Tag: vaccines

New document reveals scope and structure of Operation Warp Speed and underscores vast military involvement

When President Trump unveiled Operation Warp Speed in May, he declared that it was “unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.”

The initiative — to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics — lacks the scale, and the degree of secrecy, of the effort to build the atomic bomb. But Operation Warp Speed is largely an abstraction in Washington, with little known about who works there other than its top leaders, or how it operates. Even pharmaceutical companies hoping to offer help or partnerships have labored to figure out who to contact.

Now, an organizational chart of the $10 billion initiative, obtained by STAT, reveals the fullest picture yet of Operation Warp Speed: a highly structured organization in which military personnel vastly outnumber civilian scientists.

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Facebook Bans Ads Questioning Safety Of COVID-19 Vaccines

The company has also launched salvos against QAnon and election-related misinformation, while taking an aggressive approach toward political advertising, and political content in general.

And as global authorities struggle to convince the public that an eventual COVID-19 vaccine will be safe to take despite the expedited approval process, Facebook has decided to give them a hand by banning all content encouraging users to refuse to take a vaccine. It laid out the new global policy in a blog post published Tuesday.

“Now, if an ad explicitly discourages someone from getting a vaccine, we’ll reject it,” the company’s Head of Health Kang-Xing Jin and Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in a blog post Tuesday.

Facebook will draw the line at allowing users who advocate against “mandatory vaccination,” which the company said was a legitimate political position (not an argument made in “bad faith” that some on the left insist), to post as normal. They cited an example of a state lawmaker from Virginia who posted “STOP FORCED CORONAVIRUS VACCINATIONS”.

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Bill Gates says life will return to normal only after SECOND generation of Covid vaccines rolled out and virus eliminated globally

Technology tycoon Bill Gates said life can get back to normal only when a second generation of Covid-19 vaccines is widely available and the virus is eradicated worldwide – a higher bar than was set for any disease in history.

“The only way we’ll get completely back to normal is by having, maybe not the first generation of vaccines, but eventually a vaccine that is super-effective, and that a lot of the people take, and that we get the disease eliminated on a global basis,” Gates said Sunday in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press program. “That is where we can finally start taking all the problems that have been created — in education, mental health — and start to build back in a positive way.”

According to that standard, Americans might need to live for years, or for life, under social-distancing guidelines and other Covid-19 restrictions. It’s certainly gloomier than the assessment Gates gave in a Fox interview last month, when he said progress on vaccines might make it possible for a return to normalcy in the US by the summer of 2021. He said he expects several of the first generation of vaccines to get emergency approval by early next year.

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Scientists say fetal tissue remains essential for vaccines and developing treatments

Anti-abortion activists set off the uproar by releasing undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials that raised questions of whether the organization was profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. Planned Parenthood has denied making any profit and said it charges fees solely to cover its costs.

University laboratories that buy such cells strongly defend their research, saying tissue that would otherwise be thrown out has played a vital role in lifesaving medical advances and holds great potential for further breakthroughs.

Fetal cells are considered ideal because they divide rapidly, adapt to new environments easily and are less susceptible to rejection than adult cells when transplanted.

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