In the three months since Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, more than 10 million Americans have received the vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The single-shot viral vector vaccine — developed in collaboration with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) … Continued
Experts say it’s important for younger people to get COVID-19 vaccinations—to prevent from getting sick, losing work days, paying high medical bills, and possibly passing on the virus to others who are vulnerable. Said Howard Koh, Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, … Continued
A new method to monitor epidemics like COVID-19 gives an accurate real-time estimate of the growth rate of an epidemic by carefully evaluating the relationship between the amount of viruses in infected people’s bodies, called the viral load, and how fast the number of cases is increasing or decreasing. “This new method, which effectively links … Continued
A small study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center adds to a growing body of research that COVID-19 vaccines are safe during pregnancy and will play an important role in disease prevention in pregnant women. The findings, published in JAMA, show that mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines triggered immune responses in … Continued
To cope with the isolation and uncertainties brought on by the COVID pandemic, many people added new rituals to their lives: nature walking or home exercising, baking or gardening, video chatting or binge watching, learning to play an instrument or adopting a pet. The Gazette asked members of the Harvard community what they tried — … Continued
Public trust in healthcare workers is higher during this time than trust in public health institutions, including the CDC, FDA, and NIH According to a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, a large majority of the public (71%) favors substantially increasing federal … Continued
To screen drugs against viruses like SARS-CoV-2, researchers often use human cell lines grown in the lab. These are easy to work with and relatively inexpensive. However, they can‘t replicate the complex environment of a living organ, such as the lungs. To help overcome this challenge, a research team led by Dr. Donald Ingber from … Continued
A multidisciplinary research team from Harvard Medical School, MassGeneral Hospital for Children, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and other institutions has identified the mechanism that causes an extremely rare but serious post-COVID-19 complication to develop in children and adolescents. Led by Lael Yonker, HMS assistant professor of pediatrics and pediatric pulmonologist, the team of researchers determined that … Continued
In spite of the availability of effective vaccines for COVID-19, testing is still needed to catch any new outbreaks that occur, according to Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Testing is our eye on the virus,” he wrote in an Ideas piece. “Without testing, we can’t … Continued
When cases of COVID-19 began rising in Boston last spring, Pooja Chandrashekar, then a first year student at Harvard Medical School, worried that easy-to-understand information about the pandemic might not be available in the many languages spoken by clients of the Family Van, the health services and health literacy program where she was working at … Continued