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Scientists were close to a coronavirus vaccine years ago. Then the money dried up.

  
Via:  Just Jim NC TttH  •  4 years ago  •  43 comments

By:   Mike Hixenbaugh

Scientists were close to a coronavirus vaccine years ago. Then the money dried up.
"We just could not generate much interest," a researcher said of the difficulty in getting funding to test the vaccine in humans. For weeks, Hotez has been reaching out to pharmaceutical companies and federal scientific agencies — and even the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom — asking them to provide the roughly $3 million needed to begin testing the vaccine's safety in humans, but so far none have done so.

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If this is true, perhaps it was inside info when Mr. Trump said he wanted it quicker? Hard to tell at this point as the good doctor just testified today. Please note WHEN this was done and subsequently "put in the freezer".


S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



Dr. Peter Hotez says he made the pitch to anyone who would listen. After years of research, his team of scientists in Texas had helped develop a vaccine to protect against a deadly strain of coronavirus. Now they needed money to begin testing it in humans.
But this was 2016. More than a decade had passed since the viral disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, had spread through China, killing more than 770 people. That disease, an earlier coronavirus similar to the one now sweeping the globe, was a distant memory by the time Hotez and his team sought funding to test whether their vaccine would work in humans.

"We tried like heck to see if we could get investors or grants to move this into the clinic," said Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "But we just could not generate much interest."

That was a big missed opportunity, according to Hotez and other vaccine scientists, who argue that SARS, and the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, of 2012, should have triggered major federal and global investments to develop vaccines in anticipation of future epidemics.
Instead, the SARS vaccine that Hotez's team created in collaboration with scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is sitting in a freezer, no closer to commercial production than it was four years ago.
"We could have had this ready to go and been testing the vaccine's efficacy at the start of this new outbreak in China," said Hotez, who believes the vaccine could provide cross-protection against the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory disease known as COVID-19. "There is a problem with the ecosystem in vaccine development, and we've got to fix this."

Hotez took that message to Congress on Thursday while testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He argued that the new coronavirus should trigger changes in the way the government funds vaccine development.
"It's tragic that we won't have a vaccine ready for this epidemic," Hotez wrote in prepared remarks. "Practically speaking, we'll be fighting these outbreaks with one hand tied behind our backs."
As of Wednesday, there had been more than 94,000 confirmed coronavirus cases globally and about 3,200 deaths. Public health officials are concerned that the virus, which can lead to respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia, will spread widely in the U.S. and last beyond this year — much like the seasonal flu, but more severe and potentially deadlier.
In response, pharmaceutical companies, university researchers and the federal government have been rushing to develop a vaccine. In addition to the official government effort led by the National Institutes of Health, several drugmakers are also scrambling to develop a vaccine that can be tested in humans in the coming months. But even under the rosiest of projections, one won't be ready for more than a year, government officials say.
"I'm cautiously optimistic that we will get a vaccine," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health's director for infectious diseases, said in an interview this week. "The thing that's sobering is that it's not a vaccine we're going to have next month, so we're going to have to tough it out through this evolution."

Early efforts to develop a SARS vaccine in animal trials were plagued by a phenomenon known as "vaccine-induced enhancement," in which recipients exhibit worse symptoms after being injected — something Fauci said researchers must be mindful of as they work to quickly develop a vaccine to protect against COVID-19.
That kind of research — figuring out which vaccine strategies work and which don't — potentially could have been completed before the new outbreak, said Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health who studies vaccine development. He said the global response to the coronavirus exposes broader flaws in the way medical research is funded, which he says tends to be market-driven and reactive, rather than proactive.

"We have a pattern in our medical research landscape in which outbreaks lead to a surge in research investment, and if and when those outbreaks wane, as they invariably do, other priorities take their place," Schwartz said. "As a result, you lose those opportunities to capitalize on that initial investment, and the cycle starts over again."
The responsibility to fund this type of research must rest with governments and nonprofits, Schwartz said, because for-profit pharmaceutical companies can't be counted on to fund projects that, in most cases, will never make money.
Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak
Some progress was made in the wake of the West Africa Ebola outbreak that ended in 2016. It spurred global leaders to create the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, a private-public partnership that's based in Norway and funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The nonprofit group has poured millions of dollars into vaccine development, but Schwartz and other experts say more is needed.
"We need to make sure that there are incentives outside of our traditional business model that can lead to greater investments in that foundational research," Schwartz said.

Dr. James LeDuc, director of the Galveston National Laboratory, said work has resumed on the SARS vaccine that his researchers helped develop with Hotez's team. The laboratory, a high-security biocontainment facility on Texas' Gulf Coast, received a live sample of the new coronavirus last month and will use it to test the vaccine in mice.
But first the lab must breed a colony of mice genetically engineered to replicate the human disease, a process that LeDuc said will take months.
"I think we as a nation and as a society need to be more agile in recognizing that new diseases do occur, and once they've cropped up, they very well may come again, maybe not the same but very similar," said LeDuc, who formerly directed influenza response efforts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "So it was a shame that we had to stop that work and now are having to try and restart it."

For weeks, Hotez has been reaching out to pharmaceutical companies and federal scientific agencies — and even the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom — asking them to provide the roughly $3 million needed to begin testing the vaccine's safety in humans, but so far none have done so.
"We've had some conversations with big pharma companies in recent weeks about our vaccine, and literally one said, 'Well, we're holding back to see if this thing comes back year after year,'" Hotez said.
He said he hopes the seriousness of the outbreak leads to reforms in how the federal government funds vaccine development, although he notes that he called for similar changes after the SARS and Ebola outbreaks. He said he's particularly worried about the toll the coronavirus will take on elderly nursing home residents and health care workers. But in his testimony to Congress on Thursday, Hotez also made an economic argument.
"Because nobody would invest a few million dollars into these SARS vaccines, we're looking at, I don't know what the number is, $10 billion, $100 billion in economic losses," Hotez said ahead of his appearance in Washington. "The stakes are so high, and the amount of money you're talking about to fund this research is so modest.


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Just Jim NC TttH
Professor Principal
1  seeder  Just Jim NC TttH    4 years ago

Well Hello.................................

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
2  Sparty On    4 years ago

Interesting story.  

Somehow i think big Pharma may be behind some of the lack of interest in this.   At least from a government standpoint.

 
 
 
KDMichigan
Junior Participates
3  KDMichigan    4 years ago

Now ,now you can't bring up the failures of the last administration, It triggers' the TDS sufferers.

 
 
 
Dulay
Professor Expert
3.1  Dulay  replied to  KDMichigan @3    4 years ago

Did your READ the seed? The Dr. states that for-profit PHARMA dropped the ball in the past on investment and that for weeks he's been trying to get PHARMA or the government to invest the 3 million. I'm pretty sure that Trump's Administration has been in charge for the last few weeks and is the one that's failing. 

 
 
 
Just Jim NC TttH
Professor Principal
3.1.1  seeder  Just Jim NC TttH  replied to  Dulay @3.1    4 years ago

Did YOU read? That was back in 2016 and Trump had NOTHING to do with it.

 
 
 
igknorantzrulz
PhD Quiet
3.1.2  igknorantzrulz  replied to  Just Jim NC TttH @3.1.1    4 years ago

who was elected president in 2016 again?

 
 
 
KDMichigan
Junior Participates
3.1.3  KDMichigan  replied to  igknorantzrulz @3.1.2    4 years ago
who was elected president in 2016 again?

Who was President for all of 2016? 

 
 
 
igknorantzrulz
PhD Quiet
3.1.4  igknorantzrulz  replied to  KDMichigan @3.1.3    4 years ago

Who was President for all of 2016? 

that would be the president at the time.

are you stating Trump or anyone in his administration was never approached by these scientists ?

as i find that ridiculous. 

WHY would they not present it to the incoming administration ?

 
 
 
Dulay
Professor Expert
3.1.5  Dulay  replied to  Just Jim NC TttH @3.1.1    4 years ago
Did YOU read? That was back in 2016 and Trump had NOTHING to do with it.

Why yes Jim, YES I did and I actually comprehended what I read too. 

For weeks, Hotez has been reaching out to pharmaceutical companies and federal scientific agencies — and even the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom — asking them to provide the roughly $3 million needed to begin testing the vaccine's safety in humans, but so far none have done so.
"We've had some conversations with big pharma companies in recent weeks about our vaccine, and literally one said, 'Well, we're holding back to see if this thing comes back year after year,'" Hotez said.

Has is PRESENT TENSE Jim. 

I can only hope that "recent weeks" is self explanatory. 

 
 
 
igknorantzrulz
PhD Quiet
3.1.6  igknorantzrulz  replied to  Dulay @3.1.5    4 years ago
Has is PRESENT TENSE Jim. 

is it just me, or just Jim...?

 
 
 
Dulay
Professor Expert
3.1.7  Dulay  replied to  KDMichigan @3.1.3    4 years ago
Who was President for all of 2016? 

Who was President in 'recent weeks'? 

 
 
 
KDMichigan
Junior Participates
3.1.8  KDMichigan  replied to  Dulay @3.1.7    4 years ago
Who was President in 'recent weeks'? 

What has that got to do with anything other than giving the TDS sufferers something to bitch about? 

 
 
 
Dulay
Professor Expert
3.1.9  Dulay  replied to  KDMichigan @3.1.8    4 years ago
What has that got to do with anything other than giving the TDS sufferers something to bitch about? 

It has to do with the FACT that the seed states clearly that in 'recent weeks' Trump's "scientific agencies" ignored Dr. Hotez. Again, for what it is costing for Trump to play golf this weekend, Dr. Hotez's research could be totally funded. 

It also has to do with the FACT that the PHARMA companies that Trump met with have already been contacted by Dr. Hotez and at least one told him that they wanted to wait and see if people kept dying next year before they invested. Since Trump didn't tweet anything about it, I'm pretty sure that the PHARMA companies didn't tell Trump that there was a SARS vaccine that could be tweaked and ready to test right quick.  

So the seeder seems to want to have dumped this in the lap of prior Administrations, especially Obama's, but the actual content of the seed dumps it right in Trump's lap. 

 
 
 
Just Jim NC TttH
Professor Principal
4  seeder  Just Jim NC TttH    4 years ago

Speaking of trigger. I see none of our naysayers seem to want to touch this story. I wonder why /s

 
 
 
Dulay
Professor Expert
4.1  Dulay  replied to  Just Jim NC TttH @4    4 years ago

Actually Jim, I told you about it yesterday. 

 
 
 
Split Personality
Professor Guide
6  Split Personality    4 years ago

 
 

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