Biology Digest

  CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro appears to be counting on yet another “miracle” to save his citizens from COVID-19, promoting a secretive solution with no published scientific evidence he claims will conquer the new coronavirus. “Ten drops under the tongue every four hours and the miracle is done,” Maduro said in a televised appearance on Sunday. “It’s a powerful antiviral, very powerful, that neutralizes the coronavirus.” But his government has released no evidence. He even kept secret the name of the “brilliant Venezuelan mind” behind it, saying he needed to protect them. Scientists at home and abroad remained skeptical. The local National Academy of Medicine said it appeared be derived from the common herb thyme. It’s not the first time the Venezuelan leader has promoted a cure. In October, he notified the Pan American Health Organization that Venezuelan scientists discovered a molecule that nullifies the replication capacity of the new coronavir...

With demand for COVID-19 vaccines outpacing the world’s supplies, a frustrated public and policymakers want to know: How can we get more? A lot more. Right away. The problem: “It’s not like adding more water to the soup,” said vaccine specialist Maria Elena Bottazzi of Baylor College of Medicine. Makers of COVID-19 vaccines need everything to go right as they scale up production to hundreds of millions of doses — and any little hiccup could cause a delay. Some of their ingredients have never before been produced at the sheer volume needed. And seemingly simple suggestions that other factories switch to brewing new kinds of vaccines can’t happen overnight. Just this week, French drugmaker Sanofi took the unusual step of announcing it would help bottle and package some vaccine produced by competitor Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech. But those doses won’t start arriving until summer — and Sanofi has the space in a factory in Germany only because its own vaccine is delayed, bad news ...

  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Thursday denied a media report that it could split President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief proposal into two bills, as part of a strategy to get the divided Senate to quickly pass some aid for Americans. Biden has made ramping up the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 430,000 people in the United States and left millions out of work, a major focus of his first week in office. But Republicans and some Democrats have balked at the cost of his proposal, which is on top of $4 trillion in aid approved by Congress last year. With the Senate split 50-50, the misgivings have stirred speculation the White House could propose a two-pronged strategy, beginning with a bill small enough to garner enough Republican support to clear the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for most legislation. Politico reported the administration was considering a bill that would provide $600 billion to $800 billion in aid, including scal...

Back in January 2020 the world was preparing for a new decade. When COVID-19 started the attention was focused on China's handling of the initial reported sick cases and investigations leading to the worldwide pandemic. During this time the United States was not prepared for this pandemic and did not consider the initial cases as a soon to be humanitarian crisis.  Once the pandemic came the first wave came via Travis Air Force Base in California as a quarantine and humanitarian mission to reduce the spread of the virus. However, that mission failed once more data on the characteristics of the  virus came to light.  Ever since the pandemic exposed lots of flaws from income inequality, unequal health care among races and access to health insurance, the conspiracy theorists influencing the political response of the pandemic for political gain.  In contrast, COVID-19 also showed us opportunities such as the importance of science communication to the public, and the impor...

  SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The number of western monarch butterflies wintering along the California coast has plummeted precipitously to a record low, putting the orange-and-black insects closer to extinction, researchers announced Tuesday. An annual winter count by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Marin County to San Diego County in the south in the 1980s. Western monarch butterflies head south from the Pacific Northwest to California each winter, returning to the same places and even the same trees, where they cluster to keep warm. The monarchs generally arrive in California at the beginning of November and spread across the country once warmer weather arrives in March. On the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, another monarch population travels from southern Canada and the northeastern United States across thousands of mi...

 

The race against the virus that causes COVID-19 has taken a new turn: Mutations are rapidly popping up, and the longer it takes to vaccinate people, the more likely it is that a variant that can elude current tests, treatments and vaccines could emerge. The coronavirus is becoming more genetically diverse, and health officials say the high rate of new cases is the main reason. Each new infection gives the virus a chance to mutate as it makes copies of itself, threatening to undo the progress made so far to control the pandemic. On Friday, the World Health Organization urged more effort to detect new variants. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a new version first identified in the United Kingdom may become dominant in the U.S. by March. Although it doesn’t cause more severe illness, it will lead to more hospitalizations and deaths just because it spreads much more easily, said the CDC, warning of “a new phase of exponential growth.” “We’re taking it really very se...