Scaling up the manufacturing of syringes and other medical products required to deliver a vaccine to millions of Americans will be just as important as the vaccine itself. In the midst of national shortages of testing swabs and protective gear, some medical suppliers and health policy experts are looking ahead to another extraordinary demand on…

The U.K. will know by July whether its Covid-19 vaccine is effective, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca said Thursday. The company announced Thursday that it had partnered with Oxford University to help develop and distribute the vaccine being researched by the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group. Under the agreement, AstraZeneca would be responsible for the worldwide manufacturing and…

More Americans have now died from the coronavirus in less than two months than in the entire nine years of the Vietnam war — more than 58,000. But the United States crossed another threshold Tuesday — 1 million known coronavirus cases. That is nearly one-third of all the world’s known coronavirus cases. To put the enormity of…

Manu Prakash runs a lab at Stanford University that specializes in what he calls “frugal science,” solving global health problems with nontraditional, cost-efficient tools. His lab developed Foldscope, a paper microscope that costs $1.75 and is used across the world for scientific education and research. Prakash, a bioengineer, turned his sights to the covid-19 global pandemic when it…

WASHINGTON — The National Institutes of Health on Wednesday announced a new $1.5 billion initiative to rapidly develop coronavirus diagnostics, an effort it says will result in the deployment of “millions of tests per week” by late summer or fall of this year. The agency said the effort relies on a “national Covid-19 testing challenge”…

Dr. Laurie Hommema arrived home for dinner Friday, March 13, with masks on her mind.  It was the day President Donald Trump declared the coronavirus a national emergency, and she worried that front-line medical staff at the 12-hospital OhioHealth system where she works wouldn’t have enough protective gear. In what turned out to be a…

Agovernment-run study of Gilead’s remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Gilead made the announcement in a statement Wednesday, stating: “We understand that the trial has met its primary endpoint.” The company said that the National…

The pharmaceutical firm joins various groups pushing to have vaccines ready for emergency use in the fall, though hurdles remain The race for a vaccine to combat the new coronavirus is moving faster than researchers and drugmakers expected, with Pfizer Inc. PFE -1.10% joining several other groups saying that they had accelerated the timetable for testing and that a vaccine could be…