The U.S. government will pay $1.95 billion to American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech SE for 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine if they succeed in developing one.The companies said separately Wednesday they reached agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Defense Department to deliver a vaccine they are developing jointly, the latest in a series of similar agreements with other vaccine companies.HHS Secretary Alex Azar said during an interview with Fox News Wednesday the U.S. could buy 500 million additional doses of the vaccine provided they are “safe and effective.”The deal announced Wednesday is part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative, which hopes to deliver 300 million doses of an approved vaccine by January 2021.Of the coronavirus vaccines under development worldwide, about two dozen have reached the human trial stage.The vaccine Pfizer and BioNTech are developing has shown promise in small, early stage human trials and is expected to be tested in a large trial.The companies said they hope to be ready to seek some type of regulatory approval as early as October if ongoing studies of the vaccine are successful and expect to deliver up to 100 million doses by the end of 2020.
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COVID-19 tests that take an hour or less and can be done at doctors’ offices, workplaces, or even at home are under development. They could have a big impact on the course of the pandemic in the United States, where long lines for tests and long waits for results are undermining efforts to control the disease.  People who get tested for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 have been waiting for days, up to a week in some places, to find out if they are infected, as overloaded labs struggle to keep up with demand. Patients can spread the virus while they are waiting for test results. That’s also a setback for public health workers who need to identify patients’ contacts and isolate them before the virus spreads further. Plus, patients tested one day can be infected the next, while they are waiting for results.  “If you get the results back a week later, those results are effectively a historical record. They’re not actionable information,” said Zev Williams at Columbia University.  Testing has taken on extra urgency in the COVID-19 pandemic because roughly half of infections may be spread from people with no symptoms, according to some estimates. Frequent, widespread and fast Current assays require certified laboratories with expensive, specialized equipment and trained personnel. Labs have run into shortages of chemicals, the special cartridges some machines use, and even the long swabs that health workers insert deep into patients’ noses to get samples.  “Testing has to be frequent, widespread and fast,” Williams said. It should be fast enough so people can take a test and get results before they get on an airplane, enter a nursing home, or go to school, he said. Some companies are aiming to develop simple tests patients could do at home. That would eliminate many of the supply issues, as well as keep patients safe and prevent them from exposing anyone else. “Bringing testing home can help solve just about every aspect of how we manage this pandemic,” said Sherlock Biosciences CEO Rahul Dhanda, “as long as a test can be accurate and dependable.” Sherlock is developing a test called INSPECTR that looks and functions like a home pregnancy test. The user applies a bit of saliva to a strip of paper in a plastic holder. In about half an hour, the paper changes color if the user is infected. Dhanda says it should cost no more than $30. The company hopes to have the test on the market in the first half of next year. Sherlock is also working on a system that could run in pharmacies, grocery stores, nursing homes or just about anywhere else with a power supply. It runs on a machine developed by medical device company Binx that is currently used in clinics and doctors’ offices to test for sexually transmitted infections. Patients would spit in a tube and get results in half an hour.  Sherlock hopes to have the system up and running in the fall. It’s based on an approach the company is using in a Food and Drug Administration-approved test. That test uses CRISPR, a system best known for gene editing, to identify specific genetic fingerprints of the virus. The scientists behind the technology, including Sherlock’s co-founders, put a low-cost open-source version online at STOPCovid.science. All the reaction components are contained in one tube. Saliva or a mouth swab go in the tube, which then sits at 60 degrees Celsius for half an hour. Dip a paper test strip in the tube, and yes-or-no results show up in a few minutes. It is not FDA approved, and it is not intended for clinical testing, but the researchers say the aim is to help move the technology forward.Repurposed fertility test Columbia’s Williams helped develop a similar assay. In an example of how COVID-19 has scrambled everyone’s priorities, Williams is not an infectious disease doctor. He heads the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the university medical center.  He said one way to test prospective parents who are having trouble conceiving is to look for genetic defects that can cause infertility.  “In terms of the underlying molecular biology, it’s not that different” to look for a fertility gene or the genes of a virus, he said. But overhauling the fertility test to look for the coronavirus in saliva, and doing it in such a way that it could be done easily without special equipment or training was a challenge. “It actually took an enormous amount of work to make it very simple,” he said. Like the STOPCovid test, all the reactions take place in one tube. The only special equipment they need is a heating block or hot water kept at 60 degrees Celsius. But instead of getting results on a strip of paper, this test is based on color. The red test solution turns yellow if the sample contains virus.  All of the test makers say their assays are as accurate as those done at major labs today, but the FDA has not yet evaluated any of them. Only one test, Sherlock and Binx’s, has a commercial partner to scale up manufacturing.  Williams said his group is working to get their test to market “as quick as possible. I’ll tell you, it’s something we push on every single day.” “You just see how the problems are not getting less,” he said. “They’re growing and growing, and the need for this is growing.” 
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A new study indicates that the accelerated melting of Arctic permafrost could release as much as 40 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere not previously accounted for in global emissions estimates.  Permafrost is the thick layer of soil in the world’s Arctic and Antarctic regions that, for centuries in some cases, has remained frozen throughout the year. It is vital to the world’s climate because it stores twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere.   The study, published Monday in the science journal Nature Geoscience, examines how under usual circumstances, the top layer of this frozen soil thaws during summer when plants and microorganisms spring to life. The microbes eat plant roots and respirate like all living organisms and inevitably emit greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide. This process is known as rhizosphere priming. The researchers say with more and more of the prior frozen soil thawing, more plant roots are exposed to microorganisms, which in turn emit more carbon dioxide. The researchers determined the phenomenon could add as much as 40 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere by the year 2100.  Prior to this study, scientists estimated that global emissions must fall by 7.6% every year over the next 10 years to meet the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. But the authors of the study note that their new estimates of emissions from permafrost melting are currently “unaccounted for in global emission scenarios and implies that the remaining anthropogenic carbon budget to keep warming below 1.5 or 2 °C … may need to be even more constrained.” While Earth is heating up, warming is significantly worse in the Arctic. Analysis from NASA and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggest that the past decade was the hottest on record overall. In the Arctic, air temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average. This new study shows that permafrost melt can, in turn, prompt further melt. More carbon in the atmosphere means worsened atmospheric warming and more melting. 
 
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A study of the Arctic says polar bears are one of the most threatened species on earth because of melting sea ice caused by climate change, and without aggressive steps, the animals could be extinct by the end of the century. The University of Toronto study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that polar bears rely on sea ice to reach their prey, usually seals and other water mammals. Researchers who conducted the study say a loss of ice will force the animals onto land, where they must rely on fat reserves due to a lack of food. Co-author of a report on the study Steven Amstrup says the bears currently have less time to feed and a longer time to wait until the ice returns.  He says typically, the ice melts in the early summer and midsummer and returns in fall.  “That period when the ice is absent is getting ever longer and the bears are facing that longer period with less fat on board.” Modelling was used to determine polar bears’ energy requirements while fasting and the thresholds that would limit their survival, alongside a model predicting the future number of days without ice. The researchers used that to estimate when the survival thresholds would be surpassed for 13 Arctic sub-populations that represent 80% of all polar bears. Under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, the researchers found the bears’ survival would be “unlikely” in much of the Arctic due to reduced sea ice. But the study maintains that if there was a “moderate emissions scenario” more sub-populations could survive through this century. 
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The Justice Department on Tuesday accused two Chinese hackers of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of trade secrets from companies across the world and more recently targeting firms developing a vaccine for the coronavirus.
The indictment, which officials expected to discuss at a news conference, says the hackers in recent months had researched vulnerabilities in the computer networks of companies publicly known for their work in developing vaccines and treatments.
The indictment includes charges of trade secret theft and wire fraud conspiracy against the hackers, who federal prosecutors say stole information not only for themselves but also that they knew would be of interest and value to the Chinese government.
The charges are believed to be the first accusing foreign hackers of targeting scientific innovation related to the coronavirus, though U.S. and Western intelligence agencies have warned for months about those efforts. Last week, for instance, authorities in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom accused a hacking group with links to Russian intelligence with trying to target research on the disease.
“China has now taken its place, alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea, in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being ‘on call’ to work for the benefit of the state, here to feed the Chinese Communist party’s insatiable hunger for American and other non-Chinese companies’ hard-earned intellectual property, including COVID-19 research,” Assistant Attorney John Demers, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said in a statement.  
There was no immediate indication from the indictment that the hackers had successfully obtained any COVID-19 research, despite efforts to snoop on the companies.  
But prosecutors say the defendants in January conducted reconnaissance on the computer network of a Massachusetts biotech firm known to be researching a potential vaccine and searched for vulnerabilities on the network of a Maryland firm less than a week after it said it was conducting similar scientific work.
The case was filed earlier this month in federal court in Washington state and was unsealed on Tuesday.
An email sent by The Associated Press to the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., seeking comment on the hacking charges was not immediately returned.
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