Helsinki Airport has started making use of dogs to detect COVID-19.
The airport in Finland is deploying trained sniffer dogs as part of a new trial after researchers said that in preliminary tests, dogs could "identify the virus with nearly 100 percent accuracy," including "days before before a patient developed symptoms," The Guardian reports. They can reportedly detect it in 10 seconds or less.
"It's very promising," University of Helsinki researcher Anna Hielm-Björkman, who is overseeing the trial, told The Guardian. "If it works, it could prove a good screening method in other places."
The trial reportedly involves having passengers use a wipe to dab their necks, which one of the dogs then sniffs, and if it detects the coronavirus, the passenger can then take a polymerase chain reaction test. Participation in the trial is voluntary, The New York Times reports.
Hielm-Bjorkman told the Times that it's not entirely clear what the dogs are actually detecting, explaining that "we know how dogs detect it — by smell — but we have no clue what they detect yet." But she added, "If we find this out, we can train thousands of dogs across the world." Airport Director Ulla Lettijeff in a statement said "we are pleased" with the start of the trial, adding, "This might be an additional step forward on the way to beating COVID-19." Brendan Morrow
The British government is on the verge of approving and funding the first clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines in which healthy volunteers are deliberately infected with live coronavirus, the Financial Times reports. Such "challenge trials" are not new — they have been conducted since the 1790s — but they are more dangerous than double-blind placebo studies and therefore more rare. Still, 2,000 people have signed up to participate in the proposed trials in east London, FT reports, and Britain could green-light the research as soon as next week.
The volunteer subjects will be young, healthy, and deemed at low risk of being harmed by exposure to the new coronavirus. They will first be given a dose of the experimental vaccine and then later get a "challenge" dose of the coronavirus, to see if the vaccine works, FT reports. Imperial College London will reportedly be the academic lead on the trials. It's not clear which vaccines will bet tested at the proposed new London quarantine facility, but AstraZeneca and Sanofi both told Reuters they are not involved. Peter Weber
"A chicken in every pot and a vaccine by Election Day!" That's how Politico paraphrases President Trump's election pitch, plus a chicken. Trump keeps promising a pre-election COVID-19 vaccine, "even though his own top health officials, including the former drug company executive leading his Operation Warp Speed vaccine initiative, have said again and again they are highly dubious of his rosy timeline," Politico notes. The public has noticed, and their faith in the safety of a vaccine has dropped accordingly.
The top vaccine developers have responded the apparent politicization of the COVID-19 inoculation by releasing their typically private blueprints to their vaccine safety and approval process, and the Food and Drug Administration is reportedly preparing to issue stricter guidelines for emergency approval of a vaccine. Trump was asked about the FDA's plans on Wednesday, and he did not seem pleased. "That has to be approved by the White House," he said. "We may or may not approve it. That sounds like a political move. ... I think that was a political move more than anything else."
Still, "if Trump thinks an October vaccine is the key to his election, he may be the one who gets a surprise," Politico reports, citing a new poll conducted with the Harvard T.C. Chan School of Public Health. It turns out, "getting a vaccine before Election Day would have virtually no effect on how likely voters cast their ballots," Politico says. "That's what 84 percent of voters favoring Trump say, along with 89 percent of those supporting Joe Biden." Roughly equal numbers say a pre-election vaccine would make them more likely (7 percent) and less likely (6 percent) to vote for Trump.
The Politico/Harvard poll surveyed 1,459 likely voters via phone from Aug. 25 to Sept. 6, and its margin of error is ± 3 percentage points. Peter Weber