COVID Transmissions for 12-14-2020

A tale of two vaccines

Dec 14, 2020

Good morning! It has been 393 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

Welcome back; we’re in a new week and I hope you all had great weekends.

Late Friday, Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine was given emergency authorization in the US, and is apparently on its way to high-priority patients. A real milestone has been reached here.

In the headlines section today, that story as well as a story of a different vaccine, that did not go as well.

As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.

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Pfizer vaccine is authorized in the US

Late Friday, the FDA authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use in the US: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-key-action-fight-against-covid-19-issuing-emergency-use-authorization-first-covid-19

Sanofi-Pasteur vaccine suffers serious setback

Today’s newsletter tagline references this story, which is very disappointing but also gives us an insight to how wrong things might have gone.

Sanofi-Pasteur has run into a problem with the dosing for their vaccine candidate in high-risk older individuals, as described in this story from STAT News: https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/11/sanofi-suffers-major-setback-in-development-of-a-covid-19-vaccine/

What happened here is really very sad. In effect, they gave too low a dose to older participants in their trials. The reason wasn’t anything that was their fault. Instead, a technical issue with the measurement assay they were using led to distorted readings. They thought they were delivering the intended dose, when in fact it was much lower than expected.

The lower dose worked fine in people 18 to 49 years of age, but unfortunately it was inadequate in older individuals.

This sets their trials back substantially and is a disaster for the program, which is a shame because there doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong with the vaccine. It is made using a similar technology as Sanofi-Pasteur’s Flublok influenza virus vaccine, where engineered proteins are expressed in an insect cell line. I know that sounds kind of odd, but it works extremely well. Importantly, it’s also a known technique for the FDA, making the manufacturing process easier to monitor and approve. This vaccine had a lot going for it. In a way it still does.

But with at least three vaccines on the way to approval, the pathway for this one becomes harder since they need to restart their trial program from scratch after this error. The vaccine may need to be compared to those already on the market, instead of a placebo, in future trials. The bar to pass would be higher if that were the case, and this product may never see the light of day.

I highlight this story because really, it could have gone this way for all of the vaccines. Technical errors that in no way impact the actual idea behind the vaccine could have left all of the candidates appearing not to work. Laboratory and clinical research is very challenging and precise, and in the development phase mistakes can happen like this. We could have seen all the vaccines held back by this kind of thing.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. But while we’re feeling bad for the many researchers whose candidate just failed, let’s keep in mind how lucky we are that there have already been three successes.

Indoor dining to close in NYC today

Governor Cuomo of my home state announced that Monday, indoor dining in NYC will close. The city has reached the thresholds for COVID-19 burden that were decided would necessitate this.

It is, of course, a disaster for restaurants. However, I think it should have happened weeks ago. I don’t really think reopening indoor dining was a good idea in the first place.

I don’t know what the right solution is for providing relief to these businesses and their employees. I do know that it’s not safe for them to be open.

You can read more about it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/nyregion/indoor-dining-nyc.html

What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Cooking: combining a few techniques

In recent weeks, I’ve talked about working in the kitchen with Jade Pearl Rice, and also about trying to get a perfectly crispy fish skin. Tonight, I put that together with some farm share vegetables (also discussed here previously), and produced this:

Image is a filet of fish, skin-side up, on a bed of greenish rice and dressed with vegetables and mushrooms.

The vegetable-mushroom mixture was a bit of a production. For this, I had some chanterelle mushrooms, which take a little doing. I like to start by cooking these “dry” on medium-high heat in a nonstick pan for a few minutes, to bleed off excess moisture and concentrate the flavor a bit. I added some herbes de provence, also, because the flavors there go well with the woody chanterelles.

Cooking them in a dry pan makes them stick, though, so I deglazed with a little white wine, but not so much as to swamp the mushrooms—I didn’t want to waste all that effort cooking down the water they hold.

I let the wine mostly cook off, and then added a tablespoon of butter, along with some chopped fennel—1 small bulb plus stalks—and 2 cloves to sliced garlic. I let that sautee for enough time for the garlic to brown a bit and put it aside.

The fish is arctic char, which crisped up nicely after having its skin dehydrated like I’ve described here before. I dusted the non-skin side with a little lemon pepper, just to give it a little bit of contrasting seasoning compared to the fennel and herbs. Once the fish was done, I plated as pictured.

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