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Coronavirus Updates: Older Participants Opt Out Of Vaccine Trial To Seek Moderna and Pfizer Doses

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Sydney Pereira

Published Jan 20, 2021

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Novavax Inc. headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland on July 8th, 2020.

 

JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

By

Sydney Pereira

Published Jan 20, 2021

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This is our daily update of breaking COVID-19 news for Wednesday, January 20th, 2021. Previous daily updates can be found here, and up-to-date statistics are here.

New York City is in Phase 4 of reopening now, which includes zoos, botanical gardens, museums, and gyms. Citing rising hospitalization rates, Governor Andrew Cuomo suspended indoor dining in NYC starting December 14th. After being shut down for several weeks, NYC public schools partially reopened on December 7th for 3K-5th grade students, with students with special needs returning on December 10th. Certain parts of Staten Island remain under a zoned shutdown.

Get answers to questions you may have with our "Ask An Epidemiologist" series, or learn more about NYC COVID-19 testing options with our explainer. Here are some local and state hotlines for more information: NYC: 311; NY State Hotline: 888-364-3065; NJ State Hotline: 800-222-1222.

Here's the latest:

1:10 p.m.: Older people ages 65 and up are dropping out of a clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine developed by Novavax, as eligibility widens for already authorized vaccines, the Washington Post reports.

A Long Island physician and infectious disease expert, Benjamin Luft, told Post patients have called to find out whether they received the placebo or not.

The company added that it had recruited only 9,000 of the 30,000 subjects required to complete its phase 3 trials in the U.S. If it falls short, the company would rely on data from a smaller U.K. trial with about 15,000 participants, 27% of whom are over 65, according to Gregory Glenn, Novavax’s president of research and development. In November, the company said it planned to release this data by early 2021.

The vaccine—named PREVENT-19—could expand access to places without ultra-cold storage, given it is stable with normal refrigeration. Both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines require colder temperatures for all or part of their supply chains. Researchers are exploring a two-shot option for the Novavax vaccine, with each dose administered 21 days apart.

The project received federal support from Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s task force for developing and distributing a COVID-19 vaccine. Australia’s government has purchased 51 million doses of the Novavax vaccine.

Health advisors for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration don’t expect to authorize another coronavirus vaccine until February, but the need remains ever-present as the nation surpasses 400,000 COVID-19 deaths. A new study from the University of Southern California found the number of deaths last year in the U.S. will shorten average life expectancy by more than a year for all Americans.

Yet the toll is uneven. For Black and Latino residents, life expectancy would shorten by around 2 and 3 years, with average lifespans falling to 72.78 and 78.77 years old. respectively. For white people, the life expectancy dropped by eight months, with predicted lifespan of 77.84 years old. The racial disparities found in the new paper mirror the patterns observed in New York through the course of the pandemic, highlighting inequities in healthcare access, housing, and hunger that existed long before the pandemic.

“While the arrival of effective vaccines is hopeful, the U.S. is currently experiencing more daily COVID-19 deaths than at any other point in the pandemic,” the study author Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral fellow at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, said in a statement. “Because of that, and because we expect there will be long-term health and economic effects that may result in worse mortality for many years to come, we expect there will be lingering effects on life expectancy in 2021.”

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covid-19 updates

coronavirus

Sydney Pereira

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