Not only the popular press but even some of my distinguished science colleagues are claiming that the recent report of reinfection of a COVID-19 patient is the end of the world. Nothing could be farther from the truth. First, the facts. The patient is a healthy Hong Kong male who was diagnosed by PCR with …
All human viruses have their origin in a virus that crossed from a different animal species. The encounters that lead to these spillovers are driven by explosive human population growth and incredible change occurring in all ecosystems brought about by human occupation of almost every corner of the planet. The extent to which land-use change …
Pandemics and anthropogenic environmental change Read More »
What does the future hold for SARS-CoV-2? Will it remain in its current configuration, with 20% of infections causing serious damage? Will everyone on Earth need to be vaccinated regularly to prevent infection? Allow me to indulge in some speculation and suggest that SARS-CoV-2 will eventually become the fifth common cold coronavirus (CoV). There are …
by Gertrud U. Rey As of today, SARS-CoV-2 has infected 18.7 million people and caused 700,000 deaths worldwide. The most realistic way to quickly curb the spread of the virus would require daily identification and isolation of individuals who are contagious, a process that is hampered by cumbersome sampling and testing methods with slow turnaround …
Among the mountains of false information being peddled during the current pandemic, one of the most offensive is being used to drive opening of schools in the fall: that children do not transmit SARS-CoV-2. The results of multiple studies have shown that this assertion is incorrect. I’ll review two of them here. One study examined …
by Gertrud U. Rey On July 20, 2020, Oxford University’s Jenner Institute and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca reported preliminary results from phase I/II clinical trials assessing the safety and efficacy of a vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV-2. The vaccine candidate, named AZD1222 (referred to in the publication as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19), consists of an adenovirus vector with an …
Preliminary phase I/II results of ChAdOx1 SARS-CoV-2 vaccine Read More »
