In the three months since Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, more than 10 million Americans have received the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The single-shot viral vector vaccine developed in collaboration with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) immunologist Dan Barouch was authorized for use based on clinical trial data showing strong clinical efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 in the United States, Latin America and South Africa.
In a new study published in Nature, Barouch, director of BIDMC’s Center for Virology and Vaccine Research, and colleagues report on the antibody and cellular immune responses generated by the Ad26.COV2.S vaccine against the original viral strain and against SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. The team found that this vaccine induced immune responses against all the viral variants.
BOSTON – In the three months since Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,.
Scientific American
How COVID Changed Science
What is unprecedented is not just the speed and focus with which the community responded to the pandemic but also the singular willingness of scientists all over the world to share new ideas and data immediately and transparently
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Rarely in recent memory has the world faced such an immediate and widespread global threat as complex as COVID-19. In its face, a select few have risen to the occasion, none more cherished and admired perhaps than the health care workers staffing the front lines. But standing close behind them in the trenches are the scientists and researchers who are among the very few who truly understand the scope of our evolutionary battle with the virus. Since the start of the pandemic, our scientists have acted with unprecedented speed and coordinated action to deliver us an armamentarium of medical weaponry to confront this global threat.
POLICY
In the COVID-19 crisis, rival institutions joined forces. Can those
collaborations endure? by Bruce Walker
It is now possible to imagine a world recovered from COVID-19. In that future, how will medicine have changed? These 10 essays explore the technical, social and political ripples of the pandemic.
On March 2, 2020, within days of the first reported cases of COVID-19 in the United States, a group of about 100 physicians and scientists gathered at Harvard Medical School to discuss the gathering storm.
The meeting was notable in that it reached beyond institutional walls. It included not only people from Harvard, but also from the University of Massachusetts, MIT, Boston University, Tufts and all the teaching hospitals. It included local biotechnology firms, including Moderna, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Via video hookup, we had collaborators from the heart of the epidemic in China.
(P van Dokkum/NASA/ESA via AP)
One of the most subtle threats to any civilization is a decline in its ability to approach the unknown. The undiscovered is as important as the known. If the knowns are compiled in an encyclopedia, the compendium of things “we don’t know about” has been called by some the reversopedia. Vital as it is, how one may reasonably ask, is whether it’s possible to a map of the terra incognita?
The lists of unsolved problems that every field of inquiry– astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, etc.– seems to throw up continuously, allows us to trace the boundaries of ignorance. Mathematics, for example, generates questions in each branch (i.e. algebra, analysis, game theory, topology) for which no one yet knows the answer. Indeed, the process of inquiry seems to create more questions for each one it answers. It seems impossible to expand the encyclopedia without simultaneously enlarging the reversopedia.