Login
Dr. Anthony Fauci Looks Back on Career, COVID and Controversy
Dr. Anthony Fauci, preparing to end his high-profile run as chief White House medical adviser, says he is proud of his legacy but laments the vicious political climate surrounding the COVID pandemic.
“I just want people to know that I gave it everything I had and didn’t leave anything on the field. I was all there,” Fauci, 81, said in an interview at his Washington, DC, home that ran Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
“It’s been an amazing journey that all of us have been through and still are in actually,” he added.
Fauci said the timing of the outbreak made things much worse than they might otherwise have been. “It got political very, very quickly because we had the misfortune of an outbreak and a double misfortune of an outbreak in a divided society and the triple misfortune of a divided society in an election year,” he said. “It was a triple whammy.”
Even as Fauci leaves his posts, Republican lawmakers have vowed to investigate the country’s COVID response and ask him to testify if they win back Congress in this year’s midterm elections.
Novavax Has Its Sights Set on the Commercial COVID Vaccine Market
Novavax (NVAX) is awaiting the FDA‘s decision on its COVID-19 vaccine booster, and whether or not the agency will accept the original formula rather than a new variant-specific formula.
However, the company is expecting the FDA to green-light the booster as an option even for those who received other vaccines for their primary or previous booster doses. That’s according to chief commercial officer John Trizzino.
While Novavax already received booster approval in other countries, the U.S. remains a slow market for the company. Trizzino said he expects things to pick up when the U.S. market goes commercial if the public health emergency is declared over sometime next year.
EU Prosecutor’s Office Opens Investigation Into COVID Vaccine Purchases
The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the EU’s coronavirus vaccine purchases, an announcement that will refocus attention on European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s role in the matter.
The EPPO is an independent EU body responsible for investigating and prosecuting financial crimes, including fraud, money laundering and corruption. In its announcement on Friday, the EPPO didn’t specify who was being investigated, or which of the EU’s vaccine contracts were under scrutiny.
However, two other watchdog agencies have previously drawn attention to one particular deal involving high-level contacts between Pfizer‘s leadership and von der Leyen. “This exceptional confirmation comes after the extremely high public interest. No further details will be made public at this stage,” said the EPPO in its short announcement.
Belgian Socialist MEP Kathleen van Brempt said that “several aspects” of the Pfizer contract need to be looked into, including “the text messages between the Commission President and the fact that there is no paper trail of the preliminary negotiations in first instance.”
“The [COVID-19] committee will be following this case with great attention,” said van Brempt.
Without a Nasal Vaccine, the U.S. Edge in Fighting COVID Is on the Line
Biden administration officials are raising concerns that the slow pace of developing a nasal vaccine for COVID-19 in the U.S. could pose a security risk as China, Iran and Russia approve their own vaccines taken through the nose or mouth.
Though nasal and oral vaccines are being studied in the U.S., none are close to coming on the market because Congress hasn’t approved more money to support research and development. Big pharmaceutical companies are also not investing in these next-generation vaccines because they don’t see much profit potential.
China already has a COVID vaccine that’s ingested through the mouth. India, Russia and Iran have authorized nasal vaccines. And while none of those have yet been proven to stop COVID transmission, officials say the U.S. could find itself at a global disadvantage, particularly if a deadlier variant emerges.
Even though India, Iran, China and Russia haven’t proved their non-injectable vaccines stop transmission, the potential is there, experts said.
‘Pretty Troublesome’: New COVID Variant BQ.1 Now Makes up 1 in 10 Cases Nationwide, CDC Estimates
In just over a month since a new COVID variant known as BQ.1 was first named, that strain and a descendant called BQ.1.1 have already grown to make up more than 10% of new infections across the country, according to updated estimates published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“When you get variants like that, you look at what their rate of increase is as a relative proportion of the variants, and this has a pretty troublesome doubling time,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview with CBS News.
It comes as federal health authorities have been bracing for a widely-expected resurgence of COVID-19 this fall and winter. BQ.1 variants have already outpaced many rival strains in European nations from England to Germany, which have already seen renewed waves begin.
BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 also appear on track to overtake the only other strain that still outnumbers them: BA.4.6, which currently makes up 12.2% of infections. Out of all regions, the New York and New Jersey area has the largest proportion of BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 infections. Around 20% of infections there are already from BQ.1 or BQ.1.1, the CDC estimates.
Moderna Signs Deal on Variant-Adapted COVID Shots for World’s Poorest
Moderna Inc. (MRNA.O) has agreed to provide its new variant-adapted COVID-19 vaccine to the global scheme aiming to deliver shots to the world’s poorest people.
The biotech company and vaccine alliance GAVI will cancel their existing supply deal for vaccines based on the original coronavirus strain. Instead, Moderna will supply up to 100 million doses of its new, variant-adapted vaccines at its lowest available price from 2023.
GAVI leads the COVAX initiative alongside the World Health Organization and other global bodies. The scheme has delivered 1.79 billion doses of the COVID vaccine to 146 countries, including nearly 186 million doses of Moderna’s original shot.
After the Pandemic, Heavy Burdens for a COVID Generation
Ask anyone who has experienced the lingering maladies of the pandemic, and they’ll tell you long COVID is no figment of the imagination. Tiredness, breathlessness, body aches and “brain fog” hang around for millions of people. Some of these symptoms are also common without COVID, and researchers are trying to pin down with precision the lasting damage this virus can do to the human body. They are far from a full understanding.
That’s why a new study in Scotland is important. It was aimed at discovering the frequency, nature, determinants and impact of long COVID on a large scale, to improve on previous partial results in other investigations. The first findings in the Long-COVID in Scotland Study are based on medical records and the experiences of more than 33,000 patients who had laboratory-confirmed COVID and 62,957 who had never been infected. The researchers, Jill P. Pell of the University of Glasgow and colleagues, found about 6% of those infected had “not recovered” and 42% “only partially.”
This reinforces earlier findings that a large segment of people who are infected continue to experience one or more symptoms long after the infection has passed. In a study published in August from the Netherlands, researchers found post-COVID symptoms lingered in about 1 in 8 people.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in a recent large study that 1 in 5 adults from 18 to 64 years old who had COVID, and 1 in 4 ages 65 years and older, had at least one persisting health condition related to their COVID infection. Yet another survey in April put the prevalence at 43%. A new study just published about long COVID in Germany put the prevalence at 28.5%.
Can Long COVID Research Unlock Other Great Medical Mysteries of Our Time?
As the coronavirus grew from a fleeting concern to full-blown panic, Lili Lim started to hear about people for whom the illness lasted weeks or even months. There were news stories of young people that couldn’t shake their fatigue or cognitive malaise, of folks who had to quit their job due to debilitating exhaustion.
Chronic fatigue syndrome and long COVID are both part of a much larger group of illnesses that arise after a viral, or sometimes bacterial, infection. Mononucleosis, HIV, Lyme, Ebola, SARS and many other infections can also have similarly prolonged effects. But experts say attention, funding and research into these post-infectious illnesses has historically been limited, and patients have often had their symptoms minimized or dismissed.
Long COVID has changed that. While millions of people across the world were already living with post-viral illnesses before the pandemic, a 2021 study published by the American Medical Association found that more than half of COVID patients reported symptoms lasting longer than six months.
That means that the pool of potential post-viral illness patients has probably grown many times over during the pandemic. The surge has left scientists scrambling to find answers and unlocking the mysteries of persistent COVID, they say, could translate to further understanding of other post-infectious afflictions as well.
Gates Foundation Pledges $1.2 Billion to Eradicate Polio Globally
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says it will commit $1.2 billion to the effort to end polio worldwide. The money will be used to help implement the Global Polio Eradication Initiative’s strategy through 2026. The initiative is trying to end the polio virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two endemic countries, the foundation said in a statement Sunday.
The money also will be used to stop outbreaks of new variants of the virus. The announcement was made Sunday at the World Health Summit in Berlin.
Despite the billions of dollars that have gone into the effort to eradicate polio since 1988 — the program costs about $1 billion every year — the World Health Organization and partners have missed repeated deadlines to wipe out the disease and have come under sustained criticism for failing to adapt to challenges.
In recent years, for example, there have been more cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine used in eradication efforts than those caused by the wild virus.
Serum Institute to Produce Ebola Vaccine for Use in Uganda Outbreak
The Serum Institute of India plans to manufacture 20,000 to 30,000 doses of an experimental Ebola vaccine by the end of November for use in trials against an outbreak in Uganda, its developers and a company source said.
The response to Uganda’s outbreak has been blunted by the absence of a proven vaccine against the Sudan strain of the virus.
Oxford University, which developed a COVID-19 vaccine with AstraZeneca (AZN.L), has an Ebola vaccine that has been shown to induce an immune response to both the Sudan and Zaire strains in Phase 1 trials.
Its developers said they were working with the Serum Institute to manufacture doses that could be deployed in Uganda as part of a clinical trial once the authorities there gave regulatory approval.
Vaccines to Treat Cancer Possible by 2030, Say BioNTech Founders
Vaccines that target cancer could be available before the end of the decade, according to the husband and wife team behind one of the most successful COVID vaccines of the pandemic.
Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, who co-founded BioNTech, the German firm that partnered with Pfizer to manufacture a revolutionary mRNA COVID vaccine, said they had made breakthroughs that fueled their optimism for cancer vaccines in the coming years.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Prof Türeci described how the mRNA technology at the heart of BioNTech’s COVID vaccine could be repurposed so that it primed the immune system to attack cancer cells instead of invading coronaviruses.
Asked when cancer vaccines based on mRNA might be ready to use in patients, Prof Sahin said they could be available “before 2030.”
