As many as 29 people from the Philippines or with Filipino heritage including a Grenfell Tower fire survivor are believed to have died from Covid-19, as the pandemic exerts a heavy toll on a community that helps form the backbone to Britains healthcare sector.
Some 18 of those who have lost their lives worked in the health sector, in roles including NHS nurses and porters, healthcare assistants and care home staff. A number of others are critically ill in intensive care.
Among members of the Filipino community to have died is Virgilio Larry Castro, 63, who survived the Grenfell Tower fire less than three years ago, the Guardian has learned. He died on 9 April.
Castro, who had worked as a maintenance supervisor and at a bar, initially tried to fight the blaze and escaped in shorts and a T-shirt. He told the inquiry that he often thought about it and had suffered breathing problems since.
In evidence to the inquiry into the fire in which 72 people died, Castro told how he had lost many people he knew. The Grenfell Tower fire is such a tragedy; it shouldnt have been allowed to happen and I want the public inquiry to ensure it can never happen again, said Castro, whose daughter is a doctor.
Castro lived with his family on the 17th floor of the 24-storey tower for 26 years. He and his wife Lina, who died a decade ago, moved into the tower in April 1991 just after their daughter, Christabel, was born. She would go on to become a doctor, and was not at the tower on the night of the fire in June 2017.
I have watched my daughter grow up in that flat and have many fond memories of living there as a family, he told the inquiry. He said that he had cried at a CCTV image, provided by police, of him leaving the tower in only a white T-shirt and yellow shorts. I still find it difficult to look at that photograph.
The deaths of at least 21 Filipinos in the UK have been confirmed by the Guardian where Covid-19 was contracted or where they had been suffering from symptoms prior to death. A further eight people are on a list which community leaders have been compiling, where Covid-19 is believed to have been a factor.
Echoing concern elsewhere, there is anger that Filipino workers are among those bearing the brunt of a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers.
There are about 200,000 Filipinos in the UK, and 18,500 of them in the NHS according to House of Commons library data from 2019, making them the most numerous nationality working in the health service after Britons and Indians.
It is breaking our hearts because we are talking about friends, family and close colleagues, said Emily Barrameda of United Filipino Global (UFG), an organisation which represents Filipino overseas workers.
Like so many others, we dont know what is happening and its hard in some cases not to believe that there is also some discrimination. In some hospitals where there is a British person who is positive with Covid-19 and a Filipino one it seems that they will choose to prioritise the British one.
She referred to the death of a friend, Amor Padilla Gatinao, 50, who worked as a nurse at St Charles hospital, in west London, and died after falling ill on Mothers Day. The nurses husband has reportedly told how an ambulance crew refused to take her to hospital nine days before she died of coronavirus, after he took her there himself by car.
Other Filipinos who have died include John Alagos, 23, who become the third UK nurse to die after caring for coronavirus patients and is believed to have become the youngest British medic to succumb to the virus.
His mother, Gina Gustilo, has spoken of how her son fell ill at Watford general hospital after a 12-hour shift.
Other victims included Oscar King Jr and Elbert Rico, two porters at Oxfords John Radcliffe hospital who died last weekend weekend. King Jr, who was described as a devoted father to his 10-year-old daughter, died on Saturday an hour after being brought to hospital after isolating at home with symptoms consistent with the virus. King Jrs wife, Twilight, has been recovering after she was also taken to hospital.
The partner of Leilani Medel, 41, a nurse in Bridgend, South Wales, who died on 10 April has also been treated after being brought to hospital with severe symptoms of the virus. Medel had worked in care homes and hospitals for more than 10 years.
Among others were Linette Cruz, a senior head nurse at the Brynteg dental practice in Sketty, Swansea. The married mother of one was described by colleagues as a woman who brought love, light and joy to everyone she met.
Cruz, who trained in the Philippines and came to the UK several years ago, died on 14 April after being treated for coronavirus in the intensive care unit at Morriston hospital in Swansea.
Elvira Bucu, an NHS care worker and mother of three whose husband was also infected, died on 3 April. Leilani Dayrit, a clinical nurse sister at the hospital of St Cross in Rugby, died of suspected Covid-19 on 7 April.
Members of the community who were not healthcare workers include Arnel Ganias, a courtesy driver at Heathrow airport, and Romeo Castillo Jr, 34. Known to friends as Romy, he died after contracting Covid-19 on a work trip to Mauritius, which he had won as a reward for his good work.
Antonio Lagdameo, the Philippine ambassador to the UK, said: We are are deeply saddened by reports of Filipino staff at the NHS who are either infected by Covid-19 or have succumbed to the disease. Our thoughts are with their loved ones.
Filipino health workers have served tirelessly and courageously at the frontlines of the war against this pandemic, and their contribution to the ongoing effort to save lives is nothing but immense.
The escalation of confirmed Covid-19 cases and Covid-19-related deaths point out the undeniable truth that this disease is an existential threat even to the most healthy and fit among us. I urge everyone to follow government advice, stay home and help protect the NHS heroes who put their lives on the line for all of us.
OAKLAND, Calif. In one of the most far-ranging attempts to halt the spread of the coronavirus, Apple and Google said they were building software into smartphones that would tell people if they were recently in contact with someone who was infected with it.
The technology giants said they were teaming up to release the tool within several months, building it into the operating systems of the billions of iPhones and Android devices around the world. That would enable the smartphones to constantly log other devices they come near, enabling what is known as contact tracing of the disease. People would opt in to use the tool and voluntarily report if they became infected.
The unlikely partnership between Google and Apple, fierce rivals who rarely pass up an opportunity to criticize each other, underscores the seriousness of the health crisis and the power of the two companies whose software runs almost every smartphone in the world. Apple and Google said their joint effort came together in just the last two weeks.
Their work could prove to be significant in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Public-health authorities have said that improved tracking of infected people and their contacts could slow the pandemic, especially at the start of an outbreak, and such measures have been effective in places like South Korea that also conducted mass virus testing.
Yet two of the worlds largest tech companies harnessing virtually all of the smartphones on the planet to trace peoples connections raises questions about the reach these behemoths have into individuals lives and society.
It could be a useful tool but it raises privacy issues, said Dr. Mike Reid, an assistant professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, who is helping San Francisco officials with contact tracing. Its not going to be the sole solution, but as part of a robust sophisticated response, it has a role to play.
Timothy D. Cook, Apples chief executive, said on Twitter that the tool would help curb the viruss spread in a way that also respects transparency & consent. Sundar Pichai, Googles chief, also posted on Twitter that the tool has strong controls and protections for user privacy.
With the tool, people infected with the coronavirus would notify a public health app that they have it, which would then alert phones that had recently come into proximity with that persons device. The companies would need to get public-health authorities to agree to link their app to the tool.
President Trump said on Friday that his administration planned to look at the tool.
Its very new, new technology. Its very interesting, he said. But a lot of people worry about it in terms of a persons freedom.
Privacy is a concern given that Google, in particular, has a checkered history of collecting peoples data for its online advertising business. The internet search company came under fire in 2018 after it said that disabling peoples location history on Android phones would not stop it from collecting location data.
Apple, which has been one of the biggest critics of Googles collection of user data, has not built a significant business around using data to sell online advertising. Still, the company has access to a wealth of information about its users, from their location to their health.
There are already third-party tools for contact tracing, including from public health authorities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In March, the government of Singapore introduced a similar coronavirus contact-tracing app, called TraceTogether, that detects mobile phones that are nearby.
But given the number of iPhones and Android devices in use worldwide, Apple and Google said they were hoping to make tracing efforts by public health authorities more effective by reaching more people. They also said they would provide their underlying technology to the third-party apps to make them more reliable.
Daniel Weitzner, a principal research scientist at M.I.T.s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and who was one of those behind the schools contract tracing app, said Google and Apples partnership will help health officials save time and resources in developing their own applications to track the virus spread.
One challenge for third-party apps is that they must run constantly 24 hours a day, seven days a week to be effective. Google said some Android smartphone manufacturers shut down those applications to save battery life.
Apple and Google said their tool would also constantly run in the background if people opt to use it, logging nearby devices through the short-range wireless technology Bluetooth. But it would eat up less battery life and be more reliable than third-party apps, they said.
Once someone reports his or her infection to a public-health app, the tool will send the phones so-called broadcast beacons, or anonymous identifiers connected to the device, to central computer servers.
Other phones will constantly check those servers for the broadcast beacons of devices they had come near in the past 14 days. If there is a match, those people will receive an alert that they had likely come into contact with an infected person.
Apple and Google said they were discussing how much information to include in those alerts with health officials, aiming to strike a balance between being helpful while also protecting the privacy of those who have the coronavirus.
This data could empower members of the general population to make informed decisions about their own health in terms of self-quarantining, said Dr. Reid. But it doesnt replace the public health imperative that we scale up contact tracing in the public health departments around the world.
Apple and Google said they would make the tools underlying technology available to third-party apps by mid-May and publicly release the tool in the coming months. The companies said the tool would not collect devices locations it only tracked proximity to other devices and would keep people anonymous in the central servers.
Google and Apples approach aims to resolve one of the hurdles facing government and private efforts to create contact tracing applications: a lack of common technical standards. The European Commission, the executive of the 27-nation bloc, said on Wednesday that a fragmented and uncoordinated approach risks hampering the effectiveness of such apps.
Ashkan Soltani, an independent cybersecurity researcher, cautioned that surveillance tools that start as voluntary often become required through public policy decisions. China, for instance, has introduced a color-coded coronavirus surveillance app that automatically decides whether someone must stay at home or may go outside and use public transportation.
The danger is, as you roll out these voluntary solutions and they gain adoption, its more likely that they are going to become compulsory, said Mr. Soltani, a former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission.
Mr. Soltani said the tool could also be a way for the tech companies to pre-empt efforts by governments in the United States or elsewhere to mandate a more invasive collection of data to combat the pandemic.
The tool permits them to address the administrations ask to do something while also relieving them of the responsibility of building the app and collecting the data themselves, he said.
Natasha Singer and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries contributed reporting from New York, Adam Satariano contributed reporting from London and David McCabe from Washington.
Here's what we know about where possible coronavirus treatments, vaccines and antibody tests stand.
Antibody tests are often cited as key to returning to normal, and they would verify whether a patient had already been infected with the coronavirus and developed antibodies to it. That could mean the patient is immune or protected from being re-infected by the coronavirus, but it's unclear how certain that is.
There are currently four antibody tests approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, meaning the agency has reviewed data showing those tests work. The FDA approved one of these tests Thursday and two of them Wednesday.
In a controversial move, the FDA is allowing other companies to sell their tests without supply data that show they work.
After receiving complaints, the National Cancer Institute, a part of the National Institute of Health, is working to validate some antibody tests in hopes of getting better quality tests on the market.
Possible treatments
Right now there is no specific treatment for Covid-19. And while doctors are trying out various drugs and procedures, it's still not known if they'll work.
You've likely heard about hydroxychloroquine, a drug that's already approved and used to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
President Donald Trump has often touted hydroxychloroquine as a possible treatment, calling it a "game changer."
Results from most clinical trials are not expected until June or July.
Scientists are also looking at remdesivir, an experimental drug designed to treat Ebola. Several trials are underway in the US and worldwide.
Another possible treatment is convalescent plasma, which involves injecting blood products that contain antibodies from recovered Covid-19 patients into people who are still infected.
The hope is that the antibodies from the patients who've successfully recovered from Covid-19 will help the patients who are currently fighting off the disease.
It's an old concept, and it hasn't always been successful -- it was tried with Ebola patients, but it didn't work -- but several trials are underway in New York and Orange County, California.
Vaccines
Vaccines are seen as the holy grail. If the US population can be successfully vaccinated for the coronavirus, that would make it easier for the country to reopen.
Kizzmekia Corbett, NIH's lead scientist for coronavirus vaccine research, told CNN that a vaccine could be ready in the fall for "emergency use."
"That would be for healthcare workers and people who might be in constant contact and risk of being exposed over and over," she said. "And then for the general population our target goal is for next spring," she added, assuming all goes well.
Other researchers are skeptical, saying the type of vaccine she's referring to has not been successful in humans.
Several companies are testing vaccines, but it will take months -- or more likely at least a year -- to complete those trials.
The US biotech firm Moderna has begun enrolling patients with Kaiser Permanente and Emory University.
Johnson & Johnson, which plans to start human testing by September with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
Inovio Pharmaceuticals is testing its first human subjects this week, while Novovax plans to start human testing in mid-May.
Pfizer is also working on a vaccine with BioNTech.
CanSino Biological Inc. and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology have a vaccine in clinical evaluation.
But again, researchers are skeptical, saying there are likely other reasons for reports of low coronavirus rates in those countries.
The government has announced a new vaccines taskforce to help the development of a vaccine for Covid-19 and ensure its rapid production and rollout if one arrives.
The business secretary, Alok Sharma, also gave details of cash grants for work into both vaccines and potential treatments. Among the projects receiving cash is one led by Public Health England (PHE), which hopes to develop an antibody drug, something that has the potential to work as both a prophylactic and a treatment for those infected.
A potential antibody drug could be given as a regular infusion to healthcare workers and other high-risk groups, and would provide protection perhaps over a few weeks or months. It could also be used as a treatment to help people fight off the virus when infected.
Sharmas announcement, at the daily Downing Street press briefing, focused mainly on the idea of the vaccines taskforce, combining government and industry, which would both coordinate research efforts to develop a vaccine and then seek to ensure it could be provided to people as soon as possible.
Led by Sir Patrick Vallance, the governments chief scientific adviser, and Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, the taskforce will also include representatives from the drugs firm AstraZeneca and the Wellcome Trust medical foundation.
UK scientists are working as fast as they can to find a vaccine that fights coronavirus, saving and protecting peoples lives. We stand firmly behind them in their efforts, Sharma said.
The vaccine taskforce is key to coordinating efforts to rapidly accelerate the development and manufacture of a potential new vaccine, so we can make sure it is widely available to patients as soon as possible.
The taskforce will have the brief of first helping provide research groups and industry with support and resources to help develop a vaccine, and then when one arises, to boost manufacturing, if needed reviewing regulations to ensure it can be provided widely and at speed.
The consensus among pandemic experts is that the mass use of a reliable vaccine against coronavirus is likely to be the only way governments around the world can fully ease distancing measures.
Work is taking place in numerous countries, with some human trials already starting. Vallance has maintained that a year to 18 months is a reasonable timeframe for a vaccine to be widely available.
Some teams are aiming to move faster than this. Prof Adrian Hill, director of the University of Oxfords Jenner Institute, whose vaccine candidate is expected to enter human trials this month, said the team hoped to be able to confirm efficacy by September and is already scaling up manufacturing. The aim is to have at least a million doses [available] by around about September and move even faster from there, he said.
The government has already announced 250m in funding towards worldwide efforts to develop a vaccine, with 10.5m allocated to six projects in March. On Friday, another 14m was allocated to 21 new projects, based on both vaccines and treatments.
Among these is funding for the possible new antibody drug, being developed by PHE, billed as intended to offer protection against infection and disease progression of coronavirus.
A 3.2m grant will go to a study called Virus Watch, conducted by University College London, that will test 10,000 participants every time they report any symptoms that could be linked to Covid-19 and trace participants movements using mobile apps. Other research funded will look at the impact of Covid-19 on pregnancy outcomes and track the rates of infection, through antibody tests, in children and teenagers, who have made up only a tiny fraction of confirmed cases.
There has been considerable focus on drugs usually used to treat malaria as a possible way to alleviate coronavirus symptoms. Some of the grant money will go to a clinical trial led by Oxford University in which more than 3,000 patients over the age of 65 presenting at GP surgeries will be given the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to see whether it reduces the need for them to go to hospital or speeds up recovery.
Hydroxychloroquine, also known by its brand name, Plaquenil, is a drug used to treat malaria. It is a less toxic version of chloroquine, another malaria drug, which itself is related to quinine, an ingredient in tonic water.
A widely publicized study in France where 40 coronavirus patients were given hydroxychloroquine, with more than half experiencing the clearing of their airways within three to six days has led to it being touted in some quarters as a potential cure for Covid-19. This apparent improvement is important as it would curtail the timeframe in which infected people could spread Covid-19 to others.
However, experts have warned that the study is small and lacks sufficient rigour to be classed as evidence of a potential treatment. The French study followed work by Chinese researchers which suggested that hydroxychloroquine can slow infections by blocking the virus behind Covid-19 from entering cells in the body. But more recent, albeit small-scale, research from China has shown that patients who were treated with the drugs fought off coronavirus no more quickly than those who didnt get it. Indeed, one patient given hydroxychloroquine severely worsened in condition while four patients on the medicine developed signs of liver damage and experienced diarrhoea.
Regardless of these findings, any drug being used for a certain purpose before full clinical trials are completed is, by definition, untested and unproven. Its too early to say if hydroxychloroquine can have a major benefit or not. The European Medicines Agency, an agency of the EU, has said hydroxychloroquine should not be taken by coronavirus patients except for clinical trials or emergency use programs.
Oliver Milman
Vallance said the taskforce would ensure that any potential coronavirus vaccine, when available, can be produced quickly and at scale so it can be made available to the public as quickly as possible.
"So I hope, when I'm doing interviews, when people are hearing my story, what I really hope is that it inspires them to think beyond themselves. Its natural, when we're in crisis, to go inward to protect ourselves and to protect our family. But I really hope that this can inspire people to step outside of that and to think bigger. And I hope, certainly more broadly, that this is a wake-up call for our country to recognize the inequality that has always been there and to take some important steps to meet everybody's basic human needs: universal healthcare, paid sick time, a livable minimum wage, I could go on"
Provided by Refinery29
As soon as it became clear how quickly coronavirus was spreading across the world, and how deadly it was, the race for the vaccine was on. As of now, there are as many as 115 vaccine programs in the works, reports the journal Science Translational Medicine. One of the first in the world to be tested on humans was created by Moderna, Inc, a biotech company in Massachusetts. One month ago, that vaccine was given to the first set of human subjects as part of a safety trial.
The first person to receive the Moderna coronavirus vaccine was Jennifer Haller of Seattle; she spoke to Refinery29 the day after getting the shot. Around a month later, on April 14, she received the second and final dose. We took the opportunity to check in with her. She answered our questions about what symptoms she experienced as a result of the vaccine, and how shes handling all the attention she received after news of her participation in the Moderna trial went public.
This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.
Refinery29: What has the last month been like?
Jennifer Haller: As far as side effects from the vaccine, Ive had basically, zero. My arm was sore the day after the first shot, and my arm is sore again today after getting the second shot. But Ive experienced no other side effects, which has been great. Ive just been living my life as normal as possible, since Im under the same restrictions as everybody else no special restrictions from participating in the trial.
Did you have to go in for any blood tests or anything in the interim between these two vaccines?
Yes. After the first one, I went back one week later for a blood draw. That one was to just check my overall health and make sure that I was doing well. Two weeks after the first vaccination, I went in for another blood draw. That one was to check my overall health as well, but also to check for any antibodies that may have been produced. [Antibodies would indicate an immune response to the vaccine, which would be a positive sign.]
As of now, even the study doctors dont know what the results of the antibody production was, so neither do I. My understanding is similar, that this first phase is just to determine safety. And in the second phases theyll focus more on efficacy. I dont believe I will know any results until they are published publicly.
I got the second dose of the vaccine yesterday, and Ill go through a repeat of four weeks ago: I keep a log for the next eight days of my temperature and any symptoms. There will be a phone call today and tomorrow to just do a check in, get some vitals from me over the phone. In a week, Ill go back for a blood draw, and in two weeks, Ill go back for a second blood draw.
Then from there, over the next 12 months Ill have three more visits for blood draws.
But Im done there are no more doses of the vaccine.
Has being part of the trial affected your day-to-day at all? Does it feel different knowing that youve taken part in this trial or not really?
No, I dont presume any kind of inoculation or anything from the trial. Im conducting myself the same as if I wasnt in the trial, just taking the same precautions as everyone else.
Im based in New York City, where the vibe is still pretty anxious. What is it like in your area, in Seattle? Are you still pretty locked down?
Yes. In the last week or so, weve seen that our state has generally done a good job on the stay-at-home mandate. We leveled off on new cases. We dismantled our field hospital last week, and sent it back to the federal government for them to redeploy and returned a bunch of ventilators.
So, our state is feeling cautiously optimistic about the success of the stay-at-home order. But were certainly not out of the woods. I dont think were near lifting the stay-at-home order. Were feeling pretty lucky, especially seeing whats happening in areas of our country that didnt take it as serious.
After the first time we spoke, I noticed people reacted almost with a sense of relief to be hearing something positive. And not just that they were testing a vaccine, but that you and the other participants in the trial had volunteered and were taking this step to help the greater community. What was it like to be faced with that kind of overwhelmingly positive reaction when the news of you being part of the vaccine trial began getting around?
Yeah, I think a big piece of me wanting to do this is because I have a lot of privilege: I have a secure job, friends and family nearby, plenty in savings. Being part of a trial like this is something that a lot of people cant do because theyre under so many more stressors, and have so many more immediate concerns. So it was important to me to find something to do that others necessarily couldnt. By that I mean to use my privilege to do something a little more risky than what others could do.
And all the praise was difficult at first I did receive a ton of love and thanks and prayers from thousands of people on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and all of that. It was very overwhelming and I didnt know what to do with that. It didnt feel right to me to have all this praise because Im just one of many that are participating in a vaccine trial. Im just one small piece of this effort.
So I didnt know what to do with all that. And I talked to a trusted advisor, a spiritual leader, that Ive turned to in the past. She said, If somebody criticizes you or is mean to you, its because theyre projecting or they have something else going on in their life. So you dont take that personally. And she helped me understand that this is just the flip side of that. That praise is also not to be taken personally, and its not about me. Its about people looking for hope and some kind of positive future. And so that really helped me release and pass on the positive messages I was receiving.
And I wanted to pass it on to those who were actually putting their lives on the line here. The ones who are working to feed their family and keep their housing.People that are working minimum wage jobs, working on the farms or driving trucks or cleaning hospitals all those who are now termed essential workers. Those are the real people that are making sacrifices and going through some scary times.
Have there been any stories or news youve heard thats touched you in the same way that people were being touched by your story? Has there been anything youve heard that youve just been like, Wow, I cant believe someones doing that or people are doing that?
I dont have specific stories, but I am thinking a lot about undocumented workers right now. My birthday was just last week and for the past couple of years Ive done a fundraiser on Facebook. This year I picked a non-profit to support undocumented workers. Thats a group that has completely fallen through the cracks and received zero help from the federal government, certainly.
They have the hardest jobs in our country, I believe, and critical jobs. And so that was something that was important to me to support and to recognize.
I dont know how to say it, but I know my family and my neighbors are going to look back on this time and be like, Wow, wasnt that magical? We got to slow down. We got to spend some quality time with our family. We got to connect. And Im really kind of embarrassed by that, because half of our country, even prior to this crisis, was living paycheck to paycheck.
So I hope, when Im doing interviews, when people are hearing my story, what I really hope is that it inspires them to think beyond themselves. Its natural, when were in crisis, to go inward to protect ourselves and to protect our family. But I really hope that this can inspire people to step outside of that and to think bigger. And I hope, certainly more broadly, that this is a wake-up call for our country to recognize the inequality that has always been there and to take some important steps to meet everybodys basic human needs: universal healthcare, paid sick time, a livable minimum wage, I could go on
COVID-19 has been declared a global pandemic. Go to the CDC website for the latest information on symptoms, prevention, and other resources.
Some supporters of President Donald Trump have latched onto a new villain to attack during the COVID-19 pandemic: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
AsThe Daily Beast'sWill Sommer reports, Trump-loving social media personalities Diamond & Silk this week uncorked a bizarre conspiratorial rant about Gates working to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus to use unsuspecting Americans as "guinea pigs" in a plan to "rule the world with vaccines."
And Diamond & Silk are far from their alone in their suspicions about Gates Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson said he believes that Gates is going to use the vaccine to "track" people, while Trump ally and convicted felon Roger Stone has flat-out said that Gates will use the vaccine to "microchip" people.
Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of fact-checking site Truth or Fiction, tells Sommer that Bill Gates is rapidly becoming the right's biggest bogeyman after financier George Soros.
"These are all just recirculated, warmed-over storiesthey're just switching the names around," she said. "George Soros was the bogeyman, now it's Bill Gates."
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Binkowski also fears that these conspiracy theories will make millions of Americans reluctant to take a COVID-19 vaccine when one is eventually developed, which will further put people's lives in danger.
As companies race against time to bring to market a vaccine for the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, three contenders have emerged asfrontrunners, having advanced their candidates into the clinics.
Moderna Inc (NASDAQ: MRNA), Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ: INO) and CanSino Biological Inc./Beijing Institute of Biotechnology are those that have moved out of the crowd, even as the rest are either testing vaccines in labs,in vitro, or in animals in the preclinical stage.
Here's brief on the vaccine programs:
Moderna
Name of the vaccine candidate: mRNA-1273
Type: messenger RNA vaccine
Status: enrollment ongoing inPhase 1 study
Moderna is working on mRNA-1273 in collaboration with the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The vaccine encodes a prefusion-stabilized form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
The company said it took just 25 days to gofrom sequence selection to manufacturing of the vaccine, and 63 days from sequence selection to start of the Phase 1 trial.
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Source: Moderna
Study participants will receive two doses of the vaccine via intramuscular injection in the upper arm about 28 days apart, with dosages of 25 mcg, or 100 mcg or 250 mcg.
The company's timeline suggests a commercial launch timeline of 12-18 months. Under emergency use, the vaccine could be available to some people and health care workers in the fall of 2020.
See also: Gilead Analysts Break Down Remdesivir Data Readout From Compassionate Use
Inovio
Name of the vaccine candidate: INO-4800
Type: DNA vaccine
Status: enrollment and dosing ongoing in Phase 1 study
Inovio said it designed the vaccine within three hours of the release of the virus genomeusing its P2 MERS candidate. The program is in part funded by Coalition For Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Inovio said April 6 the FDA accepted its IND for INO-4800, signaling the regulatory agency's nod for undertaking clinical trials.
The company plans to enroll 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City. To assessinitial immune responses and safety, each participant is to receive two doses of the vaccine candidate four weeks apart.
Inovio also said it has manufactured thousands of doses to support the ongoing Phase 1 study as well as aplanned Phase 2 study. The company said is also working to scale up manufacturing so that it has about 1 million doses of INO-4800 available by year's end for additional trials and emergency use.
CanSino Biological Inc./Beijing Institute of Biotechnology
Name of the vaccine candidate: Ad5-nCoV
Type: Adenovirus Type 5 Vector (non-replicating vector type)
Status: Phase 1/2 studies
The vaccine candidate is based on the viral vector vaccine technology platform previously used to develop an Ebola vaccine.
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) and Arcturus Therapeutics Ltd (NASDAQ: ARCT) shared atimeline for their jointly developed mRNA vaccine last week. The companies are targeting an end-of-April schedule for starting human trials.
Related Link: GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Collaborate On COVID-19 Vaccine Development: What You Should Know
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2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
So far, Australia has been doing pretty well in the fight against COVID-19. Using a combination of social distancing, tight travel restrictions and contact tracing, the country has kept its death toll under 100 people and seems to be leveling off its new cases. Its even managed to avoid closing schools. But despite the relatively minor impact the novel coronavirus has had on life in Australia, medical workers are still running low on masks, gloves and gowns.
Suddenly it feels like a house of cards, said Simon Quilty, senior staff specialist at Alice Springs Hospital in Australias Northern Territory. We havent quite [run out of personal protective equipment], but weve come very close to it. We dont even have the pandemic. If we do get a pandemic, were fucked.
All around the world, whether hard-hit by the virus or not, countries are running low on crucial supplies. And while shortages are largely confined to disposable medical items for now personal protective equipment (PPE), swabs, chemicals used for COVID-19 testing experts say other shortages are likely. The spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is affecting the way we manufacture all sorts of products, and the way we get those products to where theyre needed. People who study these supply chains have seen problems coming for years. Now theyre scrambling to get ahead of the pandemic, before it ends up affecting even our ability to produce the vaccines we hope will stop the disease in its tracks.
Up until a few weeks ago, I knew very little about the supply chain, said Megan Ranney, a professor of emergency medicine at Brown University. It always just worked. But Ive learned a bunch, and its more fragile than we ever thought possible. COVID-19 has forced her and lots of other hospitalists around the country to become supply chain experts on the fly.
A supply chain is a fancy term to describe how products get made and moved all around the globe. Its a simple concept, but not a simple process. Supply chains arent a conveyor belt theyre a ballet. And there are many, many ways this spectacular show can fall flat on its face. The production of a single item often involves multiple factories in several different countries and depends on speedy, reliable international shipping to get each piece to the right place at the right time and then to the buyers exactly when they need it.
In fact, experts in both manufacturing and medicine have spent years warning of the risks a pandemic or another major disaster could cause to supply chains. In 2011, for instance, Quilty documented that the hospital where he worked at the time had less than a 30 days supply of penicillin and many other crucial pharmaceutical drugs. A 2017 paper by scientists with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pointed out that PPE supplies had run into problems during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic and the 2014 Ebola virus epidemic, and warned that the system wasnt prepared to handle a sudden increase in demand. Multiple reports have been published on how avian flu pandemics could disrupt everything from computer manufacturing to the global food supply.
PPE is the canary in the coal mine, Ranney said. She, and other experts, told me that right now, thats the main place were seeing supply chains break down. But those same issues apply to damn near everything else we make and sell. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more products will be affected.
There are three big problems with the global supply chains, experts told me. First, the push toward lowest-cost production means a lot of cheap goods and cheap components of more valuable goods are made in places with low-cost labor. When those countries experience a pandemic outbreak or when a pandemic interrupts transport from those countries it creates a bottleneck.
Around half the worlds face masks came from China before the novel coronavirus pandemic began. The virus interrupted manufacturing there early on, Ranney said. Now, China can make masks again, but demand has jumped all over the world, and there are shipping delays. Several companies have told her to expect deliveries to take three or four weeks. In the meantime, shes been left to sort through sketchy, back-alley PPE dealers, some of whom produce low-quality masks that either fall apart or dont filter properly on testing. Other would-be suppliers have turned out to be basically the high-stakes equivalent of one of those youve inherited $3,000,000! email scams.
American manufacturing companies are starting to switch over production lines to make masks and other protective equipment here but thats not a quick process and presents its own complications. For example, the nonwoven textiles that N95 respirator masks use to filter out viruses have to be made on special machines. There are only a few of those machines in the whole world, said Julie Swann, professor of industrial and systems engineering at North Carolina State University. And you cant just go buy a new one off the shelf. Her university is producing some of this material now. But not at the volume youd make at a large manufacturer, she said.
The second problem is that a global pandemic causes sudden spikes in demand for certain products. Production is designed for steady demand with predictable increases and decreases. A big, unforeseen event, like a pandemic, throws everything out of whack, said Adegoke Oke, professor of supply chain management at Arizona State Universitys school of business. Take our toilet paper woes. That supply chain didnt account for sudden, nationwide increases in having to pee at home. It also didnt anticipate every office in the nation suddenly holding it, indefinitely. You might think that the demand in one sector could be met by the excess from the other, but it doesnt work that way. The type of toilet paper you use in the office the big rolls are totally different from what you use at home, Oke said. They require different supply chains and different manufacturing lines.
And when manufacturing capacity cant keep up with a sudden surge in demand, there are no emergency backup supply closets to raid. Thats because of a popular and widespread business practice called just in time supply. Essentially, it means that businesses from hospitals to grocery stores keep only a small amount of supplies on hand at any given time enough to get through a couple of weeks or a month. Just-in-time saves money on warehouse storage, energy and staffing, but it works only if the supplies can be produced and delivered when you need them. Its been very successful, Oke said. But at a time like this, the last thing you want is just-in-time.
Finally, supply chains are also getting disrupted in some truly surprising ways ripple effects that spread from one industry to another. Take the transportation of goods. Turns out, its pretty dependent on European tourism 80 percent of the air cargo capacity across the Atlantic comes aboard passenger flights. When those all but stopped, it created a transportation bottleneck for manufacturing, said James Robinson, an independent consultant who spent 30 years working in vaccine manufacturing for companies like Merck. Airlines are turning their empty passenger jets into cargo flights, but that takes retrofitting and time and money and its going to increase the cost of shipping, Robinson said.
Then theres all the food being trashed in response to a pandemic thats cleared grocery shelves nationwide. The same parallel but separate home and business supply chains that affect the toilet paper supply also affect food. What people eat in a restaurant or at school and how much of it they eat isnt the same as what they eat at home. And the farmers who have typically supplied commercial kitchens dont have the sales, marketing, packaging and transport networks in place to get their food where its needed. Fresh vegetables and milk have simply been thrown out. And thats not to mention facilities closing when food industry workers are taken out by illness or migrant farm workers not being able to cross borders at future harvest times things that researchers have long predicted could cause food shortages in the U.S. during a time of pandemic. The food supply could be vulnerable, Swann said. As much as I dont want to scare people.
These supply chain issues can also create a weird sort of feedback loop: The virus increases demand for certain products, which jumbles supply chains for those products, which in turn hampers efforts to use those products to keep the virus in check. And that gives the virus time to beat up the economy even more.
Which is all to say that problems with the PPE supply could be only the beginning. As people like Robinson try to coordinate what will become an international effort to manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine in the months ahead, for example, theyre looking at whats going on with products like PPE knowing that the same things could happen to vaccines.
A vaccine manufacturer like Sanofi might source several thousand ingredients to make a vaccine, Robinson told me. But each material is coming from factories with hundreds of sources, and those sources have sources. Like the connection between holiday travel and international shipping, supply chains for vaccines can end in unexpected places like a Chilean tree farm.
Robinson is vice chair of the scientific advisory committee for the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an international organization that helps coordinate funding and research for vaccines against emerging infectious diseases. CEPI is involved in the development of 10 different coronavirus vaccines, and Robinson expects at least three of those will eventually make it to widespread use. One of these vaccines, though, uses an adjuvant a substance to help strengthen the bodys immune response to a vaccine that contains an oil extracted from the Quillaja saponaria Molina tree, common to Peru, Chile and Bolivia. The bark is harvested only between November and January each year, so this years harvest didnt take the new coronavirus into account. Theres only so much of that adjuvant available until next year, Robinson said.
Other expected supply chain issues with vaccines are shaped by years of international trade patterns. For example, doses of vaccines are delivered in glass vials, and theres been a global shortage of glass stretching back to at least 2015. The medical glass industry was just beginning to catch up with increased demand, Robinson said, and now, novel coronavirus vaccines will create additional pressure. Even if the vaccine is loaded into 10-dose vials, thats still hundreds of millions of vials that will be needed, he told me. Janssen, a division of Johnson & Johnson, is developing a novel coronavirus vaccine that Robinson regards as one of the most promising. [Janssen has] already preordered 250 million vials, and that might be all thats out there, he told me. Were trying to procure another 200 million.
What it boils down to is that even the vaccine industry isnt prepared for a sudden increase in demand on this scale which would likely far outpace even the spikes associated with a bad flu season. In 2009, H1N1 rapidly increased manufacturing and got up to 400 million doses in a year. But for a pandemic, we might need billions, Robinson said.
The biggest thing experts are taking away from all this is the weakness of that just-in-time supply chain. In lean terminology, inventory is waste because its supply you arent using, Robinson said. But now, when demand is sharply rising, that inventory would be helpful and so many industries are tied together that when one runs out of supply it affects the ability of other industries to keep functioning.
Production can be ramped up, and it is. But it takes time and investment and its important to remember that those investments are a risk. We might need American-made masks now, but will we keep buying them after the threat of COVID-19 has passed? Or will we revert to just-in-time supply from cheaper factories overseas? History suggests the latter. During previous epidemics of influenza, Texas-based company Prestige Ameritech saw demand soar, Swann told me. But it proved to be a boom and bust. The company invested in new machines to meet demand during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, Swann said. And then they almost went out of business later because [the Texas companys product] was a little more expensive than the ones from China, she said. We need to be willing to pay a little more during times of peace without crisis so we have supply available during crisis.
More than three months had passed since the pathogen appeared on the map in Central China, tearing through Wuhan, an industrial city of 11 million, with alarming speed. Nearly two months had passed since the disease crossed the Pacific Ocean and landed in Washington State, where it quickly began spreading among residents. And a little over a week had passed since the potentially deadly, SARS-like respiratory virus that causes COVID-19 officially touched down outside the nations fourth-largest city, promising to unleash upon Texas the same chaos that was still rippling across Asia and much of Europe.
If there was ever a time to consider every possible solution to the rapidly encroaching pandemic, it was now. But as they sat in a cozy office on the fifth floor of a glassy, twenty-story office building inside Houstons Texas Medical Center on a Friday in mid-March, Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzitwo of the worlds most prominent infectious-disease expertsinstead found themselves desperately, and mostly unsuccessfully, trying to get the worlds attention.
They claimed to have a possible vaccine for COVID-19at least 20,000 doses of which sat untouched in a lab freezer in a strip mall three miles down the road from their office. It was a stockpile of a four-year-old SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) vaccine they had manufactured that, because of the similarities between that disease and this new one (both are coronaviruses), had the potential for cross protection. Nobody could say for certain whether the vaccine was capable of saving lives, but at the very least, the researchers maintained, they should be given an opportunity to find out.
We have the experts in Texas, we have the facilities in Texas, we have the virus here, and we have the clinical people who can do the studies, said Bottazzi, her voice rising in frustration. She is the co-director of Texas Childrens Hospitals Center for Vaccine Development and associate dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. We have the largest medical center in the world, and with all this combined, we should already have had this vaccine in the human population.
Hotez, her co-director and dean of the NSTM, agreed. A normally affable scientist, hed begun to appear angrier than might be expected for a man who favors polka-dot bow ties. Thats because, despite all of his and Bottazzis credentials and the urgency of the moment; despite their appeals to health officials, Congress, and the public; despite their needing only $3 million to pull the vaccine out of the freezer and start testing on people, they were stuck. Rather than leading the fight against COVID-19 from their lab, they were waging a daily battle, in emails and phone calls, against bureaucracy.
In 2016, the researchers said, half a decade after their research began, their team was ready to begin testing their SARS vaccine. Unfortunately, as the researchers soon discovered, the interest in SARS vaccines had dried upand with it any available funding from investors and grants to advance testing to a clinical phase. With the virus no longer circulating (the SARS outbreak occurred in 2003), the interest in that disease had been displaced by more-pressing epidemics like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, and the Zika virus. But in December of last year, when news of a new SARS-like virus began circulating among health officials in China, neither Hotez nor Bottazzi were totally surprised. Weve always thought if there was a SARS and then there was a MERS, maybe theres going to be something else, Bottazzi said.
I havent been getting much sleep, said Hotez, his eyes bleary. Though his own efforts to revive his labs vaccine had so far been frustrating, he maintained optimism about the wider efforts underway to tackle COVID-19 in Texas and beyond. Indeed, his fatigue was typical of that felt by scientists across the state in several other labs at the forefront of the worldwide struggle to contain the disease. Hastened by the viruss genome being published online by Chinese scientists in January, their work has moved at a never-before-seen pace. By the time the first COVID-19 cases were identified in Texas, in February, the combined efforts of the states scientists were already having an unmistakable impact on the race for a breakthrough.
Hotez and Bottazzi in their vaccine-development lab in 2019.
Agapito Sanchez/Baylor College of Medicine
There may be no other institution in the world throwing as much brainpower at COVID-19 as the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB). Over several decades, the Galveston National Laboratory at UTMB, a high-security biocontainment facility, was instrumental in developing the first Ebola vaccine, which was approved by the FDA late last year, as well as testing a Zika vaccine, after the 2015 U.S. outbreak of that virus. The lab also partnered with Hotez and Bottazzi in developing their SARS vaccine.
In February, UTMBs researchers were among the first in the world to receive live coronavirus samples from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Scott C. Weaver, director of the Institute for Human Infections and Immunity and scientific director of the Galveston National Lab, estimated that ten UTMB scientists were actively working with the virus in their labs while several others were studying the virus using data.
Among their most intriguing campaigns is a project using genetically modified mice to trace how coronaviruses replicate and spread through cells. These mice may be key to a lot of research that seeks to understand the disease process and for efforts to create new antiviral drugs, said Weaver.
UTMB has also notched an agreement with Moleculin, a Houston biotech firm that has developed a cancer-fighting drug that may be able to interfere with coronaviruses by slowing down or stopping the replication of virus-infected cells, giving the bodys immune system more time to fight back. UTMB also has an expert exploring which bat viruses require mutation in order to jump to human hosts, offering possible clues about the origins of the latest outbreak.
The research circulated by UTMB, which has allowed its researchers to assist and influence labs all over the world, partly explains why there are already 44 possible COVID-19 vaccine candidates in development, according to the World Health Organization. Back during the Zika crisis, UTMBS research spread across the global medical community rapidly, helping establish new digital trade routes for research. Such collaboration and early dissemination of findings has only increased with the latest outbreak. Coronavirus has created an unprecedented sharing of data, Weaver said. Scientific communication has had some underlying improvements because of these global emergencies.
Two hundred miles northwest of Galveston, the Sauer Laboratory for Structural Biology at UT-Austin, which opened in 2017 and has become a global leader in the use of an imaging technology known as cryo-electronic microscopy, has underscored the importance of investments in advanced research facilities. There, associate professor Jason McLellan made news in February by leading a team that created the first 3D map of the coronavirus spike proteins, the portion of the virus that gains access to human cells, passing along the infection. In recent weeks, McLellans team, which has been researching coronaviruses like SARS and MERS for years, has shared the map with researchers across the world.
With the atomic scale model in place, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health, working with Massachusetts-based biotech firm Moderna Inc., has created an early vaccine that is in the first stage of a clinical trial, which will determine the vaccines safety on several dozen healthy volunteers.
As soon as we knew this was a coronavirus, we felt we had to jump at it, McLellan told UT News, because we could be one of the first ones to get this structure. We knew exactly what mutations to put into this, because weve already shown these mutations work for a bunch of other coronaviruses.
His comments parallel those of Hotez and Bottazzi. As COVID-19 was racing through China in January, a research contact in that country confirmed to the team in Houston that the virus was more closely related to SARS than to MERS. As soon as scientists were able to identify the new coronaviruss genetic code, Bottazzi and Hotez began to explore the similarities between it and the SARS virus in closer detail. What theyve discovered, they said, is promising.
Not only do the two viruses exhibit similar genetic codes and bind to the same receptors on human cells, new lab experiments appear to show that the blood of patients infected by SARS in 2003 can neutralize the virus that causes COVID-19, meaning some people may have an inherent immunity.
Thats when the little light bulb turned on, Bottazzi said. We realized that theyre so similar that maybe our vaccine is something that can be repurposed for this new outbreak. Even though it may not be the perfect vaccine, its certainly sufficiently similar that it will provide some added value in reducing the severity of the disease.
As recently as late January, Hotez himselfa renowned expertunderestimated the severity of COVID-19, telling CBS Austin that I guarantee you, [ the flu ] will kill more Americans by orders of magnitude than what will happen with this n-coronavirus.
For all the good work being done, researchers like Bottazzi and Weaver caution that there is no quick fix for the new coronavirus. Even the most sanguine forecaststhose that assume unpredictable human trials will proceed without a hitchdo not predict a widely used vaccine for the public until well into 2021, at the earliest.
Thats simply how long it takes to develop and test a vaccine, to ensure that its not only effective but safe, in the general population and for groups of patients with specific characteristics. But its also a reminder of the importance of funding research with uncertain tangible results in times when theres no imminent crisis. The neglect of Hotez and Bottazzis SARS vaccine is an example of what can happen when research funding freezes up. When funding continues, so can progress. Three years ago, using a technology developed by microbiologist John Schoggins, of UTSouthwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, researchers began a study that identified a protein produced by the human immune system that can inhibit coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS. With the benefit of multiple grants, Schoggins and his international partners continued their work and determined this February that the same protein inhibits the COVID-19 virus. Any potential for developing this knowledge into a treatment remains years offbut its years closer than it would have been without continued funding.
Hotez and Bottazzi are hopeful that their vaccine will be tested in clinical trials soon. Once they get funding in place, they said, they could begin testing their vaccine in clinical trials on Texans infected with COVID-19 in as little as six weeks, possibly sooner. The idea that just $3 milliona sum of money amounting to a modest NBA contractis all that stands in the way is simply too absurd for them to consider it insurmountable. Im upbeat because, you know, if I focused on my frustration, I could just sit down and cry, said Bottazzi, forcing a smile twelve hours into a day that began, like so many recently, with buzzing text messages from researchers around the world at 3 a.m. I mean, the frustration is invigorating us to do a hundred thousand things at the same time.
As we spoke, Hotezs iPhone began buzzing. On the line: a reporter from 60 Minutes. Normally a great opportunity, as far as interviews spotlighting academic work are concerned, but not the audience the researchers were truly seeking. Who they really wanted to talk to, they said, was somebody in the federal government with the power to fast-track the testing of their vaccine.
Even now, when everything is going crazy and we should have all the resources at our command to move this forward, were still getting these emails that say, Heres a request for applications, Hotez said, referring to government agencies that have asked his team to apply for grant money, a process that would take months at best.
Navigating Americas sprawling, regulation-clogged public health infrastructure is a familiar challenge to researchers, of course. Hotez has recently become more strident in his public remarks. When he testified before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on March 5, he said that by failing to fund vaccine development when the private sector wouldnt, the government had missed a major opportunity to avoid a health crisis. Its tragic that we wont have a vaccine ready for this epidemic, Hotez said then. Practically speaking, well be fighting these outbreaks with one hand tied behind our backs.
In the meantime, he and Bottazzi have pivoted to soliciting the investment they need from regional philanthropists. Bottazzi, who was born in Italy but has spent thirty years in Texas, has shaped her appeal around a theme that Texans are uniquely receptive to: bragging rights. It would be fantastic to say that Houston has one of the first vaccines [for COVID-19] being evaluated, she said. How could that not resonate?
Additional reporting by Jason Heid.
This article originally appeared in the May 2020 issue ofTexas Monthlywith the headline Is a Vaccine Sitting Untested in Texas? Subscribe today.
