Prognosis: Breakthrough

On the outskirts of Marburg, a small college town in Germany, coronavirus vaccine manufacturer BioNTech has spent five frantic months renovating one of its factories to produce mRNA. Demand for the vaccine has been so massive that the Pfizer-BioNTech partnership can’t meet it with its existing facilities--hence the race to retrofit factories that weren't initially designed to support the vaccine. Naomi Kresge reports that success would mean being able to vaccinate about 375 million more people per year, and help bring the pandemic under control.

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Just two months ago, the incredible performance of new vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer had people cheering for an imminent end to the pandemic. But an onslaught of fast-spreading and potentially dangerous mutations of the virus changed that. So now, even as pharma companies ramp up production in the early stages of a massive rollout, they are racing to retool their vaccine strategies. Robert Langreth reports that booster shots could give drugmakers a lucrative new revenue stream. 

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This weekend, Chicago Public Schools reached a tentative agreement with its teachers to resume in-person learning later this week. The deal isn’t final, and it’s the latest in a series of tense back-and-forth between the city’s schools and its teachers union. The bitter fight in Chicago echoes other big cities. Shruti Singh reports that tensions have escalated coast to coast between unions fearing the spread of Covid-19, and local officials under pressure to get teachers back into the classroom.

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When we’re coming down with a cold or are feeling a bit stressed, or perhaps even exhibiting the first symptoms of COVID-19: minute changes to our voice are often one of the first indicators that something is wrong. These vocal biomarkers are often beyond what a human can detect: but what if an app on your phone could? Health reporter Michelle Fay Cortez recently spoke to David Liu, CEO of Sonde Health, which has released an app that uses a person’s voice to detect early symptoms of respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. She explores what vocal biomarkers can tell us. 

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Joe Biden’s new Covid-19 czar is a former business executive and Biden ally named Jeff Zients, who is little known to most Americans. Zients doesn’t have a medical or military background, like the two men who ran Operation Warp Speed, the Trump Administration’s vaccine delivery program. Anna Edney reports that the posting will test Zients’s reputation with Democrats in Washington as the go-to-guy when things go awry.

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Since Pfizer and Moderna vaccine shipments in the U.S. began in mid-December, the priority has been doctors, nurses and other professionals likely to come in contact with the novel coronavirus. But health care workers who aren’t with hospitals and major health systems say they’re being overlooked. Elise Young reports that thousands of health-care workers are still seeking vaccinations even as states and cities open eligibility to people far removed from the pandemic’s front line.

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Rochelle Walensky, the new leader of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, faces two difficult missions at the same time: Leading the agency’s Covid-19 response and trying to restore the agency’s stature, post-Trump. I talked to John Tozzi reports on the job ahead for Walensky, and how she plans to achieve it.

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The U.S. is struggling to monitor Covid-19 variants, a key part of watching for the emergence of dangerous mutations that might spread quickly, evade vaccines or kill more infected people. The country ranks 32nd in the world for the number of tests it’s done to detect mutations per 1,000 Covid cases. Kristen V. Brown reports that other countries, like the U.K., have established robust, nationwide surveillance programs to identify new Covid genomes and track the spread of existing ones.

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President Joe Biden has vowed to reopen most U.S. schools in his first 100 days. But that could ignite clashes among teachers, their unions and parents over how to do that safely. Petitions and potential teacher strikes loom, even while parents watch children struggle online. Nic Querolo reports that the issue has been one of the toughest pandemic challenges for local policymakers.

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Vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and others will have the power to one day end the pandemic, or at least tame it—but only after 70 percent or more of the world’s population gets inoculated against Covid-19. So far, the rollout has been anything but smooth. Big drugstores say they’re ready to come to the rescue. Robert Langreth and Angelica Lavito describe the potentially massive vaccine infrastructure that the neighborhood pharmacy could provide.

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