March 2021 Issue: On the Recent Coronavirus Developments

A newsletter providing a brief account of the topics covered in the past month.

As global vaccination is going on, I hope all is good at your end. Without further ado, here’s a short account of the articles published this month in Microbial Instincts that I hope keeps you more scientifically informed:

Vaccines

1. What I Saw and Didn’t See at a COVID Vaccination Clinic: Ryan P. Gilley, Ph.D., an infectious disease researcher, describes his inspiring experiences as a volunteer administering vaccines for Covid-19. While the media tends to cover vaccine skepticism and hesitancy, Dr. Gilley witnessed the opposite, writing that “I saw what “in this together” really looks like.”
2. Concerns of Lipid Nanoparticle Carrying mRNA Vaccine into the Brain: What to Make of It?: As the mRNA vaccine uses lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for efficient cell delivery, it might end up in places we don’t need them to, such as the brain, and this article explains how that might happen (or not). But this is just a theoretical risk with arguments supporting and disfavoring it. And we must remember that SARS-CoV-2, on the other hand, is an actual viral risk or threat.
3. Giving Children the Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine Saves Grandparents Lives: Dr. Gilley details how science has overcome multiple setbacks in the journey to an effective vaccine for Streptococcus pneumoniae, a bacterium that lives…