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Dr. Church looks forward to the day when current research becomes a routine clinical procedure that combines inherited genomic information with analyses of RNA, proteins, metabolites and microbes in our bodies.

the cost to collect molecular data from each blood sample was about $2,500 — which did not include the cost of analysis. But the price for tests similar to Dr. Snyder’s will also decline in the future

Dr. Snyder is a co-founder of a company, Personalis, in Palo Alto, Calif., that is developing software and other tools to interpret genomes after sequencing

“Much of the new growth in the segment is coming from younger consumers who seek foods that fit an overall lifestyle, be it for health reasons or personal ethics,” Mr. Loucks wrote. “They are not just seeking foods that mimic meat. Instead they specifically want vegetarian foods with distinctive flavors and visible, recognizable ingredients.”

“Not that long ago, electrical cars were considered nonperformers, and when Prius came out, a lot of people didn’t think there was a market for it,” said Yves Potvin, founder and chief executive of Gardein Protein International, which makes the Gardein line of meatless products. “Now people are willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla, and more than one million Prius cars are sold each year.”

Mr. Brown is most proud of Beyond Meat’s “chicken breast” products, which are sold in strips that look like real chicken and can be pulled into shreds for chicken salad. “That was kind of the holy grail,” he said.

“It has to be just as good as, just as convenient as and maybe even cheaper than ground beef or chicken,” Mr. Brown said. “Our business is to create something better than meat; otherwise we are not going to move the needle.”

three different factors that might be making harder for adults today to stay thin.

First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight.

Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the ‘70s and ‘80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain.

the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle, at first, but add up over time.

Kuk believes the proliferation of artificial sweeteners could also be playing a role.

“There's a huge weight bias against people with obesity,” she said. “They're judged as lazy and self-indulgent. That's really not the case

If our research is correct, you need to eat even less and exercise even more” just to be same weight as your parents were at your age.

What is clear is that, despite years of Western involvement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, children’s health is not only still a problem, but also worsening, and the doctors bearing the brunt of the crisis are worried.

Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here. Efforts to educate people about nutrition and health care are often stymied by conservative traditions that cloister women away from anyone outside the family. Agriculture and traditional local sources of social support have been disrupted by war and the widespread flight of refugees to the cities. And therapeutic feeding programs, complex operations even in countries with strong health care systems, have been compromised as the flow of aid and transportation have been derailed by political tensions or violence.

Perhaps nowhere is the situation so obviously serious as in the malnutrition ward at Bost Hospital, which is admitting 200 children a month for severe, acute malnutrition — four times more than it did in January 2012, according to officials with Doctors Without Borders, known in French as Médecins Sans Frontières, which supports the Afghan-run hospital with financing and supplementary staff.

One patient, a 2-year-old named Ahmed Wali, is suffering from the protein deficiency condition kwashiorkor, with orange hair, a distended belly and swollen feet. An 8-month-old boy named Samiullah is suffering from marasmus, another form of advanced malnutrition in which the child’s face looks like that of a wrinkled old man because the skin hangs so loosely.

Médecins Sans Frontières helped Bost Hospital nearly double the number of beds in the pediatric wing at the end of last year, and there are still not enough — 40 to 50 children are usually being treated each day, mostly two to a bed because they are so small. Nearly 300 other children, less severely malnourished, are in an outpatient therapeutic feeding program.

“It’s quite an unusual situation, and it’s difficult to understand what’s going on,” said Wiet Vandormael, an M.S.F. official who has helped coordinate with Bost Hospital.

From testing a drop of blood, researchers could determine the type, whether it had spread into other parts of the body and where the tumor was in the body.

The researchers note that some cancers were easier to detect, such as intestinal cancers, while brain cancers were harder to find (the rate of reliable detection dropped by 11%). The reason for the latter, the researchers suspect, is because of the blood-brain barrier, which reduces accuracy. Still, this detection method is better than anything they'd tried previously.

having such a minimally invasive procedure capable of early detection could mean stopping an enormous amount of potentially fatal cancer diagnoses — many of which are discovered too late to be stopped.

But China is buying fewer U.S. soybeans, thanks to bumper harvests of cheaper beans in South America.

Limited storage capacity forced many Brazilian farmers to sell at low prices, analysts said. Many Chinese crushers also prefer the higher protein content of Brazilian beans. Brazil’s soybean exports to China more than doubled from September to January while U.S. sales to China dropped more than 20%.

The White House proposal for tariffs on steel and aluminum has nevertheless exacerbated concerns about retaliation, according to research firm AgResource Co. Even if China couldn't avoid the U.S. altogether, the firm said, it could buy exclusively from Brazil for the next six or seven months.

Other headwinds for U.S. soybean farmers are strengthening. U.S. officials said they would start labeling soybean shipments to China that contain more than 1% of detritus like weed seeds, to conform with Chinese requirements.

“It’s just one more factor that has contributed to the relative uncompetitive nature of U.S. soybeans,” said Ken Morrison, a trader and commodity newsletter author.

“Early indications are that demand for plant-based proteins will continue to grow,” said Tony Weisman, chief marketing officer with Dunkin’ US. He said the company intended to roll out its new Beyond Sausage sandwich nationally soon.

whether health-conscious young people will come out in droves for plant-based fast food remains to be seen.

fast-food options including Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are neither organic nor particularly healthy.

The Impossible Whopper meal, which automatically comes with a medium fries and Coke, is a staggering 1,280 calories. There are 34 grams of fat and 1,080 grams of sodium in the sandwich alone.

“It’s difficult to say which one is healthier, because ultimately we know a burger is not a healthy choice,”

Similarly, Dunkin’s Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwich is a nutritional bomb at 470 calories, 24 grams of fat and 910 milligrams of sodium. If a person ate both in one day, they would have eaten 1,750 calories before dinner, leaving them with 250 calories for the day if they followed the recommended 2,000 calorie per day diet.

A future where Impossible Foods or Beyond Beef – or any other single-source supplier – might dominate the market also poses a problem for restaurants like Burger King. Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat sausages are dependent on Silicon Valley intellectual property rights. It would be a huge economic risk for burger joints to shift their menus toward these products, because they would be held hostage by a single supplier with the magic ingredient.

it is entirely possible to grow food that’s better for us and grow it in ways that are better for the land. Better land management techniques include limiting the use of fertilizers that contribute to emissions and planting crops that add carbon to the soil.

The way forward, they point out, requires reducing planet-warming emissions, removing carbon from the atmosphere by storing it in trees or soil, and changing diets, especially among the world’s wealthy.

it also requires a hard look at who gets to eat what

Scientists often refer to these as “natural climate solutions,” and they point out that sequestering carbon in the soil not only helps slow down climate change, it can also make the soil hardier to deal with extreme weather events and ultimately increase crop yields.

“Farming must work with nature, not against it,

“The I.P.C.C.’s land report puts a big question mark on the future of industrial agriculture.”

when it comes to land use, better forest management has the “largest potential for reducing emissions.”

The world’s forests are under intense threat, though, especially in the tropics. They are cleared for things we consume, including soy, palm oil and beef cattle

Nowhere is that more stark than in the world’s largest rain forest, the Amazon. Its destruction has increased drastically since Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power with a promise to further open the forest to commercial exploitation.

Livestock can be raised on lands that are too arid to grow crops, they can be fed differently so they produce lower methane emissions and they produce manure that can fertilize soil.

animal protein is vital nourishment for a hungry child and raising animals has been part of the culture and livelihood for millions of people around the world.

But if the heaviest meat eaters in places like the United States and Australia cut back on meat, especially red meat, it would make a big difference.

It is entirely possible to eat well without depriving ourselves. There are tips we can borrow from many traditional cuisines.

Taken together, the amount of food that is wasted and unused accounts for close to a 10th of global emissions.

Curbing food waste is arguably the single most effective thing that can be done at an individual or household level to slow down climate change.

Sars-CoV-2 shares between 80% and 90% of its genetic material with the virus that caused Sars – hence its name. Both consist of a strip of ribonucleic acid (RNA) inside a spherical protein capsule that is covered in spikes. The spikes lock on to receptors on the surface of cells lining the human lung – the same type of receptor in both cases – allowing the virus to break into the cell. Once inside, it hijacks the cell’s reproductive machinery to produce more copies of itself, before breaking out of the cell again and killing it in the process.

Coronaviruses have caused two other recent epidemics – severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) in China in 2002-04, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), which started in Saudi Arabia in 2012. In both cases, work began on vaccines that were later shelved when the outbreaks were contained.

Though nobody could have predicted that the next infectious disease to threaten the globe would be caused by a coronavirus – flu is generally considered to pose the greatest pandemic risk – vaccinologists had hedged their bets by working on “prototype” pathogens.

Cepi’s original portfolio of four funded Covid-19 vaccine projects was heavily skewed towards these more innovative technologies, and last week it announced $4.4m (£3.4m) of partnership funding with Novavax and with a University of Oxford vectored vaccine project.

Some of the Covid-19 vaccine projects are using these tried-and-tested approaches, but others are using newer technology.

All vaccines work according to the same basic principle. They present part or all of the pathogen to the human immune system, usually in the form of an injection and at a low dose, to prompt the system to produce antibodies to the pathogen. Antibodies are a kind of immune memory which, having been elicited once, can be quickly mobilised again if the person is exposed to the virus in its natural form.

Clinical trials, an essential precursor to regulatory approval, usually take place in three phases. The first, involving a few dozen healthy volunteers, tests the vaccine for safety, monitoring for adverse effects. The second, involving several hundred people, usually in a part of the world affected by the disease, looks at how effective the vaccine is, and the third does the same in several thousand people. But there’s a high level of attrition as experimental vaccines pass through these phases.

There are good reasons for that. Either the candidates are unsafe, or they’re ineffective, or both. Screening out duds is essential, which is why clinical trials can’t be skipped or hurried. Approval can be accelerated if regulators have approved similar products before.

No vaccine made from genetic material – RNA or DNA – has been approved to date, for example. So the Covid-19 vaccine candidates have to be treated as brand new vaccines, and as Gellin says: “While there is a push to do things as fast as possible, it’s really important not to take shortcuts.”

It’s for these reasons that taking a vaccine candidate all the way to regulatory approval typically takes a decade or more, and why President Trump sowed confusion when, at a meeting at the White House on 2 March, he pressed for a vaccine to be ready by the US elections in November – an impossible deadline.

In the meantime, there is another potential problem. As soon as a vaccine is approved, it’s going to be needed in vast quantities – and many of the organisations in the Covid-19 vaccine race simply don’t have the necessary production capacity. Vaccine development is already a risky affair, in business terms, because so few candidates get anywhere near the clinic. Production facilities tend to be tailored to specific vaccines, and scaling these up when you don’t yet know if your product will succeed is not commercially feasible. Cepi and similar organisations exist to shoulder some of the risk, keeping companies incentivised to develop much-needed vaccines. Cepi plans to invest in developing a Covid-19 vaccine and boosting manufacturing capacity in parallel, and earlier this month it put out a call for $2bn to allow it to do so.

The problem is making sure the vaccine gets to all those who need it. This is a challenge even within countries, and some have worked out guidelines. In the scenario of a flu pandemic, for example, the UK would prioritise vaccinating healthcare and social care workers, along with those considered at highest medical risk – including children and pregnant women – with the overall goal of keeping sickness and death rates as low as possible. But in a pandemic, countries also have to compete with each other for medicines.

Because pandemics tend to hit hardest those countries that have the most fragile and underfunded healthcare systems, there is an inherent imbalance between need and purchasing power when it comes to vaccines.

Outside of pandemics, the WHO brings governments, charitable foundations and vaccine-makers together to agree an equitable global distribution strategy, and organisations like Gavi, the vaccine alliance, have come up with innovative funding mechanisms to raise money on the markets for ensuring supply to poorer countries. But each pandemic is different, and no country is bound by any arrangement the WHO proposes – leaving many unknowns.

When his hospital asked for volunteers for a study of an emerging Covid-19 therapy, Dr. Planer was among the first to sign up. His blood carries an especially valuable quantity of antibodies, Dr. Donato said.

While there is no evidence that convalescent-plasma treatments can help with Covid-19, the technique has been used to fight other viruses, including Ebola, influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

Enthusiasm for the potential treatment grew after a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on March 27 suggested that a small study of five critically ill patients in China had shown promising results.

The National Covid-19 Convalescent Plasma Project is a related effort that began several weeks ago as a clearinghouse for information and a way to match willing plasma donors with hospitals and doctors authorized to perform infusions.

In addition to being healthy and showing no signs of infection after testing positive for the virus, potential donors must satisfy all other requirements for giving blood.

When you see someone spooning sugar onto a bowl of cornflakes or Cheerios, you should not see the act as sweetening something that’s good for you, you should see it as someone spooning sugar onto sugar.

the biggest culprits in America’s bad health are sugar and refined grains, in that order. Sugar, a carbohydrate, now seems to be the chief villain. (In his recent book “The Case Against Sugar,” Taubes suggests it should be considered toxic in the same way cigarettes are.) But its nutritional cousin, the refined-grain carbohydrate, may be a close second.

Cereal was not always the morning staple that it is today. It only became so at about the same time that our health problems began to be documented, in the 1960s. A coincidence?

cereal was initially eaten on Sundays, when the women of our churchgoing nation didn’t have time to make the family breakfast. Once women entered the workforce, though, we began pouring our convenient breakfasts out of a box in significant numbers daily, a trend that peaked in 1995,

it may not even just be cereal that’s had such a huge impact on American health. “Maybe the problem,” Sukol said, “is the huge quantity of nutritionally bankrupt foods that are supposed to stand in for breakfast.”

By this she means anything composed primarily of refined wheat, which would be, um, 90 percent of the American breakfast repertoire: pancakes, waffles, bagels, toast, muffins, biscuits, scones, croissants, and so on.

eating this stuff on an empty stomach (i.e. in the morning), may be especially bad for your system, as there is little fiber, fat or protein in your system to slow the sugar absorption. Our breakfast staples might all best be considered as a single category of food: sugar bomb.

she nevertheless recommends that all her patients avoid what she calls “stripped” carbs, carbohydrates stripped of their fiber matrix, before noon.

What does she recommend for breakfast? Steel-cut oats, not cooked but rather soaked overnight with a dash of vinegar. I add whole-fat Greek yogurt and some nuts if I have them

Beans are great too. I had a delicious dish of lentils and a small amount of basmati rice

An egg and some cheese are also a nourishing and satisfying way to begin the day.

it throws a different light on the cereal aisle. That hulking behemoth in the middle of the grocery store, the racks of cereal, is stripped-carb and sugar ground zero, representing a kind of unrecognized terrorism wrought on parents by our own food makers

Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy

the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

“The Closing of the American Mind.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.

What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.

One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.

One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.

So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.

Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test

I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens

Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.

In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

This is journalism in defense of liberalism

Thus, an industry was born. She taught her people how to raise silkworms and later invented the loom.

It refracts incoming light at different angles and so produces different colors. 

Silk garments were worn by emperors and royalty, and it was a status symbol.

Silk is a delicately woven product made from the protein fibers of the silkworm cocoon. Silk production is a lengthy process that requires close monitoring.

Anyone found smuggling silkworm eggs, cocoons, or mulberry seeds was put to death. 

Avoid storing them in plastic since this might trap moisture and cause yellowing or mildew.

Touring the sights along the ancient Silk Road trade routes,

The Hangzhou National Silk Museum is the largest of its kind in the world. It is a showcase for the origin, evolution and technique of silk production.

But the F.D.A. advisory committee, along with an independent think tank and several prominent experts — including some Alzheimer’s doctors who worked on the aducanumab clinical trials — said the evidence raised significant doubts about whether the drug is effective.

The F.D.A. authorized the drug under a program called accelerated approval, which has been applied to therapies for some cancers and other serious diseases for which there are few, if any, treatments.

The risks with aducanumab involve brain swelling or bleeding experienced by about 40 percent of Phase 3 trial participants receiving the high dose. Most were either asymptomatic or had headaches, dizziness or nausea. But such effects prompted 6 percent of high-dose recipients to discontinue. No Phase 3 participants died from the effects, but one safety trial participant did.

About two million Americans may fit the description of the patients the drug was tested on: people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s or the stage just before that, Alzheimer’s-related mild cognitive impairment. About six million people in the United States and roughly 30 million globally have Alzheimer’s, a number expected to double by 2050. Currently, five medications approved in the United States can delay cognitive decline for several months in various Alzheimer’s stages.

The crux of the controversy over aducanumab involved two Phase 3 trials with results that contradicted each other: One suggested the drug slightly slowed cognitive decline while the other trial showed no benefit. The trials were stopped early by a data monitoring committee that found aducanumab didn’t appear to be showing any benefit. Consequently, over a third of the 3,285 participants in those trials were never able to complete them.

Aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, targets a protein, amyloid, that clumps into plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients and is considered a biomarker of the disease. One thing both critics and supporters of approval agree on is that the drug substantially reduces levels of amyloid, and the F.D.A. said that the drug’s effect on a biomarker qualified it for the accelerated approval program.

He estimates 25 to 40 percent of the clinic’s roughly 3,000 patients might be eligible, but it doesn’t have enough neurologists.

"Contacts of people with B.1.1.7 would get sicker at higher rates."

Plus there's evidence people infected with the B.1.1.7 variant have what's known as a higher viral load -- they have more virus reproducing in their bodies. That makes sense if the variant infects cells more easily, because viruses hijack the cells they infect, turning them into virus factories. More infected cells equal more virus.

Biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona said he's found evidence B.1.1.7 was imported at least five separate times to the US, and likely many more. "It is striking that this lineage may already have been established in the US for some 5-6 weeks before B.1.1.7 was first identified as a variant of concern in the UK in mid-December,"

That should reassure people, Nussenzweig said. The human immune system adapts very well to viral mutations, he said, and produces hundreds of different antibodies that can attack coronavirus.

Finally, there's a new variant seen in California. "We don't know yet what the significance of that one is," said Armstrong. It also has a mutation in the receptor binding domain of the spike protein. The new California variant is called L425R and while it's being found commonly, it's not yet clear if it's more transmissible.

The Moderna vaccine is a particularly attractive candidate for rapid scaling, since it can be kept at normal freezer and refrigerator temperatures, which makes it easier to store and transport.

After all, viruses know no borders. Protecting Americans from Covid-19 requires protecting all people from the disease. We will not end the pandemic until everyone, across the world, can receive highly effective vaccines. And the U.S. can help the world more quickly this time. Pepfar was launched seven years after effective H.I.V. treatments were available in rich countries.

Dr. Brannon Traxler, the department's interim public health director, said that the variant's arrival is an important reminder that the fight against COVID-19 is far from over.

Noting the limited supply of vaccines, she added, "Every one of us must recommit to the fight by recognizing that we are all on the front lines now. We are all in this together."

But the one first seen in South Africa has more mutations in its spike protein than the one from the United Kingdom. Several of its mutations are also present in a variant that was first identified in Brazil.

The coronavirus variants have alarmed public health experts in recent months, posing a new challenge even as vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have raised hopes in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company said that when its vaccine was used against the variant from South Africa, the vaccine produced levels of virus-fighting antibody titers that were around six times less than when it's used against other variants.

As a result, Moderna said it will test booster doses of its vaccine, including one that would be tailored to fight strains that have recently emerged.

Earlier this week, Moderna said its COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against new variants of the coronavirus — but that the vaccine is more effective against the strain first identified in the U.K. than the one found in South Africa.

Researchers have found growing evidence that both of the variants circulating in South Africa and Brazil may be capable of evading the body's immune system, heightening the risk of reinfection, as NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff recently reported.

The first U.S. case of the strain from Brazil was identified earlier this week in the Minneapolis metro are

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, will now fast-track its decision about whether to authorize use of the vaccine.

Like the Pfizer vaccine, the Moderna vaccine requires two doses to be effective. Both medicines work by using messenger RNA to induce the body to produce antibodies to help fight off an infection by the coronavirus. They essentially trick the body into making the same spike protein that the virus uses to invade cells — but without the dangerous coronavirus being present.

The benefit of mRNA vaccines, like all vaccines, is those vaccinated gain this protection without ever having to risk the serious consequences of getting sick with COVID-19."