Top 10 science stories of 2020

HISTORY OF COVID

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COVID-19

On January 7, 2020 Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), officials announced they had identified a new virus and named it 2019-nCoV.

COVID Vaccine

On Nov. 9, New York-based Pfizer and the German company BioNTech made history by presenting preliminary data indicating that their coronavirus vaccine was over 90 percent effective.

On Nov. 30, the Boston-based company Moderna announced it was applying to the Food and Drug Administration for an emergency use authorization, less than a year after it launched the first clinical trial for a coronavirus vaccine. Moderna reported 94.5% efficacy. The Gamaleya Research Institute, part of Russia’s Ministry of Health, has created a vaccine with an efficacy rate of 91.4 percent, according to a Dec. 14 announcement.

On Dec. 8, researchers with the University of Oxford and the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca published the first scientific paper on a Phase 3 clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine. The trial demonstrated that the vaccine can protect people from Covid-19, but it left many questions unresolved about the results.

New cancer vaccine ready for human trials