UK to launch vaccine trials on COVID-19

LONDON: British clinical trials of vaccines against new variants of COVID-19 will start in the summer to prepare updated jabs for the autumn if variants evade the current inoculations, the Oxford University vaccine group’s lead researcher has told the UK Parliament.

Prof. Sarah Gilbert said her team is producing an initial group of vaccines against new variants that are at least partially resistant to the current jabs being rolled out.

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The new versions of the vaccine are being produced in case COVID-19 variants substantially evade immunity provided by the current jabs.

A small trial in South Africa found that a variant that emerged there, and which has since arrived in the UK, is partially resistant to the Oxford vaccine.

Vaccines from Novavax and Johnson & Johnson also appear less effective against the South African variant.

“We need to make preparations so that everything is in place, if it turns out that we do need to do it,” Gilbert told British MPs.

“Currently, the plans are to be ready for an immunization campaign in the autumn, so before going into the winter season we’d have a new variant vaccine available if it turns out that’s what’s going to be required,” she added.

“If we see the emergence of a new strain very close to that date, it’s going to be difficult to go through this whole process, because we do need to conduct a clinical study and get regulatory approval, in time to be vaccinated before the winter.”

Gilbert said trials are underway to judge whether mixing vaccines will provide better protection against COVID-19 by stimulating the immune system in different ways.
The Oxford vaccine group is also looking at producing nasal spray and pill alternatives to the standard inoculation.

KARACHI: Amjad Ali has been a fighter all his life. Despite losing the use of his legs after childhood polio, he was able to fulfil his dream of becoming a successful wheelchair athlete.

But one dream keeps eluding him. For the past six years, he has been unable to watch his favorite cricket team play in a stadium.

With “home” matches played abroad for years due to security risks and, more recently, limited numbers of spectators allowed in stadiums because of coronavirus restrictions, Ali is yet to see his beloved Peshawar Zalmi side compete in Pakistan’s hugely popular Super League cricket competition.

Ali, a Karachi resident, is a diehard fan of Peshawar Zalmi, the home team that represents Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, his home province.

The inaugural national cricket league was launched in 2016 and has been a spectacular success, even though many of the matches in the first five editions had to be played in the UAE due to security risks, preventing fans such as Ali from attending.

Last year, however, all matches of the series were played in Pakistan for the first time, and an overjoyed Ali bought a ticket to see Peshawar play the Multan Sultans.

But the devoted cricket fan never made it to the stadium on March 13: The coronavirus pandemic broke out in February and lockdown restrictions were imposed, including a ban on spectators at stadiums.

This year, with only 50 percent spectator capacity allowed at stadiums due to the pandemic, Ali found that getting his hands on a ticket was no easy task.

“Last year, I had bought a ticket to watch my favorite Peshawar Zalmi, but unfortunately I couldn’t go due to the coronavirus outbreak,” Ali told Arab News. “This time around, the government has allowed limited crowds only, which has made obtaining tickets difficult.”

Ali was born in Shangla, a hilly district in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and now lives in a sprawling slum neighborhood in Karachi. He was only 12 months old when he contracted polio and has never walked.

But his disability did not dampen his dream of becoming an athlete: He is now Pakistan’s No. 4 in wheelchair tennis and a national-level competitor in wheelchair cricket, basketball and handball. He also works as an accountant at a school by day and teaches neighborhood children in the evenings.

“I have struggled a lot in my life and have become a sportsman despite my disability,” Ali said, adding that his favorite player was Daren Sammy, a Saint Lucian-Pakistani cricketer who played at international level for the West Indies. “I see a fighter in him.”

Ali hopes to one day meet Sammy as well as Pakistani players Shoaib Malik, Wahab Riaz and Haider Ali.

“Now coronavirus is a hurdle between me and Peshawar Zalmi,” Ali said. “But I believe, God willing, one day we will defeat coronavirus and I will be able to meet the Peshawar Zalmi players.”

As covid-19 death toll nears 500,000 ‘fight this together’

A spate of high-profile assaults on Asian Americans has renewed long-standing criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups that the U.S. government is vastly undercounting hate crimes, a problem that they say has grown more acute amid rising white nationalism and deepening racial strife.

The attacks — including several in Northern California over the past month that attracted national attention — followed months of warnings from advocates that anti­-China rhetoric from former president Donald Trump over the coronavirus pandemic was contributing to a surge in anti-Asian slurs and violence.

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Although President Biden last month signed an executive action banning the federal government from employing the sort of “inflammatory and xenophobic” language Trump used to describe the virus — such as “China plague” and “kung flu” — Asian American leaders said the recent attacks demonstrate a need for greater urgency in dealing with such threats.

Among other incidents, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old San Francisco resident who had emigrated from Thailand, was killed in late January, in a brazen attack captured on a video that went viral on social media. Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old African American man, was charged in connection with Ratanapakdee’s death and has pleaded not guilty.

Biden administration officials said they are working to address the problem, pointing to a section in the executive memo that instructed the Justice Department to expand its reporting, tracking and prosecutions of “hate incidents.” Officials said those efforts could go beyond hate crimes to include episodes of harassment and discrimination.

During his Senate confirmation hearing Monday, Merrick Garland, Biden’s nominee for attorney general, pledged to support such efforts.

“Hate crimes tear at the fabric of our society. They make our citizens worried about walking the streets and exercising even the most normal rights,” Garland said. “The role of the [Justice Department’s] Civil Rights Division is to prosecute those cases vigorously, and I can ensure you that it will if I am confirmed.”

A 1990 federal law mandates that the FBI collect data specifically on hate crimes each year, but the effort has long been plagued by incomplete and inconsistent data provided by the nation’s estimated 18,000 state, municipal and tribal law enforcement agencies.

The administration is in the early stages of identifying strategies to compel broader participation. Among the ideas advocates have pushed for is tying federal funding from the Justice Department’s extensive grant programs to increased training and reporting on hate crimes.

In 2019, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report recommending Congress adopt legislation to provide funding for incentives and calling on local police to establish dedicated hate-crime units. Catherine E. Lhamon, who chaired that commission, now serves as deputy director for racial justice and equity on the White House domestic policy council.

At a news conference last week, Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus, said she is requesting a meeting with Justice Department leaders to discuss what she called a “crisis point” for the Asian American community in dealing with “an alarming surge of anti-Asian bigotry across the nation.”

Chu added that the 1990 law on reporting of hate crime data “doesn’t have any teeth” because it does not compel localities to comply or to do so in a consistent and thorough manner.

Last fall, the FBI reported 7,314 hate crimes nationwide in 2019, the most in a decade — but experts said the statistics were woefully inadequate because too few local law enforcement agencies fully participate in federal data collection efforts.

The FBI said that 15,588 law enforcement organizations participated in the 2019 hate crimes study, but just 2,172 agencies reported the total number of incidents contained in the report. Civil rights advocates called that scenario implausible, pointing out that the entire state of Alabama reported no hate crimes to the FBI in both 2018 and 2019.

“The FBI reports help us identify trends, but their data is so woefully inadequate that it can’t be relied on for much,” said civil rights lawyer Arjun Singh Sethi, author of “American Hate: Survivors Speak Out.”

Some big-city law enforcement agencies have publicly reported an increase in bias attacks against Asian Americans. For example, New York City’s hate crimes task force investigated 27 incidents in 2020, including 24 tied to the coronavirus, a ninefold increase from the previous year.

European stock markets were cautious on Monday as UK prime minister Boris Johnson prepares to deliver his roadmap out of the third national lockdown.

The FTSE 100 (^FTSE) fell 0.62% by noon trade, recovering slightly from deeper losses in the morning, while the CAC (^FCHI) tumbled 0.52% and the DAX (^GDAXI) was 0.59% lower.

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The PM is expected to reopen schools across the country from 8 March and gradually relax rules on socialising in a public space. Reports this morning also said that outdoor gatherings will be permitted again for either up to six people or two households.

“It looks like the roadmap for easing lockdown restrictions is set to cause some disappointment in the world of business and that’s reflected in share price behaviour ahead of the prime minister’s speech,” Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said.

“The UK-focused FTSE 250 index slipped 1% as investors took the view that the UK economy would only be unlocked gradually rather than a quick flick of the switch."

Retailer JD Sports (JD.L) lost 2.8% and Games Workshop (GAW.L) lost 1.9%, rail ticket website Trainline (TRN.LR) lost 2.1%, property listings site Rightmove (RMV.L) shed 3% and housebuilder Persimmon (PSN.L) shed 1.2%.

The government has said it hopes to vaccinate all adults over the age of 50 by 15 April.

READ MORE: Coronavirus pandemic hits global dividends by $220bn in 2020

S&P 500 futures (ES=F) were down 0.78%, Dow futures (YM=F) shed 0.57%, and Nasdaq futures (NQ=F) were 1.37% lower by midday, as rising bond yields and steepening yield curves prompt some flight out of stocks, after the record highs seen last week.

It comes after US indices slipped or closed flat on Friday. Tech stocks could also see some weakness today against a backdrop of possible antitrust investigations after the UK’s CMA warned it would be conducting a series of probes into the likes of Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG) in the months ahead.

Richard Hunter of Interactive Investor said: “The proposed stimulus package in the US, accelerating vaccine rollouts and surging commodity prices each contribute to the anticipation of economic relief.

“In the US, there has been a small but noticeable rotation out of strong growth stocks such as tech into those which would be immediate beneficiaries of any return to normality. The industrial and material sectors in particular are pricing in strengthening demand as cyclical shares begin to show signs of coming back into fashion.”

A gauge of Asian stocks also edged lower overnight, erasing earlier gains amid a surge in metals that could fan price pressures. Japanese shares outperformed, with the Nikkei (^N225) climbing 0.46% while other key markets lagged.

The Hang Seng (^HSI) fell 1.06% and the Shanghai Composite (000001.SS) dipped 1.45%

Meanwhile, copper (HG=F) hit its highest level in more than nine years in a sign of optimism about a global economic recovery. Brent crude oil (BZ=F) also climbed past $63 a barrel as the market assessed the fallout from the big freeze across Texas and crimped supply.

Britain’s Living with Covid-19

Britain’s success at vaccinating faster than anywhere else in Europe is putting pressure on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to figure out what comes next.

While Israel is emerging as the global test case for a country’s ability to inoculate its way out of COVID-19, the U.K. is a pilot for whether nations can do enough to end damaging lockdowns and essentially learn to live with the disease.

The key, Johnson believes, lies with mass testing in workplaces, schools, shopping centers and theaters to make sure that employees, pupils and customers are free of the virus. He’s expected to set out details in a statement to Parliament on Monday as part of a “road map” out of lockdown, and some companies in retail and hospitality are already gearing up.

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Hundreds of thousands of tests could be sent out by post every day, including to secondary school pupils. The idea is to come down on outbreaks “like a ton of bricks,” according to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. It is these rapid tests, rather than “vaccination passports” being considered by other countries, that the government wants to be part of daily life.

The U.K. has suffered the continent’s highest death toll and its economy sank by the most since the Great Frost of 1709, albeit with a rebound in the fourth quarter. But on the other extreme, Britain has injected more than a quarter of its population with at least one vaccine shot and is also a front-runner in identifying potentially more dangerous mutations of the coronavirus.

The question is not how to eradicate COVID-19, but to get to a point where people will never again be banished to their homes, schools closed and stores shuttered. Critics say previous testing failures contributed to the country’s death toll, while some epidemiologists say that potential route to a new normal is fraught with risk given the unreliability of so-called lateral flow tests compared with those that take longer to process.

“If you just scatter tests around like fairy dust, it is not going to work,” said Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine. “They’re always looking for the silver bullet, the one thing that will sort it all out. Any public health doctor would tell you that doesn’t work.”

Johnson is well aware he is walking a tightrope. Many within his governing Conservative Party are calling for the reopening of the economy more quickly. Retail sales that are the economy’s lifeblood fell more than twice as fast as expected in January, a report on Friday showed.

The concept of mass testing is nothing new for the U.K. In September, Johnson announced to great fanfare his Operation Moonshot plan for millions of tests a day. While that language appears to have been dropped, the plan was resurrected, with the prime minister declaring on Feb. 15 that rapid testing would allow the “toughest nuts to crack” — such as nightclubs and theaters — to open.

A £22 billion ($31 billion) testing program has ramped up U.K. capacity to rates that are among the highest in the world, with more than 760,000 tests carried out in one day earlier this month. That includes both lab-processed polymerase chain reaction (PCR), tests that take a day or two, and the lateral flow tests that can give results within 30 minutes.

Companies are keen to embrace the rapid tests. Kate Nicholls, chief executive officer of the UKHospitality group, said the industry stood ready to roll out mass testing to make sure nightclubs and events such as conferences and weddings could restart “as swiftly as possible.”

Supermarkets are in talks with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on devising a workable solution for testing shop workers and want the focus to be on tests that can be taken at home or in the community, rather than in stores, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. Workers in the warehouse depots of some supermarkets are already trialing lateral flow tests because that’s easier to manage than inside busy stores, one person said.

More businesses need to be encouraged to use regular tests to ensure a safer working environment, the Confederation of British Industry said. “That’s where the business focus is right now, rather than clamoring for the introduction of a domestic vaccine passport,” a spokesperson said.

Johnson has rejected the idea that venues will demand vaccination certificates before people can enter and the government is only looking into how it can give people proof of inoculation to travel overseas should other countries require evidence. Ministers have also said it’s up to businesses to decide if they want to require their employees to have the vaccine.

Some companies are looking into potential “no jab, no job” contracts. Barchester Healthcare, which runs more than 200 care homes in the U.K., said it was considering whether “staff who refuse the vaccine on non-medical grounds will, by reason of their own decision, make themselves unavailable for work.”

Health and social care workers already get regular tests, and businesses with more than 50 employees can order rapid tests via a government website.

But there are concerns about false reassurances, and indeed how testing would work in practice for customers rather than workers.

The U.K. Cinema Association told the Daily Mirror newspaper that asking a 250-strong audience to take a test and wait 30 minutes before seeing a two-hour film “seems impractical.” It is also unclear whether companies will-in the longer term-need to pay for the tests themselves rather than the state.

Some scientists believe the real focus should be on incentivizing people to stay at home for the required 10 days of isolation to ensure they don’t pass on the virus regardless of any mass testing. Dido Harding, who runs the U.K.’s test-and-trace program, said this month that at least 20,000 people a day in England were failing to self-isolate properly.

Government officials say that lateral flow devices are effective at detecting COVID-19, though anyone who tests negative should recognize that no test is 100% accurate.

“If hundreds of thousands of people are tested per week with lateral flow tests, there will be many false results,” said Duncan Robertson, a disease modeler at Loughborough University in England. If a negative test is seen as a “green light” to visit a nightclub there’s a “very real risk that people will engage in more risky behaviors when they may in fact be COVID positive.”

UK Living with Covid-19 Virus

Britain’s success at vaccinating faster than anywhere else in Europe is putting pressure on Prime Minister Boris Johnson to figure out what comes next.

While Israel is emerging as the global test case for a country’s ability to inoculate its way out of COVID-19, the U.K. is a pilot for whether nations can do enough to end damaging lockdowns and essentially learn to live with the disease.

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The key, Johnson believes, lies with mass testing in workplaces, schools, shopping centers and theaters to make sure that employees, pupils and customers are free of the virus. He’s expected to set out details in a statement to Parliament on Monday as part of a “road map” out of lockdown, and some companies in retail and hospitality are already gearing up.

Hundreds of thousands of tests could be sent out by post every day, including to secondary school pupils. The idea is to come down on outbreaks “like a ton of bricks,” according to Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. It is these rapid tests, rather than “vaccination passports” being considered by other countries, that the government wants to be part of daily life.

The U.K. has suffered the continent’s highest death toll and its economy sank by the most since the Great Frost of 1709, albeit with a rebound in the fourth quarter. But on the other extreme, Britain has injected more than a quarter of its population with at least one vaccine shot and is also a front-runner in identifying potentially more dangerous mutations of the coronavirus.

The question is not how to eradicate COVID-19, but to get to a point where people will never again be banished to their homes, schools closed and stores shuttered. Critics say previous testing failures contributed to the country’s death toll, while some epidemiologists say that potential route to a new normal is fraught with risk given the unreliability of so-called lateral flow tests compared with those that take longer to process.

“If you just scatter tests around like fairy dust, it is not going to work,” said Gabriel Scally, president of epidemiology and public health at the Royal Society of Medicine. “They’re always looking for the silver bullet, the one thing that will sort it all out. Any public health doctor would tell you that doesn’t work.”

Johnson is well aware he is walking a tightrope. Many within his governing Conservative Party are calling for the reopening of the economy more quickly. Retail sales that are the economy’s lifeblood fell more than twice as fast as expected in January, a report on Friday showed.

The concept of mass testing is nothing new for the U.K. In September, Johnson announced to great fanfare his Operation Moonshot plan for millions of tests a day. While that language appears to have been dropped, the plan was resurrected, with the prime minister declaring on Feb. 15 that rapid testing would allow the “toughest nuts to crack” — such as nightclubs and theaters — to open.

A £22 billion ($31 billion) testing program has ramped up U.K. capacity to rates that are among the highest in the world, with more than 760,000 tests carried out in one day earlier this month. That includes both lab-processed polymerase chain reaction (PCR), tests that take a day or two, and the lateral flow tests that can give results within 30 minutes.

Companies are keen to embrace the rapid tests. Kate Nicholls, chief executive officer of the UKHospitality group, said the industry stood ready to roll out mass testing to make sure nightclubs and events such as conferences and weddings could restart “as swiftly as possible.”

Supermarkets are in talks with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on devising a workable solution for testing shop workers and want the focus to be on tests that can be taken at home or in the community, rather than in stores, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. Workers in the warehouse depots of some supermarkets are already trialing lateral flow tests because that’s easier to manage than inside busy stores, one person said.

More businesses need to be encouraged to use regular tests to ensure a safer working environment, the Confederation of British Industry said. “That’s where the business focus is right now, rather than clamoring for the introduction of a domestic vaccine passport,” a spokesperson said.

Johnson has rejected the idea that venues will demand vaccination certificates before people can enter and the government is only looking into how it can give people proof of inoculation to travel overseas should other countries require evidence. Ministers have also said it’s up to businesses to decide if they want to require their employees to have the vaccine.

Some companies are looking into potential “no jab, no job” contracts. Barchester Healthcare, which runs more than 200 care homes in the U.K., said it was considering whether “staff who refuse the vaccine on non-medical grounds will, by reason of their own decision, make themselves unavailable for work.”

Health and social care workers already get regular tests, and businesses with more than 50 employees can order rapid tests via a government website.

But there are concerns about false reassurances, and indeed how testing would work in practice for customers rather than workers.

The U.K. Cinema Association told the Daily Mirror newspaper that asking a 250-strong audience to take a test and wait 30 minutes before seeing a two-hour film “seems impractical.” It is also unclear whether companies will-in the longer term-need to pay for the tests themselves rather than the state.

Some scientists believe the real focus should be on incentivizing people to stay at home for the required 10 days of isolation to ensure they don’t pass on the virus regardless of any mass testing. Dido Harding, who runs the U.K.’s test-and-trace program, said this month that at least 20,000 people a day in England were failing to self-isolate properly.

Government officials say that lateral flow devices are effective at detecting COVID-19, though anyone who tests negative should recognize that no test is 100% accurate.

“If hundreds of thousands of people are tested per week with lateral flow tests, there will be many false results,” said Duncan Robertson, a disease modeler at Loughborough University in England. If a negative test is seen as a “green light” to visit a nightclub there’s a “very real risk that people will engage in more risky behaviors when they may in fact be COVID positive.”

Big Storms Mean Big Vaccine Delays as Bad Weather Wallops the U.S.

There is new hope that the global vaccine drive will speed up. Women leaving the work force because of the pandemic have led to a “national emergency,” Vice President Kamala Harris said. https://julianalonsorun.com/forums/topic/full-watch-wandavision-season-1-episode-7-2021-online-free/

Just as vaccine distribution was beginning to gather steam in the United States, brutal winter weather is delaying the delivery of hundreds of thousands of doses across the country.

Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projected “widespread delays” in vaccine shipments and deliveries because of weather affecting a FedEx facility in Memphis and a UPS facility in Louisville, both vaccine shipping hubs. Now those projections appear to be coming true.

Shipment delays have been reported in California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio, Utah, Washington and Oregon, among other states, forcing vaccine sites to temporarily shutter and coveted appointments to be rescheduled.

In Texas, where millions of residents lost power during this week’s powerful storm, a delivery of more than 400,000 first doses and 330,000 second doses was delayed in anticipation of the bad weather. A portion of those shots, roughly 35,000 doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, were sent to North Texas providers on Wednesday, but shipments will continue to depend on safety conditions.

Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said Thursday that the state was “asking providers that aren’t able to store vaccine due to power outages to transfer it elsewhere or administer it so it doesn’t spoil.”

On Monday, health officials in Texas scrambled to get more than 5,000 shots into arms after a power outage in a storage facility where they were being kept. But Mr. Van Deusen said that “reports of vaccine spoiling have been minimal.”

The Houston Health Department said Thursday it would restart vaccinations for second doses this weekend, and schedule additional first and second dose appointments next week.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said more than 2,000 vaccine sites are in areas with power outages.

Most of the vaccines for New York State, scheduled for delivery between Feb. 12 and Feb. 21, have been delayed as well, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday night.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference earlier in the day that “a vast majority of the resupply” the city was expecting for this week had not yet shipped from the factories.

The city has had to hold off on scheduling upward of 35,000 appointments for first vaccine doses because of shipment delays and vaccine shortages. The opening of two new distribution sites was also postponed.

In Los Angeles, the city said that appointments for about 12,500 will be delayed.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that while 136,000 Pfizer doses had arrived this week, the state had still not received its shipment for the week of 200,000 Moderna doses. He said the shipment could be delayed as late as Monday.

“Because the storms we are seeing in the rest of the country, it’s basically sitting in the FedEx warehouse — and I don’t think they can even get into it because of everything,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday, encouraging those who had appointments rescheduled to “hang in there, the doses are going to get here.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, called the weather delay “significant.”

“Well, obviously it’s an issue,” he told MSNBC on Thursday. “It’s been slowed down in some places, going to a grinding halt.”

Dr. Fauci said, “We’re just going to have to make up for it as soon as the weather lifts a bit, the ice melts and we can get the trucks out and the people out. We’re going to just have to make up for it, namely do double time when this thing clears up.”

Jennifer Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that the Biden administration was working closely with manufacturing and shipping partners to assess weather conditions.

As of Thursday, the C.D.C. said about 41 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 16.2 million people who have been fully vaccinated.

U.K. Approves Study That Will Deliberately Infect Volunteers With Coronavirus

LONDON — In the coming weeks, a small, carefully selected group of volunteers is expected to arrive on the 11th floor of a London hospital to be given what the rest of the world’s 7.8 billion people have been trying to avoid: a coronavirus infection.

They will be administered tiny droplets of the virus into their nostrils as part of a plan authorized by British regulators on Wednesday to deliberately infect unvaccinated volunteers with the coronavirus.

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The scientists hope to eventually expose vaccinated people to the virus as a way of comparing the effectiveness of different vaccines. But before that, the project’s backers have to expose unvaccinated volunteers in order to determine the lowest dose of the virus that will reliably infect them.

By controlling the amount of the virus people are subjected to and monitoring them from the moment they are infected, scientists hope to discover things about how the immune system responds to the coronavirus that would be impossible outside a lab — and to develop ways of directly comparing the efficacy of treatments and vaccines.

“We are going to learn an awful lot about the immunology of the virus,” Peter Openshaw, an Imperial College London professor involved in the study, said on Wednesday. He added that the study would be able “to accelerate not only understanding of diseases caused by infection, but also to accelerate the discovery of new treatments and of vaccines.”

The idea of such a study, called a human challenge trial, has been hotly debated since the early months of the pandemic.

In the past, scientists have deliberately exposed volunteers to diseases like typhoid and cholera to test vaccines. But infected people could be cured of those diseases; Covid-19 has no known cure, putting the scientists in charge of the British study in largely uncharted ethical territory.

To try to ensure that participants do not become seriously ill, the British study will be restricted to healthy volunteers in the 18 to 30 age range.

But there have been severe Covid-19 cases even in those types of patients, and the long-term consequences of an infection are also largely unknown. The age restrictions also may make it difficult to translate the findings to older adults or people with pre-existing conditions, whose immune responses might be different and who are the target group for treatments and vaccines.

“It will be a limited study,” said Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading who is not part of the study. “And you could argue that, by definition, it’s not going to study those in whom it’s most important to know what’s going on.”

For now, the only part of the study to be formally authorized by British regulators is the experiment to determine the lowest dose of virus needed to infect people.

After being exposed to the virus, the participants will be isolated for two weeks in the hospital. For that and the year’s worth of follow-up appointments that are planned, they will be paid 4,500 pounds, or about $6,200. The researchers said that would compensate people for time away from jobs or families without creating too large an economic incentive for people to participate.

When the idea of human challenge trials was first floated last year, some scientists saw it as a way of shaving off crucial time in the race to identify a vaccine. Unlike in large clinical trials, in which scientists wait for vaccinated people to encounter the virus in their communities, researchers in this project would eventually purposely infect vaccinated people.

Now that several vaccines have been authorized, the goals of this human challenge trial are somewhat different.

For now, the researchers will expose people to the version of the virus that has been circulating in Britain since last spring, and not the more contagious and potentially deadlier variant that has taken hold more recently. But eventually, they said, they could give people experimental vaccines designed to address the effect of new, worrisome variants and then subject them to those versions of the virus.

They could also directly compare different vaccine doses and dosing intervals for the same vaccine.

And once the pandemic wanes and there are fewer hospitalized patients to enroll in drug trials, the scientists behind the study said that additional such trials where people are directly infected would allow them to continue investigating new treatments.

“In the future, we won’t have large numbers of people you can do studies on in the field,” said Robert Read, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Southampton, who helped design the study.

Infecting unvaccinated people with even low doses of the virus could yield important insights, said Andrew Catchpole, the chief scientific officer at hVIVO, a company specializing in human challenge trials that is involved in the study.

As intensely as the coronavirus has been studied, relatively little is understood about how people’s immune systems react in the immediate aftermath of being infected.

Nor do scientists yet know the specific type or level of immune responses that are necessary to completely protect most people from infection, a clue to how the dozens of vaccines that are still being studied will perform against the virus.

“One of the things we don’t understand is what is a truly protective response,” said Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick Medical School, who is not involved in the study. “It’s a good way of understanding the host-pathogen interaction, though it does come with a whole heap of ethical issues, obviously.”

In the first part of the study, the scientists will administer tiny doses of the virus to a small cohort of volunteers. If they do not become infected, the scientists will give slightly bigger doses to a different group of volunteers, repeating the process in up to 90 participants until they have determined the right dose.

By this spring, the scientists hope to repeat a version of their experiment by exposing vaccinated people to the virus. The British government, which is helping fund the study, will help choose the vaccines. Those and other future stages of the trial would require new regulatory approvals.

There has been no shortage of interest among potential volunteers in these types of trials, with thousands of people around the world registering their interest with 1Day Sooner, a group that advocates human challenge trials as a way of speeding the development of enough vaccines to inoculate people in parts of the world still waiting for doses

It is not clear how drug regulators in Britain or around the world would evaluate results from a human challenge trial, given the age restrictions and the small numbers of people involved.

But Dr. Catchpole said Britain’s drug regulator had indicated it would take any of the group’s findings into consideration as it evaluates future vaccine candidates.

With the virus now acquiring dangerous mutations, one question facing the scientists is whether they will be able to keep up with its evolution.

Just as making new vaccines takes time, so does manufacturing new viral particles to infect people. Dr. Catchpole said that it would take the researchers three or four months to make a new coronavirus variant in a lab before they could begin putting droplets of it into the noses of volunteers.

Why the U.S. Is Underestimating COVID Reinfection

Kaitlyn Romoser first caught covid-19 in March, likely on a trip to Denmark and Sweden, just as the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear. Romoser, who is 23 and a laboratory researcher in College Station, Texas, tested positive and had a few days of mild, coldlike symptoms. 

In the weeks that followed, she bounced back to what felt like a full recovery. She even got another test, which was negative, in order to join a study as one of the earliest donors of convalescent blood plasma in a bid to help others.

Six months later, in September, Romoser got sick again, after a trip to Florida with her dad. This second bout was much worse. She lost her sense of taste and smell and suffered lingering headaches and fatigue. She tested positive for covid once more — along with her cat. https://riverdale-episode-5.8b.io/

Romoser believes it was a clear case of reinfection, rather than some mysterious reemergence of the original infection gone dormant. Because the coronavirus, like other viruses, regularly mutates as it multiplies and spreads through a community, a new infection would bear a different genetic fingerprint. But because neither lab had saved her testing samples for genetic sequencing, there was no way to confirm her suspicion.

“It would be nice to have proof,” said Romoser. “I’ve literally been straight up called a liar, because people don’t want to believe that it’s possible to be reinfected. Why would I lie about being sick?” https://riverdale-s5e5-online.8b.io/

As millions of Americans struggle to recover from covid and millions more scramble for the protection offered by vaccines, U.S. health officials may be overlooking an unsettling subgroup of survivors: those who get infected more than once. Identifying how common reinfection is among people who contracted covid — as well as how quickly they become vulnerable and why — carries important implications for our understanding of immunity and the nation’s efforts to devise an effective vaccination program.

Scientists have confirmed that reinfections after initial illness caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus are possible, but so far have characterized them as rare. Fewer than 50 cases have been substantiated worldwide, according to a global reinfection tracker. Just five have been substantiated in the U.S., including two detected in California in late January. https://good-trouble-s3e1-online.8b.io/

That sounds like a rather insignificant number. But scientists’ understanding of reinfection has been constrained by the limited number of U.S. labs that retain covid testing samples or perform genetic sequencing. A KHN review of surveillance efforts finds that many U.S. states aren’t rigorously tracking or investigating suspected cases of reinfection.

KHN sent queries about reinfection surveillance to all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Of 24 responses, fewer than half provided details about suspected or confirmed reinfection cases. Where officials said they’re actively monitoring for reinfection, they have found far more potential cases than previously anticipated.

In Washington state, for instance, health officials are investigating nearly 700 cases that meet the criteria for possible reinfection, with three dozen awaiting genetic sequencing and just one case confirmed.

In Colorado, officials estimate that possible reinfections make up just 0.1% of positive coronavirus cases. But with more than 396,000 cases reported, that means nearly 400 people may have been infected more than once.

In Minnesota, officials have investigated more than 150 cases of suspected reinfection, but they lack the genetic material to confirm a diagnosis, a spokesperson said.

In Nevada, where the first U.S. case of covid reinfection was identified last summer, Mark Pandori, director of the state public health lab, said there’s no doubt cases are going undetected.

“I predict that we are missing cases of reinfection,” he said. “They are very difficult to ascertain, so you need specialized teams to do that work, or a core lab.”

Such cases are different from instances of so-called long-haul covid, in which the original infection triggers debilitating symptoms that linger for months and viral particles can continue to be detected. Reinfection occurs when a person is infected with covid, clears that strain and is infected again with a different strain, raising concerns about sustained immunity from the disease. Such reinfections occur regularly with four other coronaviruses that circulate among humans, causing common colds.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines call for investigating for possible reinfection when someone tests positive for covid at least 90 days after an original infection (or at least 45 days for “highly suspicious” cases). Confirmation of reinfection requires genetic sequencing of paired samples from each episode to tell whether the genomes involved are different.

But the U.S. lacks the capacity for robust genetic sequencing, the process that identifies the fingerprint of a specific virus so it can be compared with other strains. Jeff Zients, head of the federal covid task force, noted late last month that the U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in genomic sequencing.

To date, only a fraction of positive coronavirus samples has been sequenced, though the Biden administration is working to rapidly expand the effort. On Feb. 1, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters that sequencing has “increased tenfold” in recent weeks, from 251 sequences the week of Jan. 10 to 2,238 the week of Jan. 24. The agency is working with private companies, states and academic labs to ramp up to 6,000 sequences per week by mid-February.

Washington’s state epidemiologist for communicable diseases, Dr. Scott Lindquist, said officials have prioritized genetic sequencing at the state laboratory, with plans to begin genotyping 5% of all samples collected. That will allow officials to sort through those nearly 700 potential reinfections, Lindquist said. More important, the effort will also help signal the presence of significantly mutated forms of the coronavirus, known as variants, that could affect how easily the virus spreads and, perhaps, how sick covid makes people.

“Those two areas, reinfection and variants, may cross paths,” he said. “We wanted to be in front of it, not behind it.”

The specter of reinfections complicates one of the central questions of the covid threat: How long after natural infection or vaccination will people remain immune?

Early studies suggested immunity would be short-lived, only a few months, while more recent research finds that certain antibodies and memory cells may persist in covid-infected patients longer than eight months.

“We actually don’t know” the marker that would signal immunity, said Dr. Jason Goldman, an infectious diseases expert at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. “We don’t have the test you could perform to say yes or no, you could be infected.”

Goldman and colleagues confirmed a case of reinfection in a Seattle man last fall, and since then have identified six or seven probable cases. “This is a much more common scenario than is being recognized,” he said.

The possibility of reinfection means that even patients who’ve had covid need to remain vigilant about curbing re-exposure, said Dr. Edgar Sanchez, an infectious diseases physician at Orlando Health in Florida.

“A lot of patients ask, ‘How long do I have to worry about getting covid again?’” he said. “I literally tell them this: ‘You are probably safe for a few weeks, maybe even up to a couple of months, but beyond that, it’s really unclear.’”

The message is similar for the wider society, said Dr. Bill Messer, an expert in viral genetics at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who has been pondering the cultural psychology of the covid response. Evidence suggests there may not be a clear-cut return to normal.

“The idea that we will end this pandemic by beating this coronavirus, I don’t think that’s actually the way it’s going to happen,” he said. “I think that it’s more likely that we’re going to learn how to be comfortable living with this new virus circulating among us.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.