Dr. Derek Lowe, arguably the finest and most influential chemistry blogger in the universe, has put together an excellent summary of the complex and confusing clinical data of hydroxychloroquine, which he published recently in his blog in Science and Translational Medicine. We thank Derek and AAAS for allowing us to reprint this important article.
SARS-CoV-2
The world anxiously awaits while clinical trials of remdesivir are in progress. The drug failed to stop Ebola. Does this mean it will also fail to stop coronavirus? No. According to a new study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, the drug should work better. Here's why.
A South Korean company named Seoul Semiconductor claims to have developed an ultraviolet light-emitting diode (UV LED) that can kill 99.9% of SARS-CoV-2 in 30 seconds.
"Test here. Test now. Test, baby, test!" has become the conventional wisdom for handling the COVID-19 pandemic. But false positives and false negatives create substantial problems for mass testing.
No, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is not a biological weapon. But that doesn't mean the virus didn't escape from a laboratory. A growing body of circumstantial evidence indicates that very well may be what happened.
Different countries may appear to have different death rates, but only because they have applied different sampling and reporting policies to their accounting efforts. It's not necessarily because they are managing the virus any better, or that the virus has infected fewer, or more, people.
The biology of the virus will help us learn how to fight it.
A new review article published in The Lancet concludes that school closures are ineffective at controlling coronavirus epidemics. What else could be wrong with the conventional wisdom about COVID-19?
Vaccines, antivirals, and antibodies are all possible strategies to treat the novel coronavirus. When will these potential COVID-19 therapies be available? And will they work?
In war, the first casualty is truth. Apparently, the same is true of pandemics. Some people are now pretending that they saw the novel coronavirus coming long before anybody else, including scientists and public health officials. In their revisionist history, they were beacons of clarity while others were "COVID deniers."
Children's Health Defense says governments and corporations are using the coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) to advance a "global immunization agenda." The anti-vaccine group claims that our leaders just needed the right pandemic as a pretext to goad us into getting vaccines. This is a clever story. It's also false.
Bad luck played a role in the COVID-19 pandemic, but China's criminally negligent and malevolent behavior has placed the world in a position in which bad things are likelier to occur. Therefore, China must bear the brunt of the blame, and our relationship with that country should not go back to normal.