By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Moderna announced today that its coronavirus vaccine is 94.5 per cent effective in trials, the second vaccine in the United States to have a high success rate after trial results released last week Pfizer.
The announcement coincides with a new daily high of 1,000 deaths per day from the pandemic in the U.S. – which may skyrocket to 2,500 deaths per day – and reports that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is self-isolating after exposure to the virus.
Johnson earlier this year tested positive for coronavirus but recovered after treatment in hospital.
“The prime minister has today been notified by NHS Test and Trace that he is required to self-isolate as a contact of someone who has tested positive for Covid-19,” his spokesperson said.
“The prime minister will follow the rules and is self-isolating,” the spokesperson added. “He will carry on working from Downing Street, including on leading the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
“The PM is well and does not have any symptoms of Covid-19.”
Johnson met with a small group of MPs in No. 10 on Thursday morning, including Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield, Downing Street said. Anderson subsequently developed Covid-19 symptoms and has now tested positive, CNN reports
The BBC adds that
· A new vaccine that protects against Covid-19 is nearly 95 per cent effective, early data from US company Moderna shows.
· However, it is not yet clear how long the immunity will last, or how well it works with older age groups.
· UK government in “advanced talks” to secure a supply of the vaccine – by spring “at the earliest”.
· Meanwhile, a major trial of a vaccine to protect against Covid has launched in the UK – the third such trial in the country.
· UK government says it hopes testing will allow all care home to admit visitors by Christmas.
· Dentists warn of an oral health crisis after 19,000 dental treatments were missed in the UK.
· In the U.S., the states of Michigan and Washington bring in strict measures as cases top 11 million countrywide.
· South Australian authorities say they are facing a “dangerous situation” after reporting 18 coronavirus cases in the state’s first outbreak since April.
· There have been more than 54 million coronavirus cases and 1.3 million deaths across the world, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Trumps abdicates leadership against virus
Live updates on worldometers.info show that global coronavirus deaths have reached 1,326,791 and cases 54,972,303. The U.S. tops the charts in both categories with 251,934 deaths and 11,373,077 cases.
According to CNN, the U.S. surpassed 11 million cases, with one million recorded in less than a week, as the virus spreads at an unprecedented speed.
It adds that President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden’s aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost.
The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, Biden’s team and independent public health experts as Covid-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 US lives a day.
More than 246,000 Americans have now died from the disease, and a bitter winter lies ahead even amid encouraging news such as Monday’s announcement that a vaccine developed by Moderna is demonstrating a high success rate in early clinical trials, the second such positive vaccine news in about a week.
But instead of listening or mobilising to tackle what some medical experts warn is becoming a “humanitarian” crisis, Trump spent the weekend during which the U.S. passed 11 million infections amplifying lies and misinformation about his election loss, CNN reports.
At one point, he appeared to acknowledge Sunday in a tweet that Biden won, before backtracking with a stream of defiance on Twitter.
This came as the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that “of course it would be better if we could start working with” the Biden team that will take office on January 20.
“It’s almost like passing a baton in a race – you don’t want to stop and then give it to somebody,” Fauci, who has been marginalised by the outgoing President, told Jake Tapper. “You want to just essentially keep going. And that is what transition is.”
Biden’s incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Sunday that the Biden;s team had been unable to talk to current top health officials like Fauci about the pandemic owing to Trump’s refusal to trigger ascertainment – the formal process of opening a transition to a new administration.
“Joe Biden’s going to become president of the United States in the midst of an ongoing crisis. That has to be a seamless transition,” Klain said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He added that while the new administration planned to contact top pharmaceutical firms making the vaccine like Pfizer, it was particularly key to get in touch with Department of Health and Human Services officials responsible for rolling it out in the coming months.
“Our experts need to talk to those people as soon as possible so nothing drops in this change of power we’re going to have on January 20th,” Klain said.
But the official who is currently most influential with the President, Dr. Scott Atlas, who critics say favours a herd immunity approach that could lead to thousands of deaths, wrote an inflammatory tweet on Sunday that exemplified the White House’s contempt for unifying leadership during the pandemic.
Atlas called on the people of Michigan to “rise up” against new Covid-19 restrictions introduced in schools, theatres and restaurants by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer – who was recently the target of an alleged domestic terrorism kidnapping plot.
Whitmer said in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Sunday evening that she would not be “bullied into not following reputable scientists and medical professionals.”
Urgent need for preparation
Fauci is not the only senior U.S. official calling for transition talks to open.
Moncef Slaoui, the official in charge of Trump’s vaccine effort, told the Financial Times in an interview that he wanted to reach out to Biden’s team, but added that he couldn’t do so without White House permission.
As the Biden team increases the pressure for the launch of a proper transition – which includes office space, meetings in government agencies and millions of dollars in government funding – members of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board spoke in increasingly alarmed terms about the effect of a continued stalemate.
Board member Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Saturday that the situation was like a terrorist attack or war and there needed to be a smooth handoff.
“We need to be prepared, and in the absence of that critical data, there may be blind spots we’re not able to anticipate and that leaves us quite vulnerable.”
U.S. death toll could rise to 2,500 per day
Another board member, infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, bemoaned Trump’s abdication of the crisis and said leadership would only arrive in January, as he pushed for the immediate opening of contacts between the transition and the White House.
“It’s our hope that in the very near future, we can start to collaborate with them,” he said, warning on CNN on Saturday of a rapid rise in cases over the next month.
An independent expert, Dr. Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, cited research saying that 2,500 Americans could die from Covid-19 every day by January and described the situation as a “humanitarian catastrophe” that Trump was making worse.
“I can’t think of a more important time in modern American history,” Hotez told CNN’s Ana Cabrera. “We need a smooth transition. The fact that, this is the time it won’t occur, will only mean greater loss of life, so this is incredibly heartbreaking.”