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Science Friday

Texas Storm, NASA Climate Advisor, Mars Sounds. Feb 26, 2021, Part 1

Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Life Sciences, Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Friday, Science

4.4 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Does A Vaccine Help You If You’ve Already Had COVID-19? Vaccines doses have started to rollout and are getting into the arms of people. We know that if you already had COVID-19, you build up antibodies against the virus. So do the vaccines affect you if you’ve already had COVID-19?  Science writer Roxanne Khamsi talks about recent studies showing that a single dose of vaccine could boost immunity for former COVID-19 patients. She also discusses a study that found over 140,000 viral species in the human gut and Elizabeth Ann, the first cloned black-footed ferret. The Aftermath Of Texas’ Winter Storm While power has been mostly restored, journalists report Texans are now facing water shortages, housing damage, and crop losses.  Texas grocery store shelves have begun filling out again. But for the state’s agriculture industry, recovering from the winter storm will take time, and consumers are likely to feel it in their pockets. The historic freeze and power outages brought agriculture across the state to a halt. Dairy farmers were forced to dump gallons of unpasteurized milk for days as processing plants were left without power. Packing houses also shut down with machinery cut off from electricity and employees unable to make their shifts, said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. Meanwhile, the products on the market were quickly bought up by panicked Texans just before and after the storm. By Monday, Miller said he had seen the price of hamburgers go up to $8.50 a pound, and he expects prices to remain elevated as the food supply chain stabilizes. “It’s not going to be back to normal for at least six to eight weeks,” Miller said. “You’ll still see shortages of some stuff, and even though the shelves may be full, the prices will be high.” Read and listen to the full story in the State of Science series.  Keeping An Eye On The Climate, From Space The climate is changing, and so is the U.S. government’s approach to it. The Biden White House has made the climate crisis a high priority, and has created several new positions focused on climate science. One of those new climate posts can be found at the space agency NASA. While rockets and Mars rovers may seem far removed from climate issues, NASA is actually the lead federal agency in climate observations, with a fleet of satellites tracking everything from sea temperature to CO2 levels to chlorophyll. Ira talks with Gavin Schmidt, who has recently been named in an acting role to be the senior climate advisor for NASA. He’s also director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. They discuss upcoming climate-focused NASA programs, last week’s cold weather in Texas, and the challenge of making better decisions in an uncertain climate future.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, a closer look at the power grid

0:05.7

problems in Texas and a conversation with NASA's senior climate advisor. But first, an FDA

0:12.1

advisory panel is meeting today to consider whether to recommend approval of the Johnson and

0:18.3

Johnson one-shot coronavirus vaccine.

0:23.5

A decision would come over the weekend.

0:28.0

One question you hear over and over again from people about the COVID vaccines.

0:32.6

Do the vaccines work for you if you've already had COVID-19?

0:39.1

There were recent studies looking at that question and here to talk about it is Roxanne Camsey,

0:45.2

a science writer based out of Montreal who has been covering COVID-19. Welcome to Science Friday.

0:50.7

Thank you, Ira. It's great to be here. We know if you had COVID-19, you naturally build up antibodies.

0:56.0

So what would a vaccine do for these people? I mean, what did these recent studies show?

1:02.0

It's a fascinating question. And essentially what the data is showing is, first of all,

1:10.1

people who have had COVID should definitely get the vaccine, but that the second dose might not be as much of an essential as the first one.

1:13.7

So if you've had COVID, your body's already kind of revving up and built some lasting

1:18.8

immunity against the SARS-CoB2 virus.

1:22.2

But what the scientists have done is looked at the blood samples of people before and after

1:26.5

they got their first shot,

1:28.3

and they see that the first shot makes their antibodies increase by like a thousand fold,

1:33.3

but that second shot doesn't really make as much of an increase.

1:37.3

And I can tell you more about the ways in which that first shot helps people that have had COVID already.

1:43.3

Yeah, go ahead.

1:44.4

So it's, I kind of like to think about this, like your immune system is a little bit like

...

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