The market’s worst month since March 2020

Plus: Fauci portrait to be displayed at Smithsonian

This month is shaping up to be one of the worst starts to a year ever - at least as far as the stock market is concerned. Driving the drop are some of the pandemic-era’s top stocks, which have begun to fall out of favor with investors. Vaccine maker Moderna, for example, is down nearly 40% from its peak over concerns about its booster shot’s effectiveness against omicron. But the market selloff has been widespread - almost half of the stocks in the S&P 500 are now down more than 10% so far this year. The market has been swinging wildly for a variety of reasons, from the surge in omicron cases to concerns over interest rate hikes as well as ongoing supply chain disruptions. It may be some time before the volatility settles out. 

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More Covid News

A new paper by researchers at the University of Washington has helped elucidate a lot about the structure of the omicron variant, which is information that may be used to develop more effective treatments for it. 

A group of scientists has developed a saliva-based Covid rapid test that appears to be accurate and can be distributed cheaply. 

Households in the U.S. placed about 60 million orders for a total of 240 million at-home Covid tests through the government website launched last week, the White House said on Friday.

That demand may be because many Americans have struggled to access tests - and even when they have them, many are unsure what to do when they test positive, according to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Hong Kong, one of the world's last holdouts of a strict 'zero-Covid' approach, is facing its worst surge in infections in nearly a year due to the omicron variant. 

Holocaust survivors, Jewish advocacy groups and Israel’s Diaspora Affairs Ministry condemned anti-vaccine activists who likened Covid-19 response measures to the Holocaust and compared healthcare officials to Nazis.

What Else We Are Reading

• Where did Omicron come from? Three key theories (Nature)

• ‘There’s no free lunch with drugs’: Janet Woodcock talks Covid monoclonal antibodies and pediatric vaccines (Stat)

• Pope denounces fake news about COVID, vaccines, urges truth (Associated Press)