By Julie
Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A critical component of the immune
system known as T cells that respond to fight infection from the original
version of the novel coronavirus appear to also protect against three of the
most concerning new virus variants, according to a U.S. laboratory study
released on Tuesday.
Several recent studies have shown
that certain variants of the novel coronavirus can undermine immune protection
from antibodies and vaccines.
But antibodies - which block the
coronavirus from attaching to human cells - may not tell the whole story,
according to the study by researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID). T cells appear to play an important additionally
protective role.
“Our data, as well as the results
from other groups, shows that the T cell response to COVID-19 in individuals
infected with the initial viral variants appears to fully recognize the major
new variants identified in the UK, South Africa and Brazil,” said Andrew Redd
of the NIAID and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who led the study.
The researchers analyzed blood from
30 people who had recovered from COVID-19 before the emergence of the new more
contagious variants.
From those samples, they identified
a specific form of T cell that was active against the virus, and looked to see
how these T cells fared against the concerning variants from South Africa, the
UK and Brazil.
They found the T-cell responses
remained largely intact and could recognize virtually all mutations in the
variants studied.
The findings add to a prior study
that also suggested T cell protection appears to remain intact against the
variants.
The NIAID researchers said larger
studies are needed to confirm the findings. Continued monitoring for variants
that escape both antibody and T cell protection is needed, Redd said.
The paper has been accepted for
publication in Open Forum Infectious Diseases but has yet to be peer reviewed.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-variants/t-cells-induced-by-covid-19-infection-respond-to-new-virus-variants-u-s-study-idUSKBN2BM3BZ
Austria in talks to buy a million
doses of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine March 30, 2021 12:39 PM By Reuters Staff
VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria is in talks with Russia to buy a
million doses of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, which has yet to be
approved by the European Medicines Agency, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s office
said on Tuesday.
Conservative leader Kurz is under
fire from opposition parties because his government did not buy as many
coronavirus vaccines as it could have under the European Union’s collective
purchasing scheme.
“There must be no geopolitical
blinkers regarding vaccines,” Kurz said in a statement issued by his office,
adding that Austria is in talks with Russia and Moscow has offered to sell it a
million doses as of April. “The only thing that must count is whether the
vaccine is effective and safe.”
The statement noted that EMA has
launched a rolling review of Sputnik V, but it did not repeat Kurz’s previous
comments that Austria would only use the vaccine if it is cleared by the
regulator for the 27-nation EU.
Sputnik V has been approved for use
in 58 countries, most recently Mali, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF),
which promotes the vaccine abroad, said on Tuesday.
Kurz has blamed an Austrian official
on the EU’s vaccination steering board, where extra doses not bought up by
member states are then redistributed, for deciding on purchases without
consulting Vienna, and says he only recently learned of how the steering board
system worked. The official has been replaced.
Kurz has also complained that
vaccines are distributed unevenly within the EU because of that system.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-austria-sputnik/austria-in-talks-to-buy-a-million-doses-of-russias-sputnik-v-vaccine-idUSKBN2BM1HV?il=0
U.S., 13 countries concerned WHO
COVID-19 origin study was delayed, lacked access - statement March 30, 2021
6:26 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and
13 other countries expressed concerns on Tuesday that the World Health
Organization (WHO) report on the origins of the novel coronavirus that causes
COVID-19 was delayed and lacked access to complete data, according to a joint
statement.
It followed WHO Director-General Tedros
Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s assertion that data was withheld from its investigators
who traveled to China to research the origins of the pandemic.
"It is equally essential that we voice
our shared concerns that the international expert study on the source of the
SARS-CoV-2 virus was significantly delayed and lacked access to complete,
original data and samples," said the joint statement released on the
website of the U.S. State Department (bit.ly/2QSQfrC
The statement was signed by the governments
of Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia,
Lithuania, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the
United States.
China refused to provide raw data on early
COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team, one of the team’s investigators has already
said, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the global pandemic
began.
The countries’ joint statement supported
further studies of animals to find how the virus was introduced to humans, and
called for a renewed commitment from WHO and member countries to access, transparency
and timeliness.
More
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-statement/u-s-13-countries-concerned-who-covid-19-origin-study-was-delayed-lacked-access-statement-idUSKBN2BM2JG
Covid: Germany limits use of
AstraZeneca Covid jab for under-60s 31 March, 2021
Germany is suspending routine use of the
Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for people aged below 60 because of a risk
of rare blood clots.
The German medicines regulator found 31 cases of a type of
rare blood clot among the nearly 2.7 million people who had received the
vaccine in Germany.
Canada earlier suspended use of the AstraZeneca jab in
people under 55.
AstraZeneca said international regulators had found the
benefits of its jab outweighed risks significantly.
It said it was continuing to analyse its database to
understand "whether these very rare cases of blood clots associated with
thrombocytopenia occur any more commonly than would be expected naturally in a
population of millions of people".
"We will continue to work with German authorities to
address any questions they may have," it added.
The EU and UK medicine regulators both backed the vaccine
after previous cautionary suspensions in Europe this month.
The
European Medicines Agency the
UK Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency
In the UK, a government spokesperson said: "The
Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is safe, effective and has already saved thousands
of lives in this country. As the UK's independent regulator has said, when
people are called forward, they should get the jab.
"Over 30 million people have already received their
first dose of a vaccine, and we are on track to offer jabs to all over-50s by
15 April and all adults by the end of July."
More
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-56580728
Provinces suspend AstraZeneca
shots for people under 55 after advice from national panel The advisory committee recommended that more
information is needed on a possible link between the shot and rare blood clots
Author of the article: Morgan Lowrie and
Mia Rabson Publishing date: Mar 29, 2021
Canadian provinces suspended use of
the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in people under age 55 on Monday,
acting on an advisory committee’s concerns about a possible link between the
shot and rare blood clots.
Meanwhile, British Columbia imposed
new public-health measures for the next three weeks to slow the rapid spread of
the virus, as it announced 2,518 new cases over the past three days.
Dr. Shelley Deeks, the vice-chair of
Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization, said the committee
updated its recommendations amid new data from Europe that suggests the risk of
blood clots is now potentially up to one in 100,000 — much higher than the one
in one million risk believed before.
Health Canada demanded Monday that
AstraZeneca do a detailed study on the risks and benefits of its COVID-19
vaccine across multiple age groups, and Deeks said the advisory committee
recommended the shot be suspended for younger groups pending the outcome of
that review.
“NACI has determined that there is substantial uncertainty
about the benefit of providing AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to adults under 55
years of age, given the potential risks associated with it,” Deeks said.
“As a precautionary measure, while Health Canada carries
out an updated benefit-risk analysis based on emerging data, NACI recommends
that the vaccine not be used in adults under the age of 55 years.”
She said most of the patients in
Europe who developed a rare blood clot after vaccination with AstraZeneca were
women under the age of 55, and the fatality rate among those who developed clots
is as high as 40 per cent.
The blood clot condition is known as
Vaccine-Induced Prothrombotic Immune Thrombocytopenia. Deeks said it is
treatable, and the fatality rate could go down now that it has been identified
and symptoms are communicated.
Health Canada said it has not
received any reports of the blood clots in Canada, and the department’s chief
medical adviser, Dr. Supriya Sharma, said she believes the vaccine’s benefits
outweigh the risks.
The department changed its label on
the vaccine last week to warn about the rare risk of blood clots. Sharma said
Health Canada hasn’t changed its decision to authorize AstraZeneca.
More
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-press-newsalert-p-e-i-suspends-use-of-astrazeneca-vaccine-among-young
Next, some vaccine links
kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most
informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World
Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines . https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY
Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford
Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory
Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker . https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
https://rt.live/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
The Spectator
https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported.
Graphene made from old tires
helps strengthen concrete By Michael Irving March 29, 2021
Researchers
at Rice University have developed a new process to convert old tires into
graphene, which can then be used to make concrete. Not only is it more
environmentally friendly, but the team says the resulting concrete is
substantially stronger.
The
research builds on the team’s previous
breakthroughs in making graphene through a process
called flash Joule heating. Essentially, this involves using a jolt of
electricity to quickly superheat almost any carbon source to around 2,725 °C
(4,940 °F), converting it into graphene flakes. Specifically, it’s a form of
the material known as turbostratic graphene, which has layers that don’t line
up perfectly. That makes it more soluble, and easier to integrate into
composite materials.
Last year the team demonstrated the technique using waste
products like food or plastic – and now, they’ve moved onto discarded tires.
The Rice team says that previous efforts to convert tires directly into
graphene didn’t yield the best results, so for the new study they turned to the
material left over after they’ve undergone a common recycling process.
Pyrolysis involves burning tires in a low-oxygen
environment, which creates an oil that’s very useful for a range of industrial
processes. But it also produces a solid carbon residue that’s been harder to
find new life for.
The Rice researchers found that this
tire-derived carbon black was a great candidate for producing flash graphene.
When they put the material through flash Joule heating, some 70 percent of it
was converted into graphene, while a mixture of shredded tire rubber and
commercial carbon black yielded around 47 percent.
Next, the team demonstrated a
particular use case for the new graphene material – concrete production. They
added 0.1 weight/percent (wt%) for the graphene produced from tire carbon black,
and 0.05 wt% for the mixture of carbon black and shredded rubber into Portland
cement. They found that concrete cylinders made with this cement showed around
30 percent better compressive strength than concrete made without the graphene
additive.
“This increase in strength is in part due to a seeding
effect of 2D graphene for better growth of cement hydrate products, and in part
due to a reinforcing effect at later stages,” says Rouzbeh Shahsavari, co-lead
author of the study.
The team says that the graphene-reinforced concrete has
several environmental benefits. Not only could it help prevent waste tires from
ending up in landfill, but the extra strength of the final material could
reduce the amount of concrete needed in structures.
“Concrete is the most-produced material in the world, and
simply making it produces as much as 9 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide
emissions,” says James Tour, co-lead author of the study. “If we can use less
concrete in our roads, buildings and bridges, we can eliminate some of the
emissions at the very start.”
The research was published in the journal Carbon .
Source: Rice University
https://newatlas.com/materials/graphene-tires-strengthen-concrete/
Experience, however, shows that neither a state nor a
bank ever have had the unrestricted power of issuing paper money without
abusing that power; in all states, therefore, the issue of paper money ought to
be under some check and control; and none seems so proper for that purpose as
that of subjecting the issuers of paper money to the obligation of paying their
notes either in gold coin or bullion.
David Ricardo
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