[News] The Coronavirus Good News thread

[Fungus]

It's been literally three posts. Hardly a thread hijacking.

Of all NSC threads, this is the one that really shouldn't be hijacked, but it has been.

Please post financial advice elsewhere!

 

[dazzer6666]

I accumulated a bit of a wedge a couple of years ago and put it in managed funds - the same sort of thing that your pension will be invested in - via an investment ISA account. Carries a risk relating to stock market, but you can choose lower risk funds if you want. The ones that most of my money is in give a monthly income equating to just over 4%, so not a bad return.

What's the capital risk of that fund ?

 

[peterward]

As selfish as it may sound, the best hope for us here, and our relative returns to normality in the shortest timeframe.....maybe even getting to go to the Amex this season, must surely lay with the Oxford/GSK vaccine...... Whilst the US has some very promising candidates, that are clearly showing positive signs, every leader is going to prioritise their own citizens, dying in their thousands before they consider export partners...... A lot of work has been done to meet capacity quickly, and in 2 years from now you'd hope all the best global candidates, with best efficacy are in the UK pharma system.... But in the shorter term, I'd guess for Us Brits the Oxford candidate is the one (if it works) that we may have quicker access too......... It's still massively encouraging when 6 months ago, we were told 18 months min and may never have something that works.

 

[Fungus]

What's the capital risk of that fund ?

There's an existing thread for financial discussions, and it's already been mentioned on the previous page. Please keep this thread for Good News!

https://www.northstandchat.com/show...rest-rates-What-to-do-with-savings-spare-cash

 

[peterward]

There's an existing thread for financial discussions, and it's already been mentioned on the previous page. Please keep this thread for Good News!

https://www.northstandchat.com/show...rest-rates-What-to-do-with-savings-spare-cash

 

[dazzer6666]

There's an existing thread for financial discussions, and it's already been mentioned on the previous page. Please keep this thread for Good News!

https://www.northstandchat.com/show...rest-rates-What-to-do-with-savings-spare-cash

Yes, I posted the link to it just above [emoji2369][emoji2369]

 

[Mellotron]

Moncef Slaoui - head of US's vaccine programme - says the first vaccine should be submitted for emergency authorization around Thanksgiving

Moncef Slaoui, an immunologist by training and a longtime pharmaceutical executive, is running the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program to spur development of vaccines on the fastest ever timetable.

While none of the four vaccine candidates to enter Phase 3 trials have publicly reported data from the mid-stage studies, Slaoui is hopeful that drug makers will file for emergency authorization with the Food and Drug Administration by late November, immunization in high-risk populations could begin this year, and that the vaccines may be more effective in clinical trials than previously assumed.

“My expectation is really something between 80% and 90% efficacy,” he said.

Operation Warp Speed has been both lauded and criticized for its aggressive timeline. The project aims to bring to market a set of vaccines and treatments with a target of delivering 300 million doses of a vaccine starting in January. Like many scientists, however, Slaoui seems to prefer to focus on the data, and not the politics, even in the highly politicized environment surrounding vaccine development. President Donald Trump has referred to Slaoui as a “world-renowned immunologist” but also said he disagrees with his timeline for vaccine distribution, citing politics. However, Slaoui told Science in September he would resign if politics interfered with the vaccine development process.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/t...-authorization-around-thanksgiving-2020-10-08

 

[Mellotron]

Johnson & Johnson To Give Poor Countries 500M Free COVID Vaccines

Johnson & Johnson, which is in the third and final stage of its trial to develop a coronavirus vaccine, announced it will give up to 500 million doses of that vaccine to poorer countries around the world. They did not specify which countries would get it for free.

Johnson & Johnson said it will know by the end of 2020 whether their vaccine works. Other pharma companies, such as Pfizer and Moderna, may have a vaccine ready even before that.

If all goes well with this final trial, Johnson & Johnson anticipates the first batches of its COVID-19 vaccine will be available for emergency use in the United States in early 2021.

The free doses given to developing nations would be rolled out in the middle of next year, said the pharmaceutical giant, which has its global corporate headquarters in New Brunswick.

https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbru...-give-poor-countries-500m-free-covid-vaccines

 

[Farehamseagull]

Johnson & Johnson To Give Poor Countries 500M Free COVID Vaccines



https://patch.com/new-jersey/newbru...-give-poor-countries-500m-free-covid-vaccines

More positive news, thank you again for these updates Mellotron. You and the others who regularly contribute are a shining light in amongst the never ending darkness I seem to be reading and hearing about from the mainstream media at the moment! I wish you had a wider reach so that the general public could see it is not all doom and gloom at the moment.

 

[highflyer]

Here's a pretty realistic roundup of where things are. No false optimism, but also showing that it's not as bleak as parts of the twittersphere would have you believe. Especially in the south (albeit with no room for complacency). In my view this is likely to be a FAR more accurate picture than the 'numbers testing positive' data, which, over the last couple of weeks, is really just a record of how the testing and reporting system broke down and then caught up again.

And don't forget, all the signs are that we may be only two or three months away from the start of a vaccination roll-out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv1ItSPkAHY

 

[Mr Banana]

Here's a pretty realistic roundup of where things are. No false optimism, but also showing that it's not as bleak as parts of the twittersphere would have you believe. Especially in the south (albeit with no room for complacency). In my view this is likely to be a FAR more accurate picture than the 'numbers testing positive' data, which, over the last couple of weeks, is really just a record of how the testing and reporting system broke down and then caught up again.

And don't forget, all the signs are that we may be only two or three months away from the start of a vaccination roll-out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv1ItSPkAHY

Tim Spector is a gem. Would trust him with my season ticket. Integrity in a sea of shit...which is fitting seeing as he's quite keen for the country to send him their shit.

 

[Mellotron]

As requested on the Covid sub-forum, a reminder of a statistical truth, in another moment where this may all feel a bit endless;

85.4% of vaccines that make it to Phase III get approved.

Source: Biostatistics paper that was published in April 2019.

We are likely to have a number of vaccines approved in the next 1-3 months. This thing will end.

 

[Mellotron]

From the New York Times;

A dose of optimism

Our colleague Donald G. McNeil Jr. wrote that since January, when he began covering the coronavirus, he has been a “consistently gloomy Cassandra” — reporting on the catastrophic fallout of the pandemic that many experts saw coming.

And yet, he said, he has recently become cautiously optimistic.

The worst-case scenario — in which some 2.2 million Americans die from the virus — has not come to pass. Around the world, hundreds of millions of people have made huge sacrifices in shutting down parts of the economy, maintaining social distance and wearing masks.

Those sacrifices have made the possibility of a “twindemic” of coronavirus and influenza infections seem far less likely now, too. The flu season is typically seeded each year in the Northern Hemisphere by travelers from the Southern Hemisphere. But this year the flu season there was almost nonexistent because of anti-coronavirus measures.

Donald also noted that the percentage of infected people who are dying from the virus has been falling because of all of the lessons we’ve learned during the last few months. Nursing homes have gotten better at protecting their residents, steroids like dexamethasone have lowered the number of deaths, and tactics like rolling patients onto their stomachs and delaying ventilator use have also been shown to help. Pharmaceutical interventions like monoclonal antibodies, still in the early stages of availability, are likely to become even more effective.

Vaccine development has been moving much faster than anticipated. Operation Warp Speed has put more than $11 billion into seven vaccine candidates, and Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser on the program, said he expected two to be approved by January, with an efficacy of 75 to 90 percent. Mr. Slaoui also said that factories would produce enough doses for all 330 million Americans to be vaccinated by next June. That all suggests the pandemic in the United States may be over far sooner than expected, possibly by the middle of next year.

 

[e77]

[tweet]1313238311662759943[/tweet]

 

[Poojah]

Right, this thread's been a bit quiet lately for obvious reasons however I wanted to at least chip in with some anti-bad news. This story just popped up as a notification on my phone, and is one of the lead stories on Sky News right now.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavi...-end-pandemic-says-uk-vaccines-chief-12103362

The headline is so depressing I almost didn't bother to read its content. It reads:

Coronavirus: First vaccines 'unlikely to end pandemic' - says UK vaccines chief

A pretty sobering title from a robust source, right? Well, no, actually - because nowhere in this article is there a quote or even an inference to this effect. In fact, most of the story is actually quite positive. The following are verbatim quotes and extracts from the article:

• The UK has 340 million doses of six prototype vaccines in its stockpile - more than any other country.
  
• The reason we've gone for a range of vaccines is to maximise our chances that we will have at least one successful vaccine that works in the population who are most vulnerable.
  
• We are always looking for additional vaccines for delivery at different times or with a different immune profile.
  
• Two vaccines, made by Oxford University/AstraZeneca and BioNTech/Pfizer, are expected to release data from key phase 3 clinical trials within weeks.
  
• Flu vaccines are 50% effective, but they are widely used and have a big impact on reducing the clinical impacts of flu in the population.
  
• More than 270,000 people have so far signed up to the Vaccine Research Registry in the hope of joining trials.
  
• The prolonged pause of a US trial of the Oxford vaccine, due to a possible adverse event, should not delay a decision by UK regulators on whether it was safe and effective to roll out on this side of the Atlantic.
  
• We have four of our six vaccines now in phase 3 efficacy clinical trials, so we have vaccines that have progressed rapidly into that final stage of efficacy testing.

I promise I'm not cherry picking here either, the extracts above account for about 80% of the article's structure. Journalists have a lot of power at the minute; it seems some are going a bit mad with it.

 

[blue-shifted]

Right, this thread's been a bit quiet lately for obvious reasons however I wanted to at least chip in with some anti-bad news. This story just popped up as a notification on my phone, and is one of the lead stories on Sky News right now.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavi...-end-pandemic-says-uk-vaccines-chief-12103362

The headline is so depressing I almost didn't bother to read its content. It reads:

Coronavirus: First vaccines 'unlikely to end pandemic' - says UK vaccines chief

A pretty sobering title from a robust source, right? Well, no, actually - because nowhere in this article is there a quote or even an inference to this effect. In fact, most of the story is actually quite positive. The following are verbatim quotes and extracts from the article:

• The UK has 340 million doses of six prototype vaccines in its stockpile - more than any other country.
  
• The reason we've gone for a range of vaccines is to maximise our chances that we will have at least one successful vaccine that works in the population who are most vulnerable.
  
• We are always looking for additional vaccines for delivery at different times or with a different immune profile.
  
• Two vaccines, made by Oxford University/AstraZeneca and BioNTech/Pfizer, are expected to release data from key phase 3 clinical trials within weeks.
  
• Flu vaccines are 50% effective, but they are widely used and have a big impact on reducing the clinical impacts of flu in the population.
  
• More than 270,000 people have so far signed up to the Vaccine Research Registry in the hope of joining trials.
  
• The prolonged pause of a US trial of the Oxford vaccine, due to a possible adverse event, should not delay a decision by UK regulators on whether it was safe and effective to roll out on this side of the Atlantic.
  
• We have four of our six vaccines now in phase 3 efficacy clinical trials, so we have vaccines that have progressed rapidly into that final stage of efficacy testing.

I promise I'm not cherry picking here either, the extracts above account for about 80% of the article's structure. Journalists have a lot of power at the minute; it seems some are going a bit mad with it.

Thanks Poojah. This is the way to keep our chins up. The cavalry is coming. We'll have to show patience and restraint for one more winter

 

[Mellotron]

Further vaccine-related bits and bobs;

The following is translated from a German article, so some sentences may read a little oddly. They seem very confident about the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine though, as Pfizer themselves do.

Corona vaccine: Breakthrough at Biontech - vaccinations possible in winter

After AstraZeneca, another major pharmaceutical company had to suspend an important vaccine study. As the US drug manufacturer Johnson & Johnson announced, the study was temporarily stopped on Monday because of an unexplained illness in a subject.

The US company originally belonged to the very group from which the EU Commission secured hundreds of millions of vaccine doses because only one dose would be enough. Others, however, require a second vaccination. Could salvation come from Germany of all places? The city of Bochum would be happy, it is on the way to the risk area.

Corona vaccine: Breakthrough at Biontech - vaccinations possible in winter

As reported by ntv , the newly developed vaccine BNT162b2 from the pharmaceutical company Biontech has successfully completed clinical trials. The mass production has already begun, the final permit application is already pending. They are on the verge of "putting an end to this pandemic," they say.

The vaccine is now being tested in the so-called rolling review process in Amsterdam. In April, Biontech was the first German company to receive approval to receive clinical studies. Around 37,000 participants have now been included in the study, 28,000 of whom have already received the second dose.

The corona vaccine BNT162b2 has "an excellent profile," says Biontech boss Ugur Sahin in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In addition, you are "slowly approaching the home straight," said Sahin.

The first corona vaccinations could start in winter. And that without a long start-up phase. "If all horses cross the finish line, we will have way too much vaccine ," said Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn.

https://www.wa.de/deutschland-welt/...e-dosis-deutschland-biontech-zr-90068929.html

Covid-19 vaccine: Oxford vaccine phase three results by November-December | India News - Times of India

NEW DELHI: The results of phase three trials of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine being conducted in India could be available by "end-November/early-December", raising hopes that the leading anti-Covid candidate - manufactured in India by the Serum Institute - may be available sooner than expected.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com...by-november-december/articleshow/78650291.cms

Saw a further confirmation of a rolling review again, this time Moderna's. So now I believe that is Oxford's, Moderna's and Pfizer's all in the review phase.

 

[Mellotron]

Further (very) positive news on novel treatments - this one appears to be particularly effective in people with severe Covid. The good news is that it is apparently relatively inexpensive and can be taken in pill form;

Relief Therapeutics has announced that its NeuroRX-partnered COVID-19 drug RLF-100 met the survival threshold in intensive care patients and added that it expects detailed trial data this year.

Relief and NeuroRx are still awaiting the detailed results from rigorous randomised studies of RLF-100 (aviptadil) for the treatment of COVID-19 patients. However, in top-line results from an open-label prospective study of patients who had severe comorbidities that meant they were ineligible for the ongoing controlled phase 2/3b trial, RLF-100 appeared to possess efficacy against COVID-19.

The companies said that 81% of patients treated with RLF-100 survived beyond 60 days, compared to 17% of patients who did not receive the medication.

In addition, patients treated with RLF-100 demonstrated a nine-fold increased possibility of survival and recovery from respiratory failure, along with a high degree of statistical significance.

“The patients included in this study are representative of those who are too ill to be included in the clinical trials of any known treatment for COVID-19,” said Jonathan Javitt, chief executive officer and chairman of NeuroRx.

“The results suggest that there may be substantial hope to mitigate the attack of the coronavirus on the delicate cells that line the lung with a natural peptide that has been protecting the lung’s lining since humans first walked the earth.

“While the number of patients treated [in the study] is modest, the initial results in our nationwide expanded access programme suggest similarly encouraging survival with RLF-100. We continue to closely monitor treatment with RLT-100T in other hospitals,” he added

RLF-100 is a formulation of vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) that was originally awarded a US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) orphan drug designation in 2001.

VIP is known to be highly concentrated in the lungs and thought to block the formulation of inflammatory cytokine and prevent cell death.

The FDA has now granted the drug an investigational new drug (IND) authorisation and a fast track designation for intravenous and inhaled delivery for the treatment of COVID-19.

The potential COVID-19 treatment is being investigated in two controlled phase 2/3b clinical trials in respiratory deficiency caused by COVID-19.

If vaccines cannot completely stamp out the virus, it is treatments like this that will reduce the mortality rate right down to a manageable level.

Science is coming to our rescue. Hold tight.

 

[Mellotron]

From Derek Lowe's In The Pipeline Blog, a useful bit of perspective on our current situation re: waiting for vaccines;

Another vaccine trial halt

The first advice is “Don’t panic”. You will have heard that last night J&J announced that their coronavirus vaccine dosing has been paused while they investigate an adverse event in the trial. And while you never like to hear that, considering the size of their effort, this sort of thing is likely to happen even if the vaccine turns out to have no real safety issues. Just this morning, the company’s CEO told analysts on a conference call that they don’t even know yet if the affected patient is in the treatment group or the controls (placebo): that’s how early this is. Now, there are definitely ways that this could go that would be concerning, but we’re not there yet.

In the larger picture, this (and the AstraZeneca vaccine halt, which continues here in their US trial) are why we have been developing so many candidates. The central fact of the biopharma industry is that most things we try don’t work. That means that (1) we have to keep trying a lot of things, and (2) since that costs a lot of money, we generally charge a lot for the things that actually do work. I expect the coronavirus vaccine success rate to be higher than the industry average, though, because (thanks to the work on the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks) we already had a lot of information about how these coronaviruses are organized, how they attack cells, where the best choices might be to produce antigens against them, and some of the potential problems we would need to look out for. All that has been an invaluable leg up.

It will be a good thing if we don’t do the industry average, though, because that’s around a 90% failure rate from a standing start. Here’s the good news about that: what we’ve been able to see from the Phase I/II data on the various candidates is very encouraging. We can indeed stimulate antibody and T-cell responses, and every single vaccine that has reported data at this level has shown this. The uncertainty is that we don’t know (yet) what responses we need for a given level of protection, how well such vaccines will work across different populations groups (ages, risk factors), nor how long such protection will last. The only way to get those numbers is to go out there and get them, which is what’s going on right now.

And the other big uncertainty, which we’re also dealing with now, is safety. Again, the only way to find out about this is to go find out about it – we have no ways to really predict what might happen when a new vaccine is dosed in a large population. Showstopping holy-crap level tox effects are extremely rare (fortunately), but that means that you’re then looking for unlikely adverse events across a large trial population, and trying to figure out what will happen when you expand to a much larger one. It ain’t easy.

So this latest J&J headline has not changed my views. They’re still overall positive. I still think we’re going to have at least one (and likely more than one) useful vaccine in the next few months. It’s just that I have no idea of which ones those will be. And I also think that we will have even better choices in the longer term, once we’ve broken the back of the current pandemic: there are a lot of other interesting candidates that are just getting towards human trials.

But this doesn’t mean that things will go smoothly, which is why I wrote this earlier post. This is what drug development is like all the time; all we’ve done is hit the fast-forward button and put the spotlights on it. I completely understand if it’s nerve-wracking to watch, believe me. Remember, it’s extremely likely that there will be more dips and swerves coming, and it’s a good idea to try to be psychologically ready for them. When they come, it doesn’t mean that everything’s failed. We have too many things going for one piece of news to mean that. I’ll end where I started: don’t panic.

Derek's credentials, should anyone be interested;

Derek Lowe, an Arkansan by birth, got his BA from Hendrix College and his PhD in organic chemistry from Duke before spending time in Germany on a Humboldt Fellowship on his post-doc. He’s worked for several major pharmaceutical companies since 1989 on drug discovery projects against schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, osteoporosis and other diseases.

I recommend his In The Pipeline blog for anyone who wants a knowledgeable and calm reading of the current situation. No politics, no unqualified opinions. Just logic and science.

 

[Postman Pat]

Oxford scientists develop extremely rapid diagnostic test for Covid-19

Scientists from Oxford University’s Department of Physics have developed an extremely rapid diagnostic test that detects and identifies viruses in less than five minutes.

The method,*published on the preprint server MedRxiv, is able to differentiate with high accuracy SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, from negative clinical samples, as well as from other common respiratory pathogens such as influenza and seasonal human coronaviruses.

Working directly on throat swabs from COVID-19 patients, without the need for genome extraction, purification or amplification of the viruses, the method starts with the rapid labelling of virus particles in the sample with short fluorescent DNA strands. A microscope is then used to collect images of the sample, with each image containing hundreds of fluorescently-labelled viruses.

Machine-learning software quickly and automatically identifies the virus present in the sample. This approach exploits the fact that distinct virus types have differences in their fluorescence labeling due to differences in their surface chemistry, size, and shape.

The scientists have worked with clinical collaborators at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford to validate the assay on COVID-19 patient samples which were confirmed by conventional RT-PCR methods.

The researchers aim to develop an integrated device that will eventually be used for testing in sites such as businesses, music venues, airports etc., to establish and safeguard COVID-19-free spaces.

They are currently working with Oxford University Innovation (OUI) and two external business/finance advisors to set up a spinout, and are seeking investment to accelerate the translation of the test into a fully integrated device to be deployed as a real-time diagnostic platform capable of detecting multiple virus threats.

They hope to incorporate the company by the end of the year, start product development in early 2021, and have an approved device available within 6 months of that time.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-10-1...elop-extremely-rapid-diagnostic-test-covid-19