At least 20 Boston scientists tested DIY coronavirus vaccine on themselves

At least 20 Boston researchers, technologists and science enthusiasts have tried a DIY vaccine developed by a group called the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or Radvac, according to the MIT Technology Review.

The scientists, many of whom are connected to Harvard University and MIT, include George Church, a celebrity geneticist from Harvard. While Church has not left his home in five months, he believes that the vaccine is extremely safe, as one of the developers is Preston Estep, a former graduate student of his at Harvard.

“I think we are at much bigger risk from COVID considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” said Church, according to the MIT Technology Review. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease.”

Radvac was formed in March, when Estep emailed a number of acquaintances wondering if a DIY project could develop a vaccine more quickly than ongoing projects, as he felt that “already sufficient information” had been published about the virus in order to guide an independent project.

“We established a core group, most of them [from] my go-to posse for citizen science, though we have never done anything quite like this,” explained Estep, a cofounder of Veritas Genetics, a DNA sequencing company.

The Radvac team went through reports on vaccines against SARS and MERS and worked in borrowed labs with mail-order ingredients in order to develop the vaccine. The team was looking for “a simple formula that you could make with readily available materials,” Estep told the MIT Technology Review. “That narrowed things down to a small number of possibilities.”

A white paper detailing the vaccine was published by Radvac in early July for anyone to copy, with four authors named on the document and a dozen initials of participants who chose to remain anonymous.

The DIY vaccine is a “subunit” vaccine consisting of fragments of the virus. Radvacs virus is made from peptides, short bits of protein that match part of the coronavirus but can cause the disease itself. Subunit vaccines are used for some other diseases including hepatitis B and human papillomavirus (HPV). Novavax, a biotechnology company, is also working on a subunit vaccine for the coronavirus, and has secured a $1.6 billion contract from the Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed.

The peptides in Radvac’s vaccine were mixed with chitosan, a substance from shrimp shells, which coats the peptides in a nanoparticle which can pass the mucous membrane.

Nasal vaccines are easier to administer than injected ones, but only five out of about 199 COVID-19 vaccines are using nasal delivery.

A nasal vaccine could also create mucosal immunity, or immune cells present in the tissues of the airway, which could be important for defending against SARS-CoV-2. Mucosal immunity is harder to detect than antibodies that appear in the blood, however, and may require a biopsy to identify, according to the MIT Technology Review.

George Siber, the former head of vaccines at Wyeth, told Estep that short, simple peptides often don’t cause much of an immune response and that he hasn’t heard of any subunit vaccine delivered nasally. Siber also asked Estep if Radvac had considered a dangerous side effect, called enhancement, in which a vaccine can actually worsen the disease.

“It’s not the best idea – especially in this case, you could make things worse,” warned Siber. “You really need to know what you are doing here.”

Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center, called Radvac “off-the-charts loony,” according to the MIT Technology Review, warning of a high “potential for harm” and “ill-founded enthusiasm.”

Radvac still can’t say whether or not the vaccine works. Church said that some studies are underway in his Harvard lab to see if the vaccine leads to antibodies against the virus and Estep hopes that mainstream immunologists will help the group. Concerning immune responses so far, Estep told the MIT Technology Review that “it’s a little bit

complicated, and we are not ready to report it.”

Estep has continued to deliver the vaccine to a number of friends and colleagues. The materials for the vaccine have been delivered to 70 people, but since the vaccine must be mixed by the recipients, they’re unsure about how many have actually taken it.

The US Food and Drug Administration requires authorization to test novel drugs in the form of an investigational new drug approval. Radvac did not request approval from the FDA and has not had any ethics board sign off on the vaccine plan.

Estep stated that he feels that Radvac is not subject to oversight because the group mixes and administers the vaccine themselves without any exchange of money. “If you are just making it and taking it yourself, the FDA can’t stop you,” said Estep.

Estep explained that the group did seek legal advice and the white paper begins with extensive disclaimers, including that anyone who uses the vaccine takes “full responsibility” and must be at least 18-years-old.

“What the FDA really wants to crack down on is anything big, which makes claims, or makes money. And this is none of those,” said Church. “As

soon as we do any of those things, they would justifiably crack down. Also, things that get attention. But we haven’t had any so far.”

Siber explained that self-experimentation with COVID-19 vaccines would never win ethics approval at any US university, but admitted that many vaccinologists had injected themselves as a quick and cheap way to get data. Siber himself has even done so, although not recently.

Some Chinese scientists have reportedly taken their own coronavirus vaccines. Hans-Georg Rammensee, of the University of Tubingen, in Germany, said that he injected a peptide vaccine for the virus into his abdomen, causing a ping-pong ball sized bump and a profusion of immune cells through his blood.

Rammensee said that he self-injected to avoid red tape and get preliminary results about a vaccine being developed at the university, adding that it was acceptable to do so because he is an expert in the field and understood the risks and implications.

“If someone like me who knows what he is doing [does it], it’s fine, but it would be a crime for a professor to tell a postdoc to take it,” explained Rammensee.

Alex Hoekstra, a data analyst with training in molecular biology who previously volunteered on the Personal Genome Project staff, explained that the virus changed how he moved through the world, according to the MIT Technology Review.

“I am not licking doorknobs,” said Hoekstra. “But it’s an amazingly surreal experience knowing that I may have an immunity to this constant danger [and] that my continued existence through this pandemic will be a useful data set. It lends a level of meaning and purpose.”

https://www.jpost.com/international/at-least-20-boston-scientists-tested-diy-coronavirus-vaccine-on-themselves-637169

Pandemic And College Football: A Look Back At The 1918 Season

This photo is of an undetermined Georgia Tech home game during the 1918 season. The photo was taken by Georgia Tech student Thomas Carter, who would receive a degree in Mechanical Engineering in the 1920s. The photo was provided by Georgia Tech alumnus Andy McNeil. Additional thanks to @GeorgiaTechFB and @CabreraAngel.

The possibility of holding some form of the 2020 college football season during a pandemic has sent folks scurrying to research the 1918 season. That’s when the Spanish Flu outbreak ravaged the World. The flu, which came in multiple waves from 1918-1919, killed more than 675,000 in the United States.

Not only was there a deadly pandemic in 1918, but World War I was still winding down. According to a report in the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier, 18 schools did not play football in 1918 because of the flu and the war.

While there were some who felt college football should completely shut down because of the pandemic, President Woodrow Wilson felt that football added to the overall morale of the country. As a result, football teams were created at various military posts around the country and actually played against established college teams.

“It would be difficult to overestimate the value of football experience as a part of the soldier’s training,” President Wilson wrote in a letter that was eventually published in 1919.

Many schools were not able to play until late October or early November. The annual Army-Navy game was not played. Many schools played only three or four games.

One of the teams that played almost a complete schedule in 1918 was Georgia Tech, coached by the legendary John Heisman. The Golden Tornadoes, as they were known then, played a seven-game schedule with six of those games played at home at Grant Field.

And despite the threat of the flu, fans turned out at Georgia Tech. The photo that accompanies this story is of an undetermined 1918 Georgia Tech home game that was taken by a student, Thomas Carter, who graduated in the 1920s with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. It’s clear that the vast majority of the spectators in the photo were wearing masks in what published reports said was the peak of the flu in October and November.

Georgia Tech, which had won the national championship the year before, did not start its season until Oct. 5. And when it started playing there was no slowing down the Golden Tornadoes. They beat Furman 118-0, The Oglethorpe 11th Calvary 123-0 (in a game that was stopped after the third quarter), and N.C. State 128-0.

In fact, Georgia Tech outscored its first five opponents 425-0.

Heisman, as you might recall,  was never bashful about running up the score as his 1916 team beat Cumberland 222-0 in the most lopsided game in NCAA history. Georgia Tech led that game 126-0 at halftime.

The biggest game of the season came when Georgia Tech, 5-0 and on a 33-game winning streak, went to Pittsburgh to play the Panthers of Pop Warner, who had a 30-game winning streak. Pittsburgh won 32-0 at Forbes Field before a crowd of 30,000. The game was played to benefit military charities.

That game was on Sunday, Nov. 23. Five days later, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, Georgia Tech closed out its season with a 41-0 win over Auburn at Grant Field.

A Georgia Tech game that was scheduled with Pennsylvania was cancelled when the Spanish flu went through Philadelphia.

There was a Rose Bowl after the 1918 season, but back then it was called the Tournament East-West game. With so many teams lacking players because of the war, the game was scheduled between two military institutions that had fielded team, Great Lakes Navy of Illinois and Mare Island Marines of California. Great Lakes Navy won 17-0. The MVP of the game was George Halas, a future Hall of Fame coach of the Chicago Bears.

According to records 25,000 attended the game.

So here we are, about 115 days from the start of college football season, wondering if the games of 2020 will, in fact, be played. And if the games are played, will there be fans in the seats? And if there are fans in the seats, would they be willing to wear masks as they did in 1918?

We certainly don’t know. We just know that the world has changed a lot since 1918.

https://www.si.com/college/tmg/tony-barnhart/spanish-flu

The Fed Is Planning To Send Money Directly To Americans In The Next Crisis

Over the past decade, the one common theme despite the political upheaval and growing social and geopolitical instability, was that the market would keep marching higher and the Fed would continue injecting liquidity into the system. The second common theme is that despite sparking unprecedented asset price inflation, price as measured across the broader economy (at least using the flawed CPI metric) would remain subdued (as a reminder, the Fed is desperate to ignite broad inflation as that is the only way the countless trillions of excess debt can be eliminated and yet it has so far failed to do so).

The Fed’s failure to reach its inflation target has sparked broad criticism from the economic establishment, even though as we showed in June, deflation is now a direct function of the Fed’s unconventional monetary policies as the lower yields slide, the lower the propensity to spend. In other words, the harder the Fed fights to stimulate inflation, the more deflation and more saving it spurs as a result (incidentally this is not the first time this “discovery” was made, in December we wrote “One Bank Makes A Stunning Discovery – The Fed’s Rate Cuts Are Now Deflationary“).

n short, ever since the Fed launched QE and NIRP, it has been making the situation it has been trying to “fix” even worse, all the while blowing a massive asset price bubble.

And having recently accepted that its preferred stimulus pathway has failed to boost the broader economy, the blame has fallen on how monetary policy is intermediated, specifically the way the Fed creates excess reserves which end up at commercial banks instead of “tricking down” all the way to the consumer level.

To be in the aftermath of the covid pandemic shutdowns the Fed has tried to short-circuit this process, and in conjunction with the Treasury it has launched “helicopter money” which has resulted in a direct transfer of funds to US corporations via PPP loans, as well as to end consumers via the emergency $600 weekly unemployment benefits which however are set to expire unless renewed by Congress as explained last week, as Democrats and Republicans feud over which fiscal stimulus will be implemented next.

Ad yet, the lament is that even as the economy was desperately in need of a massive liquidity tsunami, the funds created by the Fed and Treasury (now that the US operates under a quasi-MMT regime) did not make their way to those who need them the most: end consumers.

Which is why we read with great interest a Bloomberg interview published on Saturday with two former central bank officials: Simon Potter, who led the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s markets group i.e., he was the head of the Fed’s Plunge Protection Team for years, and Julia Coronado, who spent eight years as an economist for the Fed’s Board of Governors, who are among the innovators brainstorming solutions to what has emerged as the most crucial and difficult problem facing the Fed: get money swiftly to people who need it most in a crisis.

The response was striking: they two propose creating a monetary tool that they call recession insurance bonds, which draw on some of the advances in digital payments, which will be wired instantly to Americans.

As Coronado explains the details, Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.

As Potter then elucidates, “it took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.”

And that, in a nutshell, is how the Fed will stimulate the economy in the next crisis in hopes of circumventing the reserve creation process: it will use digital money apps (which explains the Fed’s recent fascination with cryptocurrency and digital money) to transfer money directly to US consumers.

To be sure, the narrative is already set for how the Fed will “sell” this direct transfer of money to the rest of the world and the broader US population: as Coronado explains “it’s the most efficient from a macroeconomic standpoint in supporting spending and confidence. The fear of unemployment acts as an accelerant on a recession. There’s a shock—people are losing their jobs or worry about losing their jobs. They get very risk-averse. [By] getting money to consumers you can limit the depth and duration of a recession.”

And the kicker:

“you could actually generate real inflation. It could be beneficial for not only avoiding negative rates but creating a more healthy interest-rate market, a more healthy yield curve.”

So there you have it: the one thing that was missing from a decade of monetary tinkering by the Fed, the spark of inflation, will finally arrive as the Fed gives money to those most likely to spend it: the lower and middle classes of society.

But wait, there’s more: now that the Fed is implicitly focusing on racial inequality, and soon explicitly with Joe Biden going so far as to urge the Fed to fight “racial economic inequality” and former Minneapolis Fed president Kocherlakota writing an op-ed in which he said the Fed “should have a third mandate on racial inquality“, the stage is now set for the Fed to specifically release funds for those who have “suffered from inequality”, and once the time comes when the narrative allows to deploy reparations or direct funding to minorities, the Fed will be ready.

* * *

Below we republish the Bloomberg Markets interview with Coronado and Potter because it lays out, very clearly, just what the next monetary stimulus will look like now that helicopter money is fully engaged and money is about to be sent by the Fed directly to those Americans the Fed finds to be “in need.”

BLOOMBERG MARKETS: How would recession insurance bonds work?

JULIA CORONADO: Congress would grant the Federal Reserve an additional tool for providing support—say, a percent of GDP [in a lump sum that would be divided equally and distributed] to households in a recession. Recession insurance bonds would be zero-coupon securities, a contingent asset of households that would basically lie in wait. The trigger could be reaching the zero lower bound on interest rates or, as economist Claudia Sahm has proposed, a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate. The Fed would then activate the securities and deposit the funds digitally in households’ apps.

Julia Coronado

And so instead of these gyrations we’ve been going through to get money to households, it would happen instantaneously.

SIMON POTTER: It took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.

BM: Aside from speed, what are the main advantages of this approach?

JC: It’s the most efficient from a macroeconomic standpoint in supporting spending and confidence. The fear of unemployment acts as an accelerant on a recession. There’s a shock—people are losing their jobs or worry about losing their jobs. They get very risk-averse. [By] getting money to consumers you can limit the depth and duration of a recession. And you could actually generate real inflation. It could be beneficial for not only avoiding negative rates but creating a more healthy interest-rate market, a more healthy yield curve.

BM: What are the origins of the idea?

JC: The Bank of England has proposals for digital currency. And a number of people have talked about the need for monetary financing—the idea that the interest-rate tool is simply less effective in lower growth, slower credit growth economies. Helicopter money [making direct payments to the public] goes back to Milton Friedman, but Ben Bernanke revisited it. Some people proposed doing that through financing fiscal stimulus. We think going directly to consumers is more efficient than wading through that sticky fiscal process.

BM: This policy could be complementary to Treasury stimulus?

JC: It’s not a replacement for fiscal policy. It makes sense from a fiscal perspective, for example, to authorize unemployment insurance benefits for people who lose their jobs and other assistance for medical-care providers in the current situation.

SP: The central bank is not elected. It cannot make allocation decisions about fiscal transfers. It’s now being pushed to make allocation decisions around credit with the Treasury, because we believe this situation is so unique that the private sector cannot make those decisions itself. The simplest way to do this would be a lump sum. Not in the way Congress did it. We’d take the bluntness of monetary policy and say anyone who’s eligible should get the same amount of bonds.

Simon Potter

Fiscal controls could use the same infrastructure. The imperative to invest in it is high. Nearly all Treasury payments at some point touch the Fed because it’s the Treasury’s bank. The digital payment providers—called interface providers in the Bank of England proposal—would manage these accounts and link them to the Fed and Treasury.

BM: What are the objections from the Fed, and other challenges?

SP: The reaction from some of my former colleagues a while ago to the notion of helicopter money was not the most embracing. Some of those concerns have disappeared.

The two objections were related to the switch of deposits in normal times from the traditional banking system into digital accounts and the extra stress in crisis times as people want to get safe. An account with the central bank is safe because the central bank can always print money to honor that claim. A private bank can’t do that because their asset side has all kinds of credit on it. What we’ve created is a narrow bank-type model [narrow banks only take deposits and invest them in the safest assets] that’s small and fit for purpose, with a cap of $10,000 [per person].

JC: One challenge is making it profitable for digital providers. We want strict limitations on the fees so we’re reaching people that are underbanked, but we also want a public-private partnership with a diversity of competitors jumping into this market. Privacy is just as important, because one thing that might induce them is access to people’s data. As the Fed, are you blessing that, and what structure do you put around that?

SP: We’ll all have to deal with deep questions of privacy in the digital world. One of the issues Congress had in passing the Cares Act is identifying who’s got mainly tip income, who doesn’t have sick days. If society wanted, you could use large datasets to direct fiscal transfers to those people. But that’s a job for Congress.

BM: Have you seen similar trials elsewhere?

SP: Sweden is a leader in thinking about this in part because they had a large decline in cash use. China is testing versions of digital currency. Fintech firms in the U.S. are interested in this—there’s a stable coin version of our proposal. There’s easily sufficient innovation within the U.S. to do this. How to do it in a way that’s well regulated and serving the public purpose is something the Fed should focus on over the next few years. It would be a key accomplishment of the Fed and Treasury to get this infrastructure in place.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fed-planning-send-money-directly-americans-next-crisis

Isaeli medical imaging company Nano-X Imaging files for a $125 million US IPO

Nano-X Imaging, which is developing affordable medical imaging systems, filed on Friday with the SEC to raise up to $125 million in an initial public offering.

The company is developing lower cost medical imaging technology which it believes can achieve the same functionality as legacy X-ray imaging. Nano-X’s Nanox System is comprised of its Nanox.ARC hardware, which uses microelectromechanical system semiconductor cathode as opposed to X-ray analog cathodes, and its cloud-based imaging software Nanox.CLOUD.

The Neve Ilan, Israel-based company was founded in 2018 and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol NNOX. Cantor Fitzgerald, Oppenheimer & Co., Berenberg and CIBC are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms were disclosed.

Relevant Profile: NNOX

https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/News/69985/Isaeli-medical-imaging-company-Nano-X-Imaging-files-for-a-$125-million-US-I