The Data Disaster in the U.S.

In the race to study immunity to the virus, scientists first focused on antibodies -- proteins that stick to and disable foreign invaders. That’s because creating antibodies is the basis for most successful vaccines, so scientists are interested in learning who develops coronavir ...  Show more

The drug company Eli Lilly is about to start testing its Covid-19 antibody drug in nursing homes. Vaccines may not work as well on elderly people or those with compromised immune systems. Since these are the very groups most at risk for severe disease or death if they contract th ...  Show more

Data is the lifeblood of public health, and has been since the beginning of the field. But essential data gathering for the COVID pandemic was hindered by a couple of of underlying weakness in the US public health apparatus. We have a fractured system where the power lies in U ...

State and local pandemic responses are scattershot; a national effort is all but nonexistent. A creeping sense of fatalism makes for peril far beyond the country’s borders. Aggregate American jobs numbers are promising, but our correspondent digs deeper to find <a href="https://w ...  Show more

In early February 2025, something strange started happening across US government websites. Decades of data began disappearing from webpages for agencies such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Census Bureau. In many cases ...  Show more

The United States has 4% of the world’s population but 16% of COVID-19 deaths. This series investigates the failures by federal agencies that led to over 1 million Americans dying from COVID-19 and what that tells us about the nation’s ability to fight the next pandemic. Epide ...