Noting the world is at a critical juncture in the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization is urging nations to take immediate action to prevent unnecessary deaths, the collapse of essential health systems and the shutdown of economies. Speaking at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said too many countries, particularly in the northern hemisphere, are seeing an exponential increase in COVID-19 cases forcing hospitals and intensive care units to run near or above capacity. He called on governments to take key actions immediately to prevent the crisis from spinning out of control. First, the WHO chief said leaders need to make an honest assessment of the COVID-19 outbreak in their countries. For those nations who have successfully brought it under control, he suggested they “double down” to keep transmissions low, identify cases and clusters, and be ready to act. Traffic passes a COVID-19 sign informing drivers of the upcoming lockdown which closes non-food retailers, cafes, restaurants, pubs and hotels for two weeks in a bid to reduce soaring coronavirus cases, in Cardiff, Wales, Oct. 23, 2020. (AFP)Second, Tedros said nations who see a rising number of cases, hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions should do whatever they can to address the upward trend as quickly as possible. Third, the director-general urged leaders to be clear and honest with their constituents about the status of the pandemic in their country and outline the steps required to fight the spread. He said this action requires putting systems in place to make it easy for citizens to comply with the COVID-19-related measures. Finally, Tedros said governments need to reach out to people and their families who are infected with the virus to give them specific instructions on their next steps. The WHO director said if leaders follow the steps and fine tune their contact tracing and isolating programs, then future shutdowns and stay-at-home orders can be avoided. 
 
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German Health Minister Jens Spahn says he expects a viable vaccine to be available to Germans by early next year and enough for “a large number of those want to be vaccinated” within six or seven months. In an interview published Friday in Germany’s Der Spiegel, Spahn — who tested positive for COVID-19 this week — said he expects there would be more than enough vaccine for the German population, and he would like to pass on any surplus to other nations that might need it. FILE – German Health Minister Jens Spahn receives an influenza injection at Charite hospital, during the coronavirus pandemic, in Berlin, Germany, Oct. 14, 2020. (Reuters)Spahn told the German media outlet that health care workers would be prioritized to be vaccinated first. But he said he would refer to the Standing Vaccinations Commission at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute for Health and Infectious Diseases for guidance. In another sign the German government is preparing for vaccine distribution, Germany’s Daily Bild also reported Friday the health ministry has asked the nation’s 16 state governors to identify potential vaccination centers by November 10. The report says the government is seeking to establish at total of 60 vaccination centers nationwide in order to effectively vaccinate the population. On Thursday, the Koch Institute chief Lothar Wieler warned the COVID-19 situation in Germany was “very serious,” as the nation set a record for daily infections with more than 11,000. 
 
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The United Nations warns of a looming health crisis in Sudan following historic floods which have created conditions for deadly insect-transmitted diseases to thrive.
   
Some 875,000 people across the country are affected by torrential rains and floods, which have caused widespread damage to homes, crops and livelihoods.   
 
The floods have left behind stagnant water pools which are perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns that more than 4.5 million people are at risk of mosquito-transmitted diseases such as malaria, chikungunya and viral hemorrhagic fevers, or VHF.  
 
Sudan’s Federal Ministry of Health has already reported increasing numbers of suspected VHF cases, which include dengue, yellow fever and Rift Valley fever.  The agency reports 2,226 cases, most in Northern state, including 56 deaths.
 
Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, says there also is an outbreak of chikungunya in West Darfur, where nearly 250 people have been diagnosed with this viral disease.
 
“The worst disease and the most lethal disease is in fact malaria. There [are] over 1.1 million malaria cases as of the end of September this year across the country, and malaria has reached epidemic levels in 15 out of the 18 states in Sudan,” he said.     
 
Laerke said U.N. aid agencies have procured hundreds of emergency health kits to support malaria treatment and other health needs.  He said the kits can serve up to 2.7 million people for three months.  However, he told VOA aid workers are having difficulty getting the supplies out into the field.
 
“One of the things that the partners on the ground are actually mentioning trying to get these emergency health kits out in the communities and particularly among the many internally displaced—there are almost two million internally displaced people in Sudan–is that the floods and stagnant water is still hampering access to those people,” he said.   
 
Laerke said there is a shortage of medical supplies and needs will increase as insect-driven diseases continue to spread throughout the country. He said the U.N.’s operation is in financial difficulty as it only has received 19% of needed funding.   
 
He said aid agencies urgently need to raise an estimated $25 million to procure essential medicines and to support measures for vaccine-preventable vector and water-borne diseases.
 
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United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said it was very unfortunate that the 20 major industrialized nations did not come together in March, as he suggested then, to establish a coordinated response to suppress COVID-19 worldwide.In an interview with the Associated Press, Guterres said he hopes that as the G-20 summit is coming next month, the international community understand “they need to be much more coordinated in fighting the virus.”Guterres said the U.N. will be “strongly advocating” for a coordinated response to the disease, in addition to seeking a “guarantee” that any developed vaccine be treated as “a global public good” and be made “available and affordable for everyone, everywhere.”Scores of researchers around the world are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, which has killed more than 1.1 million people worldwide and sickened more than 41 million.Meanwhile, the number of countries with more than 1 million confirmed coronavirus cases has risen to seven, with France and Spain the latest nations to reach the mark.On Thursday, France extended curfews to about 65% of its population and Belgium’s foreign minister was hospitalized with COVID-19 and treated in the intensive care unit, as a second wave of the pandemic surged across Europe.However, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, the United States remains the country with highest number of infections, more than 8.4 million total cases, followed by India, with 7.76 million; Brazil, with 5.32 million; Russia, with 1.45 million; and Argentina, which has 1,053,650. France is in sixth place with 1,041,991 cases, followed by Spain with 1,026,281.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revised its definition of close contact with a person infected with COVID-19.The agency had previously determined that close contact was spending 15 consecutive minutes within 2 meters of an infected individual. The revised changes announced Wednesday now defines a close contact as someone who spent a total of 15 minutes accumulated over a 24-hour period.The change by the CDC was prompted by a report of a prison officer in the northeastern U.S. state of Vermont who became infected with COVID-19 after more than 20 brief interactions with inmates who later tested positive for the virus. The brief visits added up to about 17 total minutes of exposure.
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At a time when growing numbers of people are shunning vaccines, the polio vaccine proves that they work. As VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, despite setbacks and a coronavirus pandemic, the world is making headway in eliminating the crippling disease.
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October marks Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month in the US. It’s a topic not often talked about but something many couples go through, as Anush Avetisyan reports in this story narrated by Anna Rice.
Camera: Anush Avetisyan
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U.S. regulators on Thursday approved the first drug to treat COVID-19: remdesivir, an antiviral medicine given to hospitalized patients through an IV.The drug, which California-based Gilead Sciences Inc. is calling Veklury, cut recovery time from 15 days to 10 on average in a large study led by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.It has been authorized for use on an emergency basis since spring, and it now becomes the first drug to win full Food and Drug Administration approval for treating COVID-19. President Donald Trump received it when he was diagnosed earlier this month with the disease caused by the coronavirus. Veklury is approved for people at least 12 years old and weighing at least 40 kilograms (88 pounds) who are hospitalized for a coronavirus infection. For patients younger than 12, the FDA will still allow the drug’s use in certain cases under its previous emergency authorization.The drug works by inhibiting a substance the virus uses to make copies of itself. Certain kidney and liver tests are required before starting patients on it to ensure it’s safe for them and to monitor for any possible side effects. And the label warns against using it with the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, because that can curb its effectiveness.”We now have enough knowledge and a growing set of tools to help fight COVID-19,” Gilead’s chief medical officer, Dr. Merdad Parsey, said in a statement.FILE – Vials of the drug remdesivir are seen at a hospital in Germany, April 8, 2020.The drug is either approved or has temporary authorization in about 50 countries, he noted.Its price has been controversial, given that no studies have found it improves survival. Last week, a large study led by the World Health Organization found the drug did not help hospitalized COVID-19 patients, but that study did not include a placebo group and was less rigorous than previous ones that found a benefit. The FDA’s approval statement noted that, besides the NIH-led study, two others found the drug beneficial.Gilead charges $2,340 for a typical treatment course for people covered by government health programs in the United States and other developed countries, and $3,120 for patients with private insurance. The amount that patients pay out of pocket depends on insurance, income and other factors.So far, only steroids such as dexamethasone have been shown to cut the risk of dying of COVID-19. The FDA also has given emergency authorization to using the blood of survivors, and two companies are currently seeking similar authorization for experimental antibody drugs.
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Using blood of recovered COVID-19 patients, the so-called convalescent plasma, as a potential treatment is of little benefit in helping hospitalized patients fight off the infection, according to results of a clinical trial in India.Published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) on Friday, the results show that convalescent plasma, which delivers antibodies from COVID-19 survivors to infected people, failed to reduce death rates or halt progression to severe disease.The findings, from a study of more than 400 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, are a setback for a treatment that U.S. President Donald Trump touted in August as a “historic breakthrough.” The United States and India have authorized convalescent plasma for emergency use.Other countries, including Britain, are collecting donated plasma so that it could be widely rolled out if shown to be effective.”The … trial was able to show a small effect on the rate at which patients were able to rid themselves of the virus, but this was not enough to improve their recovery from the disease,” said Simon Clarke, an expert in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading.”In simple terms, there were no clinical benefits to the patients,” he said.The Indian researchers enrolled 464 adults with confirmed moderate COVID-19 who were admitted to hospitals across India between April and July. They were randomly split into two groups, with one group receiving two transfusions of convalescent plasma, 24 hours apart, alongside best standard care, and the control group receiving best standard care only.After seven days, use of convalescent plasma seemed to improve some symptoms, such as shortness of breath and fatigue, the researchers said, and led to higher rates of something known as “negative conversion,” a sign that the virus is being neutralized by antibodies.But this did not translate into a reduction in deaths or progression to severe disease by 28 days.”The poor performance of convalescent plasma in this trial is disappointing but not entirely surprising,” said Ian Jones, a professor of virology, also at the University of Reading.He said the plasma is more likely to work if given very swiftly after someone contracts COVID-19.He urged these and other researchers to continue to conduct trials of convalescent plasma as a potential COVID-19 treatment, but to do so in newly diagnosed patients.”We still do not have enough treatments for the early stage of disease to prevent severe disease and until this becomes an option, avoiding being infected with the virus remains the key message,” he said.
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Healthy volunteers will be deliberately infected with the coronavirus to try to speed up the development of a vaccine, under plans announced by the British government this week.  The trial will involve healthy volunteers ages 18 to 30. Most coronavirus vaccine trials involve giving volunteers the potential vaccine or a placebo and then waiting until enough of them have been exposed to the virus through their everyday lives. That can take months or years. Britain announced this week it plans to begin the so-called “human challenge” trials in May 2021 to speed up the development of vaccines.  Several young people have already volunteered, among them Danica Marcos, 22, a recent university graduate from London. “So many people [are] struggling right now. I want this pandemic to be over,” Marcos told The Associated Press. “Every day that goes on, more cases are going on, more people are dying. And if this vaccine trial could mean that this period of trauma for the whole world will be over sooner, I want to help. I want to be a part of that.” People walk past a display featuring health advice in the shopping district in central Sheffield, south Yorkshire, Oct. 21, 2020. (AFP)Alastair Fraser-Urqhart, 18, from Stoke-on-Trent said he wanted to contribute to a vaccine.  “Personally, I can’t let this opportunity to do something, to really do something, pass me by when I’m at such low risk than other people,” he said. The British government plans to invest over $43.4 million in the challenge trial. The World Health Organization said it could be significant. “There is a very long history of this for development of a number of vaccines that has been part of what has gone on with, say, the development of the cholera vaccines and the typhoid vaccines,” said Margaret Harris, a spokeswoman for WHO. Harris also expressed some concerns. “What is critical is that if people are considering this, it must be overseen by an ethics committee, and the volunteers must have full consent, and they must select the volunteers in order to minimize their risk. Because you will be challenging people with a virus that we do not have a treatment for,” Harris said. “So, you must ensure that everybody involved understands exactly what is at stake, must be selected to minimize the risk. The volunteer and you must ensure that informed consent is rigorous, that they really do understand all the risks.” FILE – A passenger in a car receives a novel coronavirus test at a drive-in COVID-19 testing facility set up at the Chessington World of Adventures Resort, in Chessington, southwest of London, Oct. 20, 2020. (AFP)Infections, hospitalizations and deaths from the new coronavirus are rising sharply in many countries around the world. A vaccine remains the best hope of any return to some kind of normality, said Dr. Sterghios Moschos, a microbiologist at the University of Northumbria, who spoke to VOA in a recent interview. “At this point in time, we don’t have a way of stopping transmission,” Moschos said. “And we don’t even have the financial capacity to give multiple antibody treatments, steroids, et cetera, like Donald Trump received, to everybody in the population that needs treatment. The cost is quite large for these kinds of treatments. We don’t have a vaccine. And therefore, as a result, we need to contain the spread of this virus. Not just manage it, contain it.” The initial aim of the British research team will be to discover the smallest amount of virus it takes to cause a COVID-19 infection, using controlled doses of the virus. If approved by regulators and an ethics committee, it is hoped the full challenge trial could begin in May 2021.  
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed Thursday that the military alliance would establish a space center at the Allied Air Command base in Ramstein, Germany.Speaking in Brussels after a virtual conference of NATO foreign ministers, Stoltenberg confirmed reports regarding the space center made earlier this week by European news agencies.”NATO is determined to keep our cutting edge in all domains,” he said, including “land, sea, air, cyber and space.”During a meeting last December, Stoltenberg declared “space as an operational domain for NATO. And today we took another important step.”In his comments, the NATO chief said the Allied Air Command space center would help to coordinate allied space activities and provide support for NATO missions and operations from space using satellite communications and imagery. Stoltenberg said the center also would help protect NATO-allied space systems by sharing information about potential threats.Stoltenberg has said repeatedly that NATO has no interest in the “militarization” of space. But Thursday, he said threats against NATO allied satellites and space systems were real.“For instance,” he said, “Russia and China are now developing capabilities that can blind, destroy, for instance, satellites, which will have a severe impact on both military and civilian activities on the ground.”Stoltenberg also said NATO foreign ministers expressed concern about Russia’s growing arsenal of nuclear-capable missiles and the importance of Russia and the U.S. extending the new START missile treaty.The secretary-general also called for an immediate cease-fire and cessation of all hostilities between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The region lies within Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a war there ended in 1994.The current fighting that started there marks the biggest escalation in the conflict since the war’s end. Stoltenberg called on Turkey to “use its considerable influence in the region to calm tensions.”
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The head of Germany’s disease control institute sounded an alarm Thursday, warning of a possible uncontrollable spread of COVID-19 as the country reported a daily record of 11,287 new infections.Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases, told reporters in Berlin that infection numbers are rising among all age groups, not just young people, though he said their tendency to attend social gatherings is a significant cause for the spread. Wieler also disputed claims that the rise in new cases was the result of increased testing.Koch said the situation was serious and that the country must prepare for it to get worse.“We must anticipate the virus heavily spreading further, at least in some German regions, and that there might even be an uncontrolled spread.”The 11,287 new infections shattered the record of 7,830 recorded last Friday and marks the first time the nation has seen more than 10 new cases in a single day since the pandemic began.While Germany’s infection rates are lower than in much of Europe, they have been accelerating rapidly since the onset of cooler weather, with politicians warning that stricter social distancing rules may be needed if the trend continues.German authorities have toughened measures to curb the spread of the pandemic, such as banning large gatherings and mandating the wearing of masks in certain parts of Berlin. Wieler urged people to heed the rules and restrictions.Health Minister Jens Spahn tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday.
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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said he has canceled a deal to buy a Chinese-developed vaccine against the coronavirus, a day after his health minister announced Brazil would purchase millions of doses of CoronaVac.Bolsonaro said Wednesday that the intentions of Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria, one of his leading opponents, were distorted, saying he already canceled the deal before Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello signed it.Pazuello said in a statement that there was “no commitment” to buy the vaccine, only a “non-binding memorandum of understanding between the health ministry and the Butantan Institute” to test and produce the vaccine.Bolsonaro, who said he would not let Brazilians be guinea pigs for the Sinovac drug, is promoting the purchase of another vaccine developed by Oxford University in Britain.Brazil is helping to test both of vaccines in the final stage of clinical trials.Meantime, The Wall Street Journal reports, a Brazilian health regulator says the clinical trials of the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca PLC will continue although a volunteer died.Both Oxford University and AstraZeneca reportedly found no safety issues which warranted the trial being stopped.
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The number of nations with more than 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases has risen to seven.Spain and France are the latest nations to reach the unfortunate mark, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. The United States tops the list with more than 8.3 million total cases, followed by India (7.6 million), Brazil (5.3 million), Russia (1.4 million) and Argentina, which has 1,037,325. Spain is in sixth place with 1,005,325 cases, followed by France with 1,000,369.Spain and France are also the first nations in Western Europe to record more than 1 million COVID-19 infections.Scores of researchers around the world are racing to develop a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19, which has killed more than 1.1 million people around the globe and sickened more than 41.1 million.Brazil’s health authority Anvisa said Wednesday that a volunteer in a late-stage clinical trial of a vaccine developed by British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca had died but gave no further details about the circumstances.The volunteer was one of the 8,000 who either received the actual vaccine or a false drug known as a placebo. Because the testing has not been suspended, sources say the volunteer was likely a part of the control group that received the placebo.The AstraZeneca vaccine, developed in cooperation with Britain’s University of Oxford, is being tested in large-scale Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials in several nations, including the United States, Britain, South Africa and India. The drug maker temporarily put the trial on hold last month after a volunteer in Britain was diagnosed with a form of spinal inflammation after receiving a second dose of the vaccine.The trial has since resumed in Britain, Brazil, India and South Africa but remains on hold in the United States.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has revised its definition about “close contact” with a person infected with COVID-19.The agency had previously determined that close contact was spending 15 consecutive minutes within 2 meters of an infected individual. The revised changes announced Wednesday now defines a close contact as someone who spent a total of 15 minutes accumulated over a 24-hour period.The change by the CDC was prompted by a report of a prison officer in the northeastern U.S. state of Vermont who became infected with COVID-19 after more than 20 brief interactions with inmates who later tested positive for the virus. The brief visits added up to about 17 total minutes of exposure.
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The COVID-19 vaccines are coming.The question is, who gets them first? And who is next in line?Two companies say that by late November, they expect to have initial results from clinical trials showing whether their vaccines are safe and effective. Several others are not far behind.But there won’t be enough for everyone at first. Hard decisions have to be made about who gets it and who doesn’t. So, public health experts are laying out guidelines that aim to do the most good with a limited resource.Two expert panels have made recommendations already — the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Johns Hopkins University.But things get complicated quickly.”When you see these kinds of simple frameworks, they’re very important. But the devil’s in the details here,” said William Moss, executive director of the Johns Hopkins University International Vaccine Access Center.Front line, front of the lineFirst in line, experts agree, should be health care workers directly dealing with COVID-19 patients. They’re at high risk of infection and they are also critical to keeping society running.But who, exactly, counts as a health care worker? Doctors and nurses treating COVID-19 patients, clearly. Maintenance workers on the COVID wards, almost certainly. Cooks in nursing homes, possibly. But the farther you get from the bedside, the murkier it gets.”If you are someone who is an administrator, it depends,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.For example, maybe office personnel who have patients sign forms should be vaccinated, he said.It may be up to individual facilities to make the decision.”We’re going to have a committee right here in our own institution to create a staggered system of who should be first, second and third,” said Vanderbilt University Medical Center infectious disease professor William Schaffner, “because we are unlikely to get enough doses right on Day 2.”At-risk groupsThe other group that experts agree should be top priority are patients with health problems that put them at high risk for serious illness and death from COVID-19. That includes people with heart, lung or kidney disease, as well as diabetes and obesity.But that adds up to more than 100 million people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The list will likely need to be narrowed further. The National Academies report suggests focusing on people with two or more underlying health conditions.Next up are workers whose jobs are critical to the functioning of society.Who is that?”If you get four people together, you get five opinions,” Schaffner said. “There isn’t a single correct answer.”Recommendations include teachers, transit workers and people working in the food supply chain. But there is no definitive list.”It’s really hard to know who’s in the definition until one is made,” said Adriane Casalotti, chief of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officers. She said even local health department staff were not automatically considered essential workers.Coming soonAn expert panel convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to provide guidance on all the big questions following a meeting next week.”It will be interesting to see … how granular they get,” Casalotti said.It is important to have a national framework so everyone feels “that we’re all in this together, because it’s the only way we’re going to make it through the pandemic,” she said. Plus, it will help avoid a situation where “you’re a local health official who’s going to be picking winners and losers.”But there also needs to be flexibility to account for local conditions. The panel has to walk a fine line.”You run the risk of being too prescriptive and then not prescriptive enough,” Casalotti said.Is my name on the list?It is one thing to lay out priorities for who should be vaccinated. But how will officials identify the individuals who are eligible and make sure they can get their shots?”This is really a great question, and this is where I have more concern,” Moss said. “We don’t have a mechanism for generating a list of people who should get it.”And health officials already struggle to get adults vaccinated for other illnesses. Influenza vaccines rarely reach half the population.”In a good year, with an established vaccine, it’s tough to get shots in the arm,” Benjamin said.But it is doable, he added. Health departments set up drive-thru vaccination centers during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, for example. And there are plenty of mobile clinics across the country.”To give someone a vaccination, all you really need is a van and a cooler,” he said.It’s not a surprise that so many questions remain, Casalotti said.”That’s, in some ways, the nature of the beast in dealing with this pandemic,” she noted. “So much is being done in crisis mode that it takes a lot to work through a lot of these genuine, complicated questions.”
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Having a cold might protect sufferers from a severe case of COVID-19, new research shows.COVID-19 patients who had recently been infected with a common cold virus were less likely to die or require intensive care compared with those who did not have a recent cold, according to the study published recently in the Medical staff of the intensive care unit of the Casalpalocco COVID-19 Clinic in the outskirts of Rome tend to patients, Oct. 21, 2020. (Associated Press)Sagar and his colleagues compared people who’d had a recent common cold infection with those who had not. They found that both groups contracted COVID-19 at the same rate, but people who had recently beaten a common cold experienced less severe COVID-19 symptoms.“They were much less likely to require admission to the intensive care unit. And they were much less likely to die from the infection,” said Sagar.For many adults and most children, COVID-19 causes only minor coldlike symptoms or no symptoms at all. In these people, the immune system effectively clears away virus particles and destroys infected cells, preventing serious disease.But the “immune system is a double-edged sword,” said Andrea Cox, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Exaggerated or poorly regulated immune responses can cause inflammation that leads to breathing troubles, organ failure and death. These severe outcomes usually occur in the elderly or people with other conditions, such as obesity and diabetes.Such vastly different responses to the COVID-19 virus could be explained, in part, by the immune system’s past experiences, experts say. Recognition of SARS-CoV-2 by preexisting T cells could enable a faster and stronger immune response and milder COVID-19 symptoms.Common colds could worsen COVID-19It is also possible that T cells produced from past common colds could impair the immune system’s response to COVID-19.“We have this preexisting standing force of fighters against [disease-causing viruses], and when we encounter those [viruses], there’s expansion of that force that preexists,” said Cox. “The concern is that you might expand [a force] designed to fight something else, not designed perfectly to fight SARS-CoV-2, and that could sort of skew you down this pathway that isn’t the right path to go down.”Prior immune experiences can be harmful in some diseases such as dengue fever. Antibodies and T cells produced in response to one version of the dengue virus can worsen the disease if they encounter a different version of the virus.Currently, there is little evidence that T cells produced in response to common cold coronaviruses worsen COVID-19 disease, but researchers say it is too early to say that they provide protection either.Immunity may also depend on the individual.“Not everyone who gets infected with the virus makes exactly the same immune response. In fact, even identical twins do not make the same exact immune responses to a virus when they get exposed,” said Cox. “So, it may depend on who is being infected. And it may depend on where you are in the world, where different seasonal cold coronaviruses come in different times, and also where you have different genetic backgrounds of people being exposed.”
 
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The U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday that Purdue Pharma, maker of the powerful opioid painkiller OxyContin, pleaded guilty to three federal criminal charges and agreed to pay more than $8 billion in fines.
 
OxyContin is a prescription drug that many experts said helped spark a nationwide opioid epidemic in the U.S. that is responsible for more than 470,000 overdose deaths since 2000.
 
As part of the settlement, Purdue Pharma admitted that it misled the federal government by falsely stating it maintained a program to avoid the transfer of controlled substances from individuals for whom they were prescribed to other people for illicit use.
 
Purdue Pharma also admitted it violated federal laws by paying physicians to write more prescriptions for its opioids and to use electronic health records software to influence the prescription of pain medication.
 
The company also admitted to violating federal law by “knowingly and intentionally” conspiring to “aid and abet” the dispensing of medication from doctors “without a legitimate medical purpose.”
 
The plea agreement does not protect the company’s executives or members of the Sackler family, which owns the company, from criminal liability.
 
When announcing the settlement in Washington, Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said, “Just as the department prosecutes illicit drug traffickers, the department is committed to doing the same with respect to abuse and diversion of prescription opioids.”
 
Rosen added, “Today’s announcement focuses on the problems from wrongful activities in the prescription opioids realm, so let me note that our efforts there appear to be making a difference.”
 
Before the agreement was reached, there was opposition from state attorneys general, Democratic lawmakers and advocates who asked Attorney General William Barr in a letter not to negotiate with the company and the Sackler family because the proposed deal did not hold them fully accountable.
 
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said in a statement that the Justice Department “failed” by not “exposing the truth and holding perpetrators accountable, not rushing a settlement to beat an election.” The announcement comes less than two weeks before President Donald Trump stands for re-election on Nov. 3.
 
In their letter to Barr, 38 Democratic legislators said, “If the only practical consequence of your Department’s investigation is that a handful of billionaires are made slightly less rich, we fear that the American people will lose faith in the ability of the Department to provide accountability and equal justice under the law.”
 
The settlement requires Purdue to make a direct payment of $225 million to the federal government, which is part of a $2 billion forfeiture. The company also faces a more than $3.5 billion criminal fine, which it may not have to fully pay because it will likely be taken through a bankruptcy.
 
In addition to paying $2.8 billion in damages to resolve its civil liability, the U.S. company will be required to transform into a public benefit company that would be managed by a trust without the involvement of the Sackler family.
 
The settlement, which mirrors a part of the company’s proposal to settle about 3,000 lawsuits filed by state, local and Native American governments, also requires some of the settlement money to be spent on medically assisted treatments and other programs to combat the opioid epidemic. 
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