An alarming and disquieting milestone
Yesterday, we passed the five million mark. Five million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in America since January. To put this in a better perspective consider this: If you took every one of those five-million people and stood them shoulder to shoulder, the line would extend from Canada to the Mexican border. About 2,200 miles.
As for deaths, we have reached 163,000, and still rising with no end in sight. That number is more than three times the number of American soldiers who died in World War 1. More than three times the number of American soldiers killed during the 16-year Vietnam War.
This continuing death spiral is happening as Congress and the Administration are, as legendary Boston sportscaster Johnny Most used to say, “fiddling and diddling.” And all this fiddling and diddling is going on while millions of our fellow citizens watch their livelihoods and their dreams of a better life for them and their children dissolve into thin air.
We deserve better than this. Fiddling and diddling with a human tragedy of this magnitude is an obscene abomination.
Vaccine update
In the pre-clinical biotech world, we call them non-human primates. To everyone else, they’re monkeys, usually rhesus monkeys.
We have reported, and I’m sure you’re aware, that a number of companies have entered Phase 3 clinical trials testing their vaccines on thousands of people. Until COVID-19, that always followed years of pre-clinical work that usually began with mice. But because regulators have compressed and redesigned the vaccine development process, companies and institutions are running their pre-clinical and clinical trials simultaneously, in parallel.
Now, four groups have reported promising results with non-human primates, those rhesus monkeys. All of the approaches are different, but they settle into two methodologies:
- Attacking SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, through Messenger RNA.
- Using a replication-deficient chimpanzee adenovirus to deliver a SARS-CoV-2 protein to induce a protective immune response.
You don’t really need to understand the science. What is important to know is all four groups reported that their vaccines have shown promising results in monkeys. The critical thing here is this: Three or four weeks after vaccinating the monkeys, each of the groups put SARS-CoV-2 into the monkeys’ noses. Each of the vaccines offered protection for the monkeys. Three of the four groups gave the vaccine in two shots, a prime followed weeks later by a booster.
The team of Oxford University and AstraZenica injected with one shot. Their results presented some concerns. While their vaccine prevented the monkeys from developing pneumonia, it did not clear the virus, indicating the vaccinated monkeys remained infected and able to spread the disease. It should be noted that the scientists infected the monkeys with ten times the viral load that a person would experience. Still, the group said protection might have been significantly enhanced had they given two shots.
These monkey trials are tremendously important, because scientists can give the monkeys their vaccine and then infect them with SARS-Cov-2, something they cannot do with their human volunteers in their Phase 3 trials.
The four groups are:
- Moderna, working with the Swiss company Lonza, New Jersey-based Catalent and the National Institutes of Health. Its vaccine, mRNA-1273, contains snippets of viral mRNA, a molecule with instructions for making proteins. Moderna packs the mRNA inside a slippery pod made of lipids, so it can slide easily into the cells.
- Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, working with AstraZenica. Its vaccine, ChAdOx1, uses a replication-deficient chimpanzee adenovirus to deliver a SARS-CoV-2 protein to induce a protective immune response. Their approach has been successful before as the first Ebola vaccine.
- Pfizer, working with BioNTech, a German biotechnology company. Their vaccine, BNT162b2, also takes the mRNA route encoding an optimized version of the whole spike protein, which we wrote about here.
- Johnson & Johnson, working with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Its vaccine candidate, Ad26.COV2.S, delivers the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into cells using an inactivated common cold virus as the delivery vehicle. J & J gave a single shot of Ad26.COV2.S, and that provided significant immunity to COVID-19. But previous J & J studies showed giving a second booster shot raised the antibody response by tenfold in both animals and people.
All of this is promising, indeed. It is evidence we should be optimistic that we’ll have one or more effective vaccines by early 2021. However, it is worth noting that the road to a successful vaccine is littered with the decaying carcasses of failures.