‘Wall of secrecy’ in Pfizer contracts as company accused of profiteering. Ministers have agreed a secrecy clause in any dispute with the drugs manufacturer Pfizer over Britain’s Covid vaccine supply.
Large portions of the government’s contracts with the company over the supply of 189m vaccine doses have been redacted and any arbitration proceedings will be kept secret. The revelation comes as Pfizer is accused by a former senior US health official of “war profiteering’’ during the pandemic. In a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation to be broadcast this week, Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Barack Obama, said: “If you’re just focusing on maximising your profits and you’re a vaccine manufacturer … you are war profiteering.” Zain Rizvi, research director at Public Citizen, a US consumer advocacy organisation which has examined Pfizer’s global vaccine contracts, said: “There is a wall of secrecy surrounding these contracts and it’s unacceptable, particularly in a public health crisis.” Scientists warn of new Covid variant with high number of mutations. Scientists have said a new Covid variant that carries an “extremely high number” of mutations may drive further waves of disease by evading the body’s defences.
Only 10 cases in three countries have been confirmed by genomic sequencing, but the variant has sparked serious concern among some researchers because a number of the mutations may help the virus evade immunity. The B.1.1.529 variant has 32 mutations in the spike protein, the part of the virus that most vaccines use to prime the immune system against Covid. Mutations in the spike protein can affect the virus’s ability to infect cells and spread, but also make it harder for immune cells to attack the pathogen. The variant was first spotted in Botswana, where three cases have now been sequenced.
Six more have been confirmed in South Africa, and one in Hong Kong in a traveller returning from South Africa. Is Delta the last Covid ‘super variant’? Every week, a group of epidemiologists across the north-east of the United States joins a Zoom call entirely devoted to discussing the latest hints of new Covid-19 variants being reported around the world.
“It’s like the weather report,” says William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “It used to be, ‘We have a little bit of Gamma there, we’ve got Alpha coming up here.’ But now it’s just Delta.” Since it was first detected in India in December 2020, the Delta variant of Sars-CoV-2 has become so ubiquitous that it would be easy to assume that the once-rapid evolution of the virus has been replaced by a state of quiescence. According to the World Health Organization, 99.5% of all Covid-19 genomic sequences reported to public databases are now Delta. Lost in EUrope, der EU-Blog. Why is Europe returning to the dark days of Covid?
It was almost as if the pandemic had never happened.
In Cologne, thousands of revellers in fancy-dress jostled side by side in a tightly packed throng as they counted down to the start of the annual carnival season at 11am on 11 November. In Paris, the bars and clubs were open late and filled to bursting on Wednesday, with Armistice Day a national holiday. Calls for inquiry as negative Covid PCR tests after positive lateral flow reported. Scientists are calling for an urgent investigation after dozens of reports of people testing negative using gold-standard Covid PCR tests, despite testing positive on rapid lateral flow tests, and in many cases experiencing Covid-like symptoms.
The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said it had been made aware of people in some areas of the country anecdotally reporting positive lateral flow test results with subsequent negative PCR tests, and that it was looking into the cause. Scientists told the Guardian that they would like to see more being done to ensure that members of the public who may be infected with the virus are not being falsely reassured that it is safe for them to mix with other people. “But if you’ve got symptoms of a respiratory infection and a lateral flow test that’s positive, I would be working on the assumption that it’s Covid-19 regardless of the PCR result at the moment.
JCVI issues updated advice on COVID-19 vaccination of young people aged 16 to 17. In the last few weeks, there have been large changes in the way COVID-19 has been spreading in the UK, particularly in younger age groups.
The adult vaccine programme has progressed very successfully and more safety data has become available, so it was important to review the advice for the vaccination of children and young people. This updated advice means we can be confident that young people will be afforded around 80% protection against hospitalisation, following receipt of their first dose. It is expected that protection will probably be even higher as younger people respond better to vaccines and some will have already had the COVID-19 infection, meaning they will have an even better response to a first dose.
The JCVI has looked at the very latest safety data from the UK and other countries as we know that some serious side effects have been reported in this younger age group. Giving booster shots before the world is vaccinated won’t keep the UK safe from Covid. Should Britain approve booster doses for broad swathes of the population?
TheJoint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is deciding this week, and has already advised a third dose be offered to over-11s who had severe immunosuppression at the time of their first or second jab (including people with conditions such as leukaemia). Approving a mass booster programme would bring Britain in line with countries such as the United States and Israel that are already offering third doses to their vaccinated populations. These plans are based on concerns that the protection offered by vaccines may wane over time.
Fichiers - Dropbox. The Wuhan lab leak theory is more about politics than science. If Joe Biden’s security staff are up to the mark, a new report on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic will be placed on the president’s desk this week.
His team was given 90 days in May to review the virus’s origins after several US scientists indicated they were no longer certain about the source of Sars-CoV-2. It will be intriguing to learn how Biden’s team answers the critically important questions that still surround the origins of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Did it emerge because of natural viral spillovers from bats to another animal and then into humans?
Or did it leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? And, if so, had it been enhanced to make it especially virulent? Les confinements auraient nettement réduit les capacités physiques et intellectuelles des enfants. Gordon Brown hits out at EU’s ‘neocolonial approach’ to Covid vaccine supplies. Gordon Brown has accused the EU of adopting a “neocolonial approach” to the supply of Covid-19 vaccines and demanded rich western nations relinquish their stranglehold on pandemic treatments.
The former prime minister has called on Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Mario Draghi to convene a special summit to coincide with next month’s UN general assembly in New York to address Africa’s vaccine deficit. Writing for the Guardian, Brown said it was shocking that that about 10m single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccines produced at a factory in South Africa were being exported to the EU instead of helping African countries meet their modest targets for pandemic jabs.
Brown wrote: “Compared to the swift development of the pathbreaking Covid vaccines, getting shots into all the world’s arms should be straightforward. Rich countries should provide £50bn in financial support, waive patents to allow African countries to manufacture their own drugs and run down stockpiles of vaccines that were not needed.
Vaccins contre la COVID19 : doiton s'inquiéter du risque de maladie aggravée chez les personnes vaccinées ? Vaccin à ARNm : un risque de myocardite et de péricardite confirmé par l'OMS. New Covid variants ‘will set us back a year’, experts warn UK government. Ministers are being pressed to reveal what contingency plans are in place to deal with a future Covid variant that evades current vaccines, amid warnings from scientific advisers that such an outcome could set the battle against the pandemic back a year or more.
Recent papers produced by the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) have suggested that the arrival of a variant that evades vaccines is a “realistic possibility”. Sage backed continued work on new vaccines that reduce infection and transmission more than current jabs, the creation of more vaccine-production facilities in the UK and lab-based studies to predict evolution of variants. With the arrival of a new variant seen as one of the main dangers that could intensify the crisis once again, prominent scientific figures stressed the risks. “It is unlikely that such a new virus evades entirely all immunity from past infection or vaccines,” he said.
Covid-19 : face au variant Delta, l’efficacité et les limites des vaccins à ARN. Booster jabs for rich countries will cause more deaths worldwide, say experts. Many more people around the world will die of Covid if western political leaders “reject their responsibility to the rest of humanity” by prioritising booster shots for their own populations instead of sharing doses, the head of the Oxford vaccine group has warned. Writing for the Guardian, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, and Seth Berkley, the chief executive of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, say that the scientific and public health case for large-scale boosting has not been made and could have far-reaching consequences in other countries.
“This is a key moment for decision-makers,” they write. “Large-scale boosting in one rich country would send a signal around the world that boosters are needed everywhere. This will suck many vaccine doses out of the system, and many more people will die because they never even had a chance to get a single dose. On Tuesday, Sajid Javid said plans were in place to offer all over-50s a Covid booster at the same time as they receive the flu jab. Common myths about Covid – debunked. I don’t have any symptoms – so even if I have Covid, I won’t give it to anyone else The other thing is the peak infectiousness in those who do develop symptoms is actually the day or two before they start feeling ill.
Because people who feel totally fine are far more likely to be out and about than those who are feeling ill, people who have Covid either without symptoms or before they get symptoms contribute a lot to spread. One study estimated people without symptoms are responsible for more than half of new infections. Delta variant renders herd immunity from Covid ‘mythical’ Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group has said. Giving evidence to MPs on Tuesday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard said the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was “mythical”.
“The problem with this virus is [it is] not measles. If 95% of people were vaccinated against measles, the virus cannot transmit in the population,” he told the all-party parliamentary group (APPG) on coronavirus. Story telling contre virus ? Passe sanitaire : « L’échec du discernement politique aura été de ne pas saisir l’importance d’un dialogue avec la société » Covid discoveries: what we know now that we didn’t know before. Since the Covid pandemic took off in early 2020, researchers have been studying myriad aspects of the virus, and made some surprising discoveries. Here are four areas where our understanding has changed: How Covid spreads When Covid first hit the UK, so too did sales of hand sanitiser.
On 28 February, Boris Johnson said: “The best thing people can do to prevent the spread of coronavirus is wash your hands.” The emphasis was, in part, because it was thought one of the key routes by which Covid was spread was by people touching contaminated surfaces and then touching their own face – so called “fomite transmission”. UK can expect thousands of Covid deaths every year, warn scientists. Britain faces the prospect of thousands of annual Covid deaths for years to come, scientists have warned. They say waves of cases are likely to sweep the country every winter as Covid-19 joins other seasonal viruses, including influenza, in taking its toll of elderly and infirm people. Every year, as cold weather forces people indoors, virus transmission will increase, case numbers will rise, and some of these will result in deaths. The warning comes as Covid case numbers look likely to stabilise through the summer, but with researchers saying incidence could rise again in autumn as vaccination rates falter and schools return.
Covid-19 dans le monde : des documents américains sonnent l’alarme face au variant Delta. ‘The war has changed’: CDC paper warns Delta variant is far more transmissible. Peut-on transmettre le Covid-19 en étant vacciné ? Covid-19 : « Décider de se faire vacciner, c’est aussi un geste politique car il concerne les affaires de la cité, les autres, le collectif » Vaccines ‘outpaced by variants’, WHO warns, as Delta now in 98 countries. Diabète, hypertension : la pandémie de Covid-19 pourrait entraîner une flambée des maladies chroniques.
Les confinements auraient nettement réduit les capacités physiques et intellectuelles des enfants. Covid-19 : ce qu’on sait et ce qu’on ignore sur le variant indien – Réalités Biomédicales. Covid-19 en France : le vaccin d’AstraZeneca proscrit en Moselle, en Guyane, à Mayotte et à La Réunion. New COVID variants have changed the game, and vaccines will not be enough. We need global 'maximum suppression' Global rollout of vaccines is no longer a guarantee of victory over Covid-19. « En France, vous perdez sur tous les tableaux : économique et sanitaire. Vous avez les morts et la crise » Covid-19 : bientôt 100 000 morts en France, et l’indifférence s’installe. Le cocktail explosif du Covid et de la pollution de l’air. Safety and immunogenicity of a mRNA rabies vaccine in healthy adults: an open-label, non-randomised, prospective, first-in-human phase 1 clinical trial.
Une molécule d’ARN à l’origine des maladies auto-immunes. European Commission. Il est hautement improbable que les vaccins à ARN "tuent par tempête cytokinique"