TimeMagazine A version of this article appeared in this week’s It’s Not Just You newsletter. SUBSCRIBE HERE to have an It’s Not Just You essay delivered to your inbox every Sunday. March is the anteroom of months. It’s both the end of last year’s winter and the beginning of the new year’s spring. It’s half slush, … Read more
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory committee earlier today (Feb. 26) voted unanimously to recommend Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use authorization. While the FDA isn’t obligated to follow the committee’s advice, it generally does. At the end of a full day of review and discussion of the company’s shot, … Read more
When Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine became the first authorized for use in the U.S., the good news came with a catch: the vaccine, the first of its kind using a new mRNA-based technology, needs to be stored at ultra-cold temperatures (-80°C to -60°C) until thawing just before being injected into people’s arms. State health centers, hospitals and … Read more
McMurdo Station, an Antarctic research base 2,415 miles south of Christchurch, New Zealand, is a strange place to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s been a home of sorts for Pedro Salom since he took a dishwashing job there in 2001, when he was 24. Now an assistant area manager with more than a … Read more
Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s advice column. We’re trying to make living through the pandemic a little easier, with expert-backed answers to your toughest coronavirus-related dilemmas. While we can’t and don’t offer medical advice—those questions should go to your doctor—we hope this column will help you sort through this stressful and confusing time. Got a … Read more
Pfizer-BioNTech has begun testing a third dose of its COVID-19 vaccine in a small group of people. The vaccine is currently authorized in several countries in a two-dose regimen, given 21 days apart, and has proven in studies to be about 95% effective in protecting against COVID-19 disease. But as new (and more infectious) genetic … Read more
2021 got off to a grim pandemic start in the U.S. A huge surge in COVID-19 cases followed the holiday season, peaking at around 300,000 new cases on Jan. 8, 2020. More than 20,000 Americans lost their lives to the virus in a single week in January alone and over 146,00 in total have died … Read more
On Feb. 24, Massachusetts-based biotech Moderna announced that has shipped a new version of its already-authorized COVID-19 vaccine to testing sites. The new vaccine is one aspect of a three-part strategy the company is taking to address new viral mutations that make the virus more infectious. They plan to test them in both participants of … Read more
It’s one thing to test a vaccine, and another to see it in action in the real world. More than two months after the first vaccines were authorized in the U.K. and U.S., strong data have emerged showing that the shots are doing what they are supposed to do: protect people from COVID-19. In a … Read more
(ACCRA, Ghana) — Ghana received the world’s first delivery of coronavirus vaccines from the United Nations-backed COVAX initiative on Wednesday—the long-awaited start for a program that has thus far fallen short of hopes that it would ensure shots were given quickly to the world’s most vulnerable people. The arrival of 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca … Read more