Tag Archives: COVID-19 vaccine

WHO lists AstraZeneca/Oxford COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday listed AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, widening access to the relatively inexpensive shot in the developing world.

A WHO statement said it had approved the vaccine as produced by AstraZeneca-SKBio (Republic of Korea) and the Serum Institute of India.

“We now have all the pieces in place for the rapid distribution of vaccines. But we still need to scale up production,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.

The listing by the UN health agency comes days after a WHO panel provided interim recommendations on the vaccine, saying two doses with an interval of around 8 to 12 weeks must be given to all adults, and can be used in countries with the South African variant of the coronavirus as well.

The AstraZeneca/Oxford shot has been hailed because it is cheaper and easier to distribute than some rivals, including Pfizer/BioNTech’s, which was listed for emergency use by the WHO late in December.

Nearly 109 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and more than 2.5 million have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first cases were identified in China in December 2019.

(Reporting by John Revill, John Miller, Michael Shields in Zurich, Kate Kelland in London, Editing by William Maclean)

62.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines delivered, 43.2 million administered: U.S. CDC

Reuters) – The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had administered 43,206,190 doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the country as of Tuesday morning and delivered 62,898,775 doses.

The tally of vaccine doses are for both Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, the agency said.

The agency said 32,867,213 people had received 1 or more doses while 9,840,429 people have got the second dose as of Tuesday.

A total of 5,015,224 vaccine doses have been administered in long-term care facilities, the agency said.

(Reporting by Vishwadha Chander in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni)

Fauci says vaccinate quickly to fight COVID-19 variants

(Reuters) – The best defense against the evolution of COVID-19 and the emergence of variant strains is getting as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible, top U.S. infectious disease doctor Anthony Fauci said on a Monday media briefing.

Fauci said while it was reasonable to think about studying the efficacy of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccine as a one-dose regimen in light of supply vaccine constraints, such a study would take months to complete, thus likely making its conclusions moot. Fauci continued to encourage people get two doses of the vaccine.

(Reporting by Carl O’Donnell, Editing by Franklin Paul)

White House says it is working to speed early production of J&J COVID-19 vaccine

By Dania Nadeem, Rebecca Spalding and Julie Steenhuysen

(Reuters) – The Biden administration is exploring every option for increasing manufacturing of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, which is under regulatory review, and said on Friday that currently expected levels of early doses were less than hoped.

The White House has invoked the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer Inc ramp up COVID-19 vaccine production and that “every option” was on the table to produce more Johnson & Johnson vaccine should it be authorized.

It will also use the wartime powers to increase at-home COVID-19 tests, and make more surgical gloves in the United States, officials said at a Friday media briefing.

“As is the case with other vaccines, we have not found that the level of manufacturing allows us to have as much vaccine as we think we need coming out of the gate,” said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the White House’s COVID-19 response team, referring to the J&J vaccine.

J&J applied on Thursday for U.S. emergency use authorization. It expects to have some vaccine ready for distribution as soon as authorized but has not said how much.

Emergent Biosolutions’ Chief Executive Robert Kramer said in an interview on Friday that the company currently is making bulk drug substance for J&J “at large scale.” Emergent is only producing bulk vaccine, which is then filled into syringes or vials and packaged for shipment by another contractor.

Kramer said they were on track to make enough product for hundreds of millions of doses a year. It remains unclear what other supply bottlenecks may be. Kramer said his company had already benefited from the Defense Production Act under the Trump Administration, which helped the company get to the point where it’s ready to go.

Under the authority of the Defense Production Act, the government will give priority ratings to two components important to Pfizer’s vaccine production – filling pumps and tangential flow filtration units, the officials said.

“We told you that when we heard of a bottleneck on needed equipment, supplies, or technology related to vaccine supply that we would step in and help, and we were doing just that,” said Tim Manning, the supply chain coordinator for the national COVID-19 response.

The government will also invoke its powers under the Defense Production Act to increase at-home COVID-19 tests with six, unnamed manufacturers, aiming to produce 61 million tests by the summer, Manning said.

It will also invoke its powers to increase the nation’s supply of surgical gloves, which are made almost exclusively overseas.

Manning said the government will build factories that make the raw materials for surgical gloves and help build plants in the United States to make the gloves.

By the end of the year, he said, the United States would be able to produce a billion gloves a month.

Officials have said that once J&J’s vaccine is authorized, it would mean that millions more doses would be available to states. The vaccine is one-shot, as opposed to Pfizer’s and Moderna Inc’s two-dose vaccines, and can be stored in a refrigerator.

Officials have hoped that the ease of giving the J&J vaccine will mean that states will be able to more quickly immunize residents.

(Reporting by Dania Nadeem, Rebecca Spalding and Julie Steenhuysen, Editing by Peter Henderson, Steve Orlofsky and David Gregorio)

J&J adds to COVID-19 vaccine armory with 66% efficacy in global trial

By Julie Steenhuysen

(Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson said on Friday that its single-dose vaccine was 66% effective in preventing COVID-19 in a large global trial against multiple variants which will give health officials another weapon to tackle the coronavirus.

In the trial of nearly 44,000 volunteers, the level of protection against moderate and severe COVID-19 varied from 72% in the United States, to 66% in Latin America and just 57% in South Africa, from where a worrying variant has spread.

A high bar has been set by two authorized vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, which were around 95% effective in preventing symptomatic illness in pivotal trials when given in two doses.

Those trials, however, were conducted mainly in the United States and before new variants emerged.

The top U.S. infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci said the variations in effectiveness around the world underlined the need to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible to prevent new variants from emerging.

“It’s really a wake up call for us to be nimble and to be able to adjust as this virus will continue for certain to evolve,” Fauci said.

J&J’s main goal was the prevention of moderate to severe COVID-19, and the vaccine was 85% effective in stopping severe disease and preventing hospitalization across all geographies and against multiple variants 28 days after immunization.

That “will potentially protect hundreds of millions of people from serious and fatal outcomes of COVID-19,” Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer, said of the results, which were based on 468 symptomatic cases.

SEEKING APPROVAL

J&J plans to seek emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration next week. It has said it plans to deliver 1 billion doses in 2021 and will produce the vaccine in the United States, Europe, South Africa and India.

Public health officials are counting on the J&J vaccine to increase much-needed supply and simplify immunization in the United States, which has a deal to buy 100 million doses of J&J’s vaccine and an option for an additional 200 million.

J&J said the vaccine would be ready immediately upon emergency approval, but Stoffels declined to say how many doses.

“Right now, any protection and additional vaccine is great. The key is not only overall efficacy but specifically efficacy against severe disease, hospitalization, and death,” Walid Gellad, a health policy associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said.

Michael Breen, Director of Infectious Diseases and Ophthalmology at research firm GlobalData said “Most countries are still desperate to get their hands on doses, regardless of whether or not the vaccine is considered highly effective. Moderately effective will do just fine for now.”

None of the vaccine recipients in the J&J trial died from COVID-19, compared with 5 in the placebo group, the National Institutes of Health said. Three deaths in the vaccine group overall, but none were determined to be from the virus. That compares with 16 deaths overall in the placebo arm, it added.

Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, J&J’s does not require a second shot weeks after the first or need to be kept frozen, making it a strong candidate for use in parts of the world where transportation and cold storage are an issue.

SOUTH AFRICAN VARIANT

Several studies have emerged this month showing that a South African variant has mutated in areas of the virus that are key targets of vaccines, reducing their efficacy.

“What we are learning is there is different efficacy in different parts of the world,” Stoffels told Reuters.

In a sub-study of 6,000 volunteers in South Africa, Stoffels said, the J&J vaccine was 89% effective at preventing severe disease. In the South Africa portion of the trial, 95% of cases were infections with the South African variant.

“I am overwhelmed by the fact that this vaccine protected against severe disease even in South Africa,” said Glenda Gray, the joint lead investigator of the South African vaccine trial.

Gray, who is the chief executive of the South African Medical Research Council, said this is by far the best vaccine for South Africa to fight the mutant strain and can prevent a large number of hospitalizations and deaths.

A mid-stage trial of a Novovax coronavirus vaccine in South Africa also showed lower efficacy, proving to be 60% effective among volunteers who didn’t have HIV. In a separate, late-stage trial in Britain it was 89.3% effective.

In the J&J trial, which was conducted in eight countries, 44% of participants were from the United States, 41% from Central and South America and 15% from South Africa. Slightly more than a third of the volunteers were over 60.

J&J’s vaccine uses a common cold virus to introduce coronavirus proteins into cells in the body and trigger an immune response, whereas the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines use a new technology called messenger RNA (mRNA).

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Manas Mishra, Dania Nadeem and Manojna Maddipatla in Bengalaru and Rebecca Spalding and Michael Erman in New York; Writing by Alexander Smith; Editing by Caroline Humer, Peter Henderson, Edwina Gibbs and Keith Weir)

EU warns it could block vaccine exports, wields legal threat at drugmakers

By John Chalmers and Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Europe’s fight to secure COVID-19 vaccine supplies intensified on Thursday when the European Union warned drug companies such as AstraZeneca that it would use all legal means or even block exports unless they agreed to deliver shots as promised.

The EU, whose member states are far behind Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States in rolling out vaccines, is scrambling to get supplies just as the West’s biggest drugmakers slow deliveries to the bloc due to production problems.

As vaccination centers in Germany, France and Spain cancelled or delayed appointments, the EU publicly rebuked Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca for failing to deliver and even asked if it could divert supplies from Britain.

European Council President Charles Michel said in a letter to four EU leaders that the EU should explore legal means to ensure supplies of COVID-19 vaccines it contracted to buy if negotiations with companies over delayed deliveries are unsuccessful.

“If no satisfactory solution can be found, I believe we should explore all options and make use of all legal means and enforcement measures at our disposal under the Treaties,” Michel said in the Jan. 27 letter.

EU rules on monitoring and authorizing exports of COVID-19 vaccines in the 27-nation bloc could lead to exports being blocked if they violated existing contracts between the vaccine maker and the EU, an EU official said.

The European Commission is to lay out the criteria under which such exports would be evaluated on Friday.

VACCINE CRUNCH

The swiftest mass vaccination drive in history is stoking tensions across the world as big powers buy up doses in bulk and poorer nations try to navigate a financial and diplomatic minefield to collect whatever supplies are left.

Israel is by far the world leader on vaccine rollout per head of population, followed by the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Bahrain and the United States. Behind them are Italy, Germany, France, China and Russia.

The African Union (AU) has secured another 400 million doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, a regional health leader said on Thursday, in a push to immunize 60% of the continent’s population over three years.

Under fire from the EU, AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot said the EU was late to strike a supply contract so the company did not have enough time to iron out production problems at a vaccine factory run by a partner in Belgium.

Tensions have risen as both New York-based Pfizer and AstraZeneca, headquartered in Cambridge, England, have had production problems.

Britain, which has repeatedly touted its lead in the vaccine rollout race since leaving the EU’s orbit on Jan. 1, said its deliveries must be honored.

“I think we need to make sure that the vaccine supply that has been bought and paid for, procured for those in the UK, is delivered,” Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove told LBC Radio.

Just a day ahead of a decision by European regulators on whether to approve the drugmaker’s shot, Germany’s vaccine committee said AstraZeneca’s vaccine should only be given to people aged between 18 and 64.

“There are currently insufficient data available to assess the vaccine efficacy from 65 years of age,” the committee, also known as Stiko, said in a draft resolution made available by the health ministry on Thursday.

Britain’s Johnson said health authorities in Britain believed the vaccine was safe and worked across all age groups.

APPOINTMENTS CANCELLED

In the northern French region of Hauts-de-France, France’s second-most-densely-populated region, several vaccination centers were no longer taking appointments for a first jab. In several other French regions, some online appointment platforms closed booking options.

Spain’s Madrid region has ceased first vaccinations for at least this week and next and was using the few doses it has to administer second shots to those who have had the first one, said deputy regional government chief Ignacio Aguado.

Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, last week postponed opening its vaccination centers until Feb. 8, while the state of Brandenburg has also had to push back vaccination appointments originally scheduled for the end of January due to delivery delays.

AstraZeneca is prepared to publish the delivery contract it has with the European Union and aims on Friday to make proposals to the European Commission on which sensitive parts to black out, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported.

The newspaper quoted an EU source as saying that while AstraZeneca would not be able to deliver the 80 million doses expected for the first quarter, volumes should significantly exceed the 31 million doses that had earlier been reported.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson and Paul Carrel in Berlin and Matthias Blamont in Paris and Kate Holton, Paul Sandle and Alistair Smout in London; writing by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Keith Weir and Nick Macfie)

Madrid halting COVID-19 vaccinations due to supply delays

MADRID (Reuters) – Delays to COVID-19 vaccine shipments have forced authorities in Madrid to halt inoculations and are threatening supplies in Catalonia, Spanish officials said on Wednesday.

The Madrid region has ceased first vaccinations for at least this week and next and was using the few doses it has to administer second shots to those who have had the first one, said deputy regional government chief Ignacio Aguado.

“We need more doses and we need them now,” he told reporters on Wednesday, urging newly appointed Health Minister Carolina Darias to act quickly to secure the shots.

U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer said last week there would be a temporary slow down in shipments to the European Union in late January caused by changes to manufacturing processes to ultimately boost output.

The announcement angered some EU governments and the executive European Commission due to the slow pace of vaccine roll outs in the 27-nation bloc.

It is also in dispute with Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca, which developed its shot with Oxford University and notified the EU on Friday that it could not meet supply targets for the first quarter of the year.

Spain’s 14-day incidence of the virus hit a record 900 cases per 100,000 people on Wednesday and the Health Ministry reported 40,285 new infections and 492 deaths.

Officials in Madrid and Catalonia said at the current pace it would be impossible to reach the national target of 70% of Spain’s 47 million population vaccinated by July.

Catalan health secretary Josep Maria Argimon said the region would use up all its stockpile of vaccines in the coming days and will have to administer second shots later than planned due to supply delays, citing an undelivered shipment of the Moderna vaccine scheduled for this week as one example.

The affluent northeastern region will issue a new request for 30,000 vaccine doses that it expects to administer starting on Feb. 4, Argimon told a news briefing.

Spain has administered just over 1.3 million doses to a priority group of care-home residents and frontline medics, around 77% of its current stocks.

(Reporting by Inti Landauro, Emma Pinedo, Nathan Allen and Joan Faus; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Janet Lawrence)

UK AstraZeneca vaccine plant partially evacuated over suspect package

LONDON (Reuters) – A factory in Wales that produces AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine was partially evacuated on Wednesday after it received a suspicious package and police said a bomb disposal unit was dealing with the incident.

Operated by Wockhardt UK, the plant provides so-called fill-and-finish capacity for AstraZeneca’s UK supply chain, which is the final manufacturing step of putting vaccines into vials or syringes and packaging them.

AstraZeneca has agreed to supply Britain with 100 million doses of the vaccine, developed by Oxford University.

It is currently engaged in a dispute with the European Union after it cut supplies to the bloc due to production issues at its Belgian factory.

“Wockhardt UK in Wrexham this morning received a suspicious package to site. All relevant authorities were immediately notified and engaged,” the company said, referring to its facility outside the town of Wrexham in north Wales.

“Upon expert advice we have partially evacuated the site pending a full investigation. The safety of our employees and business continuity remain of paramount importance,” it said.

Local police confirmed that a bomb disposal unit was on site and advised the public to avoid the area.

“We are currently dealing with an ongoing incident on the Wrexham Industrial Estate,” they said in a statement.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout, Michael Holden and Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Estelle Shirbon and David Clarke)

American teachers grapple with patchy COVID-19 vaccine rollout

By Maria Caspani and Brendan O’Brien

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For New York City high school teacher Rebecca Crawford, receiving the coronavirus vaccine meant taking the first concrete step towards seeing her students in person again, after an uncertain year that she spent mostly teaching online.

On Wednesday afternoon, Crawford, 39, was administered the first dose of a two-shot COVID-19 vaccine at Kings County Hospital in the borough of Brooklyn, days after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo opened up inoculations for teachers.

“For so long,” Crawford told Reuters shortly after being vaccinated, “there’s nothing that felt concrete that I could do to get to see my students.”

Crawford is one of the lucky ones. Across the country, many teachers, including those in neighboring New Jersey, are still not eligible to receive the vaccine. The lack of a federal blueprint for mass inoculation has left individual states to decide who gets the shots and when.

It is yet another example of the unevenness that has long characterized the national effort to tackle the pandemic. Many of the 50 million public students in the United States are still taking their classes online, almost a year after the virus shut down schools nationwide.

While teachers in some states wait to be vaccinated, some of them say they are being pressured to return to the classroom during a surge in COVID-19 infections. In Chicago, where teachers are not getting vaccinated yet, the powerful teachers union is pushing back against the district requiring teachers to return to classrooms as it gradually reopens school buildings.

“Teachers may get their vaccines, but our family members may not be getting them as early as we will. That is why we need a safe reopening plan,” Chicago kindergarten teacher Nicole Flores, 28, said.

In one New Jersey district, educators holding signs that read “First vaccinate then return” staged a walkout on Wednesday, the first day of in-person instruction there, saying they are concerned that the reopening was premature and dangerous.

“We cannot help but feel that we are entering into a situation of very real danger, to ourselves and colleagues, and to our students and their families,” Rocio Lopez, the president of the South Orange-Maplewood Education Association said in a statement.

Lopez said she would urge local health authorities to postpone in-person education until vaccines are “amply available.”

CLASSROOM CONCERNS

In New York, some teachers who are grateful to be getting vaccinated are also concerned that inoculations alone won’t make classrooms safe again.

“I cried when I made the appointment,” said Sari Rosenberg, a New York high school teacher who is scheduled to receive the vaccine next week, describing her anticipation.

At the same time, Rosenberg said, she feared classrooms would remain a fertile breeding ground for COVID-19 as her teenaged students were not yet eligible for the vaccine and could take the virus home to their families and vulnerable members of their communities.

In-person education has resumed for some in New York City public schools and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said this week he was eager to get more children back in the classroom.

Scientists say more data is needed before we can know whether individuals who have been vaccinated can still spread the virus. Health officials have urged the public to stick with mitigation measures such mask-wearing and social distancing, at least for a few months.

Regardless of access, some educators – like many members of the public – are hesitant about getting inoculated, expressing concerns about the vaccine’s safety.

“The vaccination was put together a little too quickly for me,” said Rochell Wallace-Haley, a 37-year-old Milwaukee seventh-grade special education teacher who does not plan to get inoculated. “I believe that it is still in the experimental stage right now and I don’t want to be part of that experiment.”

Milwaukee schools are currently offering remote learning only. In the next month, the district’s school board is expected to decide whether to send students back to classrooms. Teachers in the Wisconsin city could begin getting vaccinated within weeks.

Even though Wallace-Haley is not willing to get vaccinated, she is still eager to get back into the classroom.

“I would be willing to put on a gas mask and wear a suit because I’m not working for a paycheck, I’m working because it is my passion,” she said.

(Reporting by Maria Caspani in New York and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

U.S. tops 10 million COVID vaccinations as California expands eligibility for shots

By Peter Szekely and Dan Whitcomb

(Reuters) – More than 10 million Americans had received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Wednesday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as the year-old pandemic roared on unchecked.

The United States reached 10.2 million inoculations one day after the CDC and Trump administration gave new guidance to U.S. states on who should receive the shots first. Strict rules putting healthcare workers first in line had slowed the rollout. Now states are urged to vaccinate anyone over 65 as well.

California moved on Wednesday to do just that, designating all individuals 65 and older eligible to begin receiving vaccines, adding 6.6 million people to the rolls of those qualified to be immunized, Governor Gavin Newsom said.

The move bumps senior citizens, regardless of whether they have underlying medical conditions, to the top of the priority list for vaccine recipients, just behind front-line healthcare workers and residents and staff of nursing homes.

California, like many states, has struggled to use up as much vaccine as it received in initial allotments from the federal government, administering only about a third of the nearly 2.5 million doses shipped to the state as of Monday.

Newsom has set a goal of inoculating 1 million more Californians by the end of this week with the first shot of the two-dose vaccine.

He also said the state would launch a new system next week for notifying people when they become eligible for the vaccine, and to register for notification by email or text.

The latest push to spur the most ambitious mass immunization campaign in U.S. history came as the nation set a new record for coronavirus deaths in one day, with 4,336 fatalities on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Tuesday said the administration was releasing its full stockpile of two vaccines approved for emergency use, including some that had been held in reserve to make sure that second doses could be given on schedule.

Nearly 30 million doses of the vaccines, manufactured by Moderna and Pfizer with its German partner BioNTech, have been released to U.S. states, which have used only about one-third of them.

Johnson & Johnson said on Wednesday that the pharmaceutical company was on track to roll out its single-shot vaccine in March.

In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Dr. Paul Stoffels also said J&J expected to meet its stated target of delivering 1 billion doses of its vaccine by the end of this year as the company ramps up production.

Political leaders and health officials nationwide have scrambled in recent days to push out more vaccines to their residents, many lowering the age requirement to 65. California and New York have both pledged to inoculate one million residents this month.

NEW YORK SEEKS MORE VACCINE

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said on Wednesday that short supplies of the vaccine could hamper efforts to reach the city’s inoculation goals.

“We need the federal government, the state government and the manufacturers to step up and get us more supply immediately,” de Blasio told a news conference.

The nation’s most populous city is adding vaccination sites across its five boroughs, including its two Major League Baseball stadiums.

“I confirmed with our healthcare team yesterday that even with normal supplies that we expect to have delivered next week, we will run out of vaccine at some point next week, unless we get a major new resupply,” de Blasio said.

Public health officials say so far no U.S. state has used up its supply of the vaccines.

At the Javits Center in Manhattan, which was pressed into service as a temporary hospital in April, health officials said they were prepared to vaccinate 10,000 people in 12 hours, with the ability to ramp up to 25,000 in a 24-hour period.

New York has recorded nearly 40,000 coronavirus fatalities since the pandemic broke out there in March, more than any other U.S. state.

Nationwide more than 380,000 people have died of COVID-19. A total of 22.7 million have been infected during that time.

The number of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization may have leveled off at least temporarily, according to a Reuters tally, although public health officials warned that further spread may still be seen from holiday gatherings.

California, the nation’s most populous state, has seen new hospitalizations drop this week, according to health officials. More than 30,000 Californians have so far died of COVID-19 related illness.

The recent emergence of a more infectious variant of the virus first seen in the United Kingdom has made efforts to accelerate vaccinations all the more important. The so-called UK variant has so far been confirmed in at least 10 U.S. states.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely and Andrew Hofstetter in New York, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Alistair Bell and Catherine Evans)