Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses will be “backloaded,” with more doses coming later, Fauci says
From Bioreports’s Naomi Thomas
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Bioreports’s Alisyn Camerota Tuesday that if Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate is granted emergency use authorization the number of doses will likely be relatively few at first, but will ramp up to meet contractual agreements.
Fauci said that he believes the totality of the doses is going to meet contractual agreements of having 100 million doses by late June or early July, saying “that will happen.”
“What we’re seeing is that instead of being front-loaded with a number of doses that are coming out, it very likely will be backloaded,” he said.
“It’s just a matter of what happened with their production capability and how they are now going to be revving up, and then soon after that, they’re going to have a lot of doses,” he said. “But, it’s not going to be front-loaded.”
Johnson & Johnson will testify Tuesday in front of the subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for the House Committee on Energy & Commerce that it can deliver enough doses of coronavirus vaccine by the end of March to vaccinate more than 20 million Americans against Covid-19.
The Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee meets on Friday to discuss the request for emergency use authorization from Johnson & Johnson for its vaccine candidate.
Fauci: It was “painful” when people called the pandemic a hoax while hospitals were overrun with patients
From Bioreports’s Aditi Sangal
Top US infectious disease expert Dr. Antony Fauci reflected on 500,000 Americans dying of Covid-19 and said political divisions contributed to the death toll.
You have to fight the virus “in a unifying way and not have any kind of political ideology divisiveness getting in the way of what we’re trying to do. That’s not the only thing that really was a problem. But that’s … something that I found really to be unfortunately damaging,” he told Bioreports.
Fauci also described “several low points” for him over the course of the coronavirus pandemic.
“It does intellectually pain me when I see things like pleading for people to do the kinds of things that you know work — the mask wearing, the physical separation,” he said.
He added that it was “painful” for him to see that while hospitals in many regions were overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients, people were still calling the pandemic a hoax and fake news.
“I mean, how could you possibly say that when people in your own state, your own city, your own county are dying? To me, that just boggled me and it still does,” he said. “And here we are today looking at 500,000 Americans who have died thus far. I mean, that’s the proof of what actually has been going on. You can’t deny that.”
Watch the moment here:
Risky business? Mexico is trying to balance the pandemic and its vital tourism income
From Bioreports’s Megan Frye
Though Mexico has logged more than 180,000 Covid-19 deaths, it has some of the world’s loosest entry requirements for foreigners. Visitors aren’t required to submit negative test results, and there is no mandatory quarantine.
The pandemic’s economic effect on the tourism industry has still been devastating.
The world’s seventh most popular tourist destination, Mexico’s economy has grown to depend on what amounted in 2019 to about $25 billion in income from 45 million international visitors, according to estimates from the National Tourism Business Council (Bioreports) and a center for tourism research at Universidad Anáhuac.
Across Mexico, tourist destinations are operating on limited capacity per Covid-19 regulations. The country is struggling to adapt to its slowest high season in memory, with limited government help for many workers and businesses struggling to make ends meet.
“I guess Mexico has been doing what it can do,” said birdwatching guide Alex Martínez Rodríguez, but he said he doesn’t feel that the populist government is acting in the best interest of the people.
Read the full story here:
China says their experts conducted “lots of virus tracing work,” responding to Bioreports’s report
From Bioreports’s Beijing Bureau and Sophie Jeong in Hong Kong
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) responded to Bioreports’s exclusive report on how the World Health Organization (WHO) panel will recommend “deeper” study of early Covid-19 clues, saying that Chinese experts conducted “lots of virus tracing work.”
“Chinese experts conducted lots of virus tracing work about the Huanan seafood market,” the MOFA said in a statement sent to Bioreports. “They systematically collected and tested samples of market environment, frozen food inventories, animal breeding farms in the upstream supply chain in China. Based on current information, it is not possible to determine how the virus was introduced into the Huanan seafood market.”
The World Health Organization’s preliminary report into the origins of the novel coronavirus will recommend more extensive contact tracing of the first known patient with Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, as well as the supply chain of nearly a dozen traders in the Huanan seafood market, which is thought to have played a role in the early spread of Covid-19 in late 2019, according to investigators familiar with the draft report.
Independent scientists told Bioreports the rudimentary investigative work being recommended should have been done many months previously by Chinese scientists looking into the virus’ origin. They said they found it “surprising” and “implausible” Chinese scientists had not already done that work.
In response, the MOFA statement added the supply chain was “not only from China, but also from outside China” and that the joint expert group had said, “there is no geographical limit to the next step of the study.” Bioreports reported on Sunday that the WHO panel will recommend the immediate investigation of the supply chain of the Huanan seafood market.
MOFA also said the WHO panel and Chinese scientists were not conducting an “investigation” but “joint research on tracing the origin of the virus” after Bioreports asked for comment on further recommendations by those involved in WHO mission to “investigate” the origins.
Read Bioreports’s exclusive report
Pandemic paranoia is a real thing, say mental health experts
From Bioreports’s Allison Hope
The trifecta of the pandemic, required social isolation, and social unrest has driven many of us to more extreme behavior and worries, including paranoia, experts say.
“The pandemic has brought on great uncertainty and stress,” said Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a New York City-based forensic psychiatrist who is currently president of the World Mental Health Coalition.
Contributing to this is an uncertain economic environment and the active disinformation around both the pandemic and other issues perpetuated by historically trusted institutions, like the US government and the office of the President.
“The exceptionally prolonged lockdown because of ineffective management and the subsequent social disruptions and economic misery — in many ways worse than the Great Depression, with tremendous inequities, hunger, homelessness, unemployment, and despair — are already leading to rampant drug addiction, depression, suicides, and homicides,” Lee said.
“Meanwhile, we now have a large segment of the population that has been encouraged and conditioned to avoid reality. When living in delusion, detached from reality, one naturally becomes paranoid because facts and evidence are constantly ‘attacking’ these false, cherished beliefs,” she added.
The John Hopkins Psychiatry Guide defines paranoia as “a response to perceived threats that is heavily influenced by anxiety and fear, existing along a continuum of normal, reality-based experience to delusional beliefs.”
The symptoms of paranoia can range from the very subtle to completely overwhelming and can exist with or without other mental conditions, according to Lee and major medical associations. People don’t need to have diagnosable mental health disorders to have paranoid thoughts or feelings.
Read the full story here
First batch of Russia’s Sputnik V shot is delivered to Mexico
From Bioreports’s Matthew Chance and Zahra Ullah in Moscow
Mexico, the first country in North America to approve Russia’s coronavirus shot, has received its first batch of the vaccine, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said Tuesday.
Video posted on Twitter by Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard shows the delivery of the Sputnik V vaccine in a cargo area of an airplane after landing in Mexico.
“On February 3, 2021 the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risk of Mexico (COFEPRIS) approved Sputnik V under the emergency use authorization procedure without additional clinical trials in the country,” the RDIF said in a statement.
“It is a significant breakthrough in Russia’s efforts to fight COVID-19 and clearly shows that saving lives is above politics,” Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the RDIF, told Bioreports.
Sputnik V has now been approved for use in more than 30 countries and is one of the world’s most pre-ordered vaccines, with at least 50 countries, from Argentina to the Philippines, ordering nearly 2.5 billion doses so far, according to figures from the RDIF, which oversees global distribution and sales of the vaccine.
Mexico has the third highest death toll in the world, behind the United States and Brazil, with more than 180,000 fatalities, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally.
New cases of Covid-19 variants falling “quite sharply,” says UK health secretary
From Bioreports’s Amy Cassidy in Glasgow
“New variant” cases of Covid-19 are falling across the UK, according to the country’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, who credits extra border measures for the drop.
British people arriving home from “high risk” countries have to undergo a 10-day hotel quarantine at their own expense in a bid to tighten border controls to try to curb one of the world’s worst coronavirus outbreaks.
The UK has the highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe, with more than 120,000 fatalities, and remains under strict pandemic restrictions, partly due to a new, more transmissible variant of coronavirus first discovered in southeast England. Other variants, including those first detected in South Africa and Brazil, are also spreading globally.
“In the last week or so, there were just over a dozen new cases, which is far smaller than we were seeing even a couple of weeks ago,” Hancock said on Sky News Tuesday morning.
“So the extra measures we’re taking at the border are working, and also the lower cases rate makes it much less likely that there will be new variants here because new variants tend to rise when you’ve got an area that’s got a very high case rate and the virus is trying to escape from the immunity are getting naturally,” he added.
Asked how the government’s plan to ease lockdown in England, published Monday, would affect the spread of the South African and Brazilian variants, Hancock responded: “Well, the good news is that the number of new variant cases we’re finding across the whole UK has fallen quite sharply over the last month.”
“Continued work” is needed to understand the effectiveness of vaccines against the South African and Brazilian variants, he said, and that will impact a government review into international travel restrictions, announced yesterday.
After the interview, Hancock tweeted that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s roadmap out England’s lockdown is “only possible because of the vaccine roll-out.”
“It’s vital everybody plays their part so we can get out of this as soon as we possibly can,” he added.
Japan appoints Minister for Loneliness to combat rising suicide rate
From Bioreports’s Junko Ogura in Tokyo
Japan appointed its first Minister for Loneliness this month after the country’s suicide rate increased for the first time in 11 years during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Tetsushi Sakamoto took over the newly created position on February 12.
In his inaugural press conference, Sakamoto said Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga appointed him to address national matters “including the issue of the increasing women’s suicide rate under the pandemic.”
“Suga instructed me to examine the issue and put forward a comprehensive strategy, by coordinating with the related ministry,” Sakamoto added. “I hope to carry out activities to prevent social loneliness and isolation and to protect ties between people.”
The Japanese government also created an “isolation/loneliness countermeasures office” within the cabinet on February 19 for issues such as suicide and child poverty — which have risen during the pandemic.
Japan has so far recorded more than 426,000 Covid-19 cases and 7,577 deaths, according to data from John Hopkins University.
It has so far administered more than 5,000 vaccine doses.
Oman to suspend incoming flights from 10 countries amid spread of Covid-19 variants
From Bioreports’s Raja Razek
Oman’s supreme committee for dealing with Covid-19 has decided to suspend incoming flights from 10 countries for 15 days over concerns about the spread of variants, according to state-run Oman News Agency.
“The Supreme Committee studied the impact of the global epidemiological situation on health systems in different countries of the world, particularly amid the spread of mutated variants of the virus linked to travel,” the report said.
The 10 countries are:
- Sudan
- Lebanon
- South Africa
- Brazil
- Nigeria
- Tanzania
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Sierra Leone
- Ethiopia
The report said in addition, “arrivals from any other country if the travelers happened to have visited the above-mentioned ten countries within 14 days before applying to enter the Sultanate” will also be banned.
According to the state-run news agency, the 15-day ban, with an exemption granted to Omani citizens, diplomats, and health workers and their families, takes effect from 12 a.m. local time next Thursday.
