Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

After announcing a $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” yesterday to “change the course of the pandemic,” President-elect Joe Biden today provided more details on how his administration will address what he called the “dismal failure” of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, safely reopen schools by March, and ramp up surveillance to track where SARS-CoV-2 is moving and how it’s mutating.

“The more people we vaccinate and the faster we do it, the sooner we can put this pandemic behind us,” said Biden in an afternoon speech. Almost simultaneously, the president-elect revealed key members of his administration’s science team, many of whom will be central to the plan.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

When the number of COVID-19 cases began to rise again in Manaus, Brazil, in December 2020, Nuno Faria was stunned. The virologist at Imperial College London and associate professor at the University of Oxford had just co-authored a paper in Science estimating that three-quarters of the city’s inhabitants had already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus—more than enough, it seemed, for herd immunity to develop. The virus should be done with Manaus. Yet hospitals were filling up again. “It was hard to reconcile these two things,” Faria says. He started to hunt for samples he could sequence to find out whether changes in the virus could explain the resurgence.

On 12 January, Faria and his colleagues posted their initial conclusions on the website virological.org. Thirteen of 31 samples collected in mid-December in Manaus turned out to be part of a new viral lineage they called P.1. Much more research is needed, but they say one possibility is that in some people, P.1 eludes the human immune response triggered by the lineage that ravaged the city earlier in 2020.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

A new, more transmissible coronavirus variant has upended efforts to balance the known harm that closed schools cause against the risk that the pandemic virus might spread in classrooms. Studies done before it emerged seemed to point in a hopeful direction: School outbreaks are rare, even when community spread is relatively high, providing schools limit class sizes and require safety measures including masks. And if community spread is low, those safety measures may not be essential, especially among children under the age of 10.

An outbreak of the new variant at a primary school in the Netherlands has undermined that confidence. Tests of 818 teachers, students, and families revealed 123 people—nearly 15%—were infected, just 1 month after the first case was identified at the school, which did not require teachers or children to wear masks. The new variant was responsible for a large fraction of those cases. This week, health officials asked the more than 60,000 residents of the school’s region, north of Rotterdam, to get tested for the virus in an effort to learn how widely it has spread in the community. 

President-elect Joe Biden has chosen a research policy maven—and familiar face—to be both his science adviser and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

Eric Lander, 63, is president and founding director of the Broad Institute, which is jointly run by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A mathematician turned molecular biologist, Lander was also co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) for 8 years under former President Barack Obama, where he worked closely with Obama’s science adviser, John Holdren, and interacted with Biden.

“Eric is a fabulous choice, and he will make a terrific science adviser,” predicts Holdren, who calls Lander “a science polymath” for his breadth of knowledge across many disciplines. That’s also true for policy, Holdren says. “Eric’s fingerprints were on every one of PCAST’s 39 reports” issued under Obama, Holdren adds, noting that six of them covered previous pandemics and public health crises.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

A new face at the helm of Indonesia’s Ministry of Health has raised scientists’ hopes that the country may take a more scientific approach to its increasingly desperate struggle with COVID-19. In a 22 December 2020 cabinet reshuffle, Indonesian President Joko Widodo named Budi Gunadi Sadikin, who has a degree in nuclear physics, as health minister. He took over from Terawan Agus Putranto, a military doctor known for pushing a controversial, unproven stroke therapy he had developed himself. His sluggish, secretive management of the pandemic was widely seen as a failure.

Sadikin, who has worked on the pandemic since March 2020 at the Ministry of State Owned Enterprises, “seems to understand the issue very well,” Zubairi Djoerban, head of the Indonesian Medical Association’s COVID-19 task force, wrote on Twitter after meeting Sadikin on 11 January. Indonesia lags in testing and data collection, and faces the gargantuan task of vaccinating its far-flung population of 270 million people. “Hopefully, a science-based approach will illuminate our way,” tweeted Ines Atmosukarto, an Indonesian molecular biologist who directs Lipotek, a biotech startup in Canberra, Australia.

AAAS, which publishes the Science family of journals, announced today it will offer its authors a free way to comply with a mandate issued by some funders that publications resulting from research they fund be immediately free to read. Under the new open-access policy, authors may deposit near-final, peer-reviewed versions of papers accepted by paywalled Science titles in publicly accessible online repositories.

For now, Science’s approach, known as green open access, will only apply to authors of papers funded by Coalition S, a group of mostly European funders and foundations behind an open-access mandate that takes effect this month. The funders say immediate access will accelerate scientific discovery by disseminating new findings faster. Up to 31% of research papers in the flagship journal Science and four other Science titles have cited funding from Coalition S, said Bill Moran, the journals’ publisher. Until now, these papers had been available immediately only to journal subscribers, although the paywalled Science journals do make all papers free 12 months after publication.

Articles made public under the new policy will carry an open-access license, and authors will retain copyright, another of Coalition S’s conditions.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

As an expert in marketing, Stacy Wood has studied how people respond to everything from online shopping to reality TV. Now, the professor at North Carolina State University’s business school has turned to COVID-19, co-authoring a paper on 6 January in The New England Journal of Medicine that uses marketing theory to explain how to persuade people to get vaccinated.

Wood recently spoke to ScienceInsider about her work. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

After reading a paper about Amazonian frogs in May 2020, behavioral ecologist Daniela Roessler of Harvard University was astonished. The study named 27 authors, all male. The publication sparked an outcry on Twitter for more diversity in science. Roessler and colleagues then wrote a letter to journal publishers suggesting a way for authors to help advance that goal: publicly declare in their submitted manuscripts whether they had considered diversity, equity, and inclusion in the study.

Last week, Cell Press, publisher of more than 50 journals, became one of the first publlshers to invite authors to do so. The publisher—whose titles include the prestigious Cell, as well as Neuron and Current Biology—said the declarations can highlight authors’ personal characteristics or elements of a study’s design. These can include, for example, researchers’ use of ethnically diverse cell lines and genomic data sets and efforts to ensure gender balance in study samples and on lists of citations and authors.

Submitting such a declaration is not mandatory and will not affect whether submitted manuscripts are accepted for publication, Cell Press said.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

On 2 January 2020, a group of clinician-researchers at the Jinyintan Hospital here, along with colleagues at other institutions, launched a study of 41 patients suffering from a new, atypical pneumonia. The team assembled clinical data, laboratory results, and chest x-rays; tracked the production of immune system molecules called cytokines; and noted the use of antivirals, antibiotics, and corticosteroids. Thirteen of the patients required intensive care, and six died.

The group’s observations, published online by The Lancet on 24 January 2020, were the first dispatch from the clinical front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic and gave clinicians around the world a detailed picture of what to brace for as the virus, then called 2019-nCoV, began to race across the globe. The paper also contained a clear warning: “We are concerned that 2019-nCoV could have acquired the ability for efficient human transmission,” Chaolin Huang, a Jinyintan medical doctor, and colleagues wrote. They “strongly recommended” that health care workers use personal protective equipment.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Paul Bieniasz didn’t mince words in a sarcastic New Year’s Day statement he tweeted. If he wanted to create a new, vaccine-resisting version of the pandemic coronavirus, the Rockefeller University virologist wrote, “having developed a remarkable two-dose vaccine, [I’d] … ADMINISTER IT TO MILLIONS OF PEOPLE – BUT DELAY THE SECOND DOSE. … If we let immunity wane for a little while, say 4 to 12 weeks, we just might hit the sweet spot”—and create a virus that could foil the vaccine.

Bieniasz was reacting to the United Kingdom’s 30 December 2020 decision to allow up to 12 weeks between doses of two authorized vaccines, rather than the 3 or 4 weeks tested in the vaccines’ clinical trials. Desperate to tame a massive surge in cases and alarmed by the spread of a new, more contagious variant of the virus, U.K. vaccine experts were aiming to quickly get at least some protection into the arms of as many people as possible.