Good News! Vaccines Galore, a Stowaway Owl, the Prairie & more! Not 1 but 2 vaccines are showing a

Good News! Vaccines Galore, a Stowaway Owl, the Prairie & more!

Not 1 but 2 vaccines are showing amazing promise. We learned about Pfizer last week and this week we heard about Moderna’s vaccine. Both are around 95% effective which is incredibly impressive. Both require 2 shots spaced out by a few weeks but the Moderna one doesn’t need to be kept at super low temperatures which makes distribution easier. The fact that we have 2 potential vaccine candidates just 8 months after the pandemic started is nothing short of miraculous and is a testament to the scientists who are working so hard on this. We owe them, and Dolly Parton, our gratitude and our lives. Literally. Dolly donated $1 million to Nashville’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center which was an early trial site for the Moderna vaccine. So she helped too. Thanks Dolly, and all of the scientists.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has raised about $2 billion from the European Commission, France, Spain, The Republic of Korea, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reserve and access 1 billion doses for low- and middle-income economies. In addition, 94 higher-income countries have officially joined the COVAX Facility, which is a worldwide effort to make sure that the vaccines that are produced are able to be distributed equitably for the most vulnerable groups of people. Not only will it help people in those economies, it’ll also help end the pandemic overall. They still need to raise more but it’s comforting to know that hopefully anyone on the planet who needs a vaccine most will be able to get one.

Though there is a light at the end of the tunnel, we’re not out of the woods yet. Many of us won’t be able to be physically with our families on Thanksgiving to help stop the spread of the virus. So how do you connect with your family during the holiday? Zoom has the answer! All day on Thanksgiving, zoom is lifting their 40 minute time limit on free meetings. You can talk to those relatives in Timbuktu or Chicago or wherever you are for as long as you’d like that day. Thank you zoom for helping us all stay connected.

14,000 acres of land were added to the Montana Wildlife Reserve as part of the American Prairie Reserve. This was the 29th purchase of land for The American Prairie Reserve which is a project with the goal of buying enough privately owned land to connect 2 huge tracts of federally managed land and in doing so, it would create the single largest reserve in the lower 48 states. The reserve now has about 419,000 public and private acres with the goal of eventually acquiring 3.2 million acres. Once that happens, which is basically about 5000 square miles, scientists think that will allow for the grassland reserve to be big enough to preserve the full ecosystem and have enough resources for the wildlife living there. It’s a massive conservation project and one we certainly hope is successful.

And a worker who was helping set up the famous Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York discovered a tiny male saw-whet owl in the tree. They grow only to 8.3 inches. His wife called the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center and they treated him, ensuring he’s healthy. He’s now ready to go back to the wild but with a cool new name: Rockefeller.

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