Tag: little reason
The Masks We’ll Wear in the Next Pandemic
On one level, the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic over the past two and half years was a major triumph for modern medicine. We developed COVID vaccines faster than we’d developed any vaccine in history, and began administering them just a year after the virus first infected humans. The vaccines turned out to work better than top public-health officials had dared hope. In tandem with antiviral treatments, they’ve drastically reduced the virus’s toll of severe illness and death, and
America Created Its Own Booster Problems
By this point in the pandemic, the benefits of boosters seem pretty darn clear. Boosters continue the immune system’s education on the coronavirus, upping the quantity of defensive fighters available, while expanding the breadth of variants that vaccinated bodies can snipe at. During Omicron’s winter wave, people who received a booster were less likely to be infected, hospitalized, or killed by the virus than those without a boost; older people and other high-risk populations especially benefited from dosing up again.
So Much for a ‘Foreign Policy for the Middle Class’
The fall of Kabul is a major disaster.
It is a major disaster for the people of Afghanistan, who will now have to live under a theocratic regime that suppresses their most basic liberties, ruthlessly punishes dissenters, and proudly oppresses women. It is a major disaster, in particular, for the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped Western journalists and diplomats in an attempt to build a better country, then looked on in
Why a Variant’s Deadliness Is So Hard to Define
The coronavirus is on a serious self-improvement kick. Since infiltrating the human population, SARS-CoV-2 has splintered into hundreds of lineages, with some seeding new, fast-spreading variants. A more infectious version first overtook the OG coronavirus last spring, before giving way to the ultra-transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7) variant. Now Delta (B.1.617.2), potentially the most contagious contender to date, is poised to usurp the global throne.
Alphabetically, chronologically, the virus is getting better and better at its primary objective: infecting us. And