Boosting the vaccine arsenal: Johnson & Johnson has applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization to roll out its single-dose vaccine, with the first shipments possible by early March, The New York Times reports. The application followed a promising clinical trial in the U.S., Latin America and South Africa that found the vaccine was 85 percent effective in preventing severe infections in all three regions. While not as far along, the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC and the University of Oxford was shown effective against a highly transmissible variant of the virus in a small-scale study, according to The Wall Street Journal. The results, which have not been peer reviewed, found that the vaccine was 74.6 percent effective against the variant first detected in Britain. Preliminary findings suggest that all of the vaccines, including the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines already on the market, provide some protections against new coronavirus variants that are spreading around the world.
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- Also: After a bumpy start, the U.S. vaccine rollout is picking up the pace a bit. . So far more than 57 million total doses have been distributed, with over 35 million shots administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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- Also: Confirmed Covid infections in the U.S. exceed 26.7 with about 457,000 deaths. The disease has struck more than 105 million people worldwide, taking about 2.3 million lives.
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Pilots get “rusty”: The steep downturn in commercial flights resulting from the pandemic has kept many airline pilots at home for weeks or months at a time, with some reporting they are out of practice, according to the Los Angeles Times and CNN. “Because I had not flown in a few months, I was rusty,’’ wrote a first officer who forgot to activate a plane’s anti-icing mechanism in a report to a NASA-run safety reporting system. In another incident, pilots battling turbulence and other distractions while approaching an airport reported that ‘’they forgot to obtain the landing clearance.’’ Peter Goelz, an aviation expert and former official of the National Transportation Safety Board told CNN: ‘’These kinds of fairly mundane—what appear to be mundane—errors can really result in terrible events.’’
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Crossroads for Big Oil?: Major oil companies lost tens of billions of dollars last year, as the coronavirus pandemic slashed travel and demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. The industry may hope this was a temporary blip, but weak results could become more common amid growing concerns about climate change and increasing signs that electricity, rather than gasoline, will be the dominant fuel for cars and trucks in the coming years, Clifford Krauss reports for The New York Times. For the oil companies, General Motors’ announcement that it will sell only electric cars by 2035 was a dramatic shot across the bow.
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Funding gun research: Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced legislation to provide $50 million a year to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, according to The Trace. In 2019, Congress appropriated $25 million for gun research, breaking a drought of more than 20 years that began in 1996 with a budget rider banning federally funded studies that would ‘’advocate or promote gun control’’. Although tens of thousands die each year in gun homicides, suicides and accidental shootings, research on gun violence came to a virtual standstill at the CDC before the 2019 funding.
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McKinsey settles: The global consulting giant McKinsey & Co. has reached a $573 million settlement with nearly 50 state governments, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories over its role in helping drug companies boost sales of opioid drugs, including OxyContin, NPR reports. The money is meant to fund treatment programs in communities hard hit by the addiction crisis. “Today’s agreement sets a new standard for accountability in one of the most devastating crises of our time,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, in a statement to NPR. In agreeing to the settlement, which heads off threatened lawsuits by state attorneys general, McKinsey did not admit wrongdoing. But in December the firm issued an apology for its work for the opioid industry.
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