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Stephen Hahn, the head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said he would authorize a coronavirus vaccine before Phase Three clinical trials were complete if the benefits outweigh the risks, but denied that he would rush the process to benefit Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
The CDC has come under heavy attack over revised guidelines for coronavirus testing that say even people who know they have been exposed to an infected person don’t need to be tested if they aren’t showing symptoms.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given emergency authorization for the use of convalescent plasma in treating people sick with Covid-19. In a press release, the FDA described the treatment as “Another Achievement in Administration’s Fight Against Pandemic.”
While new coronavirus infections in the U.S. have trended downward in recent days, the average of new daily cases in five major European cities has more than doubled since the end of July. Even with the recent uptick in Europe, the seven-day average of new cases in the U.S. is about five times the number across Germany, France, Spain, Italy and the U.K.
In recent years, healthcare professionals have all had to deal to some degree with patients who have been misled by online medical information—or “Dr. Google”—but the problem has reached a fever pitch during the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. reported its largest single-day death toll since May on Wednesday, with 1,499 people dying because of Covid-19. The seven-day average of new deaths has been above 1,000 for 18 consecutive days. There are now more than 5.2 million cases in the U.S. with more than 167,000 deaths.
Nearly 100,000 children tested positive for coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, shortly before in-person classes in many cities and states were set to resume. That figure represents more than a quarter of the children who have tested positive since March.
When pressed about the U.S. pandemic death toll in an interview with Axios that aired Monday, President Trump said it was under control, adding: “They are dying, that's true. And you have — it is what it is. But that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us.”
Covid-19 deaths in the United States topped 1,000 for four days straight this week, as the total number of infections hit the 4.5 million mark. Four months ago, there was a single epicenter--New York-New Jersey--as one expert put it. "Now we have lots.”
The biotech company Moderna and the National Institutes of Health launched a Phase 3 trial of their jointly-developed coronavirus vaccine on Monday, Denise Grady reports for The New York Times. Half the 30,000 volunteers this summer will receive two shots of the vaccine four weeks apart, and the other half will get a placebo.
