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.
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Advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say kids as young as 12 should get booster shots. This endorsement clears the way for the CDC to approve boosters for kids between 12 and 15.
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Those who contracted COVID-19 can end their isolation after five days while continuing to wear a well-fitting mask for an additional five days, according to the agency. -
Cutting the isolation for positive cases to five days could lead to more infections if people don't take masking seriously. A testing requirement would have made the policy safer, experts say. -
The CDC says the change is "motivated by science" showing that it's not necessary to isolate for 10 days. During a surge of a more transmissible variant, is it a good idea to revise the guideline?
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CDC advisers called an emergency meeting to review new data and update their recommendations for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It's been linked to very rare blood clotting that can be fatal.
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Pfizer's analysis shows that the drug is good at keeping people at high risk of COVID-19 from getting worse. The pill is called Paxlovid.
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The first case of the omicron COVID variant has been identified in the U.S. Health officials found it in a traveler who had returned from South Africa just before Thanksgiving.
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The FDA is considering new pills that could treat people in early stages of COVID. Here's what to know about how they work, how effective they are and the impact they could make on the pandemic. -
While China tries to stamp out COVID-19 infections as soon as they pop up, the U.S. has a much more laissez-faire approach of learning to live with the virus, even if it means a thousand deaths a day.
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A scented room spray has caused a cluster of rare bacterial infections in the South and Midwest. 3,900 bottles of the room spray are being recalled, and users are being warned to bleach their sheets.
