Tag: Harvard Medical School
When Experts Fail – The Atlantic
Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts.
The coronavirus
Ron DeSantis Does Not Seem to Be Enjoying Himself
On Saturday afternoon, with just over six weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis told a story about how he once bravely stood up to the Special Olympics.
He was speaking atop a small platform in a partitioned-off section of a former roller rink in Newton, Iowa, dubbed “the Thunderdome.” The anecdote, like so many, had something to do with the tyranny of vaccine mandates. DeSantis said he had met a family at the Iowa State Fair,
It’s the Best Time in History to Have a Migraine
Here is a straightforward, clinical description of a migraine: intense throbbing headache, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light and noise, lasting for hours or days.
And here is a fuller, more honest picture: an intense, throbbing sense of annoyance as the pain around my eye blooms. Wondering what the trigger was this time. Popping my beloved Excedrin—a combination of acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine—and hoping it has a chance to percolate in my system before I start vomiting. There’s the drawing
COVID Science Is Moving Backwards
Paul Sax is an infectious-disease physician and professor at Harvard Medical School. Even so, when Sax’s kids asked him whether they should get the updated COVID vaccine this fall, he wasn’t really sure what to tell them. His two children are in their 20s, healthy, and at no special risk of complications from disease. Each had recovered from COVID, and thus, he reasoned, had extra immunity on top of what they’d gotten from their prior shots. Another injection would
Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?
Well, here we go again. Once more, the ever-changing coronavirus behind COVID-19 is assaulting the United States in a new guise—BA.5, an offshoot of the Omicron variant that devastated the most recent winter. The new variant is spreading quickly, likely because it snakes past some of the immune defenses acquired by vaccinated people, or those infected by earlier variants. Those who have managed to avoid the virus for close to three years will find it a little harder to continue
What Did All Those COVID Infections Get Us?
I, as far as I can tell, have not yet been infected by the virus that causes COVID-19. Which, by official counts, makes me an oddball among Americans.
Granted, I could be wrong. I’ve never had a known exposure or symptoms, but contact tracing in the United States is crummy and plenty of infections are silent. I’ve taken many coronavirus tests, but not that many coronavirus tests, and it’s always possible that some of their results missed the mark.
If
The Simple Anti-COVID Measures We’re Not Taking
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Soon after, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Say you received $1 billion to spend on improving the world. How would you spend it? Why?
Email your thoughts to [email protected]. I’ll publish a selection of correspondence in an upcoming newsletter.
Conversations of
How Long Does Omicron Take to Make You Sick?
It certainly might not seem like it given the pandemic mayhem we’ve had, but the original form of SARS-CoV-2 was a bit of a slowpoke. After infiltrating our bodies, the virus would typically brew for about five or six days before symptoms kicked in. In the many months since that now-defunct version of the virus emerged, new variants have arrived to speed the timeline up. Estimates for this exposure-to-symptom gap, called the incubation period, clocked in at about five days
The Danger of Delta Holds to 3 Simple Rules
Fifteen months after the novel coronavirus shut down much of the world, the pandemic is still raging. Few experts guessed that by this point, the world would have not one vaccine but many, with 3 billion doses already delivered. At the same time, the coronavirus has evolved into super-transmissible variants that spread more easily. The clash between these variables will define the coming months and seasons. Here, then, are three simple principles to understand how they interact. Each has caveats