As part of a design-based research effort into disrupting the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, we have iteratively designed, developed, and evaluated a learning intervention intended for public audiences. In this paper we describe the design principles we created to guide our applied research into education on the topic of online misinformation.…

We discuss a case study on how misinformation regarding COVID-19 health outcomes can arise due to confounding. Data from the UK on mortality rates suggest that people who have some level of vaccination and contract the Delta variant of COVID are twice as likely to die than those who are unvaccinated. Age, however, a confounding variable, when…

In much of the philosophy of education today, diagnoses of socio-political pathologies underpin visions of a more desirable, democratic future. However, the very philosophical act of making an educational vision responsive to (and dependent on) crises of the times is rarely, if ever, critiqued. On the contrary, a pattern of standardised research…

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the engineering profession with the highest demand in 2021 is biomedical engineering (BME) (BLS, January 2021). Biomedical engineers combine engineering principles with medical and biological sciences to design and create equipment, devices, computer systems, and software used in healthcare (BLS, 2021).…

This tutorial uses publicly available data from drug makers and the Food and Drug Administration to guide learners to estimate the confidence intervals of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy rates with a Bayesian framework. Under the classical approach, there is no probability associated with a parameter, and the meaning of confidence intervals can be…

To reduce the global burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an urgent need to develop a safe vaccine. Vaccine development usually takes many years as it goes through several different phases. To hasten COVID-19 vaccine development, it has been suggested that the final stage could be replaced with a human challenge trial (HCT). Volunteers would…

Purpose: The paper offers commissioners and practitioners insights into how a gender and culturally sensitive COVID-19 vaccination clinic was set up in a local area that was experiencing lower uptake rates. Design/methodology/approach: This paper seeks to examine and share a city-wide approach to improve vaccine uptake in a large metropolitan city…

As COVID-19 cases continue to surge nationwide, the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines cannot come soon enough. Although higher education institutions (HEIs) are not at the top of the priority list to receive scarce early doses of the vaccine, colleges and universities should prepare for how they will handle vaccination on their campuses. In…

Even before the first U.S. death from the mysterious, new coronavirus, Dr. Kizzmekia S. Corbett and Dr. Barney Graham were in a race against the clock. In 2020, they were research team members at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Maryland. This article shares 3 sidebars about Dr. Corbett and vaccine…

A physical chemistry lab for undergraduate students described in this report is about applying kinetic models to analyze the spread of COVID-19 in the United States and obtain the reproduction numbers. The susceptible-infectious-recovery (SIR) model and the SIR-vaccinated (SIRV) model are explained to the students and are used to analyze the…

Hundreds of clinical trials of potential treatments and vaccines for the "coronavirus 19 disease" (COVID-19) have been set up in record time. This is a remarkable reaction to the global pandemic, but the absence of a global coordination of clinical research efforts raises serious ethical concerns. Some COVID-19 patients might carry the…

COVID-19 is a very complex pandemic. It has affected individuals, different countries and regions of the world equally in some senses and differently in other senses. While sub-Saharan Africa has weathered a range of outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, the manner in which the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved necessitates some…

To facilitate people using mathematical reasoning to compare risks associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the COViD-TASER (Creation of Visualizations of Data: The Application of STEM Education Research) research team to create the COVID-19 Relative Risk Tool (RRT). The RRT uses an interactive bar chart…

Over the past year, educators have developed curricula teaching about the COVID-19 pandemic (Reed 2020; Royce 2020; Sadler et al. 2020). Many of these curricula feature computer simulations of epidemic dynamics (Kelter 2020; Sadler et al. 2020). Because an epidemic pattern is an emergent property of interacting human behaviors, it is crucial for…

A trauma-informed organization serving young children and their families experienced differentials in vaccine uptake. Organization leadership viewed this response through a trauma-informed framework that recognizes legacies of scientific racism and attendant distrust of medical information, particularly new treatments. Trauma-informed frameworks…