Muhammet thought her family’s long journey to freedom was almost complete. The Uyghur woman had arrived in Istanbul from Egypt weeks prior with her two sons, a toddler and an infant, after fleeing the Chinese region of Xinjiang. Her husband had not yet joined the family in Turkey. The couple had heard from others in their community that Egyptian immigration officials—ostensibly acting at the behest of the Chinese…

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Facebook planned to remove fake accounts in India – until it realized a BJP politician was involved

Facebook planned to remove fake accounts in India – until it realized a BJP politician was involved

The Guardian reports: Facebook allowed a network of fake accounts to artificially inflate the popularity of an MP from India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), for months after being alerted to the problem. The company was preparing to remove the fake accounts but paused when it found evidence that the politician was probably directly involved in the network, internal documents seen by the Guardian show. The company’s decision not to take timely action against the network, which it had already…

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The brain ‘rotates’ memories to shield them from new sensations

The brain ‘rotates’ memories to shield them from new sensations

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory. But to accomplish this, the brain has to…

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How bipedalism led humans down a strange evolutionary path

How bipedalism led humans down a strange evolutionary path

Riley Black writes: No other animal moves the way we do. That’s awfully strange. Even among other two-legged species, none amble about with a straight back and a gait that, technically, is just a form of controlled falling. Our bipedalism doesn’t just set us apart, paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva posits; it’s what makes us human. There’s no shortage of books that propose this or that feature — tool use or self-awareness, for example — as the very definition of humankind. But much of our supposed…

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Welcome to the new progressive era

Welcome to the new progressive era

Anand Giridharadas writes: Washington in the first days of the Biden administration is a place for double takes: A president associated with the politics of austerity is spending money with focused gusto, a crisis isn’t going to waste, and Senator Bernie Sanders is happy. People like to tell you they saw things coming. But as I talked to many of the campers in Joe Biden’s big tent, particularly those who, like me, were skeptical of Biden, I found that the…

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The mRNA vaccines are looking better and better

The mRNA vaccines are looking better and better

Sarah Zhang writes: A year ago, when the United States decided to go big on vaccines, it bet on nearly every horse, investing in a spectrum of technologies. The safest bets, in a way, repurposed the technology behind existing vaccines, such as protein-based ones for tetanus or hepatitis B. The medium bets were on vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which use adenovirus vectors, a technology that had been tested before but not deployed on a large scale….

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Why would a Covid vaccine cause rare blood clots? Researchers have found clues

Why would a Covid vaccine cause rare blood clots? Researchers have found clues

STAT reports: A week after receiving the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, a 37-year-old woman in Norway went to the emergency department with fever and persistent headaches. A CAT scan of her head showed a blood clot in blood vessels involved in draining the brain, but her levels of platelets, involved in clotting, were low. She was treated with platelet infusions and a blood thinner, but had a bleed in her brain the next day. She underwent surgery to relieve the pressure…

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America never knew what it was doing in Afghanistan

America never knew what it was doing in Afghanistan

Wesley Morgan writes: The senior U.S. officer in the Pech, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Ryan, surprised me when I interviewed him about his battalion’s mission. Forty-one years old but with less gray in his short haircut than some of his company commanders, Ryan was a West Point graduate from Pearl River, New York, and he had been in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq since the first months after September 11, as an officer in the night-raiding 75th Ranger Regiment. I…

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Biden needs to stop Netanyahu from sabotaging talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal

Biden needs to stop Netanyahu from sabotaging talks to resume the Iran nuclear deal

Fred Kaplan writes: White House press secretary Jen Psaki has denied U.S. involvement in the [latest] attack [on Iran’s nuclear-fuel center at Natanz]. But since the United States and Israel jointly crafted Stuxnet, the 2010 covert program that sabotaged uranium enrichment at Natanz through highly sophisticated cyber attacks (a program that U.S. officials still don’t discuss openly a decade later), it’s not deeply paranoid for Iranian officials to assume that Washington was in on the plot. This isn’t the first…

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The U.S. media is touting Israel’s Covid recovery. But occupied Palestinians are left out

The U.S. media is touting Israel’s Covid recovery. But occupied Palestinians are left out

Yara M Asi writes: The US media has widely lauded Israel’s vaccine success – as a country in a “post-pandemic future” of concerts and indoor dining; as a country that could teach the United States a few lessons in pandemic management; as a country that, despite being in the midst of a contentious election, leaned on its robust universal public health system to vaccinate as many people as possible. However, many of these vaccine success stories mention the issue of…

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Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values. But there’s hope

Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values. But there’s hope

Margaret Sullivan writes: Ask almost any group of journalists to name the core values of their profession, and they’ll probably deliver a list like this: Oversight. We’re the watchdogs keeping an eye on government officials and other powerful people and institutions. Transparency. We believe it’s best to put information out in the open, not keep it hidden. Factuality. It’s crucial to provide as much accurate information as possible to get to the truth. Spotlighting wrongdoing. We think society’s problems are…

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We are living in a climate emergency, and we’re going to say so

We are living in a climate emergency, and we’re going to say so

Mark Fischetti writes: An emergency is a serious situation that requires immediate action. When someone calls 911 because they can’t breathe, that’s an emergency. When someone stumbles on the sidewalk because their chest is pounding and their lips are turning blue, that’s an emergency. Both people require help right away. Multiply those individuals by millions of people who have similar symptoms, and it constitutes the biggest global health emergency in a century: the COVID-19 pandemic. Now consider the following scenarios:…

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Amazon lives off America’s failure

Amazon lives off America’s failure

Sarah Jones writes: Bill Bodani liked his old job. He cleaned slag out at the Sparrows Point steel mill in Maryland, cleared the flues and the broken brick out of the blast furnace. He loved it despite the asbestosis it gave him, writes Alec MacGillis in his new book, Fulfillment. “I enjoyed the people,” Bodani told MacGillis. “They made it enjoyable. The Black, the white. It was a family thing. I don’t care if you knew them for five minutes,…

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