President-elect Joe Biden on Friday promised that his incoming administration will be “sparing no effort to get Americans vaccinated” against COVID-19. Citing the rising number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, he did warn that Americans still face “a very dark winter” and that “things will get worse before they get better.” Noting that the […]
Last year is either in a tie for the hottest year in the modern temperature record or a close second place, according to datasets just released by various global temperature monitoring groups. Earlier this month, the European Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that “2020 was tied with the previous warmest year 2016, making it the […]
The American Cancer Society’s latest roundup of cancer statistics is now out and the news is generally good. The data on cancer mortality and incidence rates are through 2018 and 2017 respectively. The report notes that “after increasing for most of the 20th century, the cancer death rate has fallen continuously from its peak in […]
Last week, President-elect Joe Biden announced that his incoming administration would not keep COVID-19 vaccines idling in freezers as boosters for folks who have already been inoculated with the first of two doses. Instead, his team would release all doses now and count on future production to provide the second doses in the coming weeks. […]
President Barack Obama pledged at the Copenhagen climate conference back in 2009 to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by the year 2020. Guess what? We more than did it. At that 2009 meeting, then-Secretary of State John Kerry assured the conference delegates that the U.S. would likely reduce its green house gas […]
“Today, the Trump Administration officially left the Paris Climate Change Agreement,” tweeted President-elect Joe Biden on November 4, 2020. “And in exactly 77 days, a Biden Administration will rejoin it.” On April 22, 2016—Earth Day—then–President Barack Obama signed the Paris accord, treating it as an executive agreement rather than a treaty requiring Senate approval. Recognizing that […]
The U.S. is lagging woefully in its administration of COVID-19 vaccines as the pandemic worsens. At the current national rate of about 500,000 vaccinations per day, it would take 420 days to inject just the first of two vaccine doses into the shoulders of the nation’s 210 million adults. The incoming Biden administration pledged to deliver […]
Twenty million Americans will not be vaccinated by the end of this year as promised by the federal government. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just over 2.1 million Americans have received the first dose COVID-19 vaccines and nearly 11.5 doses have been distributed. That number is tens of millions fewer […]
Researchers in the United Kingdom identified a new variant of the coronavirus earlier this month—one that appears to be around 56 percent more transmissible than the more common strains that have been afflicting humanity for the past year. While we have seen no evidence that this strain causes more severe illness, it could nevertheless ramp […]
Here’s a thought-experiment. What if the results of Johnson & Johnson Phase 3 clinical trial of the company’s one-shot adenovirus-vector vaccine finds in January that it is safe and, say, 90 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 infections? Surely, the regulators at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for that […]
