Daily briefing: See a COVID vaccine get made step-by-step

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Health disparities


Agricultural employees are thought-about important to the US financial system; it’s a label that has come at a price.Credit: Brian L. Frank for Nature

In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the individuals who work within the fields, orchards and meat-packing crops are among the many hardest hit by COVID-19. Food and agricultural workers in California had an almost 40% increased risk of dying last year, in contrast with the danger for the state’s normal inhabitants. Tragically, this inequality is not any shock: a century of analysis has proven that social determinants drive illness. The query is, what’s science going to do about it? “We know what the impact is of a lack of employment, a lack of fair wages, a lack of transport, of poor education and racism,” says public-health historian Graham Mooney. “So, if public health has no power to influence these issues, then public health becomes nothing.”

Nature | 23 min read

Charts comparing the rates of COVID-19-related deaths, hospitalizations and cases by race and job losses by income level.

In the United States, Black, Latinx and Indigenous individuals are roughly 3 times as more likely to be hospitalized and twice as more likely to die from COVID-19 as are white, non-Hispanic individuals.The pandemic has the potential to widen financial inequality. Low-wage employees skilled among the heaviest job losses in 2020, whereas higher-wage employees gained almost a million jobs.Sources: CDC (left); Economic Policy Inst./EPI Current Population Survey (proper)

Brazilian well being regulators haven’t licensed Sputnik V, the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Russia’s state-run Gamaleya Institute. Regulators cited a lack of information guaranteeing the jab’s safety, quality and effectiveness. They additionally flagged quality-control points, together with the presence of un-neutralized adenoviruses that might infect those that get the vaccine. The Russian Direct Investment Fund, which is managing Sputnik V’s world gross sales, mentioned the choice was politically motivated. “The Gamaleya Center, which carries out strict quality control of all Sputnik V production sites, has confirmed that no replication-competent adenoviruses (RCA) were ever found in any of the Sputnik V vaccine batches that have been produced,” it mentioned. Sputnik V has been licensed in Russia and 60 different areas.

The Financial Times | 4 min read

Features & opinion

Brazilian chemical engineers Gidiane Scaratti and Rafael Kenji Nishihora have spent about three of their eight years collectively separated by their careers. Now, each are again in Brazil — albeit in two totally different cities — and so they’ve shared their advice for getting through a long-distance relationship in science.

Nature | 6 min read

The strategy of turning a loop of DNA containing the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine takes 60 days and a jaw-dropping quantity of dry ice. Walk through the process and meet the scientists on this step-by-step recipe.

The New York Times | 8 min read

Gamma-ray indicators may very well be coming from antistars — stars made up fully of antimatter. Astrophysicists analysed 10 years of observations from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and located, amongst almost 5,800 sources, 14 that may match the profile of antistars. Extrapolating from that information, researchers estimate that someplace between one in 10 and one in 400,000 stars could be made of antimatter — if they exist at all. “If, by any chance, one can prove the existence of the antistars … that would be a major blow for the standard cosmological model,” says theoretical astrophysicist Pierre Salati. It “would really imply a significant change in our understanding of what happened in the early universe”.

ScienceNews | 5 min read

Reference: Physical Review D paper

Quote of the day

Astronaut Michael Collins rejects the label of ‘loneliest man in the universe’ in a letter addressing the Apollo 11 command module. In 1969, he orbited alone within the module whereas Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the primary steps on the Moon, and his delight within the expertise radiates from the web page. Collins died yesterday, aged 90. (National Geographic | 6 min read, from 2019)



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