Olivia Goldhill

Five years ago, psychedelics helped break Ian Roullier free from depression. His mental health had been spiraling for years, despite various antidepressants, counseling, and personal efforts to meditate, walk, and journal his way back to health. In 2014, he heard researchers at Imperial College London were planning to test psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, as treatment for depression. Out of desperation, he volunteered to try it.

In the southern US, Matt Maxwell has been working for months to recruit participants for ongoing Covid-19 vaccine trials. As the chief executive officer of Accel Clinical Services, a private clinic that runs trials in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, he’s used to the logistical difficulty of assembling thousands of people across hundreds of miles. With these trials, though, he’s running into a new challenge.

The rich and famous enjoy endless advantages in healthcare, but medical professionals’ extreme attentions can come with a price. Some doctors puzzling over US president Donald Trump’s plethora of coronavirus drug treatments suggest he was subject to “VIP syndrome”: when doctors pile on unnecessary and potentially harmful treatments in a bid to follow orders and show they’re taking every possible step.

Researchers in the UK are gearing up to launch the first coronavirus challenge trial, in which hundreds of participants will be deliberately infected with the disease. If all goes to plan, the trial will launch in January, according to the Financial Times, though scientists are still waiting on regulatory approval from the UK government.

The coronavirus pandemic lays bare how scientific research can be used as a political tool. 

Artificial intelligence can be used to diagnose cancer, predict suicide, and assist in surgery. In all these cases, studies suggest AI outperforms human doctors in set tasks. But when something does go wrong, who is responsible?

Ultra-cold freezers are suddenly a hot commodity.

Nearly 30 million people in the US were uninsured at some point in 2019, the highest number since 2015. In total, 9.2% of the population didn’t have health insurance when interviewed for a US Census Bureau report last year.

A global pandemic, economic lockdown, and enforced social distancing are hard on everyone’s mental health. Some people are especially vulnerable.

As beauty salons reopen across the US, they may eventually be able to offer mani-pedi-vaccine combos. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is weighing beauty salons and other community gathering points as potential distribution sites for Covid-19 vaccines.

In March, Kenya was bracing for coronavirus. Duncan Nyukuri, an infectious disease physician at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, was listening to reports coming in from China and Italy with trepidation. “Our healthcare infrastructure is not as good as in those areas,” he said, and even as Kenya implemented strict lockdown policies, it wasn’t clear how the country would cope.

Coronavirus has highlighted the racism running through US healthcare, as Black and Latino Americans die of Covid-19 at disproportionately higher rates than white people. In an effort to counter those disparities, government officials are now grappling with whether to make race an explicit feature of plans to distribute a potential vaccine.

Jobs are scarce, huge sections of the economy are shut down, and a deadly virus continues to spread around the world. Faced with these decidedly un-family-friendly conditions, American women are reconsidering their plans to have children.

If you want to change someone’s behavior, you can try all manner of sophisticated manipulation techniques. There’s paradoxical thinking, or the elaborated social identity model.

Psychedelics are the next billion dollar industry, according to market analysts, and investors and donors are taking note.

Mandatory coronavirus vaccines make cold logical sense. At least 70% of a population needs to be inoculated to create herd immunity, and governments could easily achieve that rate of coverage if they demanded vaccines for all.

A successful coronavirus vaccine is no good to anyone sitting in a lab. The next phase: sending shots around the world and into the arms of the global population.

Update: On Dec. 1, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted 13-1 to recommend giving the first Covid-19 vaccines to both healthcare workers and residents of long-term care facilities. Individual states will likely follow that recommendation, though they are not required to.

When Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins Hospital with cervical cancer in 1951, a researcher took cells from her tumor and discovered that, unlike other human cells, they survived and continued to replicate in the lab. HeLa cells, as they’re known, have since been sold all over the world, allowing countless researchers and companies to benefit. They’ve contributed to two Nobel prizes, the development of polio and HPV vaccines, cancer treatments, and AIDS research. A Black woman’s cells, taken without her consent or knowledge, transformed science.

Esketamine, the first new method to treat depression in 25 years, is gaining credibility. Last year, Janssen Pharmaceutical’s ketamine-based drug was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat patients with treatment-resistant depression. And on Aug. 3, the FDA followed up with a second approval, allowing doctors to prescribe the tranquilizing drug to patients experiencing suicidal ideation.

As the world awaits the results of the first crop of coronavirus vaccines to enter the final phase of testing, Russia has seemingly skipped ahead. Last week, a state research facility asked local regulators to approve the use of a vaccine under development, according to the country’s health minister Mikhail Murashko.

Government officials are rushing to declare racism a public health crisis across the United States. The city council in Austin, Texas made the announcement on Wednesday, officials in Louisville, Kentucky are set to follow suit, and they will join local officials in 19 states who’ve recently recognized racism as a public health issue.

Around the world, scientists are conducting studies at rapid speed with the hope of finding a coronavirus vaccine. Six companies are currently in the final stages of testing, of which three—Sinopharm, CanSino, and Sinovac Biotech—are in China.

If scientists develop a successful Covid-19 vaccine, the world’s next challenge is to ensure that as many people as possible get it. That effort could be challenged by skepticism of vaccines, especially in the United States: A recent Pew Research Center survey found that only 72% of Americans would probably or definitely get a coronavirus vaccine if it were available.