Temporary layoffs extended at US Ford auto plants, expand to other automakers

Jessica Goldstein

WSWS.ORG

Ford announced that it was extending temporary layoffs for workers at several of its US plants last Friday. Production was cut and many workers placed on temporary layoff (TLO) in the last week due to shortages of semiconductor chips and other parts, according to company labor relations memos.

At Ford Chicago Assembly Plant, all Temporary Full-Time (TFT) and many B Crew Seniority workers across departments will be on TLO through February 20. A robocall script posted on the UAW Local 551 Communications Facebook page stated to workers, “If you are on TLO the entire week of pay end February 20, 2022 you will need to file a claim for unemployment.”

Ford Chicago Assembly (WSWS)

TLOs were announced and posted at the Ford Kansas City Assembly Plant in Claycomo, Missouri on Friday. Truck A crew and all truck side TFTs are laid off through at least February 20.

Workers themselves must file for their own unemployment benefits and cannot do so until after their claim has been activated by Ford. The lengthy process of securing unemployment benefits through antiquated and backlogged state systems leaves most laid-off workers in a financial lurch and unable to pay necessary bills on time. Workers find themselves waiting up to six weeks to receive any money.

Workers receive no real support in navigating unemployment from the United Auto Workers, which has helped the companies offset lengthy shutdowns through brutal levels of overtime, particularly at the most profitable plants. For this reason some workers have chosen to find supplemental jobs, further exhausting them, or have left for other employment altogether, exacerbating the problems of the production cycle.

“We’re going back to work next week for A crew and C crew only,” An A crew worker at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant told the World Socialist Web Site on Friday. “The week after that I heard A and C crew will be laid off again and that B crew will work that week. We will work a week and then be off for a week. And we don’t know how long they will be doing that, so it doesn’t look good for us right now.

“Unemployment is all messed up. The state of Illinois put in a new system called Okta and it’s a real problem. So now we have to sign into Okta, then sign into the state of Illinois just to file a claim. It will be about five weeks before we get any money for this week. And if we get laid off again, that will add to the wait. The unemployment office called us back three or four times per day, but hung up on us every time. It was very crazy just to get to file a claim.

“Of course the union people get to work and don’t have to go through all the BS to get paid. Ford and UAW people don’t care about the members getting paid, and then they get mad at you when you call them for help. But hey, Ford made 18 billion dollars last year and the CEO will get his 30 million dollars. Ford and UAW really don’t care about the people who really do all the work. There is really no appreciation for the workers.”

Ford made this announcement as several other US automakers announced that they would be shutting production lines at plants around the country. The automakers cited blockades of far-right activists at key border checkpoints between the US and Canada as the immediate reason for the disruption of parts supply chains.

This has disrupted the flow of critical parts from Canadian to US auto plants, such as engines built at Ford’s Windsor engine plant which are used in SuperDuty pickup trucks assembled in Louisville, Kentucky and Avon Lake, Ohio. Avon Lake sent workers home and announced production shutdowns for this week. Workers were sent home from Avon Lake Friday due to the far right blockade, but the company attributes the production shutdown this week to the global semiconductor chip shortage, according to FOX8 News.

Other automakers curtailed production in the past week, with many citing the blockades at the US-Canada border as the immediate cause. Toyota announced its production had been disrupted at its Georgetown, Kentucky assembly plant. General Motors cited parts shortages as the cause of a production shutdown at its Lansing, Michigan plant, and has begun to fly parts over the border on airplanes to avoid the blockades, according to NBC News.

However, other factors are also in play in the ongoing supply chain crisis, which has gone on for a year. Chief among these is the massive spread of COVID-19 inside the auto plants, which has led to hundreds of workers quarantining at any given time at individual plants. At Stellantis’ Warren Truck plant, management has attempted to offset the impact of these absences by working Supplementals for 72 hours a week.

For the past two years, the corporations and their business partners in the unions have refused to shut down production to prevent mass infection and death due to COVID. That production has only ever shut down due to shortages demonstrates that, as far as they are concerned, workers’ lives are more replaceable than microchips or axles.

A Ford worker from Kansas City explained the conditions at the plant that have led to worker turnover and production problems. “People are not coming to work. Some are sick and some are fed up with these conditions. This is hard physical labor. You stand in one spot and your hands and arms swell up, and then on top of it you’re treated like dirt.

“The younger people won’t take it. They see how they’re treated, they get sick, and they quit. Some take their break and they don’t come back. They hired hundreds of TPTs around the end of last year but they still can’t cover shifts because so many quit that they can’t rehire them fast enough.

“You could have a whole line or department short on people because they’re out for COVID and so they have to move people from one department to work in another department just to keep the line running.”

“They’re keeping things more and more secretive,” he said about the UAW and company hiding information from workers on who was sick or who had died in the plant. “It’s amazing how they feel about human life—it’s horrible.”

Toyota’s North America Plant Disruptions Drag Into Second Week

River Davis, Bloomberg News

Signage stands outside the Toyota Motor Corp. manufacturing facility in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, on Monday, April 29, 2019. Fred Volf, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc., said that the automaker will produce the Lexus NX crossover, in gasoline and hybrid versions, beginning in 2022 at the plant. Photographer: Cole Burston/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- Toyota Motor Corp. is seeing continued disruption to its North America operations after protests closed off the Ambassador Bridge linking the U.S. and Canada, hurting production at several of the automaker’s plants in the region last week. 

Toyota plants in Ontario, which were idled last week, are likely to continue to be affected this week, a company spokeswoman said. Output will also continue to be curtailed at factories in Alabama, Kentucky and West Virginia due to impacts including weather and supply issues, the spokeswoman said.

Three of Toyota’s plants in Ontario remain shuttered, a Toyota spokeswoman said Monday. Output has also been curtailed at factories in Alabama, Kentucky and West Virginia. The disruptions are expected to continue this week, the spokeswoman said.

The North American disruptions come on top of chip shortages and interruptions to Toyota’s operations due to the spread of the highly contagious omicron variant in both Japan and China. 

Toyota, which has been seeking to ramp up production to meet soaring levels of demand, has remained relatively resilient through the supply chain disruptions that have shaken the industry the past two years. Its sturdy supply chain and inventory management systems helped it finish both 2020 and 2021 as the world’s top-selling automaker. 

Last week, the automaker cut its output goal for the fiscal year ending March 31 to 8.5 million vehicles from a previous goal of 9 million units. 

Separately, the automaker announced Monday it’s seeking to produce 950,000 vehicles in March, up significantly from the 843,393 units it assembled over the same period a year earlier. Toyota cut its production target for next month by around 100,000 vehicles from an earlier target due to chip shortages. 

In addition to the semiconductor dearth persisting globally, many other bottlenecks are surfacing in the supply chain, Jefferies analyst Takaki Nakanishi wrote in a Feb. 9 note. 

“Toyota’s output recovery undoubtedly has been relatively fast and stable in a difficult environment,” Nakanishi wrote. However “it is apparent, amid widening bottlenecks, that even Toyota is finding it tougher to markedly outpace the industry.”

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

Court Filing Started a Furor in Right-Wing Outlets, but Their Narrative Is Off Track

The latest alarmist claims about spying on Trump appeared to be flawed, but the explanation is byzantine — underlining the challenge for journalists in deciding what merits coverage.

The special counsel John H. Durham was tasked in 2019 with discovering any wrongdoing by those investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Credit...Bob Child/Associated Press

By Charlie Savage
Feb. 14, 2022

WASHINGTON — When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump.

But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.

Upon close inspection, these narratives are often based on a misleading presentation of the facts or outright misinformation. They also tend to involve dense and obscure issues, so dissecting them requires asking readers to expend significant mental energy and time — raising the question of whether news outlets should even cover such claims. Yet Trump allies portray the news media as engaged in a cover-up if they don’t.

The latest example began with the motion Mr. Durham filed in a case he has brought against Michael A. Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer with links to the Democratic Party. The prosecutor has accused Mr. Sussmann of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe’s company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates “exploited this arrangement” by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

Citing this filing, Fox News inaccurately declared that Mr. Durham had said he had evidence that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid a technology company to “infiltrate” a White House server. The Washington Examiner claimed that this all meant there had been spying on Mr. Trump’s White House office. And when mainstream publications held back, Mr. Trump and his allies began shaming the news media.

“The press refuses to even mention the major crime that took place,” Mr. Trump said in a statement on Monday. “This in itself is a scandal, the fact that a story so big, so powerful and so important for the future of our nation is getting zero coverage from LameStream, is being talked about all over the world.”

There were many problems with all this. For one, much of this was not new: The New York Times had reported in October what Mr. Sussmann had told the C.I.A. about data suggesting that Russian-made smartphones, called YotaPhones, had been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places.

The conservative media also skewed what the filing said. For example, Mr. Durham’s filing never used the word “infiltrate.” And it never claimed that Mr. Joffe’s company was being paid by the Clinton campaign.

Most important, contrary to the reporting, the filing never said the White House data that came under scrutiny was from the Trump era. According to lawyers for David Dagon, a Georgia Institute of Technology data scientist who helped develop the Yota analysis, the data — so-called DNS logs, which are records of when computers or smartphones have prepared to communicate with servers over the internet — came from Barack Obama’s presidency.

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“What Trump and some news outlets are saying is wrong,” said Jody Westby and Mark Rasch, both lawyers for Mr. Dagon. “The cybersecurity researchers were investigating malware in the White House, not spying on the Trump campaign, and to our knowledge all of the data they used was nonprivate DNS data from before Trump took office.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for Mr. Joffe said that “contrary to the allegations in this recent filing,” he was apolitical, did not work for any political party, and had lawful access under a contract to work with others to analyze DNS data — including from the White House — for the purpose of hunting for security breaches or threats.

After Russians hacked networks for the White House and Democrats in 2015 and 2016, it went on, the cybersecurity researchers were “deeply concerned” to find data suggesting Russian-made YotaPhones were in proximity to the Trump campaign and the White House, so “prepared a report of their findings, which was subsequently shared with the C.I.A.”

A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.

Mr. Durham was assigned by the attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, to scour the Russia investigation for wrongdoing in May 2019 as Mr. Trump escalated his claims that he was the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy. But after nearly three years, he has not developed any cases against high-level government officials.

Instead, Mr. Durham has developed two cases against people associated with outside efforts to understand Russia’s election interference that put forward unproven, and sometimes thin or subsequently disproved, suspicions about purported links to Mr. Trump or his campaign.

Both cases are narrow — accusations of making false statements. One of those cases is against Mr. Sussmann, whom Mr. Durham has accused of lying during a September 2016 meeting with an F.B.I. official about Mr. Trump’s possible links to Russia.

(Mr. Durham says Mr. Sussmann falsely said he had no clients, but was there on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and Mr. Joffe. Mr. Sussman denies ever saying that, while maintaining he was only there on behalf of Mr. Joffe — not the campaign.)

Both Mr. Sussmann’s September 2016 meeting with the F.B.I. and the February 2017 meeting with the C.I.A. centered upon suspicions developed by cybersecurity researchers who specialize in sifting DNS data in search of hacking, botnets and other threats.

A military research organization had asked Georgia Tech researchers to help scrutinize a 2015 Russian malware attack on the White House’s network. After it emerged that Russia had hacked Democrats, they began hunting for signs of other Russian activity targeting people or organizations related to the election, using data provided by Neustar.

Mr. Sussmann’s meeting with the F.B.I. involved odd data the researchers said might indicate communications between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked institution. The F.B.I. dismissed suspicions of a secret communications channel as unfounded. In the indictment of Mr. Sussmann, Mr. Durham insinuated that the researchers did not believe what they were saying. But lawyers for the researchers said that was false and that their clients believed their analysis.

The meeting with the C.I.A. involved odd data the researchers said indicated there had been communications with Yota servers in Russia coming from networks serving the White House; Trump Tower; Mr. Trump’s Central Park West apartment building; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan hospital company that also played a role in the Alfa Bank matter. The researchers also collaborated on that issue, according to Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch, and Mr. Dagon had prepared a “white paper” explaining the analysis, which Mr. Sussmann later took to the C.I.A.

Mr. Durham’s filing also cast doubt on the researchers’ suggestion that interactions between devices in the United States and Yota servers were inherently suspicious, saying that there were more than three million such DNS logs from 2014 to 2017 — and that such logs from the White House dated back at least that long.

But Ms. Westby and Mr. Rasch reiterated that YotaPhones are extremely rare in the United States and portrayed three million DNS logs over three years as “paltry and small relative to the billions and billions” of logs associated with common devices like iPhones.

“Yota lookups are extremely concerning if they emanate from sensitive networks that require protection, such as government networks or people running for federal office,” they said.

Commentary: U.S. daylight robbery of Afghan assets tantamount to silent massacre

By Zheng Xin, Shi Xiantao (Xinhua) 10:46, February 15, 2022

KABUL, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- Washington's latest decision to divert billions of dollars in frozen Afghan assets to the families of 9/11 victims is rubbing salt into the wounds of millions of suffering Afghan people.

Couching the theft as "aid" in a self-righteous statement, the White House claimed the haul is "to be used to benefit the Afghan people," and that the United States is "committed to supporting the Afghan people" and continues to "consider all options available to us to achieve that goal."

And even though the people of Afghanistan had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Washington decided to withhold half of the roughly 7-billion-U.S. dollars in assets from Da Afghanistan Bank (DAB) for alleged compensation for U.S. victims.

Following its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the United States has frozen more than 9 billion dollars of DAB assets. The move is widely seen as the primary factor leading to the current economic crisis and humanitarian disaster in the war-torn Asian country of some 39 million people.

Mohammad Naeem, a spokesperson of the Taliban political office in Qatar, tweeted that "stealing the blocked funds of Afghan nation by the United States and its seizure is indicative of the lowest level of human and moral decay of a country and a nation."

The world's wealthiest superpower is stealing from the pockets of a poor country, repeating a history of theft that has trampled on legal, moral and humanistic principles.

In the military campaign that lasted 20 years, more than 30,000 civilians in Afghanistan were killed by U.S. forces or have died due to U.S.-led warfare, and some 11 million people have been displaced.

The day before the evacuation from Afghanistan, a U.S. drone strike on a Kabul home in August 2021 killed 10 civilians, including seven children.

The people of Afghanistan, who have been devastated and separated from their loved ones and their families, cannot hold the U.S. military accountable, let alone receive compensation.

As Afghan political analyst Nazari Pariani noted, in the so-called "war on terror" led by the United States, not only were a colossal number of Afghan civilians killed, the number of Afghanistan's terrorist organizations increased from a single-digit number to more than 20 during the U.S. military presence. Instead of uprooting terrorism, the United States had been fanning it.

A report released in August 2021 by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said that the United States had invested 145 billion dollars in Afghanistan's reconstruction. But after 20 years, Afghanistan is left with a depleted economy, crumbling infrastructure, backward industry and a worsening crisis.

Before the troop withdrawal in 2021, statistics showed that 72 percent of the Afghan population lived below the poverty line, unemployment was 38 percent and 3.5 million children were out of school.

The reason why the United States had so little success in rebuilding Afghanistan is simple: the funds deployed were not used to improve the livelihoods of the Afghan people. According to a New York Times report, about 12 percent of U.S. reconstruction aid to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2021 had gone to the Afghan government, with most of the rest going into the pockets of U.S. companies.

Afghanistan is facing "an avalanche of hunger and poverty." The latest statistics from the United Nations World Food Program show that 22.8 million Afghans face acute food insecurity, and many families can not survive.

From casualties and inflicting trauma to fanning terrorism and looting the country's assets, Washington seems utterly oblivious to the suffering of the Afghan people, taking on a "moral high ground" and once again plundering the starving Afghan people of live-saving cash without a tinge of guilt.

It is the latest episode in yet another season of the U.S. wrecking havoc on Afghanistan, a tragedy that is truly a silent massacre. 

(Web editor: Peng Yukai, Liang Jun)

New Yale Center to Advance Phage Understanding, Treatments, Training, Education

February 14, 2022

by Julie Parry

• 
  

The Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale held its launch event on Thursday, January 27, 2022, by hosting a panel discussion centered around the context of the documentary, Salt In My Soul.

Salt In My Soul chronicles the life of Mallory Smith, a woman with cystic fibrosis, by using her own words from her diary, audio and video clips that her mother Diane Shader-Smith discovered after her daughter’s passing. Smith’s doctors tried experimental phage therapy to treat a multi-antibiotic-resistant infection, but this occurred too late to prevent her death at age 25 from infectious complications after bilateral lung transplant.

Photo by Robert Lisak

Dr. Jon Koff meets with patient.

Director of the Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale, Paul Turner, PhD, Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, discussed the antibiotic resistance crisis and how phage therapy can combat this crisis.

The antibiotic resistance crisis is a “sobering reminder that not too far off in the future, the expected rates of death from antimicrobial resistance in the human population around the world may exceed the rates of deaths from common diseases, such as cancer,” said Turner.

“What can we do?” Turner asked. “We can harness an old technology, phage therapy, and update it for modern times. At Yale, we have had successful therapeutic use of lytic phages.”

The new Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale will work to create solutions for antimicrobial resistance. Through their mission to advance and support phage research; to translate these advancements into new clinical therapies; and to train and educate students, scientists, healthcare professionals, and the community, the new Center combines the work of faculty, researchers, trainees, and staff to further develop phage for therapeutic use. These efforts bridge across Yale University and Yale School of Medicine, especially the Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Internal Medicine.

The Center has informally existed at Yale since 2016 when a case of multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa was treated successfully with phage OMKO1, discovered in a water sample from Dodge Pond, a small lake in Conn.

Ella Balasa, an individual with cystic fibrosis and advocate, feels incredibly lucky to have received phage therapy at Yale in 2019. “I believe that without it [phage therapy], at this point, I would have been transplanted because of the severe lung infection that I was facing at the time,” she said.

Balasa had been struggling with antibiotic resistant infections for many years when she came across a story about Yale researchers’ work in phage therapy. She then contacted Research Scientist Benjamin Chan, PhD, scientific director of the Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale. Chan started the process to obtain approval to treat Balasa via the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) investigational new drug expanded access program, or what is often called compassionate use.

“At that point, my lung function was about 20%,” Balasa said. “Phage did clear my infection. I want everyone to know that this therapy can be a viable option for antimicrobial resistance. I am excited that there are groups like you all [Yale] that are bringing clinical trials to people.”

The Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale is making a multi-million-dollar investment in phage biology research and phage applications. They are currently targeting pulmonary infections in cystic fibrosis and other relevant clinical conditions. In addition, the Center will expand to address causes of sepsis, prosthetic-joint infections, post-COVID pneumonia, and other antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in the future.

Jon Koff, MD, associate professor (Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine); director, Adult Cystic Fibrosis Program; and medical director of the Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale, serves as the principal investigator on the CYstic fibrosis bacterioPHage study at Yale (CYPHY), an FDA-approved human clinical phase I/II trial, developed at Yale School of Medicine and funded through Yale University, the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

“[The trial] is an exemplar of using our strategy of looking more towards treating patients chronically over the long term with phages to see if we can affect their multi-drug resistant infections and see clinical improvements. It is similar to introducing an inhaled antibiotic,” explained Koff.

“The trial has been very rewarding and a great opportunity for me to engage with our patients, our community, and providers around the country. We’ve seen patients come to Yale from all over and this has allowed me to communicate to folks from multiple communities about our phage and our phage strategies,” said Koff.

In addition to Turner, Chan, Koff, and Balasa, other presenters in the one-hour virtual event were Gunnar Esiason, cystic fibrosis advocate, and graduate student at Dartmouth in the MBA/MPH program; Will Battersby, film director and producer of Salt In My Soul; and Diane Shader-Smith, Mallory Smith’s mother.

Battersby spoke about making the documentary, the themes throughout, and how people have embraced the work. “If you tell the story of somebody going through extraordinary things, extraordinary themes and lessons will emerge. I had no intention of making a film that would be picked up by the phage community in the way that it has, but it is very moving because of the possibilities in the film, […] it makes you ask so many things about phage.”

Shader-Smith shared in Battersby’s sentiment. “Mallory was willing to try phage therapy. We had many, many long talks about it. I think the main reason that people love the film, despite the tragedy, is that they leave feeling hopeful. And phage therapy is that hope,” she said.

Chan has devoted his career to furthering phage research and developing phage therapies. Despite the long history of phage usage, until recently, it hasn’t gained steam in the 0077saestern biomedical community. He gathers his strength to continue with his efforts from cystic fibrosis patients like Balasa and Esiason, parents like Shader-Smith, and supporters like Battersby.

“The cystic fibrosis community is the best. We are in it together. We help each other move through stuff. If it wasn’t for them, I would have burned out a long time ago,” he said.

Koff believes that Chan diminishes his commitment to this work. “Ben minimized his unbelievable energy to follow through on this and to have a vision for translating what he is seeing in the laboratory to the clinic. It has been an absolute pleasure working with him and seeing that level of effort,” said Koff.

“What is awesome is that I am able to be part of this process in the clinic, in the research in collaboration with Paul [Turner] and Ben [Chan] and the research group, and we can see this happening in the clinical trial context. It has been a wonderful experience for me to cross all of these aspects and I think they make our Center pretty unique,” said Koff.

The Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale is funded by Yale University and philanthropic contributors who share the vision for phage therapy.

To learn more about the phage research at Yale, visit Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale. For more information on the CYPHY trial, visit CYstic Fibrosis bacterioPHage Study at Yale (CYPHY). To learn more about the documentary, watch the trailer, or the film, go to Salt In My Soul.

Submitted by Julie Parry on February 13, 2022

Featured in this article

• 

  Jon Koff, MD

  Associate Professor Term; Associate Director, Fellowship Research, Pulmonary,
• Critical Care & Sleep Medicine; Director, Adult Cystic Fibrosis Program
• 

  Paul Turner, PhD

  Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
• 

  Benjamin Chan

  Research Scientist

SEE  

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PHAGES

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BIOPHAGES

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PHAGE

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BACTERIOPHAGE

Vaccine scientists have been chasing variants; now, they’re seeking a universal coronavirus vaccine

BY CAROLYN Y. JOHNSON• THE WASHINGTON POST • FEBRUARY 14, 2022


A health care worker prepares a dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the CareNow Denver University urgent care center in Denver on Nov. 16, 2021. (Daniel Brenner/Bloomberg)


Volunteers are rolling up their sleeves to receive shots of experimental vaccines tailored to beat the omicron variant — just as the winter coronavirus surge begins to relent.

By the time scientists know whether those rebooted vaccines are effective and safe, omicron is expected to be in the rearview mirror. Already, mask mandates are easing. People are beginning to talk about normalcy.

The disconnect highlights the exhausting scientific chase of the last year — and the one that lies ahead. And it underscores a more pressing, overarching conundrum: Is chasing the latest variant a viable strategy? Instead of testing and potentially deploying a new shot when a new variant pops up, what if a single vaccine could thwart all iterations of this coronavirus and the next ones, too?

By now, rebooting vaccines to match a new variant is becoming part of scientific muscle memory. Drug companies made vaccines to fight beta, delta and now omicron. None of those shots have been needed yet, but to many scientists, it is a short-term, shortsighted and unsustainable strategy.

“You don’t want to play this whack-a-mole approach,” said David R. Martinez, a viral immunologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “This could go on forever.”

The original shot has held up remarkably well, but there’s no guarantee how it will fare against the next variant. Scientists like Martinez want to end the cycle of catchup.

They are inventing vaccines designed to foster broad protection — an immunity wall that will repel not only the variants of SARS-CoV-2 that we know about, but those yet to emerge.

At minimum, the world needs a truly variant-proof vaccine. Even better would be a shot that would also stop a future pandemic, protecting against a yet-unknown coronavirus that will jump from animals into people in the years to come.

Some experts have questioned why there isn’t already an Operation Warp Speed for these universal vaccines.

Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, stresses the need for patience, along with urgency. There are scientific gaps needing to be filled to build a vaccine that is broadly protective and lasts a long time — and the National Institutes of Health last fall awarded $36 million to groups trying to answer basic questions.

“You shouldn’t confuse the rapidity and the ease with which we developed a coronavirus vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 with the extraordinary obstacles you might face in trying to get a vaccine that protects” more broadly, Fauci said in an interview with The Washington Post. “There’s a lot of scientific discovery that needs to go into that.”

Privately, though, scientists say Fauci is urging them to hurry up.

“I worry about chasing variants, because there’s always going to be a new variant,” said Drew Weissman, a vaccine pioneer and immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine who is working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine. “Right now, every six months they pop up, but they’re going to pop up until the world is vaccinated.”

- - -

Flush with the success of the first vaccines, many scientists working on next-generation shots had been thinking big in 2021. Maybe they could make a vaccine that would repel not only SARS-CoV-2 and the original SARS, but also two coronaviruses that cause the common cold, Middle East respiratory syndrome, as well as future bat coronaviruses that could jump into humans.

A New England Journal of Medicine study last year demonstrated that, at least in concept, it was possible to generate broad immune protection against many viruses. Researchers in China showed that survivors of the original SARS outbreak two decades ago who were vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 produced antibodies capable of blocking an array of variants and other coronaviruses.

But making a single vaccine that works against such a wide range of viruses is tricky, and the beta, delta and then omicron variants recalibrated some of that sweeping ambition.

“When SARS-CoV-2 first emerged, it was a virus with very few tricks, and so we were very successful,” said Dennis Burton, chair of the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research Institute. “But it’s acquiring more and more tricks, basically, and so it’s more and more difficult to deal with — you’ve got to be more precise with the antibody you induce through your vaccine.”

Before developing a vaccine to stop the next pandemic, it became clear that a more modest goal — a variant-proof vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 - may be needed to help end this crisis.

“Omicron really has pointed us to say, ‘Hey, we’re not out of this epidemic, yet, and we don’t know what the future holds with this epidemic.’ We need to focus on what the next outbreak might be, but also make sure we’re covering any variant ... that would come up in the next three to five years,” said Barton Haynes, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Duke University Medical Center.

In the short-term, Haynes’s team is focused on stopping variants. They are manufacturing a vaccine — a nanoparticle with a fragment of the spike dotting its surface. In animal studies, that vaccine triggered broad immune protection against variants, the original SARS virus and bat coronaviruses. Haynes hopes to begin testing it in people this year.

Results are expected soon from the first human tests of a different “pan-SARS” vaccine developed by scientists at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. In early studies, they have also shown to provide broader protection than the first-generation shots. It consists of a many-sided nanoparticle dotted with the spike found on the original version of the coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China.

Vaccines teach the immune system to recognize a virus. They often do this by presenting a version of the virus — which simply could be a telltale feature, such as the spikes on the outside of the coronavirus. The power of these new vaccines stems from which feature they show and how they present it. Virus fragments are assembled onto many-sided nanoparticles, resembling the way the spike might look on the surface of the virus itself — an approach that helps focus the immune response.

“The immune system has evolved to respond strongly to repetition. Viruses have repetitive arrays of proteins on their surfaces,” said Neil King, a University of Washington biochemist with another variant-proof vaccine candidate in human trials. “That’s why nanoparticle vaccines work better, is that they present the antigen as a repetitive array, to provoke that strong response.”

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The first versions of coronavirus vaccines were powerful, but simple. They took spiky proteins from the outside of the virus that emerged in 2019, tweaked them to keep the spikes in the right shape — and presented those spikes to the immune system.

The next-generation vaccines, the ones built to stop future pandemics, will probably require greater sophistication.

Martinez is working on a vaccine at UNC that shows the immune system “chimeric” spikes. Like the chimera creature of Greek mythology - with the head of a lion, the midsection of a goat and the rear end of a serpent — these vaccines use spikes patched together from fragments of different coronaviruses. A piece from SARS-CoV-2, another bit of the original SARS virus and a third component from a bat coronavirus.

Other researchers, like King, are building “mosaic” and cocktail vaccines, which contain other combinations. A tiny particle might be stippled with a key piece of spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2, SARS and two bat coronaviruses, for example. California Institute of Technology researchers created mosaic nanoparticles with fragments from four to eight different coronaviruses.

The precise approach that will form the best universal vaccine is still a matter of scientific debate. But this much is for sure: Updating vaccines every six months isn’t going to be a reasonable — or equitable — way to protect people globally.

“I don’t think the experience with the variants to date, trying to pursue the new variants as they emerge and rapidly generate variant-specific vaccines — I don’t think that is a strategy for the long term, even in high-income countries, and certainly not in less-well-resourced environments,” said Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a nonprofit funding efforts to develop variant-proof and universal vaccines.

Discovering that antibodies exist that are capable of recognizing and neutralizing a broad array of viruses is key. But learning how to trigger them to create a shield of protection could be more complicated than it sounds.

It might not be enough that people can generate antibodies to block a variety of coronaviruses. The trick becomes whether a vaccine can generate sufficient quantities to protect people. In HIV, for example, antibodies that block many strains of the always-mutating virus have been isolated in people with long-term infections. But using a vaccine to replicate what nature can accomplish has loomed as the Holy Grail for the field.

In SARS-CoV-2, the spike protein looks a bit like a tree, and rare antibodies that bind to the base of the tree can block a broad array of related coronaviruses in laboratory studies, said Duane Wesemann, an immunologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“But it’s very low frequency, and if we’re making a vaccine that just does that, we have to see it may not be that easy,” Wesemann said. “It’s not clear we can elicit those special antibodies in high enough levels.”

A universal vaccine will arrive in a more complicated world than the first-generation vaccines encountered. People will have different levels of pre-existing immunity, from vaccinations and from infections related to variants.

Scientists do not agree about how previous exposures -— known as immune imprinting, or sometimes called “original antigenic sin” — will affect people’s response to new vaccines, for good or bad. One possibility is that new vaccines will create the strongest response to the virus people were originally exposed to, not the newest one. But vaccine designers like Martinez see the potential to exploit this quirk of the immune system as an asset, to focus the response on the right target.

Another scientific issue that remains to be solved is durability. A broad vaccine with protection that fades rapidly might be impractical to use to prevent future pandemics. After all, SARS emerged about two decades ago, and MERS a decade later.

“We’re looking for a tetanus-like shot,” Haynes said. “We all have to get a tetanus shot every 10 years. That would be really terrific.”

The quest for a truly universal vaccine is urgent, but many experts caution that it’s a far different challenge than creating the first-generation vaccines.

“We have been studying influenza viruses more than 70 or more years, and we are trying to make universal influenza vaccines, and we still haven’t been able to do it,” said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who is working on a pan coronavirus vaccine at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “But this is a different virus, and I think it’s worth trying. What I’m trying to say is that it may not be easy.”