This year in the United States, 14 people have tested positive for avian influenza, or bird flu. Nine of those became infected after coming into contact with poultry, and four got the virus from exposure to dairy cows. The source of the remaining, most recent case remains a mystery. The …
Read More »US Government Awards Moderna $176 Million for mRNA Bird Flu Vaccine
The US government will pay Moderna $176 million to develop an mRNA vaccine against a pandemic influenza—an award given as the highly pathogenic bird flu virus H5N1 continues to spread widely among US dairy cattle. The funding flows through BARDA, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as part of …
Read More »There’s a Huge Covid Surge Right Now and Nobody Is Talking About It
Seemingly everyone has come down with at least one bout of illness this winter: sniffles that theoretically pass as “just some bug” if you don’t test for Covid. But there’s a solid chance, with or without a test, that those sniffles were Covid after all. We’re in the midst of …
Read More »Katalin Karikó’s Nobel Prize Marks the Beginning of an mRNA Vaccine Revolution
No one expected the first Covid-19 vaccine to be as good as it was. “We were hoping for around 70 percent, that’s a success,” says Dr Ann Falsey, a professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, New York, who ran a 150-person trial site for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in …
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