Excerpt - Trump keeps slashing pandemic response In 2005, during the H1N5 bird flu scare, the US Agency for International Development ran a program called Predict to identify and research infectious diseases in animal populations in the developing world. Most new viruses that impact humans — apparently including the one causing the Covid-19 disease — emerge through this route, so investing in early research is the kind of thing that, at modest ongoing cost, served to reduce the likelihood of rare but catastrophic events.
The program was initiated under George W. Bush and continued through Barack Obama’s eight years in office;then, last fall the Trump administration shut it down.
That’s part of a broader pattern of actual and potential Trump efforts to shut down America’s ability to respond to pandemic disease.
To link to two of your others which made that clear too
Election ads should focus on actions of Trump's which have depressed the economic recovery, and others as the content of that excerpt from yours and the particular bits of his deregulation agenda which have placed Americans in more danger than they were before.
Researchers at the University of Queensland (UQ) have said they are just days away from testing a new vaccine for coronavirus, or COVID-19, on animals.
Key points:
* The UQ team's vaccine will undergo animal studies within the next week
* This will be followed by CSIRO testing in Victoria
* Their efforts are part of a worldwide race to develop a coronavirus vaccine
Paul Young, head of the university's School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, said a team of 20 UQ scientists had been working around the clock to speed up the vaccine building process since the outbreak of the virus.
Researchers from UQ were funded by an international organisation called the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) to use new rapid medical development technology to help create a vaccine for the new virus strain.
"It started back when China released the sequence back in late January. That gave us the viral genome we needed to take and express," Dr Young said.
"A key milestone is actually generating the vaccine prior to putting it into animal studies.
"We will be going into our first animal studies at the University of Queensland this week, to be followed not long after [by] studies at the Australian Animal Health laboratories at the CSIRO in Geelong."
Dr Young said while the UQ work was groundbreaking, it was hard to say if it was the world's first vaccine developed for coronavirus.
He said there are multiple versions of vaccines and a variety of approaches that can all be as effective as each other.
"The best thing that can happen is happening now — that is, there is a wide number of groups working toward vaccine approaches, and quite frankly the first one that gets there it will be great," Dr Young said.
"It is not a race between vaccine producers, it is a race against this particular virus.
"It is a new territory for vaccine design. Vaccines take many years to develop from concept to licence and use in the community.
"What we are aiming for is somewhere between 12 and 18 months, which is remarkably quick."
Dr Young said the UQ team had developed 100 different versions of a protein to work out which would be most effective against the virus.
He said they now planned to conduct pre-clinical trials (including animal testing) and hoped to undertake human trials by the middle of the year.
"Those trials are testing that the vaccine actually induces the immune response we are expecting to start manufacturing in levels that are high enough and in a pure enough state such that we can put them into humans, " he said.
Dr Young said the team was already working on a rapid response to potential global disease outbreaks.
After completing animal studies, he said they would send the vaccine to the CSIRO for further testing.
"It has been significantly more challenging than we thought," he said.
Excerpt - “You have to at least now be anticipating and responsibly planning against a sort of pandemic level scenario reaching the US,” Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran foreign disaster assistance in the Obama administration, said.
“The fact that they explicitly dismantled the office in the White House that was tasked with preparing for exactly this kind of a risk is hugely concerning,” said Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “Both the structure and all the institutional memory is gone now.”
Funding has also been cut drastically to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), forcing it to reduce or discontinue epidemic-prevention efforts in 39 out of the 49 countries .. https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-to-scale-back-work-in-dozens-of-foreign-countries-amid-funding-worries-1516398717 .. it had been helping. Among the countries where CDC efforts were scaled back were Haiti, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as China, where the agency provided technical assistance.
In its 2020 budget the Trump administration proposed a further 10% cut .. http://thenationshealth.aphapublications.org/content/49/3/1.2 .. in CDC funding, equivalent to $750m. It zeroed out funding for epidemiology and laboratory capacity at state and local levels.
After this year’s cuts, 10 advanced treatment facilities will still receive funding, but not the 60 other treatment centres one tier below.
“Those assessment and treatment hospitals are kind of wondering where they’re going to get funding to continue these very costly efforts,” said Saskia Popescu, an infection prevention epidemiologist, at George Mason University. “So not only are we creating more vulnerable hospitals, but we’re getting this message across that hospitals, if you want to prepare, you’re kind of on your own.”
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