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In Ohio, Biden Says Democrats Have Began a Manufacturing Revival

In Ohio, Biden Says Democrats Have Started a Manufacturing Revival

WASHINGTON — President Biden attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a $20 billion computer chip factory in a heavily Republican section of Ohio on Friday, testing the power of his election-year message that Democrats helped kickstart a revival in manufacturing with record amounts of government spending .

Mr. Biden traveled to Licking County, Ohio, outside of Columbus, where Intel plans to build a semiconductor fab. In a remark at the event, the president said the company’s decision to build the facility was the result of a law he signed authorizing his government to spend up to $52 billion to support the chip industry.

“This new law is a historic investment for companies to build advanced manufacturing facilities here in America,” said Mr. Biden, standing in front of an open field on which the sprawling 10-football facility will be built. “Since I signed the CHIPS and Science Act, it’s already started.”

Intel, one of the world’s leading chipmakers, announced construction of the Ohio plant in January, months before the bill passed in the summer, and said it was building the plant to meet rising global demand. In its press release announcing the investment, the company didn’t specifically mention the possibility that federal laws will help fund it.

But Pat Gelsinger, the company’s chief executive, welcomed the legislation, known as the CHIPS and Science Act, and said federal spending could boost the construction sector even more in the years to come. In introducing the President, Mr. Gelsinger praised Mr. Biden and other Washington officials.

“It was a bipartisan bill,” he said at Friday’s event. “How often do you hear that today?”

For Mr. Biden, praising Intel’s blueprints is part of a strategy to draw voters’ attention to parts of the economy that are improving — and away from record-high inflation that has frustrated many Americans and dragged his approval ratings lower.

White House officials note that manufacturing jobs in the United States have risen by 680,000 since the president took office, the fastest pace in 50 years. In his remarks, Mr. Biden said that three other high-tech companies — Micron, Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries — recently announced plans to expand manufacturing in the United States.

Government officials have promised that the investment in chipmaking will not be a giveaway to companies that are already making big profits. The law prohibits companies from using the federal investment to buy back shares or invest in construction projects in China. And it includes rules to encourage the use of unionized workers.

Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Secretary, told reporters this week that her department will be “vigilant and aggressive” to ensure the money is not misused.

“We will push companies to be bigger and bolder,” she said. “So if a company already has funding for a $10 billion project right now, we want them to think bigger and see how they’re going from $10 billion to $50 billion with taxpayer funding.”

With the primaries over, both parties are beginning to shift their focus to the November 8 general election.

She pledged that the government would “claw back” investments if companies failed to comply with government rules.

Friday’s visit to Ohio is the latest example of efforts by Mr. Biden and his advisers to rewrite the nation’s economic narrative ahead of the midterm elections, drawing on legislative wins and some bright spots in economic data in hopes to reassure consumers who have been rocked by soaring prices following the pandemic recession.

Polls show that the economy – and persistently high inflation in particular – remains a burden for the President. Mr. Biden’s economics team has been increasingly encouraged by the state of the recovery over the past few weeks, as job growth has remained solid and gasoline prices continued to fall across the country.

On Friday, Mr. Biden’s economic team released a 58-page “economic plan” aimed at claiming credit for the strong job market and manufacturing sector, and reiterated the president’s still-unfinished plans for additional tax and spending changes that would benefit the economy should help .

The document breaks Mr. Biden’s economic strategy into five parts: empowering workers, improving American manufacturing, supporting families, strengthening industrial competitiveness, and aligning tax laws to help middle-class workers.

Will it work politically to help Democrats avoid deep losses in this fall’s midterm elections?

White House officials are betting that messages like Mr. Biden’s on Friday will appeal to a broad constituency of voters, including middle-class workers, independents, and those with and without college degrees.

Places like Ohio will be a test of that theory.

The state is home to one of the most competitive Senate races in the country. JD Vance, an author who appropriated the style and ideology of former President Donald J. Trump, is running as a Republican against Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Ohio, to replace Sen. Rob Portman, who was in the going into retirement.

Mr Ryan has distanced himself from Mr Biden, refused to court the president and said the country needs “new leadership” when asked if the president should run for a second term. Mr Ryan, who also attended the Intel event on Friday, noted that during the 2020 campaign Mr Biden had hinted that he might only serve one term.

“The president said from the start that he would be a bridge to the next generation,” Ryan told reporters, “which is basically what I said.”

Mr. Biden’s approval rating has recovered somewhat from the lows earlier this year, although a majority of Americans continue to disapprove of his leadership in most polls. Still, the president’s appearance in one of the most conservative parts of Ohio suggests his political advisers believe talking about manufacturing can be a winning strategy.

In 2016, Mr. Trump won Licking County, where the Intel plant is to be built, 61 percent to 33 percent over Hillary Clinton. Four years later he won again, this time against Mr. Biden, 63 percent to 35 percent.

Prior to Mr. Biden’s comments, the White House announced that the government had allocated $17.7 million to Ohio colleges and universities to support programs focused on developing a workforce capable of Taking jobs in next-generation semiconductor fabs like the ones Intel plans to build.

Officials said the National Science Foundation plans to spend $100 million to invest in similar programs across the country, all aimed at helping people take on new, high-paying jobs in the industry regardless of where they live .

In his speech, the President made clear the message he hoped voters would take with them from these announcements.

“Jobs now,” he said. “Jobs for the future. Jobs in all parts of the country.”

Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.

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J.D. Vance Transformed to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Purchase It?

J.D. Vance Converted to Trumpism. Will Ohio Republicans Buy It?

Before he was a celebrity supporter of Donald J. Trump’s, J.D. Vance was one of his most celebrated critics.

“Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance’s searing 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Ohio and Kentucky, offered perplexed and alarmed Democrats, and not a few Republicans, an explanation for Mr. Trump’s appeal to an angry core of white, working-class Americans.

A conservative author, venture capitalist and graduate of Yale Law School, Mr. Vance presented himself as a teller of hard truths, writing personally about the toll of drugs and violence, a bias against education, and a dependence on welfare. Rather than blaming outsiders, he scolded his community. “There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself,” he wrote.

In interviews, he called Mr. Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue leading “the white working class to a very dark place.”

Today, as Mr. Vance pursues the Republican nomination for an open Senate seat in Ohio, he has performed a whiplash-inducing conversion to Trumpism, in which he no longer emphasizes that white working-class problems are self-inflicted. Adopting the grievances of the former president, he denounces “elites and the ruling class” for “robbing us blind,” as he said in his announcement speech last month.

Now championing the hard-right messages that animate the Make America Great Again base, Mr. Vance has deleted inconvenient tweets, renounced his old views about immigration and trade, and gone from a regular guest on CNN to a regular on “Tucker Carlson,” echoing the Fox News host’s racially charged insults of immigrants as “dirty.”

When working-class Americans “dare to complain about the southern border,” Mr. Vance said on Mr. Carlson’s show last month, “or about jobs getting shipped overseas, what do they get called? They get called racists, they get called bigots, xenophobes or idiots.”

“I love that,” Mr. Carlson replied.

Whether Ohio Republicans do, too, is the big question for Mr. Vance — who will crucially benefit from a $10 million super PAC funded by the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter who once employed Mr. Vance.

His G.O.P. rivals in the state have had a field day. Josh Mandel, a former treasurer of Ohio who is the early front-runner in the five-candidate field, called Mr. Vance a “RINO just like Romney and Liz Cheney,” referring to the Utah senator and the Wyoming congresswoman who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for inciting the Capitol riot.

Liberals and some conservatives have also dismissed Mr. Vance for cynical opportunism. One Never Trump conservative, Tom Nichols, wrote of “the moral collapse of J.D. Vance” in The Atlantic.

Mr. Vance’s adherence to some of the most extreme views of Trump supporters shows how the former president, despite losing the White House and Congress for his party, retains the support of fanatically loyal voters, who echo his resentments and disinformation and force most Republican candidates to bend a knee.

Yet Mr. Vance’s flip-flops over policy and over Mr. Trump’s demagogic style may not prove disqualifying with Ohio primary-goers when they vote next spring, according to strategists. Although Mr. Vance’s U-turn might strike some as too convenient in an era when voters quickly sniff out inauthenticity, it is also true that his political arc resembles that of many Republicans who voted grudgingly for Mr. Trump in 2016, but after four years cemented their support. (Mr. Vance has said he voted third-party in 2016.)

“Will he be able to overcome his past comments on Trump and square that with the G.O.P. base? Maybe,” said Michael Hartley, a Republican strategist in Ohio who is not working for any of the Senate candidates. He added that Mr. Vance had the lived experience to address policies that lift working-class people “in a way that others cannot.”

Mr. Vance, 37, who lives with his wife and two young sons in Cincinnati, has carefully seeded the ground for his candidacy, appearing frequently on podcasts and news shows with far-right influencers of the Trump base, including Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka.

In interviews, speeches and on social media, he has become a culture warrior. He threatened to make Big Tech “pay” for putting conservatives “in Facebook jail,” and he mocked Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after the four-star general said he sought to understand “white rage” in the wake of the assault on the Capitol.

To Mr. Vance, it is a “big lie” that Jan. 6 was “this big insurrection,” he told Mr. Bannon.

In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Mr. Vance credited members of the elite with fewer divorces, longer lives and higher church attendance, adding ruefully, “These people are beating us at our own damned game.” But that was not his message at a recent conservative gathering where he blamed a breakdown in the American family on “the childless left.’’

Mr. Carlson, Fox’s highest-rated host, all but endorsed Mr. Vance during the candidate’s appearance last month. Mr. Vance also has the backing of Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a rising conservative leader in the House. And Charlie Kirk, the founder of the right-wing student group Turning Point USA, who has ties to the Trump family, has endorsed the “Hillbilly Elegy” author.

“He has been consistent in being able to diagnose the anxieties of Trump’s base economically almost better than anyone else,” Mr. Kirk said in an interview. Although Mr. Vance once mocked Mr. Trump’s position that a southwest border wall would bring back “all of these steel mill jobs,” today he supports the “America First” agenda that reducing legal immigration will increase blue-collar wages, a link that many economists dispute. “Why let in a large number of desperate newcomers when many of our biggest cities look like this?” Mr. Vance said recently on Twitter over a picture of a homeless encampment in Washington.

Mr. Trump has met with all five major declared Ohio Republican Senate candidates — who are seeking the open seat of the retiring Senator Rob Portman — but has not signaled a preference. He is not likely to do so any time soon, according to a person briefed on his thinking. Among Democrats, Representative Tim Ryan has the field nearly to himself. Ohio, once a battleground state, has trended rightward in the Trump era.

Mr. Vance declined to be interviewed for this article. But an examination of his embrace of Trumpism through the ample record of his writings and remarks, as well as interviews with people close to him, show that it happened the way a Hemingway character famously described how he went bankrupt: “Gradually, and then suddenly.”

The year 2018 appears to have been the turning point. That January, Mr. Vance considered a Senate bid in Ohio but ultimately decided not to run, citing family matters, after news reports brought to light his earlier hostile criticism of Mr. Trump.

Later that year, the furious opposition on the left to the Supreme Court nomination of Brett M. Kavanaugh was a milestone in Mr. Vance’s political shift. Mr. Vance’s wife, Usha, whom he met in law school, had clerked for Justice Kavanaugh. “Trump’s popularity in the Vance household went up substantially during the Kavanaugh fight,” Mr. Vance told a conservative group in 2019.

Although Mr. Vance has said that he came to agree with Mr. Trump’s policies on China and immigration, the most important factor in his conversion, he told Mr. Gorka in March, was a “gut” identification with Mr. Trump’s rhetorical war on America’s “elites.”

“I was like, ‘Man, you know, when Trump says the elites are fundamentally corrupt, they don’t care about the country that has made them who they are, he was actually telling the truth,’” Mr. Vance said.

(His adoption of Trump-style populism did not inhibit him from flying to the Hamptons last month for a fund-raiser with Republican captains of industry, as reported by Politico.)

Finally, the influence of Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal, whom Mr. Vance has called a “mentor to me,” appears to have been decisive in Mr. Vance’s embrace of Trumpism.

An outspoken and somewhat rare conservative in Silicon Valley, Mr. Thiel addressed the 2016 Republican convention and advised the Trump transition team. He is a fierce critic of China and global trade and a supporter of restrictionist immigration policies, and Mr. Vance has moved toward all those positions. Mr. Thiel, who did not respond to an interview request, is also paying for a super PAC for another protege, Blake Masters, in a Senate race in Arizona.

In March, Mr. Thiel brokered a meeting between Mr. Vance and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s resort in Florida. Mr. Vance made amends for his earlier criticism and asked Mr. Trump to keep an open mind, according to people briefed on the meeting. If Mr. Trump were going to attack Mr. Vance — as he has other Republican 2022 candidates around the country whom he perceives to be disloyal — he probably would have done so already.

For now, the former president’s appetite for revenge in Ohio seems to be sated by attacking Representative Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican who voted for impeachment in January. Mr. Trump held a rally in the state in June to back a primary challenger to Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Vance was on hand, sharing a photo on Twitter to show his support for Mr. Trump.

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Democratic Insider and a Republican Backed by Trump Win Ohio Home Races

Democratic Insider and a Republican Backed by Trump Win Ohio House Races

The race was not so much symbolic of a liberal-moderate divide among the Democrats as a clash between an insider who rose quickly in local party circles and an agitator who made a living from alienating party leaders by showing their commitment to liberals Ideals questioned. Both candidates were solidly liberal in their views on a number of issues, including legalizing marijuana and, in some cases, making college more affordable or free.

External political groups from different corners of the democratic coalition invested heavily in the race. Ms. Turner was backed by leftist environmental interests in support of the Green New Deal; the political group founded by Senator Bernie Sanders and once headed Our Revolution; and two progressive groups, the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats.

Ms. Brown was more likely to support institutional actors and politicians such as the Political Committee of the Congressional Black Caucus; several senior members of the caucus; James E. Clyburn Rep. Of South Carolina, Whip of the Democratic House of Representatives; Hillary Clinton; Jewish Democrats; Cleveland Area Black Churches; and unofficially Marcia Fudge, who vacated this year to become Mr. Biden’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development and agreed to have her mother appear in an advertisement for Ms. Brown because she needed to remain neutral as a government official.

Democratic leaders in Washington and groups often at odds with the progressive left were concerned that a victory by Ms. Turner, who topped double digits in early polls and initially raised more money than Ms. Brown, could herald a new round of hostilities within the party for the Democrats.

And the establishment hit back hard – to a degree that it has not had in previous struggles when candidates with the support of party activists such as New York MPs Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman knock out seasoned politicians with little resistance.

This time, while Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other stars of the left in Ohio were fighting for Ms. Turner, prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus such as Mr. Clyburn visited the district and implored the people to choose Ms. Brown as someone who was respectful and to be willing to work with fellow Democrats – an implicit criticism of Ms. Turner’s more confrontational style. She was openly criticized by many, such as Mississippi MP Bennie Thompson, who called Ms. Turner a “lonely know-it-all”.

Advertising attacking Ms. Turner’s professionalism and character was ubiquitous in the district in the last days of the campaign. An ad by centrist group Third Way compared Ms. Turner’s political style and tone to that of Mr. Trump, and reiterated a moment on camera when she was struggling for survival during the campaign by making a rough analogy with choosing between Mr. Biden, whom she did not support, and Mr. Trump.

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Ohio Home Races: What to Watch For

Ohio House Races: What to Watch For

But who wins, and their margin of victory, could tell us a little bit about what Democratic voters think as the party seeks to capitalize on its tight control of Washington and prepares for a tough challenge for halftime in 2022.

If Mrs Turner wins, especially if she does so with ease, it would be a sign that the progressive energy of the upstart that drove Mr Sanders’ two presidential campaigns is not waning as the movement seeks out new national leaders gradually to succeed the 79-year old Mr. Sanders. And she would most likely send another high profile advocate to Congress for the left’s top priorities like universal health care and far-reaching climate action.

If Ms. Brown wins, especially if she does so by a wide margin, it would signal that Democratic voters would prefer a candidate more in line with the party’s flag-bearers in Washington and be careful about choosing someone who has those leaders in the past criticized. Or, as Sean McElwee, executive director of polling firm Data for Progress, put it, Democratic voters “are interested in voting for the person who will go to work and they will not have to think.” over again and again. “

In the Republican Race near Columbus, a crowded field of Republicans vies to piss off Mike Carey, an energy lobbyist who was backed by Mr. Trump. He was largely unknown until the former president threw his support for Mr. Carey in early June and all but made sure he would be the front runner.

But the race is fluid, with more than 10 candidates running for the Republican nomination. Some of Mr. Carey’s rivals also have a more established reputation in the district, the 15th Congress, as well as the support of prominent allies of Mr. Trump.

Those rivals include Bob Peterson, a state senator who also runs a 2,700 acre grain farm and is backed by Ohio Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group. There’s also Ruth Edmonds, who has a following among Christian Conservatives and has the support of Ken Blackwell, a prominent Conservative activist and Trump ally, and Debbie Meadows, an activist and wife of Mark Meadows, the last Chief of Staff to Mr. Trump in the White A house .

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Health

Ohio Clinic Says It Will not Administer Alzheimer’s Drug to Sufferers

Ohio Clinic Says It Won't Administer Alzheimer's Drug to Patients

In a conspicuous concern about the approval of the controversial new Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm, the Cleveland Clinic said Wednesday evening that it would not give it to patients.

The clinic, one of the largest and most respected medical centers in the country, said in a statement a panel of experts had “reviewed all available scientific evidence about this drug,” also called aducanumab.

“Based on the current data on safety and effectiveness, we have decided not to wear aducanumab at the moment,” the statement said.

A spokeswoman for the clinic said individual doctors there could prescribe Aduhelm to patients, but those patients would have to go elsewhere to get the drug, which is given as an intravenous infusion every month.

The stance of the major medical center is the latest fallout from the approval of the drug by the Food and Drug Administration on June 7, a decision that also fueled Congressional investigations.

Many Alzheimer’s experts and other scientists have said that it is unclear that the drug helps slow cognitive decline and that at best the evidence suggests only a slight slowdown while showing that Aduhelm causes brain swelling or hemorrhage could.

Recognition…Biogen, via Associated Press

The drug is also expensive. Biogen, the maker, has set its price at $ 56,000 per year.

In a recent survey of nearly 200 neurologists and primary care physicians, most said they disagreed with the FDA’s decision and did not plan to prescribe the drug to their patients.

Last week, Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting FDA commissioner, in response to growing criticism of an independent state investigation into the agency’s regulatory process, wrote, “To the extent that these concerns could undermine public confidence in the FDA’s decision, I believe” it is critically important that the disputed events are reviewed by an independent body. “

Two almost identical clinical trials with Aduhelm were stopped prematurely because an independent data monitoring committee concluded that the drug did not appear to be helping patients. A later analysis by Biogen found that participants who received the high dose of the drug in one study experienced a very slight slowdown in cognitive decline – 0.39 on an 18-point scale – that participants in the other study however, had not benefited from it at all.

About 40 percent of study participants developed cerebral hemorrhage or swelling, and while most of these cases were mild or manageable, about 6 percent of participants dropped out because of serious side effects from these conditions.

After reviewing the data late last year, an FDA advisory committee strongly recommended outside experts against approval, and three of its members resigned in protest last month when the agency defied the advice of the advisory committee. The American Geriatrics Society had also urged the agency not to approve the drug because it was “premature in the absence of sufficient evidence.”

In response to widespread criticism that Aduhelm was approved for anyone with Alzheimer’s, the FDA last week severely restricted the drug’s recommended use, saying that it should only be used for people with mild memory or thinking problems as it doesn’t have any Data on the use of Aduhelm gave later stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

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Ohio energy brokers search enterprise leaders to run

Ohio power brokers seek business leaders to run

Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio, speaks to media outlets as he walks the Senate subway at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Tuesday, January 26, 2021.

Sarah Silbiger | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A group of Ohio power brokers have reached out to business leaders across the state to try to win them for Republican Rob Portman’s Senate seat in 2022 in an effort to keep pro-Trump contenders from winning this contest from familiarizing themselves with the cause.

Some of those who have started engaging with potential candidates are donors and company types close to former Ohio Republican governor John Kasich.

Kasich is one of the most famous GOP critics of former President Donald Trump. He was one of the few Republicans to be featured at the Democratic National Convention that summer to support Joe Biden.

The opportunity to try to win a Republican primary in a seemingly divided party leads some executives to choose not to join. Those raised on the Republican and Democratic sides include the CEO of a corporate advocacy group in Ohio, a venture capitalist and digital marketing manager.

Some people are reluctant to enter the race because a Republican primary will involve a battle for the party’s base and likely Trump’s own endorsement. If he stands up for it, Trump will likely endorse someone more aligned with his agenda than a more traditional Republican. Trump won Ohio in the 2020 presidential election.

Jim Jordan, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, R-Ohio, will not be running for Portman’s seat, his office recently announced. Kevin McCarthy, minority chairman of the House of Representatives, R-Calif., Said in a statement Thursday that after meeting with Trump, the former president “is required to elect Republicans in the House and Senate in 2022”.

GOP politicians with allegiances to Trump who reportedly may be in the mix include Rep. Steve Stivers and Jane Timken, leaders of the Ohio Republican Party.

Political strategists say they are not surprised by the effort to find a business-minded candidate. It is the latest signal that the Republican primary for Portman’s seat will be expansive.

“There will likely be a huge box in the GOP area code with a choice of all ideological stripes,” Charlie Black, a former Kasich strategist, told CNBC. It is “expected,” Black said of executive recruitment, “but there will be conservative candidates who are not married to Trump.”

Portman announced on Monday that he would not seek re-election in 2022 because “it had become more and more difficult to overcome the partisan congestion and to make progress in the political field.” Portman was a Republican legislature who voted to ratify the electoral college results and confirm Biden as the 2020 presidential winner.

Executives with Republican ties who have made attempts to include them in the race include Alex Fischer, president and CEO of The Columbus Partnership, and Mark Kvamme, a venture capitalist who has been in Ohio for more than a decade.

Another executive who has emerged as a Democratic contender is Nancy Kramer, founder of Ohio-based digital marketing agency Resource / Ammirati. Kramer’s company was taken over by IBM in 2016.

Fischer’s Columbus Partnership is a corporate agency group for the city of Columbus and central Ohio. Fischer has also been publicly credited for helping keep the MLS soccer team, the Columbus Crew, in town when they considered moving to Texas.

Kvamme and Fischer told CNBC that they are not interested in running for the Senate despite being approached. Kramer, who currently works at IBM iX in Columbus, has not returned a request for comment.

“Yes, some people called me. I’m flattered,” Kvamme told CNBC. “Maybe I’ll step into the political arena one day, but my time will be better spent demonstrating to my friends in California that Ohio and the Midwest are the next great place to start and build tech companies.”

Fischer, who was once the deputy governor of Tennessee before moving to Ohio, said he had no interest in running despite discussions in political circles.

“No, I don’t think about it privately or position myself otherwise. Obviously there is a lot of discussion in political circles,” Fischer told CNBC. “In my conversations there is mounting frustration about the wider political environment, the inability to solve problems and work across party lines to work together. There is also a desire to see leaders to become more active,” he added.

On the Democratic side, Axios reported that Amy Acton, former director of the Ohio Department of Health, might also be in the mix. Former Columbus Mayor Mike Coleman said he was considering running. Rep. Tim Ryan, a former presidential candidate, said he was “looking seriously” at running.

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Business

Ohio researchers determine two variants probably originating within the U.S.

Ohio researchers identify two variants likely originating in the U.S.

Healthcare workers conduct free Covid-19 tests for people in their cars in the parking lot of the Columbus West Family Health and Wellness Center in Columbus, Ohio on November 19, 2020.

Stephen Zenner | AFP | Getty Images

Researchers in Ohio said Wednesday that they discovered two new variants of the coronavirus that likely originated in the United States – one of which quickly became the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio over a period of three weeks in late December and January.

Like the strain first detected in the UK, the US mutations appear to make Covid-19 more contagious, but they don’t appear to affect the vaccine’s effectiveness, the researchers said.

Ohio State University researchers have not yet released their full results, but they say an unverified study is in the pipeline. Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told CNBC that the agency is reviewing the new research.

One of the new strains, found in just one patient in Ohio, contains a mutation identical to the now dominant variant in the UK. Researchers concluded that it “likely appeared in a strain of the virus that is already present in the US”. However, the “Columbus strain,” which researchers said in a press release had become dominant in the city, includes “three other gene mutations not previously seen together in SARS-CoV2.”

“This new strain of Columbus shares the same genetic backbone as previous cases we’ve studied, but these three mutations represent a significant evolution,” said Dr. Dan Jones, Ohio state vice chairman of the molecular pathology division, in a statement. “We know that shift didn’t come from the UK or South African branches of the virus.”

The mutation of the dominant new strain in Columbus – COH.20G / 501Y – “may appear independently in several parts of the world in recent months,” the researchers said.

Peter Mohler, chief scientist at Wexner Medical Center in Ohio, United States and co-author of the upcoming study, said there was no data to suggest the new strain would affect vaccine effectiveness.

“It is important that we do not overreact to this new variant until we receive additional data,” he said in a statement. “We need to understand the effects of mutations on the transmission of the virus, the prevalence of the strain in the population, and the effects on human health.

The Ohio researchers will hold a press conference about their discovery at 11 p.m. ET.

This is the latest news. You can find updates here.