See, no crying or big needles, just a person of colour showing off his plaster. This image does the job without scaring people and demonstrates diversity.
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COVID-19 variants of concern have changed the game. We need to recognise and act on this to avoid future waves of infections, yet more lockdowns and restrictions, and avoidable illness and death.
A mass vaccination hub in Genoa, Italy.
Luca Zennaro/EPA/AAP
We need to re-analyse data from China and look further afield if we are to have a more complete picture of what happened in 2019. Just keep the politics out of it.
The revamped Victorian hotel quarantine system appears to have addressed the weaknesses of the previous system, particularly around the risk of airborne transmission.
Several factors converge in this region to produce significant risk. The tentacles of this particular outbreak might be more far-reaching, so it's crucial we get testing numbers up.
If we want to prevent lockdowns in the future, we need to know what happened at the Brisbane hospital at the centre of these recent clusters. And we just don't have the facts yet.
It's all well and good to be able to connect cases through genomic sequencing. But it's important to be able to connect them epidemiologically as well.
The government should be explicit about what proportion of the population will need to be vaccinated to warrant border reopening. Australians could then measure progress towards that goal.
Sheena G. Sullivan, WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza and Kanta Subbarao, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity
Decades of experience with influenza offers insights into how we should handle new SARS-CoV-2 variants, and the threat they pose to vaccine effectiveness.
For people who are immunodeficient, the usual controls of the immune system don't work as well. This can affect how they respond to vaccines. But this group should still get the COVID jab.
Data from clinical trials and the real world COVID vaccine rollout suggest blood clots occur no more frequently in vaccinated people than they do in the general population.
Peter Alagona, University of California Santa Barbara
The value that bats provide to humans by pollinating crops and eating insects is far greater than harm from virus transmission – which is mainly caused by human actions.
Parked school buses in Freeport, New York, 18 March 2020. Justin Lane/EPA-EFE
The cornerstone of our adaptive immune system is the ability to remember the various infections we have encountered. Quite literally, if it doesn’t kill you, it makes your immune system stronger.