Raphael Stevens

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo receives a Covid-19 vaccine, at a church in the Harlem section of New York, on March 17, 2021.Seth Wenig | AFP | Getty ImagesNew York is expanding its Covid vaccine eligibility to everyone 30 and older beginning Tuesday, followed by all residents 16 and older on April 6, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday.The move comes nearly a month before President Joe Biden’s May 1 deadline for states to vastly open up their supplies to all residents.”Today we take a monumental step forward in the fight to beat COVID,” Cuomo said in a statement. “As we continue to expand eligibility, New York will double down on making the vaccine accessible for every community to ensure equity, particularly for communities of color who are too often left behind.”Nearly 30% of all New Yorkers have received at least one vaccine shot, according to the statement. The state has administered 9,056,970 shots so far. More

In this articlePFEMRNA[The stream is slated to start at 2:10 p.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.]President Joe Biden is delivering remarks Monday on the government’s Covid-19 response and vaccination efforts around the country.Biden’s remarks come just hours after the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, issued a dire warning to reporters. She said she’s worried the U.S. was facing “impending doom” as daily Covid-19 cases begin to rebound once again, threatening to send more people to the hospital even as vaccinations accelerate nationwide.U.S. health officials are urging Americans to get vaccinated as quickly as possible while also following pandemic safety measures.A CDC study looking at health-care personnel and other essential workers published Monday found Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines were 80% effective in preventing coronavirus infections two weeks after a single dose. Two doses were better than one, with the vaccines’ effectiveness jumping to 90% two weeks after the second dose, the agency found. More

In this articlePFEMRNAThe U.S. is facing “impending doom” as daily Covid-19 cases begin to rebound once again, threatening to send more people to the hospital even as vaccinations accelerate nationwide, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday.”When I first started at CDC about two months ago I made a promise to you: I would tell you the truth even if it was not the news we wanted to hear. Now is one of those times when I have to share the truth, and I have to hope and trust you will listen,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a press briefing.”I’m going to pause here, I’m going to lose the script, and I’m going to reflect on the recurring feeling I have of impending doom,” Walensky said. “We have so much to look forward to, so much promise and potential of where we are and so much reason for hope, but right now I’m scared.”The U.S. is recording a weekly average of 63,239 new Covid-19 cases per day, a 16% increase compared with a week ago, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Daily cases are now growing by at least 5% in 30 states and the District of Columbia.CNBC Health & ScienceRead CNBC’s latest coverage of the Covid pandemic:One dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines was 80% effective in preventing Covid in CDC study of health workersCDC chief warns U.S. headed for ‘impending doom’ as Covid cases rise again: ‘Right now I’m scared’Biden says 90% of U.S. adults will be eligible for Covid shots by April 19New York expands Covid vaccine eligibility to all adults starting April 6, Cuomo says Coronavirus hospitalizations are also climbing. The U.S. is reporting a seven-day average of 4,816 Covid-19 hospital admissions as of Friday, a 4.2% increase compared with the week prior, according to CDC data.Walensky urged Americans to “just hold on a little longer” and to get vaccinated against the virus once it’s their turn. When cases rise as they have over the last week or so, Walensky said, they often “surge and surge big” shortly thereafter.”I’m speaking today not necessarily as your CDC director and not only as your CDC director, but as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter, to ask you to just please hold on a little while longer,” Walensky said.Leading public health experts have warned since late February that infections could pick back up again amid the rise of virus variants threatening to sweep across the U.S. much like they did in Europe.One of those variants first identified in the U.K, known as B.1.1.7, has now been detected in every state except Oklahoma, according to the CDC’s most recent data. The agency is also carefully watching another variant found in New York City, known as B.1.526, which is also thought to be more transmissible compared with previous strains, Walensky said last week.The White House’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said Sunday, however, that the troublesome virus mutations aren’t the only reason cases are on the rise.More Americans, tired of pandemic restrictions and reassured by the lifesaving vaccines, are traveling for spring break. Some state leaders are pulling back on restrictions, including mask mandates, intended to slow the virus’s spread.”Variants we take seriously and are concerned, but it is not only the variants that are doing that,” Fauci told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.Vaccine rollout acceleratesThe grim warning from Walensky followed what was an otherwise optimistic update on the nation’s vaccine rollout.The U.S. is administering a weekly average of 2.7 million shots per day, which is “significant progress” toward President Joe Biden’s fresh goal of administering 200 million shots in his first 100 days in office, said Andy Slavitt, White House senior advisor for Covid response.”This is good news. We’re headed in the right direction, but we can’t slow down. Millions remain unvaccinated and at risk,” Slavitt said.More than 72% of Americans ages 65 and older have now received at least one dose of a vaccine, while nearly half of that age group is considered fully vaccinated. More than a third of all adult Americans have now received at least one shot, CDC data shows. A new study from the agency on Monday found that the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are proving to be highly effective, even with just one dose.The study, which examined nearly 4,000 health-care personnel, first responders and front-line workers between Dec. 14 and March 1, found that the vaccines were 80% effective in preventing coronavirus infections after just a single dose.However, federal health officials maintained that two doses are better than one, adding that the vaccines’ effectiveness jumped to 90% two weeks after the second shot. More

A man walks past barbed wire and security fencing as it surrounds the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, January 26, 2021.Al Drago | ReutersThe Supreme Court said Monday that it will hear a plea from the Republican attorney general of Kentucky to allow him to defend a state law restricting a type of abortion procedure frequently targeted by conservatives.Anti-abortion advocates have hoped that the Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed justices, will curtail past cases expanding the right to abortion.The Kentucky case, however, is over a more narrow legal issue and is unlikely to have broader ramifications on laws affecting reproductive rights.CNBC PoliticsRead more of CNBC’s politics coverage:Murder trial begins for accused George Floyd killerSupreme Court considers whether Goldman shareholders can sueHere’s how Biden’s infrastructure package will likely tackle climate changeThe bill, known as HB 454, regulates “dilation and evacuation,” a common abortion method often used in the second trimester. It passed in 2018.Kentucky’s only licensed abortion clinic, EMW Women’s Surgical Center, challenged HB 454. The clinic sued the state’s attorney general — who at the time was Democrat Andy Beshear — as well as the state’s secretary of health and family services. The health secretary led the defense of the law after Beshear asked to be dismissed as a defendant.A district court struck down the law. That decision was affirmed by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court cited the 2016 Supreme Court case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. While the case was being argued, Republican Daniel Cameron succeeded Beshear as Kentucky attorney general, and Beshear was elected governor.Kentucky’s health secretary decided not to appeal the case after losing at the 6th Circuit. Cameron attempted to intervene in the case in order to do so, but the appeals court rejected his effort, reasoning that he was too late.In his petition with the justices, Cameron argued that the appeals court’s rejection of his effort “is an affront to state sovereignty.””The Sixth Circuit closed the courthouse doors to the very person that Kentucky law empowers to represent the Commonwealth’s interests in court,” Cameron wrote in the filing.Cameron also argued that an appeal was likely to succeed as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in June Medical Services v. Russo in 2020. June Medical Services may have limited the scope of the court’s earlier decision in Whole Woman’s Health.EMW Women’s Surgical Center, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, had urged the justices not to take the case.In a legal brief, the clinic wrote that the attorney general “had previously agreed to be dismissed from the case and to be bound by the judgment” and “could have sought to intervene earlier.”The clinic added that while the case was tangentially related to abortion, it was not an abortion dispute.”While the merits of this case concern the constitutionality of an abortion law, the issue presented by this petition is only whether a motion to intervene was timely filed,” it wrote.The Supreme Court will consider the case in its term beginning in the fall, and a decision is likely to come by the summer of 2022.The case is Daniel Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, No. 20-601. More

In this articleTSLAROKUARKKTDOCTRMBPRNTKTOSLHXJD6301.T-JPLMTIRDMHO-FRBASPCEVirgin Galactic pilots walk to the company’s SpaceShipTwo Unity spacecraft, attached to the jet carrier aircraft Eve.Virgin GalacticArk Invest, Cathie Wood’s firm with multiple actively managed exchanged-traded funds, will debut its latest fund on Tuesday: a space exploration ETF.ARKX, the firm’s eighth ETF, comes as an increasing number of private space companies prepare to go public later this year. In the past six months, seven space companies have announced SPAC deals.The ETF’s top 10 holdings by weight:Trimble – 8.3%Ark’s The 3D Printing ETF – 6.1%Kratos – 5.6%L3Harris – 5%JD.com – 4.8%Komatsu – 4.6%Lockheed Martin – 4.5%Iridium – 4.3%Thales – 4%Boeing – 3.6%Ark’s new fund also includes Virgin Galactic (1.95% weight) among its 39 constituent holdings, as of Friday.Wood — chief investment officer and CEO of Ark Investment Management — has made a name for herself by investing in “disruptive innovation” stocks. Her flagship fund, Ark Innovation, has seen more than $16 billion in inflows in the past year, according to FactSet.Wood has big bets on names like Tesla, Teladoc and Roku.Wood has garnered a large following after Ark Innovation returned nearly 150% last year. However, her flagship fund, Ark Innovation, is down nearly 9% this year. Amid the recent rotation out of technology names and into value stocks from the pressure of rising interest rates, Wood has stayed the course. Ark often buys the dip in any of its top holdings, which are all high conviction names. More

In March 2020, Hannu Rajaniemi pivoted his biotech company Helix Nanotechnologies’ focus from cancer therapies to Covid-19 vaccines.Rajaniemi’s then-six-person start-up wasn’t going to be able to compete with the likes of Pfizer and AstraZeneca, but HelixNano, as it’s known, had a different goal: Create a better, second-generation vaccine against the novel coronavirus.”We need to keep going and develop more countermeasures — more broadly effective second-wave vaccines, therapeutics and tests. … The virus is very good at generating surprises,” Rajaniemi says.Today, HelixNano has nine employees and Rajaniemi says its new vaccine will go to clinical trials in 2021, with the potential for approval by early 2022, depending “on a lot of factors.”Helix Nanotechnologies employees working in the lab in Cambridge, Mass. “Given that we’ve been working at a furious pace, it’s been very important to find space to actually think and reflect and make sure our team is working on the most important problem at any given time,” Rajaniemi says.Photo courtesy Helix Nanotechnologies.The role biotech start-ups can play in a pandemicRajaniemi originally co-founded Helix Nanotechnologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2013 to develop cancer therapeutics, which was a personal mission: His mother got sick with and eventually passed due to metastatic breast cancer.When the company pivoted to working on Covid-19 vaccines, he knew his start-up wouldn’t be one of the first vaccines out of the gate.”That would have required billions in [Operation] Warp Speed funding,” Rajaniemi says. (HelixNano has received $6.4 million in total funding as of May, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Y Combinator, and has received grant money from Google billionaire Eric Schmidt’s Schmidt Futures.)”In this crisis, the role of a start-up is to pursue more technically challenging, second-generation approaches and find solutions that the less agile bigger players might miss,” he says.While the first wave of Covid vaccines distributed in the United states from Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have to adapt their vaccines to new strains, HelixNano’s booster vaccine is designed to “provide much broader immunity,” he says.”The reason we got into this … was that we were worried about mutated SARS-CoV-2 strains able to evade vaccine immunity,” Rajaniemi says. “That is exactly the scenario that is now playing out with the South African, Brazilian and other emerging variants.”New vaccine technologies: Essentially ‘a zoom function and an amplify function’Developing a vaccine that is resistant to virus mutations is “an extremely challenging problem technically,” Rajaniemi says.But with the advantage of being able to build on all the knowledge scientists now have about the virus, HelixNano invented “two completely new vaccine technologies” for which they’ve filed for patents, according to Rajaniemi.”Essentially, we have a ‘zoom’ function and an ‘amplify’ function for mRNA vaccines,” he says. (Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are mRNA technology, as is Helix Nanotechnologies’ booster.)”We can make vaccines both more targeted and more powerful than was previously possible,” says Rajaniemi.The first technology Helix Nanotechnologies developed makes vaccines more accurate.”Traditional vaccines are blunt instruments. You show the immune system a bit of the virus — like the spike protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to infect cells — and [the body] generates antibodies against it,” Rajaniemi says. And “those antibodies are essentially random.”However, HelixNano’s new technology directs antibodies at a very specific part of the virus’ spike protein that “matters the most for preventing infection,” according to Rajaniemi.”To use a nerdy analogy, imagine the virus is the Death Star [space station from Star Wars]. To blow it up you need to hit a very small target — the thermal exhaust port,” says Rajaniemi (who is also a published science fiction author).”Your X-Wings [starfighters] could just randomly fire at the whole Death Star, but you would have to get very, very lucky to destroy it,” he says.”But if you concentrate all your fire on the exhaust port, you have a much better chance — even if your shots get less accurate as the virus mutates.” The second vaccine technology HelixNano developed is a way to multiply the body’s immune response to a specific vaccine target by a factor of 100.”For us as a company and for the biotech as a whole, the pandemic has squeezed an entire decade of development into 12 months,” says Rajaniemi.Photo credit: Helix NanotechnologiesTaken together, these two technological advances are what HelixNano has used to build their Covid-19 mutation-resistant booster vaccine.Beyond its own vaccine technology innovations, HelixNano is also collaborating with Louis Falo’s lab at University of Pittsburgh to make a vaccine technology that can be applied to the skin, rather than by a shot, which therefore can be self-administered.”The mRNA platform has proven to be effective for vaccination, but does have limitations including the requirement for very low temperatures (cold-chain) across the storage, delivery, and deployment process,” says Falo, who is chairman of the dermatology department at the University of Pittsburgh and a bioengineering professor. “We imagine an mRNA vaccine that is stable at room temperature and can therefore be readily deployed in global vaccination campaigns the same way that one would distribute and apply Band-Aids.”(Separately, Falo’s lab has its own skin application vaccine called PittCoVacc, which has submitted preclinical data to the Food and Drug Administration as a Pre-Investigational New Drug Application application.) Beyond CovidSuch broadly protective and easily administrable vaccines could play a roll in getting more of the more than 7.7 billion people people in the world immunized. Even as the U.S. vaccination efforts move along — as of March 29, 143 million vaccine doses have been administered, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention — many other countries efforts are lagging by orders of magnitude.But the work HelixNano is doing will have implications beyond Covid-19, too. The technology the start-up has created can be used to develop other vaccines beyond Covid, Rajaniemi says.”Just like we took some of the technologies we developed in a cancer context — like rapid mRNA manufacturing — and applied them to Covid, the Covid work has taught us how to develop an entirely new class of personalized cancer vaccines,” Rajaniemi says.”We’re still 95% on Covid, but are starting to spin the cancer work back up.””For us as a company and for the biotech as a whole, the pandemic has squeezed an entire decade of development into 12 months,” Rajaniemi says.Correction: This story has been corrected to reflect the collaboration between Helix Nanotechnologies and Louis Falo’s lab concerns an mRNA vaccine that can be applied to the skin rather than injected.See also:What it’s like to invent a coronavirus vaccine in the middle of a pandemicOpenAI’s Sam Altman: Artificial Intelligence will generate enough wealth to pay each adult $13,500 a yearHere’s what you need to know about ‘the social cost of greenhouse gases’—a key climate metric More

In this articlePFEMRNAA single dose of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine was 80% effective in preventing coronavirus infections, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of vaccinated health-care workers.The effectiveness of partial immunization was seen two weeks after the first dose, according to the CDC, which looked at nearly 4,000 health-care personnel, first responders and front-line workers between Dec. 14 and March 13. The health-care personnel and other essential workers in the study, which was published Monday, had no previous laboratory documentation of Covid-19 infection.Two doses are better than one, federal health officials said, adding that the vaccines’ effectiveness jumped to 90% two weeks after the second dose.”These findings indicate that authorized mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are effective for preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection, regardless of symptom status, among working-age adults in real-world conditions,” the U.S. agency wrote in the study. “COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all eligible persons.”The new CDC findings are likely to bolster arguments from some health experts and public health officials that the U.S. should prioritize giving Americans just one dose of the vaccines before moving on to second doses, accelerating the pace of vaccinations across the nation.The CDC findings were published just minutes before the agency’s director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, told reporters during a press briefing that the U.S. is facing “impending doom” as daily Covid-19 cases begin to rebound once again, threatening to send more people to the hospital even as vaccinations accelerate nationwide.CNBC Health & ScienceRead CNBC’s latest coverage of the Covid pandemic:One dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines was 80% effective in preventing Covid in CDC study of health workersCDC chief warns U.S. headed for ‘impending doom’ as Covid cases rise again: ‘Right now I’m scared’Biden says 90% of U.S. adults will be eligible for Covid shots by April 19New York expands Covid vaccine eligibility to all adults starting April 6, Cuomo says Unlike Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, which requires one dose, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines require two shots given three to four weeks apart. White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci has repeatedly said over the past few months that the U.S. should stick to the two-dose regimen.Dr. Paul Offit, a voting member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee who reviewed both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccine for emergency use authorization, said the CDC study overall is “good news.”However, he said he worries that people will now think one dose of the vaccines is “good enough” and won’t return for a second shot. He said studies have shown immunity appears to be actually more “durable” after the second dose, meaning protection may last longer.”The reason that they are two-dose vaccines is that the second doses give you a titer of neutralizing antibodies, virus-specific neutralizing antibodies that is almost 10 growth fold greater than after the first dose,” he told CNBC. Neutralizing antibodies play an important role in defending cells against the virus.Secondly, and more importantly, scientists also detected so-called T cells, another important part of the immune response that usually provides longer-lasting immunity, he said.There are also remaining questions about the highly contagious variants and whether the vaccines will protect mild to moderate forms of the disease, he said.Among the 3,950 participants in the study, 2,479, or 62.8%, received both recommended doses, and 477, or 12.1%, received only one dose, the CDC said. The infection rate among participants who were vaccinated was 0.04, compared with 1.38 for those who were not vaccinated.The study was conducted across eight U.S. locations: Phoenix, Tucson, and other areas in Arizona; Miami, Florida; Duluth, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; Temple, Texas; and Salt Lake City, Utah. The majority of the participants were female, white and had no chronic medical conditions, according to the CDC.The study had limitations, the CDC said, adding that delays in shipments could reduce the sensitivity of virus detection of Covid-19 tests.The interim vaccine effectiveness findings for both vaccines in real-world conditions complement and expand upon the vaccine effectiveness estimates from other recent studies, the CDC said. A large study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February found Pfizer’s vaccine was 94% protective against symptomatic Covid. More