This is encouraging: Update on vaccine for SARS-COV-2

[dan_s]

The only thing that will get oil prices back were they need to be is less FEAR, so the travel bans can be lifted.

Pfizer CEO Alberta Bourla on Tuesday told The Wall Street Journal the company's COVID-19 vaccine could be ready for emergency distribution by this fall, and Oxford University's Jenner Institute is preparing for mass clinical trials after tests showed their vaccine to be effective in rhesus macaque monkeys. Johnson & Johnson earlier this month said it expected to start human testing of a coronavirus candidate as soon as September.

We need a "Paradigm Shift": The old view is that vaccines that two years to develop and test. We need to stop listing to old "experts" that have wrong about everything up to now.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (N.I.A.I.D.), in March said a vaccine "that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that's deployable."
The earliest it would be deployable, he added, is "in a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go."

Let's get real:
But research into a coronavirus vaccine has developed quickly because of rapid discoveries about the virus and vaccine-making technology, according to Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta, told the Journal.

"I'm not aware of any vaccine that's been developed after only a year to a year-and-a-half after identifying a pathogen," Orenstein told the Journal. "It usually takes years. People are moving very, very quickly with this."

The Jenner Institute, one of the largest academic centers dedicated to nonprofit vaccine research, could start distributing the vaccine for emergency use by early September if clinical trials go smoothly.

"It is a very, very fast clinical program," Emilio Emini, a director of the vaccine program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the world's largest vaccine maker, the Serum Institute of India, said it would not wait for the trial to end and already was making 40 million doses to save time in case it worked.

Pfizer has already started trials in Germany, and approval for U.S. testing is "expected shortly." The pharmaceutical giant could start distributing a vaccine on an emergency basis in the fall as well.

"This is a crisis right now, and a solution is desperately needed by all," Bourla said.

The coronavirus, believed to have originated in Wuhan, China, has infected more than 3 million people worldwide and killed more than 216,000.

Its spread has left businesses around the world counting the costs and economic growth tumbling. But a vaccine would drastically change the outlook.
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Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened sharply higher on Wednesday as positive news from a trial of Gilead Science's (NASDAQ:GILD) experimental drug remdesivir upstaged the worst U.S. GDP report in nearly 12 years.

By 10 AM ET (1400 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 465 points, or 1.9%, at 24,567 points. The S&P 500 was up 2.2% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 2.6%.

The Nasdaq (NASDAQ:NDAQ) was helped by a strong contribution from Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock, which rose 7.8% after better-than-expected first-quarter results. Chief financial officer Ruth Porat told an analyst call that there had been no further big drops in advertising revenue in April after a sharp fall in March. YouTube, one of the company's biggest cash cows, raked in $4 billion in the quarter, a rise of 33% from a year earlier.

Earlier, Gilead had said that a stage 1 trial of remdesivir had shown that the retroviral drug helped improve symptoms in Covid-19 patients who were given the drug early. The effect on those who were given it at a later stage were not as positive.

Interest in Gilead's drug has been high as there are currently no approved treatments or preventive vaccines for Covid-19, something that analysts say leaves the global economy vulnerable to secondary waves of infection over the next year or two. Gilead stock rose 5.9% at opening to within a couple of percent of the two-year high it earlier in April.

The prospect of progress in finding a cure lifted airline and cruise stocks disproportionately, on the perception that they have most to gain from the boost to public confidence from having a readily available treatment for the disease.

The same reasoning also lifted the price of crude oil. U.S. crude futures extended gains to be up 24.5% at $15.38 a barrel by 10 AM ET. The international Brent contract rose 7.2% to $24.38.

The news deflected attention away from the weakest report for U.S. gross domestic product in almost 12 years. The economy shrank by an annualized 4.8% in the first quarter, even more than expected by analysts, as personal consumption slumped in response to mass layoffs as state authorities issued a barrage of lockdown orders through March.

The collapse was also reflected in a wider-than-expected loss of $1.7 billion for Boeing. Boeing (NYSE:BA) stock still rose 5.7% after Reuters reported that the company is preparing to cut around 10% of its workforce as it brings production down into line with a much lower level of expected future demand.

One underperformer was Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) stock, which fell 3.5% after the chipmaker lowered the bottom end of its guidance for 2020 sales growth to 20% from 28% previously.

[dan_s]

Personally, I can't wait until we can get back to talking about how Global Warming is going to kill all of us.

Susan & I have a cruise to Alaska booked for July, so we can see the glaciers before they all melt.

[par_putt]

Ziggy has probably never seen a glacier before... (service animal advantages )

[dan_s]

Ziggy is slowly adapting to life in Sugar Land. He is 2 but we think that he's had little exposure to the outside world. He is frightened of kids and loud noises. Everyone that we know who has adopted a rescue dog says it take about a month before they adapt to the new home. He definitely likes exploring our home.

The women who we got Ziggy from is a "saint". She has six elderly poms that are only alive because of her. There are some very good people in this world.

Maybe we should test new vaccines on people that abuse dogs because they are lower down the evolutionary process than monkeys IMO.