Health workers in personal protective equipment record COVID-19 nasal swab antigen test results in Bangkok on Thursday, a day in which Thailand reported its largest number of new daily coronavirus infections — more than 23,500 in total — since the start of the pandemic. (Jack Taylor/AFP/Getty Images)
Medicago’s homegrown, plant-based COVID-19 vaccine approved by Health Canada
Medicago’s plant-based COVID-19 vaccine is now approved by Health Canada, which will soon give Canadians the option of getting a homegrown shot against SARS-CoV-2.
In what the biopharmaceutical company calls a world first, the vaccine from Quebec City-based Medicago uses plant-derived, virus-like particles that resemble the coronavirus behind COVID-19 but don’t contain its genetic material. The shots also contain an adjuvant from British-American vaccine giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to help boost the immune response.
Dubbed “Covifenz,” the two-dose shot’s overall efficacy rate against all virus variants studied was 71 per cent, with a higher efficacy rate of 75 per cent against COVID-19 infections of any severity from the Delta variant, then dominant, according to data shared at the time in a news release. The results followed a global, Phase 3, placebo-controlled study of the two-dose vaccine that was launched last March and continued into a time period when the Delta variant was circulating.
The trial preceded the arrival of the highly contagious Omicron family of subvariants, including BA.1 and BA.2, although the company has said the vaccine can be adapted as needed.
“We will, in the next several months, know how well our vaccine did against Omicron,” the company’s medical officer, Dr. Brian Ward, told CBC News, citing ongoing company trials, which also include a study on a booster dose that’s slated to start within weeks.
Health Canada has recommended a three-week interval at minimum for the two-dose regimen, with typical, temporary potential side-effects seen with most other COVID-19 vaccines: a sore arm, headaches, joint and muscle pain and fever-like symptoms.
It’s not clear when production will be ramped up, but given Canada’s vaccination rates for adults — 84.5 per cent of the eligible population is considered fully vaccinated — it could eventually be employed more in the campaign to vaccinate underserved populations around the globe.
Without offering specifics, Canada’s deputy chief public health officer Dr. Howard Njoo said during a news conference that the federal government is “committed to the global effort to supply vaccines across the world.”
In the past, Medicago’s Ward has touted the benefits of transporting its vaccine around the world in comparison to some other products, which use yeast, insect or mammalian cells that need to be stored in glass containers called bioreactors. It also needs to be stored at manageable temperatures of 2 to 8 C.
What’s most hopeful, said Toronto-based infectious diseases expert Dr. Isaac Bogoch, is how plant-based technology could help future vaccine development.
“Is this going to have a major impact on us here in Canada? Probably not. But there might be some individuals who choose to get vaccinated with a non-mRNA product,” said Bogoch, referring to the shots offered by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
In a GSK news release in December, it was stated that there are plans to seek approval for the Medicago shots with the World Health Organization, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. It’s not clear if decisions in any of those cases are near.
From CBC News
Alberta wants to use private clinics to address surgery backlog
1 day ago
Duration 1:59
The Alberta government has proposed using private clinics to relieve pressure on the health-care system and clear surgical backlogs worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The plan would see up to 90,000 surgeries done at the private clinics but paid for by the province. 1:59
Reinfections from Omicron subvariant BA.2 seem rare, study finds, making ‘new wave’ unlikely
Out of nearly two million coronavirus infections logged in Denmark between mid-November and mid-February, researchers there zeroed in on those who tested positive twice between 20 and 60 days apart, and whose infections had gone through previous genomic surveillance and were labelled as a specific subvariant.
The team at Statens Serum Institut (SSI) found in a study published this week but not yet peer-reviewed only 187 cases of reinfection. That included 47 instances where Omicron subvariant BA.2 reinfections happened shortly after a BA.1 infection, “mostly in young unvaccinated individuals with mild disease not resulting in hospitalization or death,” the team wrote.
In other words, getting infected more than once by subvariants in the Omicron family does seem possible, but it appears to be not a common risk.
One of the researchers, Dr. Troels Lillebæk, chair of Denmark’s SARS-CoV-2 variant assessment committee, told CBC News this offers the first evidence of reinfections among members of the Omicron family, but it appears to be a “quite rare phenomenon.”
“If it was a major problem that you could catch BA.2 after BA.1, you could imagine a new wave,” he said. “This does not really point in that direction.”
The highly contagious BA.2 subvariant now makes up roughly nine in 10 cases in Denmark, with cases also rising in countries including Norway, South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Here in Canada, the subvariant was barely a blip in federal data by early January, but the latest-available data by month’s end suggest it makes up roughly one in 10 cases.
Some 1.25 million Canadians were infected with COVID-19 in December and January, according to CBC tracking of provincially released data, almost certainly an undercount as officials across the country stressed that the high transmissibility of Omicron was overwhelming case surveillance to a degree not seen in previous variants.
“So many people are vaccinated and boosted or have had BA.1 recently that they’re not very likely to be reinfected so quickly afterwards with BA.2,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist with the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO).
“We should start thinking about the next variant that’s going to come along rather than worrying so much about BA.2.”
Further to Rasmussen’s point, a recent New York Magazine article by science writer Jeff Wise expounded on the twists and turns involving COVID-19 variants over the course of two years.
“None of the variants of concern have led to the next variants of concern,” Emma Hodcroft, epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, told Wise.
Alberta expands vaccine access, encourages parents to get kids 5-to-11 inoculated
Alberta’s government is concerned about low COVID-19 vaccination rates for children and wants to push provincial numbers closer to the national average, Health Minister Jason Copping said Wednesday.
Copping told a news conference that Alberta’s government doesn’t have a “specific target” in mind for increasing childhood vaccination rates.
“But we would like to move closer [to] — and even achieve — the average across the country,” he said. The province has among the lowest vaccination rates for children in Canada. As of Monday, 47.1 per cent of Alberta children ages five to 11 have had one dose of vaccine, while 23.6 per cent of the same age group have had two doses.
That compares to vaccination rates of 56.11 per cent and 27.9 per cent respectively for Canadian children in the same age group, according to federal data from Feb. 13. The highest-ranking province is Newfoundland and Labrador, where 85.24 per cent of children ages five to 11 have had one dose and 40.27 per cent have had two.
Copping said surveys have previously shown “more reluctance” among parents in Alberta to get their children vaccinated, with many parents “taking a wait-and-see attitude,” he said. Other parents whose children have contracted COVID-19 during the Omicron wave are holding back on getting them vaccinated, Copping added.
In a bid to boost rates in Alberta children, the province has increased the availability of pediatric COVID-19 vaccines, making access widely available at pharmacies, physician offices and Alberta Health Services clinics, the minister said.
As stated in a newsletter last month, while there’s certainly room for Canada’s five-to-11 vaccination rate to grow, the uptake is not at all out of step for Western or developed countries using vaccines other than Chinese or Russian brands. In fact, Canada appears to be near the top in terms of vaccination pace along with countries such as Spain and Australia.
Canada’s pace is well ahead of countries such as the United States, Israel, France, Italy and Denmark.
Britain, Norway and Sweden — all countries moving into a non-emergency phase of “living with COVID” — are not vaccinating children that young en masse, although there are some exceptions for ill or immunocompromised kids. Meanwhile, Japan won’t start their campaign for that age cohort until next week.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
