Virus World

Scientists are still working to unpack the mystery of why some people keep catching the virus while others seem to be resistant. In the meantime, people like Marion have been left with more questions than answers. 

A cruise ship with hundreds of Covid-positive passengers docked in Sydney, Australia, after being hit by a wave of infections. The Majestic Princess cruise ship was about halfway through a 12-day voyage when an outbreak of cases was noticed, Carnival Australia president Marguerite Fitzgerald told reporters in a media briefing on Saturday.  The ship had 4,600 passengers and crew on board at the time, according to CNN affiliate Nine News. After mass testing 3,300 passengers, around 800 tested positive for Covid-19, as did a small number of crew, Fitzgerald said. “All positive cases were mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic, and those guests isolated in their staterooms and then separated from non-impacted guests,” parent company Princess Cruises representative Briana Latter told CNN. Cruise operators separately escorted those infected off the ship and advised them to complete a five-day isolation period, CNN affiliate Nine News reported. Those who tested negative were permitted to leave the ship, a New South Wales Health statement read. “Carnival has advised NSW Health that they are assisting passengers with Covid-19 to make safe onward travel arrangements,” the statement added. Latter said the outbreak aboard the Majestic Princess was “reflective of an increase in community transmission in Australia.”

Australia’s prime minister has said he wants to make any potential Covid-19 vaccine mandatory as he outlined plans to “return the country to normal life” after battling a second wave of the virus. With governments around the world anticipating resistance to compulsory inoculation from anti-vaxx groups and a sceptical public, Scott Morrison said the aim was to get 95 per cent of the population to have the jab and that he was “expecting” that it would be compulsory except on medical grounds. “I would expect it to be as mandatory as you can possibly make,” Mr Morrison said in a radio interview. “We’re talking about a pandemic that has destroyed the global economy and taken the lives of hundreds of thousands all around the world, and over 430 Australians. So, you know, we need the most extensive and comprehensive response to this to get Australia back to normal.” But the difficulties in ensuring take-up of the vaccine were highlighted by a survey in the UK this month that concluded that only half of British people would definitely have a jab to guard against Covid-19. The coronavirus has now infected more than 22 million people around the world, according to Johns Hopkins University tracker, driven by continuing large numbers of cases in the United States, Brazil and India. More than 777,000 people have died.

Of the dozens of coronavirus vaccines being tested worldwide, the one under development at the University of Queensland was the first to be abandoned. Australia on Friday canceled a roughly $750 million plan for a large order of a locally developed coronavirus vaccine after the inoculation produced false positive test results for H.I.V. in some volunteers participating in a trial study. Of the dozens of coronavirus vaccines being tested worldwide, the Australian one was the first to be abandoned. While its developers said the experimental vaccine had appeared to be safe and effective, the false positives risked undermining trust in the effort to vaccinate the public. Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday said that his government would compensate for the loss of 51 million doses it had planned to buy from the Australian consortium in part by increasing orders of vaccines made by AstraZeneca and Novavax. The government has said it plans to begin inoculating citizens by March. “We can’t have any issues with confidence,” he told reporters, “and we are as a nation now, with a good portfolio of vaccines, able to make these decisions to best protect the Australian people.”

The Australian setback showed the missteps that can inevitably occur when scientists, during a pandemic that has killed more than 1.5 million people, rush to condense the usual yearslong process to develop vaccines into a matter of months. But just as the Australian scientists made their announcement, the fruits of that race became clearer. The United States moved a step closer to issuing its first approval for a Covid-19 vaccine, as a panel of experts who advise the Food and Drug Administration endorsed a Pfizer vaccine that is already in use in Britain. The trouble that arose with the Australian vaccine, developed by the University of Queensland and the biotech company CSL, was related to its use of two fragments of a protein found in H.I.V.  The protein formed part of a molecular “clamp” that researchers placed on the spikes that surround the coronavirus and allow it to enter healthy cells. The clamp stabilizes the spikes, allowing the immune system to respond more effectively to the vaccine. The use of the H.I.V. protein posed no risk of infecting the volunteers with that virus, the researchers said. But the clamp generated the production of antibodies recognized by H.I.V. tests at higher levels than the scientists had expected.  Because H.I.V. tests could not be rapidly re-engineered to account for this, the researchers decided to abandon development of the vaccine. Proceeding could have led to widespread anxiety among Australians that the vaccine could cause AIDS. Early experiments on hamsters showed that the vaccine protected them from the coronavirus. When Phase 1 trials on humans began in July, the 216 volunteers were “fully informed of the possibility of a partial immune response” to the clamp, the University of Queensland and CSL said in a statement on Friday.

The mistake, said John P. Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, was an “honest error” that cost money, not human lives. “I’m sure a lot of people are very embarrassed by it,” Professor Moore said. “It’s not great to be associated with a mistake like this. But when you’re running at 90 miles an hour, sometimes you trip.”