Withings is today announcing yet another in its range of class-leading smart scales, Body Comp. The device is pitched as a “complete body assessment scale” which can look at the sort of facets of our bodies normally reserved for clinical settings. That includes weight, muscle mass, fat mass, water percentage, bone mass, BMI and visceral fat counts. You’ll also get information on your standing heart rate and your vascular health (based on PulseWave Velocity), as well as analyzing your nerve health. And, of course, it’s the first Withings product that will be sold to be compatible with Health+, the company’s other new announcement.

Health+ is Withings’ new subscription platform, since recurring revenue is now the one way that most hardware businesses make money these days. It promises to “unlock additional features in the Health Mate app,” offering insights on how to strive for a better body. These include six week habit-forming modules, all of which is contextualized with the data offered by your Withings devices. They will also be offered meal plans and suggested workouts to help them achieve their goals faster. (Health+ will set you back $79.95 after the first year of use, and is only compatible so far with this and any future Withings' products.)

Now, this is actually a different product to Body Scan, the scale that Withings announced back in January which came with its own electrode handle. That, much like other high-end body composition scales, asks you to hold the handle at waist height in order to better read your vital statistics. Armed with the data, it’ll tell you the fat and water ratios in your arms, legs and torso, as well as monitoring your nerve activity. That product hasn’t actually hit stores yet, but it’s already clear that Body Comp will offer the bulk of the same features with a little less fine grain data.

There is now a significant number of devices that have Withings and Body in the name and you’d be forgiven for struggling to keep them all straight in your head. The existing flagship is the Body Cardio, which has all of the current bells and whistles, including weight, BMI, body composition, heart rate and vascular age. Below that, the Body+ offers weight, BMI and body comp, while the vanilla Body just offers weight and BMI.

In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, Google announced that it is making it easier to use its Maps and Search products to find medical providers that offer abortions. When someone searches for specific services and Google has confirmation that a location provides those services, it'll be clearly labeled in Search and Maps. For example, Google notes that it already does this when you search for EV charging stations or a specific COVID-19 vaccine brand, and now it'll do so for veterans hospitals and healthcare facilities that provide abortions. As you can see in the above image, searching for "abortion clinics near me" will bring up a list of locations that Google has confirmed provide abortion services.

While Google isn't coming right out and saying it, this seems to be an effort to avoid sending people who are searching for medical care to so-called "abortion crisis centers" or anti-abortion centers. For locations that Google doesn't have confirmation for, it'll instead say "might not provide abortions," which serves as a passive but still significant red flag for anyone looking for treatment. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled that anti-abortion centers couldn't be forced to acknowledge abortion as an option, something that outsources that work to private companies like Google. 

Earlier this week, Yelp announced it would take a similar but more definitive step by adding warning labels to anti-abortion centers; these warnings note that such facilities "may not have licensed medical professionals on site." Google says its update has been in the works for months, but it comes at a time where employees have said the company needs to do more to project both users and its contract workers in a post-Roe world.

The fact that Google is getting confirmation from centers that provide abortions should make both Search and Maps results more useful. A Google spokesperson said that "we get confirmation that places provide a particular service in a number of ways, including regularly calling businesses directly and working with authoritative data sources." So users should be able to trust that medical centers that are labeled as providing abortions do in fact offer the service. Google is also making it easy to expand your search if you don't find relevant results nearby with a "search farther away" prompt, another tool that can help people looking for abortion services where clinics are rare. 

Google says these changes will start rolling out today, though they won't immediately be visible to all Google users until a bit later.

Facebook parent company Meta says it by mistake recently removed a Planned Parenthood of Michigan post that included information on where to obtain abortion medication. “A medication abortion is a nonsurgical option for ending a pregnancy in the first trimester. Approved by the FDA for use up to roughly 10 weeks of pregnancy, these medications are highly effective with little risk of serious side effects,” the post said, according to Motherboard (via The Verge), with a link to a website outlining a list of providers.

An alert shared by Planned Parenthood of Michigan spokesperson Ashlea Phenicie said the post was restricted for violating Facebook’s guidelines. “The Community Standards apply to the world, and help keep Facebook safe and welcoming for everyone,” the notification stated.

Abortion is legal in Michigan. The removal occured after Meta admitted in June to “incorrect” moderation of posts about abortion pills. In the days after the Supreme Court’s June 24th decision to overturn Roe v. Wade,Motherboard found that the company had been flagging posts that said “abortion can be mailed.” According to Meta’s Community Standards, content discussing the affordability of prescription medication is allowed on Facebook, but users cannot use the platform to buy, sell, trade, gift, request or donate pharmaceuticals.

Starting today, Yelp will apply a label to business pages for crisis pregnancy centers (also known as anti-abortion centers) to clarify that these facilities usually have limited medical services. The label also notes that crisis pregnancy centers "may not have licensed medical professionals onsite." The consumer notice could help people avoid confusion with clinics that offer abortion services.

In a blog post, Yelp said it was making the change following the US Supreme Court's decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, a ruling that conferred a nationwide right to safe abortion access for nearly 50 years. "The trust and safety of our community is a top priority, which is why providing consumers with reliable and useful information to help inform their decisions is critical to our mission — this includes access to reliable information about reproductive health services," Yelp wrote.

Yelp

Many crisis pregnancy centers have religious affiliations, as the Associated Presspreviously reported. Some are said to provide misleading information about abortion and contraception.

Yelp has reviewed tens of thousands of business listings since 2018 with the aim of ensuring crisis pregnancy centers are differentiated from abortion clinics. It noted that moderators have reclassified almost 470 businesses as crisis pregnancy centers or faith-based crisis pregnancy centers this year alone in the US, after reviewing nearly 33,500 business pages. It plans to review more than 55,000 business pages across the US, Canada and Puerto Rico in the coming months.

This is an issue that other tech companies have been contending with. Last week, the Alphabet Workers Union demanded that Google address "misleading search results related to abortion services by removing results for fake abortion providers." Democratic lawmakers have asked Google to stop directing people seeking an abortion to anti-abortion facilities, while some Republican attorneys general warned the company not to limit such centers from appearing in search results. In early July, Google said it would delete abortion clinic visits from user location histories.

After 38 years as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he will be stepping down from his role in December. Appointed to the position in 1984 by then-president Ronald Reagan, Fauci has personally overseen the federal government’s response to some of the 20th century’s deadliest infectious diseases — from tuberculosis and COVID to SARS and MERS.

But, as he told The Guardian in 2020, “my career and my identity has really been defined by HIV.” The prevention and treatment of HIV has been a prioritized area of research for the NIAID since 1986, and one that Dr. Fauci has devoted much of his public service to. The current state of AIDS research and response in America is thanks in no small part to his continued efforts in the field.

The NIAID is one of 27 specialized institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in turn reports to the Department of Health and Human Services. The NIH overall serves as the federal government’s premiere health research program. The NIAID operates within that bureaucratic framework, conducting and supporting “basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases,” per its mission statement. That includes everything from working to mitigate effects of the annual influenza strain and alleviate asthma in urban youth to leading the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19. The technology behind that vaccine is now being adapted for use against HIV and malaria as well.

Working at the forefront of immunoregulation research in the early 1980s, Fauci developed treatments for a class of otherwise-fatal inflammatory diseases including polyarteritis nodosa, granulomatosis with polyangiitis (formerly Wegener's granulomatosis) and lymphomatoid granulomatosis. The results of those studies helped lay the groundwork for today’s research by the NIAID’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation. That research includes cellular and molecular mechanisms of HIV immunopathogenesis and the treatment of immune-mediated diseases. Combining the institute’s nearly four decades of HIV/AIDS research with cutting edge genomic technology has brought us not one, but three potentially viable AIDS vaccines, all of which are currently in clinical trials.

“Finding an HIV vaccine has proven to be a daunting scientific challenge,” Dr. Fauci said in a March NIAID release. “With the success of safe and highly effective COVID-19 vaccines, we have an exciting opportunity to learn whether mRNA technology can achieve similar results against HIV infection.”

The active, hands-on approach we see in response to the AIDS epidemic today is a far cry from that of the Reagan administration at the start of the crisis in 1983, which initially met the issue with silence. That is, outside of the time Larry Speakes, Reagan's press secretary, called it “the gay plague.”

Fauci’s initial efforts during the AIDS epidemic did more harm than good. In 1983, he published The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: The Ever-Broadening Clinical Spectrum in which he warned of “the possibility that routine close contact, as within a family household, can spread the disease.” We know now that this is not at all how HIV works, but at the time — despite the study urging caution until more evidence was gathered — it set off a moral panic in the media. The study was subsequently picked up by right-wing organizations and used as a political cudgel blaming the LGBTQIA+ community for the disease.

Reagan himself didn’t publicly mention the crisis until 1985, three years after it was officially identified by the CDC (and, coincidentally, a month after he admitted his involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal). Social stigma around the disease made funding for basic health research nearly impossible to acquire, and was exacerbated by Reagan’s repeated budget cuts to the NIH and CDC.

"The inadequate funding to date has seriously restricted our work and has presumably deepened the invasion of this disease into the American population," a CDC staffer wrote in an April, 1983 memo to then-Assistant Director, Dr. Walter Dowdle. "In addition, the time wasted pursuing money from Washington has cast an air of despair over AIDS workers throughout the country."

Even after his appointment as Chief Medical Officer — one who was determined to treat the AIDS crisis with its deserved gravity — Fauci faced pushback from the LGBTQIA+ community, who demanded greater action from the government in response to the crisis and sought to accelerate the glacial pace of drug trials at the time.

By 1990, the community’s patience had reached a breaking point, resulting in ACT UP’s (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) attempt to storm the NIH in protest. “One of the things that people in ACT UP said is that we are the people who are experiencing this novel disease, and we are the experts, not just the scientists and doctors,” Garance Ruta, executive director of GEN magazine and an ACT UP member at the protest, told The Washington Post in 2020.

“I was trying to get them into all the planning meetings for the clinical trials,” Fauci told WaPo, in response. “I felt very strongly that we needed to get them into the planning process because they weren’t always right, but they had very, very good input.”

Over the last 30 years, the NIH has helped lead development of numerous antiretroviral therapies. Azidothymidine (AZT), the first drug discovered to inhibit HIV’s replication without damaging cells, was initially developed by the NIH as an anti-cancer drug in the 1960s. Its use as an antiretroviral, approved by the FDA in 1987, helped to establish the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), which further accelerated research into nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs, the class of drug to which AZT belongs). NIAID-funded studies in the 1990s helped establish combination therapies, which combine multiple medications for a synergistic effect, and explored a newly-identified class of drug, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors or NNRTIs.

NIAID

Today, nearly three dozen antiretroviral drugs are available, many of them combined into fixed-dose tablets. In the 1990s, people living with AIDS would be expected to take up to 20 individual pills at set schedules throughout the day. The average lifespan for someone infected with the disease was roughly a year. Today, assuming you’re lucky enough to live in the developed world, AIDS has become a chronic condition to be controlled with a single daily pill. For the 20 million people living with AIDS but without access to modern treatment, it remains a death sentence.

The state of medical research technology has also evolved, even if the nation’s prevailing notions of fairness and equality haven't improved much in the intervening years since Reagan held power. Advances in laboratory standardization and automation have rapidly reduced development cycles and the occurrence of outlier results. The monotonous tasks that were once performed by lab assistants are now handled by robotic arms equipped with pipette arrays.

Disease prevention and diagnosis efforts have been augmented in recent years with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. They’ve also found use in helping to stem the spread of HIV and improve access to both retrovirals and PReP with applications including, “ML with smartphone-collected and social media data to promote real-time HIV risk reduction, virtual reality tools to facilitate HIV serostatus disclosure, and chatbots for HIV education,” argue Drs. Julia Marcus and Whitney Sewell, of Harvard and UMass Amherst, respectively.

And just as Dr Fauci is, quite specifically, not retiring — “I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats,” he noted in Monday’s announcement — the work of the NIAID is far from complete. Even as we slowly conquer existing scourges like COVID and HIV, re-emerging threats like Monkeypox (not to mention ancient killers like Polio) will continue to appear on our quickly warming planet.

Over-the-counter hearing aid sales should soon become a practical reality in the US. The Food and Drug Administration has issued a final rule allowing the sales of hearing aids for mild-to-moderate impairment without requirements for exams, prescriptions or audiologist fittings. The measure is expected to take effect in mid-October, when you should see aids reach physical retail stores.

You'll still need a prescription for severe hearing loss, or for anyone under 18. The FDA has also set design and performance requirements for over-the-counter aids, and has tweaked rules for prescriptions to ensure "consistency." The definitive rule comes in response to public and industry feedback, including lower maximum sound output, a requirement for user volume control and canal depth limits.

Congress first passed laws requiring over-the-counter hearing aids in 2017 in a bid to lower healthcare costs, improve access and spur competition. In theory, you would see more people wearing the devices as access and technology improve. However, the FDA didn't propose the necessary rule to fully implement the wearables until October 2021.

It could be awhile before there's a wide range of choices, but there are already offerings here or in the works. Lexie, for instance, recently began selling the $899 B1 using technology from Bose's reportedly defunct hearing aid division. Companies like Jabra have also leaped in early. The prices aren't trivial, but they're relative bargains when aids have historically cost thousands of dollars before insurance.

Medical science is nowhere near overcoming death, but it might be closer to delaying harm in dying and seriously damaged organs. The New York Timesreports that Yale University researchers successfully revived cells in the organs of pigs that had been dead in the lab for an hour. Hearts started beating, and the pigs' bodies didn't stiffen like they normally would. 

The team mixed the animals' blood and an artificial hemoglobin with OrganEx, a solution that includes anti-inflammatory medicine, nerve blockers (to prevent a return to consciousness), nutrients and drugs that fight cell death. The project is a follow-up to a years-old breakthrough where the scientists revived dead pigs' brain cells using a precursor solution, BrainEx. After that finding, the group wondered if it could revive an entire body.

The work isn't close to helping human patients. Further studies will show if the organs are functioning. Researchers will also have to gauge the effects of OrganEx without nerve blockers, and eventually test their work on humans. There are ethical concerns that pigs might regain brain function, and it's not clear just when it would be viable to experiment with people. If synthetic blood isn't yet ready for emergency rooms, this is even further away.

The ramifications could be huge if and when solutions like OrganEx are suitable for humans, though. They could extend the viability of organ transplants — it might be possible to collect healthy organs long after the moment of death. That, in turn, could make more transplants available and save additional lives. The technology could also limit the damage to organs after serious heart attacks and strokes. Ideally, this will give people a fighting chance to recover from potentially fatal conditions.

Last week, more than 400 TV showrunners, writers and producers called on streaming giants and traditional Hollywood studios to offer improved protections for workers in states where abortions are banned or limited. Now, 594 other industry figures (many, if not all of whom are male) have pledged their support, as Variety reports. They include Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, Jason Sudekis, Ryan Murphy, Donald Glover and JJ Abrams.

The signatories said they were standing in solidarity with their “female, trans and non-binary showrunner colleagues [...] in demanding a coordinated and timely response from our employers regarding the imminent workplace-safety crisis created by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Abortion access doesn’t only affect people who can become pregnant. It affects us all."

In late June, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that conferred a nationwide right to abortion for almost half a century. Numerous states banned or severely restricted abortion access after the decision.

The initial letter was signed by the likes of Issa Rae, Lilly Wachowski, Lena Waithe, Amy Schumer, Shonda Rhimes, Mindy Kaling and Ava DuVernay. It was sent to Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Apple, NBC Universal, Amazon, Lionsgate and AMC.

The more than 1,000 industry figures who sent the letters are calling for details about studios' abortion travel subsidies, care policies for “ectopic pregnancies and other pregnancy complications” that occur during a production and legal safeguards for those who help a production worker get an abortion. The signatories also demanded that studios “discontinue all political donations to anti-abortion candidates and political action committees immediately.”

Those who signed the letters want the studios to respond by August 10th. The letters did not detail what may happen if the companies don't reply by then. Studios have previously said they would reimburse travel expenses for those who had to leave a state to get an abortion.

Thanks to its generous tax incentives for film and TV productions, Georgia has become a powerhouse in the entertainment industry, which is worth billions of dollars to the local economy. In 2019, several studios, including Netflix, said they'd reconsider setting up projects in the state if a so-called heartbeat law came into effect (the legislation bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected). A federal appeals court allowed the law to take effect last month.

The national news cycle may have largely moved on from coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic — despite, as of this writing, infections being on the rise and more than 300 deaths tallied daily from the disease. But that certainly doesn't diminish the unprecedented international response effort and warp speed development of effective vaccines. 

In The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Peter Loftus takes readers through the harrowing days of 2020 as the virus raged across the globe and biotech startup Moderna raced to create a vaccine to halt the viral rampage. The excerpt below takes place in early 2021, as the company works to adapt its treatments to slow the surging Delta variant's spread.

Harvard Business Review Press

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from The Messenger: Moderna, the Vaccine, and the Business Gamble That Changed the World by Peter Loftus. Copyright 2022 Peter Loftus. All rights reserved.

Delta

Viruses of all types frequently change. They mutate as they jump from person to person. The coronavirus was no different. Throughout the pandemic, health officials tracked variants of the SARS CoV-2 virus first found in Wuhan, China, as those variants arose. None seemed a big concern, until one was flagged in the United Kingdom in December 2020, right as Moderna’s vaccine neared approval. This UK variant appeared to be as much as 70 percent more transmissible. It was given the name the Alpha variant.

Alpha reinforced the possibility that the virus could mutate enough to become resistant to vaccines and treatments that were designed to target the earlier, predominant strain. Or it could fizzle out. But variants would keep coming. Shortly after Alpha, researchers identified another variant circulating in South Africa. Beta.

In late December—just a few days after the United States authorized its vaccine — Moderna issued a statement that it was confident the vaccine would be effective at inducing the necessary immune response against variants. The original vaccine targeted the full length of the spike protein of the coronavirus, and the new variants appeared to have mutations in the spike protein that represented less than a 1 percent difference from the original.

“So, from what we’ve seen so far, the variants being described do not alter the ability of neutralizing antibodies elicited by vaccination to neutralize the virus,” Tal Zaks said during a virtual appearance at the all-important J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2021. “My definition of when to get worried is either when we see real clinical data that suggest that people who’ve either been sick or have been immunized are now getting infected at significant rates with the new variants.”

Even if the vaccine proved less effective against a new variant, Moderna could use its mRNA technology to quickly tweak the design of its Covid-19 vaccine, to better target a variant of the virus, Zaks said. After all, the company and its federal health partners had already demonstrated the year before how quickly they could design, manufacture, and test a new vaccine.

Still, Moderna needed to run a series of tests to see if its original vaccine offered the same high level of protection against variants as it showed in the big Phase 3 clinical trial.

Moderna collaborated again with researchers from NIAID including Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett. They analyzed blood samples taken from eight people who were vaccinated with Moderna’s shot in the Phase 1 trial back in early 2020. They essentially mixed these blood samples with the coronavirus variants, engineered so they copied the mutations of the variants but couldn’t replicate and pose a threat to lab researchers. Researchers then analyzed whether the vaccine-induced antibodies present in the human blood samples could effectively neutralize the virus variants.

The results were mixed. They suggested the vaccine worked as well against the UK Alpha variant as against the original strain of the coronavirus. That was good news. Even if the UK variant spread more easily than the original virus, Moderna’s vaccine could probably mute its effects.

But the Beta variant first identified in South Africa seemed to pose a problem. The vaccine-induced antibodies had a significantly reduced neutralization effect on this strain in the lab tests. “Oh shit,” Bancel said when Stephen Hoge showed him the data. It wouldn’t be the last time. Moderna’s leaders saw the data on a Friday in late January 2021 and spent the weekend discussing it. They hoped that a modified, variant- targeted vaccine wouldn’t be needed, and that Moderna’s original vaccine would suffice, even if it had a reduced neutralizing effect. But Moderna didn’t want to be caught flat-footed if a variant-specific booster was needed.

They decided by the next Monday it was time to take action. They would develop a new version of the vaccine, one that more closely matched the mutations seen in the strain that circulated in South Africa, and which could potentially be given as a booster shot to better protect people who had gotten the original vaccine.

“It really highlights the fact that we need to continue to stay vigilant,” Moderna’s president, Stephen Hoge, said. “This virus is evolving, it’s changing its stripes. And we need to keep testing the new variants, and make sure the vaccine works against them.”

Moderna repeated the steps it took a year earlier: it quickly designed a new variant vaccine and manufactured an initial batch for human testing, shipping it to NIAID in late February, a year to the day after it had shipped the original batch of the original vaccine. The new batch was called mRNA-1273.351, appending the “351” because researchers initially called the variant seen in South Africa “B.1.351.”

“Moderna is going to keep chasing the variants until the pandemic is under control,” Bancel said that day.

Moderna also developed other plans to test. It would try a third dose of its original vaccine, given several months after the second dose, to see if that booster shot would protect against variants. It would also develop a combined vaccine that targeted both the original strain and the Beta strain.

Once again, volunteers stepped up to test these various approaches. Neal Browning, the Microsoft engineer who was the second person to get Moderna’s vaccine, showed up once again to volunteer. In the intervening year, he had gotten married, in a small outdoor ceremony to minimize Covid risk. Now he received a third dose of the Moderna vaccine. He felt tenderness at the injection site and a low-grade fever and chills, but the symptoms went away after several hours. He continued to visit the research site to give blood samples to be analyzed for immune responses.

By early May, Moderna had some answers. It gave booster shots — either the original vaccine or the Beta variant – targeting vaccine — to people about six to eight months after they had been vaccinated with two doses of the original vaccine. The company found that in the new analysis, both types of booster shots increased neutralizing antibodies against the Beta variant. And they increased antibodies against a related variant that had been detected in Brazil. But the newer version of the vaccine that targeted Beta induced a stronger immune response against the Beta variant than the booster shot of Moderna’s original vaccine.

At the time, Moderna’s plan was to continue testing the different booster approaches, with an eye toward possibly getting government approval to sell the booster shot that specifically targeted the Beta variant. But it didn’t seem particularly urgent. The existing mass vaccination campaign was making good progress at the time.

Then, with the virus on the retreat in the United States, scientists discovered a new variant driving an alarming surge in India. This variant had already jumped to other countries, including the United States. Initially, it was code-named B.1.617.2. It was even more contagious than the Alpha variant and there were fears that it could evade vaccines. This was the Delta variant.

The previous winter the hope provided by vaccines was juxtaposed with the deadliest virus surge in the United States. Again, in early summer 2021, the lifting of mask mandates and reopening of public life was bringing great hope and a sense of relief. And again, this would be juxtaposed with public-health officials sounding the alarm about the Delta variant. It could become the dominant strain of the virus in the United States, they said. The best way to stop its spread, officials said, was to get more people vaccinated, with any of the three vaccines available.

By mid-June, about 55 percent of the US adult population was fully vaccinated, which was good but still left many people exposed to the new Delta variant that spread much more easily than earlier strains. And there were clear geographic vulnerabilities. The Northeast United States had higher vaccination rates than the national average, particularly in some New England states, like Vermont with its 62 percent vaccination rate. But in the South the numbers were much lower in states like Alabama, where only 30 percent were fully vaccinated.

The high proportions of unvaccinated people in those places would serve as a breeding ground for Delta. And the more the variant spread, the more it could mutate into more variants.

By late July, the effects of an ill-fated combination — stubbornly low vaccination rates in some regions, the winding down of masking and distancing, and a rapidly spreading Delta strain—were clearer. Infections, hospitalizations, and deaths were climbing again, especially in open states like Florida, which suffered one of the highest rates of Covid-19 hospitalizations, and low-vaccinated states.

Doctors and nurses who thought they had put the worst of the pandemic behind them were once again scrambling to treat severely ill Covid-19 patients in intensive-care units. By the end of August, the United States was averaging about fifteen hundred Covid-19 deaths a day, versus fewer than two hundred in early July. Nearly all of the patients who ended up in the ICU were unvaccinated.

Some vaccinated people were beginning to test positive for Covid-19, too — commonly called “breakthrough” cases—and a few progressed to severe cases. The vaccines, after all, weren’t 100 percent effective in the clinical trials, either. A small percentage of vaccinated people in the studies got sick with Covid. But it was becoming clear that the vaccines weren’t entirely blocking transmission of the virus or stopping asymptomatic infections, as initially hoped.

Vaccinated people were better protected than unvaccinated people, even when Delta took over. In states like Massachusetts, less than 1 percent of fully vaccinated people in the state had tested positive for Covid-19 by the fall of 2021. Other analysis showed that people who weren’t fully vaccinated were nearly five times more likely to get infected, ten times more likely to be hospitalized and eleven times more likely to die from Covid than fully vaccinated people.

But Delta reminded people, or made them understand for the first time, that the vaccines weren’t bullet-proof. New indoor mask mandates were imposed, including at schools, where educators just weeks earlier had been eager for the first normal back-to-school season in two years. No vaccine was yet authorized for children under twelve (both Moderna and Pfizer were studying that population), raising concerns that Delta would spread rapidly among them as they gathered in classrooms.

By the end of the summer, people wondered if the pandemic would ever end. Some started talking about the coronavirus as endemic, not a pandemic.

And a big slice of America was still saying “No thanks” to the vaccine.

Nike wants to make fitness apps accessible to more people with disabilities. The athletics gear maker has introduced adaptive workouts to the Nike Training Club app (available for Android and iOS) that you can perform whether or not you have a disability. The seven classes in this set target a wide range of movement and equipment, ranging from upper-body strength training with dumbbells to yoga.

A Nike athlete with limb loss, Amy Bream, leads all the classes. You'll also find guidance from an adaptive training-focused physical therapist. Training Club already offers an exercise program for expecting and recent mothers.

The company isn't alone in making these apps more accessible. Apple added Fitness+ workouts for pregnant people and seniors last year and has Apple Watch wheelchair workout tracking, for instance. Still, Nike's move is an important step that could bring exercise apps to a wider audience.