But the issues voters are most concerned about, from high inflation and poor school test results to rising levels of crime, have all been exacerbated to some degree by the pandemic and its aftermath. And it is Republican candidates who are reaping the benefits.

“Covid-19 is declining as an issue for the American public,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice-president at Ipsos. “People have gone back to normal, but they are not giving the Democrats credit for that — they want to know what both parties are going to do for them next.”

Meanwhile several high-profile midterm races are hinging on rising crime, including Democrat Kathy Hochul’s campaign to hold on to the New York governor’s mansion. Although Republicans blame rising crime on Democrats’ policing policies, some criminologists argue it has been fuelled in part by the economic scars left by the pandemic lockdowns.

Data collated by the political website FiveThiryEight show that Americans broadly approve of the way in which Biden has handled the pandemic.

But Tom Cochran at 720 Strategies, said that would hold little sway in the midterms. “Things are getting back to normal, but that’s exactly why many people don’t want to talk about it. Bringing it up on the campaign trail is just giving voters PTSD.”

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Kiran Stacey

The National Institutes of Health told the Financial Times its officials were investigating whether the study, which was partly funded by the US government, should have gone through extra checks before going ahead.

An early version of findings from the study, in which researchers combined a lab-made version of Covid-19’s original strain with the spike protein from the more transmissible Omicron variant, was published last Friday. Omicron has proved less deadly than the so-called “wild type” of the virus, but has spread far more quickly because it is better able to escape immune protection.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Kiran Stacey

Three members of Congress have urged health officials to reverse a recent decision to give over $500,000 to the EcoHealth Alliance to fund its work hunting for new coronaviruses in the wild. The grant is one of four given to the organisation since the start of the pandemic, adding up to more than $7mn in total.

EcoHealth, which is based in the US and led by the British scientist Peter Daszak, has previously been criticised for coronavirus experiments it conducted on mice in 2015 with the lab in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 was first discovered, and its subsequent failure to disclose the full details of the studies.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Kiran Stacey

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday gave the companies the go-ahead to roll out their “bivalent” shots, which target both the original strain of Covid and the fast-spreading BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, ahead of a national booster programme this autumn.

US officials had resisted pushing ahead with variant-specific vaccines, but have been persuaded by the fact that many people with two or more shots are still susceptible to infection. They have taken this next step with the new vaccines despite a lack of clinical evidence about how they will work in an attempt to head off a huge spike in infections this winter.

The FDA insisted it was confident the new vaccines would prove safe and effective enough to prevent the kind of peak in cases seen last winter. The original vaccines will no longer be offered as booster shots.

Peter Marks, head of the unit that authorises vaccines at the FDA, said: “The hope here is that by increasing the amount of antibodies we have to that particular variant, we will restore the kind of protection that we had when we first saw these vaccines launched in the late part of 2020, early part of 2021, where we had very good protection against symptomatic disease.

“We don’t know for a fact yet whether we will get to that same level, but that is the goal here.”

The Moderna shot is authorised for anyone aged 18 and over, while the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine can be given to anyone aged 12 or older. The vaccines are designed to be administered as a single booster at least two months after a previous jab.

This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Kiran Stacey