California First To Be Approved For Up To $10 Billion Bailout From Feds To Pay Unemployment Benefits

California First To Be Approved For Up To $10 Billion Bailout From Feds To Pay Unemployment Benefits

As politicians argue over whether or not to bailout decades-long bad decisions on the basis of a sudden virus/lockdown-driven drop in revenues, California has stepped up to the plate with what appears to be a direct request for a bailout to fund the benefits for millions of newly-unemployed residents (and illegal immigrants).

Just a day after California Governor Newsom warned of the state’s sudden budget collapse…

“Last year I did a May revise with a $21.4 billion budget surplus,” Newsom said on Friday during his daily coronavirus briefing, according to Bloomberg.

“This year I will be doing a May revise looking at tens of billions of dollars in deficit. We just went tens of billions in surplus in just weeks to deficits.

The Wall Street Journal reports that California has become the first state to borrow money from the federal government so it can continue paying out rising claims for unemployment benefits during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Golden State borrowed $348 million in federal funds after receiving approval to tap up to $10 billion for this purpose through the end of July, a Treasury Department spokesman said Monday.

“I’m doing everything I can to work with cities and counties, but we are not going to be in a position, even as the nation’s fifth-largest economy, to provide for the needs of all the cities and the counties without federal support,” said Newsom.

Meanwhile, in a  memo last week, Newsom’s finance director ordered departments to significantly slash spending immediately using strict measures, including bans on new goods and service contracts.

As the journal concludes, California serves as an early sign of the potential magnitude of the federal assistance that could be required if states are to continue paying out jobless benefits. It is one of more than 20 states and jurisdictions that entered the current economic crisis without enough money in their unemployment trust funds to pay benefits through a yearlong recession, according to Labor Department data.

With 30 million unemployment claims filed since the coronavirus pandemic resulted in the shutdown of broad swaths of the economy, states are reporting that they’ll need at least $1 trillion in aid from the federal government – which has already doled out over $2.2 trillion in relief for business loans, stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits and small business assistance.

And with a lack of tax revenue, states with bloated budgets and massive entitlement programs are facing significant pain in the months ahead.

The U.S. government has also approved loans of up to $12.6 billion for Illinois and up to $1.1 billion for Connecticut through the end of July to replenish state unemployment insurance funds, though the two states hadn’t yet started borrowing by the end of April. California was the only state to have accessed the program so far in the current downturn, the Treasury spokesman said.

One wonders if the reason that the other states haven’t been so quick to draw down on the loans is because they are hoping for a broader-based bailout from a Democrat-sponsored Congressional bill that enables pension benefits to be covered… and not just the jobless.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 14:53

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2SzRwBH Tyler Durden

Small Businesses, Many Of Which Couldn’t Get PPP Loans, Have “A Few Months Or Less” To Survive

Small Businesses, Many Of Which Couldn’t Get PPP Loans, Have “A Few Months Or Less” To Survive

Small business impacted by the coronavirus pandemic have had difficulty obtaining loans from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), according to a CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey released Monday.

Of 2,200 small businesses owners polled, just 13% of the 45% who applied for a PPP loan were approved. 7% of respondents had already received financing, while 18% are still waiting on a response from a lender, according to CNBC.

Those applying for a different program, the $10,000 Economic Injury Disaster Loan, fared worse – with just 3% of small business owners reporting that they were approved, and 16% still awaiting a response.

Both relief programs are run by the Small Business Administration. PPP loans are capped at $100,000 per employee and can range in size. The $10,000 advance from EIDL does not have to be repaid, making it effectively a grant. 

Sole proprietorships that represent 81% of all small businesses in America is a group particularly hard hit in this credit crunch. For them the window for relief loans opened late, giving them a shorter time opportunity to garner the money desperately needed to ensure they can remain in business. –CNBC

Dire straits

Meanwhile, 43% of small businesses surveyed report that they can survive for a few more months or less – with 31% reporting a ‘few months,’ 7% ‘less than a month’ and 6% less than a week under the current economic lockdown.

Rohit Arora, CEO of online lending platform Biz2Credit, which lends to small businesses, confirms what we’ve been reporting for weeks – that multiple problems plagued the PPP rollout for small businesses.

“The law was murky, and both applicants and bank loan officers were ill-equipped to process the data, as requirements were changing so fast.”

“Another issue is the fact that as a general rule, large banks haven’t focused on small business loans given to companies with less than 50 employees,” said Arora. “They have deemed it too labor intensive.”

Meanwhile, small community banks were ill-equipped to handle the flood of applications and were quickly overwhelmed by the massive volume of data being fed into their system in a short period of time.

Karen Kerrigan, CEO of the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, says the regulations imposed on borrowers under the PPP has also been a challenge, and many business owners have decided not to tap the program for that reason. Among them: the 25/75 rule that says business owners must use 75% of the funds they receive only for payroll, and 25% for rent, mortgage payments, utilities and other operating expenses in order to get loan forgiveness.

In many cases this has been a deal breaker. Rent and other operating expenses are high, and getting only a quarter of the loan to cover those costs is not enough,” she explains.

Another requirement for loan forgiveness is that business owners have eight weeks to bring back employees after the money hits their bank accounts. “What happens to those small business owners operating in hard-hit places like New York and New Jersey, where stay-at-home orders are still in place and no one knows when the shutdown orders will be lifted?” she says. –CNBC

In a potentially promising sign for future disbursements, several fintech companies such as Square, PayPal and Intuit are now authorized PPP lenders.

“These companies serve millions of small business owners, many of whom are sole proprietorships and mom and pops. They have the AI and advanced technology to process these loans, as well as strong relationships with many borrowers who regularly use their concierge-type services,” said Kerrigan.

On Sunday, White House National Economic Director Larry Kudlow said that a third round of stimulus may be necessary, but that the Trump administration had made no decision on further funding.

Read the rest of the report here.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 14:31

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El-Erian Warns “Huge Disconnect” Between Wall Street And Main Street Could Have Devastating Consequences

El-Erian Warns “Huge Disconnect” Between Wall Street And Main Street Could Have Devastating Consequences

Authored by Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE, first published in Bloomberg

Just a few weeks into the coronavirus crisis, many are already pointing to the striking contrast between what has happened to the real economy and financial markets. This Main Street versus Wall Street tension is fueled both by legacy and current issues and sheds light on the state of economic and financial policies. It may also play a role in determining current and future well-being.

Two main factors are driving the tension.

On the legacy front, the memory of the global financial crisis is still fresh in many people’s minds. Unlike the current crisis, Wall Street caused an ugly shock in 2008 that resulted in a Great Recession for Main Street and almost tipped it into a depression. Wall Street was also the primary recipient of a huge bailout that enabled most of it not just to recover quickly but also to pay itself well during the recovery period. Adding to the sense of injustice, relatively few Wall Street leaders were seen to have suffered, let alone been held legally accountable or gone to prison.

Fast-forward to today and, again, there’s a huge disconnect between the fortunes of the two, and it has emerged quickly.

Main Street is dealing with historic collapses in employment (30 million workers have applied for jobless claims in just six weeks) and economic activity (a 4.8% contraction in gross domestic product at an annualized pace in the first quarter with a further 30% to 40% decline in the cards for this quarter). Wages are falling for many of those still lucky enough to have jobs. The pain and suffering associated with all this is visible not only in the long lines outside food banks around the country but also in reports of mounting domestic violence and mental anxiety.

Yet Wall Street is coming off the best month for stocks in 33 years. The capital markets are wide open for most listed companies to issue bond financing. A relatively big part of the financial sector has been immune from the wave of large layoffs and bankruptcies the rest of corporate America is experiencing.

The extent of this divergence has not gone unnoticed and is already raising concerns. Yet there are understandable reasons that make its resolution tricky.

Again in this crisis, the Federal Reserve has proved to be the most responsive and powerful policy-making institution. After an initial hiccup, it moved boldly and effectively to ensure that a 2008-like financial crisis did not amplify the real and present danger of a 1930s-like depression. But this could be done only by injecting trillions of dollars into capital markets, thereby also significantly boosting the prices of financial assets that are mostly held by the better-off segments of American society.

Fiscal policy has also been hard at work. But accomplishing things in this case is inherently trickier. Congressional approval is needed for virtually every action (unlike for the majority Fed policy measures), and there is the added challenge of building new pipes to get the assistance to the targeted places quickly. The result is unavoidably more haphazard and less effective.

The longer this divergence persists, the greater the fuel on the fire of other divisions in America: rich versus poor, corporations versus individuals, current versus future generations, connected versus alienated, etc.

The right response is for government agencies and the Fed to undertake efforts to close the gap from both sides in an orderly way through such steps as: making mid-course corrections to the relief efforts to ensure greater effectiveness; designing new recovery plans that target high, inclusive and sustainable growth, thereby avoiding a repeat of the 2008 mistake of winning the war but failing to secure the peace; and paying much greater attention to mounting moral hazard in financial markets and the associated risk of future financial instability that could contaminate the real economy.

The more fortunate segments of society also have an important role to play, motivated both by collective and individual interests. More companies should be stepping up their social responsibility efforts. Just like the public sector, this should focus both on relief (donations to food banks, for example) and on recovery (for instance, helping, both solo and working with others, in establishing retraining and retooling programs for low-cost jobs that are not coming back).

Some will be tempted to argue that the current stark contrast in the fortunes of Main Street and Wall Street is unavoidable. Forced by the structure of the economy and policy apparatus, it’s an unpleasant stop on a potentially successful recovery journey. Others will see it as a repeated illustration of the extent to which the system has been co-opted to serve those already privileged, both in the good and bad times.

Whatever your viewpoint, we should all agree on the urgent priority of doing more now to ensure an orderly recoupling that delivers a quick and more inclusive recovery in the context of genuine financial stability.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 14:10

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Scandal-Plagued Carnival Books First Post-Corona Cruise For Aug. 1

Scandal-Plagued Carnival Books First Post-Corona Cruise For Aug. 1

When we first saw the following headline, our first reaction was to rub our eyes in disbelief, before double-checking the URL to make sure we were really on CNBC.com and not some new Onion vertical.

With an open criminal investigation in Australia and hundreds of thousands of outraged customers and their friends and family members who will likely never voluntarily board another cruise for as long as they live, Carnival Corp – the world’s biggest cruise line operator – is planning to launch its first post-corona cruises on Aug. 1, with 8 ships leaving from ports in Miami, Cape Canaveral and Galveston, Texas.

The first few replies sum up what we imagine to be the sentiments of many Americans who followed the horrifying reports about what we dubbed “a nightmare at sea”: Every time a new outbreak aboard a cruise ship seemed to explode into an international incident, the cruise line was seemingly inevitably a Carnival subsidiary, particularly the “Princess Cruises” line that drew the ire of Australian public health officials and – later – prosecutors.

First there was the Diamond Princess, then the Coral Princess and the Ruby Princess.

Ships from other Carnival subsidiaries also saw outbreaks at sea. Ultimately, dozens died and thousands were infected. Reporting from Bloomberg and the Washington Post has suggested that Carnival management was partly at fault.

Replies to the news were pretty much what we expected…

…and, like Mr. Weisenthal, we suspect there will be quite a bit of coverage when the first cruise sets sail.

Though we imagine more than a few bargain-hunters will jump at the opportunity as well…after all…


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 13:51

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Bankrupt Cities And States Get The National Disaster They’ve Been Hoping For

Bankrupt Cities And States Get The National Disaster They’ve Been Hoping For

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.

They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.

And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.

Here, for instance, is an estimate of how high unemployment will spike for various states. Note that overall it’s brutal, but the distribution isn’t what you might expect:

And here’s a table of state rainy day funds (i.e., cash on hand). To their credit, oil-producing states had the discipline to save against that commodity’s inevitable price fluctuations. Other states apparently didn’t see the need:

Illinois, which has the most underfunded pensions but, interestingly, a relatively healthy labor market, apparently had its natural disaster bailout plan prepped and printed before COVID-19 was invented and released. Because governor Gov. J.B. Pritzker almost instantly had his hand out for – get this – $41 billion, a sum equal to three times the state’s estimated pandemic-related revenue loss in the coming year. Overall, governors have asked for about $500 billion in aid.

And wait till California starts begging. See California Governor: Expect Budget Gap in ‘Tens of Billions’.

For President Trump, bailing out “badly run Democrat states”  seems politically pointless, since those states will never, ever vote Republican. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, trolled his Dem counterparts by suggesting that states just declare bankruptcy (thus freeing them to cut pension benefits).

But of course this is just partisan fantasy. Letting Illinois go bankrupt would send the muni bond market into a “who’s next?” seizure, which would quickly spread to corporate bonds, equities, and real estate, cratering the US and then the global economy. At least that’s the worst-case scenario economists will present to policymakers.

With no stomach for presiding over the end of the world during an election year, Washington will cave, agreeing to whatever governors demand. And so the grossest mismanagement in the history of US state and city government will be swept under the rug – or more accurately will be swept onto taxpayer balance sheets along with that of all the other sectors that are – surprise! – too big to fail.

This is a shame since one of the few things worth looking forward to in the deep recession the world was stumbling towards before the pandemic hit was the collapse of unconscionable public sector pensions, and the disgrace of the people who conned teachers, firefighters, and cops into thinking that those generous benefits were guaranteed. On the list of financial/political crimes of the modern era, theirs ranks near the top. And now they’ll go both unpublicized and unpunished.

Meanwhile, the resulting multi-trillion-dollar addition to the national debt will hasten the fiery end of the fiat currency/fractional reserve banking/unlimited-government-debt world. One can only hope that future historians will get the story right while the perps are still alive to answer for their sins.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 13:35

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NYT Publishes Grim CDC Projections Calling For Daily Coronavirus Deaths To Double By June

NYT Publishes Grim CDC Projections Calling For Daily Coronavirus Deaths To Double By June

Update (1320ET): Unsurprisingly, the White House has rebutted the NYT report – which claimed that these projections represented ‘current conditions on the ground, so to speak – saying it doesn’t reflect current projections.

*      *      *

Less than 12 hours after we predicted the news media would lose its mind over President Trump’s uttering a new “projected” death toll during a briefing with reporters Sunday evening. For the first time, Trump said he expects up to 100k deaths from the coronavirus outbreak, which is higher than figures he’s quoted in the past.

There’s no debate that the pace of deaths has slowed in the US in recent weeks.

Yet, as Florida allows some businesses to reopen (albeit with strictly limited capacity) on Monday, the NYT has published “internal projections” from the CDC calling for average daily US deaths to accelerate to 3,000 a day by June 1. However, most of the hardest hit states are seeing cases and deaths decline, while some states are seeing a slight acceleration. Overall US mortality has plateaued. According to the CDC’s own coronavirus weekly summary, “nationally, levels of influenza-like illness (ILI) declined again this week. They have been below the national baseline for two weeks but remain elevated in the northeastern and northwestern part of the country. Levels of laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 activity remained similar or decreased compared to last week.”

The NYT reported that the White House continues to expect up to 3,000 deaths a day in June while Trump continues to ‘press’ for states to reopen.

The report also claimed the projections “confirm” public health experts “primary fear” that a premature reopening will instigate a rebound putting us right back where we were in March.

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of cases and deaths from coronavirus over the next several weeks, reaching about 3,000 daily deaths on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double from the current level of about 1,750.

The projections, based on modeling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases now.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, not much has changed. And the reopening to the economy will make matters worse.

“There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the C.D.C. warned.

The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways as the health care system grew overloaded.

Notice the language the NYT has used: Characterizing the situation in the US by saying “not much has changed” simply doesn’t jive with the data, or with the lived experience of millions of Americans who took to public spaces and parks over the weekend to enjoy the good weather and sunshine.

But even states that have pressed ahead with reopening aren’t seeing anywhere near the activity they saw as recently as mid-March, just as the stay-at-home orders and lockdowns were beginning.

Trump smartly stopped egging on protesters and pushing states to reopen before federal guidelines say it’s acceptable. But at this point, the notion that these projections represent anything more than a “worst case” scenario for the CDC seems far-fetched.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 13:18

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/35vE0o1 Tyler Durden

Q1 GDP To Be Revised Drastically Lower To -8%

Q1 GDP To Be Revised Drastically Lower To -8%

Last week’s -4.8% GDP which officially heralded the start of the recession, was panned as the worst economic print since the financial crisis, and one which is about to get far worse in Q2, when some expect a GDP drop as much as 40%.

But before we get to Q2 we have two more revisions of the first quarter GDP number, and according to Goldman, before all is said and done, the first quarter GDP drop may end up matching the collapse recorded in Q4 2008.

According to Goldman’s economists, today’s Factory orders – which declined 10.3% in March, missing expectations for a smaller decrease – will be the catalyst for further aggressive cuts to the Q1 GDP print. As the bank explains, “growth in core capital goods orders for February was revised up by 0.2pp to -0.7%, and growth in core capital goods shipments was revised down by 0.1pp to -0.9%. Growth in core capital goods orders and shipments were left unrevised in prior months.”

And so, reflecting the growing weakness in non-durable inventories and the net downward revisions to March durable goods data, Goldman further lowered its first quarter tracking estimate for the May 28th Q1 GDP revision by five tenths to -7.2%, roughly 50% lower than the -4.8% originally reported. Worse, as additional source data is incorporated and non-response biases are resolved, Goldman expects the final vintage of the data to show an even larger decline of -8.2% (-0.5pp relative to our previous estimate of -7.7%), which would match the Q4 2008 drop when the financial system was on the verge of collapse.

Of course, all of this only looks at Q1, when the US economy was only impaired for about 2 weeks in late March when widespread shutdowns were launched. One can only imaging what Q2 GDP will look like.

 

 

 


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 13:13

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2W3euUg Tyler Durden

American Power Grid ‘Vulnerable’ To Chinese Cyberattacks, Navarro Warns

American Power Grid ‘Vulnerable’ To Chinese Cyberattacks, Navarro Warns

A Reuters report claiming Beijing is already preparing for the prospect of “an armed conflict” with the US has seemingly driven the deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing back into the limelight (at least as far as the market is concerned).

But for conservatives, who have been looking at China with a wary eye since the outbreak began, this latest ‘escalation’ is hardly a surprise. And when it comes to rebutting China’s aggression to an audience of mostly Trump supporters, nobody in the West Wing is as practiced as Pete Navarro. Which is probably why he was called to deliver a warning about the newest “threat” from China, a threat that could potentially be even more crippling to the US economy than the virus.

That threat? The vulnerability of the US power grid.

“I think that what’s important for the American people to understand very clearly is that “China lied, people died”. China spawned the virus and they hid the virus for 6 weeks, which allowed the virus to escape Wuhan and infect the rest of the world. And they spent that time going around the world, vacuuming up masks.”

Navarro explained how President Trump’s latest executive order protects America’s power grid by forcing the federal government to buy and use components made only in the US (the federal government administers roughly 20% of the US power grid). Under current rules, companies subject to the influence of foreign adversaries are still allowed to compete for government contracts to supply these components, Navarro argued in a Fox op-ed published shortly before his appearance.

Right now, Navarro said his primary responsibility in the administration is overseeing the reorientation of American supply chains away from China (though this will ultimately be decided by individual corporations, the White House can certainly take steps to sway their decisions, not that the crisis hasn’t been instructive enough on its own). He argued that this latest EO, along with another EO that will require federal agencies to use all-American components for medicines, are the first steps of the “decoupling” of the US economy away from China’s – something that, polls show, Americans mostly support.

Without these orders, Navarro said, China poses a direct threat to the US power grid so long as components made in China and other foreign markets are used.

Navarro also reiterated demands for an investigation into the early days of the outbreak and whether the virus did indeed originate from a lab: “Did they make scientists disappear?” Navarro asked.

He also insisted that “buy American is going to be the law of the land soon at HHS at DoD at the Veterans Administration…but we need to innovate…and we need to de-regulate…we need to have the whole chain here so it’s not all around the world, holding America hostage.”

Before the interview ended, Navarro urged viewers to read an article published last week by the Daily Telegraph that Navarro said gave “the entire timeline” of Beijing’s “complicity” in this.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 12:55

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3c5C7AX Tyler Durden

Texas Regulator Says Efforts To Impose Oil Production Cuts Are Now “Dead”

Texas Regulator Says Efforts To Impose Oil Production Cuts Are Now “Dead”

So much for any Saudi hopes that the US would join OPEC+ in implementing production cuts.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton, the Texas regulator who had proposed mandating oil production cuts in line with the historic April OPEC+ agreement to cut oil output by 9.7mmb/d, called those efforts “dead” a day before the state was set to vote on the measure.

In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Sitton predicted that curtailing production in a process known as “pro-rationing” would fail to get the support needed from the three-member agency, not to mention the state’s countless shale producers all of whom are scrambling to convert every drop of oil into precious cash flow.

“At this point we still are not ready to act, and so it’s too late, so there is no proposal to make,” Sitton said adding that “I think that proration is now dead.”

As Bloomberg notes, “Sitton had been the most outspoken member of the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s chief energy regulator, when it came to advocating for production caps.” Chairman Wayne Christian recently stated his opposition to cuts in an opinion piece for the Houston Chronicle, and Commissioner Christi Craddick had expressed numerous concerns during the most recent meeting.

The question then becomes if the US will once again ramp up output following the recent rebound in the price of oil…

… even as OPEC+ continues to curtail production, while global oil and gasoline demand, which rising modestly remains far below levels where the market remains in balance. And a close follow up: will output see a renewed surge just as optimism was starting to emerge that global storage caps would not be hit in the next month, sending the price of oil sharply lower again?


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 12:51

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2VZnBoG Tyler Durden

Coronavirus Defeated By Experimental Antibody That Targets Spike Protein

Coronavirus Defeated By Experimental Antibody That Targets Spike Protein

An experimental antibody developed by researchers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands can defeat coronavirus in a laboratory setting, according to a new study published in Nature Communications Bloomberg, which notes that the antibody – known as 47D11 – neutralized the virus in cell cultures.

Monoclonal antibodies are proteins created in a lab which resemble naturally occurring versions used by the immune system to fight off viruses and bacteria. 47D11 was created by using genetically modified mice to produce antibodies which target a specific site on a virus – in this case the spike protein, which coronavirus uses to attach to and enter human cells.

After the mouse antibodies were proven effective in defeating coronavirus, the researchers ‘reformatted’ it to create a fully human version, according to the study.

The experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that’s early in the drug development process — before animal research and human trials — the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Communications.

According to Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University, more research is needed to confirm the findings in a clinical setting. According to the researchers, the antibody can also kill other viruses equipped with similar spike proteins such as Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

“Monoclonal antibodies targeting vulnerable sites on viral surface proteins are increasingly recognized as a promising class of drugs against infectious diseases and have shown therapeutic efficacy for a number of viruses,” wrote Bosch and colleagues.

They’re are already used in treatments for cancer, inflammation, ebola and other applications.


Tyler Durden

Mon, 05/04/2020 – 12:35

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2W34g6k Tyler Durden