Virus World

Trump’s words represent a remarkable escalation of his hostilities with Fauci less than two days before the presidential election. WASHINGTON — President Trump on Sunday suggested he would fire Anthony Fauci following the presidential election. As a crowd at a Pennsylvania rally chanted “Fire Fauci,” Trump paused and then responded: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until after the election … he’s a nice man, but he’s been wrong on a lot.” Trump’s words represent a remarkable escalation of hostilities less than two days before the presidential election. While the president has feuded with Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious diseases researcher, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, he has never directly threatened to dismiss him. Fauci, 79, has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. Threatening to dismiss a top government researcher on the eve of a presidential election is likely an unprecedented move in American politics. And while it’s not clear whether Trump can legally dismiss Fauci himself, since Fauci is not a political appointee, the president is certainly empowered to remove him from the White House coronavirus task force. There’s also little doubt that the president or a political appointee in his health department could reassign him, as occurred earlier in 2020 with Rick Bright, a scientist who ran a vaccine development agency until his reassignment in May.

The pledge to dismiss Fauci comes amid a broader effort by the White House and the Trump campaign to dismiss the severity of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The U.S. has recorded roughly 80,000 new cases and nearly 1,000 deaths daily in the past week. Even in the face of the escalating case count and death toll, Trump has continued to insist that the United States is “rounding the turn” in its Covid-19 response. In the wake of his own bout with the disease in early October, Trump has told Americans that they shouldn’t fear the coronavirus, given the availability of new therapeutics and forthcoming vaccines. One of the Covid-19 therapies Trump received is an experimental treatment unavailable to Americans outside the context of a clinical trial. And despite Trump’s insistence that a vaccine approval would likely come before Election Day, no drug company has submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration requesting an emergency vaccine authorization. Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, has sharply criticized Trump for his continued hostility toward Fauci and his broader skepticism for basic facts spoken by government scientists. Biden has said that if he’s declared the winner, one of his first calls would go to Fauci, asking him to continue his government service. Fauci did not immediately return STAT’s request for comment.

The White House has blocked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from enacting stricter federal guidelines on the emergency release of a potential coronavirus vaccine,  The New York Times reported on Monday. The FDA first submitted the proposal for new guidelines in late September, but they were immediately rebuffed by President Trump and top officials who worried it would delay the release of a vaccine as Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" has sought to quickly move one through the approval process. According to the Times, the new guidance included the recommendation that volunteers in the vaccine clinical trials be followed for around two months after receiving their final dose before an official vaccine authorization is granted. The recommendation is part of an effort to make sure an approved vaccine is safe.  The Times reports that specific part of the proposed guidelines was the sticking point for White House officials. The report comes as the FDA is looking to reassure the public that it is following the science and will make sure any vaccine is safe and effective before authorizing it amid fears of political pressure from Trump.   Trump had signaled he may not approve the guidelines after they were proposed.

“We’re looking at that. That has to be approved by the White House. We may or may not approve it. That sounds like a political move,” Trump told reporters at a White House briefing when asked if he agreed with the FDA's plan. “Why would [companies] have to be adding great length to the process? We want to have people not get sick. The vaccine is very important,” Trump said, adding, “I think that was a political move more than anything else.”  It marks another instance of Trump and the White House breaking with top health officials on public health guidelines and his assessments about the threat posed by the virus.  Meanwhile, some have raised questions about the safety of a vaccine.  Last month nine pharmaceutical companies signed a joint pledge not to approve any vaccine without confidence in its safety and efficacy.

The president’s result came after he spent months playing down the severity of the outbreak that has killed more than 207,000 in the United States and hours after insisting that “the end of the pandemic is in sight. President Trump said early Friday morning that he and the first lady have tested positive for the coronavirus, throwing the nation’s leadership into uncertainty and escalating the crisis posed by a pandemic that has already killed more than 207,000 Americans and devastated the economy.” “Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly before 1 a.m. “We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!”  The president’s physician said Mr. Trump was “well” without saying whether he was experiencing symptoms and added that the president would stay isolated in the White House for now. “The president and first lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence,” the physician, Sean P. Conley, said in a statement without saying how long that would be. “Rest assured I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering, and I will keep you updated on any future developments.” “The president and first lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence,” the physician, Sean P. Conley, said in a statement without saying how long that would be. “Rest assured I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering, and I will keep you updated on any future developments.”

Contrary to his predictions, President Trump won't have a coronavirus vaccine ready by Election Day, vaccine experts tell CNN after reviewing data from Moderna, the first company to begin its Phase 3 clinical trials of a coronavirus vaccine in the United States. "There's no way. There's just no way," said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist at Baylor College of Medicine and a CNN medical analyst. Last week President Trump said he was "optimistic" a vaccine would be ready around Election Day on November 3. "I believe we'll have the vaccine before the end of the year, certainly, but around that date, yes. I think so," Trump said Thursday.

In an unprecedented move, the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday published an editorial written by its editors condemning the Trump administration for its response to the Covid-19 pandemic -- and calling for the current leadership in the United States to be voted out of office. "We rarely publish editorials signed by all the editors," said Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the medical journal and an author of the new editorial. The editorial, which Rubin said was drafted in August, details how the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and deaths. So far, more than 7.5 million people in the United States have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and more than 211,000 people have died of the disease.

U.S. President Donald Trump has received a promising but experimental COVID-19 drug still in clinical trials, according to a White House statement released Friday afternoon, following his diagnosis with the disease. Sean Conley, the President’s personal physician, wrote in a memo that he treated Trump with an eight-gram dose of Regeneron’s experimental antibody cocktail. Trump has also received zinc, vitamin D, aspirin, melatonin and a heartburn drug thought to help fight COVID-19. Regeneron on Tuesday announced promising results related to its monoclonal antibodies—drugs that mimic the human body’s natural immune response. When the body detects an infection, it deploys proteins called antibodies to help fight it off. Monoclonal antibodies essentially kickstart that process with synthetic proteins. In preliminary results from a trial of 275 non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were treated with either the antibody cocktail or a placebo, Regeneron’s cocktail reduced the amount of virus in patients’ systems and helped alleviate their symptoms, the company says. The therapy worked particularly well for patients whose immune systems failed to mount a natural response to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, according to Regeneron’s results.

While those are promising results, they have yet to be peer-reviewed, and Regeneron’s therapy has not yet been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. After the trial’s findings were released, executives said they planned to “rapidly” discuss them with the FDA, CNBC reports. Regeneron has enrolled participants for a larger study to confirm and build upon the results of its first trial. Trump is “fatigued but in good spirits” following his diagnosis with COVID-19, Conley wrote in his memo. He has reportedly experienced mild symptoms so far. First Lady Melania Trump, who also tested positive for the coronavirus, has a headache and mild cough, according to the memo. Trump is being taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a “few days,” the Associated Press reported late Friday afternoon.

Cornell University researchers analyzing 38 million English-language articles about the pandemic found that President Trump was the largest driver of the “infodemic"  Of the flood of misinformation, conspiracy theories and falsehoods seeding the internet on the coronavirus, one common thread stands out: President Trump. That is the conclusion of researchers at Cornell University who analyzed 38 million articles about the pandemic in English-language media around the world. Mentions of Mr. Trump made up nearly 38 percent of the overall “misinformation conversation,” making the president the largest driver of the “infodemic” — falsehoods involving the pandemic. The study, to be released Thursday, is the first comprehensive examination of coronavirus misinformation in traditional and online media. “The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” said Sarah Evanega, the director of the Cornell Alliance for Science and the study’s lead author. “That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”

The study identified 11 topics of misinformation, including various conspiracy theories, like one that emerged in January suggesting the pandemic was manufactured by Democrats to coincide with Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, and another that purported to trace the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, to people who ate bat soup. But by far the most prevalent topic of misinformation was “miracle cures,” including Mr. Trump’s promotion of anti-malarial drugs and disinfectants as potential treatments for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. That accounted for more misinformation than the other 10 topics combined, the researchers reported. They found that of the more than 38 million articles published from Jan. 1 to May 26, more than 1.1 million — or slightly less than 3 percent — contained misinformation. They sought to identify and categorize falsehoods, and also tracked trends in reporting, including rises in coverage. For example, on April 24, a day after Mr. Trump floated — and was ridiculed for — the idea that disinfectants and ultraviolet light might treat Covid-19, there were more than 30,000 articles in the “miracle cures” category, up from fewer than 10,000 only days earlier. Mr. Trump drove those increases, the study found. To those who have been watching Mr. Trump’s statements, the idea that he is responsible for spreading or amplifying misinformation might not come as a huge shock. The president has also been feeding disinformation campaigns around the presidential election and mail-in voting that Russian actors have amplified — and his own government has tried to stop. But in interviews, the Cornell researchers said they expected to find more mentions of conspiracy theories, and not so many articles involving Mr. Trump.

Public health experts know that clear, concise and accurate information is the foundation of an effective response to an outbreak of infectious disease. Misinformation around the pandemic is “one of the major reasons” the United States is not doing as well as other countries in fighting the pandemic, said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a former principal deputy commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration. “There is a science of rumors. It’s when there is uncertainty and fear,” said Dr. Sharfstein, who teaches on public health crisis communications. In the absence of treatments or vaccines, he said, honest and consistent messaging is essential. “This is what we need to save lives,” he said. “If it’s not done well, you get far more infections and deaths.”  The Cornell Alliance for Science, which spearheaded the study, is a nonprofit devoted to using science to enhance food security and improve environmental sustainability. One of its aims is to promote science-based decision-making. Dr. Evanega and a Cornell colleague, Mark Lynas, partnered with media researchers at Cision, a company that performs media analysis, to conduct the study. Dr. Evanega said the study was being peer reviewed by an academic journal, but the process was lengthy and the authors withdrew it because they felt they had compelling public health information to share.

The researchers sought to identify all mentions of misinformation in “traditional media” — including in The New York Times and other major news outlets. They included fact-checking articles that corrected misinformation in their total tally. But fact-checking articles accounted for only 16.4 percent of those that included misinformation, “suggesting that the majority of Covid misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction,” the authors wrote. The study found that conspiracy theories, when lumped together, accounted for 46 percent of the misinformation mentions. Among those theories was one that emerged in early April suggesting that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a respected voice on the pandemic, was exaggerating deaths or was a beneficiary of pharmaceutical company efforts to find treatments and vaccines. To look for such stories, they examined social media hashtags, including #FireFauci and #FauciFraud. The researchers identified more than 11,000 misinformation articles involving Dr. Fauci, as compared with more than 295,000 involving miracle cures. There were more than 40,000 articles that mentioned the purported Democratic hoax, and more than 6,000 mentioning bat soup, which was the topic of a video that made the rounds on social media in the winter.

Study cited:

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/evanega-et-al-coronavirus-misinformation-submitted-07-23-20-1/080839ac0c22bca8/full.pdf 

The president dismissed the severity of the pandemic, downplaying the effect of the disease even as infections surge across the Sunbelt and rebound in California. President Trump dismissed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States over the weekend, downplaying the impact of the disease and saying that while the testing of tens of millions of American had identified many cases, “99 percent” of them were “totally harmless.” His remarks about a virus that has already claimed nearly 130,000 lives were perplexing. The coronavirus is surging across the Sunbelt states and has rebounded in California. At least 2.8 million Americans are known to be infected, and public health officials have said the real number of infections may be 10 times higher.

WHAT WAS SAID

Likewise, testing — there were no tests for a new virus, but now we have tested over 40 million people. But by so doing, we show cases, 99 percent of which are totally harmless. Results that no other country will show, because no other country has testing that we have — not in terms of the numbers or in terms of the quality.