Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day one, twenty
Speaker 1: eight since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's main story.
Speaker 1: Much has been made about the race to develop a
Speaker 1: vaccine and who will win it, But being first isn't
Speaker 1: the only thing that matters in the rush to inoculate
Speaker 1: US from COVID nineteen. But first, here's what happened in
Speaker 1: virus News today. All of the US government programs set
Speaker 1: to offset the economic hit from the coronavirus are about
Speaker 1: to expire. More than two trillion dollars in government spending
Speaker 1: was approved to support hard hit businesses and unemployed people
Speaker 1: earlier this year. Now leaders face an urgent set of
Speaker 1: decision about whether to extend history's biggest rescue effort. The
Speaker 1: Trump administration wants another relief built with a price tag
Speaker 1: of no more than one trillion dollars before lawmakers leave
Speaker 1: for summer recess in early August. The Democrat controlled House
Speaker 1: already approved additional measures worth three point five trillion dollars,
Speaker 1: but Republicans, who have a Senate majority, oppose many of them.
Speaker 1: New York City is ready to enter the fourth and
Speaker 1: final phase of reopening Monday. Mayor Bill de Blasio said zoos,
Speaker 1: botanical gardens, and outdoor movie production can resume, but indoor dining,
Speaker 1: museums and malls will remain closed. Hospitalizations in the state
Speaker 1: of New York dropped to a four month low and
Speaker 1: fewer than one percent of residents tested Thursday where positive
Speaker 1: for coronavirus. New York was once the epicenter of the
Speaker 1: U S crisis, and finally, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp's edict
Speaker 1: forbidding local governments to mandate mask wearing capped a week
Speaker 1: of turmoil in the state. Although still lagging behind Florida, Texas,
Speaker 1: and Arizona, George's COVID nineteen cases are surging. On Thursday,
Speaker 1: Kemp's administration followed his mask voiding order with a lawsuit
Speaker 1: seeking to block Atlanta's requirement. It was another example of
Speaker 1: him hindering local efforts, making him an outlier among southern
Speaker 1: governors who have rolled back reopenings in the face of
Speaker 1: surging infection rates. And now for today's main story, an
Speaker 1: experimental COVID vaccine from Australia joined almost two dozen candidates
Speaker 1: in clinical trials this week. Development Wise, it's months behind
Speaker 1: some of the front runners, but Bloomberg Senior editor Jason
Speaker 1: Gale explains that speed isn't everything when it comes to
Speaker 1: fighting the pandemic YEA, the global effort to vaccinate humanity
Speaker 1: against the coronavirus is a bit like a Formula one race.
Speaker 1: There are all kinds of teams and various models in
Speaker 1: the race against the pandemic, but in this case, the
Speaker 1: winner might necessarily be the fastest. We need vaccines that
Speaker 1: are not only safe and effective at protecting against COVID nineteen,
Speaker 1: we also want ones that provide durable protection, hopefully measured
Speaker 1: in years, not months. We also want munizations that are
Speaker 1: affordable and easy to administer, and can be manufactured on
Speaker 1: a massive scale so that all seven point eight billion
Speaker 1: of US can be protected. Meeting all of these requirements
Speaker 1: is a tough task, and speed is only part of
Speaker 1: the challenge. You probably already know some of the teams
Speaker 1: in the COVID vaccine race, added front to Moderner and
Speaker 1: its partner, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Speaker 1: Then there's the University of Oxford and Astra's Etiquette, plus
Speaker 1: Merk Glaxo Smith Klein and Johnson and Johnson are there,
Speaker 1: along with Sinovac and can Sino biological speedy contenters from China,
Speaker 1: just to name a few. In fact, as of July thirteenth,
Speaker 1: the World Health Organization counted twenty three candidates and human
Speaker 1: clinical trials plus one seven in earlier preclinical studies. Time
Speaker 1: will tell which team and whose scientific approach will prevail.
Speaker 1: One recent addition to the Clinical Trial League is the
Speaker 1: University of Queensland. Here in Australia, it's known as u Q.
Speaker 1: So the University Ofquensland has a has a rich history.
Speaker 1: It's where over a hundred years old. It has particularly
Speaker 1: rich history in medicine, and I guess everybody would know
Speaker 1: about the cartosail vaccine. This is Professor Paul Young. He's
Speaker 1: the head of the University of Queensland School of Chemistry
Speaker 1: and Molecular Biosciences. Ucue's pioneering research almost thirty years ago
Speaker 1: led to the human papaloma vaccine that's protected millions of
Speaker 1: women against cervical cancer. More recently, UQ scientists have broken
Speaker 1: ground on another aspect of vaccine science. They call it
Speaker 1: the molecular clap. The biology is a little complicated in essence,
Speaker 1: some viruses like the coronavirus, change their appearance after they
Speaker 1: latch onto a seller trying to infect it enables these
Speaker 1: pathogens to evade detection by the immune system, and that's
Speaker 1: not good. So Paul's team fiking out a way of
Speaker 1: training the immune system to recognize the virus early before
Speaker 1: it's infected cells. It's something they've been working on for
Speaker 1: almost a decade. We applied it to influenza, we applied
Speaker 1: it to a bowler, to mers, another coronavirus similar to
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen, mumps, measles, so a wide range of different
Speaker 1: viruses that we demonstrated that this technology could could work with,
Speaker 1: and we took a number of those through into animal
Speaker 1: protection studies and showed they induced a good immune response
Speaker 1: and and could afford protection to those animals who are
Speaker 1: challenged with live virus. One of the good things about
Speaker 1: the molecular clamp is that it can be tailored to
Speaker 1: work against a number of different diseases, including ones we
Speaker 1: don't yet know about. That made it attractive to the
Speaker 1: Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations or SEPPI, which gave Paul
Speaker 1: and his team fifteen million dollars to continue developing the
Speaker 1: Molecular Clamp Platform. SEPPI is a foundation set up in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seventeen with funding from the Bill and
Speaker 1: Melinda Gates Foundation, the governments of Norway and India, and
Speaker 1: the Welcome Trust. It works to accelerate the development of
Speaker 1: vaccines against emerging effects as diseases and to make them
Speaker 1: broadly accessible. The objective of the grant was to develop
Speaker 1: three vaccines as demonstrators of our platform. An influenza A,
Speaker 1: respirators in city or virus one so we could compare
Speaker 1: our platform with other approaches, but also an emerging disease,
Speaker 1: which just happened to be MERS. We chose MERS quite
Speaker 1: fortuitously because obviously as a coronavirus, what we learned with
Speaker 1: MERS we were able to apply to to COVID when
Speaker 1: it came on the scene. In fact, even before they
Speaker 1: knew that the coronavirus was going to cause a pandemic,
Speaker 1: they started work on a vaccine against it, in part
Speaker 1: to see if they could. We didn't know how far
Speaker 1: we'd take that process. We just wanted to give out,
Speaker 1: give ourselves a little bit of a stress test ourselves,
Speaker 1: I have to say, like many people back in early January,
Speaker 1: no one anticipated that size Kobe two would spread as
Speaker 1: far as it did, or as far as it has
Speaker 1: and still spreading globally and having the impact that it's had.
Speaker 1: A vaccine candidate was constructed within twenty four hours of
Speaker 1: the virus is genetic sequence being published. Over the next
Speaker 1: three to four weeks, we tested about two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty different variants of that and within that four week
Speaker 1: period we've chosen our lead candidate. But also within that period,
Speaker 1: in fact, it was only about ten days after we
Speaker 1: got the sequence, SEPPI got in touch with us to
Speaker 1: say that they would like to trigger us as one
Speaker 1: of the groups that they would support in developing a vaccine.
Speaker 1: All the way through. Starting last Monday, about one and
Speaker 1: twenty adult volunteers in Brisbane are participating in an initial
Speaker 1: study of the vaccine to check that it's safe and
Speaker 1: induces a sufficiently strong immune response. We're highly confident because
Speaker 1: we've already gone through genicity studies in mice and shown
Speaker 1: that our vaccine induces extremely high levels of neutralizing anybody,
Speaker 1: higher than any I've seen in other corresponding vaccine approaches.
Speaker 1: U Q delayed studying human trials until lab studies demonstrating
Speaker 1: safety and efficacy were completed. In the meantime, it's worked
Speaker 1: with various research groups and Melbourne based pharmaceutical company CSL
Speaker 1: to accelerate manufacturing. In fact, CSL began figuring out how
Speaker 1: to make large amounts of the vaccine material well before
Speaker 1: the experimental shot had entered initial human studies, just because
Speaker 1: we need the program to go as rapidly as possible.
Speaker 1: This is Dr Andrew Cuthbertson. He's an executive director at CSL,
Speaker 1: and until a few weeks ago, he was also the
Speaker 1: company's chief scientist. CSL is one of the world's biggest
Speaker 1: makers of blood based therapies. It's also the parent company
Speaker 1: of Securists, which makes flu vaccines. We believe we could
Speaker 1: make somewhere between fifteen to fifty million doses by the
Speaker 1: end of this calendar year, and we could make something
Speaker 1: like a hundred million doses over the next of months. Now.
Speaker 1: I think we will have those millions of doses available,
Speaker 1: but they won't be available for mass vaccination of the
Speaker 1: community until we've generated the clinical trial data to support
Speaker 1: a license for the vaccine. In technical terms, the candidate
Speaker 1: vaccine contains a recombinant protein stabilized into a trimeric form
Speaker 1: of the spikes on the outside of the sascovy two virus.
Speaker 1: Plus it has securisies M fifty nine adjuvant that makes
Speaker 1: flu shots more effective in the elderly. The chemical is
Speaker 1: designed to stimulate a better immune response to vaccines. Andrew
Speaker 1: says it will bolster production of so called helper T
Speaker 1: cells as well as reduced the amount of vaccine needed
Speaker 1: and eat shot and therefore we can potentially make more doses,
Speaker 1: which may be critical. Never have so many scientists work
Speaker 1: so hard at the same time to produce a vaccine
Speaker 1: against a completely new virus. The stakes are high and
Speaker 1: some of the risks. Being fast is definitely an advantage,
Speaker 1: but the real winners will be those who produce a
Speaker 1: safe and effective humanization that can save the most lives
Speaker 1: from this insidious disease. Lucky for us, we've never had
Speaker 1: so many teams using so many different approaches racing to
Speaker 1: beat a single common enemy. That was Jason Gale in Melbourne.
Speaker 1: And that's it for our show today. For coverage of
Speaker 1: the outbreak from one bureaus around the world, visit bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot com, slash Coronavirus and if you like the show,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review and a rating on Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best to help more listeners
Speaker 1: find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced
Speaker 1: by topor Foreheaz, Jordan Gaspourey, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson.
Speaker 1: Today's main story was reported by Jason Gale. Original music
Speaker 1: by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi.
Speaker 1: Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.