The unusual cases of pneumonia began to appear in midwinter, in China. The cause, researchers would later learn, was a coronavirus new to science. By March, the infection began to spread to other ...

Effective vaccines dramatically changed the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, preventing illness, reducing disease severity, and saving millions of lives. However, five years later, SARS-CoV-2 is still ...

Have you ever wondered why you have to get a flu shot every year, but some vaccines are one-and-done? It all has to do with how and how fast viruses evolve - and that depends on mutation rates.

Early in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists predicted the SARS-CoV-2 virus would mutate slowly. They were wrong. Hundreds of... What the COVID-19 pandemic tells us about how viruses ...

As evidence mounts that the omicron variant is less deadly than prior COVID-19 strains, one oft-cited explanation is that viruses always evolve to become less virulent over time. The problem, experts ...

During the early stages of a pandemic, viruses tend to evolve in ways that enhance their ability to reproduce and spread, rather than to evade the host’s immune system. The genetics and sex of the ...