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German company CureVac has received a rather strange offer from the current White House.
On March 3, CureVac's CEO was invited to the White House, for a meeting with President Trump, Vice Pence and several members of the Coronavirus Task Force. Asked for when a vaccine could be ready, he estimated that a potential candidate could be ready within a few months. Apparently, that triggered the members of the meeting so much, that they've now offered to buy the company, at whatever price.
One condition though: production would be exclusively for the United States.
The move is not exactly one to gain popularity, and follows on the heels of the President's worrying statement that "a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @12:25AM (3 children)
From one of the articles, a vaccine candidate could be ready within a few months. That means human trials would begin in June or July. It's necessary to understand the safety of the vaccine. Some of the SARS candidate vaccines caused immune hypersensitivity, for example. A vaccine would need to produce an appropriate antibody response and have limited side effects. Assuming that the candidate vaccine is viable, delivery probably wouldn't begin until mid-2021. And that assumes it passes the clinical trails, which is not certain. For that matter, there are conflicting reports about the experimental antiviral remdesivir. Some express optimism while others raise concerns both about efficacy and side effects.
The best options we have now seem to be social distancing, good hygiene, widespread testing, managing symptoms and complications, and the use of supportive treatments like ventilators. There are treatments for managing complications like a cytokine storm. There is a glimmer of optimism in the data, in the rate of new infections in the US [wikipedia.org]. For several days, the rate of new infections was around 40-45% of the previous day's total. More recently, that seems to be closer to 30-35%. Because people tend to not develop serious symptoms for a week or so, that decline is probably the rest of prior measures to control the spread. We will probably see the effects of school closings and bans on mass gatherings lower that rate more in the next week or two. To be clear, 30-35% increases per day is still much too fast, but it's an indication that the control measures are starting to have an effect.
We can't expect a vaccine anytime soon and shouldn't count on existing antivirals to be effective. The good news is that the typical measures for controlling the spread of infectious diseases are effective against this virus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @01:22AM
It's crazy though, if you look at places like Costco you see huge crowds. Wouldn't that be a bad thing? I'm no expert but it looks to me that everyone's attempt to prepare for the problem could be making the problem worse?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @02:00AM
Thanks for your response. I was searching through stuff and I found this interesting (though somewhat off topic).
Basically various labs showed potentially promising results but ultimately
"As of December 2015, research related to DRACOs had ground to a halt due to a lack of funding."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday March 16 2020, @03:19AM
The U.S. has no idea what the rate of infection is because there is virtually no testing at large in the country.
When life isn't going right, go left.