Tag: coronavirus

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Three Research, One End result: Coronavirus Vaccines Level the Manner Out of the Pandemic

Three Studies, One Result: Coronavirus Vaccines Point the Way Out of the Pandemic

Three scientific studies released on Monday offered fresh evidence that widely used vaccines will continue to protect people against the coronavirus for long periods, possibly for years, and can be adapted to fortify the immune system still further if needed.

Most people immunized with the mRNA vaccines may not need boosters, one study found, so long as the virus and its variants do not evolve much beyond their current forms — which is not guaranteed. Mix-and-match vaccination shows promise, a second study found, and booster shots of one widely used vaccine, if they are required, greatly enhance immunity, according to a third report.

Scientists had worried that the immunity conferred by vaccines might quickly wane or that they might somehow be outrun by a rapidly evolving virus. Together, the findings renew optimism that the tools needed to end the pandemic are already at hand, despite the rise of contagious new variants now setting off surges around the globe.

“It’s nice to see that the vaccines are recapitulating what we’ve also seen with natural infection,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, said, “Remember all that stuff at the beginning where people were panicking over antibodies vanishing?” With all the good news now, he said, “it’s hard for me to see how and why we would need boosters of the same thing every six to nine months.”

The coronavirus may be evolving, but so are the body’s defenders. In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers discovered that the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna set off a persistent immune reaction in the body that may protect against the coronavirus for years, in part because important immune cells continue to develop for longer than thought.

Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues reported last month that immunity might last for years, possibly a lifetime, in people who were infected with the coronavirus and later vaccinated.

But it was unclear whether vaccination alone might have a similarly long-lasting effect.

In the new study, his team found that 15 weeks after the first vaccination, immune cells in the body were still organizing — becoming increasingly sophisticated and learning to recognize a growing set of viral genetic sequences.

The longer these cells have to practice, the more likely they are to thwart variants of the coronavirus that may emerge. The results suggest that the vast majority of vaccinated people will be protected over the long term — at least, against the existing coronavirus variants.

Older adults, people with weak immune systems and those who take drugs that suppress immunity nonetheless may need boosters. But people who survived Covid-19 and were later immunized may never need additional shots, because their immune responses seem to be particularly powerful.

The study looked at mRNA vaccines and did not consider the vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson or AstraZeneca. Dr. Ellebedy said he expected the immune responses produced by those vaccines to be less durable than those produced by mRNA vaccines.

New research suggests that a mix-and-match approach may work as efficiently. People who have had a dose of the Johnson & Johnson or AstraZeneca vaccines may do well to opt for an mRNA vaccine as the second dose.

In a British vaccine study published on Monday, volunteers produced high levels of antibodies and immune cells after getting one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and one dose of the AstraZeneca shot.

Updated 

June 28, 2021, 9:05 p.m. ET

Administering the vaccines in either order is likely to provide potent protection, Dr. Matthew Snape, a vaccine expert at the University of Oxford, said at a news conference on Monday. “Any of these schedules, I think could be argued, would be expected to be effective,” he said.

Dr. Snape and his colleagues began the trial, called Com-COV, in February. In the first wave of the study, they gave 830 volunteers one of four combinations of vaccines. Some got two doses of either Pfizer-BioNTech or AstraZeneca, both of which have been shown to be effective against Covid-19. Others got a dose of AstraZeneca followed by one of Pfizer, or vice versa.

Those who got two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech produced levels of antibodies about 10 times greater than in those who got two doses of AstraZeneca. Volunteers who got Pfizer-BioNTech followed by AstraZeneca produced antibody levels about five times greater than in those who received two doses of AstraZeneca.

And volunteers who got AstraZeneca followed by Pfizer-BioNTech reached antibody levels about as great as in those who got two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech.

Another promising result came when the researchers looked at levels of immune cells primed to attack the coronavirus. Mixing the vaccines produced higher levels of the cells than two doses of the same vaccine.

Dr. Snape said it wasn’t clear yet why mixing brought that advantage: “It’s very intriguing, let’s say that much,”

Dr. Snape and his colleagues have begun another similar mixing trial, including vaccines from Moderna and Novavax on the list of possibilities. But he stopped short of recommending a routine mix-and-match strategy. For now, he said, the best course of action remains getting two doses of the same vaccine.

Large clinical trials have clearly demonstrated that this strategy reduces the chances of getting Covid-19. “Your default should be what is proven to work,” Dr. Snape said.

But for many people, that may not always be possible. Vaccine shipments are sometimes delayed because of manufacturing problems, for example. Younger people in some countries have been advised not to get a second dose of AstraZeneca, because of concerns about the small risk of developing blood clots.

In such situations, it’s important to know whether people can switch to another vaccine for a second dose. “This provides reassuring evidence that should work,” Dr. Snape said.

Despite the encouraging news that most people may not need boosters of mRNA vaccines, there may be some circumstances in which third shots are needed. So vaccine manufacturers have been testing booster doses that could be deployed just in case.

The results make for good news. Researchers reported on Monday that a third dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine generated a strong immune response in clinical trial volunteers.

Ninety study volunteers in Britain were among the first to receive the shots in a clinical trial last year. This past March, they were given a third dose, roughly 30 weeks after their second. Laboratory analyses showed that the third dose raised antibody levels to a point higher than seen even a month after their second dose — an encouraging sign that a third shot should provide new protection even if the potency of the first two doses were to wane.

The study was posted online in a preliminary preprint form, but has not yet been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal.

“We do have to be in a position where we could boost, if it turned out that was necessary,” Andrew Pollard, an Oxford University vaccine researcher, said at a news briefing on Monday. “I think we have encouraging data in this preprint to show that boosters could be used and would be effective at boosting the immune response.”

But if booster shots are deemed necessary in the coming months, availability could be severely limited, especially in poorer countries that are lacking enough supply to give even first doses to their most vulnerable citizens.

Earlier this month, the National Institutes of Health announced that it had begun a new clinical trial of people fully vaccinated with any of the three authorized vaccines in the United States. The goal is to test whether a booster shot of the vaccine made by Moderna will increase antibodies against the virus. Initial results are expected later this summer.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has won authorization in 80 countries since last December but is not approved for use in the United States, which already has more than enough doses of three other authorized vaccines to meet demand.

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Health

A Coronavirus Epidemic Hit 20,000 Years In the past, New Research Finds

A Coronavirus Epidemic Hit 20,000 Years Ago, New Study Finds

Researchers have found evidence that a coronavirus epidemic swept East Asia about 20,000 years ago and was devastating enough to leave an evolutionary imprint on the DNA of people living today.

The new study suggests that the region was plagued by an ancient coronavirus for many years, researchers say. The finding could have devastating effects on the Covid-19 pandemic if it is not brought under control soon with vaccinations.

“It should worry us,” said David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona who led the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Current Biology. “What is happening now could last for generations.”

So far, researchers have not been able to look very far back into the history of this family of pathogens. Over the past 20 years, three coronaviruses have adapted to infect people and cause serious respiratory illnesses: Covid-19, SARS, and MERS. Studies on each of these coronaviruses suggest that they jumped into our species from bats or other mammals.

Four other coronaviruses can also infect people, but usually only cause mild colds. Scientists didn’t directly observe how these coronaviruses became human pathogens, so they relied on indirect clues to gauge when the jumps happened. Coronaviruses acquire new mutations at roughly regular rates, and so by comparing their genetic variation it can be determined when they deviated from a common ancestor.

The youngest of these mild coronaviruses, called HCoV-HKU1, crossed species boundary in the 1950s. The oldest, called HCoV-NL63, can be up to 820 years old.

But before that, the coronavirus trail got cold – until Dr. Enard and his colleagues applied a new method to the search. Instead of looking at the coronavirus genes, the researchers looked at the effects on the DNA of their human hosts.

Viruses cause enormous changes in the human genome over generations. A mutation that protects against a viral infection can make the difference between life and death and is passed on to the offspring. For example, a life-saving mutation could allow humans to hack up the proteins of a virus.

But viruses can also develop. Your proteins can change shape to overcome a host’s defenses. And these changes could spur the host to develop even more counter-offensives, which leads to more mutations.

If a random new mutation creates resistance to a virus, it can quickly become more common from one generation to the next. And other versions of this gene are becoming rarer. So if, in large groups of people, one version of a gene dominates all the others, scientists know that it is most likely a sign of rapid evolution in the past.

In recent years, Dr. Enard and his colleagues searched the human genome for these genetic variation patterns to reconstruct the history of a number of viruses. When the pandemic broke out, he wondered if ancient coronaviruses had left their own mark.

He and his colleagues compared the DNA of thousands of people from 26 different populations around the world, looking at a combination of genes known to be critical for coronaviruses but not other types of pathogens. In East Asian populations, the scientists found that 42 of these genes had a dominant version. That was a strong signal that people in East Asia had adapted to an ancient coronavirus.

But whatever happened in East Asia seemed to be confined to that region. “When we compared them to populations around the world, we couldn’t find the signal,” said Yassine Souilmi, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Adelaide in Australia and co-author of the new study.

The scientists then tried to estimate how long East Asians had already adapted to a coronavirus. They took advantage of the fact that once a dominant version of a gene begins to be passed down through the generations, it can acquire harmless random mutations. The more time passes, the more of these mutations accumulate.

Dr. Enard and his colleagues found that all 42 genes had about the same number of mutations. That meant they had all evolved rapidly at about the same time. “This is a signal that we should definitely not expect by chance,” said Dr. Enard.

They estimated that all of these genes developed their antiviral mutations sometime between 20,000 and 25,000 years ago, most likely over the course of a few centuries. This is a surprising finding, since the East Asians did not live in dense communities at the time, but rather formed small groups of hunters and gatherers.

Aida Andres, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was not involved in the new study, said she found the work compelling. “I’m pretty sure there is something,” she said.

Still, she didn’t think it was possible to give an accurate estimate of how long ago the ancient epidemic was. “Timing is a complicated thing,” she said. “Whether that happened a few thousand years before or after – I personally think that we can’t be so sure about it.”

Scientists looking for drugs to fight the new coronavirus may want to study the 42 genes that evolved in response to the old epidemic, said Dr. Souilmi. “It actually points us out to molecular buttons to adjust the immune response to the virus,” he said.

Dr. Anders agreed, saying that the genes identified in the new study should receive special attention as drug targets. “You know they are important,” she said. “That’s the beauty of evolution.”

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Health

Scientist Finds Early Coronavirus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted

Scientist Finds Early Coronavirus Sequences That Had Been Mysteriously Deleted

“These additional data will play a big role in that effort,” Dr. Worobey said.

It’s not clear why this valuable information went missing in the first place. Scientists can request that files be deleted by sending an email to the managers of the Sequence Read Archive. The National Library of Medicine, which manages the archive, said that the 13 sequences were removed last summer.

“These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the submitting investigator in June 2020,” said Renate Myles, a spokeswoman for the National Institutes of Health.

She said that the investigator, whom she did not name, told the archive managers that the sequences were being updated and would be added to a different database. But Dr. Bloom has searched every database he knows of, and has yet to find them. “Obviously I can’t rule out that the sequences are on some other database or web page somewhere, but I have not been able to find them any of the obvious places I’ve looked,” he said.

Three of the co-authors of the 2020 testing study that produced the 13 sequences did not immediately respond to emails inquiring about Dr. Bloom’s finding. That study did not give contact information for another co-author, Dr. Fu, who was also named on the spreadsheet from the other study.

Some scientists are skeptical that there is anything sinister behind the removal of the sequences. “I don’t really understand how this points to a cover-up,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah.

Dr. Goldstein noted that the testing paper listed the individual mutations the Wuhan researchers found in their tests. Although the full sequences are no longer in the archive, the key information has been public for over a year, he said. It was just tucked away in a format that is hard for researchers to find.

“We all missed this relatively obscure paper,” Dr. Goldstein said.

“You can’t really say why they were removed,” Dr. Bloom acknowledged in an interview. “You can say that the practical consequence of removing them was that people didn’t notice they existed.” He also noted that the Chinese government ordered the destruction of a number of early samples of the virus and barred the publication of papers on the coronavirus without its approval.

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Health

Scientists Report Earliest Identified Coronavirus Circumstances in 5 US States

Scientists Report Earliest Known Coronavirus Cases in Five US States

When did the coronavirus arrive in the US?

The first infection was confirmed on January 21, 2020 in a Washington state resident who had recently returned from Wuhan, China. Shortly afterwards, experts concluded that the virus had been in the country for weeks.

A study published Tuesday provides new evidence: Based on an analysis of blood tests, scientists identified seven people in five states who may have been infected long before the first confirmed cases in those states. The results suggest that the virus was already circulating in Illinois, for example, on December 24, 2019, although the first case in that state was confirmed a month later.

But the new study is flawed, some experts said: it did not adequately address the possibility that the antibodies were against coronaviruses, which cause colds, and the results could be a quirk of the tests used. In addition, the researchers did not have any travel information for any of the patients, which may have helped explain the test results.

“This is an interesting paper because it raises the idea that everyone is believing that there were infections that went undiagnosed,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

But the small number of samples that tested positive made it difficult to be sure that these were real cases of infection and not just a methodological error. “It’s hard to tell what is a real signal and what is not,” he said.

However, if the results are correct, they reinforce the notion that bad testing in the US missed most of the cases in the first few weeks of the pandemic.

“You can’t see what’s going on without testing,” said Keri Althoff, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and lead author of the study. “In those earlier months, some of those states that we didn’t suspect had a lot of infections.”

It is no surprise that there may have been undocumented cases at the start of the pandemic, said Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. Experts “already knew this was the case when they looked at trends in excess mortality and hospital admissions,” she said.

The latest model from Dr. Cobey estimated that there were about 10,000 infections in Illinois as of March 1, 2020. “Given the dire state of the tests, there was no doubt we missed the earliest broadcast,” she added.

In the study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, Dr. Althoff and her colleagues took blood samples from more than 24,000 people. They found nine people who donated blood between January 2 and March 18 last year and who appeared to have antibodies to the coronavirus.

Updated

June 15, 2021, 9:21 p.m. ET

Seven of the samples were from blood donated in their states of Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Massachusetts prior to the date of initial diagnosis. The results agree with those of another study that identified coronavirus antibodies in donated blood as early as mid-December 2019.

Participants were enrolled in a long-term project by the National Institutes of Health called All of Us, which aims to involve one million people in the United States to increase minority representation in research. Only about half of the study participants were white.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the virus would have infected very few people. A low prevalence increases the likelihood that an antibody test will incorrectly identify a sample as an antibody when it doesn’t, said Dr. Hensley – a false positive.

The researchers tried to minimize this possibility by using two antibody tests in a row. The first test identified 147 samples as possible antibodies to the coronavirus; the second reduced that number to nine.

The team also analyzed 1,000 blood samples from the 2018/19 cold and flu season and found none that tested positive for antibodies to the coronavirus.

“It is still very possible that some of these are false positives,” said Dr. Josh Denny, CEO of All of Us. But “the fact that they would all be false positives seems pretty unlikely with what we’ve done.”

The researchers said they planned to contact participants to inquire about travel history and would continue to analyze additional samples to estimate when the coronavirus hit American shores.

“The exact month it likely came to the US is still unknown,” said Dr. Althoff. “Right now, it’s essentially a puzzle, and our study is only part of that puzzle.”

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Health

Coronavirus Variant Found in India is Renamed Delta

Coronavirus Variant Discovered in India is Renamed Delta

If you haven’t yet mastered the name of the latest variant of the coronavirus to turn nations upside down – B.1.617.2, as evolutionary biologists call it – then don’t worry: the World Health Organization has proposed a solution.

The group said Monday that it had developed a less technical and easier-to-pronounce system for naming variants – the mutated versions of the virus that have sparked new flare-ups around the world.

Variants are assigned to letters of the Greek alphabet in the order in which they are classified as a potential threat by the WHO

For example, B.1.617.2, which contributed to a fatal increase in India, was named Delta in the new system. This variant can spread even faster than B.1.1.7, the variant discovered in the UK that has contributed to devastating waves of cases around the world. (The new name of B.1.1.7 is Alpha.)

Scientists are constantly adding long sequences of letters and numbers to new variants for their purposes, but hope that Greek letters will roll off the tongue of non-scientists more easily.

There is also a deeper motivation: The letter-number system was so complicated that many people instead referred to variants with the locations where they were discovered (e.g. the Indian variant for B.1.617.2). Scientists fear these informal nicknames can be both inaccurate and stigmatizing, penalizing countries for investing in the genome sequencing necessary to sound the alarm of new mutations that may have surfaced elsewhere.

Whether the Greek letters stick is another question. It has been months since experts convened by the WHO started debating the issue, spreading labels like “the British variant” and “the South African variant” in the news media.

The experts said they considered a number of alternatives, such as taking syllables from existing words to form new words. But too many of those syllable combinations are already recognizable names of places or companies, they said.

Incidentally, the Greek letters had just been relieved of another task: the World Meteorological Organization announced in March that it would no longer use them to name hurricanes.

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World News

Sinovac Coronavirus Vaccine Licensed by WHO for Emergency Use

Sinovac Coronavirus Vaccine Authorized by WHO for Emergency Use

The World Health Organization has released a coronavirus vaccine from the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac for an emergency, the agency said on Tuesday.

The decision, made about a month after the agency approved another Chinese emergency vaccine from Sinopharm, means that Sinovac’s vaccine may be included in Covax, a worldwide initiative to deliver coronavirus vaccines to countries low income.

There is an urgent need for vaccines in countries and regions where the virus is increasing, such as India, much of Southeast Asia, and South America. Adding another vaccine to the distributional calculus could help meet that demand.

Sinovac’s vaccine, called CoronaVac, was developed using inactivated viruses, a technique that has been used for over a century.

Clinical trials with CoronaVac in Brazil and Turkey produced very different results, but both showed that the vaccine protected against Covid-19.

According to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, the vaccine is already approved in 29 countries, including China, Brazil and Mexico.

CoronaVac is given in two doses over two to four weeks and is easier to store than those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which must be frozen for long-term storage.

The WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on Tuesday that CoronaVac’s easy storage makes it very useful for the “resource poor environments” that need it most.

So far, an overwhelming proportion of vaccine doses have gone to affluent countries, and many of them are returning to an approach to normal life as the virus ravages less affluent countries.

“The world desperately needs multiple Covid-19 vaccines to eradicate the huge inequality of access around the world,” said Dr. Mariângela Simão, WHO Deputy Director General for Access to Health Products, in a statement.

At the press conference on Tuesday, Dr. Tedros and officials from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group and World Trade Organization launched a new push to secure $ 50 billion to boost the manufacture and distribution of coronavirus vaccines and other medical supplies and treatments to poorer countries.

“An increasingly two-pronged pandemic is causing a two-pronged economic recovery with negative repercussions for all countries,” said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF on Effective Way to Boost Global Production. In other words, vaccination policy is economic policy. “

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Business

International Shortages Throughout Coronavirus Reveal Failings of Simply in Time Manufacturing

Global Shortages During Coronavirus Reveal Failings of Just in Time Manufacturing

In der Geschichte, wie die moderne Welt konstruiert wurde, sticht Toyota als Vordenker eines monumentalen Fortschritts in der industriellen Effizienz hervor. Der japanische Autohersteller war Vorreiter der sogenannten Just-In-Time-Fertigung, bei der Teile punktgenau an die Fabriken geliefert werden und so die Bevorratung minimiert wird.

Im letzten halben Jahrhundert hat dieser Ansatz die globale Wirtschaft in Branchen weit über die Automobilindustrie hinaus fasziniert. Von der Mode über die Lebensmittelverarbeitung bis hin zur Pharmaindustrie setzen Unternehmen auf Just In Time, um wendig zu bleiben und sich an sich ändernde Marktanforderungen anzupassen und gleichzeitig Kosten zu senken.

Die turbulenten Ereignisse des vergangenen Jahres haben jedoch die Vorzüge des Abbaus von Lagerbeständen in Frage gestellt und gleichzeitig die Besorgnis neu belebt, dass einige Branchen zu weit gegangen sind und sie anfällig für Störungen machen. Da die Pandemie den Fabrikbetrieb behindert und Chaos im weltweiten Versand gesät hat, wurden viele Volkswirtschaften auf der ganzen Welt von der Knappheit einer breiten Palette von Waren heimgesucht – von Elektronik über Bauholz bis hin zu Kleidung.

In einer Zeit außergewöhnlicher Umbrüche in der Weltwirtschaft kommt Just In Time zu spät.

„Es ist eine Art Amoklauf in der Lieferkette“, sagt Willy C. Shih, ein internationaler Handelsexperte an der Harvard Business School. „In einem Rennen um die niedrigsten Kosten habe ich mein Risiko konzentriert. Wir sind am logischen Abschluss von all dem.“

Die prominenteste Manifestation eines zu starken Vertrauens auf Just In Time findet sich in genau der Branche, die es erfunden hat: Autohersteller wurden durch einen Mangel an Computerchips gelähmt – lebenswichtige Autokomponenten, die hauptsächlich in Asien hergestellt werden. Ohne genügend Chips zur Hand mussten Autofabriken von Indien über die USA bis Brasilien die Fließbänder stilllegen.

Aber die Breite und das Fortbestehen der Knappheit zeigen, inwieweit die Just-in-Time-Idee das kommerzielle Leben dominiert. Dies erklärt, warum Nike und andere Bekleidungsmarken Schwierigkeiten haben, Einzelhandelsgeschäfte mit ihren Waren zu führen. Dies ist einer der Gründe, warum Bauunternehmen Schwierigkeiten beim Kauf von Farben und Dichtstoffen haben. Es trug wesentlich zu dem tragischen Mangel an persönlicher Schutzausrüstung zu Beginn der Pandemie bei, der das medizinische Personal an vorderster Front ohne angemessene Ausrüstung zurückließ.

Just In Time ist nicht weniger als eine Revolution in der Geschäftswelt. Indem sie ihre Lagerbestände gering halten, konnten große Einzelhändler mehr Platz für die Präsentation eines breiteren Warenangebots nutzen. Just In Time hat es Herstellern ermöglicht, ihre Waren individuell zu gestalten. Und die schlanke Produktion hat die Kosten erheblich gesenkt und es Unternehmen ermöglicht, schnell auf neue Produkte umzustellen.

Diese Tugenden haben einen Mehrwert für Unternehmen geschaffen, Innovationen vorangetrieben und den Handel gefördert, so dass Just In Time auch nach Abklingen der aktuellen Krise seine Kraft behält. Der Ansatz hat auch die Aktionäre bereichert, indem er Einsparungen erzielt, die Unternehmen in Form von Dividenden und Aktienrückkäufen ausgeschüttet haben.

Dennoch wirft die Knappheit die Frage auf, ob einige Unternehmen zu aggressiv bei der Erzielung von Einsparungen durch den Abbau von Lagerbeständen vorgegangen sind, wodurch sie auf unvermeidlich auftretende Probleme nicht vorbereitet sind.

„Es sind die Investitionen, die sie nicht tätigen“, sagte William Lazonick, Ökonom an der University of Massachusetts.

Intel, der amerikanische Chiphersteller, hat Pläne skizziert, 20 Milliarden US-Dollar für die Errichtung neuer Fabriken in Arizona auszugeben. Aber das sind weniger als die 26 Milliarden US-Dollar, die Intel 2018 und 2019 für Aktienrückkäufe ausgegeben hat – Geld, das das Unternehmen hätte verwenden können, um die Kapazität zu erweitern, sagte Lazonick.

Einige Experten gehen davon aus, dass die Krise die Arbeitsweise von Unternehmen verändern wird, was einige dazu veranlasst, mehr Lagerbestände zu lagern und Beziehungen zu zusätzlichen Lieferanten aufzubauen, um sich gegen Probleme abzusichern. Andere wiederum sind zweifelhaft und gehen davon aus, dass – wie nach vergangenen Krisen – das Streben nach Kosteneinsparungen wieder andere Erwägungen übertrumpfen wird.

Die Knappheit in der Weltwirtschaft ist auf Faktoren zurückzuführen, die über die mageren Lagerbestände hinausgehen. Die Ausbreitung von Covid-19 hat Hafenarbeiter und LKW-Fahrer ins Abseits gedrängt und das Entladen und Verteilen von Waren, die in Fabriken in Asien hergestellt werden und per Schiff nach Nordamerika und Europa gelangen, behindert.

Die Pandemie hat den Sägewerksbetrieb verlangsamt und zu einem Holzmangel geführt, der den Hausbau in den Vereinigten Staaten behindert hat.

Winterstürme, die petrochemische Anlagen im Golf von Mexiko lahmlegen, haben dazu geführt, dass Schlüsselprodukte knapp werden. Andrew Romano, der den Vertrieb bei einem Chemieunternehmen außerhalb von Philadelphia leitet, hat sich daran gewöhnt, seinen Kunden zu sagen, dass sie auf ihre Bestellungen warten müssen.

“Sie haben einen Zusammenfluss von Kräften”, sagte er. “Es kräuselt sich nur durch das Angebot.”

Der steile Anstieg der Nachfrage führte dazu, dass Tiernahrung knapp wurde und Grape-Nuss-Cerealien für eine Weile aus den amerikanischen Regalen verschwanden.

Einige Unternehmen waren solchen Kräften besonders ausgesetzt, da sie bereits zu Beginn der Krise schlank waren.

Und viele Unternehmen haben ihr Engagement für Just In Time mit der Abhängigkeit von Lieferanten in Niedriglohnländern wie China und Indien kombiniert, was jede Unterbrechung des weltweiten Versands zu einem unmittelbaren Problem macht. Das hat den Schaden noch verstärkt, wenn etwas schief geht – etwa als dieses Jahr ein riesiges Schiff im Suezkanal festgefahren ist und den Hauptkanal zwischen Europa und Asien gesperrt hat.

„Die Leute haben diese Art von Lean-Mentalität übernommen und sie dann auf Lieferketten angewendet, in der Annahme, dass sie einen kostengünstigen und zuverlässigen Versand haben würden“, sagte Shih, Handelsexperte der Harvard Business School. “Dann haben Sie einige Schocks für das System.”

Just In Time war selbst eine Anpassung an die Turbulenzen, als Japan mobilisierte, um sich von den Verwüstungen des Zweiten Weltkriegs zu erholen.

Dicht besiedelt und ohne natürliche Ressourcen versuchte Japan, Land zu erhalten und die Verschwendung zu begrenzen. Toyota verzichtete auf Lagerhaltung und choreografierte die Produktion mit Lieferanten, um sicherzustellen, dass die Teile bei Bedarf ankamen.

In den 1980er Jahren emulierten Unternehmen auf der ganzen Welt das Produktionssystem von Toyota. Managementexperten förderten Just In Time, um den Gewinn zu steigern.

Heute im Geschäft

Aktualisiert

1. Juni 2021, 12:59 Uhr ET

„Unternehmen, die erfolgreiche Lean-Programme durchführen, sparen nicht nur Geld im Lagerbetrieb, sondern genießen auch mehr Flexibilität“, erklärte eine McKinsey-Präsentation 2010 für die Pharmaindustrie. Es versprach Einsparungen von bis zu 50 Prozent bei der Lagerhaltung, wenn Kunden seinen „schlanken und gemeinen“ Ansatz für Lieferketten annahmen.

Solche Behauptungen haben sich ausgebreitet. Dennoch sagt einer der Autoren dieser Präsentation, Knut Alicke, ein McKinsey-Partner mit Sitz in Deutschland, jetzt, dass die Unternehmenswelt die Besonnenheit überstieg.

„Wir sind viel zu weit gegangen“, sagte Herr Alicke in einem Interview. „Die Art und Weise, wie Lagerbestände bewertet werden, wird sich nach der Krise ändern.“

Viele Unternehmen taten so, als ob Herstellung und Versand ohne Pannen wären, fügte Herr Alicke hinzu, während sie Schwierigkeiten in ihren Geschäftsplänen nicht berücksichtigten.

„Da drin gibt es keine Art von Störungsrisiko“, sagte er.

Experten sagen, dass Unterlassungen eine logische Reaktion des Managements auf die im Spiel befindlichen Anreize darstellen. Investoren belohnen Unternehmen, die ein Wachstum ihrer Kapitalrendite erzielen. Die Beschränkung von Waren in Lagerhäusern verbessert dieses Verhältnis.

„Soweit Sie die Bestände weiter reduzieren können, sehen Ihre Bücher gut aus“, sagt ManMohan S. Sodhi, Supply-Chain-Experte an der City, University of London Business School.

Von 1981 bis 2000 haben amerikanische Unternehmen laut einer Studie ihre Lagerbestände um durchschnittlich 2 Prozent pro Jahr reduziert. Diese Einsparungen trugen dazu bei, einen weiteren Trend zur Bereicherung der Aktionäre zu finanzieren – das Wachstum von Aktienrückkäufen.

In den zehn Jahren vor der Pandemie gaben amerikanische Unternehmen laut einer Studie der Bank für Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich mehr als 6 Billionen US-Dollar für den Kauf eigener Aktien aus und verdreifachten damit ihre Käufe in etwa. Unternehmen in Japan, Großbritannien, Frankreich, Kanada und China erhöhten ihre Rückkäufe um das Vierfache, obwohl ihre Käufe nur einen Bruchteil der amerikanischen Gegenstücke ausmachten.

Durch den Rückkauf von Aktien wird die Anzahl der im Umlauf befindlichen Aktien reduziert und deren Wert erhöht. Aber die Vorteile für Investoren und Führungskräfte, deren Gehaltspakete hohe Zuteilungen von Aktien beinhalten, gingen zu Lasten dessen, was das Unternehmen sonst mit seinem Geld getan hätte – Investitionen in die Kapazitätserweiterung oder die Bevorratung von Teilen.

Diese Kosten wurden während der ersten Welle der Pandemie auffällig, als große Volkswirtschaften, darunter die Vereinigten Staaten, feststellten, dass es ihnen an Kapazitäten für die schnelle Herstellung von Beatmungsgeräten mangelte.

„Wenn Sie ein Beatmungsgerät brauchen, brauchen Sie ein Beatmungsgerät“, sagte Herr Sodhi. „Man kann nicht sagen ‚Nun, mein Aktienkurs ist hoch.‘“

Als die Pandemie begann, kürzten die Autohersteller die Bestellungen für Chips in der Erwartung, dass die Nachfrage nach Autos sinken würde. Als sie merkten, dass sich die Nachfrage belebte, war es zu spät: Der Hochlauf der Computerchip-Produktion dauert Monate.

„Die Auswirkungen auf die Produktion werden schlimmer, bevor sie besser werden“, sagte Jim Farley, der Vorstandsvorsitzende von Ford Motor, das seit langem eine schlanke Fertigung vertritt, in einem Gespräch mit Aktienanalysten am 28. April. Das Unternehmen sagte, dass die Engpässe wahrscheinlich die Hälfte des Jahres entgleisen würden seine Produktion bis Juni.

Der am wenigsten von der Knappheit betroffene Autohersteller ist Toyota. Von Anfang an verließ sich Toyota auf Zulieferer, die sich in der Nähe seines Standorts in Japan befinden, was das Unternehmen weniger anfällig für weit entfernte Ereignisse machte.

In Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, wartet Herr Romano buchstäblich darauf, dass sein Schiff einläuft.

Er ist Vice President of Sales bei Van Horn, Metz & Company, die Chemikalien von Lieferanten auf der ganzen Welt einkauft und sie an Fabriken verkauft, die Farben, Tinte und andere Industrieprodukte herstellen.

In normalen Zeiten hinkt das Unternehmen vielleicht 1 Prozent der Bestellungen seiner Kunden hinterher. An einem Vormittag konnte das Unternehmen ein Zehntel seiner Bestellungen nicht abschließen, weil es auf Lieferungen wartete.

Das Unternehmen konnte sich nicht genug von einem spezialisierten Harz sichern, das es an Hersteller verkauft, die Baumaterialien herstellen. Dem amerikanischen Lieferanten des Harzes fehlte selbst ein Element, das er von einem petrochemischen Werk in China bezieht.

Einer der Stammkunden von Herrn Romano, ein Farbenhersteller, hielt sich mit der Bestellung von Chemikalien zurück, weil er nicht genügend Metalldosen finden konnte, die er für den Versand seines fertigen Produkts verwendet.

„Alles kaskadiert“, sagte Herr Romano. “Es ist nur ein Durcheinander.”

Es war keine Pandemie erforderlich, um die Risiken einer übermäßigen Abhängigkeit von Just In Time in Kombination mit globalen Lieferketten aufzudecken. Experten warnen seit Jahrzehnten vor den Folgen.

1999 erschütterte ein Erdbeben Taiwan und stellte die Herstellung von Computerchips ein. Das Erdbeben und der Tsunami, die Japan im Jahr 2011 erschütterten, schlossen Fabriken und behinderten den Versand, was zu einem Mangel an Autoteilen und Computerchips führte. Überschwemmungen in Thailand im selben Jahr dezimierten die Produktion von Computerfestplatten.

Jede Katastrophe führte zu Diskussionen, dass Unternehmen ihre Lagerbestände stärken und ihre Lieferanten diversifizieren müssten.

Jedes Mal machten multinationale Unternehmen weiter.

Dieselben Berater, die die Vorteile schlanker Lagerbestände gefördert haben, evangelisieren jetzt über die Resilienz der Lieferkette – das Schlagwort der Stunde.

Die einfache Erweiterung von Lagerhäusern kann nicht die Lösung sein, sagte Richard Lebovitz, Präsident von LeanDNA, einem Supply-Chain-Berater mit Sitz in Austin, Texas. Produktlinien werden zunehmend individualisiert.

„Es wird immer schwieriger, vorherzusagen, welche Bestände Sie führen sollten“, sagte er.

Letztendlich werden die Unternehmen wahrscheinlich aus dem einfachen Grund, dass sie Gewinne erzielt haben, ihre Einführung von Lean weiter vorantreiben.

„Die eigentliche Frage lautet: ‚Werden wir aufhören, niedrige Kosten als alleiniges Kriterium für die Beurteilung der Geschäftstätigkeit zu verfolgen?’“, sagte Shih von der Harvard Business School. „Da bin ich skeptisch. Die Verbraucher werden nicht für Widerstandsfähigkeit bezahlen, wenn sie sich nicht in einer Krise befinden.“

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Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of the Coronavirus

Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of the Coronavirus

The intelligence on the three workers came from outside the United States intelligence agencies’ own collection, which means its veracity is more difficult to authenticate. The source of the information was unclear, but several American officials said they believed the report that the three researchers got sick.

American intelligence officials do not know whether the lab workers contracted Covid-19 or some other disease, like a bad flu. If they did have the coronavirus, the intelligence may suggest that they could have become sick from the lab, but it also could simply mean that the virus was circulating in Wuhan earlier than the Chinese government has acknowledged.

Also toward the end of Mr. Trump’s term, State Department officials began examining the origins of the virus and concluded that it was highly unlikely to have appeared naturally and thus was likely the product of laboratory work.

CNN first reported the effort and suggested that the group’s efforts had been shut down by the Biden administration, prompting scathing Republican criticism. A State Department spokesman, Ned Price, denied that, saying that the team’s findings were briefed to senior officials in the department’s arms control bureau in February and March.

“With the report delivered, the work was ended,” Mr. Price said.

Mr. Trump issued a statement on Tuesday boasting of his early insistence that the Wuhan lab was the source of the virus. “To me, it was obvious from the beginning,” he said. “But I was badly criticized, as usual.”

Despite the absence of new evidence, a number of scientists have lately begun speaking out about the need to remain open to the possibility that the virus had accidentally emerged from a lab, perhaps after it was collected in nature, a lab origin distinct from a creation by scientists.

“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told senators on Wednesday.

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Immunity to the Coronavirus Might Persist for Years, Scientists Discover

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Persist for Years, Scientists Find

Immunity to the coronavirus lasts at least a year, possibly a lifetime, and improves over time, especially after vaccination, according to two new studies. The results could help dispel lingering fears that protection from the virus will be short-lived.

Taken together, the studies suggest that most people who have recovered from Covid-19 and were later immunized don’t need boosters. However, vaccinated people, who most likely never got infected, need the shots, as do a minority who were infected but did not evoke a robust immune response.

Both reports looked at people who had been exposed to the coronavirus about a year earlier. Cells that hold a memory for the virus remain in the bone marrow and can produce antibodies when needed, according to one of the studies published in Nature on Monday.

The other study, which is also being examined for publication in Nature, found that these so-called memory B cells continue to mature and strengthen at least 12 months after the initial infection.

“The publications are consistent with the growing body of literature suggesting that immunity induced by infection and vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 appears to be long-lasting,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research.

The studies could allay fears that immunity to the virus is temporary, as is the case with coronaviruses, which cause colds. But these viruses change significantly every few years, said Dr. Hensley. “The reason we become repeatedly infected with frequent coronaviruses over the course of life could have a lot more to do with the variation in these viruses than with immunity,” he said.

In fact, memory B cells, which were produced in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection and boosted by vaccination, are so effective that they even thwart variants of the virus and nullify the need for boosters, according to Michel Nussenzweig, immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, who led the study on memory maturation.

“People who have been infected and vaccinated really have a great response, a great set of antibodies, because they keep developing their antibodies,” said Dr. Nut branch. “I assume they will last a long time.”

The result may not only apply to vaccine protection, as immune memory is likely to be organized differently after immunization than after natural infection.

That means people who haven’t had Covid-19 and have been vaccinated may need a booster shot, said Dr. Nut branch. “We’ll know something like that very, very soon,” he said.

When a virus first appears, B cells multiply quickly and produce antibodies in large quantities. Once the acute infection has subsided, a small number of cells take their place in the bone marrow and steadily pump out modest amounts of antibodies.

To study the memory B cells specific to the new coronavirus, researchers led by Ali Ellebedy of Washington University in St. Louis analyzed the blood of 77 people at three-month intervals, starting about a month after they were infected the coronavirus. Only six of the 77 had been hospitalized for Covid-19; The rest had mild symptoms.

Antibody levels in these people fell rapidly four months after infection and then slowly decreased for months afterward – results that are in line with other studies.

Some scientists have interpreted this drop as a sign of waning immunity, but it’s exactly what is expected, other experts said. If blood contained large amounts of antibodies to every pathogen the body had ever encountered, it would quickly turn into thick mud.

Updated

May 26, 2021, 11:32 a.m. ET

Instead, blood levels of antibodies drop sharply after an acute infection, while memory B cells in the bone marrow remain calm and ready to take action if necessary.

Dr. Ellebedy received bone marrow samples from 19 people approximately seven months after infection. Fifteen had detectable storage B cells but four did not, suggesting that some people may have very few cells or no cells at all.

“It tells me that even if you got infected, it doesn’t mean you have a super immune response,” said Dr. Ellebedy. The results confirm the idea that people who have recovered from Covid-19 should be vaccinated, he said.

Five of the participants in Dr. Ellebedy’s study donated bone marrow samples seven or eight months after the initial infection and again four months later. He and his colleagues found that the number of storage B cells remained stable over this time.

The results are especially noteworthy given that bone marrow samples are difficult to obtain, said Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the work.

A landmark 2007 study showed that antibodies can theoretically survive for decades, perhaps well beyond the average lifespan, suggesting the long-term existence of memory B cells. But the new study offered rare evidence of its existence, said Dr. Gommerman.

Dr. Nussenzweig studied how memory B cells mature over time. The researchers analyzed the blood of 63 people who had recovered from Covid-19 about a year earlier. The vast majority of participants had mild symptoms and 26 had also received at least one dose of the Moderna or Pfizer BioNTech vaccine.

So-called neutralizing antibodies, which were needed to prevent re-infection with the virus, remained unchanged between six and twelve months, while related but less important antibodies slowly disappeared, the team found.

As memory B cells evolved, the antibodies they produced developed the ability to neutralize an even wider group of variants. This continued maturation may be due to a small piece of the virus being bound by the immune system – for target practice, so to speak.

One year after infection, the neutralizing activity was lower in the non-vaccinated participants compared to all forms of the virus, with the greatest loss being recorded compared to the variant first identified in South Africa.

The vaccination significantly increased antibody levels and confirmed the results of other studies. The shots also increased the body’s ability to neutralize by 50 times.

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul said Sunday he would not receive a coronavirus vaccine because he was infected last March and was therefore immune.

However, there is no guarantee that such immunity will be strong enough to protect him for years, especially given the emergence of variants of the coronavirus that can partially bypass the body’s defenses.

The results of the study by Dr. Nussenzweig suggest that people who have recovered from Covid-19 and were later vaccinated will continue to have extremely high levels of protection against emerging variants, even without receiving a vaccine booster later.

“It looks exactly what we’d hope a good memory B-cell response would look like,” said Marion Pepper, an immunologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the new research.

All experts agreed that immunity in people who have never had Covid-19 is likely to vary widely. Fighting a live virus is different from responding to a single viral protein introduced by a vaccine. And in those who had Covid-19, the initial immune response had time to mature over six to 12 months before being challenged by the vaccine.

“These kinetics are different from someone who has been immunized and re-immunized three weeks later,” said Dr. Pepper. “That doesn’t mean they might not have that broad answer, but it could be very different.”

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The Newest Coronavirus Comes From Canines

The Latest Coronavirus Comes From Dogs

It also had an unusual genetic mutation, a deletion in what is known as the N gene, which codes for an important structural protein. This deletion has not been documented in other canine coronaviruses, said Dr. Vlasova, but similar mutations have appeared in the viruses that cause Covid and SARS. “So what does that mean?” Asks Dr. Gray. “Well, you know, we don’t really know.”

Although much more research is needed, one possibility is that the mutation may help animal coronaviruses adapt to human hosts, the researchers said.

It is too early to say whether this virus poses a risk to humans. Researchers have yet to prove that this virus is the cause of the pneumonia that has brought patients to the hospital. And they haven’t yet studied whether people who can get the virus from animals can pass it on to other people.

“We have to be careful because things keep popping up that don’t turn into outbreaks,” said John Lednicky, a University of Florida virologist who was not an author of the study.

Even so, the study was “extremely important,” he said. “The fact that it is a coronavirus again shows us that this is a group of viruses that deserves further investigation.” He added, “We should take this seriously and look for it because if we see more cases the alarm bells should ring.”

Indeed, one possibility is that coronaviruses are spreading between humans and other species, including dogs, far more frequently than before.

“At the moment we have no reason to believe that this virus will cause a pandemic,” said Dr. Vlasova. “What kind of attention we want to bring to this research is that coronavirus transmission from animal sources to humans is likely to be a very, very, very common occurrence. And so far it has been largely ignored. “