Faye Flam

Earlier this week, President Joe Biden seemed to commit to saying “The pandemic is over.” The backlash was swift. That’s understandable, given that hundreds of people are still dying from Covid every day. But President Biden may be doing what comes naturally to many of us — judging the situation by…

It feels intuitively right that a reformulated booster vaccine aimed at the omicron BA.5 variant would vastly improve our protection against it as well as any offspring that might threaten us in the fall. But intuition doesn’t always agree with scientific data. It’s not intuitive at all to think…

Climate-change activists should take some lessons from the mismanagement and miscommunication surrounding the pandemic. In both cases, people across the political spectrum feel helpless in the face of the problem. In both cases, experts need to figure out how to get people to overcome these…

This week, the Centers for Disease Control announced it will overhaul itself in response to pandemic mistakes. The first thing the CDC should do is to clarify what those mistakes were. While many experts think those mistakes are obvious, half of the public assumes the mistakes involved too many,…

The most popular depression drugs taken by millions don’t work by fixing an “imbalance of the brain’s neurotransmitters,” as many drug advertisements claim or imply. That’s because depression isn’t caused by a chemical imbalance, according to a new analysis published in Molecular Psychiatry…

The Covid wave fueled by the omicron BA.5 surge is finally starting to ebb in the UK and in some of the harder-hit parts of the US. But why? It’s no longer tenable to argue that disease waves peak and fall primarily because people start taking precautions. People, especially in these two countries,…

No sooner had one fire in Yosemite been contained than a new one erupted in a different part of the park. This summer’s Western wildfires have brought attention to the risks that climate change brings to America’s national parks and the treasures they contain — like the giant sequoia trees, the…

What’s captured people’s attention about the Washburn fire raging in Yosemite isn’t just its size or scope, but the fact that it threatens a giant Sequoia with a name, Grizzly Giant, and an extreme age: It’s almost 3,000 years old. The oldest trees have scientific as well as sentimental value…

The ways we think about the Covid pandemic have evolved with the virus: In 2020, it was a potentially deadly threat we could avoid by being careful; in 2021, it was something that was likely to infect everyone eventually; and now, it’s becoming seen as a persistent health hazard that can re-infect…

There’s a trend for experts who’ve yet to test positive for Covid to explain their disease virginity on social media, detailing all the steps they’ve taken to evade the increasingly pervasive virus. Covid virginity is becoming more special now that it describes a shrinking minority. The lucky few,…