David Wallace-Wells

We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong

Imagine yourself, if you can, in the months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Imagine being told then that a novel virus would emerge in China that would then spread around the world, infecting much of the global population, by some estimates killing more than 20 million people, and upending much of…

Covid-19 Isn’t a Pandemic of the Unvaccinated Anymore

Americans received their first Covid-19 vaccine doses in December 2020, which means we are now approaching the beginning of the third year of the pandemic’s vaccine phase. And yet hundreds of Americans are still dying each day. Who are they? The data offers a straightforward answer: older adults. …

The New Covid Subvariants Don’t Really Change Anything

The Covid pandemic still isn’t over, but it has gone remarkably flat. It’s been nearly a year since Omicron was discovered in South Africa and Botswana, and no new variant of concern has been declared since then by the World Health Organization. That’s a notable interlude, since five were…

The Inadequacy of the Stories We Told About the Pandemic

Year three of the Covid-19 pandemic is now more than halfway over, believe it or not — with a fall surge likely on the way. But the emergency phase is far enough in the country’s rearview mirror that the experience of the pandemic thus far can be examined a little more clinically and a little less…

Hardly Anyone Talks About How Fracking Was an Extraordinary Boondoggle

In the energy scramble provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American liquid natural gas has so far played the role of Europe’s white knight. If Europe manages to keep its lights on, homes heated and factories running this winter, when energy demand is highest, it will be in large part thanks…