Category: Covid-19 Vaccine

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, a COVID-19 vaccine has been hailed as the only way for life to return to its pre-pandemic ways. However, in order for a vaccine to be effective, it must be widely distributed, and even then, its uncertain how many coronavirus-era changes will be adapted into a new normal.

As far as vaccines go, it seems unlikely that [one] will be approved in 2020, said Stanford law professor Lisa Ouellette. Even summer 2021 is an aggressive goal.

This means that, as far as Stanfords current policy of remote learning is concerned, hoping that a vaccine will bring a swift end might be unrealistic.

Anthony Fauci did express cautious optimism that a vaccine could be available by the end of 2019 in a recent talk with Stanford Med. But, even if a vaccine were to be approved earlier as Fauci hopes, there is still a long road between regulatory approval and manufacturing. Scaling up production of a vaccine to produce the number of doses that will be potentially needed is no small task.

It will take many months after [approval] to begin to meet the demand, Ouellette said in an interview with The Daily. Whats more, World Health Organization (WHO) officials are advocating for a policy of prioritizing vaccine distribution to high-need populations such as healthcare workers and other at-risk demographics. Such policies would likely mean that college-aged students, who are at lower risk for COVID-19 related deaths, might be among the last to be vaccinated.

Once college students do gain access to the vaccine, the risk of developing COVID-19 on a college campus could remain. While Polio and HPV vaccines have been known to have a 90% efficacy rate, according to the FDAs June 30 guidance, which is discussed in Professor Ouelettes blog, a COVID-19 vaccine will likely have an efficacy rate closer to 50%. (Efficacy rate refers to the most favorable estimate of percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group.)

This means that at least some vaccinated individuals (including high-risk individuals) would become infected, Ouellette said. Though this efficacy rate is far from ideal, mandating a coronavirus vaccine to demonstrate 90% plus efficacy while the pandemic rages would be allowing perfect[ion] to be the enemy of good.

For immunocompromised and other vulnerable students, however, this 50% efficacy rate may be far from ideal, making it implausible that a crowded college campus would be a safe place, even with access to a COVID-19 vaccine.

The Stanford Department of Environmental Health and Safety declined to comment in regards to precautionary measures the University is planning for high-risk students. However, Stanford has announced a host of upcoming changes to help maximize the safety of students on campus. Families will no longer be allowed to enter residential or dining halls while moving in, students will have their temperatures checked and be regularly tested for COVID-19, and campus events and parties will be banned.

While the impending coronavirus vaccine is heralded as the end of the pandemic for Stanford and the world, it is prudent to keep in mind that the existence of a vaccine doesnt necessarily prevent infection actual vaccinations do. The process of turning the former into the latter remains unclear.

Meanwhile, fundamental changes to the Stanford student experience that will be implemented next year take-out meals from dining halls, limited access to common spaces in dorms, mask-wearing in public spaces, decreased social gatherings may continue to persist for an unpredictable period of time, changing campus life in lasting ways.

Contact Sophia Gibson at sgibson at urbanschool.org

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COVID-19 vaccine may not be the easy way out that everyone is hoping for - The Stanford Daily

By American Chemical SocietyJuly 23, 2020

With the global pandemic still in full swing, scientists are working to develop a vaccine in record time. While everyone wants an effective vaccine, they dont all agree on how to get there and what effective really means. Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, spoke with researchers, doctors and business leaders to shed light on some of the challenges vaccine developers are facing.

As of mid-July, the World Health Organization reported that over 160 vaccine programs were in progress, an unprecedented effort toward a common goal, writes Associate Editor Ryan Cross. Although traditional vaccines are made with weakened or killed virus, many modern vaccines use part of the virus itself to teach immune cells what to home in on. For SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, that part is the spike protein, which the virus uses to attach itself to human cells. Both types of methods can be time-consuming, and traditional approaches are potentially dangerous because companies need to grow large amounts of virus. This has caused some scientists to turn to experimental gene-based vaccines. Researchers put the genetic code for the spike protein into harmless viruses that act as vessels, or simply use DNA or RNA to deliver the genetic information to human cells. Human cells would use these instructions to make the spike protein, which would trigger an immune response. These types of vaccines are very fast for scientists to design and make, but the technology is largely unproven, and it remains to be seen whether these kinds of vaccines are effective. Furthermore, there are many different modifications that scientists can make to the spike protein, which could change how our immune systems respond to the real virus.

Vaccine makers are focusing on the ability of candidates to produce high levels of neutralizing antibodies that would prevent the virus from entering cells. But this area of vaccine research also faces challenges. For example, the methods for quantifying the antibody response in the laboratory are not ideal. In addition, its unclear just how much neutralization is good enough and for how long the effect would last. If antibody levels arent high enough, a person might only be left with partial immunity, which could prevent severe symptoms but still leave them with the ability to infect others. And what works in one person might not work well in another. Questions about safety still loom, and experts warn that moving too fast with an unsafe vaccine could shake public confidence. In the end, vaccine developers note that no single company can do this alone, and several types of vaccines will likely be needed.

The article, What Will it Take to Make an Effective Vaccine for COVID-19? is freely available here.

Continued here:

The Latest in the Scientific Race to Develop an Effective COVID-19 Vaccine - SciTechDaily

The pandemic, not the Fed, not the stimulus, not the election, is the most important driver of stock prices. Lately, it's feeling very binary: we get a vaccine sooner than expected, we save the economy. But if the process drags on, we'll need to adjust to the new normal.

Our fate is in the hands of a few dozen companies with a dizzying array of clinical trials, and whoever gets there first is gonna make a fortune. That's why CNBC decided to do something new: we surveyed 92 drug analysts and public health officials at the state and local level to handicap the chances of each of the main players.

Consider it the bettor's guide, an actual handicapping of the most important contest on earth, the race for a vaccine.

Coming in first, with the support of 21 respondents? The Oxford University-AstraZeneca (AZN) vaccine - the one we just read about in the Lancet. We know it's got an excellent safety profile and several qualities that could lead to immunity.

Second and third were tied, with Moderna (MRNA) and the Pfizer (PFE) BioNtech (BNTX) vaccine both getting 19 votes.

Fourth, CanSino Biologics (CASBF) , a Chinese vaccine company, with eight votes.

After that, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) , Novavax (NVAX) , and the joint team of Sanofi (SNY) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) each got seven votes. Merck (MRK) and Sinovac got six. Sinopharm (SHTDF) and CureVvac were next with five. Inovio (INO) and Medicago each got four.

Inovio also earned the dubious honor of being the company least likely to bring its vaccine candidate to market, at least according to the 92 experts we consulted. They voted Inovio off the island.

What about Covid treatments? That's another closely contested race. Gilead's (GILD) in first with 17 votes, followed by Regeneron (REGN) in second, Eli Lilly (LLY) in third, the privately held AbCellera in fourth, and Roche (RHHBY) in fifth. Bringing up the rear, there's Vir Biotech (VIR) and GlaxoSmithKline.

Now, the more I dig into the medical research, the more I realize that a vaccine is essential. If Covid's really as virulent as the experts say, you'd better pray one of these injections works, because that's the only way we beat it for good.

But I also realized something else: the race for a vaccine might have more than one winner. We may need to take several shots at this thing. It could even be like the flu where there's a new vaccine every year.

With that in mind, how do we take advantage of this poll? Maybe that's in bad taste, but my job is to help you try to make money in the stock market, so how do we game the race for a vaccine?

Okay, what I find most interesting about our survey is that the stage of testing doesn't seem to matter that much. For example, Novavax got a $1.6 billion commitment from the government to complete their testing and scale up manufacturing - they start phase 3 trials in the fourth quarter. Yet Novavax is tied with J&J, which hasn't even started human trials, as well as the Sanofi-Glaxo shotgun marriage, which goes into human trials in September.

I think the excitement about the AstraZeneca vaccine makes sense. I know many people who want in on the trials because the initial results were so promising, even though the stock has been crushed since the data came out on Monday. Why did people sell the news? I think the expectations got out of control - buyers wanted a miracle, instead they got something very positive, but still within the bounds of reason.

The thing about vaccines is that the FDA will never just stop the trials and preemptively declare a winner, which sometimes happens with regular drugs. Testing a vaccine takes time because that's the only way to be sure it works. You give it to thousands of people and then wait to see if they get sick. There's no way to accelerate that process.

But even though we can't really speed this up, I like AstraZeneca's stock here, down nine from its recent highs with a 3.4% yield and an excellent anti-cancer franchise.

Next one's tough. I used to be a huge fan of Moderna because they have an exciting AI powered approach to drug development. But then the company revealed some positive data on its Covid vaccine right at the same time as executives dumped the stock, and it left a bad taste in mouth. I understand that those execs had sell plans in place, but as someone who's created and used sell plans myself, I can tell you they should've been cancelled going into this high profile announcement.

I think Moderna's become too promotional, too quick to praise its own work off a very small sample size, which is odd because they've never actually produced a vaccine before. I loved this stock in the twenties and thirties and forties and fifties, but up here at $75? No thank you.

By contrast, Pfizer's partnered with the German BioNTech, and they've been remarkably non-promotional about their relative success. BioNTech's stock is too binary for me - they don't have enough other shots on goal. But Pfizer has a portfolio of decent, albeit boring, drugs, and while there's nothing huge in the pipeline, the company's got very deep pockets, so if their vaccine doesn't win, they can always make some acquisitions. Like Moderna, Pfizer's reached phase 3, the homestretch, and it just got $1.95 billion from the U.S. government to produce a vaccine. The Feds will own the first 100 million doses - seems fair.

I can't say much about CanSino Biologics. It's a Chinese stock and the only Chinese stock I'm willing to recommend is Alibaba (BABA) because the PRC's stock market doesn't have enough regulations enforcing transparency.

But let's talk about the three vaccines that are tied with seven votes: J&J, Novavax, and the Sanofi-Glaxo team-up. I think the Sanofi-Glaxo candidate has great possibilities because both companies have excellent vaccine divisions, though they're late to the party.

Novavax is ultra-high-risk, ultra-high-reward. It's a total long shot that's trading like it's already won because of that $1.6 billion commitment from the President's Operation Warp Speed initiative.

Which leaves me with my favorite: Johnson & Johnson. I'm hearing nothing but good things about their trial, even as it's only now has gotten to phase one. More importantly, aside from Covid, J&J has the best pipeline of any of these drug companies. Their vaccine could fail and the stock wouldn't even go down - that's how cheap this thing is. I think it's a buy right here.

There's not much to say about the others. I like Regeneron for its Covid treatment, but I like it even more for its non-Covid drugs, including a surprisingly strong oncology portfolio. As for Inovio, the handicappers have spoken and they say sell it.

We in the end went with JNJ for the trust because of its many shots on goal. I think Regeneron and AstraZeneca work, too.

(Johnson & Johnson is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS member club. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells JNJ? Learn more now.)

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Jim Cramer: Handicapping the Major Covid-19 Vaccine Makers - RealMoney

UC San Diego will be one of the sites for a national COVID-19 vaccine trial slated to begin Monday. Local sites are looking for more than 1,000 San Diegans to sign up. The trial is based on a vaccine prototype developed by Massachusetts-based Moderna Therapeutics. Plus, in San Diego, police officers are often the ones responding to mental health-related 911 calls. Well hear about a plan to change that. And, KPBS Arts Calendar Editor Julia Dixon Evans has a preview of this weekends top events, beyond Comic-Con@Home.

Speaker 1: 00:01 Governor Newsome puts a new focus on protecting essential workers,

Speaker 2: 00:05 People that are feeling sick. People that may be sick. We don't want them going to work infecting other people.

Speaker 1: 00:12 I'm Maureen Kavanaugh. This is KPBS mid day edition. San Diego is part of a large scale nationwide COVID vaccine trial.

Speaker 2: 00:30 This is a 30,000 person trial. San Diego could end up being a pretty sizable chunk of that data set that gets used to decide whether the vaccine works.

Speaker 1: 00:41 Switching police funding is explored in part two of our San Diego police budget report. Plus the weekend preview that's ahead on mid day edition In today's address on the spread of COVID in California, governor Gavin Newsome says not enough focus has been placed on essential workers. He presented a graph showing that most essential workers like grocery employees, cashiers, restaurant workers, et cetera in California are Latino, black and Asian.

Speaker 2: 01:20 This essential workforce remains the bedrock. The backbone of those that are providing foundational fundamental services to the state of California.

Speaker 1: 01:31 New some introduced expanded programs provide quarantine space for essential workers and crop workers who get sick. And he's introducing a new handbook for employers that streamlines guidance on how to provide a safe workplace for employees. Meanwhile, San Diego is, are getting a chance to join the fight against COVID-19. The first large scale COVID vaccine trial in the U S is looking for San Diego ones who want to participate 87 test sites across the U S hope to sign up 30,000 people to test the vaccine developed by the Moderna biotech company of the seven test sites in California, three are in San Diego County. Those locations are UC San Diego in the Hoya and three wake research in San Diego and East study site in Lamesa joining me with more on the modern a COVID vaccine trial is San Diego union Tribune, biotech reporter Jonathan Wilson, and Jonathan, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Maureen, what human trials has this vaccine already been through and what were the results?

Speaker 2: 02:35 So Madonna was actually the first company, first group of researchers to begin COVID-19 trials in humans. They started right around March 16, and that was trial of about roughly 45 healthy adults. Mainly looking to see if the vaccine was safe. Those results just got published last Tuesday, July 14th, the new England journal of medicine. And what they found was that of the three doses, the low, mid to high doses of the vaccine, they tested that generally mild side effects lead to expect with any vaccine. And what was interesting and a bit encouraging was they found that everyone who was vaccinated produced antibodies. So these are immune proteins that can stick to the surface of a virus and potentially prevent it from infecting yourselves. And so based on those early smaller trial results, they're now moving forward with this large upcoming vaccine trial.

Speaker 1: 03:28 Now, not only is this a vaccine for COVID a brand new disease, but it's also a brand new kind of vaccine. Tell us about it.

Speaker 2: 03:37 Yeah. So this is one of a couple approaches. Researchers have basically been testing every vaccine approach. You can imagine, including ones that we've been using for decades, as well as a, what Moderna is doing, which is an M M RNA or messenger RNA vaccine. So this is a vaccine that has molecular instructions for the body to make pieces of the surface of the Corona virus, not the whole virus, but these spike proteins that the Corona virus has. And so the idea is that by providing this messenger RNA, you're teaching that person to make and then respond from their immune cells to the, that spike protein that would allow for those antibodies to then block infection, as well as for other types of immune cells to clear infected cells too.

Speaker 1: 04:30 How many people do researchers hope will sign up to test the vaccine in San Diego?

Speaker 2: 04:35 So collectively it could be upwards of 1000. And when you think about the fact that this is a 30,000 person trial, San Diego could end up being a pretty sizable chunk of that data set that gets used to decide whether the vaccine works. UCS is hoping for about 500 people. And then each study site and three week research are looking for about 350 to 500 a piece.

Speaker 1: 05:01 And what kind of participants are researchers looking for?

Speaker 2: 05:05 In short, they're looking for folks who have not already been infected with the Corona virus, but based on where they live or where they work, who might be going forward. Uh, they're also looking for people who are in high risk groups for COVID-19 and finding the right people for these types of trials is tricky because you don't want people who have already been infected because the immune response that you see from them might be what they had from that past infection. Doesn't tell you anything about whether the vaccine is working, but then if you look for people who would never be exposed, because they're so isolated or so hold up at home, for example, then you can't, you also can't tell if the vaccine would have protected them. So you're looking for this sort of in between spot of people who haven't been infected yet, haven't been exposed yet, but just based on their day to day might be. So people who work in healthcare, people who work in grocery stores and public transportation would be good examples as well as folks who have preexisting conditions, whether that's high blood pressure or diabetes, for example.

Speaker 3: 06:10 Now, if the trial is successful, what's the earliest that this vaccine would be available,

Speaker 2: 06:16 But Dharna is one of a fairly small group of companies. That's part of the United States government's operation work speed. And that's a government bid to have potentially 300 million doses of a successful COVID-19 vaccine available by around January of 2021. So Madonna's president has, has said that they think they could potentially do that. You know, other people I've spoken to in, in the world of research and science have said, what's most likely by the end of the year, we would have a good indication of whether the vaccine works and then actually mass producing it, getting it to the people who need it quickly could potentially take a bit longer than that.

Speaker 3: 06:59 Jonathan, where can people find information on how to sign up for this trial?

Speaker 2: 07:02 So the quickest way to do that would be to go to Corona virus prevention, network.org, Corona virus prevention, network.org, which is a site that was launched by the national institutes of health. And that will direct you to ways to find out about any number of COVID-19 prevention trials that are happening in your community.

Speaker 3: 07:25 Speaking with San Diego union Tribune, biotech reporter, Jonathan Wilson and Jonathan, thanks so much.

Speaker 2: 07:31 It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 3: 07:42 As a movement to defund police travels across the country. One potential target for budget cuts is removing police from mental health calls, many activists, health officials, and some elected leaders say police are the wrong people to be responding to these calls. KPBS reporter. Claire Tresor says the details on how that would work are being explored in San Diego County on a Tuesday in September, 2016, Alfred Alango grieving. The loss of a childhood friend was in the midst of a mental breakdown. A Longo sister fearing for his safety did the only thing she felt she could do at the time. Call nine one one. When officers would the alcohol and police department arrived at the scene, a Longo pointed a vape pen at them, mistaking it for a gun. One of the officers shot him dead.

Speaker 2: 08:44 [inaudible]

Speaker 3: 08:45 Spark days of protest and renewed calls to reform how authorities respond to mental health calls. Yet nearly four years after a long goes death. If a comes in regarding someone in a mental health crisis in San Diego County, they will most likely be visited by a police officer. However, it's not like this everywhere in Eugene, Oregon, Ebony Morgan is more likely to show up for a mental health call. Then an officer with a badge and a gun. Morgan is a crisis worker for Kahoot's a nonprofit program that partners with Eugene's police department. When she gets a call, she goes to the scene with an EMT partner and first assesses the situation to ensure it's safe.

Speaker 4: 09:29 And from there, we just start asking, you know, my first question as a crisis worker is going to be, how can I support you? What is, what are we doing? What are we trying to do? And what do you need?

Speaker 3: 09:40 For example, if she responds to a person who's having a psychotic episode and is wandering in the middle of the street, she'll say, yes,

Speaker 4: 09:48 We're in the middle of the street right now. We can't stay here. This is not safe. Are you willing to walk with us over to the sidewalk and then tell us what's going on?

Speaker 3: 09:55 The cahoots program has a team of 50 and costs about two point $1 million a year, or about 3% of the Eugene police department's annual budget. San Diego police's budget for fiscal 2021 is more than 566 million. If 3% were diverted to a similar program, it would cost $17 million, which is about half of what the department spent on officer overtime. In the last fiscal year.

Speaker 5: 10:23 We can't even imagine a world where mental health professionals are the ones who deal with mental health issues.

Speaker 3: 10:29 Call it. Alexander is the founder of the San Diego criminal justice reform advocacy organization, pillars of the community.

Speaker 5: 10:36 Can't imagine a world where more money goes to schools and to education then goes to arming police officers and buying them. Um, you know, military, military grade weapons.

Speaker 3: 10:47 He says programs like hoots. Shouldn't be seen as major police reform, but just good common sense. County leaders are starting to come around to Alexander's point of view in the wake of massive protests that have erupted here and throughout the country, in the wake of George Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police officer.

Speaker 5: 11:07 If you have an individual swimming in the fountain or really having a huge problem, if they are swinging an ax or have hit someone with an ax, then you need to call nine one one, and you need to send law enforcement

Speaker 3: 11:19 Supervisor. Nathan Fletcher is working to create mental health crisis teams to respond to some calls.

Speaker 5: 11:25 The problem is if that individual is not a danger to themselves or anyone else, there is no other option for them. Other than to call nine one one,

Speaker 3: 11:35 Your estimates, the program would cost $10 million a year and would be used by all local police departments. He says it would save money by cutting the police cars and fire engines that are often sent to mental health calls.

Speaker 5: 11:49 The other problem is if that individual has ever been justice involved, uh, or if they're

Speaker 6: 11:54 Just in an agitated state of mind, the presence of law enforcement has the potential of escalating the situation. When what you need to do is deescalate the situation. You good, man, I've talked to you before.

Speaker 3: 12:06 Sergeant Rick Schnell led the San Diego police departments, homeless outreach team for 15 years and retired a few years ago. He and his officers had a lot of training on mental health issues.

Speaker 6: 12:18 It was clear that we needed to do mental health training with the officers. PERT was starting to really pick up

Speaker 3: 12:25 The county's psychiatric emergency response team. He says, even if San Diego establishes its own version of cahoots, it couldn't completely take the place of police on mental health calls.

Speaker 6: 12:37 And it's three o'clock in the morning. And you've got somebody with mental health issues going on. Who else are you going to call? The police are coming.

Speaker 3: 12:45 He advocates for more training for police officers and hiring officers who can maintain calm. When an officer shows up in his or her blue uniform with a gun and a badge that automatically escalates a situation. He says,

Speaker 6: 13:02 The officer understands how intense they can be. You know, I don't know if you've had somebody come to your house when you call the police and the police are in your living room, it's usually not a relaxing situation. And so it's kind of on us to calm the situation down. If you're an angry person inside, you probably don't want to be a police officer. This is not the job for you.

Speaker 3: 13:26 Clarity. I guess sir, KPBS news.

Speaker 6: 13:39 [inaudible]

Speaker 3: 13:41 Lots of people will probably be busy this weekend with Comicon at home. But if Comecon isn't your thing, here are some arts events and virtual offerings to fill your weekend. For instance, an outdoor front lawn socially distance dance performance plays by local black women and an annual juried exhibition that thanks to the pandemics online revolution is now able to feature digital video works, KPBS arts editor, Julia Dixon Evans is here with all the details and welcome Julia. Hi Maureen. Now there's a group putting on very intimate outdoor dance performances. Tell us about live in public. Yeah, it's a project of Anna Brown Massey and Victor Della Wente. They're both local artists and dancers and they've choreographed a 20 minute dance. That's site-specific to a front lawn. It's kind of a way to gather a small audience together in a way that's safer than being inside of theater. So just a few households wearing masks and seated at a safe distance from each other and that performers and this performance features a recitation of Octavio pauses poem, Trowbridge street in English and Spanish plus them of their own original spoken word and a pretty diverse soundtrack, some experimental instrumental stuff, but also bill Withers. They left flag this track in particular by six organs of admittance, who is a guitar based composer. It's called the acceptance of absolute negation. It's from his 2003 release

Speaker 7: 15:36 [inaudible] you can catch live in public's performance.

Speaker 1: 15:40 It's tonight and Saturday at either five, six or 7:00 PM at a private residence front lawn in city Heights, tickets and address available@liveinpublic.org up next, some dinner theater. What does Moxie theater have in store for us this weekend?

Speaker 3: 15:58 Yeah, Moxies paired up with common ground theater, which is a black run local theater. That's been around since 1964 for what they're calling dinner and a zoom they're bringing for new plays written by and directed by black women. And they're all centered around the reality of the pandemic. And for dinner, they've put together a list of local black owned restaurants that offer takeout. So you can have dinner during the show, which is of course on zoom. And the four plays are divided into two nights. Each show with two plays. They all sound amazing and really different. So try to catch both shows if you can. There's one, that's about a zoom wedding. There is a mother and a daughter struggling with their relationship while one of them is in the hospital. There's a group of friends kind thing with a salon closure by watching hair tutorials on zoom. And then there's one about the issues that pregnant black women is facing with her white police officer has been

Speaker 1: 16:58 Dinner and a zoom runs Thursday through Sunday, online via zoom in the visual art world. The Athenaeum hosts, a juried exhibition of new local works each year. And like so many things, this year's exhibition looks a little different. Tell us a little about the show.

Speaker 3: 17:17 Yeah. So this is the Athan AM's 29th installment of their juried exhibition. And everything happened digitally, even the submissions and the judging and in a silver lining sort of way as resulted in a larger than usual entrant pool. And it also allowed for films and short video and other experimental video based works. The full exhibition is now available online. It has named me to new works by 46 different local artists. So all of the work had to be made in the last five years. And you had to live or work in the San Diego area to qualify. One of my favorite pieces so far is a digital video by artists, Stephanie Bird, it's called shoe love. She calls it a tone poem and it features the really hypnotic video of the American bald Eagle meeting ritual. It's the spiraling free fall. And if it's unsuccessful, it results in debt. And it's set to this reprocessed audio of radio head song to love wings.

Speaker 7: 18:37 [inaudible]

Speaker 1: 18:37 Stephanie bird's video. True love is part of the afternoon's annual juried exhibition available for online viewing. Now through September 12th for more arts events or to sign up for the KPBS arts newsletter, go to kpbs.org/arts. I've been speaking with KPBS arts editor, Julia Dixon Evans, Julia. Thank you. Thank you so much, Maureen.

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San Diego To Participate In COVID-19 Vaccine Trial, Responding To Mental Health Calls Without The Police, San Diego Weekend Arts And Culture Events...

Read: We dont even have a COVID-19 vaccine, and yet the conspiracies are here

The good news, because it is worth saying, is that experts think there will be a COVID-19 vaccine. The virus that causes COVID-19 does not seem to be an outlier like HIV. Scientists have gone from discovery of the virus to more than 165 candidate vaccines in record time, with 27 vaccines already in human trials. Human trials consist of at least three phases: Phase 1 for safety, Phase 2 for efficacy and dosing, and Phase 3 for efficacy in a huge group of tens of thousands of people. At least six COVID-19 vaccines are in or about to enter Phase 3 trials, which will take several more months.

We are almost five months into the pandemic and probably another five from a safe and effective vaccineassuming the clinical trials work out perfectly. Even when a vaccine is introduced, says Jesse Goodman, the former chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration, I think we will have several months of significant infection or at least risk of infection to look forward to.

All of this means that we may have to endure more months under the threat of the coronavirus than we have already survived. Without the measures that have beat back the virus in much of Europe and Asia, there will continue to be more outbreaks, more school closings, more loneliness, more deaths ahead. A vaccine, when it is available, will only mark the beginning of a long, slow ramp down. And how long that ramp down takes will depend on the efficacy of a vaccine, the success in delivering hundreds of millions of doses, and the willingness of people to get it at all. It is awful to contemplate the suffering still ahead. It is easier to think about the promise of a vaccine.

Theres a lot of hope riding on these vaccines, says Kanta Subbarao, the director of the World Health Organizations flu collaborating center in Melbourne, who has also worked on other coronavirus vaccines. Nobody wants to hear its not just right around the corner.

Vaccines are, in essence, a way to activate the immune system without disease. They can be made with weakened viruses, inactivated viruses, the proteins from a virus, a viral protein grafted onto an innocuous virus, or even just the mRNA that encodes a viral protein. Getting exposed to a vaccine is a bit like having survived the disease once, without the drawbacks. A lot remains unknown about the long-term immune response to COVID-19, but, as my colleague Derek Thompson has explained, there are good reasons to believe getting COVID-19 will protect against future infections in some way.

Vaccine-induced immunity, though, tends to be weaker than immunity that arises after an infection. Vaccines are typically given as a shot straight into a muscle. Once your body recognizes the foreign invader, it mounts an immune response by, for example, producing long-lasting antibodies that circulate in the blood.

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A Vaccine Reality Check - The Atlantic

When a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, who should get it first?

A preliminary plan devised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this spring gives priority to health care workers, then to people with underlying medical conditions and older people. The C.D.C. has not yet decided whether the next in line should be Blacks and Latinos, groups disproportionately affected by the coronavirus.

But lets suppose that health care workers and people with underlying medical conditions use up the first doses of the available vaccine. Should some be held in reserve for Black and Latino people? What about bus drivers and train conductors? Perhaps teachers or schoolchildren should get it so they can return to classrooms with peace of mind.

If shortages happen, most of the nation will have no chance to get the initial lots of a vaccine under the C.D.C.s plan. And as the United States combats a soaring number of coronavirus cases, rising demand for drugs and maybe ventilators is expected. They, too, will need a fair system of distribution.

One solution that is starting to attract the attention of public health experts is a so-called weighted lottery, which gives everyone a chance at access, although some get a better shot than others.

Doctors and ethicists rank patients, deciding which groups should be given preference and how much. First-responders, for example, may be weighted more heavily than, say, very sick patients who are unlikely to recover.

The goal is to prevent haphazard or inequitable distribution of a treatment or vaccine when there isnt enough to go around. Such a system has already been used in allocations of remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the coronavirus.

This is all very new, said Dr. Douglas White, an ethicist and vice chairman of the department of critical medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, which began using a weighted lottery last month to distribute remdesivir.

Patients have accepted the results, even when they lost in the lottery and ended up being denied the drug, he added.

I speculate that is because we are very transparent about the reason and the ethical framework that applies to everyone who comes into hospital, whether that is the hospital president or someone who is homeless, he said.

To allocate the drug, Pittsburg doctors decided that the lottery would give preference to health care workers and emergency medical workers. The doctors also weighted the odds to favor people from economically disadvantaged areas, who tend to be mostly Black and Hispanic.

People with other illnesses and limited life spans, like end-stage cancer patients, had the odds weighted against them, giving them a smaller chance to win in the lottery. The system did not consider age, race, ethnicity, quality of life, ability to pay or whether a patient has a disability.

The lottery began in early June, Dr. White said: We had 64 patients. We had to make the supply of remdesivir last at least two weeks. We only had enough to treat one in four patients.

They had a brief respite from the lottery when cases began falling and supplies of remdesivir seemed adequate. But on Sunday, with cases rising again and enough remdesivir for only about half the patients who could be helped by taking it, the hospital system was forced to go back to a lottery.

A weighted lottery will be used in South Carolina if the swelling number of patients causes a shortage, said Dr. Dee Ford, an infectious disease specialist at the Medical University of South Carolina and a member of an advisory group to the state health department. So far, she said, the states supply of remdesivir remains adequate.

Dr. White and his colleagues were considering a weighted lottery before the remdesivir shortage began. And so were other ethicists, like Dr. Robert Truog at Harvard Medical School who had learned about the system when hed feared a ventilator shortage in March.

He consulted with Dr. White, who had developed a system that awarded points to severely ill coronavirus patients depending on their estimated likelihood of surviving. After Dr. Truog and his colleagues published a paper on ventilator distribution, Dr. Truog said, we got a call from an economist at M.I.T.

The economist, Parag Pathak, told Dr. Truog that he and other economists had spent years thinking about how to allocate resources, and have developed and successfully used weighted lotteries.

For example, Dr. Pathak told him, such systems are used allocate spots in oversubscribed charter schools, giving preference to children from certain neighborhoods. Dr. Truog was intrigued, but it turned out that there were enough ventilators, so a lottery was not needed.

Updated July 23, 2020

But remdesivir was another story, Dr. White and Dr. Truog realized: The shortages were not just possible; they were happening.

When remdesivir shortages began, we felt that a lottery system would be a much better allocation methods than a point system, he explained. His group and Dr. Truog developed a weighted lottery for remdesivir, and the Pittsburgh hospitals began using it.

They also noted another advantage: Weighted lotteries can allow researchers to find out, in a rigorous way, which subgroups of patients do best with a new drug or vaccine.

That is because allocation within a group is random. The distribution is, in effect, a randomized, controlled clinical trial. The only difference between, say, people over age 60 who got the drug and those who did not is the toss of a coin in the lottery.

For that reason, outcomes can reveal how well a drug or vaccine works for subgroups of people.

That sort of analysis has been done to study the variations in students performances at different schools, answering questions like: Did students with higher test scores do just as well with or without a charter school? Did the school benefit those who were not doing well in their neighborhood schools?

A large, federal clinical trial showed that remdesivir slightly improved recovery times for hospitalized patients. That study, though, was not designed to show whether some groups like younger people, or those who were earlier in the course of their infection benefited more than others.

These outcome data are buried in the patients electronic health records. Were the patients participating in a weighted lottery, it would be far easier to see who benefited and who did not from remdesivir.

Similar questions can be addressed if a vaccine were to be distributed with such a lottery. But getting that data would be more complicated, because vaccine distribution may involve tens of millions of people.

Still, in principle, lottery data about a vaccine can be as useful as randomized clinical trial data, Dr. Pathak said.

We would like to get people to think ahead about how vaccines are allocated, he said. There is no way we can vaccinate everybody, so we have to think about whats fair and whats just.

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Who Gets the Covid-19 Vaccine First? Heres One Idea - The New York Times

WASHINGTON Americans struggling through the worsening coronavirus outbreak got some rare good news this week as researchers delivered encouraging updates about potential vaccines. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose gloomy warnings have frustrated President Donald Trump, has sounded consistently enthusiastic about the prospects.

Its a heartening thought that even as the country has failed to contain the virus or implement the kinds of public health measures experts have called for, theres a deus ex machina coming to rescue us if we can just hold out long enough.

But some experts are worried about Americans getting too used to the idea that a miracle vaccine or treatment is around the corner. While theres broad agreement the latest news is promising, some are concerned that the prospect of future relief could breed complacency amid raging outbreaks that are killing hundreds of people each day.

I think we absolutely have to have a backup plan in place, Carl Bergstrom, a biologist at the University of Washington, said. It's something thats not talked about enough.

Even in a best-case scenario, the country may be six months or more away from widespread inoculations. And we may not be in a best-case scenario, which could require policymakers and the public to develop plans for the long haul.

So far the story of the vaccine development seems to be that none of the things that could have gone wrong have gone wrong, Bergstrom said. That doesn't mean were home free by any means.

If theres a Plan B, its not clear what it is at the moment. The White House and its allies in Congress are struggling to negotiate even the next temporary relief bill, and Trump has repeatedly speculated that the U.S. will soon find a vaccine or cure, or that the virus will disappear on its own.

That has some people nervous. Ken Frazier, CEO of the pharmaceutical giant Merck, recently warned that anyone hyping a medical breakthrough before 2021 was doing a grave disservice to the public given the inherent challenges of developing and administering a vaccine.

The reality of the world is that this time next year very well may look like what we're experiencing now, Frazier said in an interview with Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley. "I think when we do tell people that a vaccine's coming right away, we allow politicians to actually tell the public not to do the things that the public needs to do, like wear the damn masks, he added.

While multiple vaccine candidates in the U.K., China and America are progressing well, its possible the next phase of larger trials could reveal more serious side effects or limits to their effectiveness. And if public expectations are too high, some worry it could put pressure on officials especially in an election year to authorize their use too quickly. (The head of the FDA has insisted it will not cut corners on safety.)

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Even if a vaccine hits every mark on safety and effectiveness, theres a possibility governments could struggle to distribute it quickly. The Trump administration is buying up hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine candidates in advance in the hopes that it can move quickly if theyre approved, but roadblocks could still emerge.

Topher Spiro, vice president of health policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, has spent months researching the logistics of inoculating the public against coronavirus once a vaccine is approved.

Potential problems hes looked at include failing to produce enough glass vials to bureaucratic snafus over who administers the vaccine to simply struggling to convince enough people that its safe to get vaccinated. An Associated Press poll this week found 20 percent of respondents said they did not plan to get a vaccine if it became available, with another 31 percent unsure.

We shouldn't get ahead of ourselves and we should start preparing for the possibility we have a vaccine, but that does not mean we should stop looking for strategies to contain the virus in the meantime, Spiro said.

Avik Roy, president of the conservative Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, co-wrote a coronavirus response framework in April that argued officials should assume for planning purposes that advances in vaccines or treatments dont materialize.

I spent a dozen years as an investor in biotech companies, Roy said. When you're close to the ground in development of novel treatments, you're acutely aware of how often they fail, how often data that looks promising in the early stages doesn't pan out in the late stages."

According to Roy, accepting the prospect of no vaccine as an organizing principle could lend more urgency to installing security measures like temperature scanners, protecting vulnerable populations like seniors, and advancing plans to safely reopen schools.

If were going to say its OK to lock down the economy and keep schools closed because we'll have a vaccine in six months, that involves a lot of premature assumptions, he said.

Many expert suggestions involve redoubling current efforts to confront the virus.

Improving testing availability and turnaround times, which the White House has been reluctant to put more federal dollars into, could help detect outbreaks before they get out of hand. Hiring and training more contact tracers, and maybe even experimenting with apps to assist them, could help track the spread of the virus. Finding effective treatments that speed up recovery and increase survivability could make the pandemic easier to manage as a day-to-day threat. Former Obama health official Andy Slavitt has called for a national push to produce high-quality N95 masks for daily public use, rather than the more common cotton masks.

Any struggles on the vaccine front could affect the economic response as well. The longer the crisis persists, the more that temporary shifts like virtual offices or increased e-commerce sales could become entrenched habits. That could make aid programs like Paycheck Protection that are built on maintaining existing businesses, which may no longer be viable in a world ravaged by coronavirus, harder to sustain. As it stands, many businesses are already closing their doors permanently.

The CARES Act was mainly based on the premise that we would freeze jobs and firms in place and then everyone would go back, University of Chicago economics professor Steven Davis told NBC News. Theres a great deal of evidence that the post-pandemic economy will look significantly different and many of the lost jobs are not coming back.

Then theres the less desirable backup scenario: The virus wins.

If enough people are infected waiting for a vaccine to emerge, the country could approach herd immunity and gain at least temporary respite from major outbreaks. Some experts have estimated reaching that point would require as much as 60 percent to 70 percent of the population to get infected, while others see a potentially lower threshold. According to a study this week by the CDC, America is still a long way off either way, with only 24 percent of even worst-hit New York City believed to have antibodies against the virus.

But some argue were likelier to reach that point earlier than we might think if current outbreaks worsen.

Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a CNBC contributor who sits on the board of Pfizer, predicted that by early 2021, we will either have a vaccine, or we will have herd immunity.

The country probably wont be celebrating either way, however.

We are a long way from it now, and a lot of death and disease until we get there, Gottlieb said.

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What's the backup plan if there's no COVID-19 vaccine? - NBC News

Speed is of the essence as governments and companies rush to develop a COVID-19 vaccine that will end the pandemic and help the world return to normal.

Its also the focus of suspicion as some people wonder whether the rapid pace also means researchers are cutting corners during the process.

Overall, about half of Americans, 49%, said they planned to get vaccinated if a COVID-19 vaccine became available, 20% would refuse and the rest werent sure, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Among those who said they wouldnt get vaccinated, 7 in 10 worried about safety.

Experts understood why some people might be hesitant right now.

I think its reasonable to be skeptical about a vaccine that doesnt exist yet to prevent a virus that has been elusive and difficult to characterize, Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told TODAY. He himself wants to see the data before getting a vaccine.

Offit also didnt think it was helpful for the government to use Operation Warp Speed as the name for its goal to deliver 300 million doses of a safe, effective vaccine for COVID-19 by January 2021.

I can promise you a scientist did not come up with that phrase. I think its terrible, Offit said.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, last month admitted he "flinched a little" at the name, fearing that some people may think it implies the fast-track process is reckless when it isnt. Researchers are not compromising the safety at all, nor is there compromise of scientific integrity," he noted.

What should people know about the vaccine process now? We asked Offit and Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

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Obviously, the goal here is to get as many people protected against COVID-19 because you never know if youre going to be one of those unfortunate people who has a more severe case and because the more people who are protected, the less spread there will be in the community, just like with measles, mumps and all the other viral illnesses that we vaccinate for, Kuritzkes said.

Its estimated about two-thirds of the population needs to be immune to COVID-19 to achieve herd immunity. Getting there depends on a vaccines effectiveness.

If its 80% effective meaning 8 out of 10 people who were inoculated would not get COVID-19 if exposed to it then about 80% of the population would need to get the vaccine, Kuritzkes said. If its 50% effective, more than 90% of people would have to be vaccinated to get to herd immunity.

Phase 3 trials where the vaccine is given to thousands of people and tested for efficacy and safety will be critically important, both experts said.

One U.S. company will start this phase of testing on July 27 with 30,000 adults who will either receive the vaccine or a placebo. Theyll be tracked for two years to see whether they get COVID-19 or have any adverse reactions.

That gives you a very good safety database on which to base a decision on whether or not to approve a candidate vaccine, Kuritzkes said.

Assuming that we can reasonably mitigate risk in a phase 3 trial meaning test it in at least 20,000 people so you can say it doesnt have an uncommon side effect problem and show that its, lets say, 70% effective for at least four to six months then I think we can convince the public that this is worth getting, Offit added.

The government is looking for volunteers to take part in the trials.

Kuritzkes called it highly unlikely based on everything researchers know about vaccines and how they work. When people experience symptoms, theyre all short-lived, like local inflammation, a sore arm, and occasionally muscle aches, fatigue and low-grade fever, he noted.

Still, while 20,000 people is a reasonable number of humans to test, its not 20 million people, Offit said. Thats why the government maintains programs like the Vaccine Safety Datalink and PRISM to monitor the safety of vaccines after their approval.

The typical time for vaccine development is 15-20 years, while this vaccine will probably become commercially available within a year-and-a-half of the virus emerging, Offit said.

Are there steps that are being compressed, skipped or overlapping? Yes, but as long as you do the phase 3 trials, then youre fine, he noted. Theres a fragile vaccine confidence in this country, which is why we cant release these vaccines before phase 3 trials. That would be a dreadful mistake.

Much of the speed is due to efforts to reduce the purely bureaucratic barriers for getting the clinical trials underway quickly, Kuritzkes added. Similar efforts were made to develop a vaccine for Ebola.

Yes, both experts said. The key part will be the large phase 3 trials.

Both doctors also emphasized it was critically important for the government to get the process right so that only a vaccine thats proven to be safe and effective will be eventually approved.

If the first impression of this vaccine is that its in any sense unsafe or untested or ineffective, then I think its going to be hard to regain the trust of the American public, Offit noted.

A. Pawlowski is a TODAY contributing editor focusing on health news and features. Previously, she was a writer, producer and editor at CNN.

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When will a vaccine be ready for COVID-19? Speed causes safety concerns - TODAY

According to a new study, a Chinese phase II clinical trial of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate has shown that it is safe and induces an immune response.

With over 15 million confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and more than 624,000 COVID-19 deaths globally, scientists around the world are competing against time to fast-track the development of new treatments to combat the disease.

Globally, scientists are developing about 250 candidate vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Of these, to date, at least 17 are under evaluation in clinical trials.

Stay informed with live updates on the current COVID-19 outbreak and visit our coronavirus hub for more advice on prevention and treatment.

The authors of the recent study aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a vaccine candidate called adenovirus type-5-vectored COVID-19 vaccine (Ad5-vectored COVID-19 vaccine).

They also wanted to determine the most appropriate dose for a phase III trial in the coming months. They published their results in The Lancet.

The Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in Beijing, China, and CanSino Biologics developed the Ad5-vectored COVID-19 vaccine. It uses a weakened human common cold virus (adenovirus) that produces an immune system response, including antibodies, to fight off the coronavirus.

Danny Altmann, Professor of Immunology at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study, told the Science Media Centre in London:

The Beijing approach is based on the backbone of a conventional human, common cold virus to which some people have preexisting antibodies, and they, therefore, make a lower response in some people to the vaccine because people have preexisting antibodies to their vector, so may clear it before it has a chance to work properly.

For the randomized controlled study, which took place in Wuhan, China, the researchers recruited and screened participants for eligibility in April 2020. In total, 508 participants (50% male) were eligible. The average age of the participants was 39.7, with 61% of them aged 1844, 26% aged 4554, and 13% aged 55 or older.

Of the 508 participants, 253 received a high dose of the vaccine, 129 received a low dose, and 126 received a placebo. The researchers observed the participants for 30 minutes after the injection to check for immediate adverse reactions and then followed them for any injection site or systemic adverse reactions within 14 and 28 days of the injection.

Additionally, the scientists took blood samples immediately before the treatment and at days 14 and 28 afterward to measure antibody responses.

The results revealed that 95% and 91% of those in the high dose and low dose groups, respectively, demonstrated either T cell or antibody immune responses 28 days after vaccination.

Specifically, at day 28, the team discovered T cell responses in 90% and 88% of the participants receiving the vaccine at a high and low dose, respectively.

Furthermore, both doses of the vaccine induced significant neutralizing antibody responses (in 59% and 47% of participants in the high and low dose groups, respectively) and binding antibody responses (in 96% and 97% of participants in the high and low dose groups, respectively) by day 28.

Participants in the placebo group, however, showed no antibody increases from baseline.

Although more people in the vaccine group experienced adverse reactions compared with those in the placebo group, most of the adverse reactions were mild or moderate. Adverse reactions included fatigue and pain at the injection site, and the most common severe reaction was fever.

Among the participants, 52% had high preexisting immunity to the Ad5 vector, and 48% had low preexisting immunity. Those with low preexisting anti-Ad5 immunity had neutralizing antibody levels that were approximately two times higher than those of the participants with high preexisting anti-Ad5 immunity.

Moreover, participants aged 55 or older had a significantly lower immune response than younger participants but higher tolerability to the Ad5-vectored COVID-19 vaccine.

Since elderly individuals face a high risk of serious illness and even death associated with COVID-19 infection, they are an important target population for a COVID-19 vaccine. It is possible that an additional dose may be needed in order to induce a stronger immune response in the elderly population, but further research is underway to evaluate this, states senior author Prof. Wei Chen, of the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology.

The current trial does have certain limitations. For instance, the team did not expose any of the participants to SARS-CoV-2 after vaccination.

Consequently, it is not possible for the current study to determine whether the vaccine candidate successfully protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection or whether there are any associated risks when the antibody (that the vaccination induces) encounters the new coronavirus.

Also, the trial only followed participants for 28 days. Therefore, the study has no data available about the resilience of the vaccine-induced immunity.

The authors conclude, the results of this trial have extended our knowledge of the immunogenicity and safety of the Ad5-vectored COVID-19 vaccines. They also add, We are planning an international multicenter, randomized, double-blind, controlled phase III effectiveness trial to further evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine.

For live updates on the latest developments regarding the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, click here.

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COVID-19 vaccine is safe and triggers immune response in human trial - Medical News Today

When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Live Q&A  Financial Times

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When will we have a Covid-19 vaccine? Live Q&A - Financial Times