Tag Archives: task force

Biden convenes U.S. pandemic task force, implores Americans to wear masks

By Simon Lewis

WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Joe Biden implored Americans on Monday to wear protective masks to combat the coronavirus pandemic, appealing to their patriotism, as he convened a task force to devise a blueprint for tackling the public health crisis.

“We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives. American lives,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Delaware. “I implore you. Wear a mask. Do it for yourself. Do it for your neighbor. A mask is not a political statement.”

The pandemic has killed more than 237,000 Americans and thrown millions out of work. Biden spoke two days after clinching election victory over Donald Trump, though the Republican president has not acknowledged defeat and is pursuing legal challenges to the results while making unfounded claims of fraud.

Biden, set to take office on Jan. 20, conferred by video with his 13-member task force, headed by former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Yale University healthcare equity expert Marcella Nunez-Smith.

The president-elect labeled as “great news” Pfizer Inc’s announcement on Monday that its experimental COVID-19 vaccine was more than 90% effective. But Biden said it would be “many more months before there is widespread vaccination” in the United States and underscored the importance of wearing protective masks and social distancing.

The United States has been registering record high infection numbers in recent days. Mask wearing has become a political issue in the United States, with Trump mocking Biden for wearing a mask during the campaign and many conservatives contending masks infringe upon their individual freedom.

“The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible,” Biden said. “And masks are critical in doing that. It won’t be forever. But that’s how we’ll get our nation back up to speed economically, so we can go back to celebrating birthdays and holidays together, so we can attend sporting events together, so that we can get back to the lives and connections we shared before the pandemic.”

Biden during the campaign accused Trump of panicking and surrendering to the pandemic. Trump promoted unproven medicines, assailed public health experts, failed to signal empathy or compassion as the death toll mounted and disregarded advice on mask wearing and social distancing, ending up hospitalized in October receiving treatments for COVID-19.

Housing Secretary Ben Carson on Monday became the latest close Trump associate to test positive for the virus, his chief of staff said, just days after White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows also tested positive.

Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE are the first drugmakers to release successful data from a large-scale clinical trial of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.

Biden said his team will focus on making rapid COVID-19 testing widely available and building a corps of contact-tracers to track and curb the pathogen’s spread and prioritize vulnerable populations. Biden said his administration would work to get an approved vaccine “distributed as quickly as possible to as many Americans as possible, free of charge.”

The task force will liaise with local and state officials to consider how to safely reopen schools and businesses and tackle racial disparities.

The Biden panel includes Rick Bright, a whistleblower who says he was removed from his Trump administration post for raising concerns about coronavirus preparedness, and Luciana Borio, who specializes in complex public health emergencies.

Vice President Mike Pence is due to meet on Monday with the White House coronavirus task force for the first time since October.

Biden cleared the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency on Saturday, four days after the Nov. 3 election. He beat Trump by more than 4.3 million votes nationwide, with Trump becoming the first U.S. president since 1992 to lose a re-election bid.

TRUMP DOES NOT BUDGE

Trump has often attacked the integrity of the U.S. voting process without offering evidence. Some of his allies have encouraged him to exhaust every recourse for hanging onto power. He has filed an array of lawsuits to press his claims and plans rallies to build support for his election challenge, campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said.

Asked when Trump would concede or call Biden, Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller on Monday told Fox Business Network: “That word’s not even in our vocabulary now. We’re going to pursue all these legal means, all the recount methods.”

Trump has been talking with his advisers about the possibility of running for president in 2024, a source familiar with the discussions said.

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien held an all-staff meeting at campaign headquarters on Monday to give the message that Trump is “still in this fight,” a source familiar with the meeting said. The source said the meeting was aimed at bolstering morale given that the last paycheck everyone is to receive is on Nov. 15.

Governments from around the world have congratulated Biden since Saturday, signaling they are turning the page.

Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies have said interfered in the 2016 election to support Trump and then sought to disparage Biden in this year’s race, said on Monday it would wait for the official results before commenting, noting Trump’s legal challenges. China was similarly cautious.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan and Andrea Shalal in Washington and Simon Lewis and Trevor Hunnicutt in Wilmington, Delaware; Additional reporting by Jason Lange, Susan Heavey, Doina Chiacu, Makini Brice, Alexandra Alper and Steve Holland in Washington and Costas Pitas in London; Writing by Will Dunham and Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone, Catherine Evans and Grant McCool)

New U.S. COVID-19 cases up 34% last week, set fresh records

By Michael Erman and Julie Steenhuysen

(Reuters) – Pfizer Inc’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine is more than 90% effective based on initial trial results, the drugmaker said on Monday, a major victory in the war against a virus that has killed over a million people and battered the world’s economy.

Experts welcomed the first successful interim data from a large-scale clinical test as a watershed moment that showed vaccines could help halt the pandemic, although mass roll-outs, which needs regulatory approval, will not happen this year.

Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE said they had found no serious safety concerns yet and expected to seek U.S. authorization this month for emergency use of the vaccine, raising the chance of a regulatory decision as soon as December.

If granted, the companies estimate they can roll out up to 50 million doses this year, enough to protect 25 million people, and then produce up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

“Today is a great day for science and humanity,” said Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla.

“We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen,” he said.

Experts said they still wanted to see the full trial data, which have yet to be peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, but the preliminary results looked encouraging.

“This news made me smile from ear to ear. It is a relief to see such positive results on this vaccine and bodes well for COVID-19 vaccines in general,” said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford.

There are still many questions, such as how effective the vaccine is by ethnicity or age, and how long it will provide immunity, with the “new normal” of social distancing and face covering set to remain for the foreseeable future.

Pfizer expects to seek U.S. emergency use authorization for people aged 16 to 85. To do so, it will need two months of safety data from about half the study’s 44,000 participants, which is expected in the third week of November.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said it would take several weeks for U.S. regulators to receive and process data on the vaccine before the government could potentially approve it.

MARKETS SURGE

The prospect of a vaccine electrified world markets with the S&P 500 and Dow hitting record highs as shares of banks, oil companies and travel companies soared. Shares in companies that have thrived during lockdowns, such as conferencing platform Zoom Video and online retailers, tumbled.

Pfizer shares jumped more than 11% to their highest since July last year, while BioNTech’s stock hit a record high.

Shares of other vaccine developers in the final stage of testing also rose with Johnson & Johnson up 4% and Moderna Inc, whose vaccine uses a similar technology as the Pfizer shot, up 8%. Britain’s AstraZeneca, however, fell 2%. Moderna is expected to report results from its large-scale trial later this month.

“The efficacy data are really impressive. This is better than most of us anticipated,” said William Schaffner, infectious diseases expert at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee. “The study isn’t completed yet, but nonetheless the data look very solid.”

U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed the test results, and the market boost: “STOCK MARKET UP BIG, VACCINE COMING SOON. REPORT 90% EFFECTIVE. SUCH GREAT NEWS!” he tweeted.

President-elect Joe Biden said the news was excellent but did not change the fact that face masks, social distancing and other health measures would be needed well into next year.

The World Health Organization said the results were very positive, but warned there was a funding gap of $4.5 billion that could slow access to tests, medicines and vaccines in low- and middle-income countries.

‘NEAR ECSTATIC’

“I’m near ecstatic,” Bill Gruber, one of Pfizer’s top vaccine scientists, said in an interview. “This is a great day for public health and for the potential to get us all out of the circumstances we’re now in.”

Between 55% and 65% of the population will need to be vaccinated to break the dynamic of the spread of COVID-19, said Germany’s health minister Jens Spahn, adding that he did not expect a shot to be available before the first quarter of 2021.

The European Union said on Monday it would soon sign a contract for up to 300 million doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The companies have a $1.95 billion contract with the U.S. government to deliver 100 million vaccine doses beginning this year. They did not receive research funding from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program.

The drugmakers have also reached supply agreements with the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.

Pfizer said the interim analysis, conducted after 94 participants in the trial developed COVID-19, examined how many had received the vaccine versus a placebo.

Pfizer did not break down how many of those who fell ill received the vaccine. Still, over 90% effectiveness implies that no more than 8 of the 94 had been given the vaccine, which was administered in two shots about three weeks apart.

The efficacy rate, which could drop once full results are available, is well above the 50% effectiveness required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for a coronavirus vaccine.

Shortly after Pfizer’s announcement, Russia said its Sputnik V vaccine was also more than 90% effective, based on data collated from inoculations of the public. Its preliminary Phase III trial data is due to be published this month.

MORE DATA NEEDED

To confirm the efficacy rate, Pfizer said it would continue its trial until there were 164 COVID-19 cases among volunteers. Bourla told CNBC on Monday that based on rising infection rates, the trial could be completed before the end of November.

Pfizer said its data would be peer reviewed once it has results from the entire trial.

“These are interesting first signals, but again they are only communicated in press releases,” said Marylyn Addo, head of tropical medicine at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany.

Dozens of drugmakers and research groups around the globe have been racing to develop vaccines against COVID-19, which on Sunday exceeded 50 million cases since the new coronavirus first emerged late last year in China.

The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, which relies on synthetic genes that can be generated and manufactured in weeks, and produced at scale more rapidly than conventional vaccines. The technology is designed to trigger an immune response without using pathogens, such as actual virus particles.

The Trump administration has said it will have enough vaccine doses for all of the 330 million U.S. residents who want it by the middle of 2021.

(Reporting by Michael Erman and Julie Steenhuysen; Additional reporting by Michele Gershberg in New York, Ludwig Burger and Patricia Weiss in Frankfurt and Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Bill Berkrot, Caroline Humer, Edwina Gibbs and David Clarke)