New Coronavirus News from 5 Apr 2022

EDITORIAL | In Possible 7th COVID-19 Wave, Japan Must Protect the Elderly [JAPAN Forward, 5 Apr 2022]

Effective measures targeting the elderly would remove the necessity of imposing severe restraints on the freedom of society as a whole.

The latest seven-day average is higher than the peak in the summer of 2021. New cases exceeded that of the previous week in 37 of the 47 prefectures of Japan.

Stronger vigilance is needed to prevent this increase from escalating into what could be Japan’s seventh wave of infections.

Many of these cases are young adults in their 20s who were exposed to the virus at restaurants and other places of socialization. The BA.1 subvariant of the Omicron coronavirus variant, which triggered the sixth wave of infections in Japan, is being taken over by the even more infectious BA.2 subvariant. Dr. Takaji Wakita, chairman of the advisory board to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, has called for vigilance.

The rebound in cases must be suppressed while balancing between implementing preventative measures and protecting our ability to carry on our daily lives.

The third dose of COVID-19 vaccines is expected to prevent severe illness and hospitalization. In Japan, the vaccination rate exceeds 80% among the elderly, but is only about 40% overall. To improve these numbers, the government and municipalities need to provide detailed explanations of the vaccines.

At the end of March, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida decided to have vaccination minister Noriko Horiuchi step down from her position to comply with the maximum number of Cabinet ministers allowed by law, except when a special need arises. Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno has been appointed as her successor, which means he will take on the new role concurrently with his current roles.

Preparing for the Next Battle
As some countries roll out fourth vaccine doses, there is concern that the Chief Cabinet Secretary — with hands already full from his current responsibilities — is taking on more than he can handle.

The government must increase the rate of third-dose vaccinations, while also explaining the effectiveness of additional booster shots to the public in a manner that is easy to understand.

Severe cases from the Omicron strain are relatively rare among the working-age population. But day-to-day measures against infection must be implemented stringently ー not only to protect the elderly from infection, but also to resume normalcy in our daily lives.

Preventing hospital bed shortages is of utmost importance. Severe cases of COVID-19 among elderly patients were especially conspicuous during the sixth wave of infections. Although the third-dose vaccination rate among the elderly has improved, the necessary environment must be secured for their recuperation from COVID-19 if they do contract it.

Prolonged hospitalization of elderly patients, even at a large hospital specializing in the treatment of infectious diseases, could lead to the deterioration of their physical and cognitive functions even after the infection is cured. That makes it difficult for them to return to normal life.
One option is to divert beds in small- and medium-sized hospitals offering rehabilitation and nursing care. The beds could be assigned to the recuperation of elderly COVID-19 patients. Making rehabilitation and nursing care available in large COVID-19 recuperation facilities would also be effective.

Effective measures targeting the elderly would remove the necessity of imposing severe restraints on the freedom of society as a whole. Moreover, they would alleviate the strain on emergency medical services for non-COVID-19 patients by preventing critical care beds in large hospitals from becoming overwhelmed with elderly patients undergoing prolonged hospitalization.

China extends lockdown of Shanghai as coronavirus cases mount despite draconian "zero-COVID" policy [CBS News, 5 Apr 2022]

BY LUCY CRAFT

The lockdown of Shanghai, China's biggest city, has been extended to cover its entire population of more than 25 million as the global trade hub battles the worst COVID-19 outbreak since the pandemic began in China more than two years ago. The draconian measures are straining residents' patience and overwhelming authorities' ability to feed and care for Shanghai's stranded inhabitants.

What was initially intended to be a relatively short shutdown starting one week ago, staggered over two stages in two halves of the city, has now paralyzed the well-manicured and hyper-modern metropolis. China's government has sent almost 40,000 personnel to Shanghai from other regions – part of the country's biggest coronavirus response to date.

The number of new daily infections registered in Shanghai has hit a record 13,000. That's mild by international standards, but China is doubling down on its policy of stamping out every single case, under its "dynamic zero-COVID" strategy.

Against less transmissible variants, zero-COVID seemed to work well, winning public support. But with Omicron fueling the current wave, China's uncompromising strategy of locking down cities and barricading citizens in their homes in a bid to track and eliminate every trace of virus may finally have met its match.

Rumors have swirled on Chinese social media about some residents refusing to be tested, wary of being warehoused in huge quarantine centers with little privacy despite most positive cases being asymptomatic. Drawing particular anger is a policy of separating children, including babies, from their parents when only one or the other test positive.

U.K.-based health analysis firm Airfinity, in a report titled "China risks over a million deaths if Omicron spreads," said that because of China's low acquired immunity from past infections and its less-effective vaccines, the entire country risks sharing the fate of Hong Kong, which sustained the world's highest COVID death rate per capita.

Other analysts argue, however, that the overwhelmingly asymptomatic infections show China's domestic vaccines are holding up.

China's hardline coronavirus policy comes at substantial cost. An economist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong estimated the shutdown of the critical financial and trade center of Shanghai is costing at least $46 billion a month, or about 3% of GDP.

But despite the costs and the growing frustration in Shanghai, Chinese authorities continue to voice unwavering support for the zero-COVID strategy.

This week, China's official state news agency published an "explainer," saying the policy had been effective and that, "in the days to come, it will continue to guide the country's epidemic control and prevention efforts."

Politics is believed to be at least partly driving China's hardline stance in Shanghai. With a major Communist Party congress slated for this fall, during which President Xi Jinping will seek a controversial third term, any quick easing of the restrictions appeared unlikely.

Dr. Pieter Cullis named 2022 Canada Gairdner Award laureate [UBC Faculty of Medicine, 5 Apr 2022]

UBC Medicine professor Dr. Pieter Cullis has been named a 2022 Canada Gairdner International Award laureate for his pioneering work developing the lipid nanoparticle delivery technology that enables mRNA therapeutics such as the highly effective COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

The Gairdner Awards recognize scientists whose discoveries have had a major impact on biomedical and global health research. Nicknamed Canada’s Nobel Prize, many of the annual Canada Gairdner Award laureates have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize.

“The work of Dr. Cullis and his esteemed colleagues enabled the rapid availability of highly effective and safe COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which has been instrumental in protecting individuals during the pandemic,” says UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Santa J. Ono. “We are extremely proud of Dr. Cullis’ enormous contributions to biomedical and global health research and congratulate him on this well-deserved honour.”

Dr. Cullis was recognized alongside Dr. Katalin Karikó, senior vice president of RNA Protein Replacement Therapies at BioNTech SE and a professor at the University of Szeged and Dr. Drew Weissman, director of the Penn Institute for RNA Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania for their joint contributions to developing nucleoside-modified mRNA to avoid immunogenic reactions and improve the translational properties of mRNA once inside a cell.
The foundation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines

The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are built on over 30 years of established scientific research, including work carried out by Drs. Cullis, Karikó and Weissman. Drs. Karikó and Weissman discovered how to engineer mRNA—a molecule that carries instructions for making proteins—so that it could be used to produce the desired protein after introduction into human cells. Despite challenges and skepticism from others in the process, they saw the potential of RNA for vaccines and other applications. However, one major challenge remained: how to introduce the mRNA into the body in a way that it would be protected from degradation and could enter cells for protein production.

“The work of Dr. Cullis and his esteemed colleagues enabled the rapid availability of highly effective and safe COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which has been instrumental in protecting individuals during the pandemic.”UBC President and Vice-Chancellor Santa J. Ono

A pioneer in lipid chemistry and the formation of lipid nanoparticles, Dr. Cullis had been working with such packaging systems for the past 50 years. His foundational work has led to many clinical applications of lipid nanoparticles, such as delivering anticancer drugs to cancer tissues while limiting toxicity in normal tissues. In the case of mRNA, the lipid nanoparticles are designed to form a protective bubble around the mRNA and enable delivery to the interior of target cells. This technology is critical to the potency of mRNA vaccines.

The success of the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 suggest paths forward for similar vaccines for viral threats like influenza or HIV. Clinical trials are already underway to test mRNA vaccines to prevent infections caused by Zika virus, chikungunya and rabies infections.

‘Great research is a collective effort’
“It is an incredible honour to receive the Canada Gairdner International award,” says Dr. Cullis. “I am particularly honoured to receive it together with Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó, who have done so much to make mRNA therapeutics a reality.”

Dr. Cullis also thanked his colleagues Dr. Thomas Madden and Dr. Michael Hope. The groundwork for their lipid nanoparticle drug delivery technology was laid over 40 years ago, when Drs. Cullis, Madden and Hope, together with other UBC colleagues, began their work on developing delivery systems for small molecule drugs used for chemotherapy. In 2009, they went on to launch UBC spin-off company Acuitas Therapeutics, now a highly successful biotech company based at UBC.

“Great research is a collective effort,” says Dr. Cullis. “I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the efforts of literally hundreds of people have helped make the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines possible. To have been part of this story is truly unbelievable and is a great example of how basic research is so essential to achieve new medicines that change the world.”

New Coronavirus News from 3 Apr 2022

Robert Malone Spreads Falsehoods About Vaccines. He Also Says He Invented Some. [The New York Times, 3 Apr 2022]

By Davey Alba

The Latest Covid Misinformation Star Says He Invented the Vaccines

Dr. Robert Malone says he helped invent mRNA vaccines and has been wronged for decades.

Now he’s spreading unfounded claims about the vaccines and the virus.

MADISON, Va. — “I haven’t been able to ride a horse in months,” Dr. Robert Malone said from his 50-acre horse farm about two hours southwest of Washington. “It’s just a constant barrage of requests for assistance.”

Dr. Malone, 62, was sitting barefoot at his kitchen table, wearing a navy tie decorated with dark red spikes of the coronavirus, in the middle of another busy day of appearances on conservative television shows and podcasts. Just that week, he had appeared on “Hannity,” a hit on Fox News that averages over three million viewers, and on One America News. He joined “Candace,” an online talk show hosted by the right-wing media personality Candace Owens.

And he was a guest on the podcasts “America First With Sebastian Gorka” and “The Joe Pags Show.”

Dr. Malone spent decades working in academic centers and with start-ups seeking to bring new medical treatments to market and to combat the Zika and Ebola outbreaks. But in recent months, as the coronavirus pandemic has persisted, he has taken up an entirely different role: spreading misinformation about the virus and vaccines on conservative programs.

In many of his appearances, Dr. Malone questions the severity of the coronavirus, which has now killed nearly one million people in the United States, and the safety of the coronavirus vaccines, which have been widely found to be safe and effective at preventing serious illness and death. His statements in late December on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” one of the most popular podcasts in the country, with 11 million listeners per episode on average, were at the center of the uproar over Mr. Rogan’s role in spreading bad information about the virus.

Dr. Malone also routinely sells himself on the shows as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, the technology used by Pfizer and Moderna for their Covid-19 shots, and says he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for their development. While he was involved in some early research into the technology, his role in its creation was minimal at best, say half a dozen Covid experts and researchers, including three who worked closely with Dr. Malone.

In spreading these exaggerations and unfounded claims, Dr. Malone joins medical professionals and scientists, like Dr. Joseph Mercola and Dr. Judy Mikovits, whose profiles have grown during the pandemic as they spread misinformation about mask-wearing and convoluted conspiracy theories about virus experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But unlike many of them, Dr. Malone is quite new to the right-wing media world, first appearing regularly on podcasts last June. Even two years into the pandemic, new misinformation stars are being minted. And in today’s media echo chamber — powered by social media algorithms and a tightknit network of politicians and influencers promoting debunked claims — they can quickly catapult to stardom.

In addition to his regular appearances on conservative shows, Dr. Malone has more than 134,000 subscribers to his Substack newsletter. About 8,000 pay the $5 monthly cost, he said, which would amount to at least $31,200 in monthly revenue. And mentions of him on social media, on cable television and in print and online news outlets have soared — to more than 300,000 so far this year, according to Zignal, a media research firm.

The coronavirus pandemic has “given rise to a class of influencers who build conspiracy theories and recruit as many people into them as possible,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms. “These influencers usually have a special claim to expertise and a veneer of credibility.”

“And almost without exception, these influencers feel that they have been wronged by mainstream society in some way,” Mr. Brooking added.

Dr. Malone earned a medical degree from Northwestern University in 1991, and for the next decade taught pathology at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland.
He then turned to biotech start-ups and consulting. His résumé says he was “instrumental” in securing early-stage approval for research on the Ebola vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-2010s. He also worked on repurposing drugs to treat Zika.

In extended interviews at his home over two days, Dr. Malone said he was repeatedly not recognized for his contributions over the course of his career, his voice low and grave as he recounted perceived slights by the institutions he had worked for. His wife, Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone, paced the room and pulled up articles on her laptop that she said supported his complaints.

The example he points to more frequently is from his time at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego. While there, he performed experiments that showed how human cells could absorb an mRNA cocktail and produce proteins from it. Those experiments, he says, make him the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology.

“I was there,” Dr. Malone said. “I wrote all the invention.”

What the mainstream media did instead, he said, was give credit for the mRNA vaccines to the scientists Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, because there “is a concerted campaign to get them the Nobel Prize” by Pfizer and BioNTech, where Dr. Kariko is a senior vice president, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr. Weissman leads a laboratory researching vaccines and infectious diseases.

But at the time he was conducting those experiments, it was not known how to protect the fragile RNA from the immune system’s attack, scientists say. Former colleagues said they had watched in astonishment as Dr. Malone began posting on social media about why he deserved to win the Nobel Prize.

The idea that he is the inventor of mRNA vaccines is “a totally false claim,” said Dr. Gyula Acsadi, a pediatrician in Connecticut who along with Dr. Malone and five others wrote a widely cited paper in 1990 showing that injecting RNA into muscle could produce proteins. (The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by injecting RNA into arm muscles that produce copies of the “spike protein” found on the outside of the coronavirus. The human immune system identifies that protein, attacks it and then remembers how to defeat it.)

But Dr. Malone was not the lead author on the paper and, according to Dr. Acsadi, did not make a significant contribution to the research. While the paper stated that the technology could “provide alternative approaches to vaccine development,” Dr. Acsadi said none of the other authors would claim that they invented the vaccine.

“Some of his work was important,” said Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric infectious disease doctor based in Vancouver, British Columbia, “but that’s a long way away from claiming to have invented the technology that underpins the vaccines as we use them today.”

The vaccines “are the result of hundreds of scientists all over the world, all combining to come together to form this vaccine,” Dr. McAlpine said. “It was not one individual or the pioneering work of an individual person.”

A spokeswoman for Penn Medicine said, “We have been excited to witness the deployment of the vaccines in the global fight against the virus and the well-deserved global recognition for Drs. Kariko and Weissman’s decades of visionary basic science research.”

Dr. Malone pushes back against the criticism directed at him by scientists, researchers and journalists, and dismisses the dozens of fact-checks disputing his statements as “attacks.”

He also continues to repeat his claims, with the help of his wife, Dr. Glasspool Malone, who is trained in biotechnology and public policy. She writes, he said, more than half of the articles posted onto his Substack newsletter — which is awash in conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccines. Recent articles include “The illusion of evidence-based medicine” and “How does it feel to be vindicated?”

Dr. Malone said he did not align himself with any particular political party. But in recent months, he and his wife have made numerous stops at popular conservative conferences, like Hereticon, the Peter Thiel-backed conference in Miami for Silicon Valley’s self-proclaimed contrarians, and the “Defeat the Mandates” march in Washington.

Dr. Malone says much of the pushback he receives is because anything that questions the guidance from organizations like the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is automatically labeled misinformation by the medical establishment, as well as the technology platforms.

Many well-meaning public figures and donors committed themselves to the wrong ideas, just to be able to tell themselves that they are indeed playing a role helping to solve the crisis, he said.
“It is really easy to get caught up in it, and obsess, and lose perspective — and kind of lose yourself,” Dr. Malone said of them.

Many scientists and researchers say there is good-faith disagreement about how to translate fast-moving science into policy, and acknowledge that health agencies have adjusted guidelines over time, as new information is collected.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, said such guidance was “only as reliable as the evidence behind it, and thus it should change when new evidence is obtained.”

But they say Dr. Malone has twisted legitimate policy debates to use them as cover for continuing to spread misinformation and to advance claims about the pandemic that are demonstrably incorrect.

Months ago, he was promoting the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for treatment of Covid-19, despite several studies and scientific trials showing a lack of evidence that the drugs improved the conditions of Covid patients. Dr. Malone said that early on in the pandemic, he believed that what he could contribute was bringing repurposed drugs to market.

“All the big boys came in for the vaccines,” Dr. Malone said. “We weren’t needed for that.”

The Food and Drug Administration continues to caution against the use of hydroxychloroquine “due to risk of heart rhythm problems,” and a large study published in March found that ivermectin does not reduce the risk of Covid hospitalization. The F.D.A. has also said taking large doses of the drug is dangerous.

“Robert Malone is exploiting the fact that data-driven course correction is inherent to the scientific process to peddle disinformation,” Dr. Rasmussen said. “It’s extraordinarily dishonest and morally bankrupt.”