TimeMagazine On May 10, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) extended authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to 12- to 15-year-olds. It’s the first COVID-19 shot authorized for this younger population. “I cannot tell you how many people have been anxiously awaiting this day to get their kids vaccinated,” says Dr. Flor Munoz, a pediatric … Read more
Residents of Romania who find themselves in central Transylvania this May now have the option of getting vaccinated at a legendary location from horror history: Bran Castle. Every weekend this month, the fortress that’s believed to be the inspiration behind Count Dracula’s lair in Bram Stoker’s 19th-century gothic novel Dracula will be home to a … Read more
In the past three weeks, every adult in the U.S. has become eligible for COVID-19 vaccines, which are now widely available in most parts of the country. Yet there has been an alarming decline in the number of Americans showing up to get vaccinated, even though less than half of the population has received even … Read more
“Our Mosquito Project Takes Flight,” reads a baby-blue billboard off US-1 in the Florida Keys, alongside an image of an insect tracing a path in the shape of a heart. Sponsored by the local mosquito control board and U.K.-based biotech firm Oxitec, the ad promotes a contentious plan to release millions of genetically modified Aedes … Read more
(GENEVA) — The World Health Organization gave emergency use authorization Friday to a COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by China’s Sinopharm, potentially paving the way for millions of the doses to reach needy countries through a U.N.-backed program rolling out coronavirus vaccines. The decision by a WHO technical advisory group, a first for a Chinese vaccine, opens … Read more
Alex Denley, a 23-year-old philosophy doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, doesn’t seem like someone who would be vaccine hesitant. They’re determined to stop COVID-19 from spreading, and haven’t fallen for any vaccine conspiracy theories. However, getting the coronavirus shot was tremendously stressful for Denley. They feared it could trigger a terrible … Read more
On April 24 at 3:22 a.m., a doctor in Delhi’s Guru Tegh Bahadur hospital sent an urgent plea via Whatsapp to a colleague. She had just finished her shift at the COVID-19 ward in the hospital, where her mother was also undergoing treatment. A patient was in critical condition when she finished her shift. If … Read more
Pfizer-BioNTech announced on May 7 that they have requested that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) start the process of fully approving their COVID-19 vaccine. The companies will continue to supply the agency with additional data on vaccination safety and effectiveness on a rolling basis over coming weeks. The FDA issued an emergency use … Read more
In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers from the Maryland-based biotech firm Novavax report that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine is 51% efficacious in protecting people from disease. The results come from a Phase 2 study of the two-dose vaccine, which uses a different technology than the three COVID-19 shots currently … Read more
A version of this story first appeared in the Climate is Everything newsletter. If you’d like sign up to receive this free once-a-week email, click here. The surge of COVID-19 cases and the humanitarian crisis now unfolding in India has shocked the world and led to a search for an explanation of how the situation … Read more