Latest News

Clues beginning to emerge on asymtomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection
Back in November of 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was teaching an in-person microbiology laboratory. One of my students had just been home to see his parents, and they all c…
Read more
Could there maybe be better uses of genetics and probiotics?
Professor Meng Dong and his laboratory have created a probiotic that can metabolize alcohol quickly and maybe prevent some of the adverse effects of alcohol consumption. The scientists cloned a highl…
Read more
ChatGPT is not the end of essays in education
The takeover of AI is upon us! AI can now take all our jobs, is the click-bait premise you hear from the news. While I cannot predict the future, I am dubious that AI will play such a dubious role in…
Read more
Fighting infections with infections
Multi-drug-resistant bacterial infections are becoming more of an issue, with 1.2 million people dying of previously treatable bacterial infections. Scientists are frantically searching for new metho…
Read more
A tale of two colleges
COVID-19 at the University of Wisconsin this fall has been pretty much a non-issue. While we are wearing masks, full in-person teaching is happening on campus. Bars, restaurants, and all other busine…
Read more

News

Huge positive news on the effort to create a coronavirus vaccine


 

Pfizer has announced early data in its vaccine trial that indicates an efficacy of 90%! The news could not be better. While the article claims this is early data if you dig down into the details they indicate how many subjects were infected with coronavirus during the study. When the analysis was done, 94 people had been infected. To complete the trial, scientists decided that 164 need to be infected. We are already halfway there. This is the last piece of the puzzle and means we will have an effective vaccine. One caveat is that the Pfizer vaccine is an RNA vaccine. While this makes it easy to manufacture, the vaccine needs to be stored at very low temperatures. Thus transport of the vaccine for distribution will be an issue.

Several other vaccines are in the pipeline and I expect their results to be just as good. Hurray for science.