Today we are slumped on the sofa, head back, eyes closed, wrist to forehead with palm faced out and drooping, exclaiming(!) breathily about the futility of it all. We would like to live in one happy place where everybody is helped to maintain their health and no one is dying of underlying social conditions such as stupidity, cupidity, and cowardice.
(And where nobody has a fucking disastrous return to concert photography following a three-year layoff and months of post-infection issues, although that horse, as you will have guessed, has left the barn; that horse is well down the road.)
The announcement early last year that the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), along with other high-powered academic research organizations, had begun work on a ‘universal’ vaccine which might be effective against all variants of the plague — and possibly other coronaviruses as well — was exciting. The “ah, fuck it, we’re tired of this, you’re all cured” crowd were already gaining influence in the federal government and the wider world, so a vaccine that could balance out the looming neglect would be more than welcome.
But that was the last we heard of it; we kept expecting to see favorable updates but there, they were not. When we looked in June, the only references we could find were from late last year on the Walter Reed site touting their preclinical study results.
We looked again a few weeks ago and found a Science article offering some insight into why things haven’t been moving along so fast as the early announcements suggested might be possible. Chief but not exclusive among them is a lack of government support.
There’s a new call from the White House to develop vaccines that might protect against future SARS-CoV-2 mutants or even unknown coronaviruses. “The vaccines we have are terrific, but we can do better than terrific,” Ashish Jha, White House COVID-19 response coordinator, said at a vaccine summit yesterday that gathered researchers, companies, and government officials. “Ultimately, we need vaccines that can protect us no matter what Mother Nature throws at us.”
But no specific funding request to Congress was revealed at the summit, or any concrete plans, so vaccine developers and the public shouldn’t expect a second Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government’s multibillion-dollar crash program to develop the first COVID-19 vaccines.
The only clinical trial underway remains the one Walter Reed scientists initiated last year. Driving the lack of funding and progress for multiple projects, a Mt. Sinai virologist told Science, is a collapse of government motivation.
White House summits aside, some scientists contend there’s a deeper barrier. “The sense of urgency is completely gone,” says Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who is developing both pan–COVID-19 and panflu vaccines.
…
Lawrence Corey of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, who co-led the clinical trials network for Operation Warp Speed, is most interested in COVID-19 vaccines that set their sights higher still and promise to reduce the risk of infection and transmission of all SARS-CoV-2 spinoffs. “Do we really want to have 90,000 COVID deaths [in the United States] a year?” Corey asks. And he calls for more government backing so as to not squander the momentum of the field. “There are plenty of ideas,” he says. “What’s not forthcoming is the commitment.”
The story is well worth reading in whole, although it concludes on something of a down note. It’s not overly technical and offers a variety of perspectives. It does not answer the question about whether we’re willing to accept 90,000 or more Covid deaths annually, maybe because the answer is pretty clearly “damn skippy, podjo.”
The Walter Reed people published a technical article on the previously-mentioned preclinical study in Science at the end of last year. We’re trying to slog through it. In it we ran across this delightful detail: “QS-21 is a triterpenoid glycoside saponin derived from the bark of the Quillaja saponaria (soap bark) tree, found in Chile.”
Here’s an idea! Let’s not destroy the world’s forests.
(Musical contributors to this post include Ska Cubano, “Mambo Ska;” Sr. Bikini “Bikini-Mania;” Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones; and Delta Moon, “Black Cat Oil.” If you have music recommendations, go on and drop them in the comments.)