Tag: ebola
How Fox News Covers Coronavirus — And How It Covered Ebola

How Fox News Covers Coronavirus — And How It Covered Ebola

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

In the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, cable news outlets — and Fox News in particular — fearmongered over an Ebola outbreak in Africa, before suddenly dropping the story after the votes were counted. Fox News figures pushed hard on the idea that President Barack Obama’s administration was inept at responding to a potential pandemic. 

As America faces a coronavirus pandemic under President Donald Trump, many of those same people are now singing a different tune.

Trump Wants Cut In Heating Aid To Fund Coronavirus Emergency

Trump Wants Cut In Heating Aid To Fund Coronavirus Emergency

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

How can you tell that the government isn’t taking a crisis seriously? One likely sign is the demand that funding to address the crisis be taken from another source of funds, injecting delay and controversy into an urgent matter for no good reason.

And that’s exactly what it appears the Trump administration is doing with its efforts to fight the outbreak of a new strain of the coronavirus, known as Covid-19. Officials have asked Congress for $2.5 billion to respond to the outbreak, but according to a report from the Washington Post, only $1.25 billion of this money would be new spending. The rest would come from existing programs.

Among the most galling of the sources of funds the administration wants to draw from is the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps poor families heat their homes in the winter.

“After dithering for weeks as the coronavirus spread around the world, the Trump administration has now decided to pay for its belated response by cutting funding for heating assistance for low-income families,” said Evan Hollander, a spokesman for House Appropriations Committee Democrats, in a statement to the Post.

The new measure would draw only $37 million from the heating program, a trivial number in terms of the federal budget. But that amount could mean a lot to families who need heat. An official told the Post the funds could help 750,000 families.

There’s no clear reason why anyone would want to take these funds away, and there’s certainly no reason it should be tied in to the negotiations around the response to Covid-19.

Another $535 million would also be taken from funds dedicated to fighting Ebola. While it’s at least sensical to consider emergency preparedness funds to all come from a single pool, the cut to Ebola programs is still hard to defend. And it will look profoundly short-sighted if Ebola re-emerges as a global threat.

No cuts need to be made at all. And the Post reports that the Democrats are working on a funding plan that wouldn’t cut spending from any other program, and it could include substantially more funds that the Trump administration has planned for. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta has suggested that the $2.5 billion figure does not seem commensurate with previous outbreak responses, and even Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Wednesday that the administration’s request is likely too low; he would rather see about $4 billion in funds allocated to fight the virus.

Vaccine Success Holds Hope For End To Deadly Scourge Of Ebola

Vaccine Success Holds Hope For End To Deadly Scourge Of Ebola

By Kate Kelland and Tom Miles

LONDON/GENEVA (Reuters) — The world is on the verge of being able to protect humans against Ebola, the World Health Organization said on Friday, as a trial in Guinea found a vaccine to have been 100 percent effective.

Initial results from the trial, which tested Merck (MRK.N) and NewLink Genetics’ (NLNK.O) VSV-ZEBOV vaccine on some 4,000 people who had been in close contact with a confirmed Ebola case, showed complete protection after 10 days.

The results were described as “remarkable” and “game changing” by global health specialists.

“We believe that the world is on the verge of an efficacious Ebola vaccine,” WHO vaccine expert Marie Paule Kieny told reporters in a briefing from Geneva.

The vaccine could now be used to help end the worst recorded outbreak of Ebola, which has killed more than 11,200 people in West Africa since it began in December 2013.

WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said the results, published online in the medical journal The Lancet, would “change the management of the current Ebola outbreak and future outbreaks.”

The Gavi Alliance, which buys vaccines in bulk for poor countries who struggle to afford them, immediately said it would back an Ebola shot once it is approved.

“These communities need an effective vaccine sooner rather than later,” Gavi’s chief executive Seth Berkley said. “We need to be ready to act wherever the virus is a threat.”

This and other vaccine trials were fast-tracked with huge international effort as researchers raced to test potential therapies and vaccines while the virus was still circulating.

“It was a race against time and the trial had to be implemented under the most challenging circumstances,” said John-Arne Røttingen of Norway’s Institute of Public Health, chair of the trial’s steering group.

“Ring Vaccination”

The Guinea trial began on March 23 to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of a single dose of VSV-ZEBOV using a so-called “ring vaccination” strategy, where close contacts of a person diagnosed with Ebola are immunized — either immediately, or at a later date.

As data began to emerge showing the very high protection rates in those vaccinated immediately, however, researchers decided on July 26 that they would no longer use the “delayed” strategy, since it was becoming clear that making people wait involved unethical and unnecessary risk.

The trial is now being continued, with all participants receiving the vaccine immediately, and will be extended to include 13- to 17-year-olds and possibly also 6- to 12-year-old children, the WHO said.

Jeremy Farrar, a leading infectious disease specialist and director of the Wellcome Trust, said the trial “dared to use a highly innovative and pragmatic design, which allowed the team in Guinea to assess this vaccine in the middle of an epidemic.”

“Our hope is that this vaccine will now help bring this epidemic to an end and be available for the inevitable future Ebola epidemics,” his statement said.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which has led the fight against Ebola in West Africa, called for VSV-ZEBOV to be rolled out to the other centers of the outbreak, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where it says it could break chains of transmission and protect front-line health workers.

VSV-ZEBOV was originally developed by Canada’s public health agency before being licensed to NewLink Genetics, which then signed a deal handing Merck the responsibility to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute it.

The success of the Guinea trial is a big relief for researchers, many of whom feared a sharp decline in cases this year would scupper their hopes of proving a vaccine could work.

Another major trial in Liberia, which had aimed to recruit some 28,000 subjects, had to stop enrolling after only reaching its mid-stage target of 1,500 participants. Plans for testing in Sierra Leone were also scaled back. That left the study in Guinea, where Ebola is still infecting new victims, as the only real hope for demonstrating the efficacy of a vaccine.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva and Ben Hirschler in London; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Photo: A member of the French Red Cross disinfects the area around a motionless person suspected of carrying the Ebola virus as a crowd gathers in Forecariah, Guinea, January 30, 2015. REUTERS/Misha Hussain 

Ebola Virus Vaccine Developed By Bird Flu Scientist

Ebola Virus Vaccine Developed By Bird Flu Scientist

By Karen Herzog, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (TNS)

Another vaccine has joined the race against the often fatal Ebola virus, and this one was developed by a group led by a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist internationally known for his bird flu research.

The whole virus vaccine that Yoshihiro Kawaoka and his colleagues developed was constructed using a novel experimental platform, and it has been shown to effectively protect monkeys exposed to the Ebola virus at a top biosafety-level National Institutes of Health laboratory in Montana, according to an article published Thursday in the prominent journal Science.

This vaccine differs from other Ebola vaccines in development because, as an inactivated whole virus vaccine, it can prime the host immune system with the complete range of Ebola viral proteins and genes, which makes it more likely to trigger a robust immune response, according to a news release from UW-Madison.

“In terms of efficacy, this affords excellent protection,” said Kawaoka, a professor of pathobiological sciences in the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine who has been working on the Ebola vaccine for years, and also holds a faculty appointment at the University of Tokyo.

There are no proven treatments for Ebola or vaccines to prevent individuals from becoming infected. Ebola, previously known as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, is a rare and deadly disease first discovered in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Ebola has claimed more than 10,000 lives in a current outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Symptoms include fever, severe headache, muscle pain, fatigue, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, and unexplained bleeding or bruising.

Whole virus vaccines have long been used to successfully prevent such serious diseases as polio, hepatitis, and human papillomavirus-mediated cervical cancer.

The vaccine developed by Kawaoka’s group does not yet have the backing of a manufacturer, and has not been tested in people. Human trials are expensive and complex, costing millions of dollars.

Four other Ebola vaccines in development recently advanced to the clinical trial stage in humans.

An efficacy trial for an Ebola vaccine developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada launched Wednesday in a community in Guinea where Ebola spread. About 10,000 people are expected to receive that vaccine, which reportedly has shown positive results in smaller safety trials and is backed by NewLink Genetics and Merck.

Kawaoka said the experimental platforms on which the four other vaccines were developed have drawbacks in terms of safety and delivery.

The vaccine with UW-Madison ties was constructed on an experimental platform first devised in 2008 by Peter Halfmann, a research scientist in Kawaoka’s lab.

That experimental platform allows researchers to safely work with the virus because a key gene is deleted, according to the Science report describing the vaccine’s development. The Ebola virus uses that gene, known as VP30, to make a protein required for it to reproduce in host cells. Like most viruses, Ebola depends on host cells to grow and become infectious.

By engineering monkey kidney cells to express the deleted VP30 protein, the virus could be safely studied in the lab and be used as a basis for devising a whole virus vaccine. The vaccine also was chemically inactivated using hydrogen peroxide, the Science report noted.

Early attempts to devise an inactivated whole virus Ebola vaccine through irradiation and the preservative formalin failed to protect monkeys exposed to the Ebola virus and were abandoned, according to Kawaoka.

The Ebola vaccine study conducted by Kawaoka’s group was supported by the National Institutes of Health and Japanese Health and Labor Sciences Research Grants.

(c)2015 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso