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Moderna on Tuesday became the latest pharmaceutical company to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for full approval for its Covid-19 vaccine for use in people 18 and older. F.D.A. approval would allow the company to market the shot directly to consumers, and could also help raise public confidence in the vaccine.

Last month Pfizer and BioNTech applied to the agency for full approval of their vaccine for use in people 16 and older.

Moderna’s vaccine was authorized for emergency use in December, and as of Sunday, more than 151 million doses had been administered in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wright’s new book is most effective at detailing the missed opportunities to keep things from going so wrong. “Tens of thousands of people were bound to perish,” he writes. “But perhaps not hundreds of thousands.” This is the story of how we got that extra zero.

There were warnings; there were even manuals. Wright describes the Obama administration’s 69-page “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” a document bequeathed to Donald Trump’s incoming team during the presidential transition, outlining how various agencies should respond in case of a pandemic or bioweapon attack.

Wright also cites “Crimson Contagion,” a 2019 exercise led by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services that included the Pentagon, the National Security Council, major hospitals, health-care organizations and a dozen state governments. In the exercise, tourists contracted a novel influenza during a China trip and quickly spread it across the world. Agencies couldn’t agree who was in charge; cities challenged recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; ventilators and protective equipment for medical workers were insufficient; business struggled to remain open. With no vaccine, nearly 600,000 Americans soon died. It was “spookily predictive of what was to come,” Wright emphasizes, but few reforms were instituted in response.

Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.

Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”

Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”

Deaths from all causes, shown for selected European countries and the U.S., is the most reliable way to compare mortality during the pandemic across countries.

Russian scientists had developed a Covid vaccine widely seen as one of the best in the world — but the Kremlin has put a greater emphasis on using the Sputnik V shot to score geopolitical points rather than on immunizing its own population.

Asked to sum up 2020 at his year-end news conference in December, Mr. Putin rattled off statistics showing that Russia’s economy had suffered less than that of many other countries. Indeed, even as Europe introduced lockdowns in the fall and winter, Russians were largely free to pack nightclubs, restaurants, theaters and bars.

US wildlife authorities have launched an investigation after a manatee was discovered with the word 'Trump' scraped on its back.

The marine mammal was spotted on Sunday in Florida's Homosassa River, with the US president's surname on its body.

Officials told AP news agency that the animal does not appear to be seriously injured, and the word was scraped onto algae growing on its skin.

Transgender powerlifter JayCee Cooper is suing USA Powerlifting, the sport's biggest U.S.-based organization, after it barred her from competition on the basis of her gender identity.

"It came as a surprise to me that when I applied to compete at my first competition, I was told that I couldn't compete specifically because I'm a trans woman,"

The International Olympic Committee adopted guidelines in 2015 permitting trans women to compete if their testosterone remains below a certain level for at least 12 months.

The coronavirus variant discovered in Britain is more easily spread among children, as it is among adults. Current safeguards should protect schools, experts said, but only if strictly enforced.

Initial reports were tinged with worry that children might be just as susceptible as adults, fueling speculation that schools might need to pre-emptively close to limit the variant’s spread. B

Based on detailed contact-tracing of about 20,000 people infected with the new variant — including nearly 3,000 children under 10 — the report showed that young children were about half as likely as adults to transmit the variant to others. That was true of the previous iteration of the virus, as well.

Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey (R), who has a cisgender daughter on a school golf team, is co-sponsoring a bill that would allow school competition only based on the sex listed on one’s birth certificate.

“What if one of the boys is not doing well, so he pretends to be transgender to win?” he asked. “I’m protecting a discriminated class: that’s girls and women in sports.”

But detractors say arguments about biological advantages among transgender athletes are based on limited research and put an outsize focus on a tiny fraction of young competitors. About 2 percent of high school students in the United States identify as transgender

As temperatures rise, Australia becomes more monochrome. In the ocean, the reefs have been whitening. On land, the forests have been blackening. Successive heat waves have forced corals to expel their colorful, nutrient-providing algae; half of the Great Barrier Reef has died.

“Climate-change predictions suggested that catastrophic fires were going to happen and were going to become more frequent. But they’ve just never happened before at this scale.” The island last saw major bushfires in 2007, but the recent blazes have burned an area more than 12 times greater.

But when fires get big enough, birds get disoriented by the smoke and heat, while tree hollows transform from shelters into crematoria. That’s been the case in the recent season, as fires have been not only especially intense, but unprecedentedly thorough.

The American Psychiatric Association reported that from 2016 to 2017, the number of adults who described themselves as more anxious than the previous year rose 36 percent.

In 2017, more than 17 million American adults had at least one major depressive episode, as did three million adolescents ages 12 to 17. Forty million adults now suffer from an anxiety disorder — nearly 20 percent of the adult population. (These are the known cases of depression and anxiety. The actual numbers must be dumbfounding.)

Among all Americans, the suicide rate increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2017.

A year of extreme weather events and mounting evidence of global heating have catapulted the climate emergency to the top of the list of issues worrying the world’s elite.

After a month in which bushfires have raged out of control in Australia, Brende said there was a need for urgent action.

The report was released ahead of the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos next week, which will be attended by the chief executives of some of the world’s biggest and powerful companies. Despite the large number of participants flying in to Switzerland by private jet, the WEF said Davos would be a carbon-neutral event.

But many Black Americans have expressed reluctance to take the vaccine, a wariness some attribute to the enduring legacy of the egregious Tuskegee syphilis study.

Both expose the depth of structural discrimination in the United States. Both remind us to listen and hear patients when they express distrust or reluctance about medical treatment.

It recruited Black men in Macon County, Alabama, who had already contracted syphilis. The men were told they would be treated for syphilis, but the actual purpose of the study was to learn whether untreated syphilis progressed differently in Black people compared with White people.

While COVID-19 has mutated in thousands of mostly harmless ways, the world is increasingly focused on one variant detected in England, dubbed B.1.1.7, and one found in South Africa, called 501.V2, because they seem to spread more easily than older strains.

A dramatic rise in B.1.1.7 cases, especially in southeast London, made experts wonder if the new strain could be more infectious. While researchers are still trying to tease apart whether that's the case, or whether the rise could be attributed to a sociological change such as people mixing for the holidays, there are some biological reasons that make this strain easier to spread,

A top hypothesis that this strain is more infectious comes from a study looking at how much virus a person generates in the nose.

Kindness. Humility. Responsibility. These traits were once “the definition of manliness,” Barack Obama told a crowd on Saturday, campaigning in Flint, Mich., for his former running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“It used to be being a man meant taking care of other people, not going around bragging,” Mr. Obama said.

n two days, Americans will take their shot, making a choice between two presidential candidates who resemble vastly different case studies in what a man, even in 2020, should do or be.

In 2014, I followed him from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked as a cognitive neuroscientist, to Hungary, where he was studying the biological underpinnings of racial prejudice. He wanted to pinpoint the causes of bias against Roma people and create programs that would help eradicate it.

He talked openly about “bottling up” the altruism and good will he found among the peace activists he worked with and giving it like medicine to recalcitrant extremists everywhere. He was actively looking for ways to do that, he said, and he was prepared for the challenges, and snickers, he would face.

Emile died this fall, at the age of 47, from an aggressive form of brain cancer. He left behind a wife, two young children and a body of work as expansive and hopeful as it is unfinished. The loss of such a beautiful mind to a disease of the brain feels especially awful — especially now. But Emile was well acquainted with awfulness, and even in death, he did not grant it much currency.

Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden used a key page from their old pandemic playbook to call out President Donald Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus crisis in a new campaign video.

Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Biden recalled leaving a manual for the incoming Trump administration on how to respond quickly to “high consequence emerging infectious disease threats and biological incidents.”

Obama administration’s advice apparently went “neglected and ignored” by the Trump White House. And “we’ve now seen 225,000 people lose their lives,” said the former president.

When the body encounters an unfamiliar pathogen, it responds within hours with a flurry of immune activity, called an innate immune response. The body’s defenders are quickly recruited to the fight and begin releasing signals calling for backup.Children more often encounter pathogens that are new to their immune systems. Their innate defense is fast and overwhelming.

Over time, as the immune system encounters pathogen after pathogen, it builds up a repertoire of known villains. By the time the body reaches adulthood, it relies on a more sophisticated and specialized system adapted to remembering and fighting specific threats.

The adaptive system makes sense biologically because adults rarely encounter a virus for the first time

Chaos theory applies neatly to the spread of the coronavirus, in that seemingly tiny decisions or differences in reaction speed can have inordinate consequences.

Effects can seem random when, in fact, they trace to discrete decisions made long prior. For example, the United States has surpassed 125,000 deaths from COVID-19. Having suppressed the virus early, South Korea has had only 289. Vietnam’s toll sits at zero. Even when differences from place to place appear random, or too dramatic to pin entirely on a failed national response, they are not.

When phenomena appear chaotic, mathematical modelers make it their job to find the underlying order. Once models can accurately describe the real world, as some now do, they gain the predictive power to give clearer glimpses into likely futures.

The effectiveness of coronavirus measures in preventing flu transmission has left doctors in South Africa with a riddle: Why did they stop flu in its tracks while South Africa ended up in the top five countries globally for coronavirus cases, which now stand at nearly 600,000?

The answer lies in fundamental differences between the two viruses,

“It seems quite clear that the coronavirus is simply much, much more contagious than the flu,” she said. “This isn’t a fluke — this is proof that simple containment measures, when broadly followed, are effective against influenza transmission, but not enough for coronavirus.”

The one-shot coronavirus vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson provides strong protection against severe disease and death from Covid-19, and may reduce the spread of the virus by vaccinated people, according to new analyses posted online by the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday.

The analyses confirmed that Americans are likely to benefit soon from a third effective coronavirus vaccine developed in under a year, as demand for inoculations greatly outstrips supply.

Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine can be stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for at least three months, making its distribution considerably easier than the authorized vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, which require two doses and must be stored at frigid temperatures.