The United States is short 4 million housing units, with a particular dearth of starter homes, moderately priced apartments in low-rises, and family-friendly dwellings. Interest rates are high, which has stifled construction and pushed up the cost of mortgages. As a result, more Americans are renting, and roughly half of those households are spending more than a third of their income on shelter. This crisis has many causes: restrictive zoning codes, arcane permitting processes, excessive community input, declining construction productivity, expensive labor, and expensive lumber. And, some say, the aggressive entry of private equity into the housing market. Institutional investors have bought up hundreds of thousands of American homes since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, outbidding families and pushing up rents'a trend lamented by everyone from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to J. D. Vance. Casting private equity as a central villain in the country's real-estate tragedy makes intuitive sense. Who's going to win in a bidding war for a three-bedroom in a suburb of Cincinnati: a single-income family with a scrabbled-together 10 percent down payment or a Wall Street LLC offering cash' Still, housing economists and policy analysts have argued that institutional investors have played at most a bit part. Supply constraints began cropping up on the coasts a generation ago, if not earlier, whereas Wall Street started buying up significant numbers of homes only after the Great Recession and especially after the pandemic. Moreover, even if big investors are purchasing thousands of homes, they don't own significant numbers of homes compared with small-scale landlords and individuals....

On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old British woman became the first person in the world to receive a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. Five years on, more than 13.64 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered. Thanks to the rapid roll-out of these vaccines, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that COVID-19 was no longer a public health emergency in May 2023. The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a turning point for public health ' but the downstream effects haven't all been positive, argues Kristen Panthagani, a physician at Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. In March 2020, Panthagani started a newsletter called You Can Know Things, which originally focused on addressing rumours and myths about COVID-19 vaccines and public-health measures. It now explores how the miscommunication of science and health measures has damaged public trust in vaccines and scientific research. The pandemic was a steep learning curve. Nobody in our generation had ever encountered anything like that before and we must remember what we were dealing with at the time. It's easy to beat ourselves up looking back, but it's important that we look at what we can learn from that time and how we can do better going forwards....

In a major boost to research on long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), the German government has announced that it will provide '500 million (US$582 million) in research funding to support a National Decade Against Post-Infectious Diseases from 2026 to 2036. Germany is one of many countries facing an unprecedented health burden owing to long COVID and other post-infection syndromes since the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost one in five people in a German cohort had long COVID in 20221, and around one in seven people in the United States were affected by long COVID by late 20232. This translates to a significant burden on healthcare and the economy ' the syndrome is estimated to cost the world economy US$1 trillion every year3. 'From many conversations, I know what a great burden these illnesses represent for those affected and their families,' said Dorothee Bar, the German Federal Research Minister, in a press release announcing the funding. 'There are still no simple solutions or therapies for ME/CFS and post-viral autoimmune diseases, and previous scientific studies demonstrate the complexity of the disease mechanisms.'...

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, Vinay Prasad, the FDA's top vaccine regulator, made a claim that shocked the public-health establishment. 'For the first time,' he wrote in a leaked email to his staff, 'the US FDA will acknowledge that COVID-19 vaccines have killed American children.' The agency had supposedly identified at least 10 children who died from getting COVID shots. To say the email was poorly received by vaccine experts and physicians would be an understatement. Prasad's claim provoked a rapid series of rebuttals. A response from 12 former FDA commissioners, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, called Prasad's memo 'a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.' All of the potential vaccine-related deaths reported to the government, presumably including those to which Prasad referred, had already been reviewed by the agency's staff, the former commissioners wrote, and 'different conclusions' had been reached. Elsewhere, doctors and scientists declared that absolutely no evidence links COVID-19 vaccines to death in children; and that in order to suggest otherwise, Prasad and his colleagues had engaged in an 'evidence-manufacturing mission,' a 'dumpster dive' for shoddy data, or'worse'a campaign of lying....