'The next pandemic is not a matter of if, but when,' Oxford professor says

By Symela Touchtidou

Published on 08/07/2026 EURONEWS

The Oxford professor who developed the first highly effective malaria vaccine explains what Covid taught us, why misinformation is still a threat and why Europe must invest more in public health

Epidemics are not a thing of the past. On the contrary, they will continue to emerge and the next major pandemic is only a matter of time, says Adrian Hill, one of the world’s leading vaccine scientists and winner of the 2026 European Inventor Award in the category “Research”.

Speaking to Euronews, the British Oxford University professor argues that the world is better prepared today than it was before the Covid-19 pandemic, without, however, downplaying the challenges that lie ahead.

Epidemics will continue. They happen frequently. Some of them we never even hear about, because they are contained very quickly thanks to public health measures. But roughly once every decade, one emerges that turns out to be far more serious. Covid is, of course, the most striking example.

 Andrian Hill 

Professor at the University of Oxford and co-founder of the Jenner Institute

What Covid taught us

The British Oxford University professor is co-founder of the Jenner Institute. The Jenner Institute is one of the world’s leading vaccine research centres. It is part of the University of Oxford and is dedicated to the research and development of new vaccines for infectious diseases such as malaria, Ebola, tuberculosis and COVID-19.

According to Hill, the pandemic’s greatest legacy was that it proved the scientific community can develop a new vaccine in a timeframe that, until a few years ago, would have been considered unth

“What did we learn from Covid? That we can develop a vaccine within a year. Until then, we didn’t know that. Even leading experts believed it would take several years,” he said.

Hill believes that the infrastructure built in recent years now allows countries to detect new pathogens more quickly, develop vaccines and rapidly organise clinical trials, significantly strengthening global readiness for new health crises.

“Education is the answer to disinformation”

Despite the mistrust that grew around vaccines after the coronavirus pandemic, Hill is optimistic that public confidence is gradually being restored.

“There was a lot of disinformation. The remedy for disinformation, in a single word, is education," he said, hopeful that most people now understand that vaccines "played a pivotal role in tackling the pandemic.”

The vaccine that changed the course of malaria

Hill was honoured this year with the European Inventor Award for developing the R21/Matrix-M vaccine, the first highly effective malaria vaccine.

This breakthrough came after more than three decades of research in a field where more than a hundred previous attempts had failed.

“When I started working on malaria vaccines, every attempt had failed,” he recalls. “But we gradually learned to understand the parasite itself better and to choose the right target from about 5,000 genes. Through extensive trial, error and perseverance, we arrived at a vaccine that today has an efficacy of around 80%.”

According to the World Health Organization, in 2024 there were about 282 million malaria cases and 610,000 malaria deaths across 80 countries.

Children under the age of five accounted for roughly 75% of all malaria deaths in the WHO African Region. Traditional malaria vaccines were not very effective, especially in children, because of the parasite’s genetic diversity.

Hill and his team developed a vaccine containing more of the malaria-specific protein regions that the immune system needs to recognise in order to mount an effective response, while omitting unnecessary components that could divert the immune reaction

After decades of research, their work has evolved from a laboratory innovation into a scalable public-health intervention in a growing number of African countries, with the WHO officially recommending it for broad use in October 2023.

Why malaria matters to Europe as well

Although malaria mainly affects African countries, Hill insists that Europeans cannot treat such diseases as “someone else’s problem”.

As he points out, in a globalised world epidemics and health crises quickly spill over national borders, while investing in the health of poorer countries ultimately means investing in everyone’s security.

‘A Slap in the Face’: Trump Moves to Gut Biden-Era Rules Reining In Meatpackers

“We need robust enforcement of antitrust and fair trade practice laws to finally protect producers from meatpackers’ fundamentally unfair and illegal practices,” said one campaigner.


Workers process meat at a Triumph Foods plant in St. Joseph, Missouri in this 

 United States Department of Agriculture photo.
(Photo by USDA)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 06, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

A leading government accountability watchdog group on Monday ripped the Trump administration’s move to rescind Biden-era rules enacted to protect ranchers and farmers from abuse by meatpacking corporations and boost competition in the key industry.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced the reversal of three Biden administration rules under the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921. One of the rules prohibits meatpackers, swine contractors, and poultry companies from retaliating against producers for actions like joining associations, speaking with regulators, or seeking other buyers.

Another rule mandated improved transparency in poultry grower contracts. The third rule‚ which was set to take effect this month, would have limited how poultry companies use the tournament payment system.

USDA said it plans to start the revocation process with proposed rulemakings scheduled for later this month and October.

Farm groups and antitrust advocates argue the move removes protections against monopolistic, deceptive, and retaliatory practices by dominant meatpacking and poultry companies.

“For years, meat corporations have abused hardworking farmers and ranchers. Now, the Trump administration is proposing to undo long-overdue progress made to level the playing field,” Emily Miller, staff attorney at Food & Water Watch, said Monday in a statement. “This move is a slap in the face to all those who have long fought for fair treatment in livestock and poultry markets.”

The USDA’s move comes amid increased meat sector consolidation, which studies by Food & Water Watch, More Perfect Union, and others have found results in higher consumer prices and lower farmer profits.

Over the course of his two terms in office, Trump has boosted the meatpacking industry at the expense of worker rights, competition, and public health. His administration refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures amid the Covid-19 pandemic, and he invoked the Defense Production Act to classify meatpacking plants as critical infrastructure and force them to stay open even as the coronavirus ravaged industry workers.

Trump has also supported corporate monopolization in meatpacking, and his administration has shut down a Department of Justice antitrust probe of alleged industry collusion. Just four meatpackers control approximately 80% of the market. Meanwhile, cattle producers who in 1980 received 63 cents for every dollar paid by consumers for beef were receiving just 37 cents four decades later.

“We need robust enforcement of antitrust and fair trade practice laws to finally protect producers from meatpackers’ fundamentally unfair and illegal practices,” Miller said on Monday. “These rollbacks will do the opposite. We won’t rest until USDA does its job by putting producers above corporations.”

US-UK Medicine Deal Will Take ‘Wrecking Ball’ to NHS, Causing 229,000 Excess Deaths: Study

“We cannot afford to sit by while our NHS is picked apart by a foreign regime,” said one member of Parliament.


British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump speak during the G7 summit, in Evian, France on June 16, 2026.
(Photo by Ludovic Marin/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Jul 02, 2026
COMMON DREAMS

One member of British Parliament called on the Labour government to defend the country’s revered National Health Service “with everything we have and firmly stand up to the bully in the White House” after a study published Wednesday showed the UK-US pharmaceutical trade deal brokered last year is projected to cause 229,000 excess deaths as funding is stripped away from the NHS.

“It is a complete insult to patients who are suffering and dying on hospital trolleys and waiting months for treatment,” said Helen Morgan of the Liberal Democrats Party regarding the new analysis. “We cannot afford to sit by while our NHS is picked apart by a foreign regime.”

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of York, the University of Liverpool, and Christchurch Hospital in New Zealand and published in the British Medical Journal, found that £44.7 billion ($59.5 billion) will have to be diverted from health services by 2036 in order to pay for new medications under the deal.

The agreement was reached last December, with recently resigned Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government agreeing to pay 25% more for new US medications over the next decade. The NHS will double the percentage of gross domestic product that it allocates for pharmaceuticals, from 0.3% to 0.6%, with the spending increasing from 10% to 12% of the universal healthcare system’s budget.

In exchange, the Trump administration agreed not to impose tariffs of up to 100% that he had threatened for UK medicines being imported to the US.

Science Minister Patrick Vallance insisted in April that the deal would give NHS patients access to “life-changing new medicines that they previously would have been denied” while boosting the UK’s “life sciences sector” by avoiding Trump’s tariffs.

“Scandalously, this backroom deal was not subject to any scrutiny in Parliament before being rushed through—and the government refuses to say what impact it will have on the NHS.”

But Sir Ciarán Devane, chief executive of the NHS Alliance, told The Guardian that the study raised “serious questions” about whether Britons will truly benefit from the agreement.

“If billions of pounds are diverted away from frontline care to meet higher medicines costs, the consequences for prevention, community services, and the treatment of long-term conditions could be profound,” said Devane. “The government must urgently publish the full impact assessment and ensure there is appropriate scrutiny of the deal if it could have such far-reaching implications for population health.”

The projected avoidable death toll in the study far exceeds that which the UK saw during the coronavirus pandemic, when 137,000 excess deaths were recorded between March 2020-June 2022.

“If the indirect effect on adult social care is also included, the increase in excess deaths is even greater (291,000),” reads the study.

The greatest number of excess deaths is projected to occur in patients suffering from cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal issues as well as cancer.

Patients with “neurological, endocrine, musculoskeletal, and mental health problems” will also face “broader effects on quality of life,” the research states.

The government has assured the public that “frontline services” will be protected, notes the report, but “the NHS will need to fund this deal from allocations made six months before the deal was agreed. The evidence suggests that if additional public expenditure was available, it could be more effectively deployed within the NHS itself.”

The research projected that the greatest number of deaths would occur in cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal and cancer patients.

It added that there will also be broader harm caused to quality of life for patients in those sectors as well as “neurological, endocrine, musculoskeletal, and mental health problems”.

Tim Bierley, a campaigner with the UK-based group Global Justice Now, said that the report “adds to the overwhelming evidence that the Trump medicines deal risks taking a wrecking ball to our health and our economy.”

“Billions that could be spent on recruiting more NHS staff, cutting [general practitioner] waiting times, or improving our hospital care are set to be siphoned off by corporate giants in the pharma industry,” said Bierley, whose group has joined the campaign Just Treatment in filing a legal challenge against the deal. “Scandalously, this backroom deal was not subject to any scrutiny in Parliament before being rushed through—and the government refuses to say what impact it will have on the NHS.”

“The next prime minister,” said Bierley, “must change direction, stand up for our NHS, and unpick the mess left by their predecessors.”

 

COVID-19 vaccine boosters may help protect against future animal coronaviruses

First exposure to SARS-CoV-2 ‘locks in’ our immune response

University of Cambridge

Facebook

XLinkedIn
MessageWhatsAppEmail

COVID-19 vaccine boosters not only protect against SARS‑CoV‑2 – the virus behind the most recent pandemic – but may also help protect against some future coronaviruses that risk spreading from animals to humans, Cambridge researchers have shown.

In a related study, the team has shown that an individual’s first exposure to SARS‑CoV‑2 ‘locks in’ their immune response, impeding their ability to respond to future variants, even when vaccinated.

When an individual is infected with a virus, the immune system produces antibodies that will recognise the virus if it re-enters the body and prevent infection taking hold again. Vaccination works on the same principle.

A team led by scientists in the Gupta and Rihn laboratories at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology & Infectious Disease (CITIID), University of Cambridge, asked whether the vaccines currently given against COVID-19 might also protect us against future coronaviruses that risk ‘spilling over’ from animals to humans.

In findings published today in the journal npj Vaccines, the team studied blood samples from older UK adults (average age around 69) who had received four COVID‑19 vaccine doses, including a recent bivalent booster that included both the original Wuhan strain and the Omicron variant.

They tested how well antibodies in these blood samples could neutralise different Omicron variants of SARS‑CoV‑2. They also tested the antibodies to see if they could neutralise the SARS‑CoV‑1 virus – responsible for the 2003 SARS outbreak – and a range of closely-related coronaviruses (known as ‘sarbecoviruses’) found in bats and pangolins, some of which are considered potential threats for future outbreaks.

As expected, antibodies worked less well against newer Omicron variants than against the original Wuhan strain, showing how the virus has evolved to escape the immune response. The antibodies were poor at neutralising SARS‑CoV‑1, which is genetically more distant.

Surprisingly, the antibodies were much better at neutralising two sarbecoviruses closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2 – one from bats and one from pangolins – than they were at neutralising the original Wuhan strain itself, even though these two viruses have never infected humans. Several of the bat and pangolin viruses tested have the ability to enter human cells and are genetically close enough to SARS‑CoV‑2 to raise concern about future spillovers.

Grace West from CITIID, the study’s joint first author, said: “We’d expect the COVID vaccine to offer protection against today’s variants, but we were surprised to find that it also provides protection against some animal coronaviruses with future pandemic potential.”

Rebecca Morse, also a joint first author from CITIID, said: “We may already have a head start when it comes to protecting against certain future outbreaks. Boosters could reduce both severity and spread if spillover were to occur, buying us vital time while we develop a more targeted vaccine. This will be particularly important for older and vulnerable populations, who are usually hardest hit in new pandemics.”

The researchers say their findings could inform next‑generation vaccine design. Vaccines that target parts of the coronavirus spike protein common to multiple viruses could protect against related viruses. The spike protein is a key element of the virus that the immune system recognises.

The research was funded by Wellcome and the Medical Research Council, with additional support from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust.

Why ‘first impressions’ matter when it comes to COVID-19 immunity

In a second study, Professor Ravindra Gupta and colleagues showed how your first encounter with COVID-19 – either through infection or vaccination – leaves a lasting immune ‘fingerprint’ that shapes how you respond to new variants for years, with important implications for vaccine design and pandemic preparedness.

Early on in the pandemic, relatively low reported case numbers in many African countries led to the perception that these countries had experienced limited exposure to SARS-CoV-2. But when the team analysed blood samples from unvaccinated adults in Nigeria in early 2023, they found that this was not the case – most individuals had already been exposed to the virus, often more than once, despite many never having been diagnosed or reporting illness.

This presented the team with a rare opportunity to understand how immunity builds up when infection comes first, rather than vaccination. Their findings are published in the journal iScience.

Using two independent cohorts sampled in 2023 while Omicron was circulating, the team found that immune responses were still dominated by earlier strains of the virus, even after subsequent infection with Omicron. This reflects a phenomenon known as ‘immune imprinting’, where the first exposure to the virus – whether through infection or vaccination – largely determines how the immune system will respond in future. Even after vaccination against or infection by subsequent variants, the immune system still responds as if the virus had not changed since that first exposure, increasing the chances that the virus will ‘escape’ the immune response.

First author Dr Adam Abdullahi from CITIID, Cambridge, and the Institute of Human Virology, Abuja, Nigeria, said: “The immune system doesn’t reset with each new variant. Instead, it builds on its first encounter, and that memory continues to influence how it responds to new variants. It’s like how, when we have a negative encounter with someone the first time we meet, this first impression can be hard to shake and informs how we deal with them each time we meet.”

To investigate this further, the team removed antibodies targeting earlier strains from the blood samples. With these antibodies removed, the blood was much less able to neutralise either the earlier variants of COVID-19 or Omicron, confirming that responses to newer variants were largely built on pre-existing immune memory.

Although vaccination increased overall antibody levels, it appeared to amplify existing immune memory, boosting responses shaped by earlier infections rather than generating strong new responses to variants such as Omicron. Even after further exposure to Omicron, antibody responses rarely became stronger against this variant than against the original virus.

In other words, immune responses, established during early infection, can persist over time, constraining the body’s ability to mount new responses to new variants, even after vaccination or re-exposure.

This suggests that in populations with high levels of prior infection, vaccine performance is partly determined by the sequence of exposures individuals have experienced, including whether infection occurred before vaccination, and which variants were encountered first. The findings may help explain why new variants keep spreading, even in populations with high prior exposure

Ravindra Gupta, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Professor of Global Health at CITIID, University of Cambridge, said: “Vaccines are still extremely important as they help reduce the severity of infection, so it’s important to get your boosters if you are vulnerable. But our findings help explain why we see different patterns of immunity across the world. The pandemic did not unfold uniformly, and our vaccination strategies need to reflect that reality.

“Early infection leaves a lasting imprint on the immune system, and in this context, we need to look at designing vaccines that work across different immune histories to help prepare for future pandemics.”

Professor Alash’le Abimiku from the Institute of Human Virology, Nigeria, joint lead author, said: “Understanding how populations were exposed to the virus is essential for designing effective vaccination strategies, particularly in settings where infection occurred before vaccine rollout. Future vaccines may need to be designed so they don’t just ‘replay’ the immune system’s past experiences, but instead actively train it to recognise and respond well to new variants.”

Imprinting may also explain why the COVID vaccine offers greater protection against some sarbecoviruses than it does later variants of SARS-CoV-2, such as Omicron, as reported in the npj Vaccines study.

The original vaccine, like an infection during early COVID-19 waves, caused imprinting of our antibodies against the Wuhan strain, and as the virus mutated over time, the immune system would be increasingly less likely to recognise it. However, some of the bat and pangolin coronaviruses have spike proteins that are more similar to that of the Wuhan strain of SARS-CoV-2 than the spike proteins of Omicron and subsequent variants.

Professor Gupta, who leads The HKJC Global Health Institute, added: “This work was only possible because of close collaboration between Nigerian institutions and international partners, each bringing its own expertise. These partnerships are critical to ensuring that globally relevant evidence is generated from, and directly benefits, populations most affected by emerging infectious diseases.”

The research was funded by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Global Health Institute, Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholars Program and European Research Council, with additional support from the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference

1. West, GE, & Morse, RB, et al. COVID-19 vaccination induces cross-neutralisation of sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-2. npj Vaccines; 1 July 2026; DOI: 10.1038/s41541-026-01469-x
2. Abdullahi, A,  Morse, RB, & Cheng, TKM, et al. SARS-CoV-2 Omicron infection reveals imprinted 1 antibody responses in the absence of vaccination. iScience; 28 April 2026; DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2026.115910

---

Journal

npj Vaccines

DOI

10.1038/s41541-026-01469-x 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

COVID-19 vaccination induces cross-neutralisation of sarbecoviruses related to SARS-CoV-2

Article Publication Date

1-Jul-2026

Fauci Summoned To Testify Before Powerful Senate Committee In July

SENATOR RAND PAUL PERSECUTES THE HERO OF COVID

Dr. Anthony Fauci. Official White House photo by Tia Dufour/Wikimedia Commons


June 24, 2026
 The Center Square
By Thérèse Boudreaux

(The Center Square) – The Republican head of a powerful U.S. Senate committee has subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci, demanding the former chief medical advisor testify before lawmakers about his response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For six months, I have been negotiating with Anthony Fauci’s lawyers over a date to testify before my Homeland Security Committee. He finally agreed to appear this month. Then he backed out. So I subpoenaed him,” Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., posted on social media Tuesday. “He will testify in July.”

In a separate post, Paul outlined some of the questions he intends to ask Fauci, who headed the nation’s pandemic response.

“Did Dr. Fauci fund gain-of-function research while telling Congress he didn’t? Why were records destroyed? And why did he need a presidential pardon? The American people deserve answers, and I am going to make sure they get them during our hearing next month,” Paul said.

Fauci, who received a preemptive pardon from former President Joe Biden, has faced criticism over his handling of the pandemic response.

Paul and other Republicans have accused Fauci of covering up the true origins of the virus after a National Institutes of Health official revealed in 2024 that U.S. taxpayer dollars had indeed funded what many would term “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the area where the virus was first discovered.

The admission contradicted Fauci’s assertion to Congress in 2021, under oath, that the “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a statement Republicans considered intentionally misleading.

Paul’s subpoena Monday came just days after former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified hundreds of documents, which she claims “expose Fauci’s direct role in influencing and manipulating IC assessments on COVID-19.”

Among other records, Gabbard declassified the U.S. taxpayer-funded research on coronaviruses, which analyzed the risks of coronavirus spreading from bats to humans, that NIH had admitted to funding. The controversy-ridden nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance conducted those studies, some of which dated back to 2014.

During the pandemic, Fauci repeatedly discouraged the idea that the virus originated from a lab.

But the other documents Gabbard declassified, which largely consist of email exchanges between federal health and IC officials, fall short of proving that he “worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about his actions” and the lab leak theory.

The declassified information shows Fauci was included in the communications between federal health agencies and the Intelligence Community, both involved with pandemic research and response and both attempting to clear up conflicting information.

Per the emails, Fauci often advised IC officials – who specifically asked health officials for advice and clarification on how to interpret virus-related research and other theories – and recommended they consult certain health experts for additional information. He also provided his opinion that the virus was zoonotic in origin when asked.

Most health officials in the emails, whose names were largely redacted, emphasized caution related to assertions that the virus was created in a lab.

One email written by an IC official read “Hi team – Is anyone looking at the open source report that a Chinese virologist claims to have proof that COVID-19 was made in a Wuhan lab? We’re getting questions from our leadership and I figured those with more technical expertise probably have already evaluated this report.”


A recipient – presumably from the NIH, but both the name and office of the respondent are redacted – informed the IC official that the study in question had numerous errors and was published by a pair of nonprofit groups, which had never before released any medical research, linked to political strategist Steve Bannon.

Some of the health officials acknowledged that coronaviruses were likely studied in the WIV lab. They also confirmed that a lab analysis found that “all of the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus — specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cell receptors” were present at the WIV in 2019.

However, they pointed out to IC officials that the authors of the report determined the findings “place equal weight on the hypothesis” of an accidental lab leak versus the virus emerging naturally in Wuhan.

“I’ve been tracking this pretty closely in the literature, and would advise to set a very high threshold for any GOF [gain of function] interpretation as an origin of SAR COV-2,” a health official whose name is redacted said. “Not saying it is impossible, but I think Occam’s razor is the best guidance here. […] To be honest – I cannot imagine the Chinese NOT doing this type of research, but an escaped P3+/P4 LAI would be extraordinary.”

While the origins of the virus still remain under debate, the White House has officially endorsed the lab leak theory.

 

‘Youniversalism’ measures growing reliance on personal truth

Universiteit van Amsterdam

LinkedInWeChatEmail

It has often been suggested that we now live in a “post-truth” world. People increasingly rely on their own feelings as a yardstick for what is true. Psychologists at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have now developed the ‘Youniversalism’ scale, to allow them to measure people’s belief in subjective and experiential truths.

When emotions and personal beliefs outweigh facts and expertise, it makes it harder to recognise and correct disinformation. ‘That can have serious consequences,’ says Bastiaan Rutjens psychologist at the UvA and one of the researchers involved. ‘For example, people could negatively impact their health by following unfounded medical advice, such as we see increasingly on social media.’

Researchers call this way of thinking “intuitive epistemology”: the idea that you can sense what is true and that everyone’s truth is equally valid. ‘This concept has been described before in the humanities, by Wouter Hanegraaff among others, but until now there was no good way to measure it,’ says Rutjens.

The new term 'Universalism'

By combining ‘You’ and ‘Universalism’ the new term encompasses the idea that the individual sees themselves as central in constructing and explaining the world around them. The scale has been tested on more than 1,500 people.

Two beliefs: ‘Truth is something you feel’ and ‘Truth is relative’

The Youniversalism scale measures two types of beliefs:

1. Truth is experiential:
   People score high here if they can relate to statements such as ‘I trust my gut feeling to know what is true’ or ‘I can usually feel whether a claim is correct, even if I cannot explain why’.
2. Truth is subjective:
   This concerns the idea that truth is relative and personal. Examples are statements such as: ‘What is true depends on the context’ and ‘The truth comes from within’.

'These days, we’re seeing changes in what people believe and above all, in how they determine what is true. This scale allows us to measure that,’ said Rutjens.

Spiritual and sceptical about science

It is also important to understand how these ways of thinking relate to other societal developments. ‘In addition to the growing emphasis on feelings, more and more people call themselves “spiritual but not religious”’, says Rutjens. ‘Spiritual people often say that truth can be found by looking inward or through personal experience.’

The more people tend to view themselves as ‘spiritual’, the higher they score they on the Youniversalism scale and the lower they score on trust in science. At the same time, this group shows lower levels of trust in science. ‘That points to greater scepticism towards scientific findings,’ says Rutjens.

Consequences of disinformation

According to the researchers, Youniversalism helps explain why some people stubbornly cling to ideas that contradict the facts but ‘make sense’ to them, such as conspiracy theories surrounding the coronavirus or drinking raw milk for health reasons.

‘Those who strongly believe that truth comes from their own feelings will be less inclined to be convinced by data, experts or official sources,’ says Rutjens.

The scale could be of help to, for example, policymakers, doctors or science communicators, allowing them to better assess which groups rely primarily on intuition and which arguments might have more effect on them. ‘If we knew this, we could present scientific information differently,’ says Rutjens. ‘For example, less in terms of “dry facts” and more through stories and personal experiences.’

---

Journal

Personality and Individual Differences

DOI

10.1016/j.paid.2026.11382 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Understanding experiential and subjective truth: Development and validation of the ‘Youniversalism’ scale

Article Publication Date

1-Aug-2026

ZOONOSIS / SPILLOVER

Single amino acid change may help viruses jump from bat to human

University of California - San Francisco

Most pandemics start when a pathogen spreads from animals to humans. It’s a leading explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic: the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is a cousin to coronaviruses that live in bats. 

Now, researchers at the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Institut Pasteur, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, report that a single amino-acid change alters how a coronavirus protein interacts with the human and bat immune systems, shifting the body's response to infection. 

It helps explain how benign animal viruses can adapt to humans and cause severe disease.

The study appeared in Cell Host & Microbe on May 13.

Researchers looked at SARS-CoV-2 and a related coronavirus called RaTG13, which only infects bats, and compared how each virus interacted with immune proteins in bat and human lung cells. The experiments relied on the first laboratory-grown lung cell line from the greater horseshoe bat.

A viral protein called OrfB9 emerged as a key factor. The SARS-CoV-2 and RaTG13 versions of OrfB9 differ by one amino acid out of roughly 100. In human cells, the SARS-CoV-2 version disabled an immune alarm system, allowing the virus to multiply. In bat cells, the RaTG13 version activated an immune protein that helped suppress the virus.

"The difference between a virus that stays in bats and one that spills over into humans and causes catastrophic disease can come down to remarkably small genetic changes," said Nevan J. Krogan, PhD, director of QBI and senior author of the study. "By mapping these interactions at the protein level — across two viruses and two species — we can read the molecular signatures that predict spillover risk. It's the kind of early warning system the world needs."

Authors: UCSF authors are Jyoti Batra, PhD; Yuan Zhou, MS; Rithika Adavikolanu; Durga Anand; Sooraj Verma; Martin Gordon, MS; Shivali Malpotra, MS; Jack M. Moen, PhD; Ajda Rojc, MS; Atoshi Banerjee, PhD; Sourobh Maji, PhD; Monita Muralidharan, PhD; Helene Foussard, PhD; Irene P. Chen, PhD; CJ San Felipe, PhD; Lorena Zuliani-Alvarez, PhD; Promisree Choudhury, PhD; Kirsten Obernier, PhD; Rahul Suryawanshi, PhD; Taha Y. Taha, PhD, PharmD; Kliment A. Verba, PhD; James S. Fraser, PhD; Robert M. Stroud, PhD, MA; Melanie Ott, MD, PhD; Ben Polacco, PhD; Danielle L. Swaney, PhD; Ignacia Echeverria, PhD; and Manon Eckhardt, PhD. For all authors see the paper.

Funding:  National Institutes of Health (U19AI135990, U19AI135972, U54AI170792, F31AI164671-01, G20AI174733, UL1TR004419, S10OD026880, S10OD030463); Howard Hughes Medical Institute; James B. Pendleton Charitable Trust; Roddenberry Foundation; P. and E. Taft; Gladstone Institutes; Fast Grants; Innovative Genomics Institute; Chan Zuckerberg Biohub – San Francisco; ANR EmerCoV AAP CE35.

 

About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at https://ucsf.edu or see our Fact Sheet.
 

###

Follow UCSF

ucsf.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | Twitter.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsf

 

---

Journal

Cell Host & Microbe

 

Elsevier launches Ebola Information Center with free clinical and research resources to support response to outbreak

Elsevier

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatEmail

Following the World Health Organization’s declaration of an Ebola outbreak caused by Bundibugyo virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), Elsevier, a global leader in scientific information and analytics, has  launched its Ebola Information Center to provide healthcare professionals, researchers, policy makers and the public with free access to critical clinical and research information to support the global response to this outbreak.  

Elsevier’s Ebola Information Center brings together a wide range of freely available resources, with a focus on the emerging Bundibugyo virus variant. The center combines evidence-based clinical guidance, peer-reviewed research, early-stage research findings, datasets and AI-assisted research tools to support rapid evidence discovery and response coordination during this critical public health emergency.  

Key Resources Available: 

• Ebola Healthcare Hub: A dedicated clinical resource offering evidence-based clinical overviews, patient education materials and drug monographs to support healthcare professionals responding to the outbreak 

• ScienceDirect Research Content: Ebola-related articles and book chapters published by Elsevier journals are freely available on ScienceDirect, the world’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature. New content will continue to be made available throughout the duration of the crisis 

• LeapSpace: Researchers working on the outbreak response can access LeapSpace, the research-grade AI workspace to rapidly map existing evidence on Bundibugyo virus pathology, treatment approaches and outbreak response, identify relevant collaborators and funding opportunities, and analyse their own research data alongside published literature 

• The Lancet Ebola Collection: Ebola-related research, reviews and commentaries are being made freely available as they are published across The Lancet Group’s journals.  

• Cell Press Ebola Collection: Ebola research is being made freely available across Cell Press journals 

• SSRN Ebola Hub: Early-stage research on Bundibugyo virus is being made immediately available through SSRN, Elsevier’s platform for rapid worldwide dissemination of preprints. The curated Ebola Hub helps researchers, public health authorities, clinicians and the public access emerging findings. Please note that these papers have not yet benefited from peer review 

• Mendeley Data: Ebola-related datasets indexed across multiple repositories including figshare, Zenodo and Dryad have been curated to help researchers rapidly identify potentially relevant data for their work.  

Esra Erkal, Executive Vice President of Global Communications for Elsevier, said: “The Ebola Information Center represents our commitment to supporting the global health emergency response by making critical scientific knowledge and clinical resources immediately and freely accessible to those on the frontlines of this outbreak. We will continuously expand the resources available as new evidence emerges.”  

Elsevier has also made all the content from the Ebola Information Center available on publicly funded repositories, with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are provided free of charge for as long as the Ebola Information Center remains active.  

Additional resources will be continuously added to the Ebola Information Center throughout the duration of the public health emergency. The company’s response to Ebola follows Elsevier’s previous support for global health emergencies including SARS, MERS, Zika, Coronavirus and Mpox, demonstrating a sustained commitment to supporting the scientific community and public health response during critical health crises.  

About Elsevier 

Elsevier is a global leader in advanced information and decision support. For over a century, we have been helping advance science and healthcare to advance human progress. We support academic and corporate research communities, doctors, nurses, future healthcare professionals and educators across 170 countries in their vital work. 

We help impact makers achieve better outcomes with research and clinical-grade solutions built on the world’s leading scientific and medical knowledge base of evidence-based content, precision AI, and expert human assessment to ensure accountability at every step. 

We champion inclusion and sustainability, working with the communities that we serve. The Elsevier Foundation supports research and health partnerships around the world. 

Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. For more information, visit www.elsevier.com and follow us on social media @elsevierconnect. 

Social murder: Pandemic profits and vaccine apartheid

By Ian Angus

Published 9 June, 2026

First published at Climate & Capitalism.

Amidst the worst pandemic in 100 years, with devastation globally, instead of a freely available public good, COVID technologies largely remain a commodity owned by companies, first sold to the rich — as if it is a luxury handbag!
— Fatima Hassan, founder of the South African Health Justice Initiative1

In 2015, Turing Pharmaceuticals raised the price of a single pill of Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug used by cancer and HIV/AIDS patients, from $13.50 to $750.00. The drug was over 60 years old and Turing didn’t develop it; they had recently purchased the US rights. Responding to critics, CEO Martin Shrkeli said his only regret was not increasing the price even more.

My shareholders expect me to make the most profit. That’s the ugly, dirty truth. … No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, capitalist system and capitalist rules. My investors expect to me to maximize profits, not to minimize them, or go half, or go 70 percent, but to go to 100 percent of the profit curve.2

Shrkeli was subsequently convicted of unrelated securities frauds and anti-competitive activity — crimes against wealthy investors and competitors. He was not charged with profiteering at the expense of desperately ill people. As liberal pundit Robert Reich commented, prosecutors “couldn’t nail him for his escapades as a pharmaceutical executive, which were completely legal — although vile.”3

In fact, as Nick Dearden demonstrates in Pharmanomics, Shrkeli was unusual only in being so outspoken.

Shkreli’s activities are indeed pretty mainstream in an industry renowned for price gouging, for buying up the intellectual property of other people, for acquiring or shutting down competitors, for playing the financial markets, for making insignificant changes to existing drugs and pretending they have made something new and important, and for lobbying for an even more favorable regulatory environment.4

The fundamental contradiction that Karl Marx identified, between the use value of commodities and their exchange value — between their benefits and their prices — are particularly obvious and extreme in pharmaceuticals. Life-saving drugs, essential to the survival of people who have no alternatives, are produced only if they can generate profits that capitalists consider acceptable. The result is social murder — pharmaceutical companies have shown again and again that they will deny life-saving medicines to people who can’t pay.

COVID billionaires

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Big Pharma reaped unprecedented revenues and profits. In 2021-2022, Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and Sinovac collectively made $90 billion in profits from COVID vaccines and medicines. Pfizer netted $35 billion, while BioNTech and Moderna took about $20 billion each.5 The People’s Vaccine Alliance and Oxfam calculated that in 2021, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna had combined pre-tax profits of $65,000 every minute — over $1,000 a second.6

In 2021, COVID-19 vaccines sold by the seven largest private vaccine producers generated a revenue of USD 86 billion and a net profit of USD 50 billion. With a net profit margin of 57% in 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were beating business-as-usual high-profits, even for the lucrative pharmaceutical industry — which is among the world’s most profitable business sectors. Looking at four of the seven companies that made extraordinary profits, Pfizer, BionTech, Moderna and Sinovac, the net profit margins for 2021 are even in the range from 62% to 76%.7

Those profits in essence channeled public money into private pockets. As researchers at University College London write, “US drug companies turn taxpayer-funded innovation into astronomical profits.”

Years before the pandemic began, the US government was a major investor in what would become COVID-19 vaccines. It supplied nearly $350 million to build technologies crucial to mRNA vaccines. Later, as coronavirus infections surged, it spent some $2 billion to support vaccine clinical trials. Ultimately, the US government put more than $30 billion into research, development, and procurement of the vaccines.8

In addition, vaccine makers received at least $86.5 billion from the US government under Advanced Purchase Agreements which did not require them to return any money if they failed to produce vaccines.9

In April 2021, Forbes magazine published its annual list of the World’s Billionaires. Comparing it to the previous year’s list, Oxfam and the People’s Vaccine Alliance found nine new billionaires whose wealth came directly from COVID vaccines. They included the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech, two of Moderna’s founding investors and the company’s chair, the CEO of a company that manufactured and packaged vaccine, and three founders of CanSino Biologics.

Between them, the nine new billionaires, have a combined net wealth of $19.3 billion, enough to fully vaccinate all people in low-income countries 1.3 times. … In addition, eight existing billionaires — who have extensive portfolios in the COVID-19 vaccine pharma corporations — have seen their combined wealth increase by $32.2 billion, enough to fully vaccinate everyone in India.10

Forbes itself, using a broader definition, reported that forty of the new billionaires on its list had “ties to companies battling the Covid-19 pandemic.”11

That corporate and individual wealth was a direct result of gross overcharging for essential medicine. Independent experts from Imperial College London calculated that mRNA COVID vaccines could be produced for as little as $1.18 per dose, but Big Pharma was selling them for four to twenty times as much.12

Who gets the medicine?

At the United Nations in September 2020, sixteen pharmaceutical corporations, including AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer, signed an agreement to develop COVID-19 vaccines. They promised to “bring large quantities of safe and effective innovations to countries around the world for broad distribution as early as possible, no matter their income level” and “to make products we are developing or supporting affordable in lower-income countries.13

They lied.

The first vaccines were delivered in December 2020, and from the beginning, profit drove distribution. As the graph below shows, high-income countries began vaccinating immediately, reaching 1 dose per 100 people within the first month. Low-income countries remained effectively at zero until March 2021, and did not reach 1 dose per 100 until June 2021.

Global COVID vaccinations per 100 people, 2021-2024. (Adapted from Our World in Data.)

COVAX, a public-private bulk-buying agency, had aimed to provide low-cost or free vaccines to poor countries, enough for one dose for 20% of every country’s population. It failed to reach half of that modest goal. The pharmaceutical industry sold most of the vaccines directly to rich countries, where the most profit could be made, leaving the people of poorer nations at the mercy of the virus.

As People’s Vaccine campaigners wrote:

The COVID-19 vaccines, funded largely by the public, have been privatized and monopolized leaving pharmaceutical corporations the power to set prices as they like. Some are charging wildly varying prices to different buyers that suggests there is no discernible relationship to the actual cost of production. And some rich country governments appear to have willingly paid higher prices than necessary to push their way to the front of the vaccine queue, thus contributing directly to vaccine scarcity in low- and middle-income countries.14

By September 2021, 60% of people in rich countries had received at least one dose, compared to 3% in the Global South.15 Nick Deardon identifies the cause of that gross inequality:

The bad news was that this vaccine technology was in the hands of just three corporations, all of them committed to turning a substantial profit. The reality was that, even by 2022, for every dose of mRNA vaccine delivered to low-income countries, fifty-six were being delivered to rich countries….

The general rule was clear: the richer you were, the more likely you were to have vaccines—and, at the top end of the wealth spectrum, you’d likely end up with many more than you required. This would be a problem not only for those countries at the lower end of the spectrum: it would make ending the pandemic much harder.16

It has been credibly estimated that equitable sharing of COVID vaccines “would have prevented 295.8 million infections and 1.3 million deaths worldwide (as a direct result of COVID-19) by the end of 2021.” Under a “full sharing scenario” there would have been more than 13% fewer COVID deaths worldwide.17

In addition, dealing with large unvaccinated populations forced governments to divert resources from other public health programs. According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic “reversed years of progress in providing essential TB [tuberculosis] services and reducing TB disease burden.” Globally, more than a million fewer people received tuberculosis treatment globally in 2020 than in the previous year. That led to 500,000 additional TB deaths, making the total second only to deaths caused directly by COVID.18

+ + + +

The British Medical Journal described the drug companies’ actions as vaccine apartheid and a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rich countries had more vaccines than they needed, poor countries had little or none.

Amid the worst pandemic in 100 years, instead of a freely available public good, vaccines remain a commodity owned by companies and sold to the rich. Instead of hoarding one billion ‘excess’ doses this year, rich nations could give them to Covax. While such ‘charitable donations’ are a first step, they are not enough. Donations are a vestige of colonial injustice and reparations are long overdue. The current ‘trickle down’ colonial charity model has failed….

Covid-19 global vaccine allocation is based on power, first mover advantage, and the ability to pay. This moral scandal, enabled by corporate and political permission of mass death, is tantamount to a crime against humanity….

Global vaccine inequity is toppling all our successes in rapid vaccine development and is needlessly prolonging the pandemic. Ongoing inequity is a direct consequence of commercial greed and political self-interest. Under the cover of serving humanity, and with a blind eye turned towards the innumerable deaths in disadvantaged nations, corporations aided by their political allies are once more doing what they do best: making a killing.19

There is no better term for that than social murder.

This is a draft chapter from Ian Angus’ next book, with the working title Social Murder: Capitalism’s Assault on Our Health and Survival.

• 1

  Fatima Hassan, “Vaccine apartheid is racist and wrong,” PLOS Global Public Health, May 23, 2022

• 2

  Quoted in Nick Dearden, Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health, Verso 2023, xii.

• 3

  Robert Reich, “Martin Shkreli is just one example of excess in a rotten system,” Christian Science Monitor, December 23, 2015.

• 4

  Nick Dearden, Pharmanomics, xiv.

• 5

  Esther de Haan and Albert ten Kate, Pharma’s Pandemic Profits: Pharma profits from COVID-19 vaccines, SOMO Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, February 2023, 4

• 6

  “Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna making $1,000 profit every second while world’s poorest countries remain largely unvaccinated,” Oxfam International / People’s Vaccine Alliance, 16 November 2021.

• 7

  De Haan and ten Kate, Pharma’s Pandemic Profits, 4.

• 8

  Travis Whitfill and Mariana Mazzucato, “ARPA-H Could Offer Taxpayers a Fairer Shake,” Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2023.

• 9

  De Haan and ten Kate, Pharma’s Pandemic Profits, 5.

• 10

  Oxfam International, “COVID vaccines create 9 new billionaires with combined wealth greater than cost of vaccinating world’s poorest countries,” Press Release, May 20, 2021.

• 11

  Giacomo Tognini, “Meet The 40 New Billionaires Who Got Rich Fighting Covid-19,” Forbes, April 7, 2021.

• 12

  Zoltán Kis and Zain Rizvi, How to Make Enough Vaccine for the World in One Year, Public Citizen, May 26, 2021; Anna Marriott and Alex Maitland, The Great Vaccine Robbery, The People’s Vaccine, July 29, 2021.

• 13

  “Life Science Companies and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Commitments to Expanded Global Access for COVID-19 Diagnostics, Therapeutics, and Vaccines,” Joint Communique, September 30, 2020.

• 14

  Anna Marriott and Alex Maitland, The Great Vaccine Robbery, The People’s Vaccine, July 29, 2021.

• 15

  De Haan and ten Kate, Pharma’s Pandemic Profits, 27

• 16

  Dearden, Pharmanomics, 120-1, 124.

• 17

  Sam Moore et al., “Retrospectively modeling the effects of increased global vaccine sharing on the COVID-19 pandemic,” Nature Medicine, October 27, 2023.

• 18

  Global Tuberculosis Report 2021, World Health Organization, 2021.

• 19

  “Profiteering from vaccine inequity: a crime against humanity?” Editorial, British Medical Journal, August 16 2021