This weekend, thousands of Americans will go to movie theaters across the country to watch Christopher Nolan’s newest film, “Oppenheimer.” A star-studded cast of talented actors, including Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt, will bring to the big screen the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant theoretical physicist often called “the father of the atomic bomb.”
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Commentary: America Needs a Manhattan Project to Create a Coronavirus Vaccine
There are only two ways human action can get the SARS-CoV-2 virus permanently behind us and return to normal life: we either develop a knock-out therapy that kills the virus dead in people who have contracted it, like powerful antibiotics do with bacterial infections, or we need to develop herd immunity. Without one of those, we are left hoping that the virus simply burns itself out and disappears. That would be foolish. But a knockout drug—a cure—is highly unlikely. There is no such drug for the seasonal flu or for the rhinoviruses that cause the common cold. So while effective therapies should be a part of the strategy to combat the ill effects of this virus, and sensible precautions like masks can prevent its spread, the only way to permanently defeat it is through herd immunity.
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