New Coronavirus News from 31 Mar 2021a

T cells triggered by original COVID fight variants: US study [Nikkei Asia, 31 Mar 2021]

Research shows immune system stays intact to protect against mutant strains

CHICAGO (Reuters) -- A critical component of the immune system known as T cells that respond to fight infection from the original version of the novel coronavirus appear to also protect against three of the most concerning new virus variants, according to a U.S. laboratory study released on Tuesday. Several recent studies have shown that certain variants of the novel coronavirus can undermine immune protection from antibodies and vaccines.

But antibodies - which block the coronavirus from attaching to human cells - may not tell the whole story, according to the study by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). T cells appear to play an important additionally protective role.

"Our data, as well as the results from other groups, shows that the T cell response to COVID-19 in individuals infected with the initial viral variants appears to fully recognize the major new variants identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil," said Andrew Redd of the NIAID and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the study.

The researchers analyzed blood from 30 people who had recovered from COVID-19 before the emergence of the new more contagious variants.

From those samples, they identified a specific form of T cell that was active against the virus, and looked to see how these T cells fared against the concerning variants from South Africa, the UK and Brazil.

They found the T-cell responses remained largely intact and could recognize virtually all mutations in the variants studied.

The findings add to a prior study that also suggested T cell protection appears to remain intact against the variants.

The NIAID researchers said larger studies are needed to confirm the findings. Continued monitoring for variants that escape both antibody and T cell protection is needed, Redd said.

The paper has been accepted for publication in Open Forum Infectious Diseases but has yet to be peer reviewed.

Brazil faces health system collapse as covid-19 cases skyrocket [New Scientist News, 31 Mar 2021]

By Luke Taylor

BRAZIL is facing the biggest health system collapse in its history, according to researchers at Brazilian health institute Fiocruz, as the country records its highest number of weekly deaths since the pandemic began. Meanwhile, Chile has been forced to impose strict new lockdowns to cope with a severe second wave of infections, despite having mounted one of the world’s fastest vaccine roll-outs.

Brazil recorded 18,164 deaths last week, bringing its total to more than 300,000, a higher toll than any other country except the US. Many of the country’s intensive care units have reached capacity. “The lack of medication, materials and intensive care beds are turning the situation into chaos,” says Renata Pieratti Bueno, a doctor who works across three hospitals in São Paulo. The shortages and a lack of trained personnel are causing unnecessary deaths, she says.

Brazil’s mortality rate for SARS-CoV-2 is already high: 8 out of 10 Brazilians intubated as a result of the virus have died compared with a global average of 5 out of 10, says Fernando Bozza at Fiocruz, which is based in Rio de Janeiro.

Information from hospital admissions suggests the virus is hitting more younger people, says Raphael Guimarães at Fiocruz. He says there has been a surprising increase in the number of 30 to 59-year-olds needing hospitalisation. “It means that the pandemic in Brazil is reaching the younger population,” he says.

The P.1 variant of the virus may be to blame for the high case numbers in Brazil. Studies suggest the variant has mutations that help it evade antibodies from previous infections or from vaccination, and thus may be able to reinfect people who have already been infected.

Despite a lack of viral genetic sequencing in Brazil, the samples that have been analysed show the variant is now dominant in some regions. “We have to strongly consider that P.1 is causing the increase in the number of cases right now,” says Nuno Faria at Imperial College London.
Researchers at Fiocruz have called for stricter measures, including lockdowns to reduce non-essential activity, increased use of face masks and social distancing.

However, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has consistently criticised lockdowns, saying they will hurt the poor, and has publicly referred to regional leaders who impose them as “tyrants”. The president told supporters at an event in Goias on 5 March that the government regretted the deaths, but there had been “enough fussing and whining”.

“The lack of medication, materials and intensive care beds are turning the situation into chaos”
The government has been slow to purchase vaccines and so far only 6.4 per cent of the population has received one dose.

Infections appear to be stabilising at a high level due to increasing interventions from states that are imposing their own strict measures, says Jesem Orellana at Fiocruz, but the delay between infection and illness means the next two to three weeks will be critical.

Meanwhile, Chile has rolled out 50.46 doses of vaccine per 100 people. Nevertheless, on 25 March, the country recorded 6196 new daily cases, and has reached almost 1 million cases in total. Around 95 per cent of intensive care beds are taken in the country.

Strict lockdown measures have been put in place from 25 March for almost all of the country. These include an evening curfew and set times for exercise. Each person is only allowed to go outside for essential activities twice a week, and must request permits to do so.

The P.1 variant and the highly transmissible B.1.1.7 variant, which was first seen in England, together with lots of travel during Chile’s summer season have been blamed for the increase in cases.

Vaccine Heroes Pfizer, AstraZeneca Risk a Backlash Over Supply, Distribution [Bloomberg, 23 Mar 2021]

By Lionel Laurent

Anger over inequitable distribution and access shouldn’t be allowed to fester.

The discovery of multiple safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines has been the reputational boost the pharmaceutical industry needed. As science has caught up to the coronavirus, the price-inflating antics of Martin Shkreli and manufacturers’ roles in the opioid epidemic have faded into the background while people literally raise their glass to drugmakers like Pfizer Inc.

A Harris poll found that U.S. public opinion of the sector had risen to 62% in February, up from 32% before the pandemic, the biggest jump among several industries.

It could be a short-lived romance. “The impact on public opinion has been spectacular, but it’s not going to last,” Reinhard Angelmar, a health-care management specialist and emeritus marketing professor at INSEAD, tells me.

An unprecedented push to manufacture billions of doses this year alone has led to supply bottlenecks, putting firms such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca Plc in the firing line of angry government customers. The potential adverse effects of sticking needles into people’s arms are dominating headlines, as seen with the halting of the Astra vaccine in Canada and Europe even as regulators insist the benefits outweigh the risks.

Drugmakers Got an Image Boost, But Will It Last?

U.S.approval ratings of the pharmaceutical sector have surged in the pandemic

Now the industry is taking heat for closely guarding its intellectual property. That’s blamed for what the World Health Organization dubs a “catastrophic moral failure”: the immunization gap between the developing world and deep-pocketed rich countries, which have ordered enough doses to cover their populations several times over.

If vaccine makers were to waive exclusive rights to manufacture their product — an idea pushed by 58 countries at the World Trade Organization including India and South Africa — advocates say that supply would bloom and we would exit the pandemic quicker. The push for a “people’s vaccine,” backed by the likes of Bernie Sanders, is popular with three-quarters of British voters and almost two-thirds of French people polled by YouGov.

As with a lot of the inoculation blame game, the truth is a little more complicated. The rich-poor divide is a glaring one that needs to be narrowed for many reasons, not least the epidemiological risk that new variants could better resist the vaccines we have. But lifting patent protection won’t on its own do the trick.

Unlike in past crises such as HIV/AIDS, cracking open the recipe for Covid vaccines, especially those from Pfizer and Moderna Inc., is only half the battle given the complexity of genetic technologies making their debut in this pandemic. Manufacturing is a challenge too, and there isn’t much time for trial and error. Ken Shadlen, a professor at the London School Economics, last year warned it would be counter-productive to force companies to drop their patents if it discouraged the more essential step of sharing know-how and technology.

The Opaque World of Vaccine Prices
Prices vary widely for Covid vaccines, according to data compiled by Unicef

This situation should not be allowed to fester, though. It’s not a sustainable solution to simply dismiss such proposals as “nonsense” and lobby rich countries to keep blocking them at the WTO, the path drugmakers seem to be walking. If manufacturing problems and inequitable distribution keep plaguing the vaccine rollout, pharma companies will keep getting the blame. Praise for their scientific research, which U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently attributed to a good kind of “greed,” could start ringing hollow.

Fraying trust and an increasingly fraught relationship with governments — however hypocritical the rich world’s finger-pointing may be, given its hoarding of doses and nationalistic export curbs — would be bad in this pandemic and beyond.

Instead, companies should take the hint and commit to more voluntary partnerships and technology transfer around the world to boost manufacturing, with incentives from their government backers to price the end-product affordably where needed. Countries don’t have to actually use the stick of immediate patent removal, but they can make clear that if vaccine producers don’t do the right thing now, “they risk punishment later,” as LSE’s Shadlen puts it — like intervention to ensure more affordable drug pricing in more normal times.

Governments have their own role to play: As the text of a recent pandemic pledge signed by dozens of world leaders put it, there needs to be more “shared responsibility, transparency and cooperation.” That means more investment in manufacturing capacity and fewer beggar-thy-neighbor export curbs.

We haven’t quashed this virus yet, and letting the pharma industry’s pandemic halo crash to the floor won’t help get us there any faster. Finding constructive ways to keep the public’s romance with drugmakers last a little longer makes sense, even if it doesn’t make money.

Amid AstraZeneca setback, Germany banks on homegrown vaccine [Associated Press, 31 Mar 2021]

By FRANK JORDANS and DAVID McHUGH

MARBURG, Germany (AP) — As Germany ponders how to accelerate its sluggish coronavirus vaccination campaign after yet another hitch involving the AstraZeneca shot, a production facility in the historic pharmaceutical center of Marburg may hold part of the answer to reliable supply in the months and years ahead.

BioNTech, the German company that developed the first widely used vaccine together with U.S. partner Pfizer, is busily starting up a production facility that it says can produce up to a billion doses this year alone. That estimate was raised from the original hopes for 700 million.

The company, which had never brought a pharmaceutical product to market before, wowed the world last year when it got authorization to sell a completely new type of vaccine in Britain, the United States and Europe — three highly regulated markets for medical products.

The active ingredient in the shot is messenger RNA, or mRNA, which contains the instructions for human cells to construct a harmless piece of the coronavirus called the spike protein. The human immune system recognizes the spike protein as foreign, allowing it to mount a response against the virus upon infection.

Scientists have known how to make mRNA for some time, but not for commercial mass production.

“This is what makes it exciting from a scientific perspective, but also from a manufacturing perspective, to do it on such a large scale, in such a short period of time,” said Valeska Skilling, head of production at the plant.

BioNTech only received approval Friday from the European Medicines Agency for the manufacture of the vaccine at the Marburg site, which was bought from Novartis last year. The site is located within a pharma industry cluster whose roots go back more than a century to Nobel Prize winner Emil von Behring, who developed the antitoxin for diptheria and tetanus.

Globally, BioNTech and Pfizer now estimate they can manufacture 2.5 billion doses in 2021, half a billion more than forecast in February.

To make that happen, some 400 employees are confronting the challenges of large-scale production involving around 50,000 separate steps, some of which require months of training. A crucial concern in handling mRNA, which is notoriously fragile, is rigorously avoiding outside contamination. Workers, who typically have degrees in disciplines such as biology or pharmacy, must wear two protective suits, boots and full-head coverings that take 20 minutes to put on.

Last week the company showed journalists some of the production equipment, including the bioreactor, a metal drum where the mRNA is produced from raw material fed in by tubes and carefully monitored. One batch can contain enough mRNA for 8 million doses in a bag not much bigger than a large sack of rice. It is then filtered and combined with lipids, or fatty molecules, that form tiny particles which encapsulate the mRNA and protect it after injection into the human body. The final step is filling the vials, carried out by external partners.

The German government has come under heavy fire at home for letting the European Union handle the procurement of vaccines, resulting in a far more limited supply than that obtained by Britain or the United States. The safety and supply troubles with another vaccine, made by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, has further highlighted how reliant the EU is on research and manufacturing outside the bloc.

Stung by the criticism, and conscious of Germany’s upcoming national election, Berlin has thrown its weight behind the Marburg plant, helping push the necessary paperwork through the German bureaucracy.

Christoph Krupp, the government’s vaccine production czar, said companies are ramping up their capacity, buying new equipment and hiring more staff. Meanwhile, the government is trying to reassure them that those investments aren’t going to go to waste.

“We want to prepare ourselves to maintain the production structures that we are building up now in the medium term, because we do not know how the pandemic is evolving,” Krupp said. “We do not know how the virus mutates... we do not know if there will be another pandemic.”

In an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily, Krupp said this will require some level of state aid, and that the government is considering a vaccine production reserve of 500 million doses per quarter, or about 2 billion a year.

In practice that means another one or two plants like the one in Marburg will be needed in the European Union. While these would likely prioritize orders placed by the bloc, there is no outright export ban on vaccines from the EU, meaning other regions could benefit too.

The government may be hoping that its investment will pay off. According to economists cited by Germany’s ifo-Institute, having a vaccine available at short notice could result in a net benefit for each German of up to $1,750 a year.

WHO says not to use ivermectin on COVID-19 patients [Medical Xpress, 31 Mar 2021]

The World Health Organization said Wednesday that ivermectin—touted by some on social media as a COVID-19 "miracle cure"—should not be used to treat coronavirus patients.

In response to the swirl of claims around the cheap anti-parasite drug, the WHO issued guidelines saying ivermectin should only be used on COVID-19 patients in clinical trial settings.

The UN health agency said there was a "very low certainty of evidence" on ivermectin's effects on mortality, hospital admission and getting rid of the virus from the body.

Facebook posts and articles endorsing ivermectin have proliferated in Brazil, France, South Africa and South Korea as governments around the world struggle with vaccination programmes.

The pandemic has prompted a surge in demand for the drug, particularly in Latin America.

But in an update to its guidelines on COVID-19 therapeutics, the WHO said: "We recommend not to use ivermectin in patients with COVID-19 except in the context of a clinical trial.

"This recommendation applies to patients with any disease severity and any duration of symptoms."

'Ongoing concerns'

The WHO looked at studies that compared ivermectin against a placebo and against other drugs, in 16 randomised control trials examining 2,400 patients.

"We currently lack persuasive evidence of a mechanism of action for ivermectin in COVID-19, and any observed clinical benefit would be unexplained," it said.

The drug has long been used to treat parasites such as head lice and for river blindness in sub-Saharan Africa.

The WHO recommendation was triggered by "increased international attention" on ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

But the guidance said: "The effects of ivermectin on mortality, mechanical ventilation, hospital admission, duration of hospitalisation and viral clearance remain uncertain because of very low certainty of evidence addressing each of these outcomes."

WHO experts stressed that the guidelines were not rigid and could be updated over time if further evidence comes to light.

But for now, "the low cost and wide availability do not, in the panel's view, mandate the use of a drug in which any benefit remains very uncertain and ongoing concerns regarding harms remain".

WHO fighting 'unproven therapies'

Ivermectin is one of a string of medications tested as a potential COVID-19 treatment since the pandemic began.

Like anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine—so far unproven by clinical trials—ivermectin is widely available and relatively cheap.

The recommendation is likely to provoke fury and scepticism among the drug's social media champions.

Often the rhetoric doing the rounds on social media for ivermectin is the same as for hydroxychloroquine: that the authorities are deliberately ignoring it because it is not profitable for the pharmaceutical industry.

However, its claimed benefits in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic has not been proven in major clinical trials.

The WHO's clinical management leader Janet Diaz told reporters: "We've been fighting this over-use of unproven therapies, especially some of the repurposed drugs in various parts of the world without evidence of efficacy.

"So it is always concerning because there can be more harm than any good."

Furthermore, "It can take resources away from conditions that should be treated with these drugs."

Diversion

Proponents of ivermectin, like those of hydroxychloroquine, often argue that it is already widely used—even for totally different purposes—therefore its use for COVID-19 is nothing to worry about.

However, Bram Rochwerg, methods chair of the Guideline Development Group (GDG) behind the WHO recommendation, told reporters that while ivermectin was a "relatively safe drug", the dosing regimes used for other illnesses were not comparable.

"The other potential for harm... was a diversion of attention and resources from supportive care that we know works for COVID patients," he added.

Without evidence of efficacy, the GDG felt "these other factors outweighed any potential for uncertain benefit".

Last week, the EU's medicines regulator likewise advised against using ivermectin for coronavirus outside clinical trials.

The US Food and Drug Administration's COVID-19 frequently asked questions page says bluntly "No." in response to "Should I take ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19?".

People sign up to test vaccines by being infected with the coronavirus on purpose [Vox.com, 31 Mar 2021]

By Kelsey Piper

A new study looks at who signs up for Covid-19 human challenge trials — trials where people are infected with Covid-19 on purpose to help speed up vaccine development.

In early March, the United Kingdom exposed dozens of volunteers to Covid-19 — on purpose. The aim of this so-called human challenge trial, the first of its type in the world for Covid-19, was to study how large a dose of the virus is necessary to infect someone. The volunteers quarantined for two weeks after their deliberate exposure, and last week, the first of them was released in good health.

Such human challenge trials have been part of humanity’s arsenal against disease for a while now. But in the case of their deployment in the fight against Covid-19, such trials have sparked ethical debates, largely revolving around concerns over whether the people who volunteer to participate know what exactly they’re getting into. A new study that dives deep into the motivations of human challenge trial participants seeks to allay some of those concerns.
To back up for a second: How exactly is a human challenge trial different from regular vaccine trials? In a normal vaccine trial, drug companies have to vaccinate tens of thousands of people and then wait until some of them get sick in the course of their everyday lives. For the coronavirus vaccine trials, that process took several months.

In a human challenge trial, people sign up — and are compensated — to get infected with the virus right away. That speeds the process up and enables scientists to get results on vaccine effectiveness potentially months sooner than a normal vaccine trial.

There’s a lot at stake here. Those months saved could potentially prevent countless hospitalizations and deaths. More than 300,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 since September; if we’d had the vaccine sooner, many could have been saved.

Researchers already use such trials to test malaria vaccines. Early in the pandemic, the organization 1 Day Sooner — a nonprofit that advocates for people who want to participate in high-impact medical research — collected thousands of signups from volunteers eager to participate in human challenge trials for the coronavirus vaccines.

The surge of volunteers has been heartening — but it also raised a big question: What kind of person signs up to get the coronavirus on purpose? Research funded by 1 Day Sooner and conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, and Georgetown — not yet peer reviewed and available as an online preprint — gives us some answers.

Who signs up for a human challenge trial?

The researchers, who surveyed almost 2,000 people who signed up to be considered for a Covid-19 human challenge trial last spring and summer, were particularly interested in whether people who sign up to get the coronavirus on purpose tend to be unusually economically desperate (which would suggest they might be motivated primarily by the compensation), unusually bad at risk assessment, or unusually altruistic.

Ethicists have reservations about human challenge trials on new pandemic diseases. Human challenge trials are common for testing vaccines against diseases like malaria, for which we have a highly effective treatment. There is no highly effective treatment for Covid-19.
Some have argued that it’s hard for people to truly consent to such studies or that the trial process might unjustly exploit the financial desperation, bad judgment, or self-destructive tendencies of the volunteers.

The new study provides a clearer picture of the kind of person who signs up for human challenge trials, and addresses some of these fears.

The study found that the volunteers are, on average, unusually altruistic. Compared to the general population, they are unusually likely to donate to charity, volunteer, donate blood, and be signed up to donate bone marrow. Their leading motivations for signing up for the human challenge trial were, “I wanted to help others and potentially save lives,” and, “I wanted to contribute to the progress of medicine.”

What about worries the volunteers are bad at risk assessment? The study found that, overall, they weren’t. Participants in the study were surveyed on many different categories of risk-taking, from physical (do they take risks with their safety and health, like motorcycling or skydiving?) to financial (do they gamble?) to social (do they tend to challenge authority figures and disagree openly with the people around them?).

When it comes to physical health, the study found, the people who signed up for human challenge trials actually were more cautious than the control group, and they weren’t any more likely to gamble or take risks in other categories. The one category of risk-taking behavior where they stood out was the category called “social risk-taking” — a tendency to question authority and be willing to speak out even when others disagree.

There were no signs from the study that people signed up for human challenge trials because they take the coronavirus lightly or don’t care if they get it. And the people who signed up tended to be better off financially than the average American, assuaging worries that the financial payouts for study participation might induce people to participate despite a lack of understanding of the risks.

Instead, participants seem to have largely signed up not for the money but because they believed they could bring the pandemic to an end a little faster.

When I talked with a couple of acquaintances who signed up with 1 Day Sooner, I heard many of the same themes that the survey detected.

Miranda, who asked that her last name not be used for the piece, lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and her dog; we know each other through the effective altruist community, a group of people interested in how to do as much good as possible. She signed up for 1 Day Sooner back in July. “Helping it happen would save lives,” she told me. “It’s sort of the same reason I wear a mask and social distance — I want to protect other people from the virus.”

“I wanted to do something about the crisis,” Shaked Koplewitz, a finance worker in New York, said. “Just taking a risk (which objectively wasn’t a huge risk) in order to actually help improve something in a meaningful way was important to me.”

“Challenge trials with the novel coronavirus can attract volunteers with background conditions, attitudes, and motivations that should allay key ethical concerns,” the study concludes.
Human challenge trials and medical ethics

Studies like these should inform a brewing debate about the ethics of human challenge trials. Even though human challenge trials have the potential to save a lot of lives, some ethicists have been hesitant to recommend them.

Virologist Angela Rasmussen at Columbia University argues that the standard of informed consent is hard to meet in a case like this one: “I don’t know that we can actually inform them of all the risks because there’s still so much that’s just unknown about this virus. ... I just don’t see how a subject could provide their fully informed consent.”

When I put Rasmussen’s concerns to the 1 Day Sooner volunteers, they mostly seemed confused by them. Koplewitz told me he thinks of the “informed” in “informed consent” as being about avoiding manipulation and deceit, not about reasoning under uncertainty. “The reason we need to put the ‘informed’ in ‘informed consent’ is, I think, to prevent people being taken advantage of,” he told me. But as long as doctors are presenting patients with everything they know, the fact that there’s a lot that experts still don’t know doesn’t bother him.

“Everyone faces the unknown every day,” Miranda told me. “If someone else feels like they don’t know enough to give informed consent, that’s totally reasonable of them.” But personally? As a young healthy person with no health conditions, she is — statistically — at very low risk. “Even though I can’t know every possible outcome of being infected with Covid-19, I can be informed about the range of my uncertainty and the approximate levels of various risks, and I can informedly consent to face that uncertainty.”

Another concern is that human challenge trials still won’t let researchers skip clinical trials so they shouldn’t be oversold as a magic bullet that would obviate the traditional steps of vaccine testing. This is absolutely true. Human challenge trials are a “supplementary pathway,” as advocate and vaccine developer Stephen Plotkin puts it.

But they might tell us earlier which vaccine candidates are on the right track, letting us scale up manufacturing sooner, and they might enable earlier access to effective vaccines for health care workers and other groups at high exposure risk. Human challenge trials wouldn’t have to fully replace clinical trials to speed them up considerably.

Another concern is that because human challenge trials largely recruit young, healthy volunteers, they only tell us about the progression of the virus (or the effectiveness of the vaccine) in that population. Since what we most want to know is how the virus affects those at risk of death, they might be less useful than hoped.

This, too, is a real constraint of human challenge trials. But if vaccines had been approved only for young healthy people back in September, that would have offered protection to many health care workers — and, since we now know that the vaccines dramatically reduce viral transmission, vaccinating young, healthy people in the fall would have indirectly protected others who are at higher risk.

The limitations and challenges of human challenge trials should be kept in mind, but not overstated; a faster vaccine would save many lives even if it were only approved for the healthy.

All of that makes for a strong case that human challenge trials could ethically have a role in speeding a vaccine. But now that the vaccines are here, are they still defensible? That’s a concern Seema Shah, a bioethicist at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University, raised with my colleague Sigal Samuels in February. “To me the question is, is the risk of doing a trial like this sufficiently low and justified by the value?” Shah asked. “And I think we’re sort of at a point where we’re pushing the bounds of what’s been accepted in other kinds of research.”

And indeed, the case for human challenge trials last spring is much stronger than the case for them now. And for that reason, it makes sense to focus not on the question of whether we should do those trials now, but on what questions we can answer now to be better prepared to make that call in the early hours of the next pandemic.

Looking ahead to the next pandemic

Skeptics of human challenge trials raise some legitimate concerns. Smart, well-meaning people do disagree on this, and given the stakes, it would be strange if we didn’t have agonized debate over human challenge trials. And to be clear, it’s near impossible to say today whether we can use human challenge trials for the next pandemic because we have no idea yet what it might look like. The specifics of each situation matter a lot.

That said, the Covid-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the question of human challenge trials in emergency situations like this one, and new research has clarified some of the key questions that held us back from launching such trials early in the pandemic. And on the whole, I think that the case is strong that such trials are justified under some circumstances.
People consent to risky work all the time, including consenting to work in jobs that expose them to risk of the coronavirus. Many people faced exposure this last year despite not having given informed consent, to save others, out of a sense of duty, or because they had no choice but to work to feed their families. We shouldn’t think of people signing up for human challenge trials as any different from the many other people who risked their health in this last year to carry our society through the pandemic.

While this research is funded by 1 Day Sooner and still preliminary, studies along these lines can play a role in clarifying how a society might ethically do HCTs. The trials do not — as many people feared — draw people who just don’t understand risk assessment, and they also don’t primarily draw financially desperate people. In fact, participants are extensively screened to avoid those concerns. They mostly draw people who are knowingly choosing to take on a small risk to themselves to protect their loved ones, their communities, and the world.

If we’d had vaccines in September, they might have mitigated the devastating winter wave of Covid-19 deaths in the US. I wish we’d done more to make that happen.

But the human challenge trial debate shouldn’t primarily be about relitigating the past. Instead, it should be part of planning for the future.

This likely will not be the last pandemic in our lifetimes, and letting the next one sweep through and destroy lives isn’t a good option. Another year of hunkering down feels unendurable.

The alternative is lightning-fast vaccine development. We should keep working to overhaul our vaccine development process to make use of every tool available to us, from human challenge trials to sped-up mass clinical trials to more manufacturing plants, so that whatever comes next, we’re equipped to rise to the challenge.

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New mRNA COVID-19 vaccine candidate shows promise in vivo [News-Medical.Net, 31 Mar 2021]

By Lakshmi Supriya

Researchers report that a new lipid nanoparticle mRNA coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine candidate protected 70% of mice expressing the human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), while all the non-vaccinated mice died.

To combat the COVID-19 pandemic, several vaccines have now been approved. The first vaccines to be approved were based on mRNA technology, for example, the Pfizer BNT162b2 and the Moderna mRNA-1273. This technology has shown high efficacy, has a high safety profile and has a quick manufacturing process.

One of the challenges of mRNA technology is delivering it efficiently to target cells. The most frequently used and most advanced carrier platform for mRNA delivery are lipid nanoparticles, which are also used in the current vaccines.

These lipid nanoparticles comprise cholesterol, a phospholipid, polyethylene glycol-linked lipid, and an ionizable lipid. The ionizable lipid is key in the effective delivery and translation of the mRNA.

In a new study published on the bioRxiv* preprint server, researchers from Israel report the efficacy of an mRNA vaccine comprising an ionizable lipid that was previously shown to elicit a potent immune response in vaccinated mice.

Characterizing new vaccine candidate

Mice animal models, which are usually used to test vaccine efficacy, cannot be used as is for SARS-CoV-2 as the mouse angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) cannot bind to the virus.

Hence, the researchers used mice expressing the human ACE2 (hACE2), a receptor for SARS-CoV-2 in humans. This model has been shown to lead to severe disease and death upon infection with the virus.

Fc-conjugated receptor-binding domain (RBD) mRNA and lipid nanoparticles were mixed together to make the nanoparticle encapsulated mRNA. The vaccine candidate was injected intramuscularly in 6–8 week old female mice. Some animals also got a booster dose after 23 days. As controls, animals were given only the lipid nanoparticles or recombinant RBD-hFc (rRBD).

The team found that two doses of the vaccine candidate provided 70% protection against SARS-CoV-2, injected nasally. All untreated animals died.

Based on a previous screening of lipid formulations, the team chose one that showed the best immune response in mice, and vaccine candidates were prepared using this lipid formulation. Dynamic light scattering and cryogenic electron microscopy indicated the particles were small, about 55 nm, and uniformly distributed.

Western blot tests of transfected HEK293 cells revealed the effective translation of the mRNA into a functional protein. ELISA tests showed binding of the nanoparticle mRNA to hACE2, confirming the functionality of the translated RBD-hFc. Thus, the vaccine candidate can also elicit binding antibodies.

Testing in mice

To test how the lipid nanoparticle vaccine candidate behaves in vivo, the team injected mice with 5 μg of the nanoparticle mRNA or rRBD intramuscularly. A single dose of the vaccine candidate did not show a strong immune response in either case. However, a strong antibody response was seen after the second dose. The antibody levels produced were much higher for the nanoparticle mRNA than for the rRBD.

A plaque reduction neutralization test confirmed the formation of a strong neutralizing antibody response in vitro. Although the nanoparticle mRNA injection elicited a stronger response than the rRNA, the difference was not statistically significant.

After 23 days of the last injection, the mice were challenged with SARS-CoV-2 administered intranasally. All the animals lost weight starting five days after infection and reached a maximum weight loss after eight days.

Control animals lost almost a fourth of their weight, while those that received the vaccine candidate lost about 10% weight. All the control animals died, while 70% of the vaccinated animals who received two doses survived. Only 40% of the animals administered rRBD survived. Only 16% of the animals which received only a single dose of the mRNA vaccine candidate survived.

Previous studies on vaccines have used animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection but which did not lead to animal death, where the vaccine efficacy was determined by its ability to reduce viral replication. In contrast, this study used a mouse model expressing hACE2, which has been used less in studies. The study also showed that the mRNA vaccine candidate afforded 70% protection against another lethal dose of SARS-CoV-2 that killed animals that were not immunized.

*Important Notice
bioRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.

Journal reference:
• Elia, U. et al. (2021) A lipid nanoparticle RBD-hFc mRNA vaccine protects hACE2 transgenic mice against lethal SARS-CoV-2 infection. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.03.29.436639, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.29.436639v1

mRNA vaccines: the post-pandemic outlook after a breakthrough year [Pharmaceutical Technology, 31 Mar 2021]

mRNA-based vaccine hit the headlines in 2020 after the quick development of two candidates to protect against SARS-CoV-2. This sudden breakthrough was built on the back of more than a decade of research into mRNA vaccines, both for infectious diseases and oncology. What is the post-pandemic outlook for vaccines developed using this innovative protein-encoding technology? Chris Lo reports.

Before 2020, messenger RNA (mRNA) wasn’t a scientific term that had much public traction. More than a year on from the outset of the devastating global Covid-19 pandemic, mRNA-based therapeutic programmes have been enjoying a significant bump in interest, both from the public and from Big Pharma.

mRNA vaccines have been hitting the headlines in 2020 for the instrumental role they have played in the pharmaceutical industry’s response to Covid-19. Unlike conventional viral vaccines that inject weakened, non-replicating versions of a virus to present antigens and induce an immune response, the mRNA approach introduces engineered mRNA – single-stranded mRNA molecules that provide biological instructions for cells to produce proteins.

The efficacy of the two mRNA-based coronavirus vaccines – developed by US-based mRNA pioneer Moderna and a partnership between Pfizer and Germany-based BioNTech, another early leader in mRNA therapeutics – have showcased the clinical efficacy of the mRNA approach, as well as the dizzying speed with which such vaccines can be developed, tested and brought to the clinic.

With the benefits of mRNA-based development clear to see as these first-generation vaccines continue to roll out worldwide, a surge in mRNA vaccine development for infectious diseases is already in evidence, and industry analysts are expecting to see an uptick in interest in mRNA platforms for other therapeutic areas, primarily in oncology but also in rare autoimmune disorders and even neurodegenerative disease.

Assessing the mRNA advantage in infectious disease vaccines

“[Covid-19 has] brought the technology to [the world’s] attention,” says GlobalData oncology and haematology analyst Jessica McCormack. “There’s a huge amount of promise there for other infectious diseases. In terms of infectious disease, I think [mRNA] does seem to be the way it’s going to go.”

While researchers have been incredibly optimistic about mRNA vaccines’ potential in a wide range of viral disease, from HIV to hepatitis C, there’s still some way to go to prove the efficacy benefits of mRNA vaccines over their better-understood live-attenuated, inactivated and conjugate counterparts.

Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech’s jabs are the first mRNA-based vaccines to receive even emergency authorisation from key regulators, and real-world data from the global Covid-19 rollout will play an important role in validating their long-term efficacy and safety profiles against the coronavirus and other viral agents.

On the other side of the coin, a decade or more of research into optimising mRNA approaches to vaccine development helped inform the rapid development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines using the technology.

“[Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccines] have come on the back of a considerable amount of research into mRNA – in cancer vaccines and other infectious agents,” says McCormack. “I don’t think it would have been possible without this huge amount of research. And the amount of funding has just been unprecedented.”

Nevertheless, the field of infectious disease seems to be standing on the brink of an mRNA revolution – according to research by GlobalData there are currently 44 ongoing clinical trials assessing mRNA vaccines, of which 23 are related to infectious diseases.

Covid-19 trials – spurred by the immense global demand for new ways to combat the coronavirus – account for 60% of mRNA studies in infectious disease, but there is clear potential against other viruses.

mRNA vaccines build momentum in infectious disease space

While elicited immune responses have been underwhelming in many early stage trials – CureVac’s first-in-human trial of rabies vaccine CV7201 is a good example – incremental improvements to the formulation and molecular design are continually helping to boost their anti-viral immune potency.

Early mRNA leader Moderna is looking to build on its Covid-19 momentum by bringing its mRNA approach to the seasonal flu market, while also progressing its clinical programme in other infectious diseases.

Last year, the company announced positive results from a Phase II trial of its vaccine candidate mRNA-1647 in cytomegalovirus (CMV), the congenital form of which is one of the leading causes of birth defects in babies. The trial found the vaccine to be safe and well-tolerated, while reporting a 12-fold boost in neutralising antibody titres.

The candidate is expected to move into Phase II trials in 2021, and Moderna says the CMV programme showcases one of the benefits of mRNA in that multiple mRNAs encoding for different viral proteins can be included in a single vaccine, allowing for the production of multimeric antigens that are much harder to create with conventional vaccines.

“Our CMV vaccine contains six mRNAs, five of which encode five different proteins that combine to form a pentameric protein complex that is a potentially critical antigen for immune protection against CMV,” says Moderna on its website.

And while CureVac’s first rabies vaccine trial may have been disappointing, the German biopharma firm’s follow-up work on the clinical programme has shown the speed at which the technology is improving with new formulations.

The company repackaged the vaccine in a shell of lipid nanoparticles and reported positive data from a new Phase I trial, in which a very low dose of the vaccine was found to be well-tolerated and demonstrated a strong adaptive immune response.

Speedy mRNA development to respond to emerging viral threats

Beyond the clinical potential of emerging mRNA vaccines, mRNA technology also holds clear advantages in the speed of vaccine candidate selection and development. The ability of mRNA vaccine developers to design antigens in silico allows for much faster testing of vaccine candidates, as they avoid complex and time-consuming cell culture production and fermentation-based manufacturing of target pathogens or antigens in traditional vaccine development.

“Covid-19 was identified on 31 December 2019,” noted Massachusetts Institute of Technology biological engineering researcher Joshua Peters last year, as he summarised the lightning speed of Moderna’s SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development.

“Five days later, the full sequence of the viral genome was obtained. Eight days after that, the frontrunner vaccine candidate for Covid-19 was finalised at Moderna: mRNA-1273. Within 63 days, Moderna administered their first dose in an NIH-led Phase I study. Considering the ‘average’ timeline to develop a vaccine is 10-15 years, this is lightspeed acceleration through the scientific and regulatory gauntlet.”

The incredible vaccine development speeds achieved by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in the last year don’t even come close to the fasted observed mRNA vaccine response to an infectious disease outbreak. That title belongs to Novartis, which in 2013 developed in just eight days a vaccine candidate in response to an avian flu outbreak in China for pre-clinical testing.

RNA manufacturing flaws in 2013 meant that the vaccine never reached human trials before Novartis sold its vaccine business to GlaxoSmithKline in 2015, but it was certainly a strong proof-of-concept of the speed advantages of in silico mRNA design. As has been borne out by Covid-19, this potentially gives mRNA platforms a sizable advantage over other vaccine development methods when responding to fast-developing viral outbreaks.

Can mRNA springboard into cancer and other indications?

Infectious disease might be the current hot topic for mRNA vaccines, but the technology has the potential to bring benefits for the treatment of a far wider range of indications. mRNA has formed an important part of research into therapeutic cancer vaccines for well over a decade, and the likes of BioNTech and others are starting to carry out pre-clinical studies in rarer indications, such as autoimmune disease.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the high unmet needs and the lucrative nature of the space, immuno-oncology is by far the busiest therapeutic area for mRNA vaccine development, with cancer studies representing all the 21 ongoing mRNA human trials outside of infectious diseases, according to GlobalData.

But treating cancer with an mRNA vaccine is a very different kettle of fish to immunising against infectious diseases – cancer vaccines are generally being developed as therapies rather than as prophylactic agents.

Their mechanism of action is for clinicians to model several mutations found on a patient’s tumour, taking further information from the unique characteristics of the patient’s immune system to help elicit the strongest possible immune response.

This is the broad basis for individualised mRNA cancer vaccines – off-the-shelf options that can be administered to larger cohorts of patients are being studied but are likely to be much further off due to the intricate individual biological variations between tumours, even within the same cancer class.

“Cancer tumours are very heterogeneous,” says McCormack. “You can take a biopsy of a cancer of the same type from two different people, and potentially the thing you’ll need to target in that tumour to elicit an effective immune response will be different. That’s a huge issue. My feeling is that personalised approaches are probably where it’s going to go. The only therapeutic vaccine for cancer that’s currently approved is not an mRNA vaccine – Provenge, for prostate cancer. And that’s a personalised vaccine.

“There are a lot of different considerations that you need to take into account [for a personalised vaccine]. For example, you’ll have to think about production times in a way that you wouldn’t have to think about for an infectious agent. If you’ve got a patient who’s very rapidly progressing in their cancer, then do you have time to take the sample of their tumour, prepare this personalised vaccine for them and put it back in before they progress too far for that to be effective?”

Large pharma firms are starting to forge partnerships to get involved in the mRNA immune-oncology space, from Merck’s strategic collaboration with Moderna to Roche’s alliance with BioNTech. Innovative biotechs joining forces with Big Pharma is particularly appropriate as many personalised cancer vaccines are intended to be used alongside existing cancer treatments such as Merck’s Keytruda and Roche’s Tecentriq.

These early days of mRNA cancer vaccine research (no project has reached further than Phase II trials so far) have been littered with disappointing trial results – in summer 2020, BioNTech and Roche revealed Phase Ib trial of mRNA vaccine RO7198457 in combination with Tecentriq generated a response rate of just 8% in solid tumour patients.

But there have been rays of hope for future breakthroughs in mRNA cancer vaccines, most notably Moderna’s mRNA-4157, which in a small Phase I study of ten patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma achieved a response rate of 50% in combination with Merck’s Keytruda – positive results that the biotech will be hoping can be replicated in later-stage trials with larger patient numbers.

mRNA: racing for a breakthrough

With the major pharma players getting involved and mRNA’s role in combating Covid-19 acting as a spur to investment, the race is on to reach the first approval for an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, and to expand their use against infectious diseases.

In immuno-oncology specifically, the challenge might be just as much about finding the right patients as honing the right treatment, while the growth of personalised cancer vaccines could create access issues as they will be expensive and will need to be administered in specialist centres, potentially impacting initial uptake, as has been the case with innovative CAR-T cell therapies.

Nevertheless, the potential remains, and incremental improvements could add up to a transformative new treatment class in the years to come.

“It’s unlikely that you’re going to have [an mRNA cancer vaccine] coming through that then takes over as a first-line therapy for everyone,” says McCormack.

“It would be successful even if you can just find a sub-group of patients where it’s working. I think in general; physicians are a little bit less enthusiastic about vaccines than other things.
Potentially, the success we’ve seen with Covid-19 vaccines is going to change people’s minds, but it might take a while to filter through.”

Experts fear the Olympics could trigger a global superspreader event [The Japan Times, 31 Mar 2021]

BY LISA DU AND MICHELLE FAY CORTEZ

The Tokyo Summer Olympics has survived being postponed, a mountain of scandal and bad publicity. Now comes the real challenge: pulling off the world’s biggest sporting event safely in the middle of a pandemic.

When the games kick off on July 23, COVID-19 will still be a global reality. Even with the decision to exclude foreign spectators, more than 60,000 athletes, coaches, national team staff, media and other essential workers will converge on Tokyo from more than 200 countries — each with different rates of transmission, vaccination and viral variants.

“Based on the number of people arriving and the prevalence of the disease around the globe, the Olympics absolutely could become a superspreading event that leads to quite a number of infections, as well as spreading internationally as people return home,” said Spencer Fox, a research associate at the University of Texas, Austin, who specializes in infectious disease modeling. “The precautions they have in place are great, but you can never completely reduce the probability of infections.”

Organizers are relying on a series of six playbooks of rules that detail how participants of the Olympics and Paralympics can compete, move around and socialize, in order to manage the risks of what will be the world’s biggest COVID-19 bubble. While those involved in the games will be somewhat isolated from the Japanese public, Tokyo has ruled out using two core tenets of containment: quarantines and vaccinations. Without those, experts say infections could spread.

If it does, not only could the Olympics become the site of a sizable outbreak that spreads into Japan, it could become a cauldron of novel variants gathered from around the world. The risk is that athletes could bring them home, potentially fueling the pandemic.

While Japan has seen much lower transmission rates compared with other rich nations, its vaccination campaign is only just starting, months behind places like the United Kingdom, the United States and even other parts of Asia. There are still many unknowns, including exactly how many people will be coming into Japan, and organizers haven’t decided yet on how many domestic spectators will be allowed into venues.

Depending on how infection rates develop, there’s still a possibility that more stringent measures will be adopted, with the final version of the playbooks due in June.

“The situation surrounding the coronavirus is constantly changing, and it’s our hope that the efforts of the government, the city of Tokyo and other stakeholders will help to mitigate spread of infections,” Tokyo 2020 said in an emailed statement.

Building a bubble

Sporting events have gone on around the world this past year — with both success stories and cautionary tales.

The Olympic organizers are set to emulate the NBA, which saw no infections during its three-month run in the summer and fall of 2020. But the NBA bubble saw just a few hundred athletes cordoned off together at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. Including staff and coaches, there were fewer than 1,000 people involved.

Officials at the Australian Open earlier this year took infection control seriously, requiring tests for athletes and mandatory quarantines upon arrival, even for competitors. Still, some charter flights headed for Melbourne saw cases among athletes and support staff. While initially open to spectators, fans were later shut out for a while during an unrelated surge in infections.

Injuries blamed on limited practice times were rampant as well.

While the event didn’t lead to a local outbreak or transmissions among players, the challenges show what can happen even when stringent precautions are in place.

The extent of the risk also varies depending on the sport. A study of the NFL’s latest season in the U.S. found that players didn’t transmit the virus during game play, while matches for a high school wrestling tournament turned into deadly superspreading events. The Olympics will feature 33 sports across 42 venues across Japan.

Social setting

Further complicating the task is the social nature of the Olympics. Places such as the Athlete’s Village were designed to have people meet and socialize. Although long conversations and collective meals will be off limits, how those rules will be enforced is unclear. Some of the athletes are teenagers and the average age of an Olympian is usually in the 20s — groups where virus spread has been harder to control.

“While the playbooks are written, it’s not clear how strictly they will be implemented,” said Alex Cook, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health.

It’s not just the athletes. The games will require thousands of volunteers to help the events run smoothly, as well as local staff who will need to go in and out of the Olympic bubble regularly to do things such as cook meals, clean facilities and run the proceedings. It’s not clear how such staffers — which the Olympic Organising Committee and Tokyo Metropolitan Government say will probably number more than 150,000 — will be handled, and the playbooks don’t offer explicit instructions.

Even in normal times, disease outbreaks are common at the Olympics. During the Winter Games in Pyeongchang in 2018, around 200 athletes caught norovirus. Two years earlier, the Rio Summer Olympics were held amid the specter of Zika. More than 300 athletes caught respiratory illnesses out of 10,568 competing in the London Olympics in 2012.

“It’s a good-sized task, even without coronavirus,” said Jerne Shapiro, a field epidemiologist at the University of Florida who is overseeing the university’s COVID-19 control measures, including for athletics.

COVID-19 control

There are strategies to reduce risk. Those flying into Japan will be required to have a negative COVID-19 test and undergo additional testing at least every four days. Increasing the frequency of testing is likely the best way to prevent an outbreak, experts say. Seiko Hashimoto, Japan’s Olympics chief, has indicated that more frequent testing for athletes is being considered.

“This has become the go-to methodology in order to have an event stay on schedule despite the fact that we are in a pandemic,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious disease physician. “Short of vaccinating everybody, a combination of serial testing and the bubble is the best way.”

Still, several countries have already started vaccinating their athletes and others who will travel to the games, and some national teams may have stricter infection control rules than the Tokyo playbooks. Events will be held in large, airy facilities, with few spectators, further decreasing the danger.

But not everyone is convinced. “It would be ideal, of course, if all participants and staff were vaccinated,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Science Institute.

“The bubble model worked for the NBA,” Topol said. “It’s not clear if it can be replicated in this scenario.”

Merkel, Macron, Putin discuss Sputnik V vaccine [DW (English), 31 Mar 2021]

The three leaders talked about issues of global security as well as the possibility of authorizing and producing the Russian-developed Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine in the EU.

The leaders of Germany, France and Russia held a conference call on Tuesday in which they discussed security issues and the potential registration of the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine.

The Kremlin said after the call that the three leaders had talked about shipment and joint-production of the Russian-developed jab, pending authorization from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

Russian President Vladimir Putin also fielded questions from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron regarding the situation of the jailed opposition activist Alexei Navalny.

Another possible vaccine option for the EU

The EMA began a fast-track rolling review of the Sputnik V vaccine in early March.

Experts from the EMA are scheduled to visit Russia in April to scrutinize the results of clinical trials and production processes.

More than 50 countries worldwide are waiting for the Russian jab meaning that Russian production of the vaccine would not be able to meet European demand, should it get authorization.

The EU is in need of more vaccination doses to boost its faltering vaccination drive. Merkel has previously expressed willingness to accept the Russian vaccine if it gets the go-ahead from the EMA.

European production of the vaccine is already planned to begin in Italy in July. The Russian pharmaceutical firm R-Pharm is also planning to produce the jab in the Bavarian town Illertissen from the summer.

It is not yet clear if or when the EMA will grant authorization to Sputnik V.

"This evaluation is taking place according to the same norms that apply to all other vaccines," Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert told the German news agency dpa.

What else did the three leaders discuss?

The trio also discussed security issues in Ukraine, Libya and Syria. The three leaders gave their unanimous support to the Iranian nuclear deal.

Ukraine has been a diplomatic sticking point since Moscow annexed Crimea in 2014 and backed separatist forces against the government in the east of the country.

The jailing of Navalny, who spent several months recovering from poisoning in Berlin, has been another contentious issue.

Putin answered the questions posed by Merkel and Macron about the anti-Kremlin activist. The Russian president also expressed his readiness to "restore normal unpoliticized interaction with the EU if it shows interest in that," the Kremlin said.

Ujjain: Coronavirus should be declared 'China Virus' or 'Wuhan Virus': Shaileshanand Giri [Free Press Journal, 31 Mar 2021]

'Will prove to be a master stroke as far as our aspiration to become vishwa guru is concerned'

Ujjain: Juna Akhara Mahamandleshwar Swami Shaileshanand Giri asserted that for self-respect’s sake we must campaign against the China for causing harm to humanity. We should strike at China’s image and her economy with full force. Only then will we be able to convert China’s loss into India’s gain by implementing new industrial revolution of cluster industry plan.
Interacting with Free Press Mahamandleshwar Shaileshanand said, we need to give a more stern reply to China.

He further asserted that every disease has been named after its origin and vaccine after its inventor. Then why the dreaded virus is not named after China?

Swami Shaileshanand Giri, a pioneer of campaign against depression, said India must declare or name the coronavirus as WUHAN or CHINA VIRUS with full confidence.

This will prove to be a master stroke as far as our aspiration to become vishwa guru is concerned. Our PM must dare to declare so, and once it is done then it will draw diplomatic response and as a Spiritual Guru I can predict that whole world will unanimously agree on the same. “Our top politicians are failing to counter this Wuhan virus by treating its mental and physical symptoms. Rather we also need to fix Indian pride,” he said.

Conflicts

Juna Akhara Mahamandleshwar Swami Shaileshanand Giri recounted that one must never forget China’s firm denial and objections to blacklisting Pakistan as a global terrorist; Chinese attempt to raise Kashmir issue at UN; violating Indian territorial integrity; expansive policy of encroaching our lands, Chinese “string of pearls” policy; China supplying India with cheap low quality goods; China’s stapled visa policy for Arunachal Pradesh; Doklam; Aksai Chin and Shaksgam valley.

Origin of Covid-19

The corona virus which was discovered in 2019 was given an abbreviated name of Covid-19 by the WHO in a press release on February 11, 2020. On December 31, 2019, a strange new pneumonia of unknown cause was reported to the Chinese WHO Country Office. A cluster of these cases originally appeared in Wuhan, a city in the Hubei Province of China. These infections were found to be caused by a new corona virus which was given the name “2019 novel corona virus” (2019-nCoV). It was later renamed “severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2,” or SARS-CoV2 by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses on February 11, 2020. It was named SARS-CoV2 because the virus is a genetic cousin of the corona virus which caused the SARS outbreak in 2002 (SARS-CoV). Thus Covid-19 is the name of the infection caused by the SARS-CoV2 virus. Viruses and the diseases they cause have different names. For example, AIDS is the disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. As mentioned above, Covid-19 is an acronym. In its full form, Covid-19 stands for corona virus infection of 2019.

Origin of diseases names
* Rose fever from Rose river, Queensland Australia
* Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever: Omsk, Russia.
* Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever: Ebola river in Zaire
* Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Saudi Arabia
* Marburg Virus Disease: Marburg, Germany, 1967
* Noro virus: Named after Norwalk
* Zika fever: 1947 Zika Forest, Uganda.
* Japanese Encephalitis
* German measles
* Spanish Flu
* Guinea Worm
* West Nile Virus
* Rocky Mountain spotted fever
* Lyme disease: Lyme and Old Lyme, Connecticut
* Lassa fever: Lassa, Nigeria in 1969.