The new Lockdown Craze sweeping the globe. Welcome to our viewers on pbs in america and around the globe. Major trials of a new vaccine have shown its effective against some new variants of covid 19, helping to reduce fears that they might prove resistant. Novavax is an american jab but its being produced in the uk. Its also easier to roll out than some previous vaccines since it doesnt need to be kept at ultra low temperatures. The news came amid a deepening row between another vaccine maker, astrazeneca, and the European Union over shortages. Our medical editor fergus walsh reports. Once again, science has triumphed in the fight against coronavirus. The Us Firm Novavax has released results of its british trial showing the first proven efficacy against the new, more contagious uk variant. There were more than 15,000 volunteers on the trail throughout the uk. Over half the cases of covid recorded were the result of the new variant. The results showed the vaccine was 95 effective agains
/PRNewswire/ OrthoTrophix, Inc., a privately held biopharmaceutical company, announced today that the Company and its collaborators present clinical data.
pfizer to submit their two dose data to them for authorization, they said in part this afternoon that the fda felt it was their responsibility as a public health agency to act with urgency and have all available options including they provide us with initial data on two doses from the on going study, their goal was to understand if two dose was provide sufficient protection. remember, we had press release information already in december from pfizer that said, you know, there two dose regimen in this age-group did not trigger a comparable immune response as what was seen in 16 to 25-year-olds. typically what happens in these cases with the trials is they use that immune response as a surrogate marker in something called immunobridging to predict in that age-group that dose would actually illicit an adequate response. they got a lot more data now because of the omicron surge and
the studies, actually, the pivotal studies and the primary end point is the slowing of cognitive decline and there we had two findings. one trial was negative and one trial showed some benefit and what the fda is saying is that they re using this finding that it can reduce these plaques into a surrogate marker, but it s not actually what the studies showed. there in lies the controversy, jeff. the fda approved it anyway because their determination is the benefits of the treatment outweigh any potential risk? well, certainly, the benefit risk equation is always on the table for the fda, but they re basically again, using this concept that the reduction in the plaque is a surrogate marker for a good outcome or for a benefit, and what s important here and i reached out to some of my neurology colleagues and
relative reduction in risk that that accounted for. what they found is that just in their leisure time, regardless of whether or not they exercised during the day, there was this higher risk. and, you know, god did not design us to be sitting down for 14 hours a day, and there is this general feeling in medicine that now that people are sitting down motionless in front of a screen, or television monitor, that this is not good for your health, that there may be some clotting mechanism or effect that we have not yet really appreciated. this is the first study to really address that topic. harris: do you buy it? i think there is something there. even when they asked the authors of the study, how do you explain this. they said that leisure time screen time probably is a surrogate marker for other bad lifestyle behaviors. for example people who spend more than four hours of their leisure time in front of a screen probably are not eating well and they have other risk factors for disease, s