Katherine J. Wu

1 week ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

If the United States learned any lesson from HIV, it should have been that negligence can be a death sentence. In the early 1980s, the virus’s ravages were treated as “something that happens over there, only to those people,” Juan Michael Porter II, a health journalist and an HIV activist, told me. But the more the virus and the people it most affected were ignored, the worse the epidemic got.

3 weeks ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

By design, clinical trials ask their participants to take on risk. To develop new vaccines, drugs, or therapies, scientists first have to ask volunteers to try out those interventions, with no guarantee that they’ll work or be free of side effects. To minimize harm, researchers promise to care for and monitor participants through a trial’s end, long enough to collect the data necessary to determine if a therapy is effective and at what cost.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

For most of the past century, the United States’ track record on infectious disease has been quite good. Thanks to major investments in public health, diseases such as smallpox, polio, yellow fever, malaria, measles, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tuberculosis have either been obliterated or become vanishingly rare. America “led the charge,” Aniruddha Hazra, an infectious-disease physician at UChicago Medicine, told me.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

Until the second Trump administration took over, the National Institutes of Health—the world’s single largest public funder of biomedical research—was not in the business of canceling its grants. Of the more than 60,000 research awards the agency issues each year, it goes on to terminate, on average, maybe 20 of them, and usually only because of serious problems, such as flagrant misconduct, fraud, or an ethical breach that could harm study participants.

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Katherine J. Wu

Until this year, public-health officials have abided by a simple playbook for measles outbreaks: Get unvaccinated people vaccinated, as quickly as possible. The measles component of the measles, mumps, and rubella shot that nearly all American kids receive today is “one of the best vaccines we have,” William Moss, a measles expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Two doses in early childhood are enough to cut someone’s risk of getting measles by 97 percent.