The Liberal Gun Club Forum

lurker wrote: Mon Jan 25, 2021 7:34 am someone should make a movie: asian virus jumps from bats to humans, spreads around the world, kills tens of millions, debilitates hundreds of millions, world leaders pooh-pooh the danger while skimming profits off the dead and dying, civil disorder and insurrection break out, and then it mutates...nah, too far-fetched, no one would believe it.
until the zombies.

Moderna said Monday it’s accelerating work on a Covid-19 booster shot to guard against the recently discovered variant in South Africa. Its researchers said its current coronavirus vaccine appears to work against the two highly transmissible strains found in the U.K. and South Africa, although it looks like it may be less effective against the latter.

The two-dose vaccine produced an antibody response against multiple variants, including B.1.1.7 and B.1.351, which were first identified in the U.K. and South Africa, respectively, according to a Moderna study conducted in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The study has not yet been peer reviewed. The vaccine generated a weaker immune response against the South African strain, but the antibodies remained above levels that are expected to be protective against the virus, the company said, adding the findings may suggest “a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity to the new B.1.351 strains.”

“Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.

Shares of Moderna were up nearly 4% in premarket trading after the announcement.

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said he’s glad Moderna is preparing for the possibility that the virus could mutate enough to evade the protection of the current vaccines. He added the ultimate goal of the vaccine is to prevent severe infections and keep people out of the hospital.

“This is not a problem yet,” said Offit, also a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. “Prepare for it. Sequence these viruses. Get ready just in case a variant emerges, which is resistance” to the vaccine.

On Thursday, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said new data showed that the Covid-19 vaccines currently on the market may not be as effective in guarding against new, more contagious strains of the coronavirus. Some early findings that were published in the preprint server bioRxiv indicate that the South Africa variant can evade the antibodies provided by some coronavirus treatments.

Bancel told CNBC that Moderna’s vaccine will be protective against the South African strain in the short term, but the company doesn’t know how long that protection may last.

“What is unknowable right now is what will happen in six months, 12 months, especially to the elderly because, as you know, they have a weaker immune system,” he said during an interview with “Squawk Box.” “Because of that unknown ... we decided to take into the clinic, out of an abundance of caution, a new vaccine.” “We cannot be behind. We cannot fall behind this virus,” he said, adding the virus will “keep mutating.”

Bisbee wrote: Mon Jan 25, 2021 5:40 pm And what, pray tell, are any of the vaccine manufacturers doing about the Californian variant?

sig230 wrote: Mon Jan 25, 2021 5:48 pm

Bisbee wrote: Mon Jan 25, 2021 5:40 pm And what, pray tell, are any of the vaccine manufacturers doing about the Californian variant?

It's been put on the do not fly list and only allowed to go to Las Vegas.

After all, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas so the rest of us need not worry.

Bisbee wrote: Mon Jan 25, 2021 5:40 pm And what, pray tell, are any of the vaccine manufacturers doing about the Californian variant?

As the coronavirus assumes contagious new forms around the world, two drug makers reported on Monday that their vaccines, while still effective, offer less protection against one variant and began revising plans to turn back an evolving pathogen that has killed more than two million people.

The news from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech underscored a realization by scientists that the virus is changing more quickly than once thought, and may well continue to develop in ways that help it elude the vaccines being deployed worldwide. The announcements arrived even as President Biden banned travel to the United States from South Africa beginning on Saturday, in hopes of stanching the spread of one variant. And Merck, a leading drug company, on Monday abandoned two experimental coronavirus vaccines altogether, saying they did not produce a strong enough immune response against the original version of the virus.

Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech both said their vaccines were effective against new variants of the coronavirus discovered in Britain and South Africa. But they are slightly less protective against the variant in South Africa, which may be more adept at dodging antibodies in the bloodstream.

The vaccines are the only ones authorized for emergency use in the United States. As a precaution, Moderna has begun developing a new form of its vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against the variant in South Africa. “We’re doing it today to be ahead of the curve, should we need to,” Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said in an interview. “I think of it as an insurance policy.” “I don’t know if we need it, and I hope we don’t,” he added.

Moderna said it also planned to begin testing whether giving patients a third shot of its original vaccine as a booster could help fend off newly emerging forms of the virus.

Studies showing decreased levels of antibodies against a new variant do not mean a vaccine is proportionately less effective, Dr. Sahin said. BioNTech could develop a newly adjusted vaccine against the variants in about six weeks, he said. The Food and Drug Administration has not commented on what its policy will be for authorizing vaccines that have been updated to work better against new variants.

But some scientists said that the adjusted vaccines should not have to go through the same level of scrutiny, including extensive clinical trials, that the original versions did. The influenza vaccine is updated each year to account for new strains without an extensive approval process.

Several variants have emerged with mutations that worry scientists. A form first detected in Britain is up to 50 percent more contagious than the virus identified in China a year ago, and researchers have begun to think that it may also be slightly more deadly. Researchers in South Africa identified another variant after doctors there discovered a jump in Covid-19 cases in October. They alerted the World Health Organization in early December that the variant seemed to have mutations that might make the virus less susceptible to vaccines.

A variant found in Brazil has many of the mutations seen in the South African form, but genetic evidence suggests that the two variants evolved independently. Preliminary studies in the laboratory had hinted that those viruses may have some degree of resistance to the immunity that people develop after recovering from the infection or being inoculated with the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines.

The variant identified in Britain has been found in at least 20 states in the United States. The version found in South Africa has not been reported in this country, but on Monday health officials in Minnesota announced that they had documented the first case of infection with the Brazilian variant.

Few countries, including the United States, have invested in the kind of genetic surveillance needed to detect emerging variants. Britain leads the world in these efforts, sequencing of about 10 percent of its virus samples. The United States has analyzed less than 1 percent of its samples; officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said this month that they expect to swiftly ramp up those efforts.

Researchers at Moderna examined blood samples from eight people who had received two doses of the vaccine, and two monkeys that had been immunized. Neutralizing antibodies — the type that can disable the virus — were just as effective against the variant identified in Britain as they were against the original form of the virus. But with the variant circulating in South Africa, there was a sixfold reduction in the antibodies’ effectiveness. Even so, the company said, those antibodies “remain above levels that are expected to be protective.”

Experts also cautioned against assuming that a decrease in neutralizing ability meant the vaccines were powerless against the new variants. Neutralizing antibodies are just one component of the body’s immune defense, noted Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

“In real life, there’s also T cells and memory B cells and non-neutralizing antibodies and all these other effectors that are going to be induced by the vaccine,” Dr. Iwasaki said. Neutralizing power is “very important, but it’s not the only thing that’s going to protect someone.”

So long as the authorized vaccines continue to work against the variants, the challenge will be to inoculate as many people as possible and to prevent the coronavirus from evolving into more impervious forms. “That for me is still the highest priority,” said Dr. Sahin, of BioNTech.

Bisbee wrote: Tue Jan 26, 2021 1:00 am Booster after booster after booster... Grandma is gonna look like a pin cushion before we’re finished. Grandpa’s gonna have as tracks like a junkie.

[Scott] Gottlieb [former FDA commissioner] said he suspected that the South African variant, and a closely related new strain identified in Brazil — known as P.1 — are probably in the U.S., even if they haven’t been detected here. “Given how widespread it is in Brazil right now, and how widespread it is in South Africa, and given all the connections we have to those nations, we have to assume it’s in the United States right now.”

In a significant reshuffling of vaccine eligibility guidelines, California officials said Monday they will be shifting who is prioritized in the next round of COVID-19 inoculations to focus on age rather than specific occupations considered higher risk.

The state has so far administered more than 2.4 million vaccine doses and more than 4.5 million doses have been shipped to health providers. Currently, state and county officials have said there is not enough vaccine supply to match goals to vaccinate the masses.

State epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said last week that the state is receiving 300,000 to 500,000 doses each week. In Los Angeles County, 500,000 doses would be needed per week in order to vaccinate all adults by mid-summer, chief science officer Dr. Paul Simon said Friday. But at the rate that current allocation is going, efforts would continue well into 2022.

lurker wrote: Tue Jan 26, 2021 10:11 am i'm going to speak ill of the incoming administration once and then i'm going to let it drop.
it is atrocious and speaks ill of both the previous administration and the incoming administration that at a year into a global pandemic we have no coherent plan to even distribute vaccine. rather than arguing over who goes on the $20 bill or promoting other "liberal" agendas, joe and kamala should have had a plan, irrespective of and fully cognizant that donald had done literally nothing, and that plan should have been implemented within the first couple of days in office. preposterous. absurd. irresponsible.

The Biden administration is working to purchase an additional 200 million doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, a move that could provide enough doses for nearly every American to get fully inoculated by the end of the summer, President Joe Biden said Tuesday.

The government is seeking 100 million doses from Pfizer and 100 million from Moderna, an order that would be made available over the summer. This is in addition to the 400 million combined doses the companies had already committed to providing to the U.S., Biden said. He said he expects to be able to confirm the purchase soon. "It will be enough to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans to beat the pandemic," Biden said.

The agreement will lessen the country’s reliance on getting additional vaccines on the market from other manufacturers. The Trump administration had passed up on purchasing more vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna and was instead relying on additional vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca coming to market. Johnson & Johnson said it will release data for its single-dose vaccine in the coming days.

In the near term, the supply of vaccines being shipped to states is set to increase by about 20 percent to 10 million doses per week for the next three weeks, the official said. The federal government will also begin letting states know how many doses they will be receiving at least three weeks in advance — addressing complaints by governors that they aren’t able to plan and schedule appointments.

The Biden administration has begun using the Defense Production Act to buy more of a specialty syringe that can extract more doses per vaccine vial and plans to use the war-time law for other raw materials, like lipid nanoparticles and bioreactor bags, if necessary, the official said.

The official said the administration isn’t holding back doses aside from a small emergency reserve, but states have been holding back the doses they receive at different levels to ensure there is enough available for people to receive their second dose.

The EU has warned Covid vaccine producers they must deliver agreed supplies, amid fears reductions could seriously hamper its inoculation drive. AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech have both said production problems mean they cannot supply the expected numbers. The EU warned it could restrict exports of vaccines made in the bloc, with Germany's health minister demanding "fair distribution". The UK's vaccine minister warned of "the dead end of vaccine nationalism". AstraZeneca is mainly produced in the UK, while the UK's supplies of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine come from the company's Belgian plant.

European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen earlier told forum: "Europe invested billions to help develop the world's first Covid-19 vaccines. And now, the companies must deliver. They must honour their obligations."

lurker wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:34 am i've been waiting for a clear trend to develop. johns hopkins again. pretty clear decline since january 1, though not sure how/if it squares with reports of surges out west and new mutations. maybe most americans have finally got it thru our heads that this thing is a killer and we have the means to take some control by our own actions. apparently,3,000 dead per day is some kind of threshhold of public perception.

covid19.jpg i'm seeing pretty good mask compliance except in places like lowes and wally's, something about their demographic, bless their hearts. IMO all of those infections over the april peak, and the resulting deaths, belong squarely on donald's head. we all knew what to do, but he (and others like him) needed rallies to feed his ego and ambition.

featureless wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 10:24 am That graph is ugly. I wonder if we'll get another surge around March/April. I suspect we will, but who knows.

Listened to an interesting "town hall" put on by my state senator last night. The best weekly shipment of vaccine to California so far is about 500,000 doses. At that rate, it'll only take a couple of years to get the state vaccinated. I wonder what manufacturing bottlenecks are not being disclosed. Can we actually manufacture enough vaccine to get there by fall? I dunno.

Officials have not confirmed publicly how big the shortfall will be, but Reuters news agency reported that deliveries would be reduced to 31 million - a cut of 60% - in the first quarter of this year.

The EU has also ordered 600 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, but the company was not able to supply the 12.5 million vaccines it promised the EU by the end of 2020.

Pfizer said last week it was delaying shipments for the next few weeks because of work to increase capacity at its Belgian processing plant.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has not yet been approved by the EU, although the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is expected to give it the green light at the end of this month.

The EU had hoped that, as soon as approval was given, delivery would start straight away, with some 80 million doses arriving in the 27 nations by March. Officials have not confirmed publicly how big the shortfall will be, but Reuters news agency reported that deliveries would be reduced to 31 million - a cut of 60% - in the first quarter of this year.

The EU has also ordered 600 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, but the company was not able to supply the 12.5 million vaccines it promised the EU by the end of 2020. Pfizer said last week it was delaying shipments for the next few weeks because of work to increase capacity at its Belgian processing plant.

Wino wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 11:00 am I'm hoping the J&J gets approved soon and I anticipate that will be the one I'll get if at all possible. I don't know anyone to bribe and no money to bribe with, so kinda screwed getting vaccinated.

Wino wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 11:00 am I'm hoping the J&J gets approved soon and I anticipate that will be the one I'll get if at all possible. I don't know anyone to bribe and no money to bribe with, so kinda screwed getting vaccinated.

Amid slower than expected rollouts for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S., Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine could serve as a key boost for the nationwide immunization push. But the pharma giant has fallen behind on its initial manufacturing goals, The New York Times reports, just as its first big data readout looms.

Under J&J’s original $1 billion contract with Operation Warp Speed, the company was set to deliver 12 million vaccine doses by the end of February and 100 million by the end of June. Now, sources told the NYT, federal officials have been informed the company is behind its original manufacturing timeline.

During a press briefing last week, Operation Warp Speed chief adviser Moncef Slaoui told reporters he thought the company would be able to deliver doses in the “single-digit” millions by the end of February, the NYT reports. J&J was “trying to make that number get as close to a double-digit number as possible, and then a larger number in March and a much larger number in April,” Slaoui added, as quoted by the newspaper. A J&J spokesman said it's "premature to get into the specifics of the supply of our vaccine candidate" as the company has not yet posted phase 3 data or applied for an emergency authorization.

"We remain in active discussions with regulators, including on the approval and validation of our manufacturing processes," he added. "We have begun production of our vaccine candidate and are confident in our ability to meet our 2021 supply commitments signed with governments, and we expect to share more detail after some of these steps are achieved."

New coronavirus variants seem to be cropping up everywhere. There's one from the U.K., which is more contagious and already circulating in the United States. There's one from South Africa, which is forcing Moderna and Pfizer to reformulate their COVID-19 vaccines and create "booster" shots, just to make sure the vaccines maintain their efficacies.

But for some scientists, the most worrying variant might be the newest one. A variant called P.1, which emerged in early December in Manaus, Brazil, and by mid-January had already caused a massive resurgence in cases across the city of 2 million people.

On Monday, officials detected the first confirmed case of P.1 in the U.S., specifically in Minnesota. The state Department of Health picked up the case by randomly sequencing 50 nasal swabs from positive patients each week. The person infected with P.1. had previously traveled to Brazil.

"If you were to ask me right now, what's most concerning of all the things that I've heard so far, it's the fact that they are reporting a sudden increase in cases in Manaus, Brazil," virus expert Jeremy Luban at the University of Massachusetts told NPR two weeks ago before the variant arrived in the United States. "Manaus already had 75% of people infected [in the spring of last year]."

The concern with P.1 is twofold: Scientists don't understand why the variant has spread so explosively in Brazil, and the variant carries a particularly dangerous set of mutations.

While the variant from the U.K. took about three months to dominate the outbreak in England, P.1 took only about a month to dominate the outbreak in Manaus. In addition, Manaus had already been hit extremely hard by the virus in April. One study estimated that the population should have reached herd immunity and the virus shouldn't be able to spread easily in the community. So why would the city see an even bigger surge 10 months later? Could P.1 be evading the antibodies made against the previous version of the virus, making reinfections easier? Could it just be significantly more contagious? Could both be true?

"While we don't *know* exactly why this variant has been so apparently successful in Brazil, none of the explanations on the table are good," epidemiologist Bill Hanage at Harvard University wrote on Twitter.

Reinfections are a serious concern for several reasons. First off, like the variant from South Africa, P.1 carries a cluster of mutations along the surface of the virus where antibodies — especially the potent antibodies — like to bind. "They are kind of the major targets of the immune system," said virus expert Penny Moore at the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. "So when we see a whole lot of mutations in [those surfaces], it raises the possibility that the mutations might be conferring immune escape." That is, the mutations are helping the virus evade antibodies or escape recognition by them. In essence, the mutations are providing the virus with a type of invisibility cloak.

To test out this hypothesis, Moore and her colleagues took blood serum from 44 people infected with the previous version of the virus and checked to see if the antibodies in that serum still worked against the new variant from South Africa. Or did the antibodies lose their sensitivity?

"Indeed that's what we saw," she said. "In fact, it was really quite a dramatic drop-off in sensitivity. We saw that in half of the serum, the antibodies were significantly less effective against the new variant [from South Africa]." So far, scientists haven't tested out P.1 in similar neutralization experiments, but P.1 has two mutations that scientists have already shown reduce antibody binding.

And thus, now we have a game of "cat and mouse," said virus expert Ravi Gupta, between the virus and the vaccine. The virus finds ways around the vaccine (and our immune system), said Gupta, and so the manufacturers have to reformulate the vaccines (or else we run the risk of getting infected twice).

"We've been here before with the flu. We're having to live with influenza and figure out a way of staying ahead of the virus by making vaccines on a yearly basis," said Gupta at the University of Cambridge.

"So I can imagine that we'll be doing something similar with [the] coronavirus. Eventually we'll need to design different vaccines that are targeting different parts of the virus — ones that the virus finds harder to change."

This process is going to cost the world a great deal of money — and take time, Gupta added. "I don't think there's going to be a single solution that just comes along in 2021 that says, 'That's it, we're done.'

"The coronavirus is going to cause a long-term disruption."

Following a shaky rollout of the state’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts, advisors to Gov. Gavin Newsom have struck a far-reaching agreement with Blue Shield of California for the health insurance company to oversee the distribution of vaccine doses to counties, pharmacies and private healthcare providers.

The decision marks a sharp turn away from a more decentralized process that has been criticized for inconsistency across regions of the state and sluggishness in its effort to vaccinate Californians. It will also mean the outsourcing of tasks that, until now, have been overseen by state and local government officials.

“We understand that vaccine supply is limited,” state Government Operations Secretary Yolanda Richardson said on Tuesday. “But we also need to address that the supply we have now needs to get administered as quickly as possible, so we’re developing an approach that allows us to just that.”

On Tuesday, officials announced their intent to create a statewide vaccine distribution network but declined to identify Blue Shield until Wednesday as the company that will be placed in charge of the program. A spokesman for the California Department of Public Health said Wednesday that the contract is expected to be finalized soon and that the transition in oversight will take several weeks.

With Blue Shield as the statewide vaccine administrator, the nonprofit’s employees will be tasked with managing the flow of vaccination requests and deliveries using new guidelines from state officials that determine the order in which Californians will be eligible to be inoculated. Those guidelines are expected to abandon some of the state’s more detailed categories of eligibility by employment, instead favoring a yet-to-be-explained approach based largely on age. With Blue Shield at the helm, state officials said the new system will bring equity to a COVID-19 vaccine distribution process that has thus far been dictated by where Californians live.

“We want to make sure that nothing slows down the administration of vaccine, other than the pace in which vaccine arrives in the state,” Richardson said Tuesday.

The new statewide vaccine distribution network overseen by Blue shield will comprise a wide variety of locations at which vaccinations will be administered, including pharmacies, community health centers and temporary pop-up locations. State officials said the system will focus on fair distribution of vaccine doses and allow for fast adjustments as needed.

How Blue Shield was selected for its powerful new role in California’s vaccine strategy — and the specific terms of its contract with the state — wasn’t immediately clear. The Oakland-based healthcare provider serves some 4 million Californians and has been deeply involved in the Newsom administration’s pandemic response efforts since last spring, including stepping in to help improve COVID-19 testing efforts last April after the state’s disastrous start. The company’s chief executive, Paul Markovich, served as co-chair of the governor’s testing task force, and some of the company’s employees also worked on the effort.

Blue Shield’s connections to Newsom aren’t limited to policy. The healthcare company, a prominent player in California political campaigns, spent more than $1 million in support of Newsom’s campaign for governor in 2018 and almost $1.3 million on lobbying state government in the most recent legislative session.