A Vaccine Advance, Buying Live Chickens, and the Failed Return of Martin Shkreli
A roundup of Covid-19 stories we’re reading today
Published in
2 min readMay 18, 2020
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- U.S. stock futures for the biotech company Moderna soared Monday after the company announced positive results from recent human tests of its coronavirus vaccine, according to the Washington Post. All 45 participants in the study produced antibodies, and eight even produced the neutralizing antibodies thought to be most important for protection. The second trial, which is slated to start soon, will involve 600 people, and the third will expand to thousands, the New York Times reports. It will be at least a year until it reaches the public.
- Hand sanitizer and TP are so last month: Now, people are panic-buying live chickens, driving sales of chicks, coops, and feed up 500%, reports The Hustle. Some are driven by concerns over an egg shortage; some are just bored at home. Others are “just yearning for something to love and nurture.”
- If getting a fuzzy live chick isn’t an option, there are many other ways to find small joys during the pandemic. A delightful collection of short essays in the New York Times documents 14 of them, ranging from Lesley M.M. Blume’s “The Joy of a Junky Old Nintendo” to my favorite, from Caity Weaver, titled “The Joy of Deleting My Many Mediocre Photos.” My phone has never enjoyed so much space.
- Remember Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” convicted of fraud who also briefly (and controversially) owned Wu-Tang’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the most expensive album of all time? He recently asked to be released early from his seven-year prison sentence so he could research a coronavirus cure. Probation officials described his request as “delusional self-aggrandizing behavior,” NPR reports, and a district judge denied the request.
