Russia’s RDIF sovereign wealth fund and China’s Shenzhen Yuanxing Gene-tech have agreed to produce over 60 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine against COVID-19 in China, RDIF said on Monday.
RDIF, which is marketing Sputnik V globally, said that commercial production was due to start in May.
Drug developer Humanigen Inc said on Monday its lead drug candidate met the main goal of improved survival without the need for mechanical ventilation in patients hospitalized with COVID-19, in a late-stage trial.
Patients receiving the drug, lenzilumab, in combination with other treatments including steroids and Gilead Inc’s remdesivir, were 54% were more likely to survive without mechanical ventilation versus patients on placebo through day 28, Humanigen said.
The study aimed to determine whether lenzilumab can prevent and treat an immune hyper-response called “cytokine storm” and enable ventilator-free survival.
Cytokine storm is phenomenon wherein the body’s immune system has a dangerous overreaction to virus, and ends up killing not only the offending viruses, but the host’s cells and tissues too.
“Our next step is to submit an application for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the Food and Drug Administration as soon as possible,” Chief Executive Officer Cameron Durrant said in a statement.
The trial had enrolled 520 participants across 29 sites in the United States and Brazil who received three infusions of either lenzilumab or placebo along with other treatments.
Lenzilumab belongs to a class of drugs known as monoclonal antibodies, similar to the ones being developed by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc and Eli Lilly and Co for COVID-19.
Monoclonal antibodies are manufactured copies of proteins produced by the body to fight coronavirus infection.
Humanigen’s Lenzilumab is also being tested in a National Institutes of Health-backed study in COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilation.
The U.S. government has hit the accelerator on its shipments of COVID-19 vaccines after a month of largely stagnant weekly deliveries, giving states the doses they say they need to finish vaccinating priority groups and open shots to all adults in the coming weeks.The biggest supply boost has come from Johnson & Johnson. Shipments of the one-shot vaccine had been slow to ramp up since its late February authorization as the company waited for regulatory clearance of a key U.S. factory. Pfizer Inc also has boosted output of its vaccine, doubling batch sizes and shortening production time.
Officials from more than half a dozen states including Vermont, Idaho and New Jersey told Reuters that increased vaccine shipments will allow them to accelerate efforts to inoculate the elderly and front-line workers,
and in some cases to open shots to all adult residents earlier than expected.
“The increasing allotment of vaccine by the Biden administration is making it possible for us to speed up our vaccination timetable,” said Ben Truman, a spokesman for Vermont’s department of public health.
Vermont has now decided to offer vaccines to all adults on April 16, a month sooner than planned, he said.
The U.S. government boosted its weekly allocations of COVID-19 doses by more than 20% to 27 million last week. That includes 4 million J&J vaccine doses, up from only a few hundred thousand in weeks prior.
The White House expects that to surge even further over the next week, with plans to deliver around 11 million of the J&J shots. If shipments of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Inc vaccines remain constant, that should put the total number of weekly shots at more than 34 million.
And Pfizer’s shipments to states has increased, jumping about 25% last week from the week prior and around 45% since the beginning of the month, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC).
The United States has been hovering at a seven-day average of around 2.5 million shots in arms each day for most of the second half of March as the federal government worked to overcome supply bottlenecks. Vermont expects the increased shot deliveries to allow it to speed vaccinations of priority groups such as teachers and people with chronic health problems that put them at risk for severe COVID-19, Truman said.
SHOTS FOR ALL
The higher allotments of J&J shots, which can be stored in a standard refrigerator and immunize people with one shot, could be especially useful for getting vaccines to hard-to-reach and underserved groups, officials from New Jersey and Vermont told Reuters.
Indiana is using its J&J shot allotments to set up a mass vaccination center at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the first half of April, a spokeswoman said. Ohio is planning to use mobile vaccination clinics to get J&J shots to harder to reach people.
Residents in Idaho are actively seeking out J&J’s single-dose vaccine over the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna alternatives, said Zachary Clark, spokesman for Idaho’s public health agency, despite data suggesting J&J’s shot is somewhat less effective at preventing illness. He added that Idaho’s allocation of J&J shots it still much lower than the other vaccines.
About half of U.S. states plan to begin offering shots to all residents over the age of 16 in April, ahead of the Biden administration’s target date of May 1 for widespread vaccine availability.
However, Wisconsin officials said they are waiting to make sure the federal government can sustain the increased shipments before committing to a faster rollout.
“We’d like to see more vaccine and more currently eligible people vaccinated before we move to general population,” Jennifer Miller, a spokeswoman for Wisconsin’s public health agency, said in an email.
The companies making the three authorized COVID-19 vaccines have committed to providing the U.S. government with 240 million doses by Wednesday.
New York and New Jersey now have the highest rates of COVID-19 infection in the country.
The Empire State has averaged 548 cases for every 100,000 residents over the past 14 days — only surpassed by the Garden State with 647 cases.
Despite vaccination efforts, New York has not seen a dramatic reduction in infections. Daily cases have averaged about 50,000 people per week since mid-February.
And across the Hudson River in New Jersey, the number of new infections has climbed by 37 percent in a little more than a month, to about 23,600 every seven days.
In New York, Orange and Rockland counties are seeing the highest test positivity rates — 6.7 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively, state Department of Health data shows. Just below them is Bronx County, which currently has a 5.5 percent positivity rate, and Suffolk County, which has a 5.4 percent positivity rate.
Statewide, the positivity rate was 4.1 percent on Saturday.
The highest number of new infections recorded in New York Saturday were in Queens and Brooklyn, which saw 1,661 and 1,547 new cases recorded, respectively. Over the last week, cases have been on the rise in both of those counties, though the numbers are still lower than in January during the post-holiday surge.
The alarming trend come even as New York continues to relax coronavirus restrictions.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has recently invited the state’s largest stadiums to host sporting events and concerts again at limited capacities — while allowing indoor fitness classes to resume in the Big Apple, over the objections of Mayor Bill de Blasio.
City Council health committee chairman Mark Levine on Sunday called for an extra supply of vaccines to be sent to states being hit hard by variants of the virus, which local officials have blamed for the stubborn infection rates.
“It’s in the national interest to blunt this wave. That means sending more supply to the variant hot spots,” he wrote on Twitter.
Meanwhile, New York City’s Public Advocate Jumaane Williams urged Cuomo to slam the breaks on reopening plans.
“I ask the governor to stick to the science, trust the experts, and pause the planned reopenings now, before they take effect and more are infected,” Williams said.
While vaccination rates are improving each week, not much is known about whether people who have received the shot can transmit the virus, noted Bruce Farber, chief of infectious diseases and public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health.
“To allow larger groups to gather, to give the message to the public that we’re over the worst and that we can go back to normal is a mistake,” Farber said.
New variants of the virus showing up in New York and New Jersey could be part of the problem, experts said.
“Is there something different that’s happening in this part of the country compared to some other parts of the country?” asked Dr. Ed Lifshitz, the medical director of New Jersey’s communicable disease service within the state Health Department. “And the answer is probably yes.”
The Empire State’s own homegrown variant has been widely circulating in the region — in addition to other concerning strains from across the globe that are understood to be more transmissible.
But relaxing restrictions doesn’t always appear to correlate with rising infection rates — cases in Texas are dropping, even after the state did away with its mask mandate and all social distancing requirements.
On Saturday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced the state “hit an all-time recorded low” for its seven-day COVID positivity rate, which was 5.27 percent.
Abbott said the rate has been below 6 percent for five days and below 10 percent for an entire month, while hospitalizations are at their lowest level since the beginning of October.
Nationwide, however, cases are starting to tick back up again — after they dropped, and then plateaued, in the beginning of March, data shows.
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday blamed both variants and states lifting restrictions.
“The variants are playing a part, but it is not completely the variants. What we’re likely seeing is because of things like spring break and pulling back on the mitigation methods that you’ve seen,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“Now, several states have done that. I believe it’s premature .. because when I’ve said many times to you that when you’re coming down from a big peak and you reach a point and start to plateau, once you stay at that plateau, you’re really in danger of a surge coming up.”
https://nypost.com/2021/03/28/new-york-new-jersey-now-have-highest-covid-19-infection-rates/
Back in May 2016, Japanese mega-bank Nomura, announced that it had suffered its biggest-ever loss in history (of a rather tame by Western standards $40 million) from a single client, and which it then quickly blamed on an "incompetent" bond trader. Fast forward to today, when Nomura just suffered a far, far greater loss from a single client, this one is anything but boring.
Early on Monday local time, Nomura Holdings said it may have incurred a “significant loss" arising from transactions with a U.S. client.
The estimated amount of the claim against the client is about $2 billion based on market prices as of March 26, the Japanese brokerage said in a statement. The estimate is "subject to change depending on unwinding of the transactions and fluctuations in market prices."
Nomura is currently evaluating the extent of the possible loss and the impact it could have on its consolidated financial results.
The Japanese brokerage also canceled plans to sell dollar-denominated bonds.
The news, incomplete as it may be, was enough to send Nomura stock crashing 15%, wiping out all March gains, and the biggest one day drop in a decade.
While it wasn't immediately clear if Nomura's loss is linked to the spectacular margin call at Tiger Cub Bill Hwang's Archegos Capital which we noted earlier (accurately noting that the unwind is probably not yet done), the two are almost certainly linked especially as some have noted that in the case of Nomura, the bank owned some $10MM shares in Chinese tech firm GSX which imploded, via leveraged swaps to clients. Since GSX was one of the firms aggressively dumped by Hwang, one can see how the house of cards, having crippled Prime Brokers, may be spreading down the investment bank foodchain next.
Meanwhile, as we asked earlier, the real question is whether the liquidation of the handful of highly concentrated stocks is over, or whether the selling cascade is only just starting.
One thing we do know: as of Sunday night, the seller was not done yet, as this Bloomberg headline confirms:
Some more details:
Morgan Stanley was shopping a large block of ViacomCBS Inc. shares on Sunday, according to a person familiar with the matter, the latest in a flurry of block trades that began before the weekend.
About 45 million shares were offered Sunday on behalf of an undisclosed holder, the person said. The media giant was also the subject of at least one large block trade on Friday through Goldman Sachs, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg at the time.
Incidentally, just last Monday, ViacomCBS sold $3BN in common and preferred stock, including 20mm shares of VIAC stock at $85. With the stock now trading at roughly 50% of this price, the company should immediately announce a 20MM shares (or more) stock buyback to i) take advantage of the plunge in the price and ii) to contain investor panic due to one shareholder's forced liquidation. Indeed, moments ago, Tencent just announced a $1BN share buyback to offset just this liquidation-driven drop in the stock price.
And while we wait for that to happen at VIAC, DISCA and other, we still have two big questions: i) is Archegos still dumping, or is this now a fellow Hedge funders who was also margined out on a similar portfolio, and ii) just how bad is the pain - as more prime brokers issue urgent margin calls - and how widespread will the liquidation chain stretch...
The family office of former Tiger Management trader Bill Hwang was behind the unprecedented selling of some U.S. stocks Friday, according to two people directly familiar with the trades.
Archegos Capital Management was forced by its banks to sell more than $20 billion worth of shares after some positions moved against him, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details aren’t public. The companies involved ranged from Chinese technology giants to U.S. media conglomerates.
Morgan Stanley traded about $13 billion, including Farfetch Ltd., Discovery Inc., Baidu Inc. and GSX Techedu Inc., said the people, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. sold $6.6 billion worth of shares of Baidu, Tencent Music Entertainment Group and Vipshop Holdings Ltd. before the market opened in the U.S, according to an email to clients seen by Bloomberg News.
That move was followed by the sale of $3.9 billion of shares including ViacomCBS Inc. and iQiyi Inc. the email said.
Hwang didn’t reply to an email seeking comment Sunday. A Goldman spokesperson declined to comment and a Morgan Stanley official didn’t immediately respond.
ViacomCBS and Discovery posted their biggest declines ever Friday, after the selling and analyst downgrades. ViacomCBS closed 27% lower to $48.23, down from a high of $100.34 on March 22. Discovery also slumped 27% to $41.90, down from $77.27 on March 19.
Wall Street figures have been feverishly speculating about the identity of Friday’s seller. The liquidation had triggered price swings for every stock involved in the high-volume transactions, rattling traders.
Block trades -- the sale of a large chunk of stock at a price sometimes negotiated outside of the market -- are common, but the size of these trades and the multiple blocks hitting the market during the normal trading hours aren’t.
Hwang was an institutional stock salesman at Hyundai Securities Co. in the early 1990s, where he dealt with Julian Robertson’s Tiger Management. Robertson hired him in 1995 after Hwang won an annual prize awarded to the person outside of Tiger who had contributed most to the fund’s success.
After Robertson closed Tiger, Hwang set up Tiger Asia Management, in part with money seeded by his mentor Robertson.
In December 2012, Hwang admitted to illegally using inside information to trade Chinese bank stocks and agreed to criminal and civil settlements of more than $60 million.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tiger-cub-hwang-family-office-161118088.html
