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Chandrayaan 3 launch date: Covid curbs delay Chandrayaan-3 mission by one more year; launch likely during third quarter of 2022: Minister | India News

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NEW DELHI: With the Covid pandemic delaying crucial missions of Isro, the country’s third lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 is now “likely to be launched during the third quarter of 2022 assuming normal workflow henceforth”, Union minister for department of space Jitendra Singh said on Wednesday. Chandrayaan-3 is a lander-and-rover-specific mission that will land on the lunar surface as the orbiter of Chandrayaan-2 is already functional and taking images 100km from Moon’s orbit.
In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha, Jitendra Singh said the realisation of Chandrayaan-3 was in progress as the work was earlier hampered due to the pandemic. “However, all works that were possible in work from home mode were taken up even during lockdown periods. Chandrayaan-3 realisation resumed after commencement of unlock period and is in a matured stage of realisation,” Singh said in his reply to the LS. The minister said the realisation of Chandrayaan-3 involves various processes, including finalisation of configuration, subsystems realisation, integration, spacecraft-level detailed testing and a number of special tests to evaluate the system performance on Earth.
Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is critical for Isro as it will demonstrate India’s capabilities to make landings for further interplanetary missions, was earlier scheduled for launch last year. However, the lockdown-triggered Covid restrictions in Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, where the key Isro centres are situated, delayed the mission by a year. Now, the lunar mission launch, scheduled for this year, is deferred again till next year.
Chandrayaan-2, aimed at landing a rover on the unchartered south pole of Moon, was launched on July 22, 2019. However, lander Vikram hard-landed on September 7, 2019, crashing India’s dream to become the first nation to successfully land on the lunar surface in its maiden attempt. Learning from its past mistakes, Isro now plans to achieve its lunar landing dream with Chandrayaan-3 mission.

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Don’t count on needing a Covid booster shot, WHO scientist says

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GENEVA: As some governments and pharmaceutical officials prepare for Covid booster shots targeting more-infectious virus variants, health authorities say it’s too early to tell if they will be required.
“We do not have the information that’s necessary to make the recommendation on whether or not a booster will be needed,” Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, said in a Zoom interview Friday. The “science is still evolving.”
Such a call is “premature” while high-risk individuals in most of the world haven’t yet completed a first course of vaccination, Swaminathan said. Data from countries introducing precautionary extra inoculations later this year — particularly for vulnerable people whose immunity to SARS-CoV-2 may wane faster — will inform WHO’s guidance, she said.
Covid booster shots are likely to be rolled out in UK in the fall to avoid another winter surge. Seven different vaccines are being tested in volunteers in England in the world’s first booster study, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said last month.
The UK, which has inoculated a larger proportion of people than any other major economy, has been forced to delay a planned lifting of coronavirus restrictions amid a resurgence of cases driven by the delta variant. The strain, first reported in India, is the most infectious reported to date.
Tweaking shots
More-transmissible variants, including the beta strain that emerged in South Africa, require higher antibody levels to prevent infection, prompting vaccine makers including Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc. to test whether tweaked versions of their existing shots will provide broader immunity.
One dose of Novavax Inc.’s variant-directed vaccine may provide sufficient protection against the beta strain in individuals previously immunized against Covid-19, according to pre-clinical research released this month by scientists at the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based company and the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
The modified shot also has the potential to provide broad protection against various strains if used as a primary vaccine regimen, said Gregory M. Glenn, Novavax’s president of research and development, in a June 11 statement.
So far, the existing US-approved vaccines work well enough to protect against beta, delta and two other strains that the WHO has designated as variants of concern, said Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
‘Our Future’
“Nobody is saying you need a booster today,” Collins said in an interview with biologist Lee Hood at the Precision Medicine World Conference Thursday. “But boosters might very well be in our future at some point, and they might be here sooner if other variants pop up” that aren’t covered as well by existing vaccines.
As a minimum, vaccines will need to protect against hospitalization, ICU admission and death, according to Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “With that bar, we probably would need a vaccine maybe every three to five years,” he said in a STAT biotech podcast on Thursday.
Immunization with a combination of vaccinations may offer longer immunity or fewer side effects for certain individuals, Offit said.
Early data from the UK, Spain and Germany suggest a “mix-and-match” regimen using two different types of vaccines generates more pain, fever and other minor side effects compared with two doses of the same inoculation, the WHO’s Swaminathan said.
Still, the so-called heterologous prime-boost combinations appear to spur a more robust immune response, leading to both higher levels of virus-blocking antibodies and the white blood cells that kill virus-infected cells, she said.
Combinations of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech shots are being considered in Malaysia, where the government is trying to speed up immunizations to achieve population-level immunity by year-end, Science, Technology and Innovation Minister Khairy Jamaluddin said on Wednesday.
“It seems to be working well, this concept of heterologous prime-boost,” Swaminathan said. “This opens up the opportunity for countries that have vaccinated people with one vaccine and now are waiting for the second dose they have run out of, to potentially be able to use a different platform vaccine.”





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3rd wave possible if vaccination not ramped up, Covid norms not followed: Scientist

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NEW DELHI: If the vaccination drive against coronavirus is not ramped up and Covid-19 appropriate-behaviour is not maintained, there is a possibility of a third wave of the pandemic in 6-8 months, said M Vidyasagar, a scientist involved in the Sutra Model which uses mathematics to project the trajectory of Covid-19.
He, however, stressed the Sutra Model has not predicted any third wave and it is working on it.
The Indian Institutes of Technology-Hyderabad professor cited a paper by Italian researchers on infected people with decreasing antibodies, which give some sort of immunity, in six months.
“If the antibodies are lost, then there is a chance of immunity going down. In this case, vaccination has to be ramped up and Covid-19 appropriate-behaviour must be practiced. If not then there is a possibility of a third wave in 6-8 months,” Vidyasagar said.
“We are also adding the aspects of immunity and vaccination in our model for our future forecasts,” he added.
According to a study by the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, antibodies against coronavirus remained in the blood of patients with Covid-19 for at least eight months after they were infected.
A recent sero-survey by the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (IGIB) suggested that the neutralising antibodies declined significantly after five-six months, making people prone to reinfections.
The coronavirus cases in the country peaked in September 2020 and there was a nationwide decline of new cases starting in October.
“Using more stringent measures (more than 30 per cent inhibition of surrogate receptor-spike protein binding), the loss of neutralisation may be even higher.
“We speculate that this may be related to recurrence of outbreaks in March 2021, after the peak in September 2020,” the IGIB paper said on the second wave that started raging from late March and has claimed thousands of lives since then.
K VijayRaghavan, Principal Scientific Adviser, had said on May 5 that as the virus mutates further, a third wave of COVID infection is inevitable and it is necessary to be prepared for new waves.
Two days later, he said there may not be a third wave of coronavirus in the country, if strong measures are taken and effectively implemented at the state, district and city-level.
“If we take strong measures, the third wave may not happen in all places or indeed anywhere at all. It depends on much how effectively guidance is implemented at the local level in the states, districts and cities everywhere.
“The guidance about precautions, about surveillance, about containment, about treatment and about tests. This insidious asymptomatic transmission can be stopped if we follow the guidelines. This sounds difficult, it is difficult and we can and must do it,” VijayRagahvan had said in a press briefing.



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Young Covid survivors not safe from reinfection: Lancet

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NEW YORK: If you are planning to avoid vaccination just because you are a Covid survivor, think twice. According to a new study, despite a prior Covid-19 infection young people can likely catch the virus again and may still transmit it to others.
Even after a previous infection and the presence of antibodies, vaccination is still necessary to boost immune responses, prevent reinfection, reduce transmission, and that young person should take up the vaccine wherever possible, asserts the study published in the journal The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
“Immunity is not guaranteed by past infection, and vaccinations that provide additional protection are still needed for those who have had Covid-19,” said Professor Stuart Sealfon, from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the US.
In the study, the team involved 2,346 young and fit Marines from the US Marine Corps – 189 were seropositive (they had previously been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and had antibodies) and 2,247 were seronegative at the start of the study.
Across both groups of recruits, there were 1,098 (45 percent) new infections between May and November 2020. Among the seropositive participants, 19 (10 percent) tested positive for a second infection during the study. Of the recruits who were seronegative, 1,079 (48 percent) became infected during the study.
Further, they found that, among the seropositive group, participants who became reinfected had lower antibody levels against the SARS-CoV-2 virus than those who did not become reinfected. The neutralizing antibodies were also less common – in 45 (83 percent) of 54 uninfected, and in six (32 percent) of 19 reinfected participants.
In addition, they found the viral load (the amount of measurable SARS-CoV-2 virus) in reinfected seropositive recruits was on average only 10 times lower than in infected seronegative participants, which could mean that some reinfected individuals could still have a capacity to transmit infection. However, this needs further investigation, the team said.

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Cancer patients less protected after first Covid vaccine jab, UK study finds

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LONDON: Cancer patients may not be protected to the same degree as the rest of the population after they receive their first of two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, a new UK study has found on Thursday.
A team of experts from King’s College London and Francis Crick Institute found in the first real-world study of its kind that a shorter than the stipulated 12-week gap between the two vaccine doses for such patients appeared to be the answer.
The study’s senior authors, Dr Sheeba Irshad and Professor Adrian Hayday, believe that there should be urgent re-evaluation of UK policy for the dosing interval for all cancer patients, and likewise for many other high-risk groups of immuno-suppressed patients.
“Our data provides the first real-world evidence of immune efficacy following one dose of the Pfizer vaccine in immunocompromised patient populations,” said Dr Sheeba Irshad, a senior clinical lecturer from the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s College London.
“We show that following the first dose, most solid and haematological cancer patients remained immunologically unprotected up until at least five weeks following primary injection; but this poor one dose efficacy can be rescued with an early booster at day 21,” she said.
Data from the world’s first reported trial to examine the level of immune protection after the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in cancer patients has found that anti-SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – antibody responses at week three following the first dose of the vaccine were only 39 per cent and 13 per cent in the solid and haematological cancers, compared to 97 per cent in those without cancer.
The preprint study, which is to be peer-reviewed, also reports that when the second dose of the vaccine was given three weeks after the first dose, the immune response improved significantly for solid cancer patients with 95 per cent of them showing detectable antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 virus within just two weeks.
By contrast, those who did not get a vaccine boost at three weeks did not see any real improvement, with only 43 per cent of solid cancer patients and 8 per cent of blood cancer patients developing antibodies to the Pfizer vaccine at five weeks compared to 100 per cent of healthy controls.
The evidence of vaccine responses in cancer patients shows that a gap of 12 weeks between doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine could leave many cancer patients vulnerable to serious Covid-19, the study finds.
Prof. Adrian Hayday from King’s College London and the Francis Crick Institute said: “Cancer patients should be vaccinated and boosted quickly and their responses, particularly those of blood cancer patients, should be intensively monitored so that those who mix with family, friends and carers can be confident of their environment.”
Dr Simon Vincent, Director of Research, Support and Influencing at Breast Cancer Now, called on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), which determines the UK’s vaccine rollout cohorts, to urgently review the evidence and to consider adapting its strategy to ensure that cancer patients can receive both the first and second dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine within a three-week timeframe to minimise their risk of both contracting and becoming seriously ill with coronavirus.
“Worryingly, this study suggests that people affected by cancer, including breast cancer, get little protection against the virus when they only receive a single dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, and then do not receive their vaccine boost in the following three weeks,” he said.
But Cancer Research UK said the small study had not yet been reviewed by other scientists and people undergoing cancer treatment should continue to follow the advice of their doctors, while the government said that antibody response “was only part of the protection provided by the vaccine”.
Meanwhile, the UK study will continue to follow cancer patients after their vaccinations for up to six months.



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