New Coronavirus News from 29 Mar 2021b

A City in Brazil's Amazon Rain Forest Is a Stark Warning about COVID to the Rest of the World [Scientific American, 29 Mar 2021]

By Luke Taylo

Manaus and cities like it will continue to generate dangerous viral variants if vaccination campaigns are not expanded to broadly reach all nations, rich or poor

Manaus, a Brazilian city of more than two million that lies hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast in the midst of the Amazon rain forest, has stood out as one of the world’s leading COVID hotspots. Tragically, it continues to provide the wrong lessons about what should be done to ease the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.

The city and Brazil as a whole have become an exemplar of what happens when a country pursues a strategy of denying the pandemic and embracing herd immunity by letting the virus spread unchecked. Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has promoted the idea of letting the pathogen move throughout the population until most people have been infected. He described proposals for a lockdown in Manaus before a crushing second wave of infections hit as “absurd.” And he has downplayed the severity of the crisis, saying that the nation of 211 million has to recognize that death is an inevitability and so Brazilians should stop being “sissies.” The country is currently recording around a quarter of all weekly COVID-19 deaths despite being home to less than 3 percent of the world’s population.

The legacy of the nation’s approach to countering COVID has meant that the spiraling case numbers and deaths registered in Manaus and the rest of Brazil are now spreading through the world in the form of a new variant of the virus. Studies suggest this variant could spread more than twice as fast. “Manaus was the first city to have its health system collapse in the new wave,” says Brazilian physician and neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis. “But now there are many ‘Manaus’s all over Brazil’s five regions. Brazil badly needs help from the international community to handle this situation, or new variants from here will continue to spread worldwide!”

Manaus was devastated by a first wave of COVID cases beginning last March. Excess deaths—the 3,457 people in the city who died above the expected mortality figures between March 19 and June 24, 2020—represented 0.16 percent of Manaus’s relatively young population. And 7 percent of men older than 75 died at the peak of the spread.

Infections were so prevalent that researchers at the University of São Paulo and their colleagues concluded that Manaus was the first city in the world to reach herd immunity—the point at which enough people are immune to a virus that the spread of new infections is hindered. Their preliminary preprint study estimated that 66 percent of the population had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 (they later revised their figure to 76 percent as of October). The threshold for COVID herd immunity is unknown, but projections often cited range from 60 to 90 percent. Similarly high rates of infection have also been found in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon.

After a peak of hospitalizations and deaths last April, numbers dropped to relatively low levels until November 2020, despite the reopening of schools and businesses. Some Brazilian researchers warned that the pandemic was not over. Infections could rise, and the absence of stricter public health measures would condemn the city to a resurgence. The response from public officials, they say, was always the same: herd immunity would protect them. This false sense of security precipitated the new wave of infections, says Jesem Orellana, a Manaus-based epidemiologist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a leading Brazilian public health institute.

In December 2020 a second wave did hit. And by January the city’s health system, which serves communities across the Amazon, had collapsed. ICUs were full to bursting, and oxygen supplies became exhausted. Some patients were airlifted to other regions of Brazil. But many died of asphyxiation on makeshift beds in hospital corridors or their home, doctors say.

More severe than the first one, the new wave took Manaus by surprise. Wearing masks and practicing social distancing had been discarded in the belief the city had reached herd immunity. Caseloads surged out of control, and bleak milestones from last year were surpassed. In January alone more than 3,200 excess deaths were logged, Orellana says.

Questions arose as to whether herd immunity had ever been achieved, the number of people infected had been overcounted or immunity to the virus had waned. Another disturbing prospect was that mutations to the virus in the Amazonian city that had spawned what is called the Manaus variant, or more formally P.1, could have caused reinfections in people who had earlier bouts or could have sped the rate of transmission among the still uninfected.
“It’s quite hard to come up with any scenario that can be made to fit Manaus which is not hugely concerning,” says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Heath.

Recent studies have corroborated the suspicions that P.1 drove Manaus’s second wave. The exact rate of infection prior to the recent upsurge has not been determined. But Hanage emphasizes that inducing immunity by leaving people to contract the virus unguarded is a mistake. “Following the tragedy of Manaus, I would hope we can put an end to discussion of controlling the pandemic through herd immunity acquired from natural infection,” he says.

Hanage hopes the dire scenes in the Amazon—hospital systems collapsing, grave diggers carving out trenches for mass graves shared by multiple bodies, and families desperately queuing for oxygen supplies—will send a clear message: “Herd immunity through infection, instead of a vaccine, only comes with an enormous amount of illness and death,” Hanage says.
“[People in Manaus] thought, ‘We passed through this big wave, so now it’s fine,’” says Paola Resende, a research scientist at the Laboratory of Respiratory Viruses and Measles at Fiocruz. “Of course, the people relaxed and started to live their life as normal. And of course, it happened again.”

Resistance to new measures persisted for months. Social distancing and mask wearing lagged. On December 26, 2020, when the state of Amazonas ordered businesses closed to slow rising infection numbers, protests by businesses and workers erupted, and the decision was quickly reversed.

The Manaus experience holds a cautionary message for the rest of the world, including the U.S., about maintaining basic public health strictures even as vaccination campaigns progress. And it underlines why only a global approach to immunizations will work.

“Manaus got hit really hard because they dropped all of their mitigations, and they didn’t have an adequate state of herd immunity,” says Warner Greene, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and founding director of Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology. “This false sense of security, it’s kind of like right now [in the U.S.],” he says. “I think we're gonna get hit really hard.”

Latin American countries—where vaccination numbers are behind the global North and infection rates are high—are fertile ground for breeding new variants. The more the virus spreads, the more it is able to find vulnerable groups in which mutations can arise.

The P.1 mutation is believed to have emerged in Manaus in early November 2020, but by January it made up three quarters of all variants detected in the city and had spread to Japan.
It has since been detected in at least 34 other countries and regions, including the U.S. and the U.K. “We call [COVID] a pandemic because it’s everywhere,” Greene says. “And as long as it’s somewhere, it has the potential to be everywhere.”

Like other variants first detected in the U.K. and South Africa, P.1’s 17 mutations occurred unusually quickly, and many of them are in the spike protein, which is used to penetrate the cells of an infected person.

Research has not concluded that P.1 alone caused the crisis in Manaus despite previously high infection rates: overestimates of herd immunity or a natural decline in antibodies may be at fault as well. But there is mounting evidence that P.1 is more pernicious than its predecessors.
A preprint lab study by the Brazil-U.K. Center for Arbovirus Discovery, Diagnosis, Genomics and Epidemiology (CADDE) estimated P.1 to be 1.4 to 2.2 times more transmissible than previous strains. And in another preprint paper, Fiocruz researchers found that the level of SARS-CoV-2, or viral load, in patients infected with the variant was 10 times higher.

More concerning is evidence that the Manaus variant is better able to evade antibodies. The same CADDE study estimated that P.1 dodges 25 to 61 percent of protective immunity gained from infection with earlier variants. There have been only three confirmed instances of P.1 reinfection, but cases are difficult to find and verify, Resende says.

Immunity gained through vaccination appears to be more robust than immunity achieved from infection. Though vaccines from leading manufacturers have generally shown less efficacy against P.1 than they have against older variants, Resende says that they still provide protection and that the issue should not yet ring alarm bells. Johnson & Johnson’s jab proved 85 percent effective against severe disease in trials in Brazil—no less than it did in the U.S.

Following P.1’s transmission across Brazil, infections are soaring nationwide. Most hospitals are operating at capacity, and 3,650 daily deaths were reported on March 26, the highest number to date. Two days earlier, the country’s total death count reached 300,000. P.1 may not only be driving higher infection rates in Brazil’s North Region, where P.1 is most prevalent. There is an increase in mortality in young people, suggesting it may cause more severe illness, says Margareth Portela, a senior researcher at Fiocruz.

Experts say that the situation is worrying—not just for the people of Brazil but for the rest of the world as well because of the virus’s track record of acquiring mutations in areas where it abounds.

The lingering concern is whether P.1 is a portent of what could happen if the pandemic continues unabated. It is not the only Brazilian variant. There is already a P.2. And the virus is continuing to alter itself in Brazil, deleting sites on the spike protein that antibodies bind to, according to preliminary research that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Manufacturers are already working on how to tweak vaccines to account for new variants such as P.1, says Dan Barouch, an immunologist at Harvard University. But for now getting the existing ones rolled out as quickly as possible is key.

The U.S. is currently confronting the prospects of a vaccine surplus—and will have to decide what to do with the extra doses. “These viral variants provide a very strong argument for accelerating the vaccine campaign throughout the world because only with vaccination will we be able to control the pandemic and stop the emergence of new viral variants,” Barouch says.
“And viral variants in the future, potentially, will be even more problematic than the ones we have today.”

Japan getting more Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines to immunise elderly faster [Reuters, 29 Mar 2021]

by Rocky Swift & Simon Cameron-Moore

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan will receive bigger shipments of Pfizer Inc’s COVID-19 vaccines to immunise the elderly faster, the government said on Friday after negotiating the increase in supplies.

There would be enough vaccines distributed during the two weeks from May 10 to give a first shot to half of Japan’s 36 million elderly people, it said.

Japan’s immunisation campaign began in February, later than most major economies, and the Pfizer vaccine is the only one on offer.

Health workers have been prioritised, and as of Thursday more than 890,000 people had received at least the first of two shots.

WHO draft report says animals likely source of COVID-19 56 MIN [WCVB Boston, 29 Mar 2021]

By KEN MORITSUGU and JAMEY KEATEN

BEIJING —

A joint World Health Organization-China study on the origins of COVID-19 says that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is "extremely unlikely," according to a draft copy obtained by The Associated Press.

The findings offer little new insight into how the virus first emerged and leave many questions unanswered, though that was as expected. But the report does provide more detail on the reasoning behind the researchers' conclusions. The team proposed further research in every area except the lab leak hypothesis.

The report, which is expected to be made public Tuesday, is being closely watched since discovering the origins of the virus could help scientists prevent future pandemics — but it's also extremely sensitive since China bristles at any suggestion that it is to blame for the current one. Repeated delays in the report’s release have raised questions about whether the Chinese side was trying to skew its conclusions.

Last year, an AP investigation found the Chinese government was strictly controlling all research into its origins.

"We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a recent CNN interview.

China rejected that criticism Monday.

"The U.S. has been speaking out on the report. By doing this, isn't the U.S. trying to exert political pressure on the members of the WHO expert group?" asked Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian.

The report is based largely on a visit by a WHO team of international experts to Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first detected. The mission was never meant to identify the exact natural source of the virus, an endeavor that typical takes years. For instance, more than 40 years of study has still failed to pinpoint the exact species of bat that are the natural reservoir of Ebola.

In the draft obtained by the AP, the researchers listed four scenarios in order of likelihood for the emergence of the new coronavirus. Topping the list was transmission from bats through another animal, which they said was likely to very likely. They evaluated direct spread from bats to humans as likely, and said that spread to humans from the packaging of "cold-chain" food products was possible but not likely.

That last possibility was previously dismissed by the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but researchers on this mission have taken it up again, further raising questions about the politicization of the study since China has long pushed the theory.
Bats are known to carry coronaviruses and, in fact, the closest relative of the virus that causes COVID-19 has been found in bats. However, the report says that "the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and (COVID-19) is estimated to be several decades, suggesting a missing link."

It said highly similar viruses have been found in pangolins, which are another kind of mammal, but scientists have yet to identify the same coronavirus in animals that has been infecting humans.

The AP received the draft copy on Monday from a Geneva-based diplomat from a WHO-member country. It wasn’t clear whether the report might still be changed prior to release, though the diplomat said it was the final version. A second diplomat confirmed getting the report too. Both refused to be identified because they were not authorized to release it ahead of publication.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that he had received the report over the weekend and said it would be formally presented Tuesday.

"We will read the report and discuss, digest its content and next steps with member states," Tedros told a news conference in Geneva. "But as I have said, all hypotheses are on the table and warrant complete and further studies from what I have seen so far."

The draft report is inconclusive on whether the outbreak started at a Wuhan seafood market that had one of the earliest clusters of cases in December 2019. Research published last year in the journal Lancet suggested the market may have merely served to further spread the disease rather than being its source.

The market was an early suspect because some stalls sold a range of unusual animals — and some wondered if they had brought the new virus to Wuhan. The report noted that animal products — including everything from bamboo rats to deer, often frozen — were sold at the market, as were live crocodiles.

As the virus spread globally, China found samples of it on the packaging of frozen food coming into the country and, in some cases, have tracked localized outbreaks to them — but has never published convincing data to prove that link. As the search for the origins of the virus has become highly politicized, Beijing has pushed for scientists to explore this theory more because it could mean the virus originated outside of China.

The report said that the cold chain, as it is known, can be a driver of long-distance virus spread, though the risk is lower than through human-to-human spread. Most experts agree with that.

While it’s possible an infected animal contaminated packaging that was then brought to Wuhan and infected humans, the report said the probability is very low.

"While there is some evidence for possible reintroduction of (COVID-19) through handling of imported contaminated frozen products in China since the initial pandemic wave, this would be extraordinary in 2019 where the virus was not widely circulating," the study said.

The report cited several reasons for all but dismissing the possibility the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, a speculative theory that was suggested and promoted by former U.S. President Donald Trump among others.

It said such laboratory accidents are rare and the labs in Wuhan working on coronaviruses and vaccines are well-managed. It also noted that there is no record of viruses closely related to the coronavirus in any laboratory before December 2019 and that the risk of accidentally growing the virus was extremely low.
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The Latest: Trump Blasts Fauci and Birx as 'Self-Promoters' [U.S. News & World Report, 29 Mar 2021]

Donald Trump is slamming two of his most prominent coronavirus advisers.

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump is slamming two of his most prominent coronavirus advisers. He says Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx are “two self-promoters trying to reinvent history.”

Fauci is the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, and in a statement released Monday evening, Trump calls him “the king of ’flip-flops.” He accuses Fauci of “moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible.”

Birx managed the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, and Trump says she “is a proven liar with very little credibility left.”

Trump’s comments come in response to a documentary that aired on CNN on Sunday. In the film, Birx says the U.S. did not act aggressively enough to fight the spread of the coronavirus, saying that deaths “could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” after the initial wave.
Fauci told CNN it seemed like the Trump virus team was “fighting with each other rather than fighting the virus.”

In his statement, Trump says “Dr. Fauci would always talk negatively about (Birx) and, in fact, would ask not to be in the same room with her.”
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THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:

VACCINES: More than 93.6 million people, or 28.2% of the U.S. population, have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 51.5 million people, or 15.5% of the population, have completed their vaccination.

CASES: The seven-day rolling average for daily new cases in the U.S. increased over the past two weeks from 53,670 on March 14 to 63,239 on Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

DEATHS: The seven-day rolling average for daily new deaths in the U.S. decreased over the past two weeks decreased from 1,363 on March 14 to 969 on Sunday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

— Hungary first in European Union for vaccinations, and deaths
— ICU cases creep toward new peak in French virus surge
— AP Exclusive: Pandemic means far fewer eyes on kids’ welfare
— Merkel blames German ‘perfectionism’ for current virus woes
— AP Interview: Japan urges EU to ensure stable vaccine export
— Dear Normal: Were you really that great in the first place?
— Happy Monday: England embarks on major easing of lockdown
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— Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

SANTA FE, N.M. — The Indian Health Service is shifting its vaccine distribution system to target individual hospitals and clinics with high demand for shots and tapering off supplies to vaccination hubs where most eligible patients have received doses.
The federal agency said Monday the shift is designed to improve efficiency after a drop-off in vaccine demand in some regions.

Native Americans have been disproportionately sickened and killed by the pandemic and are now at the forefront of federal vaccination efforts.

The Indian Health Service has administered more than 940,000 vaccine doses across the U.S. and plans to hit the million-dose mark before April.

Over a year after the nation’s first reported coronavirus case, more than 80,000 Navajo Nation members have been fully vaccinated on the sprawling reservation that overlaps portions of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.
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MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A spokeswoman for Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey says the state’s mask mandate will end April 9 despite the request by President Joe Biden for states to reinstate, or maintain, restrictions.

Spokeswoman Gina Maiola issued a statement Monday saying that “we have made progress, and we are moving towards personal responsibility and common sense, not endless government mandates.”

The comment came after the White House asked states to maintain restrictions. Biden and a top health official appealed for mask requirements and other restrictions to be maintained or restored to stave off a new surge of coronavirus infections.

Alabama has kept a mask mandate in place longer than surrounding states, but the governor has made clear it will not be extended.
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AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas has opened coronavirus vaccine eligibility to all adults, joining a rapid national expansion as state health officials continue monitoring whether spring break will change a downward trend in cases.

At least a half dozen states opened eligibility to anyone age 16 and older on Monday.
Texas officials say the state is receiving more than 1 million new doses this week, and shipments are expected to increase in April. Vaccination rates in Texas have lagged behind much of the nation. Although officials put some blame on data reporting delays, they acknowledge that some appointment slots are going unfilled.

Texas has administered more than 10 million vaccine doses.
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ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is in isolation after exposure to someone who tested positive for the coronavirus over the weekend, though the governor has tested negative.
In a statement on Twitter, spokesman Cody Hall said the governor’s office was informed that someone the governor had been near when he was touring storm damage Saturday in the town of Newnan tested positive Monday. Hall said the governor took a “rapid-response antigen test” Monday and it was negative.

This is the second time the governor has had to go into isolation over exposure to the virus. Last year he was exposed at a campaign event.

On Friday, Kemp was given a dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
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TOPEKA, Kan. — State legislators in Kansas are working on a plan for setting aside potentially several hundred million dollars in federal pandemic relief funds to pay businesses harmed by restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

The state Senate Judiciary Committee is considering a bill that would set up a state fund to pay claims from businesses that either were shut down or had their operations curtailed by state restrictions.

The measure also would require counties and cities that imposed restrictions to set up similar funds. The state, cities and counties would be required to set aside 25% of their federal COVID-19 relief funds that aren’t dedicated to a specific purpose.

The measure is designed to end the threat that the state, counties and cities could face a larger total payout from lawsuits from business owners.
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ATLANTA — Georgia’s governor says he plans to ease COVID-19 restrictions in the state.
Gov. Brian Kemp says that his administration will outline plans to rescind remaining coronavirus restrictions.

Those include capacity limits, restrictions on large-scale gatherings and dozens of safety guidelines for restaurants, bars, entertainment and other venues, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

The move is a “critical step” in moving the state back to normalcy, Kemp said. He pointed to recent declines of new infections and rising numbers of Georgians getting vaccinated.

The changes are expected to take effect Thursday, the newspaper reported.
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NEW YORK — The top public health agency in the U.S. has added drug addiction to the list of conditions that can increase the risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19.

It means people with alcoholism or addiction to other drugs can be counted as a priority group for vaccinations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.

The change means there are now 17 conditions that can qualify for COVID-19 vaccines.
Besides drug addiction, the CDC also added Down syndrome, dementia and other neurological conditions, liver disease, HIV infection, stroke and Type 1 diabetes.
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DENVER — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has announced that residents over age 16 will be eligible for the coronavirus vaccine starting Friday.

All Colorado residents who want vaccines will be able to get them by mid to late May, Polis said on Monday.

The Democratic governor says there will be six mass drive-in sites for the state’s eligible population and four mobile bus clinics to distribute vaccines to underserved communities.

He says more than 1 million Colorado residents have been fully vaccinated and over 1.5 million have received their first vaccine doses. Despite expanded eligibility, Polis says vaccine providers have been ordered to prioritize people in higher risk groups.
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DES MOINES, Iowa — Public health officials in Iowa acknowledged some counties have already started providing COVID-19 vaccinations to individuals ages 16 and older a week before Gov. Kim Reynolds plans to make all adult Iowans officially eligible for the shots.

The state had planned to open vaccines to people 16 and older starting next Monday.

Iowa is currently eighth in the nation for the percent of its population that is fully vaccinated at 19%, or 598,935 people out of 3.1 million.

Nationally, 15.8% of the U.S. population — or roughly 52.6 million people — are fully vaccinated, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

Like many U.S. states, Iowa is seeing a recent increase in virus activity, reporting on Monday 110 new confirmed cases and seven additional deaths.
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MADRID — With the number of new COVID-19 cases in Spain creeping higher, officials are urging people to prevent the pandemic from surging out of control by complying with restrictions on movements and gatherings over Easter.

Fernando Simón, who heads the country’s pandemic response, said he believed Spain can keep a lid on the slow but steady rise while a vaccination campaign continues, as long as people remain disciplined over the Easter break.

Spain reported an incidence rate of 149 cases per 100,000 people over 14 days. That’s up from 129 cases per 100,000 a week ago. That key pandemic indicator reached a peak of 900 at the end of January before dropping amid limits on travel and gatherings. This month the indicator levelled off and in recent days has started ticking higher.
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NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Johnson & Johnson says it’s agreed to provide up to 400 million doses of its one-dose COVID-19 vaccine to African countries, starting this summer.

The drugmaker said under its agreement with the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust, the company will provide up to 220 million vaccine doses for the African Union’s 55 member countries, with delivery beginning in the July-to-September quarter. The trust will be able to order 180 million additional doses from J&J, for a total of up to 400 million shots through 2022.

The company’s vaccine still must receive authorization from regulators in the African countries, but the World Health Organization approved it for emergency use on March 12.
In late-stage testing, J&J’s vaccine prevented about 67% of symptomatic infections with the coronavirus and was 85% effective at preventing severe disease, beginning 28 days after vaccination.
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WASHINGTON — The head of the CDC making an impassioned plea to Americans not to let their guard down in the fight against COVID-19, warning of a potential “fourth wave” of the virus as cases in the U.S. rose 10% over the last week.

Speaking during a White House briefing, Dr. Rochelle Walensky grew emotional as she reflected “on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom.”

She added: “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope. But right now, I’m scared.”

Walensky appealed to elected officials, community leaders and everyday Americans to maintain social distancing measures and mask-wearing. She said, “Just please hold on a little while longer.”

She added: “We are not powerless, we can change this trajectory of the pandemic.”
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BOSTON — Hotels in the Boston area were hit harder by the coronavirus pandemic than just about any other major U.S. city, and hospitality industry officials said the recovery could take years.

The Boston Globe reported that the occupancy rate in Boston and Cambridge fell to less than 26% last year, driving revenue per available room — the performance measure used in the industry — down more than 80%, according to the hotel consultant Pinnacle Advisory Group.
Only New York fared worse. The area’s hotels are projected to hit 42% occupancy this year, half of what it was in 2019, while hotel revenues aren’t expected to get back to pre-pandemic levels until 2025.

About 8,000 hotel employees in the area are still out of work. More than a dozen hotels in Boston and Cambridge remain closed, including the 1,200-room Sheraton Boston Hotel, the biggest property in the city.

Trump slams Birx, Fauci following critical CNN coronavirus report [Boston Herald, 29 Mar 2021]

By JOE DWINELL

A furious Donald Trump blasted his onetime White House coronavirus top doctors a day after they fried the former president on a CNN special, saying both were leading the country into a COVID “depression.”

Both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump said, were “self-promoters trying to reinvent history” and didn’t embrace banning flights from China and then banking on new vaccines. The former president never mentions CNN by name.

“Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression,” Trump wrote Monday night from his 45 Office email feed. “Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before.”

In the most damning exchange on Sunday’s CNN special, Birx said coronavirus deaths in the nation — beyond the first 100,000 — were avoidable.

“The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially,” Birx said on CNN.

As of Monday evening, the Johns Hopkins University pandemic map of the world lists nearly 550,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. — the most anywhere — and almost 2.8 million worldwide.

Trump said both Fauci and Birx went on CNN to “cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned.”

He said “Operation Warp Speed,” that has hustled out life-saving coronavirus vaccines from Cambridge-based Moderna and others from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, has quieted all naysayers.

“We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world,” Trump wrote. “We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world.”

To date, about a third of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of the three vaccines — Johnson & Johnson is a one-dose vax.

Trump’s team, however, told of infighting and politicking they say sent dangerous mixed messages to the nation.

Trump has pushed back with a vengeance.

“Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move (vaccines) through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this,” Trump said.

“Dr. Fauci is also the king of ‘flip-flops’ and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible,” he added.

Trump called Birx a “liar with very little credibility left,” adding she was taking the U.S. into a “COVID caused depression.”

Coronavirus: Dr. Fauci reveals ‘best decision’ he made during COVID [Deseret News, 29 Mar 2021]

By Herb Scribner

Dr. Fauci spoke on a new CNN special about the COVID-19 pandemic

Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a new CNN special that his best decision during the coronavirus pandemic is related to the COVID-19 vaccine.

What did Fauci say during the CNN special report?
Dr. Fauci spoke during “COVID WAR: The Pandemic Doctors Speak Out,” a new CNN special, which aired on Sunday night.
• The special included interviews with Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Brett Giroir, Dr. Stephen Hahn, Dr. Robert Kadlec and Dr. Robert Redfield, who all worked at the White House at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fauci — who has become the face of public health and the government’s response to the pandemic — said his best decision was related to the vaccine.

“When I saw what happened in New York City, almost overrunning of our health care system, it was like, ‘Oh my goodness,’” Fauci said. “And that’s when it became very clear that the decision we made on January the 10th — to go all out and develop a vaccine — may have been the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the institute.”

So far, 50.5 million people (or 15.5% of the total U.S. population) have received the full COVID-19 vaccination, NPR reports.

Others talk about COVID-19 vaccine development

Dr. Francis Collins, the National Institutes of Health director, said the entire team of Operation Warp Speed — the name of the group who looked to fight the pandemic — deserved credit.
• “The Operation Warp Speed ... was an effort that many of us were not initially convinced was going to be necessary. And it was thought about as a Manhattan Project,” Collins told Axios.

“Those words were used sometimes to describe what needed to happen in order to get all parts of the government together in an unprecedented way to test up to six vaccines in rigorous trials, and to do this at-risk manufacturing, so that if any of those trials happened to work, you would already have doses ready to go into arms.”

Fox News reports that former President Donald Trump said he deserves credit for the COVID-19 vaccine and its rapid development.

• “I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 ... Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all,” Trump said in a statement earlier this month, according to Fox News. ”I hope everyone remembers!”

Trump lashes out at Fauci and Birx after CNN documentary [POLITICO, 29 Mar 2021]

By BENJAMIN DIN

The former president released a fact-challenged statement criticizing the former advisers after they criticized his administration’s pandemic response.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday attacked Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, his administration’s top coronavirus advisers, in a highly personal — and at times inaccurate — statement released after the two criticized the administration for its response to the pandemic.

“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” Trump said. “They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine — putting millions of lives at risk.”

Trump’s statement amounted to a point-by-point rebuttal of comments from Fauci and Birx in a CNN documentary that aired Sunday, which featured former Trump health officials, some of whom were critical of the former president.

Fauci said the decision “to go all out and develop a vaccine” was “the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the institute,” referring to his role at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The agency’s vaccine research center helped develop a key component of ultimately successful shots from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.

But Fauci’s characterization drew Trump’s ire. In his statement on Monday, the ex-president called the vaccines authorized for emergency use “American vaccines,” even though the first vaccine to be authorized in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration was developed by the Turkish immigrants who founded BioNTech in Germany, and later collaborated with Pfizer to bring it to market. Pfizer, which manufactures the vaccine, did not receive development money from the government.

“Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move it through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this,” Trump said, even though Fauci, in his capacity as NIAID director, did not have the authority to pressure the FDA to make such decisions.

Fauci also told CNN that Trump’s social media use ran counter to what the administration’s response should have been. Birx also criticized the inconsistent messaging from the federal government as “fault number one.”

“The thing that hit me like a punch to the chest was then all of a sudden he got up and says, ‘Liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan,’ and I said to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, what is going on here?’” Fauci told CNN, referring to a series of Trump tweets. “It shocked me because it was such a jolt to what we were trying to do.”

In his statement, Trump labeled Fauci as “the king of ‘flip-flops’ and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible,” while adding that he ignored the recommendations of both Fauci and Birx. Because the coronavirus was unknown to the world before late 2019, scientists and health officials fighting the pandemic frequently revised their advice as they have learned more about the virus and the disease it causes. And one official who worked inside the Trump White House said the former president's criticisms were off the mark.

“Bit of revisionist history from the former president. We all had our issues with Fauci and his media marathons but very few people — including President Trump — had anything negative to say about Dr. Birx,” said the former White House official.

Birx told CNN that the Trump administration could have done more to prevent hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. So far, nearly 550,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus.

“I look at it this way — the first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge,” she said. “All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially.”

Trump criticized Birx for not following her own advice, citing a family trip she took the day after Thanksgiving, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was advising Americans not to travel over the holidays. Birx later announced that she would retire from her position.

In the past, Birx has said that she “always” thought of quitting the Trump administration over the hyperpartisan nature of the workplace.

“Dr. Birx was a terrible medical advisor, which is why I seldom followed her advice,” Trump said in his statement.

In the interview that aired Sunday, Birx also spoke about a phone call she received from Trump after speaking publicly on CNN in August about the spread of Covid-19.

“Everybody in the White House was upset with that interview and the clarity that I brought about the epidemic,” she said. “I got called by the president. It was very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult to hear.”

Trump denied that there was a “very difficult” phone call, and criticized Birx for her policies, which he said “would have led us directly into a COVID caused depression.”

“Time has proven me correct,” he said. “I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long — they are like a bad habit!”

Philippine Capital Returns to Lockdown as Vaccinations Lag [Bloomberg, 29 Mar 2021]

By Clarissa Batino and Andreo Calonzo
• Duterte may announce late Monday if lockdown to extend: Roque
• Philippine stocks rose after weak start, peso up on Monday

The Philippines’ key economic area plunged back into another lockdown for a week starting Monday as the Southeast Asian nation faces its worst coronavirus surge and a slow vaccine rollout.

Metro Manila and the adjacent provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal were placed under enhanced community quarantine or ECQ, the nation’s strictest classification of movement curbs, from March 29 to April 4. A curfew from 6pm to 5am will be imposed during the lockdown.

President Rodrigo Duterte may announce later in the day if the lockdown will be extended, his spokesman Harry Roque said at a briefing Monday, adding that economic impact will be balanced with further stemming the outbreak. “We can’t let more people die of hunger and other reasons in our effort to lower Covid-19 cases,” Roque said.

The economic impact of the stay-home order is expected to be minimal as offices and financial markets will be shut on April 1 and 2 for the Easter holiday, Roque said on Saturday.

“Our main objective why we’re closing down again is to make our healthcare system more manageable,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire said at a virtual briefing Monday. “Our emergency rooms and intensive care units are choking.”

The government will tap 23 billion pesos ($475 million) in unused funds from last year’s relief measure to aid millions affected by the lockdown, Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado said Monday. Economic managers will also meet to discuss “ways forward” amid the surge in infections, he said.

Philippine stocks closed almost 1% higher on Monday, reversing a decline of as much as 1.7% earlier in the day. The peso rose 0.2% to 48.415 against the dollar.

Recession

Before the lockdown, authorities tightened mobility in the capital and the surrounding provinces for two weeks from March 22 but cases continued to spike, hitting a record 10,016 on Monday. Daily infections have risen more than five times from the start of the year, while the percentage of people testing Covid-19 positive rose to nearly 20% on Sunday from about 7% in January.

Moody’s Investors Service said the spike in coronavirus infections delays the country’s economic recovery, it said in a March 26 note. Pandemic containment measures implemented earlier this month are also expected to weigh on prospects of fiscal consolidation and exacerbate income equality and poverty, the rating agency said.

The Philippines, which implemented one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns last year, suffered its worst-ever recession in 2020, prompting economic managers to push for a sustained reopening and targeted restrictions rather than a hard lockdown. Gross domestic product shrank 9.5% last year and the contraction is expected to persist this quarter.

The week-long lockdown will likely cut less than 1% from total economic output and can be offset by the impact of the corporate income tax cut signed into law on Friday, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. economist Michael Ricafort wrote in a note on Sunday.

Infections are rising globally even as countries ramp up vaccinations amid efforts to reopen economies and revive social activities.

In the Philippines, less than a third of the 1.7 million health workers had been inoculated as of March 23, while the country has received more than 1.1 million vaccine doses. One million Sinovac Biotech Ltd. Vaccines are scheduled to arrive on Monday, while around 1 million from AstraZeneca Plc are expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

The Philippines is behind its Southeast Asian neighbors like Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia in inoculations, based on World Bank data. The Philippines has administered 0.2 vaccine doses per 100 people as of mid-March, compared to Singapore’s 13.5 doses.

Covid Keeps Spreading Death Where Vaccines Haven’t Reached

Stay Home

Similar to the strict lockdown imposed a year ago, only essential industries including hospitals and food manufacturers are allowed to operate at full capacity. People must work from home, may only leave for essentials and are barred from holding mass gatherings.

Malls are shut, except for tenants such as pharmacies, hardware stores, supermarkets and businesses engaged in food delivery and takeout. Public transport including trains are allowed to run at limited capacity.

The capital region, with a population of about 13 million, accounts for nearly half of the nation’s total virus cases.

Coronavirus: PM's warning as England lockdown eases and 180 wedding guests cut to six [BBC News, 29 Mar 2021]

Here are five things you need to know about the coronavirus outbreak this Monday evening. We'll have another update for you tomorrow morning.

1. Being cautious is the way to get the results we want, says PM

A cautious approach as lockdown eases in England is the "way to get the results that we want", Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said. Speaking at a Downing Street news conference, he said a "wave is still rising across the Channel and it's inevitable, as we advance on this roadmap, that there will be more infections and unavoidably more hospitalisations, and sadly more deaths". But he said there is nothing in the data "right now" that means the roadmap to unlock cannot proceed as planned. Mr Johnson announced a deal to produce up to 60m doses of the Novavax vaccine entirely in the UK, including at a factory in Barnard Castle, County Durham - the jab is not yet approved.

2. Secret filming exposes contamination risk at test results lab

Secret filming at one of the biggest UK Covid testing labs has found evidence of potential contamination, discarded tests and pressure to hit targets. A BBC reporter working as a lab technician, filmed staff cutting corners and processing samples in a way that could cause contamination. This means some people who had taken a test via NHS Test and Trace may have received no result or a wrong result. Read the full investigation by BBC Panorama.
3. Jabs for households of adults with weak immune systems

People living in the same household as adults with weakened immune systems should be offered a Covid vaccine, the UK's vaccine committee has said. It will help to stop the spread of the virus to vulnerable people in the same house, after recent evidence suggested they may not respond as well as others to a vaccine. Household contacts of those with blood cancer or HIV are included, but children under 16 are not.

4. Ethnic vaccine gap 'not due to area or education'

Where people live, how poor that area is and their level of education explains only a fraction of the difference in Covid vaccination rates between ethnic groups, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) found. It highlighted higher vaccination hesitancy among some ethnic groups. White people were the most, and people of black African ethnicity the least, likely to have had a jab, the ONS added.

5. 'We cut our wedding guest list from 180 to six'

The first weddings in England since the latest lockdown have taken place. After months under stay-at-home orders, small ceremonies can now go ahead with up to six people. Jess Warren-Basham and Jonny Cope from Hampshire told BBC News they were thrilled to finally tie the knot in glorious sunshine on Monday - even if it meant cutting down the number of people invited.

Vienna Plans to Extend Easter Lockdown Until Following Weekend: Minister [U.S. News & World Report, 29 Mar 2021]

by Francois Murphy & Marguerita Choy

VIENNA (REUTERS) - Vienna plans to extend an Easter coronavirus lockdown by five days until the following Sunday, Austria's health minister said on Monday, while two nearby provinces introducing the same restrictions are still undecided on prolonging them.

The eastern provinces of Lower Austria, which surrounds Vienna, Burgenland, which borders Hungary, and the capital itself last week announced a lockdown from Thursday, April 1 to Tuesday, April 6, closing non-essential shops and replacing a nighttime curfew with all-day restrictions on movement.

The three provinces have high levels of the British variant of the coronavirus, which has been causing severe illness faster and in more of those infected. With national infections rising, eastern hospitals are nearing their intensive-care capacity.

Scientific experts, however, say a lockdown of less than a week will do little to relieve the pressure on hospitals.

"I am pleased that Mayor Michael Ludwig and the City of Vienna have decided that they want to implement an extension of the Easter quiet period until April 11," Health Minister Rudolf Anschober said in a statement after a video conference with the three provinces' governors.

Vienna is the only city to also be one of Austria's nine provinces, and the mayor is also its governor. Lockdown decisions now usually involve the national government and the influential governors.

"Because of the alarming situation, further provinces will have to follow the City of Vienna on this path," Anschober added without saying which provinces.

Separately, people leaving the western province of Tyrol will have to show a recent negative coronavirus test result as of Wednesday because of more than 200 cases there are of a mutation of the British variant known as E484K, which is believed to weaken the body's immune response to the virus.

Why are flu-vaccinated people more resistant to COVID-19? [DW (English), 29 Mar 2021]

By Fabian Schmidt

People who have been vaccinated against influenza contract COVID-19 less often and tend to have less severe cases. Is this because vaccinated people are more cautious, or are there medical reasons?

Does a flu vaccination protect against COVID-19? And if so, why? These are the questions medical professionals are asking, because a team of doctors led by Anna Conlon from the University of Michigan came to some startling conclusions in a recent study published in the American Journal of Infection Control.

The physicians had looked at patient data from 27,201 Michigan residents who had taken a COVID-19 test before July 15, 2020. Of those, 12,997 had previously been vaccinated against the flu.

The study found that the proportion of flu-vaccinated people who contracted the coronavirus was slightly lower than among those who had not been vaccinated, 4% instead of 4.9%. In addition, the flu-vaccinated patients were also less likely to require hospitalization or ventilation for coronavirus infection, and their hospital stays were shorter on average.

However, there were no significant differences in mortality between the two comparison groups.

Does our innate immune defense have an influence?

The crucial question for the experts: Is there a medical and a microbiological explanation for these results? This could be, for example, the innate immune defense, which is possibly activated by the flu vaccination. The immune defense functions independently of learned antibody immunity, which primarily targets the characteristic spike protein when fighting COVID-19, thus rendering the virus harmless.

In contrast, the innate immune defense, which may be stimulated by vaccination, consists of a number of different elements which react to infections in general, not specific viruses.

This standing army of our immune defenses includes, for example, phagocytes and dendritic cells (cells which ingest harmful foreign particles), but also various cytokines (proteins that play a role in immune reactions and inflammatory processes) as well as T and B leukocytes (white blood cells).

Some vaccinations are generally good for the immune defense, as can be seen in people vaccinated against measles, for example. Epidemiological studies showed years ago that vaccinated children still had a higher immunity to a variety of pathogens than non-vaccinated children, even a very long time after the vaccination took place.

Or is it just correlation?

It is also conceivable, however, that fewer people who had been vaccinated against the flu contracted COVID-19 simply because they were more cautious than non-vaccinated people. More people from high-risk groups, like seniors and people with preexisting conditions, typically get vaccinated against influenza than young and healthy people.

In the United States, for example, many seniors and retirees had already voluntarily isolated themselves early last year, while others were still out in public.

However, there are two indications against such a correlation: Seniors typically show more severe courses of COVID-19, which was not the case with those who got flu shots in the Michigan study.

A non peer-reviewed preprint study from last year points more to an immunologic explanation: Among Dutch hospital workers who had received the influenza vaccination ahead of the the 2019/2020 flu season, COVID-19 occurred significantly less often than among those who had not been vaccinated.

And there were no seniors over 70 years of age in either of these groups. All of those studied were of working age and had a correspondingly high number of contact encounters.

Stanford Scientists Post Entire mRNA Sequence for Moderna Vaccine on Github [Gizmodo, 29 Mar 2021]

ByT om McKay

A group of Stanford researchers has hacked Moderna’s messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine for the novel coronavirus, Motherboard first reported on Monday, and published its entire genetic sequence on the open-source code repository Github.

The mRNA vaccines work by delivering genetic information that allows the body’s own cells to produce a viral protein—such as a harmless, engineered version of the spike protein that the coronavirus uses to break its way into the body’s cells. When the body subsequently produces that protein, the immune system rapidly mobilizes to fight it, conducting a sort of live-fire training exercise that prepares it to fight the actual coronavirus; the actual mRNA delivered by the vaccine quickly disintegrates, but the antibodies stick around as a garrison against future infection. Per the MIT News Office, this allows for much easier and faster production than prior generations of vaccines relying on manufacturing the proteins under laboratory conditions.
The mRNA sequence more or less serves as a sort of source code for the vaccine.

The documents the Stanford team published on Github include two pages of explanation and two pages containing the entire mRNA sequence for Moderna’s vaccine. Researchers wrote in the report that although Moderna’s mRNA has ended up in a large swathe of the population, scientists and medical personnel don’t have access to the actual genetic sequences involved.

“With the rollout of vaccines for COVID-19, these synthetic mRNAs have become broadly distributed RNA species in numerous human populations,” the researchers wrote. “Despite their ubiquity, sequences are not always available for such RNAs... Sharing of sequence information for broadly used therapeutics has the benefit of allowing any researchers or clinicians using sequencing approaches to rapidly identify such sequences as therapeutic-derived rather than host or infectious in origin.”

The research team told Motherboard that they didn’t “reverse engineer” the vaccine, they simply “posted the putative sequence of two synthetic RNA molecules that have become sufficiently prevalent in the general environment of medicine and human biology in 2021.”

“As the vaccine has been rolling out, these sequences have begun to show up in many different investigational and diagnostic studies,” Stanford scientists Andrew Fire and Massa Shoura told Motherboard by email. “Knowing these sequences and having the ability to differentiate them from other RNAs in analyzing future biomedical data sets is of great utility.”
“For this work, RNAs were obtained as discards from the small portions of vaccine doses that remained in vials after immunization; such portions would have been required to be otherwise discarded and were analyzed under FDA authorization for research use,” they added. Fire and Shoura told Motherboard that they had received permission from the FDA to collect scraps of vaccines that wouldn’t have otherwise been used from empty vials and that they’d notified Moderna in advance of their plans to publish the sequence without receiving any objection in turn.

There is a “substantial economy of scale and educational value in having the sequences available ASAP and in not having to guess where they have come from,” the two researchers told Motherboard.

Moderna’s mRNA vaccine and the competing one made by Pfizer-BioNTech were the first ones ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Per Motherboard, PowerDNS founder Bert Hubert was able to use publicly available data to reveal Pfizer’s mRNA sequence late last year.

As Hubert wrote in a separate blog post, however, this does not mean that anyone is going to be homebrewing either vaccine soon in a “distributed manufacturing revolution.” Hubert detailed the ridiculously complicated supply chain that powers the pharmaceutical companies’ vaccine manufacturing, which involves numerous complex ingredients, DNA and mRNA production in specialized facilities, and combining mRNA and lipids into lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), the last of which perhaps only a number of experts in the “low hundreds” know how to do. The final steps, including formulation where the LNPs are mixed with other more generic ingredients and are filled into vials, also require specialized knowledge and equipment—with subsequent distribution to patients being its own daunting technical challenge.

“Technically, the last step of the supply chain of these mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is the production of the spike protein,” Hubert concluded. “That’s what happens in the cells of your body after you receive the vaccine. You are the globally distributed vaccine manufacturing revolution.”

Joe Biden’s administration is facing pressure from some legislators to suspend patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines, according to Time, in the hopes of ensuring that profit incentives won’t get in the way of attaining levels of mass vaccination that could snuff out the pandemic. (Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a member of the Pfizer board of directors, has argued that bottlenecks in mass vaccination lay primarily in supplies and production, not intellectual property restrictions.) The White House is still considering whether to do that, according to CNBC.

Investors are throwing money at mRNA and new medical technologies. What could go wrong? [Marketplace, 29 Mar 2021]

There's a rush to invest in synthetic biology, which approaches the body and natural systems as programmable platforms like computers.

We’ve been talking about all the potential of mRNA technology — better vaccines and virus detection for all kinds of diseases. Now, let’s talk about the money because the rush is on to invest in mRNA and the whole field of synthetic biology, which approaches the body and natural systems as programmable platforms like computers. However, the history of Silicon Valley and medical tech is mixed.

You remember Theranos. Just last week, the founders of a once-hot biotech firm called uBiome were charged with fraud in a similar fashion. I spoke with John Cumbers, the founder of SynBioBeta, a network for entrepreneurs, engineers and investors interested in synthetic biology. He said billions of dollars are flowing into the field. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.

John Cumbers: Now, what you’re seeing is a new generation of investors and entrepreneurs coming in, who are looking at a whole, new set of tools around reading, writing and editing of DNA and designing and building and testing of biological systems. So you’ve got to look at the potential for these technologies to do a lot of good in the world, not just in health care or “quantified self” or, in this case, mRNA vaccines. But also, for climate change, for food production, for chemicals and materials. So I think with any technology, there’s the power to do good and there’s the power to do bad. But I think with this technology, the power to do good in so many different parts of our lives is just huge.

Molly Wood: Well, it seems like there’s also the power to ask good questions or ask bad questions. And I wonder if you could suggest to investors who are getting into this field: what should they be asking so that they don’t make mistakes on the level of something like Theranos, or even uBiome?

Cumbers: The reality is that you’re basing a lot of that business decision on trust and personal connection to people that you know and you trust. So I think that the question that you have to ask is: Do you have that connection to the person that you’re investing in, in terms of do you trust them? And then, can that trust be backed up with the data that they need to show you to convince you that it’s true? So I think trust is one thing. “Trust and verify” is how I always like to look at it, if I’m thinking of investing in a company or if I’m communicating with an entrepreneur.

Wood: Synthetic biology is a big field and encompasses a lot of types of bioengineering, as you mentioned. Are you worried that there will be such a gold rush around mRNA and vaccine development, which is great, but there will be so much attention on that, that there will be other parts of this industry that will be neglected?

Cumbers: The biopharma segment is so big and influential. It is the elephant in the room of the bioeconomy. It dwarfs all the other sectors. So yes, I’m always worried that the biopharma segment is going to suck up all the air and all of the money. So that means that it does overshadow a lot of the other technology areas like climate change or food production or materials and chemicals.

Wood: As you look, though, at this moment in history, if there is a silver lining to this pandemic, it’s potentially that we’ve kick-started a pretty incredible time around vaccine development, around synthetic biology. How big a deal is this right now?

Cumbers: I think this mRNA boom is very transformative. The main reason is because suddenly this drug that you’re putting into the body, or this vaccine that you’re putting into the body, is based on a programming language. That programming language is four letters [representing the chemical bases of DNA]: A, C, T and G — or in the case of RNA, A, C, U and G. And by having a programmable medicine that you can put in, it means that you can rapidly iterate if something changes. For example, these new coronavirus variants, Moderna is able to rapidly iterate the sequence of the mRNA vaccine that it’s produced, and quickly get out a new version and put it through clinical trials. So I think it’s a revolution in the programmability of medicine. And that’s why everybody’s making such a big deal about this. And all of the companies that are making therapeutics are suddenly looking at this new modality, which we didn’t know worked. It wasn’t until Moderna pushed it through the clinical trial and showed that it worked against COVID-19 that this was actually proven to work. And now they’ve done that. It’s sped up the development cycle, and it’s sped up the amount of money that’s pouring into the industry to now treat many other diseases.

Wood: So are we on the cusp of a revolution in treatment of diseases and viruses?

Cumbers: We are on the cusp of a revolution. We’re on the cusp of what some people are predicting is the next 100 years of biology, the century of biology. And people have been predicting this. There’s some wonderful quotes by Steve Jobs talking about the intersection of computation and biology. Bill Gates has been predicting this. A lot of the traditional tech pioneers have been looking at biology for the last 20 years and knowing that something big is coming. And I think COVID-19 was this wake-up call for everybody. And for the last 12 months, so many of the companies have been focusing on tools and technologies to be able to diagnose and now treat these diseases. But those tools and technologies, like reading, writing and editing of DNA and designing and building and testing biological systems, is going to have an impact on so many different markets.

So, a little more on what John Cumbers mentioned about the 100 years of biology and the tech luminaries who’ve been fascinated with it for years. He actually sent us some quotes to that effect. One from Bill Gates, who wrote back in 1995, “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.” And Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, quoted him as saying, “I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology.”

Cumbers wrote a Forbes piece back in 2019 about big tech names who are investing in synthetic biology. And although Silicon Valley types are somewhat famous for wanting to hack the body, whether it’s mysterious life-extension technology or microdosing on smart drugs like nootropics or Jack Dorsey’s extremely intermittent eating — I’m telling you, astral planes, people — a lot of these new investments aren’t just about the human body. Cumbers’ article points to things like using biotech to grow meat replacement from living cells, like Memphis Meats does, or programming microbes to create synthetic silk or engineering mushrooms into faux leather. Or, yes, figuring out how to store digital information in DNA, which sounds a little like a future “Matrix” situation or extreme life extension because, you know … Silicon Valley stuff.