Mix-and-match vaccines
Scientists are examining whether giving people different types of Covid-19 vaccines for their first and second shots can provide the same or even greater protection than two doses of the same drug. Mixing vaccines is not a new concept: Researchers have investigated the approach for viruses such as HIV and Ebola, but the cost of developing and trialing two separate vaccines can be prohibitively expensive. With Covid, the research opportunities are greater because 13 different vaccines are already in use around the world. In Britain, which has authorized mixing when a matching second shot isn’t available, Oxford University researchers are running a trial pairing AstraZeneca’s and Pfizer’s vaccines. AstraZeneca is also planning trials with Russia’s Sputnik V jab. Mixing and matching could ease global supply bottlenecks, and—by employing two different approaches to generate immunity— might offer enhanced protection against mutant strains. Paul Heath, a member of the Oxford team, tells CBSNews.com that he hopes “the broader immune response that ensues will be sufficient to deal with, for example, the South African variant.”
Erroneous memories are an important area of research because court cases so often rely on witness recollections, reports The Wall Street Journal. The two-part study involved 52 people, average age 22, and their parents. In the first part, the parents were asked whether their child had undergone certain negative experiences growing up, such as being stung by a bee. They were also told to make up two realistic-sounding events that definitely hadn’t happened. For the second part, an interviewer pushed volunteers to recall four “memories” provided by their parents—two real, two false. Overall, participants described having strong memories of 20 percent of fake events mildly suggested to them, and 45 percent for those aggressively suggested. A different interviewer then told the volunteers that some of the memories may have been based on family stories or photos, not personal experience, and that it was possible to have false memories. After that, fewer subjects stuck to false recollections, while faith in their real memories remained intact. Lead author Aileen Oeberst, from the University of Hagen in Germany, says the study shows “it’s possible
to empower people to really identify what might be a false memory.”