# Coronavirus Vaccine .. Updates & Discussion



## The SC

*Researchers Announce Promising Coronavirus Vaccine Candidate*

The drug is delivered through a Band-Aid-like patch — not a needle.

April 02 2020

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine announced today that they have developed a promising new COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

Early animal trials have shown promise so far, but human trials are still in the planning stages. The researchers already had a big leg up from past epidemics.

“We had previous experience on SARS-CoV in 2003 and MERS-CoV in 2014,” said Andrea Gambotto, co-senior author of the peer-reviewed paper published in the journal _EBioMedicine_, and associate professor of surgery at the Pittsburgh School of Medicine, in a statement.

“These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus,” Gambotto explained. “We knew exactly where to fight this new virus.”

The vaccine dubbed “PittCoVacc” (Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine) works in the same basic way as a flu shot: By injecting lab-made pieces of viral protein into the body to help it build an immunity.

When tested in mice, the researchers found that the number of antibodies capable of neutralizing the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus surged two weeks after delivery.

Instead of being delivered through a needle, the new drug is administered through a microneedle array, a Band-Aid like patch made up of 400 tiny microneedles. Once the patch is applied, the microneedles, which are made entirely of sugar and protein dissolve, leaving no trace behind.

“We developed this to build on the original scratch method used to deliver the smallpox vaccine to the skin, but as a high-tech version that is more efficient and reproducible patient to patient,” said co-senior author Louis Falo, professor and chair of dermatology at Pitt’s School of Medicine, in the statement. “And it’s actually pretty painless — it feels kind of like Velcro.”

According to the researchers, these patches can be easily manufactured in massive “cell factories” at an industrial scale. The vaccine doesn’t even need to be refrigerated during storage or transport — a massive complication for other vaccines.

“For most vaccines, you don’t need to address scalability to begin with,” Gambotto said. “But when you try to develop a vaccine quickly against a pandemic that’s the first requirement.”
Before starting human trials, the researchers are currently applying for drug approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.

“Testing in patients would typically require at least a year and probably longer,” Falo said. “This particular situation is different from anything we’ve ever seen, so we don’t know how long the clinical development process will take.”

https://futurism.com/neoscope/resea...gn=67332171ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_02_06_57


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## The SC

*Debate Heats up over Using an Anti-Malaria Drug for COVID-19*

Monday, 6 April, 2020 - 17:00





Medical staff at a ward specialized in receiving any person who may have been infected with coronavirus, at the Rajiv Ghandhi Govt. General hospital in Chennai, India, January 29, 2020. (Reuters)

Asharq Al-Awsat

President Donald Trump and members of his administration are growing emphatic in promoting an anti-malaria drug not yet officially approved for fighting COVID-19, even though scientists say more testing is needed before it’s proven safe and effective against the virus.

Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro promoted the drug, hydroxychloroquine, in television interviews Monday, a day after Trump publicly put his faith in the drug to lessen the toll of the coronavirus pandemic.

“What do I know, I’m not a doctor," Trump told reporters Sunday. "But I have common sense.”

The administration's promotion of the drug comes after a heated Situation Room meeting of the White House's coronavirus task force on Saturday, in which Navarro challenged the top US infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, over his concerns about recommending the drug based only on unscientific anecdotal evidence.

Navarro, who has no formal medical training, erupted at Fauci, raising his voice and claiming that the reports of studies he collected were enough to recommend the drug widely, according to a person familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the Situation Room blow-up.

Fauci has repeatedly said that current studies provide only anecdotal findings that the drug works. Navarro told CNN on Monday: "I would have two words for you: ‘second opinion.’”

Hydroxychloroquine is officially approved for treating malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, but not COVID-19, reported The Associated Press. Small, preliminary studies have suggested it might help prevent the new coronavirus from entering cells and possibly help patients clear the virus sooner. But those have shown mixed results.

Doctors are already prescribing the malaria drug to patients with COVID-19, a practice known as off-label prescribing. But Fauci has said more testing is needed before it’s clear that the drug works against the coronavirus and is safe for COVID-19 patients.

Navarro told Fox News Channel's “Fox & Friends” that doctors in New York hospitals are already giving out the drug to COVID-19 patients and that health care workers are taking it in hopes it will protect them from being infected. And while he acknowledged the Saturday debate with Fauci, he said that the focus was on whether the administration should take 29 million doses of the drug in Federal Emergency Management Agency warehouses and send them to hard-hit cities.

“The media is trying to blow it up as a big big debate, but I can tell you that within the room the decision was a sound one, and it was unanimous," Navarro said.

Asked about his credentials for pushing the drug, Navarro cited his doctorate in social science.

“In the fog of war, we might take more risks than we otherwise would. And, given the track record of the drug over many many years in treating malaria that there are side effects but it’s been used a lot in lesser doses, the decision’s been made by many doctors to prescribe it,” Navarro said. "If it saves lives, that’s a beautiful thing ... I think history will judge who’s right on this debate. I’d bet on President Trump’s intuition on this one.”

Trump has been enthusiastically supporting the drug, and he announced Sunday that his administration has amassed 29 million doses for distribution to areas of the country hard-hit by the coronavirus.

“There’s a study out there that says people that have lupus haven’t been catching this virus,” Trump said at a Saturday briefing on the virus. “You know, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. ... There’s also other studies ... that the malaria countries ... have very little of this virus.”

Trump said he would likely take the drug. “I may take it. OK? I may take it. And I’ll have to ask my doctors about that, but I may take it.”

Administration officials say Trump's embrace of the drug stems from his desire to provide “hope” for the American people as the death toll mounts and he looks to avoid political consequences from the outbreak.

Some limited studies have been conducted on the use of hydroxychloroquine and antibiotic azithromycin in concert to treat COVID-19, but they have not included critical control groups that scientists use to validate the conclusions.

A series of 11 patients in France found that an antibiotic-malaria drug combo did not improve how fast patients cleared the virus or their symptoms. Researchers in China reported that cough, pneumonia and fever seemed to improve sooner among 31 patients given hydroxychloroquine compared with 31 others who did not get the drug, but fewer people in the comparison group had cough or fevers to start with.

At least one other world leader has followed on Trump's claims to promote the use of the drugs. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly touted the benefits of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. He said he heard reports of 100% effectiveness when administered in the correct dosages, zeroed tariffs for import of the drugs and on March 30 announced army labs were ramping up their chloroquine production. On Sunday, he shared a video on social media of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani interviewing a doctor who claimed he has successfully treated hundreds of coronavirus patients with the drugs.

Brazil’s health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who has led the nation’s virus response and endorsed broad isolation measures, said on April 3 that initial tests of chloroquine’s efficacy remain “fragile.” Still, he announced the government would broaden criteria for the drug’s use in “grave” cases. Previously, it had only authorized its use in “critical” cases.

For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.


https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/2219906/debate-heats-over-using-anti-malaria-drug-covid-19


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## Rahil khan

*Possible coronavirus drug identified by Australian scientists:*
*MONASH UNIVERSITY*

Australian Scientists have shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world can kill the virus within 48 hours.



Scientists from Monash University in Melbourne showed that a single dose of the drug, Ivermectin, could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture - effectively eradicating all genetic material of the virus within 48 hours.



The next steps are to determine the correct human dosage - ensuring the doses shown to effectively treat the virus in the test tube are safe levels for humans.



The use of Ivermectin to combat COVID-19 depends on pre-clinical testing and clinical trials, with funding urgently required to progress the work.



Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus.



The findings of the study were published today in _Antiviral Research_.


A collaborative study led by Monash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI) in Melbourne, Australia, with the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), has shown that an anti-parasitic drug already available around the world kills the virus within 48 hours.

The Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute's Dr Kylie Wagstaff, who led the study, said the scientists showed that the drug, Ivermectin, stopped the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture within 48 hours.

"We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it," Dr Wagstaff said.

Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug that has also been shown to be effective in vitro against a broad range of viruses including HIV, Dengue, Influenza and Zika virus.

Dr Wagstaff cautioned that the tests conducted in the study were in vitro and that trials needed to be carried out in people.

"Ivermectin is very widely used and seen as a safe drug. We need to figure out now whether the dosage you can use it at in humans will be effective - that's the next step," Dr Wagstaff said.

"In times when we're having a global pandemic and there isn't an approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available around the world then that might help people sooner. Realistically it's going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available.

Although the mechanism by which Ivermectin works on the virus is not known, it is likely, based on its action in other viruses, that it works to stop the virus 'dampening down' the host cells' ability to clear it, Dr Wagstaff said.

Royal Melbourne Hospital's Dr Leon Caly, a Senior Medical Scientist at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) at the Doherty Institute where the experiments with live coronavirus were conducted, is the study's first author.

"As the virologist who was part of the team who were first to isolate and share SARS-COV2 outside of China in January 2020, I am excited about the prospect of Ivermectin being used as a potential drug against COVID-19," Dr Caly said.

Dr Wagstaff made a previous breakthrough finding on Ivermectin in 2012 when she identified the drug and its antiviral activity with Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute's Professor David Jans, also an author on this paper. Professor Jans and his team have been researching Ivermectin for more than 10 years with different viruses.

Dr Wagstaff and Professor Jans started investigating whether it worked on the SARS-CoV-2 virus as soon as the pandemic was known to have started.

The use of Ivermectin to combat COVID-19 would depend on the results of further pre-clinical testing and ultimately clinical trials, with funding urgently required to keep progressing the work, Dr Wagstaff said.

Read the full paper in _Antiviral Research_ titled: The FDA-approved Drug Ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 in vitro: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220302011

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-04/mu-pcd040320.php

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## The SC

*Human testing beginning on second coronavirus vaccine candidate*

Human testing is beginning on a second coronavirus vaccine candidate after approval from the Food and Drug Administration, Inovio Pharmaceuticals announced Monday.

The company said the first phase of clinical testing is set to begin this week with a study of 40 healthy adult volunteers.

Each participant will receive two doses of the drug, INO-4800, four weeks apart. The initial immune responses and safety data from the study are expected by late summer, according to Inovio.

Preclinical data has shown “promising immune response results across multiple animal models,” the company said in the release.

“This is a significant step forward in the global fight against COVID-19. Without a new safe and effective vaccine, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to continue to threaten lives and livelihoods,” J. Joseph Kim, Inovio’s president and CEO, said in the release.

The Inovio program is supported in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The drug is a DNA vaccine that is designed to prevent COVID-19 infection. Inovio said the preclinical results for the potential COVID-19 vaccine are consistent with a completed phase one vaccine study for MERS, which is also caused by a coronavirus.

Inovio said it plans to head into a second phase of the study “as rapidly as possible” and said thousands of doses of the drug have been manufactured to support ongoing phase one and phase two trials.

This is the second COVID-19 vaccine trial to be launched. A vaccine developed by the National Institutes of Health and collaborators at Moderna Inc. administered its first shot in a trial for the potential vaccine in mid-March.
The novel coronavirus is believed to have originated in China late last year and has rapidly spread around the globe, with more than 1.3 million cases confirmed worldwide and nearly 76,000 deaths from the virus, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.


https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...nning-on-second-coronavirus-vaccine-candidatehttps://thehill.com/policy/healthca...nning-on-second-coronavirus-vaccine-candidatehttps://thehill.com/policy/healthca...nning-on-second-coronavirus-vaccine-candidatehttps://thehill.com/policy/healthca...nning-on-second-coronavirus-vaccine-candidate


*With record-setting speed, vaccinemakers take their first shots at the new coronavirus*

The coronavirus that for weeks had been crippling hospitals in her hometown of Seattle changed Jennifer Haller’s life on 16 March—but not because she caught it. Haller, an operations manager at a tech company in the city, became the first person outside of China to receive an experimental vaccine against the pandemic virus, and in the days since, she has been flooded by an outpouring of gratitude. “There’s been overwhelming positivity, love, and prayers coming at me from strangers around the world,” Haller says. “We all just feel so helpless, right? This was one of the few things happening that people could latch on to and say, ‘OK, we’ve got a vaccine coming.’ Disregard that it’s going to take at least 18 months, but it’s just one bright light in some really devastating news across the world.”

The vaccine Haller volunteered to test is made by Moderna, a well-financed biotech that has yet to bring a product to market. Moderna and China’s CanSino Biologics are the first to launch small clinical trials of vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to see whether they are safe and can trigger immune responses. (The CanSino vaccine trial also began on 16 March, according to researchers from the Chinese military’s Institute of Biotechnology, which is collaborating on it.) An ever-growing table put together by the World Health Organization now lists 52 other vaccine candidates that could soon follow. “This is a wonderful response from the biomedical community to an epidemic,” says Lawrence Corey, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has run vaccine trials against a dozen diseases but is not involved with a COVID-19 effort. “It’s both gratifying and problematic in the sense of how do you winnow all this down?”

Broadly speaking, these vaccines group into eight different “platforms”—among them old standbys such as inactivated or weakened whole viruses, genetically engineered proteins, and the newer messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that is the backbone of the Moderna vaccine—and their makers include biotechs, academia, military researchers, and a few major pharmaceutical companies. On 30 March, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) announced what it said could be a $1 billion COVID-19 vaccine project, with about half the money coming from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority if milestones are met.

Many viruses, including HIV and hepatitis C, have thwarted vaccine developers. But the new coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), doesn’t appear to be a particularly formidable target. It changes slowly, which means it’s not very good at dodging the immune system, and vaccines against the related coronaviruses that cause SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) have worked in animal models. Corey heads the United States’s HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which has seen one candidate vaccine after another crash and burn, is optimistic about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. “I don’t think this is going to be that tough.”

One concern is whether people develop durable immunity to SARS-CoV-2, which is crucial given that vaccines try to mimic a natural infection. Infections with the four human coronaviruses that typically cause minor colds don’t trigger long-lasting immunity. Then again, researchers have found long-lasting immune responses to the viruses causing SARS and MERS, and genetically they are far more like SARS-CoV-2. And unlike cold-causing viruses, which stay in the nose and throat, the new coronavirus targets the lower respiratory tract, where the immune response to a pathogen can be stronger, says Mark Slifka, an immunologist who studies vaccines at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. “When you get an infection in the lungs, you actually get high levels of antibodies and other immune cells from your bloodstream into that space.”

Even with this all-out effort, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), predicts getting a vaccine to the public “is going to take a year, a year and a half, at least.” And Fauci adds “at least” because side effects, dosing issues, and manufacturing problems can all cause delays. Already some are calling for an ethically fraught shortcut to speed up clinical trials: giving people candidate vaccines and then intentionally attempting to infect them to see whether they’re protected.

A new vaccine might also be made available to health care workers and others at high risk even before phase III efficacy trials are completed. And Stanley Perlman, a veteran coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa, suggests a vaccine that only offers limited protection and durability could be good enough—at first. “In this kind of epidemic setting, as long as you have something that tides us along and prevents a lot of deaths, that may be adequate,” he says.

*A better spike*

On 13 January, 3 days after Chinese researchers first made public the full RNA sequence of SARS-CoV-2, NIAID immunologist Barney Graham sent Moderna an optimized version of a gene that would become the backbone of its vaccine. Sixty-three days later, the first dose of the vaccine went into Haller and other volunteers participating in the small trial at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. In 2016, Graham had made a Zika virus vaccine that went from lab bench to the first volunteer in what he then thought was a lightning-fast 190 days. “We beat that record by nearly 130 days,” he says.

Studying the 3D structures of the RSV surface protein, Graham discovered that the dynamic molecule had different orientations before and after fusing with the cell. Only the pre-fusion state, it turned out, triggered high levels of neutralizing antibodies, so in 2013 he engineered a stable form of the molecule in that configuration. “It was so clear at that point that if you didn’t have structure, you didn’t really know what you were doing,” Graham says. An RSV vaccine that built on this concept has worked well in early trials.

The experience came in handy in 2015, when a member of Graham’s lab made a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and came back ill. Worried that it might be MERS, which is endemic in Saudi Arabian camels and repeatedly jumps into humans there, Graham’s team checked for the virus and instead pulled out a common cold coronavirus. It was relatively easy to determine the structure of its spike, which then allowed the team to make stable forms of the spikes for the SARS and MERS viruses, and, in January, for SARS-CoV-2’s. That’s the basis of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, which contains mRNA that directs a person’s cells to produce this optimized spike protein.

Still a new strategy, no mRNA vaccine has yet reached a phase III clinical trial, let alone been approved for use. But producing huge numbers of vaccine doses may be easier for mRNA vaccines than for traditional ones, says Mariola Fotin-Mleczek of the German company CureVac, which is also working on mRNA vaccine for the new coronavirus. CureVac’s experimental rabies vaccine showed a strong immune response with a single microgram of mRNA. That means 1 gram could be used to vaccinate 1 million people. “Ideally, what you have to do is produce maybe hundreds of grams. And that would be enough,” Fotin-Mleczek says.

Many companies are relying on time-tested techniques. Sinovac Biotech is making a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine by chemically inactivating whole virus particles and adding an immune booster called alum. Sinovac used the same strategy for a SARS vaccine it developed and tested in a phase I clinical trial 16 years ago, says Meng Weining, a vice president at Sinovac. “We immediately just restarted the approach we already know.” The company’s SARS vaccine worked in monkeys and although there were concerns that an inactivated coronavirus vaccine might trigger the sort of antibody enhancement disease that occurred with the RSV vaccine, Meng stresses that no such problems surfaced in their animal studies.

Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, says inactivated virus vaccines have the advantage of being a tried-and-true technology that can be scaled up in many countries. “Those manufacturing plants are out there, and they can be used,” says Krammer, who co-authored a status report about COVID-19 vaccines that appears online in _Immunity_.

CanSino is now testing another approach. Its vaccine uses a nonreplicating version of adenovirus-5 (Ad5), which also causes the common cold, as a “vector” to carry in the gene for the coronavirus spike protein. Other vaccine researchers worry that because many people have immunity to Ad5, they could mount an immune response against the vector, preventing it from delivering the spike protein gene into human cells—or it might even cause harm, as seemed to happen in a trial of an Ad5-based HIV vaccine made by Merck that was stopped early in 2007. But the same Chinese collaboration produced an Ebola vaccine, which Chinese regulators approved in 2017, and a company press release claimed its new candidate generated “strong immune responses in animal models” and has “a good safety profile.” “I think pre-existing Ad5 immunity and HIV vaccine risk are not a problem,” Hou Lihua, a scientist working on the project at the Institute of Biotechnology, wrote in an email to _Science_, noting that the Ebola vaccine trial results adds to their confidence that these will not be issues.

Other COVID-19 vaccine platforms include a laboratory-weakened version of SARS-CoV-2, a replicating but harmless measles vaccine virus that serves as the vector for the spike gene, genetically engineered protein subunits of the virus, a loop of DNA known as a plasmid that carries a gene from the virus, and SARS-CoV-2 proteins that self-assemble into “viruslike particles.” J&J is using another adenovirus, Ad26, which does not commonly infect humans, as its vector. These different approaches can stimulate different arms of the immune system, and researchers are already “challenging” vaccinated animals with SARS-CoV-2 to see which responses best correlate with protection.

Many researchers assume protection will largely come from neutralizing antibodies, which primarily prevent viruses from entering cells. Yet Joseph Kim, CEO of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which is making a DNA COVID-19 vaccine, says a response by T cells—which clear infected cells—proved a better correlate of immunity in monkey studies of the company’s MERS vaccine, which is now in phase II trials. “I think having a balance of antibody and T cell responses probably is the best approach.”

Kim and others applaud the variety of strategies. “At this early stage, I think it makes sense to try anything plausible,” he says. As Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, says, “Nobody knows which vaccines are going to work.”

*Final products*

Spurring many of the efforts in the nascent COVID-19 field has been the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a nonprofit set up to coordinate R&D for vaccines against emerging infectious diseases. So far, CEPI has invested nearly $30 million in vaccine development at Moderna, Inovio, and six other groups. “We have gone through a selective process to pick the ones that we think have the greatest likelihood of meeting our goals—which we think ought to be the world’s goals—of speed, scale, and access,” says CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett. But he is rooting for other candidates as well. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we have [one] successful vaccine and we have a contamination event [during manufacturing] and suddenly we don’t have any vaccine supply.”

CEPI invests in manufacturing facilities at the same time it puts money into staging clinical trials. “By doing things in parallel rather than in serial fashion, we hope to compress the overall timelines,” Hatchett says. After reviewing phase I data and animal model data, CEPI plans to move six of the eight products into larger safety studies to arrive at three that are worthy of full-scale efficacy trials that enroll perhaps 5000 participants.
CEPI has less than $300 million in its coffers for the effort, and Hatchett estimates the price tag at $2 billion. He says CEPI hopes to raise this money from governments, private philanthropies, industry, and the United Nations Foundation.

Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, argued in an editorial in the 27 March issue of _Science_ that the world needs to come together even more to streamline the search for a COVID-19 vaccine. “If ever there was a case for a coordinated global vaccine development effort using a ‘big science’ approach, it is now,” Berkley wrote, stressing that there must be extraordinary sharing of data, coordination of clinical trials, and funding. “You can’t move 100 vaccines forward,” he says.

Moderna and J&J both say that if everything goes perfectly, they could launch an efficacy trial with about 5000 people by late November and determine by January 2021 or so whether the vaccine works. Meng says that, depending on approval from Chinese regulatory agencies, Sinovac could move its vaccine through small phase I and II tests by June. But, because of China’s success at controlling its epidemic, the company may have to find another country that has high transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to stage an efficacy trial quickly.

Haller has had no serious side effects from the mRNA injected into her arm but realizes that the phase I study will not determine whether the vaccine is effective. “The chances of the one that I got being really anything? I don’t know,” Haller says. “This is just the first of many, many vaccines, and it’s just stupid luck that I was the first one.”
_
With reporting by Kai Kupferschmidt.
**Correction, 1 April, 11 a.m.: *A World Health Organization table inaccurately described Sinovac’s inactivation process as using formaldehyde. The company does chemically inactivate the virus but does not want to disclose specifics. _


https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...akers-take-their-first-shots-new-coronavirus#https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...akers-take-their-first-shots-new-coronavirus#


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## skyshadow

*breaking news: IRGC has announced they will build coronavirus vaccine in 3-5 months and its drug to permanently curing the virus soon








 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1235472055950282753*


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## Ivan

*First trial for potential Covid-19 drug shows it has no effect

WHO draft put online states remdesivir does not benefit severe coronavirus patients

Sarah Boseley Health editor
The Guardian
Thu 23 Apr 2020 20.35 BST
*

*'**Remdesivir, a drug thought to be one of the best prospects for treating Covid-19, failed to have any effect in the first full trial, it has been revealed.

The drug is in short supply globally because of the excitement it has generated. It is one of the drugs Donald Trump claimed was “promising”.

In a “gold standard” trial of 237 patients, some of whom received remdesivir while others did not, the drug did not work. The trial was also stopped early because of side-effects.

News of the failure was posted on a World Health Organization clinical trials database, but later removed. A WHO spokesman said it had been uploaded too soon by accident.

“A draft document was provided by the authors to WHO and inadvertently posted on the website and taken down as soon as the mistake was noticed. The manuscript is undergoing peer review and we are waiting for a final version before WHO comments,” said Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson.

The drug, made by the US company Gilead Sciences, is an antiviral that was trialled in Ebola, but which failed to show benefits in Africa.

In the race for drugs that might work against Covid-19, many doctors have given remdesivir to patients on “compassionate grounds” without waiting for trials. Because of the interest in it, the world’s biggest trial of possible treatments for Covid-19 at Oxford has not been able to include it, because researchers could not obtain supplies.

The trial of the drug in China, on patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms, may give some doctors pause. Gilead, however, claimed there were still signs that it could be useful, possibly in patients with milder versions of disease.

In the trial, 158 patients were randomly assigned to be given remdesivir, while 79 others had standard care with a placebo instead. There was no difference between the groups with respect to recovery time. Just under 14% of those on remdesivir died, compared with nearly 13% of those not taking the treatment.

“In this study of hospitalised adult patients with severe Covid-19, [which] was terminated prematurely, remdesivir was not associated with clinical or virological benefits,” said the report on the WHO website.

The report added: “Remdesivir was stopped early in 18 (11.6%) patients because of adverse effects, compared with 4 (5.1%) in the control group.” There were no details in the short report of the side effects that caused the trial to be halted.

Just a week ago, it emerged that researchers in Chicago were excited by the results of a Gilead-run trial of remdesivir in 125 patients. Nearly all those people were discharged within a week, according to STAT News, which follows the pharmaceutical industry. However, there was no placebo group, which meant researchers could not be sure that it was the drug that made the difference, and not something else.

Remdesivir is one of a handful of drugs that have been enthusiastically backed by doctors and politicians as potential cures for Covid-19. There has also been a rush to give patients hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic version of the antimalarial chloroquine. That has led to shortages for people who need to take it for lupus, a disease that affects the immune system.

Scientists who want to see proper trials conducted are likely to point to the remdesivir trial failure as strong evidence of the dangers of giving out even tested drugs on compassionate grounds for a disease that is so novel.'*


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## PakSword

Bad news. 

This drug created excitement all over the world.

Now we should be waiting for Hydroxychloroquine and Azitromycin trial results.



Jawad Ali Khan said:


> *First trial for potential Covid-19 drug shows it has no effect
> 
> WHO draft put online states remdesivir does not benefit severe coronavirus patients
> 
> Sarah Boseley Health editor
> The Guardian
> Thu 23 Apr 2020 20.35 BST
> *
> 
> *'**Remdesivir, a drug thought to be one of the best prospects for treating Covid-19, failed to have any effect in the first full trial, it has been revealed.
> 
> The drug is in short supply globally because of the excitement it has generated. It is one of the drugs Donald Trump claimed was “promising”.
> 
> In a “gold standard” trial of 237 patients, some of whom received remdesivir while others did not, the drug did not work. The trial was also stopped early because of side-effects.
> 
> News of the failure was posted on a World Health Organization clinical trials database, but later removed. A WHO spokesman said it had been uploaded too soon by accident.
> 
> “A draft document was provided by the authors to WHO and inadvertently posted on the website and taken down as soon as the mistake was noticed. The manuscript is undergoing peer review and we are waiting for a final version before WHO comments,” said Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesperson.
> 
> The drug, made by the US company Gilead Sciences, is an antiviral that was trialled in Ebola, but which failed to show benefits in Africa.
> 
> In the race for drugs that might work against Covid-19, many doctors have given remdesivir to patients on “compassionate grounds” without waiting for trials. Because of the interest in it, the world’s biggest trial of possible treatments for Covid-19 at Oxford has not been able to include it, because researchers could not obtain supplies.
> 
> The trial of the drug in China, on patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms, may give some doctors pause. Gilead, however, claimed there were still signs that it could be useful, possibly in patients with milder versions of disease.
> 
> In the trial, 158 patients were randomly assigned to be given remdesivir, while 79 others had standard care with a placebo instead. There was no difference between the groups with respect to recovery time. Just under 14% of those on remdesivir died, compared with nearly 13% of those not taking the treatment.
> 
> “In this study of hospitalised adult patients with severe Covid-19, [which] was terminated prematurely, remdesivir was not associated with clinical or virological benefits,” said the report on the WHO website.
> 
> The report added: “Remdesivir was stopped early in 18 (11.6%) patients because of adverse effects, compared with 4 (5.1%) in the control group.” There were no details in the short report of the side effects that caused the trial to be halted.
> 
> Just a week ago, it emerged that researchers in Chicago were excited by the results of a Gilead-run trial of remdesivir in 125 patients. Nearly all those people were discharged within a week, according to STAT News, which follows the pharmaceutical industry. However, there was no placebo group, which meant researchers could not be sure that it was the drug that made the difference, and not something else.
> 
> Remdesivir is one of a handful of drugs that have been enthusiastically backed by doctors and politicians as potential cures for Covid-19. There has also been a rush to give patients hydroxychloroquine, a less toxic version of the antimalarial chloroquine. That has led to shortages for people who need to take it for lupus, a disease that affects the immune system.
> 
> Scientists who want to see proper trials conducted are likely to point to the remdesivir trial failure as strong evidence of the dangers of giving out even tested drugs on compassionate grounds for a disease that is so novel.'*

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## The SC

*Chinese COVID-19 Vaccine Effective in Monkeys*

"This is old school but it might work."

by Victor Tangermann / 9 hours ago

Researchers at Beijing pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech have developed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that it says protected macaques from infection, _Science Magazine_ reports.

The vaccine was based on a tried-and-true formulation that included an inactivated version of the virus SARS-CoV-2, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the server _bioRxiv_ on April 19.

“These data support the rapid clinical development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for humans,” reads the paper.
The team at Sinovac injected eight macaque monkeys with two different doses. Three weeks after injection, they introduced the coronavirus straight into the money’s lungs. There were reportedly no side effects.

None of the monkeys developed an infection beyond a small “viral blip.” A less fortunate control group of monkeys developed severe pneumonia after being infected by the virus.

“This is old school but it might work,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-authored a status report on COVID vaccine candidates, told _Science Mag_. “What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.”

Critics say, though, that the sample size in Sinovac’s trial was too small to produce generalizable results. Questions also remain about the viability of the vaccine candidate for use in humans — especially considering that monkeys don’t experience the same severe symptoms of COVID as humans.

In a separate Sinovac experiment, the researchers mixed a cocktail of antibodies from patients in China, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom with the virus.

According to the team, the antibodies “potently neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, indicative of a possible broader neutralizing ability.”
And that’d be good news.
“This provides strong evidence that the virus is not mutating in a way that would make it resistant to a #COVID19 vaccine,” tweeted of Oregon Health & Science University immunologist Mark Slifka on Wednesday.
Sinovac Biotech is now planning trials on thousands of human subjects.


https://futurism.com/neoscope/doctors-use-lethal-injection-drugs-covid19-patients

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## casual

The SC said:


> *Chinese COVID-19 Vaccine Effective in Monkeys*
> 
> "This is old school but it might work."
> 
> by Victor Tangermann / 9 hours ago
> 
> Researchers at Beijing pharmaceutical company Sinovac Biotech have developed an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that it says protected macaques from infection, _Science Magazine_ reports.
> 
> The vaccine was based on a tried-and-true formulation that included an inactivated version of the virus SARS-CoV-2, as detailed in a preprint uploaded to the server _bioRxiv_ on April 19.
> 
> “These data support the rapid clinical development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines for humans,” reads the paper.
> The team at Sinovac injected eight macaque monkeys with two different doses. Three weeks after injection, they introduced the coronavirus straight into the money’s lungs. There were reportedly no side effects.
> 
> None of the monkeys developed an infection beyond a small “viral blip.” A less fortunate control group of monkeys developed severe pneumonia after being infected by the virus.
> 
> “This is old school but it might work,” Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who co-authored a status report on COVID vaccine candidates, told _Science Mag_. “What I like most is that many vaccine producers, also in lower–middle-income countries, could make such a vaccine.”
> 
> Critics say, though, that the sample size in Sinovac’s trial was too small to produce generalizable results. Questions also remain about the viability of the vaccine candidate for use in humans — especially considering that monkeys don’t experience the same severe symptoms of COVID as humans.
> 
> In a separate Sinovac experiment, the researchers mixed a cocktail of antibodies from patients in China, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and the United Kingdom with the virus.
> 
> According to the team, the antibodies “potently neutralized 10 representative SARS-CoV-2 strains, indicative of a possible broader neutralizing ability.”
> And that’d be good news.
> “This provides strong evidence that the virus is not mutating in a way that would make it resistant to a #COVID19 vaccine,” tweeted of Oregon Health & Science University immunologist Mark Slifka on Wednesday.
> Sinovac Biotech is now planning trials on thousands of human subjects.
> 
> 
> https://futurism.com/neoscope/doctors-use-lethal-injection-drugs-covid19-patients


here's the link
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...nkeys-new-coronavirus-chinese-biotech-reports


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## The SC

*This COVID-19 Vaccine Could Be Ready by September*

"It is a very, very fast clinical program."

As various teams race to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus, one group at Oxford University says that — if everything goes perfectly — theirs could be available as soon as September.

The vaccine was demonstrated to be effective in macaques, primates often used in biomedical research because they’re similar to humans, but has yet to be tested in people, _The New York Times _reports. But with scheduled clinical trials involving 6,000 participants, it will soon become clear whether the vaccine is actually as promising as it currently seems.

The scientists at Oxford’s Jenner Institute for vaccine research had a bit of a head start, the _NYT_ reports. They’re working on an accelerated timeline because they had previously shown that a vaccine similar to the one they’re now developing that inoculated against a different coronavirus was safe for use in humans.

That’s the first crucial benchmark for regulatory approval, but not by any means a guarantee that the new vaccine will work.

“It is a very, very fast clinical program,” Emilio Emini, a vaccine program director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told the _NYT_.

Even on top of accelerated testing, the group would need to get an emergency approval from the U.K. government if it wants to hit that September target.

But if everything goes to exactly as planned, the _NYT_ reports that the group would be able to send out millions of vaccines by then — allowing the start of inoculation programs several months ahead of current timelines.

https://futurism.com/neoscope/covid...gn=eab51f1a6b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_04_29_06_42


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## Bill Adams

Seems like Madagascar has produced some sort of cure for coronavirus, but WHO is dragging their feet to verify if it actually works.


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## Shahzaz ud din

*Scientists in China believe new drug can stop pandemic 'without vaccine'*
*



*


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## Indos

*Scientists in China believe new drug can stop pandemic 'without vaccine'*

Qian Ye and Matthew Knight
Agence France-Presse

Beijing, China / Tue, May 19, 2020 / 12:30 pm 





This picture taken on May 14, 2020 shows Sunney Xie (right), director of Peking University's Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics, with a member of his research team at their laboratory in Beijing. - The Chinese laboratory says it has developed a drug it believes has the power to bring the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic to a halt, shortening the recovery time for those infected and even offering short-term immunity from the virus. (AFP/Wang Zhao)

A Chinese laboratory has been developing a drug it believes has the power to bring the coronavirus pandemic to a halt.

The outbreak first emerged in China late last year before spreading across the world, prompting an international race to find treatments and vaccines.

A drug being tested by scientists at China's prestigious Peking University could not only shorten the recovery time for those infected, but even offer short-term immunity from the virus, researchers say. 

Sunney Xie, director of the university's Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Genomics, told AFP that the drug has been successful at the animal testing stage.

"When we injected neutralizing antibodies into infected mice, after five days the viral load was reduced by a factor of 2,500," said Xie.

"That means this potential drug has [a] therapeutic effect."

The drug uses neutralizing antibodies -- produced by the human immune system to prevent the virus infecting cells -- which Xie's team isolated from the blood of 60 recovered patients. 

A study on the team's research, published Sunday in the scientific journal Cell, suggests that using the antibodies provides a potential "cure" for the disease and shortens recovery time.

Xie said his team had been working "day and night" searching for the antibody.

"Our expertise is single-cell genomics rather than immunology or virology. When we realized that the single-cell genomic approach can effectively find the neutralizing antibody we were thrilled."

He added that the drug should be ready for use later this year and in time for any potential winter outbreak of the virus, which has infected 4.8 million people around the world and killed more than 315,000.

"Planning for the clinical trial is underway," said Xie, adding it will be carried out in Australia and other countries since cases have dwindled in China, offering fewer human guinea pigs for testing.

"The hope is these neutralized antibodies can become a specialized drug that would stop the pandemic," he said.

China already has five potential coronavirus vaccines at the human trial stage, a health official said last week.

But the World Health Organization has warned that developing a vaccine could take 12 to 18 months.

Scientists have also pointed to the potential benefits of plasma -- a blood fluid -- from recovered individuals who have developed antibodies to the virus enabling the body's defenses to attack it.

More than 700 patients have received plasma therapy in China, a process which authorities said showed "very good therapeutic effects".

"However, it [plasma] is limited in supply," Xie said, noting that the 14 neutralizing antibodies used in their drug could be put into mass production quickly.



*Prevention and cure *

Using antibodies in drug treatments is not a new approach, and it has been successful in treating several other viruses such as HIV, Ebola and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). 

Xie said his researchers had "an early start" since the outbreak started in China before spreading to other countries.

Ebola drug Remdesivir was considered a hopeful early treatment for COVID-19 -- clinical trials in the US showed it shortened the recovery time in some patients by a third -- but the difference in mortality rate was not significant.

The new drug could even offer short-term protection against the virus.

The study showed that if the neutralizing antibody was injected before the mice were infected with the virus, the mice stayed free of infection and no virus was detected.

This may offer temporary protection for medical workers for a few weeks, which Xie said they are hoping to "extend to a few months".

More than 100 vaccines for COVID-19 are in the works globally, but as the process of vaccine development is more demanding, Xie is hoping that the new drug could be a faster and more efficient way to stop the global march of the coronavirus.

"We would be able to stop the pandemic with an effective drug, even without a vaccine," he said.

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## Baby Leone

I wish it's true and not in competition with USA.


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## Turingsage

*Coronavirus: Immune clue sparks treatment hope*
By Victoria Gill & Rachael BuchananBBC News

22 May 2020
UK scientists are to begin testing a treatment that it is hoped could counter the effects of Covid-19 in the most seriously ill patients.

It has been found those with the most severe form of the disease have extremely low numbers of an immune cell called a T-cell.

T-cells clear infection from the body.

The clinical trial will evaluate if a drug called interleukin 7, known to boost T-cell numbers, can aid patients' recovery.

It involves scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, King's College London and Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital.

They have looked at immune cells in the blood of 60 Covid-19 patients and found an apparent crash in the numbers of T-cells.

*Prof Adrian Hayday* from the Crick Institute said it was a "great surprise" to see what was happening with the immune cells.

"They're trying to protect us, but the virus seems to be doing something that's pulling the rug from under them, because their numbers have declined dramatically.

In a microlitre (0.001ml) drop of blood, normal healthy adults have between 2,000 and 4,000 T-cells, also called T lymphocytes.

The Covid patients the team tested had between 200-1,200.

*'Extremely encouraging'*
The researchers say these findings pave the way for them to develop a "fingerprint test" to check the levels of T-cells in the blood which could provide early indications of who might go on to develop more severe disease.

But it also provides the possibility for a specific treatment to reverse that immune cell decline.

*Manu Shankar-Hari,* a critical care consultant at Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital, said that around 70% of patients that he sees in intensive care with Covid-19 arrive with between 400-800 lymphocytes per microlitre. "When they start to recover, their lymphocyte level also starts to go back up," he added.
Interleukin 7 has already been tested in a small group of patients with sepsis and proved to safely increase the production of these specific cells.

In this trial, it will be given to patients with a low lymphocyte count who have been in critical care for more than three days.

Mr Shankar-Hari said: "We are hoping that [when we increase the cell count] the viral infections gets cleared.

"As a critical care physician, I look after patients who are extremely unwell and, other than supportive care, we do not have any direct active treatment against the disease.

"So a treatment like this coming along for in the context of a clinical trial is extremely encouraging for critical care physicians across the UK."

BBC


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## Baby Leone

Who confirmed that the vaccine will be available for all early 2021.


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## POPEYE-Sailor

Putin right now, after Russia approves first vaccine for Covid!

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## skyshadow

*Shifa-Pharmed vaccine on live Iranian TV 

Note that this type of vaccine does NOT need a complicated cold-chain solution and can retain efficacy in normal commercial refrigerators. *



__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1341654399907729408

*Interesting (unconfirmed) report: Several EU companies and a South African company have expressed their readiness to volunteer in Iran's vaccine Trials if Iran agrees to sell the vaccine in advance. I'll keep an eye on this and will update with more info. 


In less that 18 hours, nearly 10/000 Iranians have signed up for volunteer vaccine injection during the first phase of the trials. 17000 people have called the dedicated company line. *


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## beijingwalker

*Five million doses of China's Sinovac Biotech vaccine arrive in Brazil*




*Turkey to Start Using China's Covid-19 Vaccine After Tests Showed it was 91% Effective*
A staff member checking vaccines during a media tour of a new factory built to produce a Covid-19 vaccine at Sinovac, one of 11 Chinese companies approved to carry out clinical trials of potential coronavirus vaccines, in Beijing. (Photo by WANG Zhao / AFP)

Turkey will initially receive three million doses of Sinovac and have the option for 50 million more as it begins inoculations next month, starting with healthcare workers and the most vulnerable.

*AFP*
*LAST UPDATED:*DECEMBER 25, 2020, 07:13 IST
Turkey will receive its first shipment of China's Sinovac coronavirus vaccine within days as preliminary domestic tests showed it was 91% effective, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Thursday.

Ankara in the next few days will also sign a deal with Pfizer/BioNTech for 4.5 million doses, with the option to buy 30 million more from the US pharmaceutical giant and its German partner, Koca said

Turkey will initially receive three million doses of Sinovac and have the option for 50 million more as it begins inoculations next month, starting with healthcare workers and the most vulnerable.

Koca said the first shipments of the Chinese vaccine will be sent to Turkey on Sunday.

The preliminary tests on 7,371 volunteers in Turkey showed that the Chinese vaccine was 91.25 per cent effective, although phase three tests were still not complete.

Turkey "will be able to vaccinate 1.5 million or even two million people per day," Koca said, adding that the "first stage" of vaccinations would cover nine million people.

The nation of 83 million has officially recorded 19,115 Covid-19 deaths and 2.2 million virus infections.








Turkey to Start Using China's Covid-19 Vaccine After Tests Showed it was 91% Effective


Turkey will initially receive three million doses of Sinovac and have the option for 50 million more as it begins inoculations next month, starting with healthcare workers and the most vulnerable.




www.news18.com


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## skyshadow

*Great news: First Iranian participant has got vaccinated


Truly a historic moment for Iran and the Iranian nation. We're back. We will not rest anymore. Our country will regain it's deserved status in the world. Congratulations to everyone


First participant - daughter of the company owner- was successfully injected with the vaccine*


View attachment 701057



*Second participant received his vaccine. 


He's a General Physician and an executive in EIKO (Shifa-Pharmed father Institution) "I'm very proud, Iran has a long history of vaccine production and we're very confident about this vaccine's lack of serious side-effects" "inshallah our people will go back to normal life, soon" *

View attachment 701055





__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1343820797018861569

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## CAPRICORN-88

*CanSino vaccine approved in Mexico, found to cause no serious side effects for elderly*
By Global TimesPublished: Feb 10, 2021 07:14 PM





CanSino Bio Photo:VCG

Chinese vaccine producer CanSino's recombinant COVID-19 vaccine Convidecia received emergency use approval in Mexico on Wednesday, the company announced. The vaccine will be given to adults over the age of 18 in the country.

CanSino signed a pre-purchase framework agreement with the Mexican Ministry of Health in October, 2020 to supply 35 million doses of the vaccine, according to a notice CanSino sent to the Global Times on Wednesday. As planned, the vaccine will be provided to the country from the end of 2020 to 2021.
*
The vaccine is effective with a single dose and can bring dual protection - humoral and cellular immunity - at the same time, *according to the company. It is so far the only COVID-19 vaccine that is effective for a single dose and can be stored stably at 2-8 C for a long time.

It is also effective for the elderly, based on phase II and III trials which involved aged participants and saw no serious adverse reactions.

The vaccine is a recombinant adenovirus vector vaccine jointly developed by CanSino Biologics and researchers from the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences led by prominent Chinese coronavirus vaccine developer Chen Wei.

It reported 65.7 percent efficacy against symptomatic COVDI-19 cases, 90.98 percent against severe disease, according to its global Phase III interim data released on Monday. The trials were carried out among more than 40,000 volunteers, aged 18 and older, in 78 clinical trial sites across five countries in three continents.

The trial in Pakistan showed that after 28 days of single dose vaccination, the protection against severe infection was 100 percent, with an overall protection efficacy of 74.8 percent, and no serious vaccine-related adverse reactions occurred.

Experts told the Global Times that the good effective rate of the vaccine and single-dose vaccination indicates that a rapid, large-scale inoculation of the population can be achieved, which is of great significance to overall epidemic control

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## CAPRICORN-88

*WHO expert: Virus research in Wuhan 'successful in many ways'*
Updated 2021.02.13 13:40 GMT+8





A World Health Organization's (WHO) expert team said on Friday that they learned a lot about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, during a recent mission to China.

The remarks were made at the WHO's daily press conference in Geneva.

The team started a visit to the central Chinese city of Wuhan on January 14 for a joint study on the coronavirus's origins. The experts have now concluded their research with Chinese medical professionals in the city.

Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO mission, said the international team's visit to China has been "successful in many ways," with a lot of new knowledge made about the start of the event and understandings deepened in the fields including the spread of the virus, virus genome sequencing and wildlife tracing.

He reiterated that none of the labs in Wuhan had the virus, and no one had seen the virus before the outbreak.

*Ben Embarek said the WHO experts visited and discussed with different laboratories in Wuhan, and learned that none of the labs was working or had the SARS-CoV-2 in their collections, which is in line with what other laboratories around the world have said – that "this virus had not been worked with knowingly in any of labs around the world working with coronaviruses."*

"It's of course always possible that the virus is and was present in samples that have not yet been processed, or among viruses that have not yet been characterized," the expert said. "But knowingly, apparently from all the labs we've talked with, nobody has seen this virus before."

Ben Embarek at the press conference in Wuhan last week ruled out the possibility that the novel coronavirus was made from laboratories, saying it is extremely unlikely and they will not work on this hypothesis regarding the virus tracing in the future.

Marion Koopmans, who's also in the international panel to China, added that more than 30,000 animals of different species and from different locations have been tested and screened, and no potential reservoir has been found among them with all results negative.

"There was not a clear candidate for intermediate host yet," said Koopmans, but the traceback process "does provide some leads for the next steps in the studies."

*Two reports to be released*

A summary report of the mission's findings could emerge as early as next week, followed by a final report "in the coming weeks," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"We look forward to receiving both reports, which will be released publicly," said Tedros.

The WHO chief pointed out again that this mission would not find all the answers, but it has provided important information that "takes people closer to understanding the origins of the virus."

"The mission has achieved a better understanding of the early days of the pandemic, and identified areas for further analysis and research," he added


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## CAPRICORN-88

*China's first 1-dose COVID-19 vaccine rolls out; 500m people can be inoculated a year*
By Global TimesPublished: Feb 27, 2021 03:44 PM





Photo:VCG

China's first Ad5-nCoV COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out on Friday. One of the developers of the single-dose vaccine said that the annual production capacity can reach 500 million doses, which means 500 million people can be vaccinated in a year.

Phase-I clinical trials of the vaccine started on March 16, 2020, making it the world's first COVID-19 candidate vaccine that entered clinical trials.

*The Ad5-nCoV vaccine is a recombinant adenovirus vector vaccine jointly developed by CanSino Biologics and researchers from the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences led by Chen Wei.*

Chen is an infectious disease expert and a researcher at the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences.

Unlike inactivated vaccines, Ad5-nCoV is effective with a single dose and can bring dual protection ̶ humoral and cellular immunity ̶ at the same time.

It is the only single-dose COVID-19 vaccine that has been given a conditional approval to be rolled out in China, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) reported on Friday.

People can get desirable protective effect after 14 days of inoculation.

The protective effect can last at least six months after a single-dose inoculation and it can increase immune response by 10 to 20 times if the second dose is taken half a year after the first one, Chen told CCTV in an exclusive interview on Friday.

"We have data for six months so far to prove the vaccine's efficacy People don't need to take another dose within the first six months after their first inoculation. What if the epidemic is not over after six months? We have also developed the vaccine so that its effect is strengthened even after six months," Chen said.

According to data, Chen and other researchers predicted that the vaccine's effect can last two years after two doses.

The most important feature of the vaccine is that it can be produced fast and on a large scale, Chen said.

The vaccine showed full protection against severe-illness morbidity in Pakistan, Chen said, noting that it can achieve more than 90 percent protection against severe-illness.

The vaccine showed 90.98 percent efficacy rate in preventing severe diseases in its interim analysis. And it's effective in preventing 65.7 percent of symptomatic diseases in clinical trials conducted in multiple countries including Pakistan, Faisal Sultan, special assistant to the Pakistani Minister on Health, announced in early February.

Chen said no serious adverse reactions associated with the vaccine have been reported in the vaccinated population so far, including those in extreme environments. And no specific adverse events have been reported that are different from those of other vaccines.

The Ad5-nCoV vaccine is actually mature and reliable. The vaccine with such technology has already been used for Ebola virus in 2014, Chen said.

People aged under 18 and over 60 are not allowed to take the other approved vaccines without conditional approval. However, the Ad5-nCoV vaccine is different.

Ad5-nCoV's Phase-II and Phase-III trials all involved elder participants as people aged over 55 or 60 have a higher morbidity of severe illness, Chen said.

The oldest volunteer was a man surnamed Xiong whose antibody tested positive after the clinical trial results were revealed, this gave researchers great confidence, Chen noted. She also said they have safety data of clinical trials for people aged 6-18 which are being reviewed by China's National Medical Products Administration.

A PhD volunteer took the vaccine on February 29, 2020, the same day as Chen. And she had given birth to a baby one week earlier. "She and her baby are healthy now," Chen said.

Since the vaccine can be transported and stored at 2C-8C, Chen hopes that the vaccine won't require cold-chain logistics. She also said they have finished the clinical trials around the world and will soon release the results.

In China there are two types of COVID-19 vaccines ̶ inactivated and Ad5-nCoV vaccines. When asked which one people should choose, Chen said those who want to take fewer doses and get faster immune response should choose the Ad5-nCoV.

As other variants of the virus have been found in other parts of the world, Chen said they will follow the safety of the vaccine over the long term after the rollout, and they will also track its effectiveness against the new variants. She also stated that they have started to develop a vaccine against the new variants.

When asked what the level of China's vaccine research and development is in the world, Chen said, "There is no doubt we are in the first group."

"There are few other countries that can reach the level that China has reached," she noted.

"We are neither arrogant nor condescending. We also learn more from others in order to produce safer vaccines. We must have confidence in our science and technology," she remarked


----------



## CAPRICORN-88

*Infected US consulate employees in HK reportedly reject quarantine, sparking public outcry*
By Global TimesPublished: Mar 15, 2021 07:38 PM





The US consulate in Hong Kong. Photo: cnsphoto

Two employees of the US consulate in Hong Kong have tested positive for COVID-19 but refused to be quarantined, local Hong Kong media reported Monday. Their behavior has drawn public outcry as of Monday afternoon.

"We have been informed that two Consulate General employees have tested positive for COVID-19. Due to privacy concerns, we are not able to share additional information," according to an official announcement published by the consulate on its website on Monday, confirming the situation.

*According to local media Dot News, both employees refused to accept the quarantine arrangement on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. They are still roaming the community after the preliminary diagnosis and working in the consulate, posing a huge potential hazard to the prevention and fight against the epidemic, Dot News reported on Monday, quoting government sources.*

While notifying the consulate's indefinite temporary closure, the consulate did not respond to earlier news that two employees had refused to be quarantined.

" We can confirm that the employees in question do not work in offices that interact with the public," said the consulate. "We have closed the Consulate General to perform a deep disinfection and cleaning, while appropriate contact tracing is completed."

Hong Kong's Secretary for Food and Health Sophia Chan Siu-chee said on Monday that the two cases will be handled seriously.

"Those who tested positive in initial tests also need to be isolated as soon as possible. We must find their close contacts and do more tests," Chan said.

*The employees' arrogant outlaw behavior sparked public outrage.

"They can do whatever they want to do in the US, but they must obey local rules as long as they are in the Chinese territory," a netizen wrote on China's Twitter-like platform Sina Weibo, slamming their irresponsible behavior.*

"*The Chinese government should evict them from the country," another said.*

Chan said that government authorities have contacted the US consulate regarding the issue. The government will announce any update on the issue as soon as possible.

The US consulate in Hong Kong could not be reached for comment as of press time

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## KurtisBrian

really interesting to see which nations are getting the vaccinations first or at the fastest rate. 









Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World


More than 5.47 billion people worldwide have received a Covid-19 vaccine, equal to about 71.2 percent of the world population.



www.nytimes.com





doses / 100 people
Israel 108
Seychelles 93
UAE 71
...
UK 41
...
USA 34
....
France 11
....
Canada 9.2
....
India 2.7
....
Pakistan 0.2


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## CAPRICORN-88

CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
8 JUN, 21:36
*People vaccinated with Sputnik V may need jab of another vaccine — Deputy Health Minister*
The research in this field is still underway, Oleg Gridnev added

MOSCOW, June 8. /TASS/. 

*People who took the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine may require repeat vaccination with a different one after some time, Russian Deputy Health Minister Oleg Gridnev said Tuesday, adding that research into this is still ongoing.*

"It is a good thing that we have other vaccines [besides the Sputnik V], that ramp up their production, their volume; in the future, as our esteemed scientists predict, maybe next year or in a year, a revaccination might be needed, with a vaccine other than the Sputnik V - namely with the Covivac or EpiVacCorona," he told lawmakers. "But the research in this field is still underway".

Gridnev added that much more Sputnik V is being produced at the moment, therefore its spread and shipments in Russia are larger as well.

Currently, there are four domestically-developed coronavirus vaccines registered in Russia. Sputnik V, developed by the Gamaleia Center, is the most widespread one.


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## ghazi52

*World wide*

*Coronavirus Cases:*
176,901,879

*Deaths:*
3,822,510

*Recovered:*
161,025,122


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## skyshadow

*الهم صلی علی محمد و آل محمد 

Iran's Leader Ali Khamenei has received the first jab of domestically-produced vaccine, COV-Iran Barekat. These are leaders who walk the talk. He has said he wouldn't take Western made vaccines because he didn't trust them.


I am truly grateful to all those who used their knowledge & experience & made scientific & practical efforts to provide the country with such a great, prestigious capability, i.e. the #CovidVaccine.*


















*

 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1408353301163393028*


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## khansaheeb

Mexico won’t be ‘hostage’ to Big Pharma, president says, as internet predicts trouble after country rejects Covid jabs for kids


Social media users have theorized that President Andres Manuel López Obrador could face severe repercussions after he refused to purchase Covid vaccines for children, vowing that Mexico wouldn’t bow to pressure from drugs firms.




www.rt.com





*Mexico won’t be ‘hostage’ to Big Pharma, president says, as internet predicts trouble after country rejects Covid jabs for kids*
31 Jul, 2021 10:46
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FILE PHOTO: Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador © REUTERS/Edgard Garrido

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Social media users have theorized that President Andres Manuel López Obrador could face severe repercussions after he refused to purchase Covid vaccines for children, vowing that Mexico wouldn’t bow to pressure from drugs firms.
In remarks made earlier this week, the Mexican leader said his government was still waiting for the scientific community to demonstrate the benefits of vaccinating minors. Until conclusive evidence was provided, Mexico would refuse to purchase jabs for children, Obrador announced, adding that pharmaceutical firms seemed to be focused more on making profits than on ensuring medical necessity as they rake in record sales from Covid-19 vaccines.


> *Mexico will not be held hostage by pharmaceutical companies that only want to do business and scare children with the idea that it is necessary to vaccinate against Covid-19.*


He was similarly critical of plans by drugs companies to introduce third- or even fourth-dose booster shots, opining that the jabs could be _“superfluous.”_
Speaking on the same topic, Undersecretary for Health Hugo López-Gatell claimed there was _“no scientific evidence”_ showing the jab was _“essential”_ for minors, given the high rate of inoculation among the adult population, Excélsior, Mexico City’s second-oldest daily, reported. 
Mexico has approved a range of Covid vaccines for emergency use, including shots developed by Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Sinovac, as well as Russia’s Sputnik V. 
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The country’s Health Ministry recently revealed that a minimum of 48% of Mexicans have received at least one vaccine dose. 
Like many other countries, Mexico rolled out its inoculation program in phases, giving high-risk groups first priority. Currently, those under 18 are not included in the vaccine drive.
Largely ignored by international media, Obrador’s provocative remarks went viral after an English-subtitled video of his speech was shared across social media. 

Several comments hailed the Mexican president’s _“cajones”_ for calling out Big Pharma greed. Pfizer, for example, has boasted record profits and recently raised full-year sales estimates for its vaccine to $45 billion.


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## CAPRICORN-88

__ https://www.facebook.com/100044198031294/posts/359664115516853


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## CAPRICORN-88

_George Yeo was Singapore's former Health Minister. _


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## The SC

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1520452194360827904


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## The SC

WHO Chief Says China’s Zero-COVID Policy Not ‘Sustainable’ ​https://english.aawsat.com/home/art...s-china’s-zero-covid-policy-not-‘sustainable’

Pandemic Gets Tougher to Track as COVID Testing Plunges​https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3638171/pandemic-gets-tougher-track-covid-testing-plunges ​​


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## Han Patriot

The SC said:


> WHO Chief Says China’s Zero-COVID Policy Not ‘Sustainable’ ​https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3638151/who-chief-says-china’s-zero-covid-policy-not-‘sustainable’
> 
> Pandemic Gets Tougher to Track as COVID Testing Plunges​https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3638171/pandemic-gets-tougher-track-covid-testing-plunges ​​


I believe they will tweak it, zero covid doesn't really mean zero cases, its more of zero local transmission. China used to be very successful in targeted isolations and testing until omicron. There will need to be new modus operandi from this Shanghai experience.


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## The SC

__ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1547245264381018114


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## Han Patriot

The SC said:


> __ https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1547245264381018114


It's starting all over again, and then they wil say how come China has low deaths. They are lying.


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