Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
In A Time When Stakes Are So High, Trump's Vaccine Exaggerations Strike Experts As Particularly Dangerous
Politico: A Few Months? Trump’s Vaccine Hyperbole Complicates Coronavirus Message
Nearly every time President Donald Trump has talked about a coronavirus vaccine, he has gotten a real-time fact check from a health expert sitting nearby. “So you’re talking over the next few months, you think you could have a vaccine?” Trump asked during a meeting with top health officials on Monday. “You won’t have a vaccine,” corrected Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar after some cross talk. “You’ll have a vaccine to go into testing.” “All right, so you’re talking within a year,” Trump said moments later. (Allen and McGraw, 3/5)
The Washington Post: Trump’s Inaccurate Coronavirus Vaccine Timeline
President Trump has adopted a new refrain: A vaccine for the novel coronavirus will be completed in record time. On several occasions, the president has bragged about the speed with which experts and pharmaceutical companies are working on a vaccine. Trump is not wrong in saying that scientists are rapidly developing a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus. However, he seems to be overstating when a vaccine will be available to the public. (Samuels, 3/4)
The Wall Street Journal: Recruitment Begins For First Test Of Experimental Coronavirus Vaccine
Researchers have started to recruit healthy Seattle-area volunteers to participate in the first clinical trial of an experimental coronavirus vaccine, a faster-than-expected start for the first vaccine readied for testing. Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle said Wednesday it aims to enroll 45 adults from the region in the trial. The study will test the safety of various doses of the vaccine developed by biotech Moderna Inc. MRNA -1.50% and whether the shots produce an immune response. (Loftus, 3/4)
NBC News: Scientists Were Close To A Coronavirus Vaccine Years Ago. Then The Money Dried Up.
Dr. Peter Hotez says he made the pitch to anyone who would listen. After years of research, his team of scientists in Texas had helped develop a vaccine to protect against a deadly strain of coronavirus. Now they needed money to begin testing it in humans. But this was 2016. More than a decade had passed since the viral disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, had spread through China, killing more than 770 people. That disease, an earlier coronavirus similar to the one now sweeping the globe, was a distant memory by the time Hotez and his team sought funding to test whether their vaccine would work in humans. (Hixenbaugh, 3/5)
Stat: Labs Scramble To Find Right Animals For Coronavirus Studies
One lab is digging into its freezer to thaw out the archived sperm of SARS-susceptible mice. Another is anesthetizing ferrets so they don’t sneeze when the new coronavirus is squirted into their nostrils. Yet others are racing to infect macaques, marmosets, and African green monkeys. Those animals could prove critical for understanding how Covid-19 works — and for concocting vaccines and treatments to stop its sweep. (Boodman, 3/5)
Meanwhile, other scientists are focusing on treatments —
The Wall Street Journal: Drugmaker Takeda Is Working On Coronavirus Drug
Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. TAK -1.96% said it is trying to develop a drug to treat people infected with the novel coronavirus or at high risk of contracting it. The company’s experimental drug would be derived from the blood of coronavirus patients who have recovered from the respiratory disease, officials said. Researchers hope the antibodies developed by the recovered patients can bolster the immune systems of new patients and defeat the infections. (Hopkins, 3/4)
