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Pharmacy shelves worldwide are being stocked with COVID-19 antivirals Paxlovid (pictured) and molnupiravir.Credit: YONHAP/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
The race to develop more COVID antivirals
As two promising oral antiviral treatments for COVID-19 — molnupiravir and Paxlovid — slowly make their way into pharmacies worldwide, researchers are already looking ahead to the drugs that could supersede them. Scientists are keen to find single treatments or combinations that attack the virus on several fronts. This will help to ensure that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t become resistant to our drug arsenal, and will lay the groundwork for fighting future pandemics.
Has Biden followed the science?
On the road to becoming US president in January 2021, Joe Biden promised to “listen to the science”. Many scientists Nature spoke to say he has largely made good on that pledge: the White House is no longer questioning the threat of COVID-19 or global warming. But just because the president has embraced science doesn’t mean his administration has always acted swiftly or sensibly on it. “They’re saying the right things, and calling on programmes to do the right things on a whole range of issues,” says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But there’s an awful lot of work to do.”
A huge open index of scholarly papers
An ambitious free index that pulls together databases of publication sources, author information and research topics has been launched. The index, called OpenAlex after the ancient Library of Alexandria, aims to chart connections between these data points to create a comprehensive, interlinked view of the global research system, say its founders. The database, which launched on 3 January, is a replacement for Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), a free alternative to subscription-based platforms such as Scopus, Dimensions and Web of Science. MAG was discontinued at the end of 2021.
Features & opinion
How to boost your students out of academia
Nervous about advising junior colleagues who are interested in non-academic careers? Don’t be, say four scientists who have made the move. Principal investigators are uniquely positioned to help their graduate students to learn about non-academic career opportunities and gain experiences outside the laboratory to make them competitive for these jobs.
Pandemic lessons from genetic counsellors
Genetic counselling offers a template for how public-health leaders can communicate uncertainty about COVID-19, write three professionals in the field. They argue that new isolation guidelines, issued by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December, show how the agency’s failure to grapple with uncertainty can dent public trust and understanding. “If the three of us had crafted the announcement,” they write, “we would have added a brief summary of the evidence supporting this decision, acknowledged that these studies have limitations, stated that the guidance change is an effort to balance the need to keep society open against controlling viral spread, and foreshadowed that future guidance may change as scientists learn more about the virus.”
Coronapod: The true death toll of COVID-19
The global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has reached 5.5 million, according to official data. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that compares all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show that many more people have died in the pandemic. Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. Coronapod looks at the methods used to correct the record, including satellite images of cemeteries, door-to-door surveys and machine-learning computer models that extrapolate estimates from available data.
Nature Coronapod Podcast | 26 min listen
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