224 15 APRIL 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6590 science.org SCIENCE
ILLUSTRATION: MAURICIO ANTON/SCIENCE SOURCEFourth shot helps, for a while
COVID-19 | A fourth dose of Pfizer’s
COVID-19 vaccine offers older people
some protection against serious illness
caused by the Omicron variant of SARS-
CoV-2 but only a brief defense against
being infected at all, researchers report.
In a study published on 5 April in The
New England Journal of Medicine, they
describe data from Israel, where people
60 and older have been offered a sec-
ond booster shot since early January.
The team found that 4 weeks after their
fourth shot of the messenger RNA vac-
cine, recipients were half as likely to be
infected as people who had received only
three shots. The second booster’s protec-
tion against infection, however, had waned
almost completely after 8 weeks. But
recipients were also less than one-third as
likely to suffer from severe COVID-
symptoms 4 weeks after the fourth shot,
a defense that was still strong after
6 weeks, the longest period for which these
data were available. The findings come
as the BA.2 variant of Omicron increases
COVID-19 cases in the United States and
other countries. European health agen-
cies said on 6 April they had observed no
“substantial waning” of protection from
severe COVID-19 in singly boosted people
between ages 60 and 80 who are not
immunocompromised, and so there was
no “imminent need” for them to get
a second booster dose.Professor’s conviction questioned
LEGAL AFFAIRS | Franklin Tao, a chemi-
cal engineer at the University of Kansas,
Lawrence, last week was found guilty of
lying about his ties to a Chinese research
institution—and then received reason to
hope his conviction might be overturned.
Instead of setting a date to sentence
Tao, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson
took the unusual step of asking federal
prosecutors to explain why they believe
Tao intended to defraud two U.S. agen-
cies that had funded his research. In
June 2019, Tao was the first academic
scientist arrested under the U.S. govern-
ment’s China Initiative, although he was
never accused of economic espionage, theNEWS
“
Health equity work to me is not separate work.
It’s one of the major challenges in modern medicine.
”
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a Black physician-researcher, commenting in STAT after being named
editor-in-chief of JAMA, which became embroiled last year in a debate over racism in medicine.A
site in North Dakota has yielded what researchers contend are
the first-known fossils of dinosaurs whose deaths can be directly
linked to an asteroid impact that caused a major extinction
some 66 million years ago. Reported last week, the discoveries,
which have not been peer reviewed, also include pieces of amber
that the team claims preserve shards of the asteroid itself, flungfrom the impact site in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Speaking at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center, paleontologist Robert DePalma, now a
graduate student at the University of Manchester, said his team recov-
ered the amber from sedimentary layers thought to date to minutes or
hours after the impact, found at a fossil-rich site known as Tanis. Inside
the amber, researchers identified the mineralogical signature of a type
of asteroid known as a carbonaceous chondrite—not a comet, as others
have suggested. DePalma also presented two fossils from those layers,
including a pterosaur embryo. The BBC filmed DePalma and colleagues’
work at Tanis for a documentary set to air this week. Some researchers
support DePalma’s claims, whereas others remain skeptical until they
see the evidence for themselves, The New York Times reported.
The fossilized embryo of a pterosaur was found in a deposit from the end of the dinosaurs’ reign.
IN BRIEF
PALEONTOLOGY
Fossils of dinos killed by asteroid unveiled
Edited by
Jeffrey Brainard