THE BIG STORY The race for a vaccine
It’s one of the most important scientific and industrial challenges of our lifetime: How quickly can we develop a coronavirus vaccine and produce the billions of doses needed to conclusively end the crisis? We’ve been warned it will take at least 18 months, and that’s on the optimistic side. But scientists across the globe are racing to do it faster than ever before.
One way that might happen is with a “challenge trial” — essentially a shortcut for the lengthy process of vaccine testing. Typically, first you make sure an experimental vaccine doesn’t hurt people — that’s phase one. In phase two, you test if it actually works, giving it to a small group of people and checking if they develop the antibodies that signal immunity. In phase three, you give it to a much larger group and monitor their health over a longer period of time, making sure there are no complicated side effects and seeing if they get infected by the virus.
A challenge trial would happen during phase three, and it would involve deliberately exposing people to the virus. Some of those people would have taken the experimental vaccine, some a placebo. Then you see if the vaccine protects them.
“Normally, deliberately giving someone an infection that is potentially lethal would be unacceptable,” one bioethicist told Dan Vergano. “But in extreme times, like a plague, you might look to extreme measures.” Groups of scientists and politicians are pushing for these kinds of trials to happen, and some are even recruiting young, healthy volunteers.
 YOU BUSY ON FRIDAY? Come hang out with meWhat’s it like to be fresh out of college right now, entering the job market during the worst economic times in living memory? Ryan Brooks spent weeks talking to young people born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who are entering adulthood as the coronavirus reshapes the world. Want to hear more? I’ll be hosting a live streamed Q&A with Brooks to talk about his story and take questions from our BuzzFeed News members. Come and join us! It’s this Friday, April 24, at 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. All the details can be found here. STAYING ON TOP OF THIS Who gets hit by Trump’s immigration freeze?
Last night President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning the issue of green cards to certain groups of people living overseas. The 60-day pause, which may be extended, applies to family members of US-based green card holders, the parents and siblings of US citizens, and participants in the visa lottery system, which issues green cards to people from countries with historically low levels of immigration to the US.
The order’s practical impact will be limited for the time being, Hamed Aleaziz reports — US embassies and consulates abroad have already suspended the issuance of most visas, and travel restrictions and flight cancellations mean few people are able to enter the US in the first place. But it includes language that allows its scope and duration to be expanded later on, leaving open the possibility of stricter immigration restrictions in the future.
“Today, the president made progress on the one thing he previously needed Congress's help to accomplish: reducing legal immigration,” said Sarah Pierce, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler and Immigration and Citizenship Chair Zoe Lofgren, both Democrats, said in a joint statement that the order was an "illegal and shocking usurpation of power" intended to forward the president's "anti-immigrant agenda."
IT'S NEWS O'CLOCK Our new podcast is live! BuzzFeed News launched its new daily podcast this week, and it’s wonderful. In the latest episode of News O'Clock, Hayes Brown and Casey Rackham talk to immigration reporter Hamed Aleaziz about how Trump's latest freeze on immigration will work. Check it out here! SNAPSHOTS Another 4.4 million people filed for unemployment benefits in the US last week. It brings the total number of unemployment claims filed in the last five weeks to 26.5 million.
Housing lawyers are warning of a “tsunami” of evictions being filed once current restrictions are lifted. State and local moratoriums are currently limiting evictions, but those will eventually end.
Two pet cats in New York City have tested positive for the coronavirus. They’re the first confirmed cases among pets in the US.
Instagram is speeding up the rollout of a memorial account feature for users who have passed away. The feature has been planned for a while, but the company says it will be released sooner “to help support our community during a difficult time."
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HOW THIS ALL BEGAN The timeline of the coronavirus outbreak is changingWe’ve now learned that the first coronavirus death in the US was weeks earlier than previously known. Officials in California's Santa Clara County say examinations of tissue samples from a person who died on Feb. 6 show they were infected with the virus — until now, the first known death was thought to be in Washington state more than three weeks later, on Feb. 29. It means the virus was spreading inside the US earlier than we previously knew. Scientists are also slowly figuring out how the virus moved around the country in the earliest days of the outbreak, and have made an amazing discovery, the New York Times reports: Of all the coronavirus samples that have been genetically sequenced across the country, almost a quarter of them traced back to a single infected person in Seattle. Frederic J. Brown / Getty Images HE LOVES IT WHEN YOU CALL HIM BIG POPPA Throw your hands in the air, if you's a true playa Rashida Ellis, a 38-year-old costume designer based in Atlanta, isn’t making many costumes these days – film and TV production has been shut down. Instead, she’s working from home, making clothes and selling them online. And she’s not working alone: she’s sharing her apartment with her English bulldog, Pop.
While she makes clothes, Big Poppa sits, sadly, on the balcony, looking at the street below and missing all the people who should rightfully be petting him. Ellis tweeted a photo of a pensive Big Poppa; it currently has more than 700,000 likes.
 "The sad thing is we have to social-distance even him," Ellis told David Mack. "When he's inside, he just walks out to the patio looking for people. He's sleeping more. He's a little sluggish. I can tell he's not as happy and excited as he usually is. He's probably tired of just me playing with him."
There has been an enormous response to the pic. Arya Stark swore allegiance to him:
Others looked beyond his sadness and blamed the system itself: "I think when people look at that photo, we can all relate right now,” Big Poppa’s human says. “Not only is he so sad and cute and you want everything to change for him, but you want everything to change for yourself, too, because we're all in this situation."
Big Poppa will get through this, and so will you,
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