Super Tuesday: Elizabeth Warren loses in home state Massachusetts to Joe Biden

Warren has struggled to attract voters in recent weeks, after leading in the polls months ago



Clark Mindock New York @ClarkMindock THE INDEPENDENT Wednesday 4 March 2020 


AT LEAST IF SHE LOST TO BERNIE THE PAIN WOULD NOT BE AS GREAT

Elizabeth Warren has lost her home state to Joe Biden, in a stunning Super Tuesday defeat for the Massachusetts senator as she has struggled for viability in a race that is quickly boxing her out.

Ms Warren's loss in Massachusetts is a stinging defeat for the race's most prominent female candidate, and comes to a candidate who had largely been written off by pundits and political observers just one week ago.

The loss is sure to fuel further calls for her to drop out of the race, with progressives already arguing that she should step aside and endorse Bernie Sanders in his bid to make history in this primary.



So far, Ms Warren has repeatedly insisted that she will not drop out of the race, and that she plans on bringing her candidacy all the way into the Democratic convention this summer.

A path to the Democratic nomination appears to be all but non-existent at this point, however, and it would take an incredible show of force at a contested convention for her to be the candidate to go up against Donald Trump this fall.

Even with that poor showing in Massachusetts, though, Ms Warren did manage to amass some delegates on Super Tuesday, which would give her further leverage in such a contested convention.

She has steadfastly refused to say she would support the idea of ensuring that the nomination goes to the candidate with the most delegates in the race even if the candidate missed the necessary delegate threshold to win the contest outright.


Super Tuesday: Warren called on to drop out and back Sanders after bruising defeat

Progressive fails to win her home state of Massachusetts to cap night of dismal results

Adam Withnall @adamwithnall
Wednesday 4 March 2020  

THE INDEPENDENT 

After a disastrous set of results on Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren is facing mounting pressure from her progressive backers to step aside and throw her support behind Vermont senator Bernie Sanders.

Once leading in the polls and considered a frontrunner at debates, Ms Warren’s campaign for the Democrat nomination was in tatters on Wednesday morning as partial results showed she had failed to win the primary in her home state of Massachusetts, trailing to Joe Biden.

Across the 15 states and territories voting on Super Tuesday, Ms Warren was projected to have won just seven delegates, compared to at least 178 for Mr Biden and at least 153 for Mr Sanders. Mike Bloomberg, who has spent the better part of half a billion dollars on his campaign, was also struggling on eight delegates.

The disappointing Super Tuesday results come after Ms Warren failed to finish higher than third in any of the first four contests - Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.

Ms Warren and Mr Sanders have both campaigned on progressive policies and providing universal public healthcare, but the long-time friends have clashed publicly in their respective drives to be named the leading candidate of the Democrat left.

Speaking to Politico before the Super Tuesday results came out, Aimee Allison, founder of the progressive organisation She the People, noted that after the drop-outs of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, the moderates had coalesced behind one candidate in Mr Biden.

“If a candidate pulls ahead after [Tuesday], we need to put aside our differences and unite on behalf of economic and racial justice,” Ms Allison said in reference to Ms Warren and Mr Sanders.

“The country is ready for new ideas, and we have two leading progressive campaigns that have so much to offer millions of Democrats. The moderates are playing to win. It’s time we rose up as a movement to play to win as well.”

Evan Weber, director of the Sunrise Movement which has been actively pro-Mr Sanders, said the two progressives “should publicly commit to grouping their delegates together at the convention in order to ensure that a progressive can win against the establishment”.

And Alexandra Rojas, executive director of the left-wing group Justice Democrats, accused Ms Warren of “attacking” Mr Sanders and urged her to “give her delegates to him if he has more votes to ensure a progressive wins the nomination”.

With Super Tuesday's results unfolding, there were mounting calls on social media for Ms Warren to step aside - and criticism of her failure to do so previously.

But Ashlee Marie Preston, the prominent trans rights activist and Warren campaign surrogate, wrote on Twitter: “Stop saying Warren should’ve dropped out for Bernie. He could have done the same when she was leading and he saw her robust plans/body of work she brought. If he supposedly encouraged her to run—he should have dropped out & supported her knowing she could materialize his vision.”

In spite of the latest poor results, Ms Warren appeared set on remaining in the race, at least for now.

Speaking to supporters in Detroit ahead of next week's Michigan primary, she introduced herself as "the woman who's going to beat Donald Trump."

The senator encouraged supporters to tune out the results and vote for the person they believed would be the best president, saying: “Prediction has been a terrible business and the pundits have gotten it wrong over and over.

“You don't get what you don't fight for. I am in this fight,” she said.

With a defeat in her home state, the humiliation of Elizabeth Warren is complete. So what now?

She predicted the future correctly — and it backfired

Holly Baxter New York @h0llyb4xter
THE INDEPENDENT 

Warren said she'd stick it out to the convention in Milwaukee, 

but surely this result is a step too far ( AP )

Poor, talented Elizabeth Warren. Mere months ago, we thought she was a shoo-in for president. Remember the four-hour selfie lines; the early endorsements from Julian Castro, Scarlett Johansson, John Legend and Chrissie Teigen; the impressive, uncompromising debate performances? We thought she might throw Bernie a bone and make him her VP when he floundered in the polls. We thought “I have a plan for that” was 2020’s answer to “Yes we can”.

But then her much-vaunted ability to predict the future backfired. On Tuesday night, she came away without first or even second place — those honors were reserved for Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders respectively. Donald Trump tweeted a mocking racial slur about her in response.
It was, to put it bluntly, a humiliation. And it shouldn’t have ever happened.

When Warren saw where the race was heading, she dealt with it in the most infuriating way. She stopped talking about the revolutionary universal healthcare system known as Medicare for All at the same time as she began distancing herself from Bernie, the man who “wrote that damn bill”. Once, Sanders supporters cheered as loudly for her as they did for their own candidate.

Then she started saying she’d expand Obamacare in her first year in office — which was basically Joe Biden’s pitch — and did a Buttigieg-esque waffle about how people with private insurance “enjoy having a choice”.

It looked like she was creeping away from her principles before she even hit the Oval Office. The people who had thought she was going to deliver a revolution began to melt away. They started talking, again, about how she used to be a Republican; how she once falsely claimed Native American ancestry.

Trump poisoned the well, and Democrats began to drink from it. Warren’s past mistakes were no longer old faux pas — they were evidence of her flakiness, her unreliability. How could anyone trust her to stand for anything any more? She’d refused to shake her old friend Bernie Sanders’ hand in front of the nation. She’d co-opted his ideas for popularity points and now she wanted to cast him aside.

Almost all of this is monumentally unfair. Warren is a talented politician with a long history of standing up for the little guy. She stuck it to Wall Street when it wasn’t cool, and she did it from within. She was more energetic, more on-the-ball and more articulate than her fellow septuagenarians Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. She had more to say about women’s rights and a more coherent policy on gun control. She was also free from the baggage of either a former VP or a former independent who spent most of his career shouting from the sidelines at every passing Democrat. Indeed, Warren had the whiff of electability about her, and no doubt Trump’s team were glad to see his “Pocahontas” jibes take effect.

Warren could have been a unifying candidate, one who successfully bridged that wide chasm between Biden and Bernie. But she overthought it. She clearly predicted, correctly, that everyone bar Sanders would coalesce around a single moderate candidate. Too late and too awkwardly, she tried to make herself into that candidate.

What happened to the righteous, relatable anger channeled by a woman who had specialized in bankruptcy law and had her Republican foundations shattered when she realized the system was rigged against the people? It became subdued as time went on, as healthcare and punishing the bankers — lines which echoed Sanders — stopped appearing so often in her speeches.

That anger did return, briefly, when Bloomberg made an appearance on the Democratic stage in Nevada. “I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians’,” she said at the time. “And I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.” It was Warren at her best. But a lot of primary votes had already been cast early, and she didn’t benefit from her performance in the way she would have in a more just system.



Where does Warren go now? Does she make a joint-ticket agreement with Joe Biden, thus sealing the deal on her centrist conversion? Does she throw it all in with Bernie, back the revolution and risk being cast out in the cold by the DNC for the rest of her career? Does she retire back to Massachusetts and regroup, re-strategize, at the age of 70? Time is not on her side — although it’s still two presidential cycles until she’s the same age as Bernie is now.




Tonight, she may, for the first time, be left without a plan. Not long ago, she said she would stick it out to the Democratic convention in Milwaukee, come hell or high water; but failing to even win her home state is surely a humiliation too far.

Perhaps she can still pull some strings in a cabinet position which befits her energy and experience, under either a President Biden or Sanders. Perhaps a miracle will happen and she’ll make it to the White House anyway. Perhaps she’ll run away with the nomination in 2024 and finally oust Trump in a landslide victory, long after both Uncle Joe and Bernie are shown to be inadequate bulwarks against the rising tide of Keep America Great.

She would have made a better president than either of the two frontrunners. She deserved better than this. But Elizabeth Warren changed what she was selling too late for people to buy it — and in the end, she was left with not very much at all. Not even Massachusetts.

World's biggest meat company linked to 'brutal massacre' in Amazon

Investigation traces meat sold to JBS and rival Marfrig to farm owned by man implicated in Mato Grosso killings  

Protests against the illegal timber trade in Brazil have highlighted the number of people killed while defending the forest. Photograph: Eraldo Peres/AP

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Published on Tue 3 Mar 2020

A new investigation has linked the world’s biggest meat company JBS, and its rival Marfrig, to a farm whose owner is implicated in one of the most brutal Amazonian massacres in recent memory.

The report by Repórter Brasil comes as JBS faces growing pressure over transparency failings in its Amazon cattle supply chain.

On 19 April 2017, nine men were brutally murdered in what became known as the “Colniza massacre”. The men had been squatting on remote forest land in the state of Mato Grosso when their bodies were found, according to court documents. Some showed signs of torture; some had been stabbed, others shot.

According to charges filed by state prosecutors in Mato Grosso, the massacre was carried out by a gang known as “the hooded ones”. The aim, they said, was to terrify locals, take over land they lived on and extract valuable natural resources. The first reporter to reach the lawless, far-flung region only got there a week later.

 

House of farmer and evangelical pastor Sebastião de Souza in Taquarussu do Norte, Brazil, one of the men murdered in the Colniza massacre. Photograph: Fabiano Maisonnave/Courtesy of Climate Home

On 15 May 2017, prosecutors said they had charged Valdelir João de Souza, a farmer who owned two timber companies on neighbouring land, and four others with homicide and forming or being part of an illegal paramilitary group. Prosecutors said de Souza had ordered the massacre, although he had not been present when it occurred.

Since then de Souza has been a fugitive. But in April 2018 two adjacent areas of land – Três Lagoas and Piracama farms - in nearby Rondônia state were registered under his name (one of the oddities of the Brazilian property system is that landowners register their own land and boundaries). The two farms covered 1,052 hectares (2,599 acres) in an area set aside by the government for low-income agricultural workers. Satellite images show extensive deforestation on the Três Lagoas farm in 2015.


Meat company faces heat over ‘cattle laundering’ in Amazon supply chain

Government sanitary records seen by Repórter Brasil show that on 9 May 2018 143 cattle were sold by the Três Lagoas and Piracama farms to a farm owned by Maurício Narde.

Minutes later Narde’s farm sold 143 animals of the same sex and age – 80 female cattle between 13– 24 months old and 63 female cattle over 36 months old – to a JBS meatpacker.

In June 2017, according to court documents in a separate case, Narde worked at a sawmill owned by de Souza in Machadinho d’Oeste in Rondônia state. He still works at the same sawmill, although it has since changed its name and is no longer controlled by de Souza. Reached by telephone by the Guardian, Narde confirmed the transaction but did not explain why he had sold the cattle after buying them minutes beforehand.

“We buy and sell, just to keep things moving,” he said, before deciding not to answer any more questions and concluding the interview.

Cattle laundering involves the selling on of cows raised illegally on deforested land to ‘clean’ farms. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Greenpeace

The quick sale of the cattle suggests what environmentalists call “cattle laundering” – when cattle from a farm that has environmental issues sells cattle to a “clean” farm. This gets around monitoring systems because meat companies including JBS do not monitor these “indirect suppliers”.

“This series of coincidences suggests a common practice, which is the triangulation of animals,” said Mauro Armelin, director of Friends of the Earth Brazil. “It is a practice that could indicate cattle laundering.”

On 25 June 2018, according to government sanitary records, Três Lagoas also sold 153 head of cattle to the Morro Alto farm in Monte Negro, Rondônia, owned by José Carlos de Albuquerque.

In the following months de Albuquerque sold dozens of head of cattle to JBS and Marfrig slaughterhouses.

De Albuquerque told Réporter Brasil that the sale had never been completed – but the report cited sanitary records showing the cattle had, in fact, entered the Morro Alto farm. Contacted by the Guardian by phone and email, he declined to answer questions.

The Repórter Brasil investigation highlights the difficulties that Brazil’s big meat companies have in monitoring their supply chains.

JBS and other big companies such as Marfrig committed to not buying from farms involved in illegal deforestation in two separate agreements signed with Greenpeace and Brazilian prosecutors in 2009 and subsequent years. Under the Greenpeace deal, the companies also promised to remove producers accused of land grabbing or convicted in rural conflicts from their suppliers lists. The deal with federal prosecutors similarly bans farms that have been convicted of involvement in rural conflicts, or that are being investigated.

Greenpeace quit their deal in 2017, after JBS was fined for buying cattle from farms in illegally-deforested areas in the Amazon state of Pará. An audit by federal prosecutors found that 19% of the cattle JBS purchased in the state in 2016 had “evidence of irregularities”.

  

Large meat companies have promised not to buy cattle from farms that encroach on indigenous lands. Photograph: Paulo Pereira/Greenpeace


In the years following the cattle agreement, JBS made enormous progress in improving its monitoring of Amazon suppliers and the company defended its sustainability in a statement.

“We monitor over 280,000 square miles, an area larger than Germany, and assess more than 50,000 potential cattle-supplying farms every day, as well as conducting daily checks of all purchases to ensure compliance with strict standards. To date we have blocked more than 8,000 cattle-supplying farms due to noncompliance,” it said.

But while the company now has a complex system in place to monitor its direct suppliers, it is still unable to monitor its indirect suppliers – those farmers who sell to farms that then sell on to JBS.

Revealed: fires three times more common in Amazon beef farming zones

De Souza’s case has yet to be concluded. Ulisses Rabaneda, a lawyer representing de Souza, told the Guardian that he had decided not to reply to questions from the media at this stage in the court proceedings.

In an interview with the Gazeta Digital in 2019, de Souza said he was innocent of all charges, had never been involved in death squads, and remained a fugitive because he was scared he would be murdered by the real killers if he handed himself in.

“I never went around armed, so why at my age of 41, with solid companies, a peaceful life, no debts, without any problems, would I do something so barbaric?” de Souza said in the interview. “I built everything with the honesty and effort of my family. Why would I throw it all away?”

JBS told Réporter Brasil that de Souza was not a supplier and that it does not “acquire cattle from farms involved in deforestation of native forests, invasion of indigenous reserves of conservation, rural violence, land conflicts, or that used slave or child labour”.

“JBS reiterates that any attempt to link the company to the person mentioned in the report, who was never on its list of suppliers, is irresponsible,” the company told the Guardian.

Marfrig declined to comment on the investigation and sent the statement it had previously sent to the Guardian in December in which the company recognised that 53% of its Amazon cattle comes from indirect suppliers.

“Marfrig is fully aware of the challenges related to the livestock production chain and recognises its role as an important transformation agent to ensure production vis-à-vis the conservation of Brazilian biomes, especially the Amazon,” the company said.

  

Marfrig has recognised that over half of its Amazon cattle comes from indirect suppliers. Photograph: Ricardo Funari/Greenpeace

It detailed measures including a supplier monitoring platform and its Request for Information (RFI) tool, in which suppliers voluntarily list the farms they may have acquired animals from. The company says a third of the cattle it sources in the Amazon come with an RFI, and it is now working to improve the process with World Wildlife Fund.

In 2017, a Greenpeace report published after the Colniza massacre said a company owned by de Souza, called Madeireira Cedroarana, had accumulated around $150,000 (£116,000) in unpaid fines over a decade from Brazil’s environment agency, Ibama.

Between January 2016 and October 2017 the company exported thousands of cubic metres of timber to the US and Europe. In 2018 it changed its name to Colmar Madeiras; it continues at the same address, but de Souza is no longer its controlling partner. In the interview with Gazeta Digital, he said his company had challenged fines it had received.

JBS IS ALSO IN ALBERTA AND OTHER PROVINCES IN CANADA  

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/12/all-news-that-fits-washington-post.html

Can Biden beat Trump? The truth is he's just as much of a risk as Bernie

The 'sensible, establishment choice' is just as likely to garner votes from former Republicans as a populist with a bold new plan
Holly Baxter New York @h0llyb4xter  THE INDEPENDENT 

Both Biden and Sanders put in a strong performance on Super Tuesday ( AFP via Getty Images )

As the dust settles on Super Tuesday, Democrats are left with two clear frontrunners: former vice president Joe Biden and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Biden, who was only a couple of weeks ago seen as dead in the water, benefited from a flurry of endorsements just before 14 states went to the polls. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke (remember him?) all turned up in Texas to profess their belief in former President Obama’s old running-mate. And most of them were talking about electability.

“I’m voting for Joe Biden because he can defeat Donald Trump,” O’Rourke wrote in an email that hit my inbox early Tuesday morning. “Having him at the top of the ticket will help our down-ballot candidates, especially in Texas,” he added. “… Joe can beat Donald Trump because he is the clear contrast to Donald Trump. Joe Biden is kind and decent. Empathetic and caring. He will reassert our moral standing in the world at a moment that it’s been called into question.” A couple of paragraphs later, Beto added that he also admired the “integrity” of Elizabeth Warren, the way in which Michael Bloomberg had “used his wealth for good”, and the way in which Bernie Sanders has “consistently and successfully pushed this country to think big”.

“Thinking big” never means “being electable” — everybody knows that. But is it really true that Bernie Sanders’ big ideas — those calls for full structural and systemic reform — make him less likely to appeal to American voters than steadfast, sensible Uncle Joe? I’m not convinced

The problem with calling someone unelectable while thousands of people turn out to vote to them is it can make you look a bit foolish. Whether or not the DNC thinks that Sanders will speak to the entire US population in November’s general election, it’s undeniable that his rallies have been well-attended and have translated into real-life voters turning up to the ballot box. And the simple fact is that there is overlap between Sanders voters and Trump voters; they’re just not the same Trump voters who might be tempted over by Biden.

In 2016, Trump asked Americans to vote for a revolution with a maverick at its helm. Democrats chose a safe, establishment candidate. This wasn’t the year to mess around, they said. They needed someone guaranteed to knock an inexperienced idiot like Trump out of the park. We know how that strategy ended up. Yet we are being sold the same reasoning again, as if 2016 — and the midterms in 2018, where a surge of young progressives won it for the Democratic Party — never happened.

There are a lot of swing voters in the United States. For better or worse, they tend to vote on issues that directly affect them, such as healthcare, personal taxation and gun rights. They made it loud and clear in 2016 that they wanted to drain the swamp, stick it to the establishment and bring the troops home from endless wars. Trump hasn’t held Wall Street or any of his billionaire buddies to account, but Bernie promises he will in no uncertain terms. An impeachment and a Mueller report later, some who believed in Trump back then may well be ready to believe in Sanders now.

Then there’s the other side. Biden is a household name who stood beside one of the most beloved presidents in American history. There’s no denying he knows how it all works and that he already has a working relationship with some of the world’s most powerful leaders. The “Never Trump” movement, comprising Republicans embarrassed by what The Donald has done to their Grand Old Party, has been growing in ranks over the past four years. Some of those “Never Trumpers” have been saying that they would be willing to vote for Biden. They consider the situation within their party so dire that they’d rather press the reset button and start again in 2024. But those people — people for whom “socialism” is the dirtiest of dirty words — could never countenance voting for Bernie Sanders. If Sanders was the Democratic nominee, they’d either hold their noses and vote for Trump or fail to turn up to vote at all. That’s a powerful argument in favor of Biden.

The problem is that those people might fail to turn up even if Biden is the nominee. Can we really count on dedicated, life-long Republicans to switch allegiances and vote for someone so emblematic of a previous Democratic administration? Would a group of “Never Bernie” Democrats seriously go to the ballot box for Dick Cheney? Counting on this group of voters to come out for Biden is just as risky as counting on disillusioned former Trump evangelists to ditch Make America Great Again and hop on board the Medicare for All train. Both strategies make for an uphill struggle. This polarization is what such a ridiculously overstuffed race for the nominee gave us.

Consider what the young, enthusiastic backers of Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Beto O’Rourke might do when faced with the choice between Biden and Trump. In their hearts, they will most likely be “blue no matter who”. But will that get them out to vote early in the morning or late at night on election day? More than a few former Mayor Pete campaigners told me this week that they’d been left confused by his quick endorsement of Biden — only five minutes ago, weren’t they backing a millennial touting “a new kind of politics”? And wasn’t Biden offering a kind of optimistic nostalgia, a return to the good old days? It seemed like a bait-and-switch of the cruelest kind.

We can’t know whether Biden would unseat Trump in November in the way moderate Democrats hope he will — but we can learn the right lessons from the past four years. Nothing is guaranteed, and electability doesn’t always mean what you think it means. If we’re to move towards a Trumpless future, we first have to admit that the “safe choice” in the Democratic race dropped out a long time ago.

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DARPA’s competition to find a rapid rocket launch provider ends without a winner

Astra came super close

ONCE UPON A TIME DARPA WAS KNOWN AS THE JASONS

By Loren Grush@lorengrush Mar 3,  2020

Astra’s rocket on the launchpad in Alaska. Image: DARPA

DARPA’s competition to find a rocket company that can rapidly send satellites to space ended without a winner on March 2nd when the final team failed to launch by the contest’s deadline. Rocket startup Astra came within less than a minute of launching its brand-new rocket for the competition out of Alaska, but it had to halt the mission due to some bad data from the vehicle. As a result, the company lost out on winning up to $12 million — and now, no one will win the money prize.

The competition, known as the DARPA Launch Challenge, began about two years ago with the goal of finding a rocket launch provider that could quickly respond to a request to launch any payload from the military. To win the competition, eligible teams had to demonstrate that they could launch small national security satellites from practically any launch site in the US with very little heads-up. A company had to launch at least two rockets carrying DARPA payloads within two weeks of each other during very specific windows.

DARPA originally selected three teams to compete in the challenge, including Virgin Orbit’s subsidiary Vox Space and former small-satellite launcher Vector, which went bankrupt in December. Both dropped out, leaving Astra, a company that had been in stealth mode for years until early February. Astra has been testing its new vehicle over the last couple of years and has had a few launch failures, including one that led to soil contamination at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island.
ASTRA WAS THE ONLY COMPANY REMAINING IN THE COMPETITION

However, Astra remained in the competition, and on February 18th, DARPA publicly revealed the dates and locations for the company’s launch attempts. In order to win, Astra had to first launch its rocket from the Pacific Spaceport Complex between February 17th and March 1st and then again sometime later in March. For the first launch, DARPA gave details about what payloads Astra would be launching on January 22nd, and the company only saw the satellites when they arrived at the launch site in Alaska to be added on top of the rocket. The initial payloads consisted of three small satellites as well as one that was supposed to remain attached to the rocket in space.


After experiencing some weather delays, Astra was finally set to launch on Monday, March 2nd — the last day in the window, which had been extended by a day due to the poor weather. With its rocket on the launchpad, the company counted down to T-53 seconds but ultimately stopped the countdown when engineers saw some bad data coming from the rocket. The engineering team tried to fix the problem before the launch window ended at 6:30PM ET, but it didn’t figure out the issue in time.

“Fundamentally, safety is our top priority, and winning the challenge would have been fantastic today, but our objective really is to reach orbit in as few flights as possible,” Chris Kemp, Astra co-founder and CEO, said on the live stream broadcasting the mission. “So we really want to use this rocket, and we want to get out there again when we know everything is perfect. And unfortunately, that wasn’t today.” The flight would have been the company’s debut flight to orbit.

If Astra had been able to launch to orbit successfully yesterday, the company could have won a $2 million prize and been eligible to win an additional $10 million if it could launch a second time just a few weeks later. Now, no one will win that prize money, and DARPA plans to remove the payloads from Astra’s rocket. “It was a hard challenge,” Todd Master, the project manager for the DARPA Launch Challenge, said during the live stream. “We set it to be achievable. But certainly, DARPA holds a bar for really hard tests that we asked competitors to do. So they got almost there, almost made it to the finish line. Just didn’t quite make it.”

In the meantime, Astra says it’s already working toward its next launch attempt, which could occur out of Alaska as soon as March 15th. Kemp says he’s unsure what the company will fly on the mission, if anything. But there are apparently a lot of customers who want the opportunity to fly on the vehicle. “We were frankly bombarded with interest from folks that want to fly on it,” Kemp told The Verge after the launch. “The DARPA payload was removed because that was part of the challenge, and so we’re trying to decide whether we will revive the license to fly without a payload, or if one of our many customers can be ready for us.”

With this next launch, Kemp says the company will still consider things a success even if the vehicle doesn’t reach orbit. In fact, the goal is to get to orbit within the next three upcoming launches. “We’re going for a birdie here,” Kemp said. “We’re not going for a hole in one.”

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It’s going to take a lot longer to make a COVID-19 vaccine than a treatment
Scientists have a head start on treatments

By Nicole Wetsman Feb 28, 2020
   

Photo by Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images

Scientists and drug companies are racing to develop and test treatments and vaccines that address COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Work on both is progressing at an unprecedented speed — but researchers are starting essentially from scratch on vaccine development, so the process is going to take a long time. Treatments, on the other hand, were further along when the outbreak started and might be available sooner.

“They’re in vastly different situations right now,” says Florian Krammer, a professor and vaccine development expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Both treatments and vaccines are important for a robust and effective response to the outbreak. Treatments help people after they already have a disease; in the case of COVID-19, researchers hope to treat the around 15 percent of COVID-19 patients who have non-mild symptoms. Vaccines, on the other hand, help prevent people from getting sick in the first place.

Scientists started work on drugs to treat coronaviruses during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, but because the outbreaks died down, the job was never completed. Now, they’re able to dust off that old research and start building on it. The leading candidate is a drug called remdesivir, which was developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead. Research showed that it could block SARS and MERS in cells and in mice. In addition, remdesivir was used in a clinical trial looking for treatments for Ebola — and therefore, it had already gone through safety testing to make sure it doesn’t cause any harm.

That’s why teams in China and the US were able to start clinical trials testing remdesivir in COVID-19 patients so quickly. There should be data available showing if it helps them get better as soon as April. If it proves effective, Gilead would presumably be able to ramp up production and get the drug in the hands of doctors fairly quickly, Krammer says.

The vaccine development process will take much longer. Experts say that it will be between a year and 18 months, or maybe longer, before they’re available to the public. One of the strategies for creating a vaccine involves making copies of one part of the virus (in this case, the bit that the novel coronavirus uses to infiltrate cells). Then, the immune system of the person who receives the vaccine makes antibodies that neutralize that particular bit. If they were exposed to the virus, those antibodies would be able to stop the virus from functioning.

The pharmaceutical company Moderna is the furthest along in the process; it already has that type of vaccine ready for testing. A trial in 45 healthy people to make sure that it’s safe will start in March or April and will take around three months to complete. After that, it’ll have to be tested in an even larger group to check if it actually immunizes people against the novel coronavirus. That will take six to eight months. And then, it’ll have to be manufactured at a huge scale, which poses an additional challenge.

Making vaccines is always challenging. Developing this one is made more difficult because there has never been a vaccine for any type of coronavirus. “We don’t have a production platform, we have no experience in safety, we don’t know if there will be complications. We have to start from scratch, basically,” Krammer says.

It was much easier to make a vaccine for H1N1, known as swine flu, which emerged as a never-before-seen virus in 2009. “There are large vaccine producers in the US and globally for flu,” Krammer says. Manufacturers were able to stop making the vaccine against the seasonal flu and start making a vaccine for this new strain of flu. “They didn’t need clinical trials, they just had to make the vaccine and distribute it,” he says.

There won’t be a vaccine done in time to hold off any approaching outbreak of COVID-19 in the US or in other countries where it’s still not widespread. That’s why treatments are so important: along with good public health practices, they can help blunt the impact of the disease and make it less of an unstoppable threat. The best experts can hope for is that a vaccine can help prevent other outbreaks in the future if the novel coronavirus sticks around.

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Ford announces an all-electric Transit cargo van
6

No specs or passenger version yet, but it’s coming to the US and Canada in 2021

By Sean O'Kane@sokane1 Mar 3, 2020
The standard Transit cargo van. Image: Ford


Ford is making an all-electric version of its popular Transit cargo van for the US and Canadian markets, slated to be released in 2021. The company did not share any specifics about the van’s battery pack size, estimated range, or performance characteristics. Ford previously announced an electric Transit for the European market in 2019.

The new cargo van will come equipped with a 4G LTE hotspot and will be outfitted with a number of tech features designed for fleet managers, like live GPS tracking and diagnostics. The electric Transit van will also be equipped with a number of Ford’s safety and driver assistance features, like collision warning and assist, automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection, and automatic lane-keeping.

Ford said it didn’t have any news to share about an electric version of its Transit passenger van “at this time.”

Ford’s Transit van is the bestselling cargo van in the US, though it has seen increased competition over the last few years from Mercedes-Benz, which recently refreshed its popular Sprinter van.

A teaser image released by Ford on Tuesday. Image: Ford

Mercedes-Benz has already unveiled an electric version of the Sprinter, which comes in two configurations. There’s a version with a 55kWh battery pack that can travel 168 kilometers (104 miles) on a full charge, and has a payload capacity of 891 kilograms (1,964 pounds). Mercedes-Benz is making a version with a smaller 41kWh battery pack that goes 115 kilometers (72 miles), but which can carry up to 1,045 (2,304 pounds). Both versions come with 10.5 cubic meters (370.8 cubic feet) of storage space.

Mercedes-Benz also announced the EQV concept a year ago, which is an electric van aimed at slightly more everyday use. The company touted more promising specs with the slightly smaller EQV, saying it will get around 249 miles out of a 100kWh battery pack. Oh, and it has 200 horsepower on offer and will be equipped with the company’s MBUX infotainment system.

Another player in the space is EV startup Rivian, which will build 100,000 electric delivery vans for Amazon over the next few years. Ford has invested $500 million in Rivian, and the startup is helping build a luxury electric SUV for the automotive giant’s Lincoln brand, though the two van projects don’t seem to be related. Ford is also collaborating with Volkswagen on commercial vans after the two companies formed a global alliance early last year.

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Nikola is going public to try to become the first zero-emission big rig company

And adding $525 million to its war chest

By Sean O'Kane@sokane1 Mar 3, 2020

Photo: Nikola Corporation

Electric trucking startup Nikola is becoming a publicly traded company. The Arizona-based outfit announced Tuesday that it’s merging with a publicly listed acquisition company called VectoIQ, in a move that’s similar to what space company Virgin Galactic just pulled off in the second half of 2019. The transaction is expected to close sometime in the second quarter of this year, and when it does, Nikola will be listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the name NKLA.

Nikola will receive $525 million in new investment as a result, adding to an existing stockpile of $525 million it raised across three rounds of funding (and funding from a joint venture it started in Europe).

NIKOLA HAS DEVELOPED HYDROGEN- AND BATTERY-POWERED BIG RIGS
Founded in 2015, Nikola set out to make zero-emission big rigs using hydrogen fuel cell technology. While a number of companies like Tesla, Daimler, Freightliner, and other established players and startups are working on all-electric trucks, Nikola is one of the only ones pursuing hydrogen-powered big rigs. However it gets done, though, switching big rigs over to zero-emission powertrains could help put a big dent into the pollution caused by the transportation sector.

The startup has developed three different trucks, with the last two aimed at mass production in the US and European markets. But the company has since developed versions of its trucks that are battery-powered, too, for companies that don’t need as much range as the hydrogen-powered versions provide.

Hydrogen-powered vehicles have never really caught on in the passenger car space because there’s been very little investment in the necessary infrastructure. Where companies like Tesla and multiple governments and clean energy groups have spent the last decade building out relatively vast networks of electric vehicle chargers, only a handful of hydrogen filling stations exist to date.
Nikola teases an electric pickup with 600 miles of range

But Nikola’s pitch has always been that hydrogen power makes a ton more sense in a commercial application. Since many commercial trucking routes run point to point, it’s easier to identify where hydrogen stations should be built. Nikola has argued that hydrogen trucks are even better suited for the task of long-haul trucking than battery-powered vehicles for a few reasons. It takes far less time to fill a tank than it does to charge a massive battery. Battery-powered big rigs also face a conundrum. They need big battery packs to generate sufficient range, especially with a trailer attached. But the bigger the pack, the more the truck weighs, ultimately limiting how efficient it can be.

THE STARTUP SAYS IT WILL GENERATE $3.2 BILLION OF REVENUE IN 2024

Along the way, Nikola lined up a number of customers, including Anheuser-Busch, which ordered hundreds of trucks in 2018. It also signed a deal with energy company Nel to develop the hydrogen filling stations, and automotive supplier Bosch to help design parts of its trucks. Nikola got a big boost last year when it landed a joint venture with Iveco, a European truck manufacturer. Not only did this lend some legitimacy to the startup’s plans, it also offered them a shortcut to production.

According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission laying out the merger, the company wants to start production of its battery-electric big rigs next year and expects to deliver 600 of them. It will then double that number each year following as it brings production of the hydrogen trucks online in 2023. Nikola expects to be able to generate $3.2 billion in revenue in 2024 by selling 7,000 battery-powered trucks and 5,000 hydrogen trucks.

Nikola also wants to take the tech it’s developing for its big rigs and apply it to different form factors. Last year, the company showed off an electric personal watercraft and a four-wheeled electric off-road utility vehicle. Just last month, the company teased a pickup truck called the Badger, which would combine hydrogen fuel cell and lithium-ion battery technology to enable a range of up to 600 miles.

TRUMP PUBLIC HEALTH CARE

The earliest known deaths from COVID-19 in the US went undetected for a week

The patients were residents at a nursing home in Washington battling an outbreak

By Nicole Wetsman  Mar 3, 2020, 

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Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images

Two people who died last week in Seattle had undetected cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, The New York Times reported. One person was hospitalized on February 24th and died on February 26th. The other also died on February 26th at a nursing facility. There have now been nine deaths from the novel coronavirus in the US.

Both of the people who died last week were residents at the Life Care long-term nursing facility in Kirkland, Washington, where there’s an ongoing outbreak of the virus. Several of the deaths previously announced were in elderly Life Care residents, and dozens of other residents and staff have symptoms of the virus. A person in North Carolina infected with the novel coronavirus was first exposed at the facility, as well.

The deaths and continued spread of the virus from the cluster in Washington highlight the problems with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) initial recommendations for health care providers on when to test people. The agency wasn’t recommending testing for anyone who hadn’t traveled to countries with high numbers of sick people, which made it easy to miss any undetected circulation of the virus in the community. That’s why the people who died on the 26th weren’t tested until this week.

These particular deaths are worrying to public health experts because both patients were hospitalized and treated before they were diagnosed. That means they may have exposed health care workers, who wouldn’t have known to take the precautions normally made when treating COVID-19 patients.

More local and state health labs are now able to test people suspected of having the novel coronavirus, and the CDC says that testing capacity is set to increase over the next week. The CDC’s guidance, though, still says that people who haven’t traveled to countries with outbreaks and who have not been in contact with people sick with COVID-19 shouldn’t be tested unless they’re sick enough that they need to be hospitalized. That guidance likely won’t be sufficient to pick up any virus spreading among people who don’t get severely ill, which is around 80 to 85 percent of cases.

There are currently over 90,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the world, and over 3,000 people have died from the disease.

Panic buying of masks puts health care workers’ ‘lives at risk,’ WHO says

Health care workers may be left ill-equipped

By Mary Beth Griggs Mar 3, 2020

A doctor wearing a mask while working at El Alto International 

Airport in Bolivia. Photo by AIZAR RALDES/AFP via Getty Images

A shortage of masks, gloves, and other protective gear “is putting lives at risk from the new coronavirus and other infectious diseases” warned the World Health Organization (WHO) in a statement on Tuesday. A frightened public has been buying up masks and other equipment, leaving limited supplies for health care workers who need the gear the most.

Masks can be useful for people who are sick with a respiratory virus to keep them from spreading the illness to others. They are most useful for health care workers who come face to face with disease every day.

Health experts, including those at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), do not currently recommend that people who are well wear masks as protection against diseases like the new coronavirus. People have bought them anyway, in such huge amounts that the WHO is worried that the people who need them the most won’t be able to get them. Supplies are dwindling. The price of surgical gowns has doubled; the price of surgical masks is now six times higher than it was at the start of the outbreak.

“Without secure supply chains, the risk to healthcare workers around the world is real,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “Industry and governments must act quickly to boost supply, ease export restrictions and put measures in place to stop speculation and hoarding. We can’t stop COVID-19 without protecting health workers first.”

The surgeon general recently made a similar appeal over Twitter begging people to stop buying masks. He also warned that improperly wearing masks could actually increase the spread of the disease.
Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!
https://t.co/UxZRwxxKL9— U.S. Surgeon General (@Surgeon_General) February 29, 2020

The WHO is asking manufacturers to increase production by 40 percent. They estimate that 89 million masks will be needed by health care workers every month, along with 76 million gloves and 1.6 million goggles.

TV manufacturer Sharp recently announced that they would start making masks in one of their Japanese factories this month, in order to deal with the growing shortage of the products. Amazon has warned sellers against price gouging items like masks. The company has also scrubbed a million products making misleading claims about curing or preventing COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

More than 90,000 cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed globally, and more than 3,000 people have died. Health officials recommend that people protect themselves from the disease by staying home when sick, covering their mouths when they sneeze, and washing their hands thoroughly and frequently.

Incredible colourised footage from 1911 shows what life was like in vintage New York


Image: YouTube

Ever wondered what photographs and films from more than 100 years ago would look like in glorious colour?

Well now you don’t have to, because old footage has been brought to life by a YouTuber using artificial intelligence.

In 1911, a Swedish production companyvisited the United States and took black and white footage of the streets of New York City. YouTuber Guy Jones then posted it online for us all to enjoy. Then another YouTuber, Denis Shiryaev, restored and colourised the footage.


IFL Science’s James Felton reports that the colour was restored using using DeOldify, an open-source AI tool available on GitHub for retouching pictures and videos using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN).

Lots of iconic older films have been colourised recently, including The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) and Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic “I have a Dream” speech.

There’s some more niche examples floating around online too, like old episodes of Doctor Who and old political footage.

H/T: IFL Science

Experts baffled as Trump asks why they can't just use flu vaccines to prevent coronavirus

by Sirena Bergman in news
Donald Trump appears to be even more confused than ever bout coronavirus.

In a series of videos actually released by the White House, Trump can be seen getting increasingly more confused by the experts in the room, who are patiently trying to explain very very basic concepts to the president.

During one segment, he seems incapable of understanding how long it actually takes to formulate a vaccine, repeatedly suggesting "a couple months" should be the timeframe, because he "likes that better" than the actual realistic year-and-a-half estimate he's given.


He keeps going on and on about this among awkward laughter from people who understand that science doesn't actually bow to Trump's whims. It only stops when an advisor explains:

Vaccines have to be tested because there's precedent for vaccines actually making diseases worse.

You don't want to rush and treat a million people and find out you're making 900,000 of them worse.

Trump's response? A baffling "that's a good idea". (Good idea to rush and screw it up? Good idea to mention this? WHAT??)

But perhaps the weirdest of all was when he thought that he – a mediocre business person – may have come up with the solution to a complex global pandemic which no medical professional could ever have thought of:

You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that would have an impact? Or much of an impact? On corona?

Let's recap. A "solid" (whatever that means) flu vaccine. For the flu.

To stop "corona", as he calls it. Which is... a completely different type of virus. Otherwise it would be called flu. That's how words (and science) work.

So what impact would a flu shot have? "Probably none," Trump is told. For obvious reasons. The president responds:

Probably none? That simple?

Well no, not simple at all really, despite him seeming to think that coronavirus can be cured either by a vaccine for a different virus or by way of actual miracles. For context, researchers have been trying to develop a vaccine against HIV since the 1980s. Does that sound simple to you? Us neither. Maybe they should just use the flu one instead and see if that works.

Trump’s ignorance was on public display during coronavirus meeting with pharmaceutical execs

The president is pushing to get a Covid-19 vaccine before the election. It doesn’t work like that.

By Aaron Rupar@atrupar Mar 3, 2020, 11:30am EST

Trump during a meeting with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and pharmaceutical executives on Monday. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It’s understandable that during a White House meeting on Monday with pharmaceutical executives and public health officials, President Donald Trump pressed them to develop and deploy a vaccine to Covid-19 (the disease caused by the novel coronavirus) as quickly as possible. Beyond the obvious public health benefits, a vaccine could help allay fears, stabilize markets, and quell criticisms that his administration was unprepared for or mismanaged the response to the outbreak.

What is harder to wrap one’s brain around, however, is the level of ignorance Trump displayed about how vaccines work.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has already said it will take up to 18 months to develop a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus — a time frame much shorter than the usual two- to five-year window. There are straightforward reasons it’s impossible to roll out new vaccines for public consumption overnight: They need to be developed, tested for effectiveness and safety during trials, approved by regulators, manufactured, and then distributed. Each of those steps takes time.

At one point during the meeting, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tried to explain to the president that it would be at least a year and probably closer to 18 months before a coronavirus vaccine could be available to the public. But Trump didn’t want to hear it, and kept pressing the executives to come up with something before November’s election.

“I mean, I like the sound of a couple months better, if I must be honest,” Trump said, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the “couple months” time frame execs mentioned merely referred to a vaccine being ready for trials.

Trump on it taking up to a year to develop a coronavirus vaccine: "I mean, I like the sound of a couple months better, if I must be honest." pic.twitter.com/zvvrE9JnPS— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2020

Later, Trump pressed the pharmaceutical leaders on why they can’t just release the coronavirus drugs their companies are working on tomorrow — in the process revealing that he doesn’t understand the concept of clinical trials.

“So you have a medicine that’s already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it’s specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can’t you?” he said.

“Now the critical thing is to do clinical trials,” explained Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences, which has two phase-three clinical trials going for remdesivir, a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “We have two clinical trials going on in China that were started several weeks ago ... we expect to get that information in April.”

"So you have a medicine that's already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it's specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can't you?" -- Trump has no idea what a clinical trial is pic.twitter.com/PoA2usKZ9Z— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2020

Trump also wondered aloud why the flu vaccine can’t just be used for coronavirus, asking, “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don’t think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”

“No,” one of the experts at the table replied.

Following the meeting, an unnamed administration source told CNN that they thought the scientists and experts were able to convince Trump that a vaccine would not be available for a year or longer.

“I think he’s got it now,” the source told CNN.

But if Trump does get it now, that wasn’t apparent during a political rally in Charlotte hours later, during which the president claimed pharmaceutical companies “are going to have vaccines I think relatively soon.”

"We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies, and they're going to have vaccines I think relatively soon. And they're going to have something that makes you better, and that's going to actually take place we think even sooner" -- Trump on the coronavirus pic.twitter.com/oujTse5Lnp— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 3, 2020

Trump went on to portray the coronavirus problem in ethnonationalist terms: “There are fringe globalists that would rather keep our borders open than keep our infection — think of it — keep all of the infection, let it come in,” he said, before expressing surprise that tens of thousands of Americans die from the flu each year.

“When you lose 27,000 people [from the flu] a year — nobody knew that — I didn’t know that. Three, four weeks ago, I was sitting down, I said, ‘What do we lose with the regular flu?’ They said, ‘About 27,000 minimum. It goes up to 70, sometimes even 80, one year it went up to 100,000 people.’” (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have not been more than 51,000 flu-related deaths in the US over the past decade.)

“I said, ‘Nobody told me that. Nobody knows that.’ So I actually told the pharmaceutical companies, ‘You have to do a little bit better job on that vaccine,’” Trump continued.

"I told the pharmaceutical companies that they have to do a better job on that vaccine" -- Trump admits he just learned that the flu can be deadly and says he wants the pharmaceutical companies to do something about it pic.twitter.com/7jPDsi7WAX— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 3, 2020

Then, following the rally, the White House released a statement not detailing new federal initiatives to help stop the spread of Covid-19, but highlighting tweets from Republicans praising the administration’s response.

This is bonkers. Press release just released by the White House with tweets praising Trump's management of Coronavirus outbreak. "Top Tweets". pic.twitter.com/8lPGAsfN2h— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 3, 2020

On Tuesday, Trump gave a speech to the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference in which he brought up the coronavirus but then expressed confusion about the difference between cures, which eliminate diseases, and therapies, which treat them.

“Therapies are sort of another word for cure,” he said, conflating the two.

"Therapies are sort of another word for cure" -- Trump still hasn't figured out what a vaccine is pic.twitter.com/QSAk6cyDlW— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 3, 2020

While Trump may be confused about what’s going on, Vice President Mike Pence — head of the administration’s coronavirus task force — did claim during a news conference on Monday that treatments for Covid-19 could be available within the next couple of months. He did not provide details, however.
It’s going to take a lot longer to make a COVID-19 vaccine than a treatment
Scientists have a head start on treatments

By Nicole Wetsman Feb 28, 2020
   

Photo by Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images

Scientists and drug companies are racing to develop and test treatments and vaccines that address COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Work on both is progressing at an unprecedented speed — but researchers are starting essentially from scratch on vaccine development, so the process is going to take a long time. Treatments, on the other hand, were further along when the outbreak started and might be available sooner.

“They’re in vastly different situations right now,” says Florian Krammer, a professor and vaccine development expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Both treatments and vaccines are important for a robust and effective response to the outbreak. Treatments help people after they already have a disease; in the case of COVID-19, researchers hope to treat the around 15 percent of COVID-19 patients who have non-mild symptoms. Vaccines, on the other hand, help prevent people from getting sick in the first place.

Scientists started work on drugs to treat coronaviruses during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, but because the outbreaks died down, the job was never completed. Now, they’re able to dust off that old research and start building on it. The leading candidate is a drug called remdesivir, which was developed by the pharmaceutical company Gilead. Research showed that it could block SARS and MERS in cells and in mice. In addition, remdesivir was used in a clinical trial looking for treatments for Ebola — and therefore, it had already gone through safety testing to make sure it doesn’t cause any harm.

That’s why teams in China and the US were able to start clinical trials testing remdesivir in COVID-19 patients so quickly. There should be data available showing if it helps them get better as soon as April. If it proves effective, Gilead would presumably be able to ramp up production and get the drug in the hands of doctors fairly quickly, Krammer says.

The vaccine development process will take much longer. Experts say that it will be between a year and 18 months, or maybe longer, before they’re available to the public. One of the strategies for creating a vaccine involves making copies of one part of the virus (in this case, the bit that the novel coronavirus uses to infiltrate cells). Then, the immune system of the person who receives the vaccine makes antibodies that neutralize that particular bit. If they were exposed to the virus, those antibodies would be able to stop the virus from functioning.


The pharmaceutical company Moderna is the furthest along in the process; it already has that type of vaccine ready for testing. A trial in 45 healthy people to make sure that it’s safe will start in March or April and will take around three months to complete. After that, it’ll have to be tested in an even larger group to check if it actually immunizes people against the novel coronavirus. That will take six to eight months. And then, it’ll have to be manufactured at a huge scale, which poses an additional challenge.

Making vaccines is always challenging. Developing this one is made more difficult because there has never been a vaccine for any type of coronavirus. “We don’t have a production platform, we have no experience in safety, we don’t know if there will be complications. We have to start from scratch, basically,” Krammer says.

It was much easier to make a vaccine for H1N1, known as swine flu, which emerged as a never-before-seen virus in 2009. “There are large vaccine producers in the US and globally for flu,” Krammer says. Manufacturers were able to stop making the vaccine against the seasonal flu and start making a vaccine for this new strain of flu. “They didn’t need clinical trials, they just had to make the vaccine and distribute it,” he says.

There won’t be a vaccine done in time to hold off any approaching outbreak of COVID-19 in the US or in other countries where it’s still not widespread. That’s why treatments are so important: along with good public health practices, they can help blunt the impact of the disease and make it less of an unstoppable threat. The best experts can hope for is that a vaccine can help prevent other outbreaks in the future if the novel coronavirus sticks around.

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