The experimental antibody drug given to President Donald Trump has been called one of the most promising approaches to preventing serious illness from a COVID-19 infection.Its maker, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., said the company agreed to supply a single dose, given intravenously, for Trump at the request of his physician under “compassionate use” provisions, when an experimental medicine is provided on a case-by-case emergency basis, while studies of it continue.The new drug is in late-stage testing and its safety and effectiveness are not yet known. No treatment has yet proved able to prevent serious illness after a coronavirus infection.Trump was given the experimental drug at the White House on Friday before he was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he’ll be monitored, officials said. So far, Trump has had only mild symptoms, including fatigue.Several physicians who treat COVID-19, including Dr. David Boulware at the University of Minnesota, had speculated that doctors might use the antibody drug, given that this approach has worked against other diseases in the past.”They’re not going to just sit around and watch to see if he gets sick,” Boulware said.How antibodies workAntibodies are proteins the body makes when an infection occurs; they attach to a virus and help the immune system eliminate it. Vaccines trick the body into thinking there’s an infection so it makes these antibodies.But it can take weeks for them to form after natural infection or a vaccine. The drugs aim to give that protection immediately, by supplying concentrated versions of one or two antibodies that worked best against the coronavirus in lab and animal tests.Regeneron’s drug contains two antibodies to enhance chances that it will work. The company previously developed a successful Ebola treatment from an antibody combo.What’s known so farThe drug is given as a one-time treatment through an IV. In multiple studies, Regeneron is testing it both for preventing infection and in people already infected, like Trump, to try to prevent serious illness or death.Earlier this week, Regeneron said partial results from about 275 COVID-19 patients who were not sick enough to need hospitalization suggested it might be cutting how long symptoms last and helping reduce the amount of virus patients harbor.The study, however, has not been completed. Results were announced only in a company news release and have not been published or reviewed by other scientists.FILE – A lab technician inspects filled vials of the coronavirus disease treatment drug remdesivir at a Gilead Sciences facility in La Verne, Calif., March 11, 2020.Trump’s other treatmentsTrump’s physician, Dr. Sean Conley, said late Friday that the president had also been given the antiviral drug remdesivir at the military hospital. The Gilead Sciences drug has been shown to help some COVID-19 patients recover faster.Earlier, Conley said Trump also was taking zinc, vitamin D, an antacid called famotidine, melatonin and aspirin. None of those have been proven to be effective against COVID-19.Trump apparently is not receiving hydroxychloroquine, a drug he widely promoted that has been shown in many studies to be ineffective for preventing or treating COVID-19.
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Day: October 3, 2020
Cameroon says more than 9 million girls aged 9 and above risk developing cervical cancer because their parents have been convinced the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine makes their daughters sterile. Some communities that had accepted the vaccination are now refusing it, claiming that what is being administered now are dangerous experimental COVID-19 vaccines. The government, doctors and female medical staff members are now working to convince parents the HPV vaccination reduces the risk of cervical cancer.
To counter misconceptions, groups of 20 young women move from market to market and through popular spots in Cameroon capital, Yaounde, sharing posters and tell Cameroonians that the HPV vaccine does not make girls sterile.Among them is Linda Fonyuy, a 21-year-old mother.
“I for instance, I am giving my testimony that I received my vaccine as far back as 2014 and today, I am a mother of two.”
Forty-year old fruit seller Gloria Amana says she is not convinced by Fonyuy.
She says she will not accept HPV vaccine because a lot of negative information about the vaccine has been circulating on social media platforms. She says she wants to be a grandmother, so she rejects any vaccine that would sterilize her daughters.A poster of a member of Cameroon’s Medical Women Association endorsing HPV vaccines.This month, Cameroon is implementing systematic use of the HPV vaccine. The effort was first launched in 2014 and has been in a demonstration phase since.
The government and organizations such as the Cameroon Medical Women Association organized the nationwide campaign to convince parents the HPV vaccine protects their children from cervical cancer.
Celine Mairousgou, coordinator of Cameroon’s Expanded Vaccination Program on the country’s northern border with Nigeria, says much controversy has been generated about the vaccine since Cameroon reported its first coronavirus case in March.
She says the first reason the vaccine has become controversial is that it is free. She says the vaccine is free because the government wants to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer among its citizens and that people should stop claiming that it is not an HPV vaccine, but anti-COVID-19 vaccines Western countries have paid to test in Cameroon. She says the vaccine is given before a girl’s first sexual encounter, when the virus that causes cervical cancer can be contracted.
Rose Leke, professor emeritus of immunology at the University of Yaounde, says the controversy reached its apex when, in a television discussion last April, two French doctors—one of them the head of an intensive-care unit in Paris—suggested trials for vaccines against COVID-19 should be conducted in Africa.A poster of a member of Cameroon’s Medical Women Association endorsing HPV vaccines.Leke says the HPV vaccine has nothing in common with what the French doctors proposed.
“Everybody should know that the government is working with UNICEF, and what comes here, I can assure you, is of good quality. People should ask themselves which government will go on to destroy its people? So, people should get that trust and I think the head of the communities and so on should also be responsible to take correct messages down to the communities,” Leke said.
The government and its health partners say they are combating the coronavirus but not neglecting other life-threatening diseases. The government is asking organizations, lawmakers and medical staff members to convince people that vaccinations protect them, and that no vaccine is intended to kill or make girls sterile.
Cameroon’s Expanded Vaccination Program says 1,500 women in the central African country die each year of cervical cancer. About 11 million are targeted for vaccination, starting this month.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says HPV vaccination is recommended for 11- and 12-year-old girls. It is also recommended for girls and women age 13 through 26 years old who have not yet been vaccinated or completed the vaccine series. The center says the vaccine can also be given to girls beginning at age 9 to protect against cancers caused by HPV.
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While the world wants flashy quick fixes for everything, especially massive threats like the coronavirus and global warming, next week’s Nobel Prizes remind us that in science, slow and steady pays off.
It may soon do so again.
Science builds upon previous work, with thinkers “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton put it, and it starts with basic research aimed at understanding a problem before fixing it. It’s that type of basic science that the Nobels usually reward, often years or decades after a discovery, because it can take that long to realize the implications.
Slow and steady success in science has made researchers hopeful in the fight against the pandemic. It even offers a glimmer of climate optimism.
Many years of advances in basic molecular science, some of them already Nobel Prize-winning, have given the world tools for fast virus identification and speeded up the development of testing. And now they tantalize us with the prospect of COVID-19 treatments and ultimately a vaccine, perhaps within a few months.
“This could be science’s finest hour. This could be the time when we deliver, not just for the nation but the world, the miracle that will save us,” said geophysicist Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences.
The coronavirus was sequenced in a matter of weeks, testing became available quickly, and vaccines that would normally take years may be developed in a year or less, and “it’s all been built on the back of basic science advances that have been developed in the past three decades,” McNutt said.
She pointed to gene sequencing and polymerase chain reaction, which allows for multiple copying of precise DNA segments. That latter discovery won the 1993 Nobel in chemistry.
And even further back, in 1984, the Nobel in medicine went to a team for theories on how to manipulate the immune system using something called monoclonal antibodies. Now those antibodies are one of the best hopes for a treatment for the coronavirus.
“Despite the politics, despite whatever other things are slowing us down, Nobel Prize-winning discoveries from 20 years ago are going to be key to treating and preventing COVID next year,” said Sudip Parikh, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “That was made possible by basic research.”
Basic research comes first. The benefits are typically reaped only later, in what is called applied science.
“Without basic science, you won’t have cutting-edge applied science,” said Frances Arnold, a Caltech chemical engineer who won the 2018 Nobel in chemistry.
Nobel-winning basic research has allowed us to see the world in a whole new light.
Do you like white, efficient LED light to replace the nasty fluorescent hum of industrial lighting or energy-gobbling incandescent bulbs? A key part of those lights are blue light-emitting diodes, and their discovery won the 2014 Nobel in physics, said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, head of the Hayden Planetarium.
How about seeing better, without glasses, thanks to LASIK surgery? That stemmed from research into precise lasers that led to the 2018 Nobel for physics, but was also the product of an accident in which a researcher got lasered in the eye, said microbiologist Rita Colwell, former head of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
And those lasers used concepts that date back to Albert Einstein, said British Royal Astronomer Martin Rees.
John Mather, who won the 2006 physics Nobel for cosmology, which is the study of the origin of the universe and is thus the ultimate basic science, said nearly everything we use around us is there because of basic science.
“Engineers and entrepreneurs use this knowledge to build commercial empires,” he said. “Doctors use what we find to develop new cures. Architects build houses with modern materials. Airplanes are designed at the very edge of what is possible. Even cars are completely dependent on basic science.”
But some people don’t make that connection. Adam Riess, who won the 2011 Nobel in physics, and Tyson said this is especially noticeable when people who deny climate science or vaccine effectiveness do so while reaching fellow nonbelievers on smartphones and Google searches made possible because of basic science research.
“Maybe, maybe science needs a PR agent, OK?” Tyson said in an interview. “Maybe with a new discovery in science in a way that affects your life outcomes, the TV commercials say, ‘Did you know this? This thing that you’re using was invented here in this lab by this person. And it was brought to market by this company. And now you’re using it and enjoying it.’ Stop in silence. ‘You’re welcome.’”
As for fixing climate change, Mexican chemist Mario Molina has hope that the world will be able to solve the problem because of the work that led to his 1995 Nobel Prize.
He and others discovered that industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons were reaching high into the atmosphere and eating away at Earth’s protective ozone layer. He discovered this many years before an ozone hole developed over Antarctica.
His work and the opening of the hole led to a 1987 international agreement to ban those ozone-depleting chemicals, and the hole has started shrinking. Now Molina hopes that kind of action can be applied to what he calls “the climate emergency.”
“That’s why I’m optimistic. Because we do have one example of a global problem where practically all the countries of the planet agreed to work together. The ozone layer is healing. It takes quite a while,” Molina said. “But it’s working, slowly. So, it can be done.”
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