The experimental novel coronavirus drug Donald Trump took last week is not, as the president claims, a cure for COVID-19. The monoclonal antibody cocktail, under development by New York pharma Regeneron, seems promising, experts and health officials say. But it and a similar antibody cocktail from Indiana firm Eli Lilly—also touted by the president—are still in trials. It’s too soon to say exactly what they do […]
Rabbit Hole
17 posts
One month after regulators in the United States and United Kingdom froze trials of a British novel coronavirus vaccine candidate, U.S. testing is still on hold. That has big implications for the urgent, multi-billion-dollar effort to produce a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine. The testing pause could slow development efforts by Astrazeneca, the U.K. pharmaceutical company, and, in turn, leave two rival pharmaceutical giants alone as leading […]
The experimental drug President Trump received at the White House hours after being diagnosed with COVID-19 was provided under a “compassionate use” program usually reserved for patients who exhaust other treatment options, the manufacturer said Friday. News of the president consuming the so-called “polyclonal antibody cocktail,” made by New York-based pharma Regeneron, broke around the same time the administration announced Trump was being taken to Walter […]
If the Trump administration tries to push out a novel coronavirus vaccine before it’s fully tested, there are three committees of independent experts who could stand in its way. It’s a testament to the massive stakes of this kind of work that some of their names are effectively kept secret. These committees—two in government and one in the private sector—keep tabs on vaccine-testing, sign off on […]
The possibility that the American population might be able to achieve some kind of herd immunity to the novel coronavirus without a vaccine seems to be slipping away. Or at least that’s the worrying implication of a new study that appeared Friday in The Lancet, a medical journal. Experts said the research clarifies the desperate need for a vaccine, and the risk of letting up on […]
Government regulators in the United Kingdom have ordered Cambridge-based pharma AstraZeneca to pause development of its novel-coronavirus vaccine candidate after a patient in the U.K. apparently had an unspecified adverse reaction to the vaccine. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the stand-down order came from the U.K. Data Safety Monitoring Board, which oversees pharmaceutical trials. The U.K. board coordinated with American regulators […]
Drug development is a long, costly process. In non-pandemic periods, a new pharmaceutical product could gobble up a billion dollars and a decade from start to finish. So as thousands of people per week die of COVID-19 in the United States, researchers are scrambling to make headway via their only shot at speeding up the process: finding a drug that already exists. The problem is that […]
Feeling isolated, anxious, or depressed since the pandemic hit? Struggling to cope with uncertainty? Homebound with your entire family and going berserk from too much chaos and no privacy? If you’ve felt any of these things in the past six months, experts say you might be a dog. Indeed, dogs are feeling the emotional impacts of coronavirus just like their owners are, and it may be […]
Over seven months after the novel coronavirus went global, the United States still isn’t testing enough people. Nor is the U.S. delivering results quickly enough to provide meaningful disease surveillance. But virologists Dave O’Connor and Chris Mason had a simple idea for loosening up the testing logjam: pack vans with $5,000 worth of testing equipment and drive them around key locations in badly-hit communities with low […]
Human cells are like little factories, producing goods that fuel the body. That is, until viruses—opportunistic strands of RNA or DNA—arrive with their own subversive agendas. They infiltrate the body’s manufacturing industry, find gullible factory workers and convince them to abandon their programming to take up new orders. If the immune system doesn’t arrest and disarm them in time, before long, the virus may be running […]
The U.S. Army has declared war on the novel coronavirus—and civilian scientists are grateful for the reinforcement. The ground combat branch’s Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick in Maryland has been working on a range of tests and therapies as well as possible vaccines, the command’s top officer told reporters last week. “Our researchers and scientists are using all of our assets to develop […]
Search for “LAPD scanner” on Twitter right now and you’ll see it—a video showing radio traffic in which two vile racists laugh and joke about killing protesters. “We gotta start shooting to kill, man. Mr Trump said so, shoot to kill,” one voice says. “Come one, come all. $100 a head. Every [n-word] you kill, $100. $50 for a Mexican,” the other responds. On Tiktok, Facebook, […]
Scientists are closely tracking mutations in the novel coronavirus, hoping that the virus evolves fast enough to give researchers hints about its future, but slow enough that the same researchers can make sense of, and keep up with, the changes. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Efforts to contain the virus and treat the people it infects both hinge in part on the pathogen’s mutation rate. So […]
They’re leaked communications from the Democratic presidential frontrunner and conservatives are already sharing them all over social media in hopes they’ll help Trump’s re-election campaign. It sounds like the final months of the 2016 election—or the height of 2019’s Burisma madness—but the tapes released on Tuesday are from a new breach. Andriy Derkach—a Ukrainian politician with a KGB background, a penchant for conspiracy theories, and a […]
The pharmaceutical firm Moderna has reported good results so far in trials of its novel-coronavirus vaccine, inspiring cautious optimism in scientists scrambling to contain the damage from the ongoing pandemic. But these same scientists warn against getting too excited about early results, however positive. The world could still be a long way from having a working vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, to say nothing of deploying that vaccine […]
It’s the supposedly rapid test that President Trump claimed was “lightning-fast” and about to usher in “a whole new ballgame” in COVID-19 detection. But since then, the fine print has started to creep into the Trump administration’s rhetoric about Abbott Labs’ diagnostic coronavirus tests and where they can be useful. When asked by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) about the possibility of rapid testing for meatpackers during […]
Marissa Guale is like all too many Americans right now. Her husband and father of her two children, Raul, is on a ventilator in a hospital on Long Island, fighting for his life while sick with COVID-19. Raul, a 34-year-old nurse, likely caught the disease while working in a nursing home. When the National Institutes of Health announced an emergency use authorization for the experimental antiviral […]