The Body Scientific

I was looking forward to writing about something other than COVID-19 and there is a lot to discuss. But first, let’s put the delta variant into some context. General Colin Powell once said, “The enemy always gets a vote” and hopeful situations can change, even if the enemy is a virus.

I confess I was writing a summary of my articles on SARS-CoV-2 and it was not going well. Maybe I will start from scratch, but in the meantime, my colleagues Kelly Kandra and Elias Olsen and I have made a video. (It is a little stiff, but we will get better at it).

We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses.  There is no guarantee that we will be the survivors.  ­

— Joshua Lederberg

Three vaccines have passed Phase 3 tests — that last step before submitting the data to the FDA for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). These are the two vaccines made by Pfizer and by Moderna, both of which consist of an mRNA molecule wrapped in lipid.

On Jan.10, 2020, Chinese scientists published the genome sequence of a novel virus by depositing a file in Genbank, a digital resource for DNA sequences at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). People at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease used that sequence to make a vaccine, one of 11 now in Phase 3 clinical trials.

The genome sequence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus was deposited on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) server on Jan. 10, 2020. Within days, scientists all over the world started to use the sequence to make vaccines.