The Covid-19 pandemic "would look very different if scientists had been able to develop a treatment sooner," writes Bill Gates, in a guest essay Friday in the New York Times. This ultimately would've reduced fatalities — "and it may have been harder for myths and misinformation to spread the way they did."

But note that Gates said "treatment" — not vaccine. Gates believes most people in the public health community had expected an effective treatment would appear before vaccines became available. Unfortunately, that's not what happened. Safe, effective Covid vaccines were available within a year — a historic feat — but treatments that could keep large numbers of people out of the hospital were surprisingly slow out of the gate....

In late 2021, a few of their efforts paid off — not as soon as would have been ideal, but still in time to have a big impact. Merck and its partners developed an antiviral called molnupiravir, which was shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for people at high risk. Soon after, another oral antiviral, Paxlovid, made by Pfizer, also proved to be very effective, reducing the risk of severe illness or death by nearly 90 percent among high-risk, unvaccinated adults. These drugs are useful tools for combating the pandemic, but they arrived much later than they should have and, for many, they are still difficult to access....

It's a mistake to think of vaccines as the star of the show and therapeutics as the opening act you would just as soon skip. We're lucky that scientists made Covid vaccines as quickly as they did — if they hadn't, the death toll would be far worse. But in the event of another pandemic, even if the world is able to develop a vaccine for a new pathogen in 100 days, it will still take a long time to get the vaccine to most of the population.... With good therapeutics, the risk of severe illness and death could drop significantly, and countries could decide to loosen restrictions on schools and businesses, reducing the disruption to education and the economy. What's more, imagine how people's lives would change if we're able to take the next step by linking testing and treatment. Anyone with early symptoms that might indicate Covid (or any other viral disease) could walk into a pharmacy or clinic anywhere in the world, get tested and, if positive for the virus, walk out with antivirals to take at home....

In short, although therapeutics didn't rescue us from Covid, they hold a lot of promise for saving lives and preventing future outbreaks from crippling health systems. But to make the most of that promise, the world needs to invest in the research and systems we'll need to find treatments much faster. That's why my foundation has supported a therapeutics accelerator at Duke University, but broader initiatives will be necessary to make lasting change. This will require substantial investment to bring together academia, industry and the latest software tools. But if we succeed, the next time the world faces an outbreak, we'll save millions more lives.
Gates offers several specific recommendations — including "investing in large libraries of drug compounds that researchers can quickly scan to see whether existing therapies work against new pathogens." And... With advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's now possible to use computers to identify weak spots on pathogens that we already know about, and we'll be able to do the same when new pathogens arise. These technologies are also speeding up the search for new compounds that will attack those weak spots. With adequate funding, various groups could take the most promising new compounds through Phase 1 studies even before there's an epidemic, or at least have several leads that can be turned into a product quickly once we know what the target looks like.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Researchers have rejuvenated a 53-year-old woman's skin cells so they are the equivalent of a 23-year-old's. [...] The scientists in Cambridge believe that they can do the same thing with other tissues in the body. The head of the team, Prof Wolf Reik, of the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, told BBC News that he hoped that the technique could eventually be used to keep people healthier for longer as they grow older. [...] Prof Reich stressed though that the work, which has been published in the journal eLife, was at a very early stage. He said that there were several scientific issues to overcome before it could move out of his lab and into the clinic. But he said that demonstrating for the first time that cell rejuvenation is possible was a critical step forward.

Prof Reik's team used [a method, called iPS, that involves adding chemicals to adult cells to turn them into stem cells] on 53-year-old skin cells. But they cut short the chemical bath from 50 days to around 12. Dr Dilgeet Gill was astonished to find that the cells had not turned into embryonic stem cells -- but had rejuvenated into skin cells that looked and behaved as if they came from a 23-year old. He said: "I remember the day I got the results back and I didn't quite believe that some of the cells were 30 years younger than they were supposed to be. It was a very exciting day!"

The technique cannot immediately be translated to the clinic because the iPS method increases the risk of cancers. But Prof Reik was confident that now it was known that it is possible to rejuvenate cells, his team could find an alternative, safer method. "The long-term aim is to extend the human health span, rather than the lifespan, so that people can get older in a healthier way," he said. Prof Reik says some of the first applications could be to develop medicines to rejuvenate skin in older people in parts of the body where they have been cut or burned -- as a way to speed up healing. The researchers have demonstrated that this is possible in principle by showing that their rejuvenated skin cells move more quickly in experiments simulating a wound. The next step is to see if the technology will work on other tissues such as muscle, liver and blood cells.

A new immunotherapy that targets cells infected with Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) has halted the progression of multiple sclerosis (MS) in a small trial. Perhaps even more incredibly, in some patients, it is possible that symptoms of MS were actually reversed, though this was not fully identified in the most recent presentation of results (PDF). IFLScience reports: [S]ignificant evidence has linked infection of EBV and the eventual development of MS. [...] Attempting to "transform treatment of Multiple Sclerosis," Atara Biotherapeutics has developed an allogeneic T-cell therapy called ATA188. The concept is simple -- when cells are infected with EBV, they express small proteins called antigens on the cell surface, and the immunotherapy contains immune cells that target and destroy them.

In a trial of 24 patients who received the therapy, 20 saw improvements or stability in their symptoms and no fatal or serious adverse effects were reported. Early brain scans suggest that some damaged nerve cells may have been "repaired" by the therapy in a process called remyelination, which could mean a reversal of damage caused by MS in the nervous system, but this has not yet been confirmed. While the results are extremely promising, it is an early Phase 1 trial with a small sample size and no placebo or control group, so it is unclear whether the results are significant at this stage. However, it is unlikely that this repair would occur naturally, suggesting the therapy is having a beneficial effect on some level.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers from Harvard and MIT detail work they've done on a "living cellular therapeutic device" that promises to protect humans from the harmful side effects antibiotics can have on our guts. Engadget reports: Per Science Daily, they modified a strain of bacteria that is frequently used in cheese production to deliver an enzyme that can break down beta-lactam antibiotics. Many of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in the US, including penicillin, fall under that family. Using gene editing, they further modified how their bacterium synthesizes the enzyme to prevent it from transferring that capability to other bacteria. The result is a treatment that reduces the harmful effects of antibiotics while still allowing those drugs to do their work.

In a study involving mice, the researchers found their bacteria "significantly" reduced the damage ampicillin did to the test subject's gut microbes and allowed those communities to recover fully after just three days. By contrast, in mice that only received the antibiotic, the researchers saw a much greater loss of microbial diversity. "We are now focusing on getting these living therapies to patients and are finalizing the design of an effective, short, and inexpensive clinical trial," said Andres Cubillos-Ruiz, the lead author of the study.

Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC). The Verge reports: After analyzing data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the union coalition found that Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than people who work in warehouses for other companies. The report considers "serious injuries" to be ones where workers either have to take time off to recover or have their workloads reduced, following OSHA's report classification (pdf) of "cases with days away from work" and "cases with job transfer or restriction." The data shows that, over time, the company has been shifting more toward putting people on light duty, rather than having them take time off. The report authors also note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average, versus 44 across the industry.

Amazon employees have said it's not the work itself that's particularly dangerous but rather the grueling pace the company's automated systems demand. Amazon actually had workers go slower in 2020 to help combat COVID-19, which accounts for the notably lower injury rates that year. But, as the report notes, the injuries increased by around 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace -- though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019. [...] Unfortunately, this study's results tell the same story we've been hearing for years. Even with its reduced injury rates in 2020, Amazon workers were still hurt twice as often as other warehouse workers, according to SOC. Further reading: Amazon Workers At 100 More Facilities Want To Unionize (Yahoo Finance)

Apple's plan to add a highly anticipated blood-pressure monitor to its smartwatch has hit some snags and the technology isn't expected to be ready until 2024 at the earliest, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The company has teams working on an updated sensor and software for the Apple Watch that would determine if a user has high blood pressure, but accuracy has been a challenge during testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The feature has been planned for at least four years, but it's probably two years away from hitting the market and may slip until 2025, they said. Apple's shares were up about 1% at 9:41 a.m. in New York. Blood-pressure features may become a key selling point for smartwatches in coming years, but the technology hasn't been easy to master. Though Apple rivals such as Samsung have launched watches with the capability, they require monthly calibration with a traditional monitor. Last year, Alphabet-owned Fitbit launched a public study to test wrist-based blood-pressure measurement.

Psilocybin, a drug found in magic mushrooms, appears to free up the brains of people with severe depression in a way that other antidepressants do not, a study has found. The BBC reports: The results, based on brain scans of 60 people, mean the drug could treat depression in a unique way, the researchers say. Patients with depression are warned not to take psilocybin on their own. A synthetic form of the drug is tested on people in trials under strict medical conditions, with psychological support from experts provided before, during and after it is taken.

With depression, the brain can get stuck in a rut and locked into a particular negative way of thinking, he said. But when given psilocybin, people's brains opened up and became "more flexible and fluid" up to three weeks later. This could be seen in increased connections between regions of the brain when patients were scanned. These patients were more likely to experience an improvement in mood months later. Similar changes were not seen in the brains of people treated with a standard antidepressant.

The results, published in Nature Medicine, are taken from two studies. In the first, everyone received psilocybin; and in the second -- a randomized controlled trial - some were given the drug while others were given a different antidepressant. All participants also received talking therapies with registered mental health professionals. Brain scans were taken before, and then one day or three weeks after taking the therapy.

"At first glance, U.S. Covid cases appear to have plateaued over the last two weeks," reports NBC News, "with a consistent average of around 30,000 per day..."

"But disease experts say incomplete data likely masks an upward trend." "I do think we are in the middle of a surge, the magnitude of which I can't tell you," Zeke Emanuel, vice provost of global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, said. The BA.2 omicron subvariant, which now accounts for about 72 percent of U.S. cases and is more contagious than the original omicron variant, is fueling that spread, Emanuel added. "It's much more transmissible. It's around. We just don't have a lot of case counts," he said.

Emanuel and other experts cite a lack of testing as the primary reason cases are underreported. At the height of the omicron wave in January, the U.S. was administering more than 2 million tests per day. That had dropped to an average of about 530,000 as of Monday, the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The milder symptoms become, the less likely people are to test or show up in official case counts," said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. More people also now have access to at-home rapid tests that are free or covered by insurance, and most of those test results don't get reported to state health departments or the CDC.

"Case counts and testing are progressively becoming shaky indicators because we're not catching everyone in the system," said Dr. Jonathan Quick, an adjunct professor at the Duke Global Health Institute.

Some local data, however, does reveal recent spikes. Average Covid cases have risen nearly 80 percent in Nebraska, 75 percent in Arizona, 58 percent in New York and 55 percent in Massachusetts over the last two weeks. Wastewater surveillance similarly suggests that infections are rising in Colorado, Ohio and Washington, among other states.
The Johns Hopkins epidemiologist emphasized that hospitalization figures are more important than case counts.

"If we're seeing an increase in cases, but not an increase in severe cases, I think it's a very valid question of does that matter?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: It's a sunny day on a city street as a green bus pulls up by the kerb. Onboard, a handful of passengers sit stony-faced as you step up to present your pass. But you cannot see your body -- only a floating pair of blue hands. It might sound like a bizarre dream, but the scenario is part of a virtual reality (VR) system designed to help people with agoraphobia -- those for whom certain environments, situations and interactions can cause intense fear and distress. Scientists say the approach enables participants to build confidence and ease their fears, helping them to undertake tasks in real life that they had previously avoided. The study also found those with more severe psychological problems benefited the most. "It leads to a real step-change in people's lives," said Prof Daniel Freeman, the lead researcher in the work, from the psychiatry department at the University of Oxford.

The VR experience begins in a virtual therapist's office before moving to scenarios such as opening the front door or being in a doctor's surgery, each with varying levels of difficulty. Participants are asked to complete certain tasks, such as asking for a cup of coffee, and are encouraged to make eye contact or move closer to other characters. Freeman said while the scenarios feel real, the computer-generated scenes allow participants to feel able to try something new or approach the situation differently. "There's a little bit of the conscious bit [of the brain] going: 'OK, it's OK, I know it's not real and therefore I can persist, try something new and do something differently,'" he said. "That enables people to apply it in the real world. Basically, if you get over something in VR, you will get over in the real world."

Writing in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, Freeman and colleagues report how they randomly allocated 174 patients with difficulties going outside and psychosis to use the "gameChange" VR technology alongside their usual care. Another 172 patients were allocated to receive their usual care alone. [...] The results show that six weeks after the trial began, those allocated to the VR therapy had a small but significant reduction in avoiding real-life situations because of agoraphobia, as well as less distress, compared with those who had only received their usual care. However, by six months there was no difference between the two groups. But further analysis revealed that those who had severe agoraphobia benefited most, and for these people the effect was sustained at six months. Such patients were able to complete, on average, two more activities than before -- such as going shopping or getting on a bus.

Across three different animal models researchers have demonstrated how short bursts of ultrasound targeted at specific clusters of nerves in the liver can effectively lower insulin and glucose levels. New Atlas reports: Reporting in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by GE Research, including investigators from the Yale School of Medicine, UCLA, and the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, demonstrated a unique non-invasive ultrasound method designed to stimulate specific sensory nerves in the liver. The technology is called peripheral focused ultrasound stimulation (pFUS) and it allows highly targeted ultrasound pulses to be directed at specific tissue containing nerve endings. "We used this technique to explore stimulation of an area of the liver called the porta hepatis," the researchers explained in a Nature briefing. "This region contains the hepatoportal nerve plexus, which communicates information on glucose and nutrient status to the brain but has been difficult to study as its nerve structures are too small to separately stimulate with implanted electrodes."

The newly published study indicates short targeted bursts of pFUS at this area of the liver successfully reversed the onset of hyperglycaemia. The treatment was found to be effective in three separate animal models of diabetes: mice, rats and pigs. [...] The study found just three minutes of focused ultrasound each day was enough to maintain normal blood glucose levels in the diabetic animals. Studies in humans are currently underway to work out whether this method translates from animal studies. But there are other hurdles facing broad clinical deployment of the technique beyond simply proving it works. Current ultrasound tools used to perform this kind of pFUS technique require trained technicians. The researchers suggest the technology exists to simplify and automate these systems in a way that could be used by patients at home, but it will need to be developed before this treatment can be widely deployed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Scientists have developed a blood test that can predict whether someone is at high risk of a heart attack, stroke, heart failure or dying from one of these conditions within the next four years. The test, which relies of measurements of proteins in the blood, has roughly twice the accuracy of existing risk scores. It could enable doctors to determine whether patients' existing medications are working or whether they need additional drugs to reduce their risk. It could also be used to hasten the development of new cardiovascular drugs by providing a faster means of assessing whether drug candidates are working during clinical trials. The test is already being used in four healthcare systems within the US and [...] it could be introduced to the UK in the near future.

[Researchers] used machine learning to analyze 5,000 proteins in blood plasma samples from 22,849 people and identify a signature of 27 proteins that could predict the four-year likelihood of heart attack, stroke, heart failure or death. When validated in 11,609 individuals, they found their model was roughly twice as good as existing risk scores, which use a person's age, sex, race, medical history, cholesterol and blood pressure to assess their likelihood of having a cardiovascular event. The results were published in Science Translational Medicine. Importantly, the test can also accurately assess risk in people who have previously had a heart attack or stroke, or have additional illnesses, and are taking drugs to reduce their risk, which is where existing risk prediction scores tend to fall down.

Mumbai's city administration reported India's first case of the highly-transmissible coronavirus variant, XE, on Wednesday. From a report: The hybrid of two omicron strains BA.1 and BA.2 was detected in a 50-year-old woman who had traveled to the city from South Africa in February, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said in a statement. The asymptomatic patient had no cormorbidities and had been quarantined after being diagnosed almost a month later in March, the BMC said. The hybrid strain, which was first detected in the U.K., could be the most transmissible variant yet, according to the World Health Organization.

Olive is the buzzy startup whose purple "go save health care" buses dominate industry conferences. But its promises to save health systems millions of dollars with its automation software don't deliver. Axios reports: An Axios investigation finds that Olive relies on rough estimations for its calculations, inflates its capabilities and, in many cases, generates only a fraction of the savings it pledges. Erin's reporting includes interviews with 16 people, including former and current employees and health tech executives.

Valued at $4 billion by firms like Tiger Global and Vista Equity Partners, Olive is the highest-profile startup in health care automation; a holy grail that promises to cut costs and direct more time toward patient care. In just 10 years, Olive's promise to reduce its clients' administrative spending by roughly 5X the cost of installing the software has garnered the attention of some of the largest health systems in the U.S. Axios' reporting, which includes interviews with 16 people -- including former and current employees, health tech executives and others -- finds Olive is failing to deliver on those promises.

Mortality risk was reduced by 50% for older adults who increased their daily steps from around 3,000 to around 7,000, according to new medical research. Axios reports: 7,000 is the new 10,000, in terms of steps you should shoot for, The Lancet medical journal reports. This is all it takes for those 60 and older to dramatically increase their lifespans. Even for younger adults, the benefits of daily walking actually level off around 9,000 steps per day, not 10,000, the researchers found. The risk reduction plateaued beyond that number.

"Walking benefits nearly every cell in the body," says Amanda Paluch, a kinesiologist and public health expert at UMass Amherst and the lead author of the study. It's wildly effective. Walking strengthens your heart, improves bone density, relaxes your mind, and helps with muscle-building and pain management. Almost everyone can do it anywhere: your house, the office, outside. Start with 30 minutes and work your way up."It's not an all or nothing situation," says Paluch. Even just boosting daily step count to 5,000 -- for 60 and older -- and 7,000 -- for younger folks -- slashed mortality risk by 40%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The largest genetic study of Alzheimer's to date has provided compelling evidence linking the disease to disruption in the brain's immune system. The study, using the genomes of 100,000 people with Alzheimer's and 600,000 healthy people, identified 75 genes linked to an increased risk of the disease, including 42 that had not previously been implicated. The findings suggest degeneration in the brains of dementia patients could be spurred on by "over-aggressive" activity in the brain's immune cells, called microglia.

The study, the largest of its kind to date, also allowed scientists to devise a genetic risk score that could predict which patients with cognitive impairment would, within three years of first showing symptoms, go on to develop Alzheimer's. The score is not intended for clinical use at the moment, but could be used when recruiting people for clinical trials of drugs aimed at treating the disease in the earliest stages. The latest work highlights different sets of genes seen in more common forms of Alzheimer's, including a role for the immune system. "If [at the outset] we'd seen the genetics of common disease, we would've said this is an immune disease," said professor Julie Williams, the director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University and a co-author of the study. "It's not the same disease."

Risk genes highlighted in the study include ones that affect how efficiently the brain's immune cells, microglia, clear away tissue that is distressed. In people at risk, these housekeeper cells appeared to be working too aggressively. A similar pattern was found for genes that control how readily synapses, which connect neurons, send out an "eat me" signal when in distress. The high-risk variants appeared to lower the threshold for synapses sending out distress signals, causing the brain to purge connections at a quicker rate. The findings, published in the journal Nature Genetics, fit with previous results pointing to a role for the immune system. People with diabetes, which affects the immune system, are at considerably higher risk, for instance, and once dementia has been diagnosed infections can trigger more rapid cognitive decline.

"Researchers in the United Kingdom have developed an autonomous, snakelike robot designed to slither down human lungs into places that are difficult for medical professionals to reach," reports the Washington Post.

The tool "could improve the detection and treatment of lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases." In a medical paper released in the journal of Soft Robotics last week, scientists from the University of Leeds unveiled a new "magnetic tentacle robot," which is composed of magnetic discs and is roughly 2 millimeters thick — about double the size of a ballpoint pen tip — and less than a-tenth-of-an-inch long.

In the future, the robot's use could be expanded to help doctors better, and more thoroughly, investigate other organs, such as the human heart, kidney or pancreas, they said....

The robot is still 5 to 10 years away from showing up in a clinical setting, researchers said, but the device comes on the heels of a fleet of other robotic innovations allowing doctors the ability to better scan a patient's lungs for cancerous tissue. They are designed to ease a task doctors have long struggled with: reaching the inner recesses of the human body, for diagnostic and treatment purposes, without causing damage or using invasive procedures.... [I]ts smaller size and magnetic composition would allow it to shape-shift more easily and better navigate the intricate shape of a lung's network of airways, which can look like a tree....

Once at its desired location, the robot could ultimately have the capability to take a tissue sample or deliver a clinical treatment.... Nitish V. Thakor, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, said the autonomous robot is "very novel and interesting technology" that could become potentially useful in areas outside the lungs, most notably the heart. The device's autonomous capability is its unique factor, he said, and has the capability to change invasive surgeries. "I can imagine a future," he said, "where a full [cancer-screening] CAT scan is done of the lungs, and the surgeon sits down on a computer and lays out this navigation path of this kind of a snake robot and says: 'Go get it.' "

Genetic testing to predict how individuals will respond to common medicines should be implemented without delay to reduce the risk of side-effects and ensure that everyone is given the right drug at the right dose, experts have said. From a report: About 6.5% of UK hospital admissions are caused by adverse drug reactions, while most prescription medicines only work on 30% to 50% of people. A significant part of this is due to genetics: almost 99% of people carry at least one genetic variation that affects their response to certain drugs, including commonly prescribed painkillers, heart disease drugs and antidepressants. By the age of 70, about 90% of people are taking at least one of these medications.

A new report, published by the British Pharmacological Society and the Royal College of Physicians, argues that many of these issues could be addressed through pharmacogenomic testing, which allows personalised prescribing according to people's genes. "The ultimate goal is to make pharmacogenomic prescribing a reality for everyone within the NHS, which will empower healthcare professionals to deliver better, more personalised care," said Sir Munir Pirmohamed, a professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at the University of Liverpool, who chaired the report's working party. "The aim of pharmacogenomics is to make sure patients get the right drug, at the right dose, at the right time to be able to improve their outcomes, treat their symptoms, cure their disease and prevent side-effects."

Walgreens Boots Alliance is opening robot-powered micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S. to fill customers' prescriptions as the role of stores and pharmacists change. CNBC reports: Inside of a large facility in the Dallas area, they fill thousands of prescriptions for customers who take medications to manage or treat high blood pressure, diabetes or other conditions. Each robot can fill 300 prescriptions in an hour, the company said -- roughly the same number that a typical Walgreens pharmacy with a handful of staff may do in a day.

Walgreens Boots Alliance is opening the automated, centralized hubs to keep up in the fast-changing pharmacy industry. The pandemic has intensified the drugstore chain's need to stay relevant as online pharmacies siphon off sales and more customers have items from toilet paper to toothpaste delivered to their doorstep. The global health crisis has also heightened demand for pharmacists, as hospitals and drugstores hired them to administer Covid vaccines and tests. That has forced Walgreens and its competitors, CVS Health and Rite Aid, to rethink the role of their stores and pharmacists.

By 2025, as much as half of Walgreens' prescription volume from stores could be filled at the automated centers, said Rex Swords, who oversees facilities as Walgreens' group president of centralized services, operations and planning. That will free up more of pharmacists' time to provide health care, Brewer said in an interview with CNBC's Bertha Coombs. "We're doing all of this work, so that the pharmacist has an easier job, so that they can get back to being front and center, building a relationship with that patient and interacting the way they were trained -- the work that they love to do," she said. Pharmacists will continue to fill time-sensitive medications and controlled substances at local stores as the company expands its use of robots.

Sarah Cobey, who studies the interaction of immunity, virus evolution and transmission at the University of Chicago, Jesse Bloom and Tyler Starr, both of whom study virus evolution at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, writing for The New York Times: It's impossible to say whether future variants will have more big Omicron-like jumps or more typical stepwise changes, but we are confident SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve to escape immunity. While transmissibility of viruses does plateau at a certain point, other human viruses that escape immunity keep doing so. The influenza vaccine has been updated annually for decades to chase viral evolution, and some influenza viruses show no sign of slowing down. Immune escape is an endless evolutionary arms race, because the immune system can always make new antibodies and the virus has a vast set of mutations to explore in response. For instance, Omicron has just a tiny fraction of the many mutations that have been observed in SARS-CoV-2 or related bat viruses, which are in turn just a small fraction of what lab experiments suggest the virus could potentially explore.

Taking all this together, we expect SARS-CoV-2 will continue to cause new epidemics, but they will increasingly be driven by the ability to skirt the immune system. In this sense, the future may look something like the seasonal flu, where new variants cause waves of cases each year. If this happens, which we expect it will, vaccines may need to be updated regularly similar to the flu vaccines unless we develop broader variant-proof vaccines. And of course, how much all this matters for public health depends on how sick the virus makes us. That is the hardest prediction to make, because evolution selects for viruses that spread well, and whether that makes disease severity go up or down is mostly a matter of luck. But we do know that immunity reduces disease severity even when it doesn't fully block infections and spread, and immunity gained from vaccination and prior infections has helped blunt the impact of the Omicron wave in many countries. Updated or improved vaccines and other measures that slow transmission remain our best strategies for handling an uncertain evolutionary future.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A nearly decade-long scheme to steal millions of dollars of computers and iPads from Yale University's School of Medicine is officially over. Former Yale administrator Jamie Petrone, 42, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Hartford, Conn., to two counts of wire fraud and a tax offense for her role in the plot. Petrone's ploy started as far back as 2013 and continued well into 2021 while she worked at the university, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut. Until recently, her role was the director of finance and administration for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale. As part of this job, Petrone had the authority to make and authorize certain purchases for the department -- as long as the amount was below $10,000.

Starting in 2013, Petrone would order, or have a member of her staff order, computers and other electronics, which totaled to thousands of items over the years, from Yale vendors using the Yale School of Medicine's money. She would then arrange to ship the stolen hardware, whose costs amounted to millions of dollars, to a business in New York, in exchange for money once the electronics were resold. Investigators said Petrone would report on documents to the school that the equipment was for specific needs at the university, like medical studies that ultimately didn't exist. She would break up the fraudulent purchases into orders that were below $10,000 each so that she wouldn't need to get additional approval from school officials. Petrone would ship this equipment out herself to the third-party business that would resell the equipment. It would later pay Petrone by wiring funds into an account of Maziv Entertainment LLC, a company she created.

Petrone used the money to live the high life, buy real estate and travel, federal prosecutors say. She bought luxury cars as well. At the time of her guilty pleas, she was in possession of two Mercedes-Benz vehicles, two Cadillac Escalades, a Dodge Charger and a Range Rover. [...] At the time of her guilty plea, she agreed to forfeit the luxury vehicles as well as three homes in Connecticut. A property she owns in Georgia may also be seized. Petrone has also agreed to forfeit more than $560,000 that was seized from the Maziv Entertainment LLC bank account. Federal prosecutors say the loss to Yale totals approximately $40,504,200.