Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
UK To Infect Healthy Volunteers In Risky Approach To Speed Up Vaccine Development
AP: UK To Infect Healthy Volunteers To Speed Up Vaccine Efforts
U.K. researchers are preparing to begin a controversial experiment that will infect healthy volunteers with the new coronavirus to study the disease in hopes of speeding up development of a vaccine. The approach, called a challenge study, is risky but proponents say it may produce results faster than standard research, which waits to see if volunteers who have been given an experimental treatment get sick. Imperial College London said Tuesday that the study, involving healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 30, would be conducted in partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust and hVivo, a company that has experience conducting testing. (10/20)
The Washington Post: Britain To Infect Healthy Volunteers With Coronavirus In Vaccine Challenge Trials
The research, led by scientists at Imperial College London and funded by the British government, is a gutsy gambit, given that people will be submitting themselves to a deadly virus with no surefire treatment. The United States is moving more cautiously, with leading government researchers saying human challenge trials might be too risky or unnecessary. But the British scientists say the potential payoff is massive — that accelerating vaccine development by even three months could save hundreds of thousands of lives globally. (Booth and Johnson, 10/20)
In other global vaccine developments —
Reuters: Sinopharm Says May Be Able To Make Over 1 Billion Coronavirus Vaccine Doses In 2021
China National Pharmaceutical Group (Sinopharm), one of several Chinese firms developing coronavirus vaccines, said it may have the capacity to produce more than 1 billion doses in 2021, Chairman Liu Jingzhen said on Tuesday. About 60,000 people have received Chinese coronavirus vaccine candidates during Phase III clinical trials, with no serious side effects reported so far, Tian Baoguo, an official at China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, said at the same government media briefing. (10/20)
AP: Vaccine Storage Issues Could Leave 3B People Without Access
The chain breaks here, in a tiny medical clinic in Burkina Faso that went nearly a year without a working refrigerator. From factory to syringe, the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccine candidates need non-stop sterile refrigeration to stay potent and safe. But despite enormous strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live where temperature-controlled storage is insufficient for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control. The result: Poor people around the world who were among the hardest hit by the virus pandemic are also likely to be the last to recover from it. (Hinnant and Mednick, 10/19)
The Hill: UNICEF Is Stockpiling Syringes Ahead Of A COVID-19 Vaccine
The United Nations children's agency UNICEF is stockpiling hundreds of millions of syringes in anticipation of a coronavirus vaccine to make sure there is enough global supply, the organization announced Monday. UNICEF said initially it will stockpile 520 million syringes in its warehouses, part of a larger plan to have 1 billion syringes by 2021. The goal is to guarantee initial supply and help ensure that syringes arrive in countries before the COVID-19 vaccine does. (Weixel, 10/19)
Fortune: World's COVID Vaccine Testing Ground Calls China Candidate Safest, Most-Promising
Brazil is one of the world’s top COVID-19 vaccine testing grounds. Now, officials there say that CoronaVac, the experimental COVID-19 vaccine from Chinese developer Sinovac, is the safest of the coronavirus immunizations evaluated in the country so far. “The first results of the clinical study conducted in Brazil prove that among all the vaccines tested in the country, CoronaVac is the safest, the one with the best and most promising rates,” São Paulo Governor João Doria told reporters in Brazil on Monday. (McGregor, 10/20)
The Guardian: India At Heart Of Global Efforts To Produce Covid Vaccine
As the largest global supplier of drugs and producer of 60% of the world’s vaccines, India has long been known as the “pharmacy of the world”. Now, as the frenzied hunt for a Covid-19 vaccine gathers momentum, the country is playing an increasingly strategic and central role in the development, manufacturing – and, crucially, possible future distribution – of several possible Covid shots. (Ellis-Petersen, 10/20)
Science: Could Certain COVID-19 Vaccines Leave People More Vulnerable To The AIDS Virus?
Certain COVID-19 vaccine candidates could increase susceptibility to HIV, warns a group of researchers who in 2007 learned that an experimental HIV vaccine had raised in some people the risk for infection with the AIDS virus. These concerns have percolated in the background of the race for a vaccine to stem the coronavirus pandemic, but now the researchers have gone public with a “cautionary tale,” in part because trials of those candidates may soon begin in locales that have pronounced HIV epidemics, such as South Africa. (Cohen, 10/19)
