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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 16 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
"it can set the immune system to a state where it can't generate antibodies to the real thing"
Are there any citations to this?
(Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Monday March 16 2020, @05:02AM
I linked to an interview below where this is discussed. It's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement [wikipedia.org]
Osterholm mentioned ADE caused a recall for dengue fever vaccine recently. Anyway, here's an article entitled "Too much or too little—better than some". Honestly it is beyond me, but here's a link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6365/929.full [sciencemag.org]
This appears to be the specific dengue fever vaccine recalled because of the ADE effect: http://www.virology.ws/2017/12/07/a-problem-with-dengue-virus-vaccine/ [virology.ws]