Villa Leonardo Gambin
Villa Leonardo Gambin facing questions over Moderna vaccine doses, which are only usable for six hours after vial is opened.
A nurse at a GTA long-term-care home hit hard by COVID-19 is speaking out after she says she was tasked with giving vaccine doses to the chair of the board and a handful of friends and family of management who had been called in because there was no other plan for a vial set to expire.
Villa Leonardo Gambin, an independent not-for-profit, long-term-care home in Woodbridge, received a shipment of Moderna vaccines in the second week of January, with shots earmarked for residents, staff and essential caregivers, meaning family members who helped with a resident s care.
A study today in
Nature Medicine showed Pfizer s mRNA vaccine, the first vaccine approved in the United States for use against COVID-19, neutralized three variants of the virus, including the B117 strain first identified in the United Kingdom, and two new variants first confirmed in South Africa.
The mutations tested included the N501Y from the United Kingdom and South Africa, the 69/70-deletion + N501Y + D614G from United Kingdom; and E484K + N501Y + D614G from South Africa.
To conduct the study, University of Texas Medical Branch researchers engineered three COVID-19 viruses with the spike mutations from the variants. They then measured neutralization geometric mean titers (GMTs) against the variants in 20 samples of human sera from subjects who had been vaccinated with Pfizer s two-dose vaccine 2 to 4 weeks earlier.
Credit: Courtesy UHN
TORONTO (February 5, 2021) - A clinical study led by Dr. Jordan Feld, a liver specialist at Toronto Centre for Liver Disease, University Health Network (UHN), showed an experimental antiviral drug can significantly speed up recovery for COVID-19 outpatients - patients who do not need to be hospitalized.
This could become an important intervention to treat infected patients and help curb community spread, while COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out this year. This treatment has large therapeutic potential, especially at this moment as we see aggressive variants of the virus spreading around the globe which are less sensitive to both vaccines and treatment with antibodies, says Dr. Feld, who is also Co-Director of the Schwartz Reisman Liver Research Centre and the R. Phelan Chair in Translational Liver Research at UHN.
A new antiviral drug, delivered in a single shot, could be a key tool to slow community spread, according to a Canadian study that shows the treatment may be able to help those with milder cases of COVID-19 recover from the infection much faster.