Synopsis
A company press release did not indicate why efficacy has fallen, but one reason might be the emergence of new variants of concern which are not as susceptible to antibodies evoked to the vaccine.
Agencies
Moderna is working on two variant-specific boosters, and said mice studies showed they elicited an increased immune response. The results of these studies have been posted online in a scientific paper that is now awaiting peer review.
US biotech company Moderna announced Covid vaccine is 90 percent effective against all forms of the disease and 95 percent effective against severe disease. The new results come from its ongoing Phase 3 clinical trial involving more 30,000 people across the United States, and the headline efficacy figure is a slight decrease from an earlier figure of 94.1 percent published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December.
Unusual treatment shows promise for kids with brain tumors
MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Chief Medical Writer
April 11, 2021
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1of6This 2016 photo provided by the family shows Jake Kestler, center, with his parents, Gallite and Josh, and his sister, Lily, a month before he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Jake received a genetically-modified virus-based treatment for the cancer when he was 12. He lived for a year and four months after that, long enough to celebrate his bar mitzvah, go with his family to Hawaii and see a brother be born, said his father, Josh Kestler, of Livingston, N.J. Jake s parents started a foundation, Trail Blazers for Kids, to further research. (Family Photo via AP)APShow MoreShow Less
The Atlantic
The Reagan Family’s Secret Battle Over the AIDS Crisis
The former first lady fought the most conservative elements of the Reagan administration in an attempt to get her husband to pay more attention to the deadly pandemic. It wasn’t enough.
, Simon & Schuster 2021.
In mid-1981 the U.S. Center for Disease Control noticed a set of medical curiosities: an alert from Los Angeles that five previously healthy young men had come down with a rare, fatal lung infection; almost simultaneously, a dermatologist in New York saying that he had seen a cluster of unusually aggressive cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obscure skin cancer. These seemingly unconnected occurrences had two things in common. First, all of the victims were sexually active gay men. Second, their maladies pointed to a catastrophically compromised immune system.