Pien Huang
Pien Huang is a health reporter on the Science desk. She was NPR's first Reflect America Fellow, working with shows, desks and podcasts to bring more diverse voices to air and online.
She's a former producer for WBUR/NPR's On Point and was a 2018 Environmental Reporting Fellow with The GroundTruth Project at WCAI in Cape Cod, covering the human impact on climate change. As a freelance audio and digital reporter, Huang's stories on the environment, arts and culture have been featured on NPR, the BBC and PRI's The World.
Huang's experiences span categories and continents. She was executive producer of Data Made to Matter, a podcast from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was also an adjunct instructor in podcasting and audio journalism at Northeastern University. She worked as a project manager for public artist Ralph Helmick to help plan and execute The Founder's Memorial in Abu Dhabi and with Stoltze Design to tell visual stories through graphic design. Huang has traveled with scientists looking for signs of environmental change in Cameroon's frogs, in Panama's plants and in the ocean water off the ice edge of Antarctica. She has a degree in environmental science and public policy from Harvard.
-
A new program will pair tests and COVID pills in pharmacies, solving some of the timing issues with the pills. This is currently limited to pharmacies that have an on-site prescribing clinician.
-
Doctors and health researchers are looking to testing rates, case rates – and intuition – to determine when they'll feel comfortable mingling maskless indoors. -
The federal health agency released new guidance for when Americans need to mask up indoors, saying about 70% of the population lives in a place where it's safe to go mask free.
-
The antiviral pill molnupiravir was authorized and distributed by the government late last year. But it's not doctors' first choice of treatment, except for a narrow slice of patients. -
The antiviral infusion was just revived as an early treatment for COVID patients. But the drug is relatively expensive and hard to administer, relegating it to what some are calling "stopgap" status. -
The antiviral infusion Remdesivir was just revived as an early treatment for COVID. It can be expensive and hard to administer, but is useful when monoclonals and pills are in short supply like now.
-
The FDA curbed the use of two out of three monoclonal antibody treatments. Studies show they're highly unlikely to work against the omicron variant, which is overwhelming hospitals.
-
So far the government has distributed nearly 400,000 doses of Evusheld, a new drug that protects against COVID-19. Some 7 million Americans could benefit from the drug right away. -
Antibody-based drug Evusheld protects immune-suppressed people against COVID-19 for up to six months. The drug is hard to get, and some hospitals are selecting patients by lottery.
-
When he came into office, Biden launched an ambitious seven-point plan for defeating the virus. Here's how experts score his results.
