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Moderna Begins Work on China mRNA Manufacturing Site
U.S. vaccine maker Moderna (MRNA.O) began construction of its first facility in China this month to manufacture mRNA medicines, the company said on Tuesday.
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine has yet to be approved in China, but the company said in July it had signed a deal with the city government of China’s financial hub Shanghai to work towards opportunities for it to research, develop and manufacture mRNA medicines in the country.
The facility in Shanghai would manufacture medicines for the domestic population, the world’s second-largest after India, a spokesperson for Moderna told Reuters.
It did not say what it planned to make at the facility and when production might start.
WHO Authorizes Emergency Use of Novavax’s Updated COVID Shot
Novavax‘s (NVAX.O) updated vaccine has been granted emergency-use authorization by the World Health Organization (WHO) for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals aged 12 and older, the company said on Tuesday.
The updated Novavax shot, which was authorized in the U.S. last month, targets a descendant of the XBB lineage of the coronavirus that was globally predominant earlier this year.
The emergency use listing helps speed up the regulatory approvals to import and administer the vaccines by member states, according to the WHO.
Novavax missed out on the COVID-19 vaccine windfall, which benefited mRNA rivals, due to manufacturing issues that delayed its filing for regulatory approval during the peak of the pandemic. Its original COVID shot received U.S. authorization in July 2022, long after Pfizer (PFE.N) and Moderna (MRNA.O) vaccines were in use.
Ex-White House Official Sheds More Light on Fate of Researcher Who May Have Caused COVID Pandemic
A former Trump administration official has claimed “it’s certainly possible” the Chinese government killed a Wuhan scientist who may have caused the COVID pandemic by secretly working on a vaccine months before the global health crisis broke out.
Dr. Robert Kadlec, who served as an official in the biodefense and epidemic response departments during the pandemic, said Chinese military scientist Zhou Yusen was conducting research on live animals at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019, and filed a patent for a COVID vaccine in February 2020 — barely one month after China put Wuhan into a lockdown due to the first outbreak.
Three months later, Dr. Yusen died when he allegedly fell from the roof of the Wuhan Institute. “It looked like he was censored as a consequence of whatever happened,” Kadlec told Australia’s Sky News. “Our evidence would suggest that something happened while he was doing his work, which we believe was when the virus first emerged,” he said.
Yusen’s quick turnaround of a COVID vaccine sparked concerns the Wuhan Institute was secretly working on a vaccine months before Beijing admitted to the outbreak of the novel virus. That research may have led to an accidental lab leak, House Republicans concluded in an April report.
But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly denied the claim. Kadlec now says he thinks Fauci’s denial was a way for the doctor to divert attention away from the fact that his agency allocated grant money that was used to fund experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Childhood Pneumonia Surge Reported in Netherlands Amid Outbreak in China
Childhood pneumonia cases are surging in the Netherlands, a health agency in the country has reported. During the week of Nov. 13-19, there were 103 pneumonia cases in the Netherlands out of every 100,000 children between the ages of 5 and 14. That was an increase from 83 the prior week, according to the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research (NIVEL).
China has also seen an unexplained increase in childhood pneumonia cases and other respiratory illnesses. On Nov. 22, WHO said it requested “additional epidemiologic and clinical information” from China — as well as laboratory results from the affected children.
“I think people are worried about new respiratory infections showing up, even in other countries, as we have found out how quickly a respiratory virus can spread internationally,” said Edward Liu, M.D., infectious diseases section chief at Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center. “No one wants another pandemic.”
“It makes sense for the WHO and/or CDC to assist China and the Netherlands in determining the cause of these respiratory infections.”
Pandemic Preparedness: Is the U.K. Ready for a Pandemic That Affects Children?
Before COVID-19, concerns were raised that the U.K. was unprepared for a pandemic that predominantly affected children. The situation has not changed with a lack of granular pandemic planning for children since the planning for a potential H1N1 pandemic in the mid-2000s.
This is of concern as a future global pandemic may result in a marked increase in critical illness and mortality in children compared to the COVID-19 pandemic, where serious illness has been much lower than in adults. For example, the emergence of a new virus with the pathogenicity and high transmissibility of measles would be devastating.
Children are extremely effective at transmitting respiratory viruses. For example, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infects almost all children by the age of two and infection rates of health workers caring for children with RSV, are very high.
Mitigating transmission is problematic as infants and young children have close physical contact with siblings and family members and, if admitted to the hospital, with the staff caring for them. The social distancing of young children during play is difficult; they are far less likely to wash their hands and much more likely to smear oral and nasal secretions onto others and rarely cover their mouths and nose when coughing and sneezing. SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses such as RSV and influenza may also be transmissible in small aerosol particles.
New COVID Variant Takes Hold in the United States
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The prevalence of a highly mutated COVID variant has tripled in the past two weeks, new government data shows. Now, nearly 1 in 10 new COVID cases are fueled by the BA.2.86 variant, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday.
The variant is spreading the fastest in the Northeast: Just over 13% of cases in the New York and New Jersey region are blamed on BA.2.86.
The CDC also noted that BA.2.86 variant poses a “low” public health risk.
In recent weeks, scientists have been studying a steep increase in a BA.2.86 descendant called JN.1, which has become the fastest-growing subvariant worldwide.
MRI Study Spotlights Impact of Long COVID on the Brain
A new study comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images of patients with long COVID, fully recovered COVID-19 survivors, and healthy controls shows microstructural changes in different brain regions in the long-COVID patients. The findings will be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
The research is the first to use diffusion microstructure imaging (DMI), a novel MRI technique, which looks at the movement of water molecules in tissues. DFI can detect smaller brain changes than traditional MRI.
“We noted gray matter alterations in both patients with long-COVID and those unimpaired after a COVID-19 infection,” said lead study author Alexander Rau, MD, of the University Hospital Freiburg in Germany. “Interestingly, we not only noted widespread microstructural alterations in patients with long COVID, but also in those unimpaired after having contracted COVID-19.”
The authors of the study said that though the findings are intriguing, they do little to explain why some patients develop long COVID and others do not.
