In remarks on January 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warned that clinical trial results from Johnson & Johnson showing that its vaccine is less effective against the South African variant of the coronavirus, were a \u201cwake-up call.\u201d J&J and other vaccine manufactures will have to be \u201cnimble to be able to adjust readily\u201d to produce modified vaccines, Fauci said. The new Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Rochelle Walensky stated at the same briefing that it is urgent to increase the level of sequencing nationwide, in order to catch new strains before they get completely out of control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have scaled up surveillance dramatically just in the last 10 days, in fact. But our plans for scaling up surveillance are even more than what we\u2019ve done so far,\u201d Walensky said. The CDC has contracted with various universities and four private companies\u2014Quest, Labcorp, Illumina and Helix\u2014to conduct more sequencing. By mid-February, those contracts should hit full capacity, analyzing 6,000 samples per week, CDC officials said. But this is far less than what is required, according to various experts in the field, and even less than what many other countries are already doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are in a race against time because of these mutations. And in that race, we are falling behind,\u201d said Mara G. Aspinall, a biomedical diagnostics professor at Arizona State University, in comments reported by the Washington Post. More equipment, staffing and funding are needed to increase sequencing,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cNone of that exists right now. We\u2019re incredibly behind compared to other countries,\u201d said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. \u201cWe have no idea what is out there in our country. We don\u2019t even know what we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Southern Illinois University RNA biochemist Keith Gagnon stated: \u201cGenomic surveillance is probably the number-one thing, besides COVID-19 testing itself, that we can do to track the virus. Without it, we are flying blind.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In remarks on January 29, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warned that clinical trial results from Johnson & Johnson showing that its vaccine is less effective against the South African variant of the coronavirus, were a \u201cwake-up call.\u201d J&J and other vaccine manufactures will have to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":67897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[842],"class_list":["post-67896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-allgemein","tag-lang-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67907,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67896\/revisions\/67907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2.schillermeet.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}