A lethal rabbit virus is spreading across the southwestern United States, killing wild rabbits on this continent for the first time and causing concern for some fragile species and the animals that prey on them.
While rabbit hemorrhagic disease virus type 2 can produce symptoms such as seizures or fever, it often causes sudden death, marked by “terminal squeals” and collapse. In wild die-offs, some rabbits have been found with blood near their noses and mouths, “but a lot of the time, the reports are just, ‘dead,’” said Deana Clifford, senior wildlife veterinarian for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “That’s a little bit startling to see a bunch of dead rabbits.”
As the nation struggles to slow the spread of the coronavirus, agriculture and wildlife officials across the southwest are emphasizing the rabbit virus is not linked to the coronavirus or known to be dangerous to humans. But like the coronavirus, the rabbit virus is highly contagious and hard to contain. It can remain viable for months and spreads easily — through contact with infected rabbits or via scavengers, insects, feces, a handler’s clothing or bedding that might line a rabbit hutch.
Vaccines are available in Europe, where the virus has caused significant mortality in wild and domestic rabbits since emerging in France in 2010, but they are not approved for sale in the United States. Some U.S. states, including Nevada — where the virus has killed domestic rabbits at an animal rescue near Las Vegas — are scrambling to help veterinarians obtain approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to import limited numbers of doses.
Those would be administered to domestic animals that are part of what the USDA says is a $2.2 billion rabbit industry that is mostly pet-focused. But they would be of no help to native rabbits and hares, which until March were not known to be susceptible to the virus, known as RHDV2.
“There’s not really much we can do with the wilds,” said Ralph Zimmerman, state veterinarian for New Mexico, where the nation’s first wild rabbit deaths occurred in March. “It’s moving from area to area. We’ve had bigger die-offs in some areas, and we’re still getting reports of dead rabbits — like, hundreds,” at each site, he said.
As of Thursday, the virus had also killed 470 domestic rabbits in New Mexico, Zimmerman said. Nearly 600 others have been euthanized at affected sites that keep rabbits — as pets, or for breeding, meat or pelt — a step the state is requiring to prevent the virus’s spread. About 30 sites are under quarantine, he said. New Mexico received 500 doses of vaccine from France on Wednesday, he said.
Rabbit hemorrhagic disease first emerged in China in 1984, where it may have been introduced by imported angora rabbits, according to a report by Iowa State University. Outside Europe, the newer variant, type 2, has occurred in Australia and Canada, and there have been a few domestic cases in the United States since 2018.
But wildlife officials hoped North America’s native wild rabbits, which are different from European species, might be immune.
So far, the virus has killed four native species, according to the World Organization for Animal Health, to which the USDA reports various animal diseases: desert and mountain cottontails and black-tailed and antelope jack rabbits. Those are all abundant, but wildlife officials say they are worried about more fragile members of the rabbit family, as well as broader ecosystem effects. In Europe, researchers have linked lynx declines in some areas to rabbit die-offs.
In Texas, there is concern for the rare Davis Mountain cottontail but also the possibility lower rabbit numbers could force animals that eat them — among them, coyotes, bobcats and mountain lions — to target other prey, such as the dwindling population of pronghorn antelope. “It could have an effect on those predator numbers as well,” said Bob Dittmar, a wildlife veterinarian at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
In California, a handful of native rabbit species, including the federally endangered riparian brush rabbit, are at risk. It is possible the virus also could infect the pika, a mountain-dwelling mammal that belongs to rabbits’ lagomorph family and is threatened by climate change, Clifford said.
“This has the potential to depress those populations, and if we have depressed prey, then potentially we have predators who often heavily rely on rabbits that may have trouble finding some food,” said Clifford, referring to species including golden eagles and foxes.
Scientists and conservationists already are discussing moving riparian brush rabbits into captivity to prevent their exposure to the virus, Clifford said.
Wildlife officials said the focus is on mitigating the spread in domestic populations, via quarantines and sanitation, and instructing the public to stay away from dead rabbits and report them to authorities. The specter of the virus has already halted some adoptions of domestic rabbits — often the most common animal at shelters after dogs and cats — and rescues by wildlife rehabilitation groups.
“Eventually it might taper off and some of the remaining animals will develop immunity to it,” Zimmerman said. “And then it’s a slow climb back for the population numbers.”
“This is probably the most significant issue that has faced the hobby since its inception,” said Jay Hreiz, a North Carolina veterinarian who chairs the group’s health committee and who said he expects the virus to race across the nation. “We are almost irrelevant now that it’s in the wild population. … I just fear the damage is already done.”
The association has asked the USDA to ease restrictions on vaccine imports and pleaded with U.S. companies to release a vaccine, Hreiz said. But “rabbits sit in this weird interstitial space between companion animal and livestock in the United States,” he said. “It boils down to money.”
One good thing, he said, is that the covid-19 pandemic had already forced the association to cancel its spring shows, which would have fueled the virus.
“If there was ever a good time for a deadly rabbit virus to spread through the United States, that time is now,” he said.
Giz AsksGiz AsksIn this Gizmodo series, we ask questions about everything and get answers from a variety of experts.
Reality has plenty of exit-hatches: strong drugs, streamed television, certain corners of social media. But the most immersive reality-dissolver might be lucid dreaming, wherein the dreamer recognizes they’re dreaming and proceeds to reshape their dreamscape per their own specifications. A slight disreputableness clings to the phenomenon—it sounds like a schoolyard fiction, the kind of thing a kid would make up to impress his friends. But there are thousands who claim to experience them regularly, and countless guides online purporting to teach you how to achieve them. So is lucid dreaming real? And—if it is—what’s the science behind it? To find out, for this week’s Giz Asks we reached out to a number of experts in the interrelated fields of sleeping and dreaming.
Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Arizona, whose research focuses on how sleep and stress influence human memory and psychological function
It definitely is real, even though it sounds crazy—like some kind of mysterious finding that could never be scientifically replicated. But actually, there’s real empirical work in support of lucid dreaming.
There’s a misconception that it’s rare, or really difficult to achieve. We actually know that quite a few people can learn to do it. There’s a lot of evidence coming from my lab and others that the sleeping brain will selectively process instructions or memories that you give it before you go to bed. So for instance if you’re studying for an exam, one of the best things you can do is read your notes one last time before you go to sleep, because you’re telling the sleeping brain what to focus on. This also works if you’re trying to solve a problem, or come up with an insight or a creative solution. In my studies, at least 80% of people who go to bed with the intention of remembering their dreams for three weeks will start reporting very vivid dreaming. Often these are people who never remembered their dreams before, who were convinced they don’t dream.
Lucid dreaming is harder than that, but you can teach people to start trying to become aware of things that don’t quite make sense. One common instruction is look down at your hands: do you have the proper number of fingers? Are they in the right spot? If there’s a clock in your dream, is it telling a reasonable time? Are the hands in the right place? Usually, when people are learning to become lucid they’ll have a quick moment of lucidity and then wake up. Over time, if you keep practicing, a lot of people will just kept better at it.
There’s a man named Stephen LaBarge, a Stanford psychologist, who was so far ahead of his time on this phenomenon. He came up with some of the most convincing evidence years ago, and nobody really believed it. Maybe some people just didn’t think it was important. He’d teach people ahead of time to signal with their eyes—left-right-left, or other sequences—to mark when they’d begun lucid dreaming.
When you’re lucid dreaming, you’re definitely still asleep—but “sleep,” as a term, is kind of a misnomer. Sleep is a collection of vastly different brain-states. And late night or early morning REM sleep—which is when lucid dreaming occurs—looks a lot more like wakefulness in a lot of ways than it does like deep sleep.
But there’s really new, fascinating and—I have to say—preliminary evidence that what’s happening in lucid dreaming is that people are activating a part of their brain. There’s a part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex, and during REM sleep it’s totally shut down—it’s deactivated. It’s the part of your brain that tells you that you can’t fly across your room—which is why, in REM dreams, you can fly without questioning how crazy that is. You don’t realize that that’s bizarre until you wake up. And there’s preliminary evidence that what may be going on during REM sleep lucid dreaming is that you’ve somehow reactivated that prefrontal cortex, which allows you to have insight into your dreams, and (in the most extreme version of lucidity) control.
Professor of Psychology and Director of the Dream & Nightmare Laboratory at Universite de Montreal
This question is somewhat ambiguous and could be understood in two senses: 1) does the phenomenon of lucid dreaming really exist, ie., are some people really able to become aware that they are dreaming while they continue dreaming? And 2) are the very vivid sensory impressions one has while lucid dreaming some form of an alternate ‘reality’?
The second sense of the question touches on issues of the ultimate nature of reality and of human belief systems in such reality (e.g., animism). These issues have not been answered definitively by science and will not be addressed further by me.
The first sense of the question, however, is easy for me to answer, not only because I am a dream researcher familiar with the relevant research on lucid dreaming, but because I have had many lucid dreams myself. In short, I’ve been there and done that—not once but many times, so I am convinced beyond a doubt that the phenomenon really exists. However, because vociferous claims are not the same as empirical proof, it is important to ask: what is the research evidence that supports this claim?
There has been a lot of evidence available since the 1960s—too much to summarize all of it here. But the most compelling studies—and these have been replicated by several research groups—rest on a strange feature of many lucid dreams: that individuals when dreaming lucidly are able to voluntarily control some of their muscles. While it is increasingly common knowledge that REM sleep, which is when vivid dreaming—including lucid dreaming—typically occurs, is characterized by the paralysis of voluntary muscles (so-called muscle atonia), it is less well-known that some muscle groups are only partially or minimally affected by this paralysis mechanism. Eye muscles are the prime example; for as-yet unknown reasons, eye muscles continue to function despite muscle atonia and are responsible for the infamous ‘rapid eye movements’ from which REM sleep gets its name.
Because of this exception, when a dreamer slips into a lucid dream, very often they are able to make voluntary eye movements while the dream continues. This fact has opened the door to what is referred to as ‘eye-movement signaling’ from within a lucid dream. When entering a lucid dream while sleeping in a laboratory, individuals can execute pre-arranged eye movement sequences, such as a series of left-right-left-right movements, and this movement sequence will appear on the lab polysomnograph as a clearly identifiable set of line tracings that are different from the rapid eye movements of REM sleep. Importantly, these eye-movement signals occur even though the polysomnograph indicates that REM sleep, and its accompanying dream, continue.
Participants can also repeat eye-movement signals at strategic times during their lucid dream, for example, just before and just after performing a planned experiment, like counting to 10 or walking 10 steps. These dream behaviors can then be compared objectively against similar behaviors executed during the waking state. Comparisons show that the durations of many dream behaviors take about the same time to execute as waking state behaviors, although they may be a bit slower at times (this does not really support the claim in the movie Inception that time is dramatically slowed in lucid dreams).
So, in sum, the eye-movement signaling method has allowed dream researchers to demonstrate not only that lucid dreaming is real, as so many lucid dreamers have claimed, but that the behaviors intentionally executed in these dreams unfold in near-real time like they would in wakefulness.
Assistant Professor, Neurology, Harvard Medical School, whose research focuses on better understanding the plastic brain processes during sleep, among other things
The short answer is, yes, it’s real. Going by lucid dreaming’s broader definition—i.e., becoming aware that you’re dreaming within the dream itself—I think many people have had that experience. And there are some practices that people use to train themselves to lucid dream – not only to increase their awareness of dreaming within a dream, but also to gain some control over the dream content.
I think where lucid dreaming can become helpful is when it comes to nightmares. As a clinician, I’ve seen a couple of patients who have successfully trained themselves to lucid dream to help cope with and eliminate their nightmares and there are reports in the literature that confirm this phenomenon.
That said, it’s not clear that practicing it continuously would be beneficial. Because lucid dreamers have features of waking and sleeping combined, it remains unclear how this affects the overall quality of sleep and subsequent day-to-day functioning. Nobody has formally studied this – in general, studies on dreaming are very difficult to conduct in a scientific and regulated manner— this is because the dream experience is not transparent to the researcher and therefore they rely on the study participant recounting their dream which mostly consists of fragments and is very subjective.
Lucid dreams are real in the sense of being real dreams; they occur mostly in REM sleep—the stage in which most dreaming occurs, albeit in a version of REM with a few brain areas’ activation midway between REM and waking. A research study of mine titled “Just How Lucid Are Lucid Dreams?” suggested that while they’re by definition lucid as to the dream state, they’re not always everything we might mean by “lucid.” I examined the lucid dreams of 50 subjects as to whether they are also fully lucid for the following corollaries, which should flow logically from knowing one is dreaming: 1) people in the dreams are dream characters, 2) dream objects are not real, i.e., actions will not carry over concretely upon awakening, 3) the dreamer does not need to obey waking-life physics to achieve a goal, and 4) memory of the waking world is intact rather than amnestic or fictitious. Many lucid dreams were too brief to evaluate on all corollaries. Only about half of the lengthier accounts were lucid for any particular corollary and less than a quarter were lucid on all four. Dreamers made pacts with their characters to phone each other to prove they’d shared the same dream; one who became lucid when she realized she was wearing a barrette she only wore to bed nevertheless took it for the real object, being very careful not to damage it. More experienced lucid dreamers tended to be lucid about more corollaries. In the dream journals of these frequent lucid dreamers, a related and reciprocal category of dreams that were lucid in terms of some of these four corollaries, but missing the realization that “I’m dreaming” were also examined. These comprised 4% of the total dreams. Dreamer occasionally realized that events were not real but misattributed the cause to “I’m the director of a play” or “I’m in a deep trance.” Other times they simply realized the corollary without ever wondering about it’s cause such as in the following two examples:
“This was a special situation and I could just walk through the wall although this would usually be impossible…”
“… I knew the man wasn’t real, that I was making him up, and should be able to make him take it back if I didn’t like this…”
When Apple added a “Screen Time” feature to its devices in 2018 that allowed users to monitor how much time they spend on their devices, your weekly average was likely a little…startling, to say the least. Yes, it’s probably bad for your mental health, but could these blue light-emitting devices also be taking a toll on your skin health?
“Blue light, or high-energy visible (HEV) light, is primarily from the sun, but it’s also emitted by our phone, tablet, and computer screens,” explains board-certified dermatologist Deanne Robinson, MD. While blue light can at times be beneficial (i.e. for killing bacteria and treating acne), Dr. Robinson says that being exposed to too much of it can also “prompt the formation of free radicals, which break down collagen and cause inflammation, leading to redness, dark spots, and wrinkles.” It can also darken hyperpigmentation, especially in deeper skin tones, so it’s important to protect skin from its powers in the same way we do from the sun.
Her tips to help prevent and combat the damage: antioxidants and mineral, broad-spectrum sunscreen. “Antioxidants do not physically block the light, rather they work to neutralize oxidative stress caused by the light,” Dr. Robinson explains. “Next, layer overtop a mineral-based, physical sunscreen that will shield the light. Be sure to choose a broad-spectrum formula which protects skin against UVA/UVB and blue light.”
As much of the world now shifts to work-from-home setups and becomes increasingly reliant on devices, it seems more impossible than ever to shrink the daily screen time average. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, most of the blue light we’re exposed to comes from the sun, but as research continues to show, we are spending more than half of our waking hours interacting with devices and are therefore exposed to more blue light now than at any other point in history. Luckily, there are plenty of products that provide blue light protection and help shield skin from its harmful effects. From serums to sunscreens to screen protectors, there’s fortunately no shortage of ways to guard your skin from blue light, and now is the perfect time to add them to your daily routine.
Blue Light Protection Hyaluronic Serum
CHANTECAILLE nordstrom.com
$150.00
This oil-free serum combines the hydrating powers of hyaluronic acid with Nasturtium flower and fermented extracts to combat the signs of blue light exposure without sacrificing moisture. It’s gentle on skin, making it ideal for all skin types, and should be used underneath your favorite moisturizer and sunscreen every morning.
Super Serum Skin Tint SPF 40
Ilia credobeauty.com
$46.00
How there is 12 percent non-nano zinc oxide in this liquid formula, I’ll never know. The lightweight, dewy finish is anything but streaky and protects skin from UVA, UVB, and blue light damage while also evening out your skin tone for an almost-filtered looking finish.
Anti-Pollution Drops
DR. BARBARA STURM nordstrom.com
$145.00
These drops are formulated to protect skin from environmental pollution, harmful UV rays, and blue light. The serum features extracts from marine microorganisms proven to boost skin’s barrier to protect from pollutant-caused aging, while cocoa seed extract shields skin from signs of digital aging. Apply it when you would your serum, before moisturizer and sunscreen.
Glowscreen Sunscreen SPF 40
Supergoop! sephora.com
$36.00
Leave skin dewy and glowing (read: not pasty and white) while also offering protection from UVA, UVB, and blue light thanks to this sunscreen’s cocoa peptides and antioxidants.
100% Mineral Sunscreen for Face SPF 45
Soleil Toujours dermstore.com
$55.00
This sunscreen is designed specifically with the face in mind, formulated with titanium dioxide and zinc oxide for broad spectrum UVA and UVB protection alongside antioxidants like green tea leaf extract and vitamin C that help protect against and repair blue light damage.
City Skin Age Defense Broad Spectrum SPF 50 PA++++
This popular sunscreen from Murad was formulated with the damaging effects of urban pollution in mind, but it’s a great option even for those who never step outside. Perfect for all skin types, the mineral-based formula goes beyond UV protection to fight blue light, pollution, and infrared radiation, all of which can accelerate signs of aging. The soft peach tint also helps color-correct to even out discoloration.
TONE SMART SPF 68 Sunscreen Compact
sunbetter skinbetter.com
$55.00
One of Dr. Robinson’s go-to products, the Sunbetter SPF 68 compact from Skinbetter Science is ideal for anyone seeking a sunscreen/makeup hybrid or just a white cast-free finish. The water-resistant formula provides UVA and UVB protection and shields skin from blue light. The tinted, creamy sunscreen comes in a foundation-like compact and adjusts to your natural skin tone. Use it in place of your makeup or as a touch-up for reapplications throughout the day.
Hydra Zen Anti-Stress Glow Liquid Moisturizer
Lancôme sephora.com
$45.00
One of the principal effects that blue light exposure has on skin is the weakening of its moisture barrier, which can lead to a delay in skin’s recovery time to damaging products and environmental stressors.By protecting and strengthening skin’s moisture barrier with hyaluronic acid, aloe vera, and amino acids, it helps restore skin’s natural self-defense mechanisms against water loss and keeps it in fighting shape.
Water Jelly Dew Cream
Goodhabit goodhabitskin.com
$25.00
The entire goodhabit line was created to help protect and combat the effects of blue light. In addition to antioxidants it also uses a marine extract that’s high in proteins and polysaccharides to create a protective film over your skin that helps prevent blue light damage.
Blue Light Blocking Screen Protector
Eye Just eyejust.com
$34.99
Stop blue light damage at the source by putting a protective screen like this one over top of your devices. Ophthalmologist-tested and approved for its blue-light-blocking efficiency, EyeJust was created by fashion and design veteran Gigi Mortimer after realizing the blue light coming from her devices was affecting her sleep. The screen protectors are applied just like any other and help shield eyes and skin from blue light’s threats.
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DETROIT – A revamped research project in Detroit will seek to find out if the sewer system can help predict coming virus outbreaks.
The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) and Michigan State University (MSU) began a virus research project in November 2017 to determine if viruses can be detected in the city’s sewer collection system.
This may be another mechanism for public health agencies, including the Detroit Health Department (DHD), to predict virus outbreaks. The original project was to detect known viruses at the time and now, with funding and technical expertise from the Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA), has evolved to trace the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Detroit has been at the forefront of testing and providing the community resources during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Mayor Mike Duggan. “This project with MSU [launched in 2017] again shows that we have a forward-thinking and collaborative mentality that puts the community first.”
The MSU study’s findings show that viruses can be detected in untreated sewage, including coronaviruses, and when that data is joined with healthcare data they can further trace outbreaks. In fact, the researchers took the data from the sewage samples and looked at county health data for the same timeframe. They discovered that viruses were apparent in the sewer collection system approximately 1-2 weeks prior to seeing increases in reported data at health departments for those same viruses.
“We are excited by the efforts of MSU and the implications this work may have in supporting our response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Denise Fair, the City of Detroit Chief Public Health Officer. “I am encouraged and applaud any effort that seeks to enhance the health and wellbeing of our community.”
The city says that once sewage enters the city’s collection pipe, it is not encountered by the general public. Most basement backups are either stormwater or the household’s own untreated sewage. The treatment process uses chlorine to kill viruses in sewage at the Water Resource Recovery Facility in southwest Detroit operated by GLWA. DWSD, GLWA and health experts always advise precautions when encountering raw fecal matter and sewage.
A top biotech venture capitalist has been named to chair a UK government taskforce on developing and equitably distributing a vaccine.
Kate Bingham, managing partner of SV Health Ventures, will lead the taskforce, helping coordinate efforts across industry, academia and government. Those efforts are now backed by 250 million (£303 million) in commitments from the UK government.
As one of five managing partners at SV, Bingham founded the £250 million Dementia Discovery Fund five years. She has also at times been a voice for a change in biopharma, in 2016 penning an open letter eventually signed by dozens of scientists and executives pillorying a biotech for hosting a party that used women to woo male clients.
The taskforce, announced at the end of last month, also includes noted immunologist John Bell and executives from Wellcome Trust and AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca is leading the UK’s principal vaccine effort, manufacturing a vaccine developed at Oxford, with the promise of giving the country early access to the vaccine should it prove effective.
World summit to play host to vaccine and treatment fight
The simmering fight over access to existing and eventual Covid-19 drugs and vaccines will get another arena today.
Officials from every country will meet via link today for a summit that is widely expected to center on a single issue: A voluntary patent pool where companies and research institutes could place their Covid-19 inventions, allowing other countries to make cheap versions. Although voluntary, the pool could put pressure on vaccine and drug developers to put their intellectual property accessible.
The resolution is expected to be approved, but with softer wording after pushback from countries with major pharmaceutical companies, including US, the UK and Switzerland, The Guardian reported. A similar debate emerged 20 years ago as the first AIDS drugs became available, leading to a declaration from the World Trade Organization to reaffirm the rights of countries in some situations to circumvent patents for essential medicines.
The summit comes days after Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson set off a firestorm in France with his comments that
the US would have “the right to the largest pre-order” of their experimental Covid-19 vaccine because the federal government invested millions into the effort. UNAIDS and Oxfam released a letter calling for a “people’s vaccine” distributed globally to the peopl of highest need first, but other countries, including the UK have also taken steps to secure early access.
Gilead ending trials on Covid-19
Three months after they started testing remdesivir in China, Gilead is ending its remaining clinical trials for the Covid-19 antiviral, Reuters reported. They will reportedly wind down by the end of the month.
The two open-label trials have enrolled over 8,000 patients. The yawning number that attracted critics, who said the drugmaker was pulling patients from randomized controlled trials that could yield data fasters, but Gilead said was designed to assure greater access.
Now, per Reuters, hospitals are concerned the end of the trials will cut off access to the drug.
Although with the data from a randomized NIH trial, the the drug has now been authorized by the FDA – in theory obviating part of the need for clinical trials – doctors have raised concerns about how the Trump administration has distributed the drug so far. First, they did not announce criteria or a plan for which hospitals would receive the drug,, and the first shipments overlooked some hospitals that with a high number of patients and gave to hospitals with few patients. Later, HHS announced state governments would be responsible for deciding which hospitals in their state would receive the drug, but they did not outline how they would decide how many doses to give to each state.
Those doses are from Gilead, which has pledged to donate 1.5 million doses of remdesivir – about 40% of which are for patients in the US. The company has said it is actively ramping manufacturing.
Federal judge to Shkreli: You’re not going to save the world, stay in prison
Last month, Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli posted a paper online with an unusual addendum.
“I am asking for a brief furlough (3 months) to assist in research work on Covid-19,” Shkreli wrote in a PDF published to the otherwise empty site of a company he founded in 2015, Prospero Pharma. “As a successful two-time biopharma entrepreneur, having purchased multiple companies, invented multiple new drug candidates, filed numerous INDs and clinical trial applications, I am one of the few executives experienced in ALL aspects of drug development from molecule creation and hypothesis generation.”
At the time, few in the industry were impressed with either the quality of Shkreli’s scientific paper — which detailed an effort to screen compounds for ones active to Covid-19, a practice already commonplace — nor his capacity to make unique contributions in a coronavirus fight that was already enlisting some of the country’s top scientists and biotech executives.
And now, it seems, a judge was similarly unimpressed with his plea.
In a 9-page ruling Saturday, US District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto sided with prosecutors who described Shkreli’s plea for release as indicative of the “delusional self-aggrandizing behavior” that landed him in jail to begin with.
”The court does not find that releasing Mr. Shkreli will protect the public, even though Mr. Shkreli seeks to leverage his experience with pharmaceuticals to help develop a cure for Covid-19 that he would purportedly provide at no cost,” Matsumoto wrote. “In any event, Mr. Shkreli’s self-described altruistic intentions do not provide a legal basis to grant his motion.”
Although the conditions in some prisons during the pandemic have become the subject of significant criticism, with many inmates unable to secure home transfers despite outbreaks within the facility and urgings from the Justice Department, Matsumoto determined that wasn’t the case for Shkreli, who was “healthy” and whose low-security prison in Allenwood, PA has not experienced an outbreak.
“Defendant requests to be released into, among other places, an apartment in New York City, the epicenter of the covid-19 pandemic,” Matsumoto wrote.
Shkreli, 37, was given a 7-year sentence in 2017 for defrauding investors.
UK unveils plan to get early access to 30 million vaccines by September
Forget 12-18 months. The British government is hoping to vaccinate half its population by September, or 9 months after the initial outbreak — an aggressive timeline that is among the fastest put forward by world leaders or public health officials.
Business Secretary Alok Sharma said Sunday that the government would fund AstraZeneca with an additional £84 million ($102 million) as part of an agreement that will see the British drugmaker give the UK 30 million doses by September, should it prove effective in trials over the summer.
”The UK will be first to get access,” Sharma said. “We can also ensure that in addition to making the vaccine available to developing countries at the lowest possible cost.”
The UK plan slots into a larger debate over how to distribute the vaccine when it becomes available. The US has funded companies’ vaccine efforts at a larger scale, and have similarly secured rights to make certain orders as part of those funded agreements. AstraZeneca, which is producing a vaccine developed at Oxford University, had already announced that the UK would get early timeline.
These plans have so far not sat well with other world leaders. Last week, Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson caused a stir among his board and in the French government when he told Bloomberg that the US would get “the right to the largest pre-order.” And UNAIDS and Oxfam released a letter from current and former world leaders, calling for a “people’s vaccine” that was accessible “first for front-line workers, the most vulnerable people, and for poor countries with the least capacity to save lives.”
The UK–AstraZeneca plan is of course contingent on the vaccine proving effective — no sure thing. A study in non-human primates showed the vaccine appeared to elicit an immune response and protect the monkeys from serious lung damage, but it did not entirely stop infection. The developers are now in Phase I, but have said they plan to move into a combined Phase II/III this month. Public health officials have warned a vaccine could take 12-18 months, or significantly longer, and that some vaccine candidates are likely to fail in the clinic.
The new funding includes £38 million pounds for the erection “rapid-deployment facility” to begin manufacturing over the summer, before a larger factory, the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre, opens at Oxford next summer.
Europe nears remdesivir okay
The US authorized it, Japan has approved it, and now Europe may soon clear it as well.
The head of the EMA, Guido Rasi, said that an initial authorization for remdesivir could come in the next few days, Reuters reports. The Gilead antiviral was shown in an NIH trial last month to reduce the time it takes patients to recover from Covid-19.
The EMA began their review process for remdesivir a day after the NIH results became public on April 29, but indicated the process could take time — a contrast with the FDA, who was rumored to be nearing an emergency use authorization the day the trial came out and ultimately issued one two days later. The drug is already authorized on the continent to be given under compassionate use.
Okaying remdesivir, though, will only be half the battle. Acquiring and distribution will be the rest. In the US, that process has been marred by confusion, as the federal government failed to detail a criteria for which hospitals got access and an inadequate supply left some doctors scrambling. Gilead, though, has been working since the early days of the outbreak to scale up production and have accelerated their efforts since the NIH trial.
Last week, the California company signed deals with 5 generics manufacturers in Pakistan and India, although those contracts are largely for distribution in low and middle income countries.
Vir Biotechnology publishes antibodies in Nature
Vir Biotechnology, the George Scangos-led infectious disease company, published in Naturethe details for the monoclonal antibody they are bringing into the clinic for Covid-19 this summer.
The paper, published initially as a preprint last month, is the first by one of the three major companies developing monoclonal antibodies against Covid-19 to detail their lead candidate. It describes an antibody called S309 that neutralizes both SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, and the SARS virus that caused a major outbreak in East Asia and other parts of the world in 2002 and 2003. The idea is that by targeting an epitope — a part of the spike protein — that is present in multiple different viruses, you’re likely targeting an essential part that won’t change as the virus mutates. Vir will bring two versions of the antibody forward, one with edits to make it last longer and one with edits to make it both longer lasting and generate a stronger T cell response
Vir, along with Abcellera and Regeneron, are expected to enter the clinic with their antibodies this summer, testing them both as a prophylaxis and as a protection against Covid-19. Antibodies from Regeneron and Humabs — now a subsidiary of Vir — were the two drugs that proved effective last year against Ebola.
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A Florida man who initially believed the coronavirus was a “fake crisis” that was “blown out of proportion” is now hospitalized along with his wife — and is sounding a cautionary note about the deadly bug.
“I thought it was maybe the government trying something, and it was kind of like they threw it out there to kinda distract us,” Brian Hitchens told WPTV from his hospital bed.
“I’d get up in the morning and pray and trust in God for his protection, and I’d just leave it at that. There were all these masks and gloves. I thought it looks like a hysteria,” he added.
Brian HitchensFacebook
The Uber driver described his ordeal in a lengthy Facebook post.
“Many people still think that the Coronavirus is a fake crisis which at one time I did too and not that I thought it wasn’t a real virus going around but at one time I felt that it was blown out of proportion and it wasn’t that serious,” he wrote.
Hitchens said he continued downplaying the pandemic until he began feeling sick and stopped working.
A couple of days later, his wife also began feeling unwell, so she went to a hospital and was told to go under quarantine.
But when the couple’s conditions worsened, Hitchens wrote, they went to Palm Beach Gardens Medical Center.
“They admitted us right away and we both went to ICU. I started feeling better within a few days but my wife got worse to the point where they sedated her and put her on the ventilator,” he said.
“I was never put ventilator and started feeling better feeling stronger never had terrible aches and pains just weak and exhausted,” Hitchens said, adding that his wife remains sedated.
“After 3 weeks I have come to accept that my wife may pass away and the peace I have about it is that I know without a shadow of a doubt that she will be going home to be with the Lord but I also do believe in miracles and I’m holding on to the chance that she may get healed but if not I am thankful for her I know we’ve been married for 8 years,” he said.
He added: “So think about what I wrote and think about if this thing is a fake crisis.
“Looking back I should have wore a mask in the beginning but I didn’t and perhaps I’m paying the price for it now but I know that if it was me that gave it to my wife I know that she forgives me and I know that God forgives me.”
“We love you, we need you, your girls need you,” Barry Morphew told his wife Suzanne in the video posted Sunday.
“If anyone is out there that can hear this that has you, please, we’ll do whatever it takes to bring you back,” Morphew said. “No questions asked — however much they want — I will do whatever it takes to get you back. Honey, I love you, I want you back so bad.”
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Susan Morphew.GoFundMe
Morphew of Maysville, Colorado, went for a bike ride on May 10 and never came back, her family told the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Office.
The office said in a statement Sunday that the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were helping to search for Morphew.
Members of the Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office Dive Rescue Team also searched bodies of water in the area. The Chaffee County Sheriff’s office said Friday that one of Morphew’s personal items had been recovered, but didn’t specify what it was.
The sheriff’s office asked Chaffee County residents to keep all video footage from home security cameras. “One of the most helpful ways the community can aid in the search of Suzanne Morphew is by preserving these recordings,” said Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze.
Suzanne’s nephew, Trevor Noel told Dateline last week that people could help in the search for Morphew by “pounding the keyboard.” The family has set up a Find Suzanne Morphew Facebook page, tip line and a GoFundMe, which has raised nearly $30,000.
“Everyone involved in this search, we just want her back so bad,” Noel said. “We want her back because she is just such a bright light in all of our lives.”
Barry Morphew initially offered a 100,000 reward for his wife’s safe return, but the reward amount has since been doubled to $200,000.
Elisha Fieldstadt
Elisha Fieldstadt is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Sunday, May 17, 2020. Trump was returning from a visit to nearby Camp David, Md.(Alex Brandon/AP)
President Trump on Sunday denounced President Obama as “grossly incompetent” and slammed Joe Biden as “corrupt” even as the coronavirus death toll neared 90,000.
Returning from a weekend at Camp David, Trump claimed he hadn’t seen his popular predecessor’s speech to graduating college students in which Obama criticized the “people in charge” for bungling the response to the pandemic.
“Look, he was an incompetent president, that’s all I can say,” Trump told reporters. “Grossly incompetent.”
Obama avoided directly attacking Trump by name even as he has begun to speak out about the botched response to the pandemic.
The death toll is set to rise above a once-unthinkable 100,000 on Trump’s watch by the Memorial Day holiday that marks the traditional beginning of summer.
Despite the still-raging health crisis, Trump spent most of last week raging at Obama and Biden. He claims that their knowledge of an FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying about conversations with a Russian envoy, somehow amounts to a major scandal dubbed “Obamagate.”
Attorney General William Barr sought to drop the case against Flynn despite his guilty plea. But the federal judge handling the case hasn’t agreed to do so and may sentence the fired National Security Administration chief anyway.
Trump improbably dubbed the probe “the greatest political hoax in history,” in a Fox News interview with host Maria Bartiromo. That used to be a term he reserved for the anti-Biden Ukraine smear effort that led to his impeachment last winter.
“This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them,” Trump said.
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Trump later thanked Obama and Biden in a tongue-in-cheek tweet that asserted that their supposed misdeeds helped catapult him to the White House.
“Remember, (Obama) and Sleepy Joe are the reasons I am in the White House!!!” Trump tweeted, using his preferred derogatory nickname for Biden.
Along with the Flynn debacle, Trump has stepped up efforts to point fingers at Obama as somehow being to blame for the coronavirus crisis.
Trump has derided the previous administration’s pandemic playbook as inadequate and repeatedly claims Obama left the cupboards bare when it comes to medical equipment stockpiles.
The president also bemoans the “broken” testing system he inherited as a key reason for the tragic toll, even though he had been in office for three years when the pandemic hit.
The Saudi aviation student who killed three American sailors in a December 2019 shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola had been in contact with Al Qaeda before carrying out the attack, law enforcement sources tell Fox News.
The communication was discovered after investigators broke through the encryption on a phone belonging to gunman Mohammed Alshamrani, the sources said Monday.
Attorney General Bill Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray are expected to address the matter at a press conference at 11 a.m. EDT.
The FBI, following the Dec. 6 shooting, had asked Apple for help in accessing data from a pair of iPhones owned by the gunman, as investigators had been unsuccessful in unlocking the devices.
The NAS Pensacola shooter was identified as Mohammed Alshamrani, a 21-year-old 2nd Lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force who was a student naval flight officer of Naval Aviation Schools Command. (FBI)
“We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of American people and prevent future attacks,” Barr said in January.
It is not immediately clear if Apple gave in, or if the FBI was able to find another way to search the phone’s contents.
Barr in January also called the attack an “act of terrorism,” noting that Alshamrani – a second lieutenant with the Royal Saudi Air Force – was “motivated by jihadist ideology.”
Senior Justice Department officials told Fox News the 21-year-old shooter left a “trail of extremism” in the days and weeks leading up to the attack.
“During the course of the investigation, we learned that the shooter posted a message on September 11, [2019] stating, ‘the countdown has begun,’” Barr said in January. “During the Thanksgiving weekend, he then visited the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.
“He also posted other anti-American, anti-Israeli, and jihadi messages on social media, including two hours before his attack,” Barr added.
Senior law enforcement officials told Fox News the attack lasted 15 minutes and Alshamrani used a Glock 9mm that had five extended magazines. The gun, they added, was purchased legally in Florida.
A deputy from the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office ultimately shot and killed Alshamrani.
NAS Pensacola is home to the Naval Education and Training Security Assistance Field Activity’s International Training Center, which Navy officials said was “established in 1988 to meet the aviation-specific training needs of international officers and enlisted students from allied nations.”
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
