Tag Archives: Vaccine

Coronavirus claims 1.5 million lives globally with 10,000 dying each day

By Shaina Ahluwalia and Sangameswaran S

(Reuters) – Over 1.5 million people have lost their lives due to COVID-19 with one death reported every nine seconds on a weekly average, as vaccinations are set to begin in December in a handful of developed nations.

Half a million deaths occurred in just the last two months, indicating that the severity of the pandemic is far from over. Nearly 65 million people globally have been infected by the disease and the worst affected country, United States, is currently battling a third wave of coronavirus infections.

In the last week alone, more than 10,000 people in the world died on average every single day, which has been steadily rising each passing week. Many countries across the world are now fighting second and third waves even greater than the first, forcing new restrictions on everyday life.

The novel coronavirus caused more deaths in the past year than tuberculosis in 2019 and nearly four times the number of deaths due to malaria, according to the World Health Organization.

Robert Redfield, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned on Wednesday that the pandemic will pose the country’s grimmest health crisis yet over the next few months, before vaccines become widely available.

“I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation,” Redfield told a livestream presentation hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

The United States continues to lead in terms of fatalities, with over 273,000 deaths alone. North America and Latin American regions combined have more than 50% of all coronavirus deaths that have been reported.

The Latin American region, the worst-affected globally in terms of fatalities, recently surpassed over 450,000 deaths.

VACCINE HOPES

On Wednesday, Britain became the first country to approve the vaccine candidate developed by Germany’s BioNTech and Pfizer Inc, jumping ahead of the rest of the world in the race to begin a crucial mass inoculation program.

However, supplies are expected to be very limited in the early stages which means that every country beginning the drive will have to prioritize based on risk factors.

U.S. health regulators are expected to approve distribution and administration of the vaccine in mid-December.

Africa aims to have 60% of its population vaccinated against COVID-19 within the next two to three years, the African Union’s disease control group said on Thursday. The continent of 1.3 billion people has recorded more than 2.2 million confirmed coronavirus infections, according to a Reuters tally.

(Reporting by Shaina Ahluwalia and Sangameswaran S in Bengaluru; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Hackers targeting groups involved in COVID-19 vaccine distribution, IBM warns

By Raphael Satter

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – IBM is sounding the alarm over hackers targeting companies critical to the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, a sign that digital spies are turning their attention to the complex logistical work involved in inoculating the world’s population against the novel coronavirus.

The information technology company said in a blog post published on Thursday that it had uncovered “a global phishing campaign” focused on organizations associated with the COVID-19 vaccine “cold chain” – the process needed to keep vaccine doses at extremely cold temperatures as they travel from manufacturers to people’s arms.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency reposted the report, warning members of Operation Warp Speed – the U.S. government’s national vaccine mission – to be on the lookout.

Understanding how to build a secure cold chain is fundamental to distributing vaccines developed by the likes of Pfizer Inc and BioNTech because the shots need to be stored at minus 70 degrees Celsius (-94 F) or below to avoid spoiling.

IBM’s cybersecurity unit said it had detected an advanced group of hackers working to gather information about different aspects of the cold chain, using meticulously crafted booby-trapped emails sent in the name of an executive with Haier Biomedical, a Chinese cold chain provider that specializes in vaccine transport and biological sample storage.

The hackers went through “an exceptional amount of effort,” said IBM analyst Claire Zaboeva, who helped draft the report. Hackers researched the correct make, model, and pricing of various Haier refrigeration units, Zaboeva said.

“Whoever put together this campaign was intimately aware of whatever products were involved in the supply chain to deliver a vaccine for a global pandemic,” she said.

Messages sent to the email addresses used by the hackers were not returned.

IBM said the bogus Haier emails were sent to around 10 different organizations but only identified one target by name: the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union, which handles tax and customs issues across the EU and has helped set rules on the import of vaccines.

In a statement, the European Commission said it was aware that it had been targeted by a hacking campaign.

“We have taken the necessary steps to mitigate the attack and are closely following and analyzing the situation,” the statement said.

IBM said other targets included companies involved in the manufacture of solar panels, which are used to power vaccine refrigerators in warm countries, and petrochemical products that could be used to derive dry ice.

Who is behind the vaccine supply chain espionage campaign is not clear.

Reuters has previously documented how hackers linked to Iran, Vietnam, North Korea, South Korea, China, and Russia have on separate occasions been accused by cybersecurity experts or government officials of trying to steal information about the virus and its potential treatments.

IBM’s Zaboeva said there was no shortage of potential suspects. Figuring out how to swiftly distribute an economy-saving vaccine “should be topping the lists of nation states across the world,” she said.

(Reporting by Raphael Satter; editing by Grant McCool and Rosalba O’Brien)

4.2 million COVID-19 cases in November

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States entered the final month of the year hoping that promising vaccine candidates will soon be approved to halt the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus after 4.2 million new cases were reported in November.

The new COVID-19 cases were more than double the previous monthly record set in October, as large numbers of Americans still refuse to refuse to wear masks and continue to gather in holiday crowds, against the recommendation of experts.

A Food and Drug Administration panel of outside advisers will meet on Dec. 10 to discuss whether to recommend the FDA authorize emergency use of a vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc.

A second candidate from Moderna Inc could follow a week later, officials have said, raising hopes that Americans could start receiving inoculations before the end the year, although widespread vaccinations could take months.

Other global pharmaceuticals including AstraZeneca PLC and Johnson & Johnson also have vaccines in the works, leading a member of the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” program to predict the country could be vaccinated by June.

“One hundred percent of the Americans that want the vaccine will have the vaccine by (June). We will have over 300 million doses available to the American public well before then,” Paul Ostrowski, the vaccine program’s director of supply, production and distribution, told MSNBC television on Monday.

In the meantime, leading health officials are pleading with Americans to follow their recommendations and help arrest a pandemic that killed more than 36,000 people in November, pushing hospitalizations to a record high of nearly 93,000 on Sunday, according to a Reuters tally.

The widespread impact of the pandemic has led Merriam-Webster to choose “pandemic” as the Word of the Year after it racked up the most online dictionary lookups of any word.

“Sometimes a single word defines an era, and it’s fitting that in this exceptional – and exceptionally difficult – year, a single word came immediately to the fore,” the dictionary publisher said.

In the absence of a federal blueprint to curb the spread of the virus, states are issuing new or revamped restrictions on businesses and social life.

California’s governor said he may renew a stay-at-home order in the coming days, warning that ICU admissions are on track to exceed statewide capacity by mid-December unless public health policies and social behavior change.

“The red flags are flying,” Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters in an online briefing. “If these trends continue, we’re going to have to take much more dramatic, arguably drastic, action.”

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Writing by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

Caribbean resorts get starring role in U.S airlines’ COVID-19 holiday playbook

By Tracy Rucinski

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. airlines are adding flights, and in some cases COVID-19 testing programs, for travel to Mexico and the Caribbean, a region central to carriers’ strategies to tap into pockets of holiday demand before a vaccine makes its way around the world.

Beachside resort destinations in areas like Cancun are the only spots that now have more flights from U.S. cities scheduled for November and December than last year, numbers from aviation data firm Cirium show.

Overall, U.S. airlines are flying about 50% less than 2019, with flights to traditional European vacation hotspots like Paris down by as much as 82% due to travel bans and quarantines.

While new revenue streams from destinations like the Caribbean will help, they won’t be enough to put airlines in the black for the year, analysts have said.

The holiday period is traditionally when airlines thrive ahead of slow months in January and February. But this year they have said they will continue to burn millions of dollars daily through the fourth quarter as they wrestle with slashed demand.

Ahead of Thanksgiving, U.S. airports saw their busiest weekend since mid-March, even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urged Americans not to travel amid a spike in COVID-19 cases. Still, demand is down by around 60% and airlines say it’s too soon to know how Christmas travel will play out.

Still, airlines are hoping to build up a base of customers who feel comfortable about flying before a COVID-19 vaccine becomes widely available, eyeing the typically lucrative summer travel season.

More studies, including from the Harvard School of Public Health and the U.S. Department of Defense, have said the risk of COVID-19 transmission in flight is low if people wear masks.

Recent positive vaccine developments have helped reassure investors that U.S. airlines can make it through the crisis. Sector shares rose 4% on Monday and are up 23% for the month.

But the speed and depth of their recovery, particularly from higher-margin business and international travel, will determine how they cut piles of debt they took on to weather the crisis.

Airlines are trying to reboot overseas travel through bilateral bubbles – deals between countries on COVID-19 testing protocols that would replace or reduce quarantines – though programs have been slow to take off.

United Airlines last week launched a free rapid COVID-19 testing program between Newark Liberty International and London Heathrow airports, and on Monday said it was rolling out a test program for flights from U.S. energy capital Houston, Texas to 10 places in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Starting Dec. 7, passengers can take the self-collected, mail-in test 72 hours before departure for $119 to meet entry requirements at their destination.

(Reporting by Tracy Rucinski; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)

AstraZeneca vaccine can be up to 90% effective; COVID-19 reinfection unlikely for at least six months

By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine shows up to 90% efficacy

An interim analysis of late-stage trials of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine finds it prevented 70% of COVID-19 cases with no confirmed serious adverse effects, the company announced on Monday. In 8,895 participants who got two full doses, the efficacy was 62%. But due to a dosing error that proved to be a happy accident, among 2,741 volunteers who got a half dose followed by a full dose, efficacy rose to 90%. Pfizer and Moderna reported that their vaccines were about 95% effective at preventing illness. But AstraZeneca’s vaccine is cheaper, easier to make, and can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures. Investment analysts at SVB Leerink said Astra’s vaccine was unlikely to gain U.S. approval because safety data so far are inadequate and the trial design did not meet U.S. requirements for representation of high-risk groups such as the elderly and minorities. AstraZeneca said it plans to seek approval to modify its U.S. study to get more data on the smaller initial dose. Eventually, all three vaccines could prove comparable. “My suspicion is that by the time we are a year down the line, we’ll be using all three vaccines with about 90% protection,” said immunologist Danny Altmann of Imperial College London.

COVID-19 reinfection appears unlikely for at least 6 months

People who have had COVID-19 are unlikely to contract it again for at least six months, British researchers said on Thursday in a report posted on medRxiv ahead of peer review. Between April and November, they tracked more than 12,000 frontline healthcare workers at high risk for infection with the new coronavirus. COVID-19 with symptoms occurred in 89 of 11,052 workers who did not already have antibodies showing exposure to the virus, whereas none of the 1,246 staff with antibodies developed a recurrent infection. Staff with antibodies were also less likely to test positive for COVID-19 without symptoms, the researchers said. “This is really good news because we can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who get COVID-19 won’t get it again,” said coauthor David Eyre of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health. Maria van Kerkhove of the World Health Organization added, “We still need to follow these individuals for a longer period of time to see how long immunity lasts.”

Delirium may signal COVID-19 in elderly

Delirium is common among older patients with COVID-19 and may be their only symptom, U.S. researchers warned on Thursday in JAMA Network Open. Among more than 800 COVID-19 patients over age 65 who showed up at emergency departments around the country, nearly 30% had delirium, they found. Overall, delirium was the sixth most common of all the symptoms and signs in these older patients. Those most at risk for delirium included elders with vision or hearing impairment, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and residents of assisted living or skilled nursing facilities. Delirium is not on any official list of COVID-19 signs and symptoms, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should add it, said coauthor Dr. Maura Kennedy of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “Sometimes delirium is the chief complaint when these patients arrive at the emergency department,” Kennedy said. “But there can be a number of reasons they come, including falls that occurred because of the delirium. They may present without what we consider typical COVID-19 symptoms, such as fever, shortness of breath and cough.”

New data help distinguish COVID-19 from flu

Certain findings can help distinguish COVID-19 from influenza or other respiratory illnesses, a new study suggests. Israeli doctors studied 693 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, plus more than 8,000 adults who had been hospitalized in previous years for the flu or severe respiratory infections. Compared to the other patients, those with COVID-19 were on average younger, more overweight, and had fewer preexisting conditions other than dementia, which was more prevalent in COVID-19 patients. Upon hospital admission, COVID-19 patients had overall lower levels of infection-fighting white blood cells and neutrophils, but their hearts were beating faster, they had less oxygen in their blood, and they had higher percentages of immune-system B cells, which produce antibodies to attack invading germs, and T cells, which destroy cells that have become infected. During the first two days of hospitalization, white blood cell and neutrophil levels rose in COVID-19 patients but fell in the other groups, the researchers said in a paper posted on Sunday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. “At the dawn of winter, recognizing the characteristics discriminating COVID-19 from influenza, will be critical to support the management of the current pandemic,” they conclude.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Linda Carroll, Kate Holton, Josephine Mason and Kate Kelland; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

U.S. prepares for first COVID-19 shots as another vaccine candidate emerges

By Daniel Trotta

(Reuters) – U.S. officials expect to begin inoculating Americans against the novel coronavirus by mid-December as another global drug company on Monday unveiled promising trial results on a vaccine candidate, providing hope as the pace of infections accelerated.

The head of the U.S. campaign to rapidly deploy a vaccine that U.S. healthcare workers and other high-risk people could start getting shots produced by Pfizer Inc within a day or two of regulatory consent next month.

“I would expect, maybe on day two after approval on the 11th or 12th of December, hopefully the first people will be immunized across the United States,” Dr. Moncef Slaoui, chief scientific adviser for “Operation Warp Speed,” told CNN on Sunday.

With many Americans traveling and potentially increasing their risk ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, the United States has surpassed 12 million infections and the death toll has climbed to more than 255,000 since the pandemic began.

Coronavirus hospitalizations have surged nearly 50% over the past two weeks as the pace of new infections quickened, and the average number of new COVID-19 deaths reported in United States has been increasing for 12 days.

The latest vaccine breakthrough came on Monday as British company AstraZeneca said its vaccine could be 90% effective without any serious side effects. The vaccine would give the world another important tool against the pandemic and one that is potentially cheaper to make, easier to distribute and faster to scale up than those of rivals.

The vaccine was 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 when administered in two different doses a month apart, late-stage trials showed.

The British drugmaker said it would have as many as 200 million doses by the end of 2020 and 700 million doses could be ready globally as soon as the end of the first quarter of 2021.

Pfizer, working with German partner BioNTech, says its vaccine was 95% effective against infection from the highly contagious respiratory virus.

Other pharmaceutical companies making progress include Moderna Inc, which is expected to seek separate approval later in December, and Johnson & Johnson, which is working on a single-dose vaccine.

In the United States, the first people to receive the Pfizer vaccine would likely include doctors, nurses and front-line emergency medical personnel, as well as those at the highest risk of severe illness and death from the virus, Slaoui said.

But U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams expressed concern that Americans who are dismissive of science and skeptical about vaccines may discourage people from getting their jabs.

“What I’d hate is for us to have a vaccine that could end this pandemic but people don’t trust it,” Adams told the ABC News show “Good Morning America” on Monday.

“I’m just excited we now have three vaccines out there because when you’re trying to immunize the entire planet we want to have as many different tools in our arsenal as possible,” Adams said.

Adams warned Americans that holiday parties “can be super-spreader events,” while New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy urged people to scale back or cancel Thanksgiving plans.

“We’ve pleading with people: Please, God, do the right thing,” Murphy told “Good Morning America.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom said late Sunday he would quarantine for 14 days after three of his children were exposed to a California Highway Patrol officer who tested positive for the virus.

(Additionl reporting by Lisa Lambert, Susan Heavey, Doina Chiacu, Kate Holton, Josephine Mason and Kate Kelland; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

U.S. coronavirus wildfire hitting jobs as broad recovery trudges on

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The most intense U.S. coronavirus outbreak yet appears to have slowed hiring and may have begun to drag on retail spending on the cusp of the holiday shopping season, even as overall economic activity proves more resilient than in the spring.

But that uneasy coexistence – wildfire-like spread of a deadly disease with an economy that remains largely open – may be tested in coming weeks if face mask mandates and lighter-touch restrictions imposed by local governments fail to curb the spread of COVID-19. Infections are growing by more than 1 million a week, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, and the week-to-week percentage change is rising too.

Some local governments are taking more aggressive steps, with New York City again closing schools, and in a rare federal response from the “lame-duck” administration of President Donald Trump, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged Americans not to travel for next week’s Thanksgiving holiday, which typically sees tens of millions on the move.

Most states, though, are moving gingerly, curbing restaurant hours or seating capacity, but not shuttering nonessential businesses like during the early months of the U.S. outbreak in the spring.

Still, the surge in cases appears to have capped the U.S. economic rebound, according to high-frequency data tracked by economists for real-time evidence about the recovery.

Employment at a sample of mostly small businesses from time management firm Homebase declined for a fourth week, and shifts worked across different industries fell, according to time management firm UKG.

“The uncertainty that exists right now and has existed really since mid-summer is making it really hard for business owners to think about growth,” said David Gilbertson, UKG vice president for strategy and operations. “We seem to take one step forward, and then one step back.”

The decline in shifts from mid-October to mid-November likely points to a weakening jobs report in November, he said.

LOOKING ‘GRIM’

Since the spring’s catastrophic drop in employment, the economy has clawed back about half of the more than 20 million lost positions. But momentum is slowing, and last week the number of new claims for unemployment insurance rose for the first time in about a month.

An index of new job postings from analytics firm Chmura as of August had reached a high of 85% of the level predicted in the absence of the pandemic, but is now at 67%.

Workers may be in for a “grim” period, said AnnElizabeth Konkel, economist at Indeed Hiring Lab, whose index of job postings remains 13% below 2019 levels. Holiday hiring is largely complete, and unemployment benefits are expiring for many of those out of work since the spring, a lapse that may finally be weighing on national data.

Initially, the flood of government support increased incomes for many families and supported consumer spending. Data on 30 million JPMorgan debit- and credit-card customers, however, showed spending fell “notably” in early November from a level just 2.7% below 2019 to 7.4% below last year, said JPMorgan economist Jesse Edgerton.

Declines were sharper in places where COVID-19 was spreading more rapidly but were still widespread, suggesting “a broader pullback in spending,” Edgerton wrote. U.S. retail sales in October also grew less than expected.

That and other data indicate an outright decline in jobs in November versus October, Edgerton said, evidence that millions left jobless by the pandemic face a long road back to normal.

SOME IMPROVEMENTS

Vaccine prospects, however, “represent a ray of light at the end of the tunnel,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. Oxford recovery tracker rose slightly last week, snapping a five-week skid, a sign that the scale of economic collapse seen in the spring is not in the offing.

Data from OpenTable showed a slight rise in diners seated at restaurants over the past week even as new limits were imposed.

Some Federal Reserve officials have noted how businesses, particularly in manufacturing, construction and some parts of the retail sector, have adapted to operating during the pandemic. A New York Fed weekly index projecting growth in gross domestic product has risen steadily since the recession began.

But Oxford’s index and other data have also remained largely stalled, well below pre-pandemic levels. Data tracking cellphone movement from Unacast, for example, has shown no upward trend since summer.

That may remain the case until vaccines are rolled out to enough people to make a difference.

Meanwhile, “the recovery is becoming entrenched in a low-growth mode, and we are worried about signs of lasting economic damage,” Daco wrote.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)

AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine shows promise in elderly, trial results by Christmas

By Kate Kelland and Alistair Smout

LONDON (Reuters) – AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s potential COVID-19 vaccine produced a strong immune response in older adults, data published on Thursday showed, with researchers expecting to release late-stage trial results by Christmas.

The data, reported in part last month but published in full in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday, suggest that those aged over 70, who are at higher risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19, could build robust immunity.

“The robust antibody and T-cell responses seen in older people in our study are encouraging,” said Maheshi Ramasamy, a consultant and co-lead investigator at the Oxford Vaccine Group.

“We hope that this means our vaccine will help to protect some of the most vulnerable people in society, but further research will be needed before we can be sure.”

Late-stage, or Phase III, trials are ongoing to confirm the findings, researchers said, and to test whether the vaccine protects against infection with SARS-CoV-2 in a broad range of people, including people with underlying health conditions.

Results of those trials should definitely be known by Christmas, the Oxford Vaccine Group’s director, Andrew Pollard, said, adding it was too early to know whether and how well the vaccine works in preventing COVID-19 disease.

“We’re still waiting to get to the point where we can do the analysis to just work out how well the vaccine can protect people, and we’re getting ever closer to that,” he told journalists.

“We are optimistic that we’ll be able to do that before Christmas, and obviously we’ll share that with you as soon as we can at that point.”

The Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine candidate, called AZD1222 or ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, had been among the front-runners in global efforts to develop shots to protect against infection with the novel coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2.

But rival drugmakers Pfizer Inc, BioNTech and Moderna Inc have in the past 10 days edged ahead, releasing data from late-stage COVID-19 vaccine trials that shows more than 90% efficacy.

“We’re not in a rush. We and it’s not a competition with the other developers,” Oxford’s Pollard said, adding that AstraZeneca would release headline efficacy data before it was published in an academic journal.

Oxford University has set a target of 53 infections to start the interim analysis of its late-stage trial results, though “lots of cases” in its trial arms in Britain, South Africa and Brazil mean the exact number of infections reported could differ.

Unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, both of which use new technology known as messenger RNA (mRNA), AstraZeneca’s is a viral vector vaccine made from a weakened version of a common cold virus found in chimpanzees.

The Phase II trial reported in The Lancet involved a total of 560 healthy volunteers, with 160 aged 18-55, 160 aged 56-69, and 240 aged 70 or over.

Volunteers got two doses of the vaccine or a placebo, and no serious side effects related to the AZD1222 vaccine were reported, the researchers said.

AstraZeneca has signed several supply and manufacturing deals with companies and governments around the world.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Additional reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Matthew Lewis, Alexander Smith and Nick Macfie)

COVID-19 survivors may have long lasting immunity; Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective in trial

COVID-19 survivors may have long lasting immunity; Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective in trial
By Nancy Lapid

(Reuters) – The following is a roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on the novel coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

Immune protection against severe reinfection appears lasting

Regardless of their detectable antibody levels, most COVID-19 survivors are likely to have lasting protection against severe COVID-19 if they become re-infected, thanks to other components of the body’s immune response that remember the new coronavirus in different ways, researchers say. In a study of 185 patients, including 41 who had been infected more than six months earlier, scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California found that multiple branches of the immune system – not just antibodies – recognized the novel coronavirus for at least eight months. For example, so-called memory B cells that could recognize the virus and produce antibodies to fight it were more abundant six months after infection than at one month, they reported in a paper posted on Monday on bioRxiv ahead of peer review. The new findings “suggest that the immune system can remember the virus for years, and most people may be protected from severe COVID-19 for a substantial time,” said study leaders Shane Crotty and Alessandro Sette.

Final data from Pfizer vaccine trial shows 95% efficacy

Final results from Pfizer Inc’s pivotal COVID-19 vaccine trial show it had a 95% success rate – even higher than an earlier analysis – and two months of follow-up data without serious side effects, the company said on Wednesday. In the study involving about 43,000 volunteers, 162 of the 170 who contracted COVID-19 had received a placebo, not the vaccine. Of the 10 participants who had severe COVID-19, only one had received the vaccine. The final analysis of the trial’s data comes a week after interim results showed the vaccine was more than 90% effective. Moderna Inc on Monday released preliminary data for its vaccine, showing 94.5% effectiveness. Pfizer said the efficacy its two-dose vaccine, developed with German partner BioNTech SE, was consistent across different age and ethnic groups. Efficacy in adults over age 65 was over 94%. Pfizer said it expects to make up to 50 million vaccine doses this year – enough to inoculate 25 million people – and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021.

Respiratory muscle damage linked to severe COVID-19

Critically ill COVID-19 patients develop virus-induced damage of respiratory muscles, scientists at Amsterdam UMC in The Netherlands reported on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. They performed autopsy studies of the diaphragm, the main respiratory muscle, in 26 COVID-19 patients who died in the intensive care unit (ICU) and 8 ICU patients who died without COVID-19. In everyone, the diaphragm muscle cell membranes contained a protein called ACE2, which the new coronavirus uses as an entryway into cells. The researchers found genetic evidence of the virus in diaphragm muscle cells in some of those who died from COVID-19, and microscopy analyses showed much more connective tissue scarring (fibrosis) in COVID-19 patients’ diaphragms, indicating damage, study coauthor Coen Ottenheijm told Reuters. He said the diaphragm damage may help explain why it is often difficult for COVID-19 patients to breathe on their own again after they have been on mechanical ventilators in the ICU. It may also explain the persistent shortness of breath in patients recovering from COVID-19.

Cardiac arrest survival is down during the pandemic

U.S. data from early this year suggest the pandemic has led to decreased survival rates after “out-of-hospital” cardiac arrest. Based on nationwide data, the proportion of patients whose hearts could be restarted was 21% lower in March-April 2020 than in the same period in 2019, researchers reported on Saturday at the annual American Heart Association meeting, held virtually this year, and in JAMA Cardiology. The proportion of patients who survived to be discharged from hospitals was also lower in 2020, at 6.6%, versus 9.8% in 2019. Survival rates after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest had nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and “we want to make sure we don’t lose those gains,” said coauthor Dr. Paul Chan of St. Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute in Missouri. Dr. Clifton Callaway of the University of Pittsburgh, who viewed the presentation but was not involved in the study, said other viewers noted it is more difficult for paramedics to work wearing full personal protective gear as it takes time to put on and can impede emergency care. Furthermore, some patients may have delayed calling for help over concerns of becoming infected with the coronavirus. And some may have also had COVID-19, making their medical condition more severe.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid, Linda Carroll and Michael Erman; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

Travel restrictions challenge vaccine rollout, airlines warn

PARIS (Reuters) – Air cargo operators may struggle to distribute new COVID-19 vaccines effectively unless pandemic travel restrictions are eased, global airlines cautioned on Monday.

The warning came in vaccine transport guidelines issued by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which is pushing governments to replace travel curbs and quarantines with testing.

“If borders remain closed, travel curtailed, fleets grounded and employees furloughed, the capacity to deliver life-saving vaccines will be very much compromised,” the IATA document said.

Moderna Inc. said on Monday its experimental COVID-19 vaccine had proved 94.5% effective in a clinical trial, a week after rival drugmaker Pfizer reported 90% efficacy findings for its vaccine. Once approved, both vaccines are likely to require transport and storage well below freezing, posing logistical hurdles.

Widespread grounding of passenger flights that normally carry 45% of global cargo in their holds has taken out capacity, thinning the air freight network and driving up prices.

Existing immunization campaigns have struggled with the partial shutdown. The World Health Organization and UNICEF “have already reported severe difficulties in maintaining their planned vaccine programs during the COVID-19 crisis due, in part, to limited air connectivity,” IATA said.

Vaccines will need to be shipped to developing countries reliant on passenger services for cargo, IATA’s head of cargo Glyn Hughes told Reuters. Even in industrialized states, vaccine dispersal may be a tighter bottleneck than production, requiring shipments to secondary airports on passenger jets.

In preparation for the challenge of mass vaccine distribution, governments should move to reopen key passenger routes backed by robust testing, the airline body argues.

“There are several more months for governments to go through the planning cycle,” Hughes said, leaving enough time to “get passenger networks safely resumed, looking at safe travel corridors (and) mutual acceptance of testing procedures.”

(Reporting by Laurence Frost; editing by David Evans)