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This Vaccine Stock Surged After the FDA Cleared It for Mpox
Emergent BioSolution’s stock surged early Friday morning, following news that one of its vaccines got approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prevent mpox (formerly known as monkey pox).
The biopharma company announced on Thursday that the federal health regulator expanded the approved use of its smallpox vaccine (ACAM2000) to include the prevention of mpox disease in individuals determined to be at high risk of infection.
Emergent BioSolutions EBS-6.29% stock initially shot up 18% to $10.49 during pre-market trading. However, it subsequently sank below its Thursday closing price of $8.98.
France Aims to Contain Livestock Viruses With Vaccine Push
France extended vaccination campaigns to contain a new variant of the bluetongue virus and the epizootic haemorrhagic disease, or EHD, livestock diseases that have been spreading in the country, the farm ministry said on Friday.
The BTV3 bluetongue virus, which spreads by insects and can be deadly for sheep, cattle and goats, has been circulating in the Netherlands, northern Belgium and western Germany since late last year.
It passed into France earlier this month and Britain reported a first outbreak on Monday.
Bluetongue and EHD are not harmful to humans and have no impact on the safety of food produced from infected animals, but the diseases can have significant economic repercussions, including with the closure of foreign markets.
An Obesity Drug Prevents Covid Deaths, Study Suggests
Wegovy, the popular obesity drug, may have yet another surprising benefit. In a large clinical trial, people taking the drug during the pandemic were less likely to die of COVID-19, researchers reported on Friday.
People on Wegovy still got COVID-19, and at the same rate as people randomly assigned to take a placebo. But their chances of dying from the infection plunged by 33 percent, the study found. And the protective effect occurred immediately — before participants had lost significant amounts of weight.
In addition, the death rate from all causes was lower among subjects taking Wegovy, a very rare finding in clinical trials of new treatments. The result suggests that lower life expectancy among people with obesity is actually caused by the disease itself, and that it can be improved by treating obesity.
“Stunning,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said of the data. The study was published in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The study was not originally designed to look at the effects of taking Wegovy on people with COVID-19. But the participants taking the drug were not healthier than the others, said Dr. Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale and the editor in chief of the journal.
Myocarditis Complications More Common After COVID Infection Than Vaccination, 18-Month Data Suggest
A study today in JAMA suggests that hospitalized patients — primarily previously healthy young men — have considerably fewer cardiovascular sequelae by 18 months if they develop myocarditis after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination than after COVID-19 infection.
French researchers mined data from the French National Health Data System on all 4,635 residents aged 12 to 49 years hospitalized for myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, from December 2020 to June 2022.
Participants had postvaccination myocarditis (within 1 week of COVID-19 mRNA vaccination; 588 patients [12%]), post-COVID-19 myocarditis (within 30 days of infection; 298 [6%]), or conventional myocarditis (3,779 [82%]). The team also compared medical management in the three groups after hospital release.
Low rates of myocarditis after vaccination with mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been reported, mainly in young adults after receipt of their second dose, the vast majority with a favorable outcome.
Wisconsin and Illinois Health Officials Report Three Deaths From West Nile Virus
Two people in eastern Wisconsin and one person in northeastern Illinois have died of West Nile virus, according to health officials.
A third person in Wisconsin has been hospitalized because of the mosquito-borne illness, the Wisconsin department of health services said Thursday in a release.
That state’s cases involve residents of Outagamie, Fond du Lac and Brown counties.
In Lake county, Illinois, three people have tested positive for the virus over the past seven days, the Lake county health department and community health center said Thursday in a release.
One of the victims experienced symptom onset in mid-August and died shortly thereafter.
West Nile virus is commonly spread through the bite of an infected mosquito. While most people don’t experience symptoms, about one in five can develop a fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea or rash, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. Repeating COVID Mistakes With Bird Flu as Spread Raises Alarm, Experts Say
The U.S. is making the same mistakes with the H5N1 bird flu virus as with COVID-19, even as the highly pathogenic avian influenza continues spreading on American farms and raising alarms that it could mutate to become a pandemic, public health experts argue in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We’re closing our eyes to both the COVID-19 pandemic and to a potential nascent bird flu [pandemic] on the horizon,” said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and co-author of the article. “Our ability to react swiftly and decisively is the big problem.”
Beyond the outbreaks — of COVID-19, bird flu, mpox, measles and other dangerous pathogens — the inability or refusal to learn the lessons of each crisis is the most pressing health issue facing America, he said. “The social epidemic of forgetting is probably the more worrisome public health event of 2024.”
A lack of testing, opaque data, political divides, poor healthcare access and a sense of hubris — all have plagued the COVID-19 response, and now these errors are playing across the bird flu response, Gonsalves said.
