Google has banned the Infowars Android app from the Google Play store, the company confirmed to Wired on Friday. Google also confirmed the apps removal to The Verge, and we couldnt find the Infowars app in a search on the Play Store this evening.
The app was apparently removed because of a video posted by radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that, according to Wired, disputed the need for social distancing, shelter in place, and quarantine efforts meant to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. Before it was removed, the app had more than 100,000 downloads, Wired reports.
Now more than ever, combating misinformation on the Play Store is a top priority for the team, a Google spokesperson said in a statement given to The Verge. When we find apps that violate Play policy by distributing misleading or harmful information, we remove them from the store. Infowars was not immediately available for comment.
Last week, Alex Jones was ordered by New York Attorney General Letitia James to stop selling Infowars products that were marketed as a treatment or cure for the coronavirus. [Alex Jones] latest mistruths are incredibly dangerous and pose a serious threat to the public health of New Yorkers and individuals across the nation, James said in a statement.
Tech companies have also publicly committed to cracking down on coronavirus misinformation. Google has an SOS Alert in place for searches for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, that points to resources from the CDC and local governments at the top of search results. And a group of companies that includes Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube said theyre jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus in a statement issued on March 16th.
Apple permanently banned the Infowars app from the App Store in September 2018, citing App Store guidelines that forbid content thats offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, or in exceptionally poor taste.
As the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 virus continues, with countries facing lockdowns and hospitals dealing with unprecedented demand, a research team at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering is working around the clock on a new vaccine, the school announced Saturday.
The team is also looking at isolating the human antibodies that can successfully fight the viral infection in order to create working therapeutic treatments to improve recovery times for COVID-19 patients, according to researchers.
The research is led by Prof. Pin Wang, Zohrab A. Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering and Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering. Wang's lab specializes in the emerging field of immunobioengineering, which uses engineering tools to better understand the immune system and develop novel molecular and cellular immunotherapies.
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To create the vaccine, Wang and his team have engineered a hybrid virus, the core of which is based on that of the vesicular stomatitis virus; a family of viruses which includes rabies among others. The surface of the hybrid virus is then covered with spike proteins derived from the COVID-19 virus.
"The reason that this hybrid virus can be a good vaccine format is that by having the COVID-19 surface protein, this can hopefully trick our immune system into recognizing it," Wang said. "That way we can induce the neutralizing antibody to stop the virus from infecting us in future."
Wang said the team is "hoping we'll have a very potent product compared to other vaccine platforms."
This type of vaccine is known as a vectored vaccine and does not contain the harmful components of original viruses, and thus has safety benefits as opposed to vaccine forms using live-attenuated viruses, he said.
Wang said the vaccine research was also looking into ways in which cells' immune response works to combat the virus so that this process can be replicated in the development of therapeutics to manage COVID-19.
"If we can immunize animals like mice, then we can isolate the B cells that can generate antibodies; antibodies that can neutralize the virus," Wang said.
COVID-19 is new and scientists understand little about how it behaves and spreads. The cost of creating a vaccine to protect people against the new coronavirus will run into billions of dollars and could take many months. Here are some of the reasons why.
Technology is enabling new methods of exploring vaccine candidates for trial, but there are already a few tried and tested ways to make them.
In all of them, scientists try to stimulate the bodys immune system to combat invasive pathogens. Thats commonly done by creating something so similar to the pathogen that the body begins to create antibodies to fight off the real thing.
The most common way of doing this is to make whats called attenuated vaccines those that are made of weaker strains of the actual pathogen. Reared on animal cells outside of human bodies (some flu vaccines are cultured on chicken eggs), they are then extracted and injected in a single tiny dose.
Vaccines for measles and tuberculosis are created in this way.
The number of US adults who would be vaccinated against COVID-19 grew between February and March.
Image: Statista
Inactivated vaccines, on the other hand, are derived from identifying the active proteins in a virus that enables them to invade human cells. Thats done by taking dead samples of the pathogen and studying their genetic make-up so that scientists can replicate them en masse. When injected into a human, the body gets to work again constructing the necessary antibodies.
Often such vaccines require multiple doses over time, including those to protect against such diseases as rabies and polio.
Then there are nucleotide-based vaccines, which seek to replicate the genetic material DNA and RNA of a virus. This method stimulates the bodys own creation of this viral material in order for it to produce the necessary antibodies.
A DNA-based vaccine for Zika virus, which was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organization in 2016, was ready for clinical trials seven months after it was designed, but that is unusual.
There are already at least 35 companies and academic institutions racing to make a COVID-19 vaccine, with at least four candidates in the animal-testing phase. And one will enter human trials soon. But thats just one hurdle cleared.
As Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, said: A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine thats deployable. [It will take] a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.
Vaccines must be rigorously tested to ensure they not only work but will not cause other dangerous side-effects.
The trial methodology consists of three phases:
1. Testing on a small number of healthy adults
2. Testing on a larger number of adults in an area where the disease has spread
3.Testing on thousands of people in an area where the disease has spread
Each of these steps can last between six and eight months, but even if the vaccine candidate gets that far many are abandoned or fail before then they must then be studied by regulators before approval is granted.
Constricting the whole timeline of going from concept to a product that can be distributed into a year or two is really a herculean endeavour, said Jon Andrus, an adjunct professor of global vaccinology and vaccine policy at the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University.
A new strain of Coronavirus, COVID 19, is spreading around the world, causing deaths and major disruption to the global economy.
Responding to this crisis requires global cooperation among governments, international organizations and the business community, which is at the centre of the World Economic Forums mission as the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.
The Forum has created the COVID Action Platform, a global platform to convene the business community for collective action, protect peoples livelihoods and facilitate business continuity, and mobilize support for the COVID-19 response. The platform is created with the support of the World Health Organization and is open to all businesses and industry groups, as well as other stakeholders, aiming to integrate and inform joint action.
As an organization, the Forum has a track record of supporting efforts to contain epidemics. In 2017, at our Annual Meeting, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched bringing together experts from government, business, health, academia and civil society to accelerate the development of vaccines. CEPI is currently supporting the race to develop a vaccine against this strand of the coronavirus.
Once a candidate vaccine passes through those hoops, the challenge is to produce it in the volume necessary to end a pandemic.
A number of organizations are helping to fund the process. Among them is Norway-based CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
It was first launched at the World Economic Forums Annual Meeting in Davos in 2017, with the intention of bringing together public, private, philanthropic and civil organizations to develop vaccines against epidemics.
Backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among other donors, in 2020 CEPI announced a new partnership to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
It has issued an urgent call for $2 billion of new funding, to expand the number of vaccine candidates at the outset to increase the chances of success, and to fund the clinical trials.
Our ambition is to have at least three vaccine candidates, which could be submitted to regulatory authorities for licensure for general use/use in outbreaks.
CEPI has already provided funding to several organizations and institutions working on vaccines, including:
It remains to be seen how long it will take until there is a workable vaccine against COVID-19. For the time being, the best way to ensure you reduce your risk of infection is to follow the World Health Organizations advice on handwashing and social distancing.
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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
For biotechnology companies, responding to a sudden public health crisis, like the coronavirus, can be risky business. It can take more than a year to develop a vaccine or treatment. By that time, the threat may be gone, leaving little or no demand for a drug.
The current coronavirus pandemic appears to be different.
The race to beat the pathogen is on, with many biotechs now expecting a large market for coronavirus therapies in 2021 or beyond.But the starting gun didn't fire right away when the virus began spreading late last year.
"There were a lot of companies that kind of felt once bitten, twice shy," saidJose Trevejo, chief executive of SmartPharm Therapeutics in Kendall Square.
Companies were shy because drug makers have been bitten in the past when they've hustled to confront an outbreak, only to see the danger subside and their efforts go to waste. That's what happened during a previous coronavirus scare the SARS outbreak of 2003, which ended before any vaccine maker could earn a buck.
"There was also Ebola, and then a lot of people forget about the swine flu the H1N1," Trevejo said. "So, I think a lot of big pharma were a bit hesitant to plunge fully into coronavirus."
In recent weeks, the industry's view has changed. At LabCentral, the shared workspace where Trevejo's gene therapy startup operates, more than a dozen companies have turned their attention to the coronavirus, including SmartPharm.
And that's just one lab in Cambridge.
The number of companies pursuing coronavirus drugs is constantly growing, according to Yasmeen Rahimi, co-head of biotechnology research at Roth Capital Partners, an investment banking firm in Newport Beach, Calif.
"I track COVID-19 on a daily basis," she said. "Almost every day we get 10 or 12 companies that are coming."
Rahimi said the most notable may be Moderna, another Cambridge biotech. It's the first company to begin testing a potential coronavirus vaccine on humans in the U.S.
Moderna didn't respond to an interview request. But in a public document this week, the company said that "a commercially-available vaccine is not likely to be available for at least 12-18 months."
Moderna doesn't think the virus will peter out by then. Instead, it is "scaling up manufacturing capacity toward the production of millions of doses per month."
That may not be enough, according to Dr. Lee Wetzler, an infectious disease specialist at Boston Medical Center.
"Just like the flu vaccine, you're talking not just millions of doses," said Wetzler, who is also a professor at Boston University School of Medicine. "Tens tens of millions of doses and even more."
Then again, Wetzler added, it's hard to predict what this previously unknown virus will look like a year from now. It's possible that the pandemic will be under control, which would be good for the world but maybe not so good for companies, like Moderna and others, investing in drugs to stop it.
There's a cautionary tale in theonce-hot biotech Vical, which received federal money to chase vaccines for anthrax, SARS and Ebola. The fear and the funding always faded before Vical could cross the finish line, said John Carroll, editor of Endpoints News, a biotech publication.
"What Vical did was just flame out," he said. "They weren't able to come up with a vaccine and, after repeated failures, they just couldn't make it anymore."
The risk of failure is well understood by James Sietstra, chief business officer of Totient, one of the startups at LabCentral that have shifted to the coronavirus. But he maintains that working on the coronavirus won't be futile, even if the disease runs its course before Totient can bring a drug to market.
"As a business case for us, this is a great proof point for the power of our platform," he said.
Sietstra said the same method Totient will use to attack the coronavirus could also be used against other diseases including the company's original target, cancer.
Everyone agrees that a vaccine will be essential to stop the global spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But Ofer Levy, a physician-scientist at Boston Childrens Hospital, worries that vaccines being designed today are not going to be effective enough for the people who need them most: older adults.
Whatever we develop, weve got to make sure it works in the elderly. Otherwise we dont have our eye on the ball. And right now, the way vaccines are developed, the eye isnt on the ball, says Levy, an infectious disease doctor who directs the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Childrens. Initial data suggest the virus that causes COVID-19 most severely affects people who are older than 60 and those who have preexisting medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or lung disease. A vaccine that protects young people would slow the viruss spread, but one that protects the most vulnerable will directly save lives, he says.
On the eighth floor of the Harvard Institutes of Medicine building, Levy and his colleagues are aiming to design a vaccine that will work for people of all ages. Their strategy involves testing candidates in a more realistic setting than most laboratories use and adding an adjuvanta substance that boosts the vaccines effectiveness while allowing the minimum possible dosage.
In banks of freezers kept at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers lab has stored hundreds of samples of cells donated by older patients who were treated at the nearby Brigham and Womens Hospital before the current outbreak. In a neighboring freezer are newly arrived samples of the viral protein that the vaccine will target. Those samples will allow Levy and his collaborators to test vaccine-adjuvant combinations directly on cells from older people. By contrast, most vaccine research instead starts with cells from young mice, grown in blood products from cows.
Dozens of labs around the world are working on vaccine candidates, but it is too early to know which ones will advance far enough to win approvaland that could take at least 12 to 18 months, experts say. Time will tell if any of them will work well on older people, says Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a private-public partnership that provides vaccines for nearly half of the worlds children. The reality is: we need many shots on goal here, he says.
Levys program at Boston Childrens had focused on flu vaccine research, but it began to pivot to coronavirus work on January 1, when David Dowling, a vaccinologist and immunologist in the group, started hearing about a strange outbreak of pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan. When he learned that the virus mainly affected older people, he started to worry. I said, Everyones going to make a big mistake. Theyre going to be developing a vaccine that works in a normal, healthy population, and theyre going to miss the elderly. And were all going to lose a year, Dowling says. He started thinking about how he could look for a vaccine-adjuvant combination for this novel pathogen.
The human immune system, Dowling says, completely transforms during the first weeks after birth and changes dramatically again in old age. So, a vaccine that is effective in healthy adults may not work well at either the beginning or end of life.
For example, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline developed a malaria vaccine at a cost of about $2 billion that was shown to protect 30 to 50 percent of adults and about 19 percent of babies, Dowling says. But it seems to provide less protection to infants under the age of six monthswho are at the highest risk for dying from malaria. In a 2016 study, Dowling and Levy found that the white blood cells of infants do not mount a strong response to an adjuvant similar to the one in the malaria vaccine, suggesting the need to identify adjuvants with greater activity in early life.
Levy and Dowling are now beginning to develop and test adjuvants combined with various COVID-19 vaccine candidates. Levy says their menu of adjuvants, a portion of which the team had already been testing as part of its flu vaccine work, includes some they buy off the shelf, some that are homegrown (based on screening studiesof small molecules supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health), and some that other academic centers or companies are developing and have asked the group to evaluate.
The team at Boston Childrens is not the only group testing adjuvants. This week, for example, Dynavax Technologies, a biopharmaceutical vaccine developer in Emeryville, Calif., andClover Biopharmaceuticals, a China-based biotechnology company, entered into a research collaboration to study a vaccine-adjuvant combination against COVID-19.Clover is developing a protein-based coronavirus vaccine candidate called COVID-19 S-Trimer, and Dynavax is providing technical expertise and the companys adjuvant CpG 1018, according to a joint press release from the companies.
Although Levy and Dowlings project is still in the planning stage, they aim to test a vast number of possible vaccine-adjuvant pairings in cells from older adults. The plan is to find promising candidate combinations before moving them on to mouse testing, which is generally important for federal approval. There are so many variables involvedwhich host cell proteins to target, which adjuvants to use, the way the vaccine is formulated, the different populations that need to be addressedthat it would not be feasible to test every possible combination in large clinical trials. Instead evaluating these combinations in a cell culture could accelerate vaccine development and lower its risk, Levy says. The researchers hope to eventually test their candidate vaccine-adjuvant pairs in elderly individuals across the globe to make sure that the finished product will work in as wide a range of people as possible, he adds.
Many other groupsincluding at least 40 companies around the worldare working on their own COVID-19 vaccines. Cambridge, Mass., biotech company Moderna, supported by the NIH, has developed a candidate using the genetic sequence of the virus, and it is already being tested in the first patients. Modernas approach, which is based on protein-making instructions called messenger RNA, or mRNA, has never been employed in an approved vaccine. But before the COVID-19 outbreak, the technology had been tested in about 1,000 healthy people, and it effectively generated an immune response against other diseases, said Tal Zaks, Modernas chief medical officer, in an article I published in late January. He added that side effects were minimal and that older people benefited as much as younger ones. Based on the fundamental immunology and the initial data we have, my expectation is that it will work in older adults as well as it does in younger adults, Zaks said.
But Dowling is skeptical that such a novel tactic can be used to make the billions of doses that will be needed worldwide. And he is less confident than Zaks that it will protect older, vulnerable people. We might have a vaccine that works but cant be scaled or a vaccine that doesnt work and can be scaled, Dowling says.
In another approach, Natasa Strbo, a microbiologist and immunologist at the University of Miami, has been collaborating with Heat Biologics in North Carolina, to research a protein called gp96, which triggers both a targeted immune response and a broader, innate oneespecially in the lungs, gut and reproductive tract. The proper activation of innate immune responses is what is driving your successful vaccine immune response. Theres no doubt about that, Strbo says. In a sense, she adds, gp96 acts as both a vaccine and an adjuvant, so it will hopefully work well in those older than 60.
Levy and Dowling admit that other vaccines are further ahead of their efforts, with some already starting human testing. But the researchers think their work will be more efficient in the long run because they will leave the lab with a more effective product. What is faster, Levy asks rhetorically, finding a vaccine-adjuvant combination in a lab or doing 50 complex and expensive clinical studies and finding out later which vaccine worked best for the most vulnerable among us?
Read more about the coronavirus outbreakhere.
Should scientists infect healthy people with the coronavirus to test vaccines? Nature.com
For researchers working on possible coronavirus treatments, time is short.
More than 100 clinical trials of dozens of potential coronavirus treatments are already underway around the world, a mobilization of global medical resources rarely seen before in human history.
But science can be slow and indirect. And despite the sheer number of scientists involved in these efforts, the scientific method requires a rigor that can only be sped up so much.
Experts have said that it could take at least 12 to 18 months before a vaccine is commercially available to administer widely a timeline already seen as aggressive. And with international attention focused on coronavirus efforts, some researchers are warning about the potential pitfalls of accelerating scientific research and the risks of overpromising what science can deliver in a short time.
In an essay published Monday in the journal Science, the publications editor-in-chief H. Holden Thorp, a chemist and a former provost at Washington University in St. Louis, voiced concerns about the unusual nature of relying on science to find a swift solution to a problem with still many unknowns that is unfolding in real time.
The scientific method, Thorp wrote, inherently takes time, and involves basic research to first identify the problem and subsequently applying that research to test and build on scientists understanding.
Now, scientists are trying to do both at the same time, he wrote. This is not just fixing a plane while its flying its fixing a plane thats flying while its blueprints are still being drawn.
As new coronavirus cases multiply in many countries and fatalities rise, the scientific community is under enormous scrutiny and pressure to identify potential treatments.
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The proposed timeline of 12-18 months for a vaccine is already exceptionally fast given the normal pace of vaccine development and trials, according to Walter Orenstein, a professor at the Emory University School of Medicine and the former director of the United States National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It often takes 10 years for a new vaccine to make it through all the steps and all the tests necessary, Orenstein said. The public health urgency of this is definitely moving things faster than would generally be done.
Part of the challenge of working at such an accelerated pace is ensuring that safety is not compromised.
Typically, clinical trials are made up of three main stages. Most of the trials currently underway are in the first phase, which is designed to test whether the experimental drug of a vaccine candidate is safe to give to humans.
Phase one is about basic safety does it make people get violently ill, or are there other extreme consequences? said Jeremy Block, a biochemist and co-founder of Medaptive Health, a New York-based company that develops tools to help scientists conduct clinical studies and trials. This step is not necessarily to see if the drug even does what you want it to do.
Once safety is established, the drug moves into phase two, which is designed to test its effectiveness and the specificity of the treatment.
If you give somebody a drug and it does a good job of killing the invading cells, but it also kills three of your main organs, it may be effective but it doesnt work specifically on what you want it to work on, said Block, who is part of Northwell Healths Institutional Review Board, which approves and monitors biomedical research on humans at the organizations hospitals.
The last step, and sometimes the most involved, requires demonstrating that the drug is effective in different populations, and thus would be safe and ready to administer widely.
But over the course of a clinical trial, there are few, if any, opportunities to speed up the process, Block said, particularly because scientists need to monitor the long-term effects of these new drugs.
All these things take time, and if we cut corners, bad things can happen, he said.
In 1982, for instance, research emerged that benzyl alcohol which is used as an anti-bacterial agent in some medical solutions and was approved for use in adults but had not been studied in children and infants was associated with 16 neonatal deaths at two medical centers in the U.S. And in the 1970s, pressure to rapidly develop and issue a new flu vaccine was later associated with hundreds of cases of a type of paralysis known as Guillain-Barr syndrome.
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Avoiding these types of dangers is even more important during a pandemic, because researchers will likely have to weigh potential risks and benefits that are magnified by the urgency of the situation, according to Orenstein.
Ideally you want a vaccine that is more than 90 percent effective, he said. But we would have to look at: Even with a less-than-ideal effectiveness, are there greater benefits if we can reduce the pressure on the health system? So it may be that under certain circumstances, a 50 percent effective vaccine is better than nothing.
Regulators will most likely also have to weigh these same risks in deciding whether a potential vaccine is safe for the general public, he said. In some cases, this may involve accepting the results of smaller trials that may carry more uncertainty than normal.
Orenstein said that over the course of his career, which includes 26 years working at the CDC, he cant recall a situation comparable to the one unfolding now.
Nothing comes to mind of this kind of setting, where were talking about a massive pandemic occurring and the longer we wait, the more we have potential for really adverse outcomes, he said.
But Thorp cautioned that putting pressure on the meticulous and sometimes deliberately lengthy scientific process could have negative impacts for both members of the public looking for hope and answers, and the scientists who are trying to deliver them.
I worry that engendering false hope will cause complacency that will deprive us of the time needed to find a lasting solution. And I worry about lasting damage if science overpromises, he wrote in Science. Lets underpromise. Lets overdeliver.
Petri, vice chair for research at the schools Department of Medicine, and his team are working on a COVID-19 vaccine using a new approach that would jumpstart peoples immune response to the virus by adding a new ingredient of sorts. He thinks his theory, if proven, could not only protect people against the coronavirus, but also improve upon existing vaccines like those used with the seasonal flu.
Developing a vaccine against the coronavirus could take a year to 18 months: researcher
Coronavirus could very well become a "seasonal, cyclical" infection, based on the patterns it is exhibiting through its spread in the southern hemisphere, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases scientist on the White House coronavirus task force.
"It totally emphasises the need to do what we're doing in developing a vaccine, testing it quickly and trying to get it ready so that we'll have the vaccine available for that next cycle", Fauci said at a White House briefing Wednesday.
"We're starting to see it now in the southern hemisphere where you're having cases that are appearing as they go into their winter season. And if in fact they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle around the second time", Fauci explained.
Fauci said there is now enough data because multiple different countries have gone through various phases of their individual outbreaks. "You could learn something from them about where you are in your own outbreak", Fauci explained.
Taking the example of China and using arbitrary numbers, Fauci said that when the number of new cases begins to flatten out, it is not time to "declare victory" but it is crucial because you know that you are on the right path towards blunting the peak infection rate.
Citing information coming in from Chinese counterparts, Fauci said that as China begins to relax restrictions, they have begun to report "imported" cases.
"They wanted to warn us that when we get successful, make sure you very carefully examine how you're going to release the constraints on input", Fauci said, speaking to rising public concerns over recent comments by US president Trump that he would like to open up the economy as soon as possible.
"I think we're going to have to remember we don't want to import cases in", Fauci cautioned.
In the weeks since the White House coronavirus task force was cobbled together, Fauci has swiftly risen to become the calm, persistent, apolitical counterpoint to many of US president Trump's comments.
"The president is talking about hope for people and it's not an unreasonable thing," Fauci said recently. "I've got to do my job as a scientist and others have other things to do."
Fauci has indicated early on that developing a vaccine against the coronavirus could take a year to 18 months.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Researchers studying the strain of coronavirus wreaking havoc across the world have found that it is not mutating at a level that would make it significantly more deadly.
The findings by a veteran coronavirus research team have raised hopes that when a vaccine is eventually discovered for Covid-19, it will be effective for most people.
When you look at the sequences that are available from around the world, what youre finding is that youre not getting a dominant mutation, said Dr Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, in an interview with The Independent.
Sharing the full story, not just the headlines
The good news is that because its not changing appreciably, we could reasonably argue that vaccines would work against most of the strains out there, he added.
Dr Menachery has been studying coronaviruses for 10years, including work on the SARS virus. Much of his research has focused on the interaction between viruses and the host immune system. He has also studied the threat of bat viruses and what makes them transmit to humans.
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An empty street in Manhattan borough following the outbreak of coronavirus disease in New York City
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A cab drives down at Seventh Avenue in Times Square
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Syracuse University campus is seen almost empty as number of universities are moving all classes to e-learning, due to the coronavirus outbreak
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Empty street is seen near Lincoln tunnel
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An empty restaurant
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Empty chairs are seen near Hudson yards
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An empty restaurant
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A mobile souvenir shop sits in an empty parking lot at Allianz Field as a match between the New York Red Bulls at Minnesota United FC is postponed
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An empty Jacob K Javits Convention Center
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A person sits in an empty eating hall
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Empty parking lots
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Jacob K Javits Convention Center
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Empty retail stores
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Empty street is seen outside the New York Times building
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His teams research may be crucial in better understanding the deadly coronavirus outbreak as it continues to spread.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says at least 20 coronavirus vaccines are being developed around the world. The first human trials have already begun in Seattle, led by the Boston-based biotech firm Moderna.
Although the speed with which the vaccine went to trial is almost unprecedented, experts say it could still take about 18 months for any potential vaccine to become available to the general public.
According to Dr Menachery, some viruses can develop resistance to drugs and vaccines intended to treat it. But the early findings of this research suggest that is not happening quickly enough to increase the deadliness of the coronavirus. Thats good news, he said.
That doesnt mean it cant happen, but if we can develop either drugs or vaccines, they likely will work for the vast majority of people for the vast majority of time, he said.
No hype, just the advice and analysis you need
Despite working on coronavirus research since 2010, Dr Menachery said the scale of the current outbreak took him by surprise.
I dont know I would have predicted the size and scope of this. I would have expected it to be on a smaller scale, something like the original SARS outbreak, which was 8,000 people. It was a significant outbreak at the time, he said.
This was surprising in how transmissible it was and how quickly it spread. Were looking at approaching over half a million cases here in less than three months.
The total number of coronavirus infections worldwide has likely already passed that number. The current number of confirmed infections stands at around 450,000, but many people are thought to have contracted it without being tested.
The US is fast becoming a new epicentre of the outbreak. Nationwide, about 60,000 people have been diagnosed with Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus that is particularly perilous to the elderly and people with pre-existing medical conditions, with at least 812 deaths.
