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COVID-19 vaccine update
UK approves Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine
The United Kingdom is the first country to approve the COVID-19 vaccine developed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotechnology company BioNTech. Hospitals, which have the ultracold freezers that are necessary to store the vaccine, had already started preparing to become the first places to roll it out next week. Conference centres and sports stadiums are being set up to support “the largest-scale vaccination campaign in our country's history”, says Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the country’s National Health Service. Residents and staff in care homes will be the first to receive the vaccine, followed by people over 80 years old and frontline health workers.
The speedbumps facing vaccine rollouts
Developing COVID-19 vaccines in record time is an eye-watering accomplishment — but it’s still just the beginning. Hospitals and health workers — who are, in some places, overwhelmed and exhausted — are needed to administer them. Pregnant and breastfeeding women, who make up a significant chunk of health-care and care-home workers, have been left out of clinical trials. Similarly, there are no data on how the front-running vaccines affect children under 12. STAT explores the challenges that must be overcome to make the most of the spectacular scientific achievements of vaccine-makers.
US agrees on vaccine pecking order
Advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control have voted in a distribution plan that would give priority access to COVID-19 vaccines to health-care workers and people living or working in care homes. Some committee members expressed concern that safety in older people has not been adequately tested, but the toll of the disease outweighed that risk in one member’s mind. "Ultimately, I was persuaded by the tremendous burden in terms of mortality and hospitalizations that the residents of these facilities bear, [and] the remarkable efficacy that has initially been reported,” says infectious-disease physician Robert Atmar.
The vaccine conversation can’t wait
“Vaccinating almost the whole country in a short period of time — while the pandemic rages on — will be a daunting task,” writes public-health researcher Saad Omer. “The time to prepare for a communication and education campaign is now.” He presents the evidence on how to build trust, overcome politicization and reach the communities that will benefit most from immunization — but might have a well-founded distrust of medical authority. The core of the plan must be health-care providers, says Omer: they are the most trusted source of vaccine information, even among those who end up refusing vaccines.
Chang’e-5 lands on the Moon
China’s Chang’e-5 lander has successfully touched down on the Moon. The next stage in its technically challenging mission is to drill up to 2 metres into the ground and extend a robotic arm to scoop up dust and debris. The material will then be launched back into space to rendezvous with the orbiting part of the spacecraft and return to Earth. The ascent must take place within one lunar day (around 14 Earth days) to avoid the extreme overnight temperatures that could damage its electronics. If successful, it will be the first material collected from the Moon since the US–Soviet space race and offer fresh insight into how the Moon evolved.
MIT Technology Review | 4 min read
Read more: China set to retrieve first Moon rocks in 40 years (Nature | 5 min read, from November)
Climate goals ‘within striking distance’
Net-zero pledges from China, Japan and South Korea and the election of US-president-elect Joe Biden have shifted the needle closer to achieving the targets set by the Paris climate agreement. Climate researchers say the world is on track to keep global warming below 2.1 ℃ compared with pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, and the more ambitious 1.5 ℃ target is “within striking distance”. “We now have north of 50% of global emissions covered by big countries with a zero emissions by mid-century goal,” says climate scientist Bill Hare, who helped to lead the analysis. “When you add all that up, along with what a whole bunch of other countries are doing, then you move the temperature dial from around 2.7 ℃ to really quite close to two degrees.” There are significant caveats: this is the optimistic scenario, which would require countries to back up their bold long-term commitments with the short-term actions to make them happen.
Reference: Climate Action Tracker report
Life on Doggerland after the flood
Around 8,200 years ago, a series of huge tsunamis, triggered by enormous underwater landslides off the coast of Norway, severed what is now Britain from continental Europe. But scraps of the inundated area — known as Doggerland — might have survived and later been settled, say archaeologists.They analysed the topography of the land now beneath the North Sea and sedimentary cores that revealed evidence of the cataclysmic Storegga slides. The land that remained could have offered the first Neolithic farmers step-stones from the continent to Britain thousands of years later.
