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US, US Territories, Canada, Mexico

(This program is no longer available for online streaming.) A sequel to one of the most popular NOVAs of all time, &quot;Miracle of Life,&quot; this Emmy Award-winning program tracks human development from embryo to newborn using the extraordinary microimagery of Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson.

Trace human development from embryo to newborn through the stunning microimagery of photographer Lennart Nilsson.

Life's Greatest Miracle

US & Territories

Water. Turn on the faucet and it’s always there. Without it we perish. But how safe is our tap water? In this special report narrated by Joe Morton, NOVA investigates what happened in Flint, Michigan, when local officials changed the city’s water source to save money, but overlooked a critical treatment process. As the water pipes corroded, lead leached into the system, exposing the community—including thousands of children—to dangerous levels of poison. NOVA uncovers the science behind this manmade disaster— from the intricacies of water chemistry to the biology of lead poisoning to the misuse of science itself. NOVA follows ordinary citizens and independent scientists who exposed the danger lurking in Flint’s water and confronted those who turned a blind eye. And discover the disturbing truth that reaches far beyond Flint—water systems across the country are similarly vulnerable. How can we protect ourselves from poisoned water? (Premiered May 31, 2017)

What exactly went wrong in Flint—and what does it mean for the rest of the country?

Poisoned Water

Whether they make you fat, fart, or freak out, microbes play a central role in your life. Right beneath your nose—on your face, in your gut, and everywhere in between—trillions of bacteria, viruses, and fungi are so abundant in your body, they outnumber your human cells. But these aren’t just nasty hitch-hikers. Many are crucial to your survival. Evidence suggests that a diverse microbiome can keep you healthy and, conversely, a damaged one could kill you. NOVA Wonders peers into this microscopic world to discover the fascinating, bizarre, and downright surprising secrets of the human microbiome, including the world’s largest stool bank, which transforms raw stool into life-saving poop pills.

Discover how a world of microbes living in and on you can make you sick-and keep you healthy.

What's Living in You?

Koch Foundation

NOVA Science Trust Logo

Draper

Emmy Award-winning television producer and writer John Mansfield died on Sunday, Jan. 17 at age 84. Mansfield served at WGBH Boston as NOVA’s executive producer from 1980 to 1984 after producing, directing, and writing more than 100 films for the BBC, including documentary films for its science series, Horizon. During Mansfield’s tenure as executive producer, NOVA won multiple national and international awards—including a Peabody and Emmy award for The Miracle of Life—and became one of PBS’ most popular offerings. Mansfield executive produced dozens of NOVA films during his time at WGBH, including Anatomy of a Volcano, on the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption; Test-Tube Babies: A Daughter for Judy, on America’s first in vitro fertilization and “test-tube baby”; and It’s About Time, on the nature of time. 
 

 
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 “We are so grateful for the early, pioneering work that John did to help establish NOVA and put the series on such firm footing that now, 37 years later, we&#x27;re still going strong,” NOVA Co-Executive Producer Chris Schmidt says.“He absolutely loved his time at NOVA and at WGBH,” Mansfield’s daughter, Laura Mansfield, wrote in an email. “He described the interview to get the job...as an extraordinary and humbling experience—apparently you had to be interviewed by a panel of all the NOVA producers who would ultimately work on your team—a bit like a papal election.” Laura adds that her father, originally from the United Kingdom, also loved the “simple pleasures” of living in Boston: the maples changing color in the fall, snowplowing during “the big winters” (“unlike anything we&#x27;d experienced in London at that time,” she says), and enjoying sushi, lobster, and Rockport, Mass’ chocolate ice cream.Mansfield “was a very fair person,” says NOVA Senior Series Producer Melanie Wallace, who was hired by Mansfield as a researcher in 1983. “I knew he came from the BBC and from NOVA’s sister series HORIZON. And I was really nervous to meet him,” Wallace says of her interview for the position. “He grilled me.”But after hiring Wallace as an entry-level employee, Mansfield quickly gave her a raise, having heard she was doing the same work as her senior counterpart. “That totally changed my lifetime job trajectory for the better,” Wallace says. “Clearly he did not have to do that, but he saw the big picture and said ‘yes.’ That shows genuine compassion, I believe.”
 

 
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 After returning to London in 1984, Mansfield mentored TV producers &quot;from Singapore to Syria,&quot; Laura Mansfield says, and wrote multiple award-winning training films and manuals in the process.“Growing up I saw how much variety his job offered and how it enabled him to travel around the world and delve into so many different subjects and meet so many different and fascinating people,” says Laura, who initially had “no intention” of following in her father’s footsteps, but now works as a creative director at Outline Productions in London.Mansfield is survived by his wife of 52 years, Fiona; daughters Laura and Tessa; and grandchildren Amber, Lily, Oscar, and Arlo.
 

 
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Emmy Award-winning television producer and writer John Mansfield served at WGBH Boston as NOVA’s executive producer from 1979 to 1984. Image courtesy of Laura Mansfield from the book, Nova: Adventures in Science, Addison-Wesley publishers, 1982

The Emmy-winning television producer and writer, who served as NOVA EP from 1980-1984, died on Sunday, Jan. 17.

John Mansfield, former NOVA executive producer, dies at 84

The University of Illinois is trying to control the spread of COVID-19 by collecting spit.
One out of 50 COVID-19 tests in the U.S. are processed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here&#x27;s how its researchers are tracking the spread of the coronavirus on campus, and how the University became a model of testing for other flagship universities.
This University Monitors COVID-19 Through Saliva TestingPublished: January 21, 2020Jahaira Bustos: You pretty much just spit into this tube. It fills up so slowly. It takes maybe like 2, 3 minutes tops and you put it in a container and you get your results in like 12 hours. Narrator: The University of Illinois is trying to control the speed of the COVID-19 by collecting... spit. Chris Marsicano: Illinois’ testing is I mean, that has been one of the major innovations of our time. Marsicano: As far as large public universities have gone, Illinois has been able to keep its case count lower than a lot of places that we would expect it to sort of follow -the University of Georgia or the University of Texas, that kind of thingNarrator: The U of I implemented a mandatory screening program that tests students fro the coronavirus two or three times a week. It&#x27;s one of the largest programs in the country using a saliva-based test created in-house and one of the only mandating frequent testing.Sam Owusu: And that&#x27;s fairly, fairly uncommon among universities. Most universities are opting for only symptomatic testing. So testing students when they start to exhibit symptomsMarsicano: That&#x27;s a massive issue because of how we know this virus spreads.Most people in that age group in the eighteen to twenty five year old age group who get covid-19 will be asymptomatic. So if you&#x27;re testing only symptomatic people, you&#x27;re not going to catch the disease as it spreads now. [00:37:35][14.0]Narrator: U of I build an entire system for tracking and testing campus-goers centered around a coronavirus test that samples the amount of virus in saliva. Students need proof of recent negative test results to gain access to campus buildings. Paul Hergenrother: It says granted and that means I&#x27;ve had a recent negative test. So for the undergrads, if you haven&#x27;t had a negative test in three days it will say denied and they can&#x27;t get into a building.Narrator: If students do test positive, they get a push notification on the app and are put into isolation either in a dorm or a hotel room. Becky Smith: We have had students with symptoms, but we have not had a student hospitalized, and of course that means there have been no student deaths. Narrator: While the testing is central to the university&#x27;s strategy, building a new culture on campus has been a large part of the effort to control the spread of the virus.Owusu: Socialization and culture are really important when it comes to this virus. Culturally, it&#x27;s hard for students to buy into to testing when they know they have to go get get get their brain checked every every week or so. They simply planned earlier and better than I would say everyone elseNarrator: In April, researchers started developing a test that didn&#x27;t require the supplies needed for a nasal test—things like swabs and solutions that were hard to find earlier this year due to a national shortage.Hergenrother: If you heat the saliva at ninety five degrees C for 30 minutes, it does a few really, really important things. One is that it inactivates the virus.Secondly, it enables the genetic material to be accessible. And thirdly, it activates the components in saliva that are inhibitory to PCR. Narrator: PCR—or polymerase chain reaction—is a method researchers use to detect the coronavirus by looking for the virus&#x27; genetic material, RNA.Scientist found that heating up the samples prepares it for the PCR process without all of the reagents needed for the nasal swab. With the addition of one buffer, the sample is ready for PCR.Martin Burke: So we don&#x27;t need a swab. We don&#x27;t need the viral transport medium and we don&#x27;t need the RNA isolation kit. All of those are gone. And so we don&#x27;t have any of those supply chain bottlenecks. It&#x27;s also why our test is so cheap, because we don&#x27;t have to pay for those things. So it&#x27;s also why it&#x27;s so fastNarrator: The test also gives information about viral load, of how much of the virus is in a sample. That information, coupled with a record of recent tests, can be key in identifying how long someone has been infected. Burke: We actually get a quantitative readout of how many copies of the virus per milliliter of your saliva. And so we&#x27;ve been using that CT value. It&#x27;s called the cycle threshold, which is a direct readout of the concentration of the virus to help make decisions. If you&#x27;ve got 15 negatives in a row and now all of a sudden they just flip positive, that means you caught them on the way up. So it&#x27;s context dependentNarrator: Testing everyone who comes on campus multiple times a week is no small undertaking. Their labs run around the clock—processing up to as much as 10,000 samples a day. Chris Marsicano: One in 50 covid-19 tests in America happens at the University of Illinois every day. I want to be very clear here, not one in 50 tests on college campuses in America, one in 50 tests in America happens at the University of Illinois.Narrator: While the testing has been key to controlling the spread of the virus, it hasn&#x27;t stopped the spread. When students returned to campus in the fall, there were two big spikes in cases—one researchers predicted... the other, an unwelcome surprise.Burke: We modeled that seven to eight thousand students would go to parties two or three times per week.And we modeled that they might not wear their masks all the time at their party, so we knew this was going to be a challenge and we still predicted we&#x27;d be in really good shape, but we didn&#x27;t model, however, was that students who knew they were positive would still go to a party or if they knew they were positive, they would host a party in their house. And that&#x27;s what got us. That&#x27;s what surprised us.Narrator: County contract tracers have found that most cases in undergrads stem from either social gatherings, or from where they live.Becky Smith: There is no evidence of infection in class, there is no clusters in class group. It’s their social networks and where they live. Narrator: And university researchers don&#x27;t think that infections among the student population are spreading to faculty and staff, or to the community around campus. Smith: The student group tends to infect amongst themselves. And with the faculty and staff what we see is cases acquired in the community. Narrator: Now as cases rise across the U.S., researchers are noticing an uptick on campus too... adding to growing concern about the holidays.Burke: If you look at the modeling data, it says it&#x27;s like you take all the marbles, shake them up, and then everybody mixes and then you bring everybody back. And the chances are it&#x27;s going to be a very challenging event. It&#x27;s almost like what we saw when they all came back the first time. They bring back a lot of cases with them. So our hope was that there were a lot of them would just choose to stay home. That said, we&#x27;ve been doing lots of surveys and turns out a lot of them are coming back.I think we all have to recognize we&#x27;re in for a really tough next three months or so.

This University Monitors COVID-19 Through Saliva Testing Hero

The University of Illinois is trying to control the spread of COVID-19 by collecting spit.

This University Monitors COVID-19 Through Saliva Testing

A person is tested for COVID-19 at a drive-thru testing site in Florida in July 2020. Image Credit: Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto, Getty Images

Figuring out when to get tested after exposure requires understanding what happens once the virus enters your body. We’ve got you covered.

I’ve been exposed to Covid-19. When should I get tested?

Learn more about the first coronavirus vaccines.
Here’s how the Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccines work, their potential side effects, who’s first in line to receive them, and why we need to address racial and social equities.
Your COVID-19 Vaccine is ComingPublished: December 17, 2020Narrator: A COVID vaccine is coming for you. What should you expect? First, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. These are furthest along and both are mRNA vaccines.Georges Benjamin: Messenger RNA is a little piece of genetic material. It has the blueprint for creating proteins. And so in this case, what they&#x27;ve done is they&#x27;ve taken the part of the messenger RNA that codes for the little spiky thing on top of the virus. The spike protein is the part of the virus that causes the best immune response. They put it in a little piece of fat. They inject it in your body. Your machinery makes the spike protein, and then your body recognizes that spike protein as foreign. And it creates an immune response to it and helps destroy viruses.Narrator: Now, RNA is fragile and unstable.Benjamin: It just falls apart in warm temperatures.Narrator: Which means these vaccines must be transported at cold temperatures. For Pfizer, that’s minus 94 Fahrenheit. And that requires dry ice in the packaging and an entire ultra cold chain with special freezers all along their journey. In-box digital data loggers track the temperature so when the box is opened, the user will know if the vaccine ever got too warm, which could make it ineffective.Benjamin: But it&#x27;s moving it from a storage bin to a clinic or doctor&#x27;s office where we only have refrigerators. And we generally don&#x27;t have the ability to keep things very, very cold. So part of the challenge is making sure that we get the right number of doses to the right practice at the right time.Narrator: The Moderna vaccine is more stable than Pfizer’s, so standard refrigeration during transport will do just fine. Both mRNA vaccines will require a double dose, separated by three to four weeks. For the vaccine to work properly, you need both shots. There are other vaccine contenders in the works, too. If the ones from Johnson &amp; Johnson and Oxford-AstraZeneca get approved, they’ll require normal refrigeration during transport. They rely on a different approach. Instead of RNA, the vaccines use DNA that codes for the spike protein, which is inserted not into a bubble of fat or lipid, but into a common kind of virus called an adenovirus.Benjamin: Think of the adenovirus as a delivery virus that actually delivers it into your body’s cells that’s non-lethal, it doesn&#x27;t also make you sick. It’s just another way of getting it into your body.Narrator: Now, it’s important to mention that all these vaccines can cause side effects. In trials for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, some people reported severe, short-term side effects. Severe fever in fewer than 2% of participants. But higher numbers for other side effects.Benjamin: For some people, that first shot puts them down for 24 hours or so. They just feel really terrible.Abigail Echo-Hawk: When we think about communicating the side effects of the COVID vaccine, it is going to be really important to be absolutely transparent.Benjamin: Well, it’s your body’s immune response. It tells you that it’s working. Your body’s sending the antibodies to that spot and it causes a huge amount of inflammation.Narrator: For the mRNA vaccines, it may be that the lipid bubble is what sets off the side effects.Benjamin: People are going to have to be encouraged to come back for their second shot so that they&#x27;re fully protected. Yeah, making the vaccine and then getting shots of the arms are two different things.Narrator: Vaccinating the better part of an entire country is a massive logistical undertaking.Howard Koh: We have a foundation of a system that works, but it needs to be amplified and ramped up. We&#x27;re also introducing the Department of Defense and the military to work in collaboration with this ongoing system. And that has never been tried before.Echo-Hawk: We also have to be transparent about who is going to get the vaccine first, why, and then how it will be phased out across the other populations.Narrator: Millions of people will be prioritized based on risk level and exposure. The first wave of vaccines will likely go to people in long-term care facilities like nursing homes, and frontline healthcare workers.Echo-Hawk: The doctors, the nurses, the MAs, those that we need to provide the necessary care and testing.Koh: Dedicating themselves in such heroic fashion, 24/7 to be as healthy as possible so they can keep caring for all of us and get us through this pandemic.Narrator: There’s another high priority group.Benjamin: There’s a population of people that are at risk, people with chronic diseases: heart disease, lung disease, kidney disease, diabetes.Narrator: Some of these conditions are inherited. But for many, they’re a result of systemic racial and social inequities.Benjamin: Particularly in communities of color, African-American, Native American and Latinx individuals, they’re much more likely to be exposed to the virus and get sick than Non-Hispanic whites.Echo-Hawk: And so a lot of repair work is going to need to be done to rebuild the trust that these vaccines, these treatments are built on the best science available, so that there is vaccine uptake in communities who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Many of them are very distrustful. And the population I serve, American Indians and Alaska Natives, are not going to take that vaccine because of the extreme hesitancy that exists.Koh: Making this vaccine acceptance effort a high priority is absolutely critical for the future public health of our country.Narrator: As the vaccines course through our communities, it’s worth stating: they’re not an instant fix. It’s estimated to take one to two weeks after getting the second shot for your immune system to have produced the antibodies you need to be protected from COVID-19.Koh: No vaccine is 100% effective.Echo-Hawk: We are going to need to ensure that there are proper public health safety precautions that are also continued such as masking, such as social distancing, hand washing, all of those things need to be continued to be communicated.Narrator: We also don’t know yet if any of the vaccines actually stop you from getting infected. So far, we just know that they can prevent people getting sick. But it’s possible that people could still catch the coronavirus and be able to spread it to others, even if they’ve been vaccinated. The vaccines will take time to roll out. And they haven&#x27;t even been tested on certain populations yet — like pregnant women and children.Benjamin: Which is our practice. We do adults first before we put our kids at risk. Their bodies are developing differently, their immune systems function differently. Narrator: There’s a lot we don’t yet know about these vaccines—like how long they’ll last. But one thing’s certain. The fact that we have working vaccines a mere year into this pandemic is a mighty achievement.Benjamin: We should think of this as our moonshot in terms of what we’ve done to try to create vaccines. It&#x27;s an amazing story. And we should think of it as an amazing success.

Learn more about the first coronavirus vaccines.

Your COVID-19 Vaccine is Coming

What can DNA testing companies reveal about our ancestry and health, and at what risk?

Secrets in our DNA

If you do have to fly, here&#x27;s what to expect.
The CDC advises people to avoid travel for the 2020 holidays due to COVID-19 surges.
Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic?Published: December 8, 2020Narrator: Is it safe to fly now?Annalies Wilder-Smith: To be honest, my advice is minimize air travel, minimize contact with people. We have a pandemic. In 6 or 12 months, the pandemic will be over.Carina Marquez: It’s really balancing the risks and the benefits of travel for the individual. I would say right now, as cases are surging throughout the United States that those risks are higher. It’s important to think about the family member that you’re seeing and how vulnerable they are to severe manifestations of COVID, how vulnerable you are to COVID.Narrator: The most vulnerable people are those who are older and who have certain underlying medical conditions. Including: diabetes, heart conditions, obesity, smoking, a weak immune system. Risks of travel go up with the infection rates at your point of origin and your destination. But what if you do fly?Marquez: Transmission on an airplane does happen, but the relative number of cases reported on airplanes is on the lower side. So I think with good precautions, you can really work to minimize the risk.Narrator: The most important way to reduce your risk:Wilder-Smith: Face masks. Use them consistently, correctly, and use a well-fitting face mask of high quality.Narrator: Face masks are crucial, because the primary way COVID spreads is through tiny droplets in our breath. These can hang in the air for hours, making indoor spaces especially dangerous. A well-fitting mask is snug around your nose and chin with no large gaps around the edges. You want your breath to be filtered through the mask, not flowing in and out around it. And when it comes to quality, the tighter the fabric’s weave, the more protection it provides.Marquez: If you as a passenger are masking, if your other passengers are also masking, this is very, very important. Wearing masks reduces your droplet spread and contains it.Wilder-Smith: I personally would not eat on a flight because I would not want to take off my mask.Narrator: Which brings us to how you should behave on a plane...Wilder-Smith: So the nature of this virus is that it’s driven by contact duration, contact proximity, and contact frequency.Narrator: And right now, with cases soaring, each of these factors is elevated.Wilder-Smith: When people are close together, there is a risk. So minimize contacts, do not talk to people. Ideally, never ever use a middle seat.Marquez: Making sure you’re traveling with hand sanitizer and not touching your face or your eyes.Narrator: Airplane cabins might be safer than most indoor spaces.Wilder-Smith: The ventilation on airplane is thought to be better than the ventilation indoors, which is stagnant. Narrator: The air you breathe inside a plane is a mix of outside air and recirculated cabin air. Along the lengths of most aircraft, the air enters from overhead outlets, flows downwards, and leaves through grills near the floor. There’s very little forward and backward movement of the air. In addition, every few minutes, the air is pushed through a hospital-grade, HEPA air filter. While the plane is cruising, the volume of air in the cabin is exchanged every couple minutes.Marquez: Not only are the airplane filters very effective at filtering out coronavirus, it is also helpful in terms of how the ventilation flows. This helps really to decrease the risk of transmission.Wilder-Smith: But the issue is when you board or at the time of exit, often they turn off the engines and then the ventilation may stop.Narrator: Getting on and off the aircraft can pose the highest risk.Wilder-Smith: Waiting in your lines, at security. And then there’s always a rush when you exit. There’s crowding. I think the risk is much higher in these settings.Marquez: Certainly being in an environment where others are masking and as much as possible maintaining six feet social distancing will certainly decrease those risks.Narrator: In the lead up to your trip, try to minimize exposure. And we should stress — if you have COVID or you think you might have been exposed, you should not be flying.Wilder-Smith: Symptomatic persons should not be traveling, they should not be in airplanes, they should be at home safe, self-isolating, full stop. Therefore, transmission that is still occurring is then because of asymptomatics.Narrator: It’s estimated that up to 40% of people infected with the coronavirus have no symptoms at all.Marquez: A simple symptom screen or doing temperature measurements, while important, won’t catch all the people who are infected.Narrator: Due to the high risk of asymptomatic and presymptomatic spread, some airports and airlines are offering rapid onsite or at-home testing before you board — for some flights.Wilder-Smith: They are not yet perfect. And they may not detect all cases, but testing is the way forward to make sure that you do not spread it also from one country to the other, from one state to the other, one city to the other.Narrator: Testing passengers after they leave the plane and screening wastewater from an aircraft that’s just landed won’t stop the spread of COVID. But they can help with contact tracing.Marquez: If you want to be extra cautious, quarantine after you arrive.Narrator: Right now, COVID-19 is surging across the US. Chances are higher now than at any other time during the pandemic, that someone on your flight will be infected — even if they don’t know it. And it could be you.Wilder-Smith: If we take precautions, I think we can minimize the risk of in-flight transmission.Marquez: That being said, it’s not a zero risk. And so everybody needs to factor that into their decisions about travel.Narrator: And perhaps more dangerous than flying is the act of getting together with friends and family. Small gatherings have become increasingly responsible for the spread of coronavirus.Wilder-Smith: Wait it out. Next year will be better.

Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic? Hero

If you do have to fly, here&#x27;s what to expect.

Is it Safe to Fly During the Pandemic?

On Monday, AstraZeneca announced that its coronavirus vaccine is up to 90% effective, according to late-stage trials. It’s also relatively cheap and easy to store, meaning it may become the choice vaccine for developing nations.Though the vaccine’s efficacy was 90% in one of the dosing regimens its team tested, its average effectiveness was 70%. A vaccine’s efficacy is measured as the percent reduction in disease incidence among a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated or placebo group, according to the Canadian Center of Vaccinology. (The average <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/does-the-flu-shot-work/">flu vaccine</a> is about 31-44% effective, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccines-work/2019-2020.html#anchor_1573061303373">the CDC reports</a>.)The team administered different vaccine regimens to different groups: One received two full doses, whereas another received a half dose followed by a full dose. The team expected that two high doses would set off the strongest immune response, Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford University Vaccine Group and chief investigator for the trial, explained at a news conference. But the opposite occurred.
 

 
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 For the subgroup that received two full doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine a month apart, it was only 62% effective. But in the group that was given half a dose followed by a full dose one month later, the vaccine was 90% effective.Oxford scientists, who helped develop the new vaccine, are positing that a half dose followed by a full dose may prime the body to create a greater immune response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But they’re unsure why. The 90% efficacy rate, while comparable to 95% effectiveness reported last week by both <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccines-clinical-trials/">Moderna and Pfizer</a>, was recorded in a group of fewer than 3,000 people. Conversely, Moderna’s trial has involved 30,000 people, half of whom received its vaccine and half a placebo. Pfizer’s trial has enrolled more than 43,000 volunteers, 38,955 of whom have completed its vaccine regimen as of November 16 (with half receiving a vaccine and half a placebo).AstraZeneca’s results reported Monday come from trials involving a total of 23,000 people in the U.K. and Brazil, 11,636 of whom were given the vaccine with the remaining receiving a placebo. Researchers said 131 Covid-19 cases were detected during the clinical trials and none of the study participants that fell ill required hospitalization. AstraZeneca has yet to release information on how many of these participants received the vaccine and how many received the placebo.Unlike <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccines-clinical-trials/">Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines</a>, which use synthetic genetic material to help the body produce one small component of the virus itself that the immune system can learn from—in this case, SARS-CoV-2’s iconic spike protein—the AstraZeneca vaccine uses a weakened version of a common cold virus that’s combined with genetic material for the spike protein, Danica Kirka <a href="https://apnews.com/article/astrazeneca-vaccine-third-cheaper-oxford-c99d26eb2946f6fde45a1edc002ff028">writes for the Associated Press</a>. “After vaccination, the spike protein primes the immune system to attack the virus if it later infects the body.”Watch to learn more about mRNA vaccine technology:
 

 
 

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 And while Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccines need to be stored at freezing temperatures, this new vaccine remains viable at 36 to 46 F. (Storing vaccines at their required temperature is one of the greatest challenges that developing countries face with routine immunization.)“I think these are really exciting results,” Pollard said. “Because the vaccine can be stored at fridge temperatures, it can be distributed around the world using the normal immunization distribution system.”It’s also cheaper. Pfizer and BioNTech, as part of their $1.95 billion contract with the federal government under <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/coronavirus/explaining-operation-warp-speed/index.html">Operation Warp Speed</a>, “have set the initial price at $19.50 a dose, which comes to $39 per patient (since each vaccine requires a two-dose regimen),” Katie Jennings <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2020/11/17/how-much-will-a-covid-19-vaccine-cost/?sh=7c14e82f576d">writes for Forbes</a>. Moderna, which received nearly $1 billion from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and has a $1.5 billion contract for 100 million doses, says its vaccine will cost approximately $25 a dose or $50 a patient, since it too requires a second dose.Conversely, AstraZeneca’s vaccine will cost about $2.50 a dose.AstraZeneca has pledged to not make a profit on the vaccine during the pandemic and having reached agreements with governments and health organizations, Kirka reports.It plans to have more than 300 million full doses of its vaccine available globally by the end of March 2021. That number could increase by 50%, given the promising results of first administering a half dose to patients, followed by a full dose one month later. The company hopes to produce around 200 million doses a month, AstraZeneca’s Executive Vice President Pam Cheng said during a press event.
 

 
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 The Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines will all need to be approved by regulators before they can be widely distributed. “AstraZeneca said it will immediately apply for early approval of the vaccine where possible, and it will seek an emergency use listing from the World Health Organization, so it can make the vaccine available in low-income countries,” Kirka writes.Pfizer and Moderna plan to apply for FDA emergency use authorization this month. Moderna stated on November 16 that it expects to be able to ship about 20 million vaccine doses in the U.S. by the end of this year and another 500 million to 1 billion in 2021, if authorized to do so. Pfizer expects to produce up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020, and 1.3 billion in 2021, if authorized.These COVID-19 vaccine rollout plans raise the question: Who should—and ultimately will—get vaccinated the soonest?Vaccine supplies will be limited at first, meaning the decisions about who gets those first doses could save tens of thousands of lives, Jill Neimark <a href="https://undark.org/2020/11/18/best-strategy-to-deploy-covid-19-vaccine/">writes for Undark Magazine</a>. “The consensus among most [disease] modelers is that if the main goal is to slash mortality rates, officials must prioritize vaccinating those who are older, and if they want to slow transmission, they must target younger adults,” she writes.Many experts agree that the threat of superspreaders must not be ignored. “This is a pandemic defined by clusters,” Christopher Cox <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-vaccine-super-spreaders/">writes for WIRED</a>. “Some cause deadly outbreaks in nursing homes, prisons, and meatpacking plants. Others overwhelm families and friend groups. Although the numbers vary from study to study, SARS-CoV-2 seems to follow the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of cases stem from just 20 percent of infected individuals.” Some network theorists believe that social butterflies, who are the most likely to become superspreaders, should be vaccinated first.For now, it seems, the first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine will go to health care providers here in the U.S. and in the World Health Organization’s member countries, per its recommendation. But the CDC committee is grappling with a fundamental question, Cox writes: Do doctors first immunize the most vulnerable, and therefore protect individuals, or do they immunize the most social, and therefore reduce transmission and protect the population?And then, of course, are the issues of trust and inequity, Neimark writes: “For instance, it’s widely acknowledged that Black people have experienced hospitalization and death at disproportionately high rates compared to White people.” And because of algorithmic bias, a recent study found, White patients are often <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/racial-bias-medical-algorithm-black-patients/">prioritized over Black patients</a> in hospitals, even when Black patients are sicker than their White counterparts. “When ethicists begin to talk about prioritizing Black people for vaccines, it can be perceived as an intent to experiment on them by pushing them to the head of the line,” Neimark writes.One thing is sure: Multiple vaccines will be necessary to help bring an end to the pandemic, which has to date sickened more than 12.5 million Americans and nearly 60 million people worldwide. And if there’s any silver lining to the surge of cases in the U.S. and worldwide, Rebecca Robbins <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/business/covid-pandemic-speeding-vaccines.html?action=click&amp;module=RelatedLinks&amp;pgtype=Article">reports for the New York Times</a>, it’s that the uptick could make results from other closely watched vaccine trials available sooner and with greater statistical power, while also speeding up trials of COVID-19 treatments.
 

 
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Vaccine and band-aid on a tray in a doctor's office. Image credit: SELF Magazine

The Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines are at least 90% effective, according to clinical trials. Here’s who may get vaccinated first.

Topic: Body & Brain

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