Daniel Engber

I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I’d applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. “Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure,” he’d later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Measles seems poised to make a comeback in America. Two adults and two children staying at a migrant shelter in Chicago have gotten sick with the disease. A sick kid in Sacramento, California, may have exposed hundreds of people to the virus at the hospital. Three other people were diagnosed in Michigan, along with seven from the same elementary school in Florida. As of Thursday, 17 states have reported cases to the CDC since the start of the year.

The state of Florida is trying out a new approach to measles control: No one will be forced to not get sick.
Joseph Ladapo, the state’s top health official, announced this week that the six cases of the disease reported among students at an elementary school in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale, do not merit emergency action to prevent unvaccinated students from attending class.

For years now, health experts have been warning that COVID-era politics and the spread of anti-vaxxer lies have brought us to the brink of public-health catastrophe—that a Great Collapse of Vaccination Rates is nigh. This hasn’t come to pass. In spite of deep concerns about a generation of young parents who might soon give up on immunizations altogether—not simply for COVID, but perhaps for all disease—many of the stats we have are looking good.

For more than three hours yesterday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic grilled a pair of virologists about their participation in an alleged “cover-up” of the pandemic’s origins. Republican lawmakers zeroed in on evidence that the witnesses, Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry, and other researchers had initially suspected that the coronavirus spread from a Chinese lab.

The lab-leak theory lives! Or better put: It never dies. In response to new but unspecified intelligence, the U.S. Department of Energy has changed its assessment of COVID-19’s origins: The agency, which had previously been undecided on the matter, now rates a laboratory mishap ahead of a natural spillover event as the suspected starting point.

A new subvariant of SARS-CoV-2 is rapidly taking over in the U.S.—the most transmissible that has ever been detected. It’s called XBB.1.5, in reference to its status as a hybrid of two prior strains of Omicron, BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75. It’s also called “Kraken.”Not by everyone, though. The nickname Kraken was ginned up by an informal group of scientists on Twitter and has caught on at some—but only some—major news outlets.

On a recent weeknight in Punta Gorda, Florida, a bird thief cut the power at a strip mall. It was roughly 2 a.m., a time when cockatoos and cockatiels are asleep; and also when, with its security cameras knocked offline, one might slip inside the coral-stucco storefront of the Parrot Outreach Society, a local rescue-and-adoption group with close to 100 animals on-site.

Okay this is embarrassing: The news I shared the other day, about the sharing of fake news, was fake.That news—which, again, let’s be clear, was fake—concerned a well-known MIT study from 2018 that analyzed the spread of news stories on Twitter.

As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between) persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations have sustained an atmosphere of profound unease.

jarun011 / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s official: America’s vaccine-supply crunch is over. The U.S. has ordered, optioned, or procured enough doses to immunize every single member of the population more than five times over, and all adults will be eligible for the shots by May 1. In other words, after months of careful rationing and distribution snafus, we’ve finally hit a new phase of the pandemic endgame: vaccines galore.