Hackers linked to the Chinese government are trying to steal coronavirus-related research on vaccines, treatments and testing, the FBI and a U.S. cybersecurity agency warned Wednesday.

The FBI, in a joint statement with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said it is investigating “the targeting and compromise of U.S. organizations conducting COVID-19-related research by [People’s Republic of China]-affiliated cyber actors and non-traditional collectors.”

The hackers have been caught attempting to “identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property” and public health data related to coronavirus research, according to the statement.

“The potential theft of this information jeopardizes the delivery of secure, effective, and efficient treatment options,” the statement read.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, is a division of the Homeland Security Department.

The federal agencies urged all U.S. organizations researching the virus to beef up their cybersecurity practices to “prevent surreptitious review or theft of COVID-19-related material.”

The coronavirus originated near the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province and has since grown to a global pandemic that has hit the U.S. harder than any other country, according to data on confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths. More than 1.3 million cases and at least 82,389 deaths have so far been counted in the U.S., data from Johns Hopkins University shows.

U.S. political leaders and health experts have said that the world may not be relieved of the disease’s massive impact on daily life, which has brought the United States economy to a virtual standstill, until an effective vaccine is made widely available.

But even if a vaccine is developed at a breakneck pace, it could still be at least a year to 18 months away.

“Biomedical research has long been at the heart of something the Chinese have wanted and something they have engaged in economic espionage to get,” John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, told CNBC on Monday.

“It would be crazy to think that right now, the Chinese were not behind some of the cyberactivity we’re seeing targeting U.S. pharmaceutical companies and targeting research institutes around the country that are doing coronavirus research, treatments and vaccines,” Demers said on “The Exchange.”

The unfolding health crisis caused by the coronavirus is the latest issue to rattle relations between Beijing and Washington. The world’s two largest economies were already engaged in a disruptive trade war with intellectual property theft proving to be a major sticking point between the two nations.

U.S. officials have long complained that Chinese intellectual property theft has cost the economy billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs and that it threatens national security. China maintains that it does not engage in intellectual property theft.

The F-35, the crown jewel in the defense giant Lockheed Martin’s portfolio, had its sensitive design and electronics data compromised in 2009. Chinese hackers were believed to be behind the cyber-intrusion.

China later announced it was developing its own fifth-generation fighter, the stealth Shenyang J-31 jet, which bears a striking resemblance to the F-35.

The Trump administration is also working to isolate Chinese tech firm Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, from developing a larger foothold in U.S. partner countries.

China’s actions have received bipartisan criticism: Earlier this year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., took a hard stand against doing business with Huawei, and warned other nations not to deal with the company.

After years of negotiations, the Trump administration and the Chinese government in January signed the first phase of a trade agreement. But President Donald Trump has in recent weeks blamed China for the virus and sharply criticized its handling of the outbreak.

“It could have been stopped right where it came from,” Trump said in March.

On Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted, “We just made a great Trade Deal, the ink was barely dry, and the World was hit by the Plague from China.”

“100 Trade Deals wouldn’t make up the difference – and all those innocent lives lost!” Trump wrote.

As I have said for a long time, dealing with China is a very expensive thing to do. We just made a great Trade Deal, the ink was barely dry, and the World was hit by the Plague from China. 100 Trade Deals wouldn’t make up the difference – and all those innocent lives lost!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2020

Reporting by Kevin Breuninger, Kevin Stankiewicz and Amanda Macias @ CNBC

— CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace Jr. contributed to this report.

Johnson & Johnson says it aims to have more than half a billion coronavirus vaccines ready early next year.

The pharmaceutical giant will have 600 million to 800 million vaccines available in early 2021, when it expects the US government to approve the drug it plans to start testing in humans this September, chief financial officer Joe Wolk said Tuesday.

“The timeline still is pretty certain,” Wolk told Yahoo Finance in an interview. “We’re manufacturing at risk to ensure that should the clinical development and the trials be successful, we are in a position to kind of flip the switch and ready to go to create great access across the globe.”

The company aims to ramp up production to 1 billion doses annually by the end of next year, Wolk said in the interview. J&J and the federal Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority announced a $1 billion investment last month to help achieve that goal.

J&J plans to set up a new manufacturing facility in the US to supplement the company’s plant in the Netherlands that can produce up to 300 million doses. The stateside factory will be up and running later this year or early next year, Wolk told Yahoo.

Reporting by Noah Manskar. This article first appeared on NYPost

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson left hospital on Sunday and thanked staff for saving his life from COVID-19, but his government was forced to defend its response to the coronavirus outbreak as the national death toll passed 10,000.

Johnson, 55, was taken to St Thomas’ Hospital in London on April 5. He was moved into intensive care the following day and remained there until April 9.

“I have today left hospital after a week in which the NHS has saved my life, no question,” Johnson said in a five-minute video message posted on Twitter from 10 Downing Street, referring to the state-run National Health Service.

He named and thanked nurses who had cared for him, with a special mention for two of them, Jenny from New Zealand and Luis from Portugal, who he said had stood by his bedside for 48 hours “when things could have gone either way”.

“The reason in the end my body did start to get enough oxygen was because for every second of the night they were watching and they were thinking and they were caring and making the interventions I needed,” he said.

Johnson wore a suit and tie and spoke in his usual upbeat manner. In characteristic fashion, he made a joke, thanking the doctors who had cared for him, “several of them for some reason called Nick”.

He will continue his recovery at Chequers, the official prime ministerial country residence northwest of London, his office said. Health minister Matt Hancock said there was no advice on when he would return to work and it would be a clinical decision.

“VERY DARK TIMES”

A Reuters photographer saw Johnson and his pregnant fiancee Carrie Symonds, 32, who has also suffered from COVID-19 symptoms, being driven out of Downing Street with their dog.

“There were times last week that were very dark indeed. My heart goes out to all those in similar situations, worried sick about their loved ones,” Symonds said on Twitter. “Today I’m feeling incredibly lucky.”

While Johnson has been out of action, his ministers have come under pressure to explain why the number of people dying of COVID-19 is rising so fast.

The death toll in hospitals across the United Kingdom stood at 10,612 as of 1600 GMT on Saturday, an increase of 737 over a 24-hour period, official figures showed on Sunday.

That was lower than the daily increases of 980 and 917 reported on Friday and Saturday. On previous weekends, the numbers have dipped, which can reflect delays in registering deaths.

“The UK is likely to be certainly one of the worst-affected if not the worst-affected country in Europe,” Jeremy Farrar, director of health foundation the Wellcome Trust and a member of a scientific panel advising the government, told the BBC.

Asked to comment on Farrar’s prediction during the daily government news conference, Hancock did not dispute it.

“The future of this virus is unknowable as yet because it depends on the behavior of millions of people,” he said.

MINISTERS UNDER PRESSURE

In his video message, Johnson thanked the public for following social distancing restrictions in place since March 23 and assured them their efforts were paying off.

“I want you to know that this Easter Sunday I do believe that your efforts are worth it, and are daily proving their worth,” he said.

However, ministers faced a barrage of questions on whether the government had been too slow to impose a national lockdown.

“Different countries have different cycles in terms of where they are in terms of the spread of this pandemic,” Business Minister Alok Sharma told Sky News earlier in answer to that question.

At Sunday’s briefing, Hancock came under pressure to explain persistent problems such as a lack of personal protective equipment for hospital and care home staff, and low levels of coronavirus testing compared with some European countries.

He said the NHS had not been overwhelmed, unlike the health services of some other countries, and that it currently had close to 3,000 spare critical care beds.

The medical director of Public Health England, Yvonne Doyle, said there were signs that the number of hospital admissions in London could be stabilizing, but the position was still getting worse in parts of northern England.

Reporting by Reuters‘ Estelle Shirbon and Kate Holton/ Additional reporting by Henry Nicholls and Hannah Mackay, Editing by Alison Williams and Giles Elgood

Forty-five people will be enrolled in the preliminary safety trial of the new vaccine.

Researchers in Seattle have begun recruiting healthy volunteers to participate in a clinical trial for an experimental COVID-19 vaccine, according to news reports.

The vaccine, developed by the biotechnology company Moderna Therapeutics, was initially sent to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Maryland on Feb. 24, according to The Wall Street Journal. The agency anticipates launching a clinical trial by the end of April and will sponsor the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute to conduct the testing, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci told The Wall Street Journal.  

Forty-five healthy volunteers between the ages of 18 and 55 will be enrolled in the initial trial, which aims to determine whether the vaccine triggers an immune response, and whether the given dose causes adverse side effects, according to a description on ClinicalTrials.gov. 

The vaccine does not contain the virus that triggers COVID-19, called SARS-CoV-2, and cannot cause infection, according to a report by Kaiser Permanente. Unlike vaccines developed for other viruses, such as measles, this new vaccine does not utilize a weak or dead virus as its base. Instead, the vaccine contains a short segment of genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA, generated in a laboratory. In a typical cell, mRNA encodes instructions for building different proteins. 

The artificial mRNA prompts cells to build a protein found on the surface of the virus, according to the Kaiser Permanente report. A person’s immune system should react to this new protein by building up an arsenal of antibodies that target and latch onto this protein, tagging the virus for elimination. Then, the mRNA should break down and be eliminated by the body, leaving the vaccinated person better prepared to fight off SARS-CoV-2, should they ever encounter it.

Designing the vaccine to work in this way allowed Moderna to fast-track the development process, as the company did not need to isolate and modify live samples of SARS-CoV-2 as it would for a more conventional vaccine, according to Kaiser Permanente. 

Volunteers will receive two injections of the vaccine in the upper arm, with a 28-day gap between doses. The 45 participants will be split into three groups, with each group receiving a different dose of the vaccine. Volunteers will be asked to attend 11 in-person study visits over the course of the 14-month study and will receive $100 for each appointment they attend, totaling up to $1,100 by the end. 

Following this initial safety trial, the vaccine’s effectiveness must be tested in several subsequent trials in larger groups of people before being distributed widely. Meanwhile, researchers around the world will continue to work on viable treatments to help people who contract the virus. For now, patients with COVID-19 will receive supportive care to address symptoms of the disease, Live Science previously reported. 

Although this advance in vaccine development is encouraging, earlier this week, U.S. health officials noted that they can’t guarantee that a COVID-19 vaccine will be affordable. 

“We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told the House Energy and Commerce Committee Wednesday (March 4), according to Market Watch. “The priority is to get vaccines and therapeutics, and price controls won’t get us there.”

However, Moderna Therapeutics CEO Stéphane Bancel has stated that the company’s vaccine should be affordable. 

“We are highly aware this is a public-health issue, and so we will be very thoughtful about setting a price if this product gets to approval,” Bancel told Business Insider. “There is no world, I think, where we would contemplate to price this higher than other respiratory virus vaccines.”    

Once the vaccine is developed, it will take at least 90 days to complete the regulatory process and potentially more to enter the marketplace.

Israeli scientists are on the cusp of developing the first vaccine against the novel coronavirus, according to Science and Technology Minister Ofir Akunis. If all goes as planned, the vaccine could be ready within a few weeks and available in 90 days, according to a release.

“Congratulations to MIGAL [The Galilee Research Institute] on this exciting breakthrough,” Akunis said. “I am confident there will be further rapid progress, enabling us to provide a needed response to the grave global COVID-19 threat,” Akunis said, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

For the past four years, a team of MIGAL scientists has been developing a vaccine against infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), which causes a bronchial disease affecting poultry. The effectiveness of the vaccine has been proven in preclinical trials carried out at the Veterinary Institute.

MIGAL is located in the Galilee.

“Our basic concept was to develop the technology and not specifically a vaccine for this kind or that kind of virus,” said Dr. Chen Katz, MIGAL’s biotechnology group leader. “The scientific framework for the vaccine is based on a new protein expression vector, which forms and secretes a chimeric soluble protein that delivers the viral antigen into mucosal tissues by self-activated endocytosis, causing the body to form antibodies against the virus.”

Endocytosis is a cellular process in which substances are brought into a cell by surrounding the material with cell membrane, forming a vesicle containing the ingested material.

In preclinical trials, the team demonstrated that the oral vaccination induces high levels of specific anti-IBV antibodies, Katz said.

“Let’s call it pure luck,” he said. “We decided to choose coronavirus as a model for our system just as a proof of concept for our technology.”

But after scientists sequenced the DNA of the novel coronavirus causing the current worldwide outbreak, the MIGAL researchers examined it and found that the poultry coronavirus has high genetic similarity to the human one, and that it uses the same infection mechanism, which increases the likelihood of achieving an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time, Katz said.

“All we need to do is adjust the system to the new sequence,” he said. “We are in the middle of this process, and hopefully in a few weeks we will have the vaccine in our hands. Yes, in a few weeks, if it all works, we would have a vaccine to prevent coronavirus.”

MIGAL would be responsible for developing the new vaccine, but it would then have to go through a regulatory process, including clinical trials and large-scale production, Katz said.

Akunis said he has instructed his ministry’s director-general to fast-track all approval processes with the goal of bringing the human vaccine to market as quickly as possible.

“Given the urgent global need for a human coronavirus vaccine, we are doing everything we can to accelerate development,” MIGAL CEO David Zigdon said. The vaccine could “achieve safety approval in 90 days,” he said.

It will be an oral vaccine, making it particularly accessible to the general public, Zigdon said.

“We are currently in intensive discussions with potential partners that can help accelerate the in-human trials phase and expedite completion of final-product development and regulatory activities,” he said.

Reporting by MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMAN @ JPost