News Room

As the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to rage across the U.S., people are yearning for a win after Washington’s spectacular failures to secure adequate supplies of testing kits and personal protective equipment. Success hinges on whether any of the fast-tracked Covid-19 vaccine candidates supported by the almost $10 billion federally funded Operation Warp Speed will save the day. With the aim of getting 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines delivered by January 2021, the challenge is enormous. 

Last August, five climate scientists were tasked with fact-checking an article on climate change by Climate Feedback, a global network of academics sorting fact from fiction. Under the lens was a piece titled “The Great Failure of the Climatic Model” that appeared in the Washington Examiner. It was gaining popularity on Facebook, which outsourced the fact-checking. 

A study by an accounting professor at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business shows that first impressions can have a long-term impact on career success. In an article to be published in Management Science, professor Marshall Vance found that first impressions can weight future decisions regarding promotion decisions, even if on-the-job performance “tells a different story.”

Colleges and universities are wrestling with how to reopen their campuses for the fall semester. With social distancing requirements likely in place through the rest of the year, any environment that brings large groups of people together in close proximity can create new opportunities for the coronavirus to flourish.

As scientists race to test coronavirus vaccines in humans, a parallel scramble is underway to produce billions of medical-grade vials and syringes that will be needed to inoculate the world’s population. The job of delivering a vaccine to a majority of humans is so vast that global production of pharmaceutical vials needs to be ramped up by 5 to 10 percent within two years, a job the industry says requires immediate preparation and increases in production but is not an
insurmountable challenge.