Coronavirus

Julia Lynch of the School of Arts & Sciences weighed in on a controversy in Philadelphia, where city officials had to terminate a relationship with a startup that tried to monetize personal data from the mass vaccination site they were tasked with operating. “I think there is a place in our health system for our innovative partners,” said Lynch. “But maybe this isn’t the time to be experimenting with disruptors. Maybe this is the time we should be turning to a health service delivery infrastructure that operates like a well-oiled machine.”

Richard Doty of the Perelman School of Medicine said the link between smell loss or irregularities and autoimmune or immune-mediated diseases is so strong that it suggests these conditions might have unknown viral causes.

Ashley Ritter, a postdoc in the School of Nursing, said she’s waiting to visit her immunocompromised family members until she and they are fully vaccinated.

David Rubin of the Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said that while there’s been a decline in COVID-19 transmission rates in most parts of the country, it will take many weeks or months for the number of people getting sick and dying to fall. "It's going to take a while. There's going to be a long tail, unfortunately," he said.

E. John Wherry and Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about how new variants of the novel coronavirus might respond to the existing COVID-19 vaccines. “We don’t want people thinking that the current vaccine is already outdated. That’s absolutely not true,” said Wherry. However, he warned, the mutations “do in fact reduce how well our immune response is recognizing the virus.”

Aaron Richterman of the Perelman School of Medicine said overemphasizing the COVID-19 vaccine’s imperfections and unknowns may do more harm than good. “Not being completely open because you want to achieve some sort of behavioral public health goal—people will see through that eventually,” he said.