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These devices can measure a person’s temperature, heart rate, level of activity and other biometrics. With this information, researchers have been able to track and detect COVID-19 infections even before people notice they have any symptoms.

Wearables can detect symptoms of COVID-19 or other illnesses before symptoms are noticeable. While they have proved to be capable of detecting sickness early, the symptoms wearables detect are not unique to COVID-19.

So a logical way to look for new drugs to treat a specific disease is to study individual genes and proteins that are directly affected by that disease.

But this idea of mapping the protein interactions of diseases to look for novel drug targets doesn’t apply just to the coronavirus. We have now used this approach on other pathogens as well as other diseases including cancer, neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders.

Airlines and technology companies have been working on developing technology to do so, but New York's is the first pass being made widely available to residents.

The idea is similar to mobile airline boarding passes: they can be printed or stored on smartphones, and participating businesses and venues can use a companion app to confirm patrons' health status.

rather than boost the economy and encourage vaccination, efforts like the Excelsior Pass could wind up further spread of variants. It's also still not clear that vaccinated people cannot spread the virus to people who have not been vaccinated.

Some worry that the passes might encourage fraud and increase the spread of the virus by people who claim to be vaccinated or COVID-19 negative but aren't.

“I heard a lot from friends in Miami about people flying in, because they were giving it to everybody,”

, it began to seem like anyone could get a vaccine if they were willing to hunt one down or stretch the truth about their medical history.

“the equivalent of knocking over an old lady for a taxi and feeling good about yourself,” as she put it in an interview.

“It’s broadcasting status, that you got the vaccine ahead of others,”

“We should all consider taking up the Garbo challenge and stay off social media for a spell instead of broadcasting every waking second of the day, including your vax shot.”

Those people seemed just fine when they were splashing in bikinis in Turks and Caicos at Christmas,

Occasionally, those posting on Instagram have said that they were trying to say to others that the vaccine is safe and effective

“On some level, they know it’s tone-deaf for a wide audience but have their group where they feel safe,”

“What’s funny is that many of them just post their vaccination selfies to green circle Close Friends.”

“I mean, come on. You’re not Joe Biden. You’re not the queen,”

Three psychiatrists interviewed for this article said their patients all seemed to understand that attention deficit disorder and mild anxiety do not meet the state definition of an “intellectual” or “developmental” disorder sufficient to place them in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s

“I have patients who brought stacks of medical info when they went to get vaccinated. No one ever asks to see it.”

“I’ve never had so many people happy to be told they’re obese,”

“At this point, the goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible,”

He sees no issue with giving a note to a patient who had a melanoma five years back. Cancer is cancer. Elevated blood pressure is fine too, even if it’s sometimes less a reason than an excuse.

“Young people are the super-spreaders!

Some young people get around the fauxmorbidity issue by volunteering at a vaccine site.

. “It was basically treated as a given when I got there,”

“I get that people are eager to shame those who are gaming the system,” she said, “but let’s shame the people who set up that system.”

“There are certain things that increase perception of risks,” Dr. Sell said. “One of these is risks to future generations. So rumors related to pregnancy are particularly gripping.

“We know pregnant individuals are at an increased risk when it comes to Covid-19, but they absolutely should not and do not have to die from it,” said Dr. Christopher Zahn

60 percent believed that pregnant women should not get the vaccine, or were unsure if this was true;

One reason misinformation about the vaccines and pregnancy may have gained so much traction, experts say, is that the earliest clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccines excluded pregnant women. The lack of trial data led the C.D.C. and World Health Organization to initially give different recommendations to pregnant women, though neither explicitly forbade, nor encouraged, immunizing pregnant women. Other health organizations chose to wait for more safety data from later trials before making an official recommendation for pregnant women to get vaccinated.

“At the root of this problem is trust, or really, it’s a lack of trust,” Dr. Sell said.

one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”

Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”

But for those hoping that 25 percent represents a true ceiling for pandemic spread in a given community, well, it almost certainly does not, considering that recent serological surveys have shown that perhaps 93 percent of the population of Iquitos, Peru, has contracted the disease; as have more than half of those living in Indian slums; and as many as 68 percent in particular neighborhoods of New York City

overshoot of that scale would seem unlikely if the “true” threshold were as low as 20 or 25 percent.

But, of course, that threshold may not be the same in all places, across all populations, and is surely affected, to some degree, by the social behavior taken to protect against the spread of the disease.

we probably err when we conceive of group immunity in simplistically binary terms. While herd immunity is a technical term referring to a particular threshold at which point the disease can no longer spread, some amount of community protection against that spread begins almost as soon as the first people are exposed, with each case reducing the number of unexposed and vulnerable potential cases in the community by one

you would not expect a disease to spread in a purely exponential way until the point of herd immunity, at which time the spread would suddenly stop. Instead, you would expect that growth to slow as more people in the community were exposed to the disease, with most of them emerging relatively quickly with some immune response. Add to that the effects of even modest, commonplace protections — intuitive social distancing, some amount of mask-wearing — and you could expect to get an infection curve that tapers off well shy of 60 percent exposure.

Looking at the data, we see that transmissions in many severely impacted states began to slow down in July, despite limited interventions. This is especially notable in states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas. While we believe that changes in human behavior and changes in policy (such as mask mandates and closing of bars/nightclubs) certainly contributed to the decrease in transmission, it seems unlikely that these were the primary drivers behind the decrease. We believe that many regions obtained a certain degree of temporary herd immunity after reaching 10-35 percent prevalence under the current conditions. We call this 10-35 percent threshold the effective herd immunity threshold.

Indeed, that is more or less what was recently found by Youyang Gu, to date the best modeler of pandemic spread in the U.S

he cautioned again that he did not mean to imply that the natural herd-immunity level was as low as 10 percent, or even 35 percent. Instead, he suggested it was a plateau determined in part by better collective understanding of the disease and what precautions to take

Gu estimates national prevalence as just below 20 percent (i.e., right in the middle of his range of effective herd immunity), it still counts, I think, as encouraging — even if people in hard-hit communities won’t truly breathe a sigh of relief until vaccines arrive.

If you can get real protection starting at 35 percent, it means that even a mediocre vaccine, administered much more haphazardly to a population with some meaningful share of vaccination skeptics, could still achieve community protection pretty quickly. And that is really significant — making both the total lack of national coordination on rollout and the likely “vaccine wars” much less consequential.

At least 20 percent of the public, and perhaps 50 percent, had some preexisting, cross-protective T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2, according to one much-discussed recent paper. An earlier paper had put the figure at between 40 and 60 percent. And a third had found an even higher prevalence: 81 percent.

The T-cell story is similarly encouraging in its big-picture implications without being necessarily paradigm-changing

These numbers suggest their own heterogeneity — that different populations, with different demographics, would likely exhibit different levels of cross-reactive T-cell immune response

The most optimistic interpretation of the data was given to me by Francois Balloux, a somewhat contrarian disease geneticist and the director of the University College of London’s Genetics Institute

According to him, a cross-reactive T-cell response wouldn’t prevent infection, but would probably mean a faster immune response, a shorter period of infection, and a “massively” reduced risk of severe illness — meaning, he guessed, that somewhere between a third and three-quarters of the population carried into the epidemic significant protection against its scariest outcomes

the distribution of this T-cell response could explain at least some, and perhaps quite a lot, of COVID-19’s age skew when it comes to disease severity and mortality, since the young are the most exposed to other coronaviruses, and the protection tapers as you get older and spend less time in environments, like schools, where these viruses spread so promiscuously.

Balloux told me he believed it was also possible that the heterogeneous distribution of T-cell protection also explains some amount of the apparent decline in disease severity over time within countries on different pandemic timelines — a phenomenon that is more conventionally attributed to infection spreading more among the young, better treatment, and more effective protection of the most vulnerable (especially the old).

Going back to Youyang Gu’s analysis, what he calls the “implied infection fatality rate” — essentially an estimated ratio based on his modeling of untested cases — has fallen for the country as a whole from about one percent in March to about 0.8 percent in mid-April, 0.6 percent in May, and down to about 0.25 percent today.

even as we have seemed to reach a second peak of coronavirus deaths, the rate of death from COVID-19 infection has continued to decline — total deaths have gone up, but much less than the number of cases

In other words, at the population level, the lethality of the disease in America has fallen by about three-quarters since its peak. This is, despite everything that is genuinely horrible about the pandemic and the American response to it, rather fantastic.

there may be some possible “mortality displacement,” whereby the most severe cases show up first, in the most susceptible people, leaving behind a relatively protected population whose experience overall would be more mild, and that T-cell response may play a significant role in determining that susceptibility.

That, again, is Balloux’s interpretation — the most expansive assessment of the T-cell data offered to me

The most conservative assessment came from Sarah Fortune, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Immunology

Fortune cautioned not to assume that cross-protection was playing a significant role in determining severity of illness in a given patient. Those with such a T-cell response, she told me, would likely see a faster onset of robust response, yes, but that may or may not yield a shorter period of infection and viral shedding

Most of the scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and immunologists I spoke to fell between those two poles, suggesting the T-cell cross-immunity findings were significant without necessarily being determinative — that they may help explain some of the shape of pandemic spread through particular populations, but only some of the dynamics of that spread.

he told me he believed, in the absence of that data, that T-cell cross-immunity from exposure to previous coronaviruses “might explain different disease severity in different people,” and “could certainly be part of the explanation for the age skew, especially for why the very young fare so well.”

the headline finding was quite clear and explicitly stated: that preexisting T-cell response came primarily via the variety of T-cells called CD4 T-cells, and that this dynamic was consistent with the hypothesis that the mechanism was inherited from previous exposure to a few different “common cold” coronaviruses

“This potential preexisting cross-reactive T-cell immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has broad implications,” the authors wrote, “as it could explain aspects of differential COVID-19 clinical outcomes, influence epidemiological models of herd immunity, or affect the performance of COVID-19 candidate vaccines.”

“This is at present highly speculative,” they cautioned.

‘Listen, I have all this vaccine. And people are afraid to get it here,’” Ms. Platten recalled. “‘If you have any friends, or there’s anyone you know who wants a vaccine, please have them call me.’”

“The result has been a mini boom of visitors on an island whose tourism economy, like most others, has been brutalized by the pandemic.”

“Nowhere else in the U.S. can you actually just walk in and get the vaccine, anybody over 16,” Mr. Bryan said on Monday. On March 1, the islands also opened two federally supported community vaccination centers on St. Thomas and St. Croix.

“On the public health side, it’s a plus,” she said. “On the equity side, I don’t see it as significant issue.”

politicians will not be considered a priority group in the first phase of the rollout.

Shots were given to at least 165,714 people on Saturday

But doubts over the effectiveness of the homegrown vaccine have created a hurdle for the ambitious plan. Health experts worry that the government’s approval of the Bharat Biotech vaccine — without concrete data showing its efficacy — could amplify vaccine hesitancy. At least one state health minister has opposed its use.

“Right now, we don’t have the option to choose between the vaccines,”

In wealthy countries including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some measure of protection by vaccines developed with revolutionary speed and quickly authorized for use.

Many experts are predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for about a quarter of the world’s COVID-19 deaths.

This pervasive claim that “I have my rights” but “I don’t have responsibilities” is unraveling our country today.

But societal immunity “is a function of trust,”

“When trust in institutions, leaders and each other is high, people — in a crisis — are more willing to sublimate their cherished rights and demonstrate their sense of shared responsibilities toward others, even others they disagree with on important issues and even if it means making sacrifices.”

When our trust in each other erodes, though, as is happening in America today, fewer people think they have responsibilities to the other — only rights that protect them from being told by the other what to do.

completely ignored the four most important statistical facts about Covid-19 today that highlight our responsibilities — to our fellow citizens and, even more so, to the nurses and doctors risking their lives to take care of us in a pandemic.

First, unvaccinated adults 18 years and older are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than fully vaccinated adults

Second: Adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated are around 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than those who have received a full vaccine course and a booster.

Third: Unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of Covid than people who are vaccinated and boosted.

the emotional toll and other work conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nurses giving thought to leaving the profession.

many hospitals today are experiencing an unprecedented 20 percent annual turnover rate of nurses — more than double the historical baseline. The more nurses leave, the more those left behind have had to work overtime.

Especially when so many dying unvaccinated patients tell their nurses, “I wish I had gotten vaccinated,”

none of these statistics were mentioned during that podcast

“You can listen to the entire 186-minute lovefest between Rogan and Malone and have no idea that our hospitals are overloaded with Covid cases,” wrote Levy, “and that on the day their conversation transpired, 7,559 people worldwide died of Covid, 1,410 of which were in the United States. The vast majority of them were unvaccinated.”

“When Malone uncorks questionable allegations about disastrous vaccine effects and the global cabal of politicians and drugmakers pulling strings, Rogan responds with uh-huhs and wows.”

That was Rogan’s right. That was Spotify C.E.O. Daniel Ek’s right.

But who was looking out for the doctors and nurses on the pandemic front lines whose only ask is that the politicians and media influencers who are privileged enough to have public platforms — especially one like Rogan with an average of 11 million listeners per episode — use them to reinforce our responsibilities to one another, not just our rights.

He could start by offering his listeners a 186-minute episode with intensive care nurses and doctors about what this pandemic of the unvaccinated has done to them.

That would be a teaching moment, not only about Covid, but also about putting our responsibilities to one another — and especially to those who care for us — at least on a par with our right to be as dumb and selfish as we want to be.

“herd immunity might be hard to achieve without children being vaccinated,” Dr. Erbelding said.

Each dose will be assessed first in children 5 through 11 years of age, then in children ages 2 through 4 years, and finally in the youngest group, six months to 2 years.

“It sounds like a good plan, and it’s exciting that another Covid-19 vaccine is moving forward with trials in children,”

More than 3.3 million children have tested positive for the virus, at least 13,000 have been hospitalized and at least 260 have died,

Other vaccines have helped to control many horrific childhood diseases that can cause long-term complications,

Any side effects are likely to appear soon after the shot, within the first week and certainly within the first few weeks, experts have said.

there’s a higher degree of confidence now in giving this vaccine to kids.”

The more transparent you can be, the better.”

reassure the country of the safety of the vaccines.

Delaware

get the entire Covid operation up and running,

US Capitol, which was stormed and breached by supporters of President Donald Trump

impeach President Donald Trump

incitement of insurrection

"That's my hope and expectation,

refusing to take masks

irresponsible,

listen to public health experts

to stop the spread of the virus.

50 million Americans in his first 100 days.

n 374,500 Americans have died

cases are rapidly climbing across the country.

encouraged Americans to receive one as soon as it becomes available to them.

requires two doses administered several weeks apart in order to reach nearly 95% efficacy.

9 million people have received a first dose

adults, ages 75 and older, and "frontline essential workers,"

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received the first dose

Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff, Harris' husband, have also both received the first doses

100 million Covid-19 vaccine shots

Mike Pence was administered the first dose

President was likely to get his shot once it was recommended by his medical team.

Trump's treatment for Covid-19 included the monoclonal antibody cocktail made by Regeneron.

“This virus has a surface protein that is primed to lock on that receptor and slip its RNA into the cell,”

Once inside, that RNA inserts itself into the cell’s own replication machinery and makes multiple copies of the virus. These burst out of the cell, and the infection spreads. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system eventually target the virus and in most cases halt its progress.

“A Covid-19 infection is generally mild, and that really is the secret of the virus’s success,” adds Ball. “Many people don’t even notice they have got an infection and so go around their work, homes and supermarkets infecting others.”

the virus can cause severe problems. This happens when it moves down the respiratory tract and infects the lungs, which are even richer in cells with Ace-2 receptors. Many of these cells are destroyed, and lungs become congested with bits of broken cell. In these cases, patients will require treatment in intensive care.

Even worse, in some cases, a person’s immune system goes into overdrive, attracting cells to the lungs in order to attack the virus, resulting in inflammation

This process can run out of control, more immune cells pour in, and the inflammation gets worse. This is known as a cytokine storm.

Just why cytokine storms occur in some patients but not in the vast majority is unclear

Doctors examining patients recovering from a Covid-19 infection are finding fairly high levels of neutralising antibodies in their blood. These antibodies are made by the immune system, and they coat an invading virus at specific points, blocking its ability to break into cells.

Instead, most virologists believe that immunity against Covid-19 will last only a year or two. “That is in line with other coronaviruses that infect humans,

“It is clear that immune responses are being mounted against Covid-19 in infected people,” says virologist Mike Skinner of Imperial College London. “And the antibodies created by that response will provide protection against future infections – but we should note that it is unlikely this protection will be for life.”

“That means that even if most people do eventually become exposed to the virus, it is still likely to become endemic – which means we would see seasonal peaks of infection of this disease. We will have reached a steady state with regard to Covid-19.”

Skinner is doubtful. “We have got to consider this pandemic from the virus’s position,” he says. “It is spreading round the world very nicely. It is doing OK. Change brings it no benefit.”

In the end, it will be the development and roll-out of an effective vaccine that will free us from the threat of Covid-19,

the journal Nature reported that 78 vaccine projects had been launched round the globe – with a further 37 in development.

vaccines require large-scale safety and efficacy studies. Thousands of people would receive either the vaccine itself or a placebo to determine if the former were effective at preventing infection from the virus which they would have encountered naturally. That, inevitably, is a lengthy process.

some scientists have proposed a way to speed up the process – by deliberately exposing volunteers to the virus to determine a vaccine’s efficacy.

Volunteers would have to be young and healthy, he stresses: “Their health would also be closely monitored, and they would have access to intensive care and any available medicines.”

The result could be a vaccine that would save millions of lives by being ready for use in a much shorter time than one that went through standard phase three trials.

phase-three trials are still some way off, so we have time to consider the idea carefully.”

He points out that if one HIV vaccine had succeeded, the company behind it would have won big. Instead, all of the competitors in the vaccine field learned from collective failure and contributed to collective wisdom. The many false starts of HIV vaccination sired an explosion of new technologies and helped usher in a possible new golden age of vaccines.

We can call our record-breaking vaccine-development process good luck. Or we can call it what it really is: a ringing endorsement for the essential role of science in the world.

As a parable of scientific progress, I sometimes imagine the life cycle of a tree. Basic scientific research plants a variety of seeds. Some of these seeds fail entirely; the research goes nowhere. Some seeds become tiny shrubs; the research doesn’t fail entirely, but it produces little of value

And some seeds blossom into towering trees with abundant fruit that scientists, companies, and technologists pluck and turn into the products that change our lives. For years, mRNA technology looked like a shrub. In 2020, it blossomed in full view.

The final price of any vaccine should be one that governments of poor and rich countries alike can afford so all citizens can get it free at the point of care.

Without price controls, poor countries are unlikely to be able to afford or access enough vaccines to protect their populations.

A sad truth we have learned from past global pandemics is that poor people are hit first and worst. Vaccines are most urgently needed where health systems are fragile, and where the effects of this new coronavirus could be catastrophic.

Many countries lack the resources, infrastructure, and health care personnel to mount full-scale efforts to detect the virus and prevent it from spreading, meaning it will move quickly and easily among populations. In these settings, the number of cases is likely to grow exponentially, putting stress on already burdened health care workers and facilities and making it harder to provide timely care for those who are ill. Vaccines will be an important tool for preventing such a catastrophe.

For those with resources — rich countries and rich people — a vaccine would be valuable, one of several tools we will need to prevent the most serious effects of the new coronavirus. But for those who are poor or who live in poor countries, it may be essential. Without it, they will suffer disproportionately and unnecessarily.

To let a coronavirus vaccine be monopolized by the rich will perpetuate the unjust economics of outbreaks, where the poor always pay the heaviest price. Allowing this to happen would be a moral disgrace.

The idea is textbook economics. People respond to incentives.

incentives can be used not just for the sake of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole.

it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the economic harm if the pandemic persists.

His plan would cost the country between $250 billion and $300 billion.

"Payments may indeed encourage some people to get the vaccine," says Cynthia Cryder, an associate professor of marketing at Washington University's Olin Business School. "But it may also deter people from getting the vaccine. Because payments signal that the vaccine is risky."

Another method of getting to herd immunity may exist, though it has not been discussed widely. Mandates — requiring people to get vaccinated either by orders of state governments or employers.

To economist Robert Litan, if we ultimately must choose between the carrot of cash payouts and the stick of mandated vaccines, the answer is clear: the carrot.

"I think the level of anger in the country will go up extraordinarily high if we had mandates," he says.

COVID-19 survivors, found that 36% of people with long-haul symptoms noticed improvements in their condition after vaccination. About 50% remained the same. Other unofficial surveys have also estimated that about a third of patients with long COVID feel better after getting a vaccine.

“We don’t know who gets PASC, who avoids it, what exactly is causing it, or how to even diagnose it effectively,” said William Li, a vascular biologist and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation. Without those answers, it’s difficult to clearly see how the vaccines impact long-haulers, for better or worse.

As of today, 189 economies have signed up or are supported by the facility, but more is needed.

"5-point plan to protect humanity against another pandemic like Covid-19,"

The more vaccine candidates we have, the more likely we are to end the pandemic quickly.

poorer countries will be left behind and all of us will be less safe.

killed over 2 million adults and children in a single year at its peak.

Right now, even now, we've gone from half a million a day to 750,000 a day.

"If we get about 70% to 85% of the people in the country vaccinated, we likely will get to that umbrella of herd immunity,

His remarks come a day after he outlined a $1.9 trillion emergency legislative package to fund a nationwide vaccination effort and provide direct economic relief to Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic, telling Americans that "the health of our nation is at stake."

100 million vaccine shots in his initial 100 days in office.

Ohana reportedly objected to vaccinating Palestinian prisoners convicted of attacks on Israelis. He instructed only prison staff to be vaccinated for the time being, excluding all Israeli and Palestinian prisoners, Herbst says.

"Preventing life-saving medical treatment from people in prison — whether due to a sentence imposed on them by the court or due to detention before reaching a verdict — is inconsistent with our values, the values of the Jewish and democratic state,"

"The normal policy of every country is to vaccinate its own citizens. That's what they pay taxes for," Edelstein said.

Vaccines are expected to arrive in the Palestinian territories in the coming months.

Content moderation comes to every content platform eventually, and platforms are starting to realize this faster than ever.

Nothing symbolizes this shift as neatly as Facebook’s decision in October (and Twitter’s shortly after) to start banning Holocaust denial. Almost exactly a year earlier, Zuckerberg had proudly tied himself to the First Amendment in a widely publicized “stand for free expression” at Georgetown University.

The evolution continues. Facebook announced earlier this month that it will join platforms such as YouTube and TikTok in removing, not merely labeling or down-ranking, false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.

the pandemic also showed that complete neutrality is impossible. Even though it’s not clear that removing content outright is the best way to correct misperceptions, Facebook and other platforms plainly want to signal that, at least in the current crisis, they don’t want to be seen as feeding people information that might kill them.

When internet platforms announce new policies, assessing whether they can and will enforce them consistently has always been difficult. In essence, the companies are grading their own work. But too often what can be gleaned from the outside suggests that they’re failing.

It tweaked its algorithm to boost authoritative sources in the news feed and turned off recommendations to join groups based around political or social issues. Facebook is reversing some of these steps now, but it cannot make people forget this toolbox exists in the future

As platforms grow more comfortable with their power, they are recognizing that they have options beyond taking posts down or leaving them up. In addition to warning labels, Facebook implemented other “break glass” measures to stem misinformation as the election approached.

Platforms don’t deserve praise for belatedly noticing dumpster fires that they helped create and affixing unobtrusive labels to them

Warning labels for misinformation might make some commentators feel a little better, but whether labels actually do much to contain the spread of false information is still unknown.

News reporting suggests that insiders at Facebook knew they could and should do more about misinformation, but higher-ups vetoed their ideas. YouTube barely acted to stem the flood of misinformation about election results on its platform.

Even before the pandemic, YouTube had begun adjusting its recommendation algorithm to reduce the spread of borderline and harmful content, and is introducing pop-up nudges to encourage user

And if 2020 finally made clear to platforms the need for greater content moderation, it also exposed the inevitable limits of content moderation.

Down-ranking, labeling, or deleting content on an internet platform does not address the social or political circumstances that caused it to be posted in the first place

even the most powerful platform will never be able to fully compensate for the failures of other governing institutions or be able to stop the leader of the free world from constructing an alternative reality when a whole media ecosystem is ready and willing to enable him. As Renée DiResta wrote in The Atlantic last month, “reducing the supply of misinformation doesn’t eliminate the demand.”

Even so, this year’s events showed that nothing is innate, inevitable, or immutable about platforms as they currently exist. The possibilities for what they might become—and what role they will play in society—are limited more by imagination than any fixed technological constraint, and the companies appear more willing to experiment than ever.

The administration is investing billions of dollars to boost coronavirus preparedness, accelerating the pace of vaccinations and working to prepare the public and governors for the prospect of another surge.