COVID-19; Research

High COVID vaccine hesitancy in sub-saharan Africa

Mary Cunningham — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:34:02 +0000

High COVID vaccine hesitancy in sub-saharan Africa Mary Cunningham Thu, 10/13/2022 - 20:34

In This Story

A new study by Dongqing Wang, assistant professor of Global and Community Health, finds there is high COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among adolescents in five sub-Saharan African countries mostly because of perceived lack of safety and perceived lack of effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

Only 22% of people living in Africa are fully vaccinated for COVID-19, according to Africa CDC, and this falls well below the global average of 64%. Vaccine hesitancy is one of multiple reasons that Africa has the lowest vaccination rate of any populated continent.

A new study by Dongqing Wang, assistant professor of Global and Community Health, assessed the prevalence and determinants of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among adolescents in five sub-Saharan African countries (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania) and found vaccine hesitancy to be high in all five countries and extremely high in Tanzania.

“COVID-19 vaccination campaigns among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa should address adolescents' concerns and misconceptions about COVID-19 vaccine safety and effectiveness,” said Wang. “Health care workers, parents, schoolteachers, peers, religious leaders, and social media could all be leveraged as channels of advocacy to support vaccination efforts.”

Individual characteristics associated with greater vaccine hesitancy were female sex, perceived lack of safety, and perceived lack of effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

“Beyond COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, it is crucial to ensure that vaccines are accessible should adolescents desire to be vaccinated, and it rests upon the global medical community to get the shots into the arms of the often-neglected population of sub-Saharan African adolescents,” said Wang.

The research was a multi-country survey in 2021 using computer-assisted telephone interviewing. This work was jointly supported by institutional support from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University Center for African Studies, Heidelberg Institute of Global Health (Germany), and the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and its determinants among sub-Saharan African adolescents was published October 2022 in PLOS Global Public Health.

Topics

coronavirus; covid-19

Fast Grants to aid in the development of a pan-coronavirus vaccine

John Hollis — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 17:49:07 +0000

Fast Grants to aid in the development of a pan-coronavirus vaccine John Hollis Mon, 12/13/2021 - 12:49

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics and the faculty director at the Mercatus Center. Photo provided

��AV’s Fast Grants program continues to play a leading role in the global pandemic by expediting critical research needed in the fight against COVID-19.

The philanthropic effort, which is part of the Emergent Ventures program for innovators based within Mason’s Mercatus Center, recently received nearly $7 million from generous benefactors, most of whom have chosen to remain anonymous. As a result, the Fast Grants Program was able to quickly send out nearly $4 million in support of pan-coronavirus vaccine research at the University of Washington and at the California Institute of Technology in the hopes of soon developing a vaccine that can offer protection against every strain of the virus.

“The necessity to fight back against COVID is obvious,” said Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics within Mason’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the faculty director of the Mercatus Center. “We are supporting research into vaccines that will—if they succeed—work against all variants to come in the future. And Fast Grants has had a good track record supporting quality research against COVID, and in a timely manner. The researchers have some initial promising results. Now they can get started on the next steps right away.”

Cowen, who founded Emergent Ventures, announced the start of the Fast Grants program in March 2020 in the hopes of inspiring immediate breakthroughs in the fight against the deadly virus that has now claimed more than 5.2 million lives around the globe, including nearly 800,000 Americans, according to the World Health Organization.

Donors soon began coming forward to aid in the efforts, including Telsa’s Elon Musk, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, among others.

Launched with a $1 million grant from the Thiel Foundation, Emergent Ventures Fast Grants range between $10,000 and $500,000. Decisions on funding typically are made within 14 days of requests and are quickly dispersed to recipients.

To date, the Fast Grants program has distributed more than $54 million in more than 200 grants, including several for potential vaccines and treatments for the virus.

“I am hoping this work can save lives,” Cowen said, “and restore our economy to normal operation more rapidly. Perhaps it also will be the basis of future advances in medical sciences, directed at other problems as well.”

Topics

Campus News

coronavirus; COVID-19; Editorial

Vaccines

COVID-19; Research

Mercatus Center

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Statistics professor takes on big data challenges with multi-faceted research

Martha Bushong — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 19:19:36 +0000

Statistics professor takes on big data challenges with multi-faceted research Martha Bushong Fri, 11/19/2021 - 14:19

In This Story

Lily Wang

��AV’s outstanding location, available opportunities, and growing reputation combined to produce a winning formula that attracted statistics professor Lily Wang to the College of Engineering and Computing Department of Statistics in fall 2021.

“Collaboration is the key for my profession, and the Washington, D.C. area has so many government agencies and top technology companies, and it creates fantastic opportunities. Mason is growing so fast and on an impressive trajectory,” says Wang.

Wang’s primary areas of research are broad and diverse. They include non- and semi-parametric modeling and inference, statistical learning of data objects with complex features, methodologies for functional data, spatiotemporal data, survey sampling, and data reduction methods. Working at the interface of statistics, mathematics, and computer science, she is also interested in general issues related to data science and big data analytics. Her methods have a wide application in engineering, neuroimaging, epidemiology, environmental studies, economics, and biomedical science.

For example, she has been heavily involved with the Centers for Disease Control and spatiotemporal data related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The team’s research findings created a dashboard with multiple apps embedded. The dashboard provides a real-time seven-day forecast and a long-term forecast of COVID-19 infection and death count at the county and state level, and the corresponding risk analysis. “We are honored to be one of the teams that the CDC is relying on to better understand and forecast COVID-19 in the United States,” says Wang.

Another area of great interest to Wang is using functional data to learn how to apply statistics to help with early disease diagnosis and disease prognosis prediction. Currently, most existing studies focus on one-dimensional (1D) function. For example, 1D children’s growth charts are commonly used to screen children’s growth. “Modern technologies produce large volumes of multi-modality imaging data that might be used as biomarkers for diseases,” Wang said. So, Wang’s research team uses 2D and higher dimensional medical imaging data and other clinical and genetic data for Alzheimer’s disease research.

The wealth of data presents new opportunities to innovate in science and technology; however, it also requires a parallel effort in statistical method development that enables researchers to make a rigorous inference. She says, “If you think about a high-resolution image, you can have a million pixels for just the one image, and beyond the image, you also have the patient medical and genetic information, so-called ‘big data squared.’ Analysis of these big data can easily go beyond the capability of the traditional methods. Our state-of-art statistical models and powerful learning tools can help to delineate associations among these data.”

Wang is also teaching a split undergraduate/graduate course in applied regression analysis. She really cares about her students, and she always offers various modalities of her classes. She says, “I always try my best to accommodate students’ special needs, especially under the pandemic.”

Whether she is teaching students or working with research collaborators, Wang’s excitement about being a new faculty member at Mason comes through. “Statistics is a thriving and fast-developing discipline in the data science era. Our department at Mason is home to renowned researchers in statistics, biostatistics, and data science/analytics with a bright future. I am so happy to be part of it,” she says.

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Department of Statistics

COVID-19; Research

CEC faculty research

Mason’s Michael Buschmann and team at start-up AexeRNA Therapeutics Inc. pursue patents for improved COVID-19 vaccines

John Hollis — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 19:18:20 +0000

Mason’s Michael Buschmann and team at start-up AexeRNA Therapeutics Inc. pursue patents for improved COVID-19 vaccines John Hollis Wed, 07/28/2021 - 15:18

In This Story

Caroline Hoemann

Michael Buschmann (seated) and his team that includes (l to r) Aarthi Narayanan, Mikell Paige and Caroline Hoemann have developed improved technology that could help make COVID-19 vaccines better and more readily available. Not pictured: Pat Gillevet. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services

��AV bioengineering professor Michael Buschmann and a team of scientific collaborators have devised improved lipid nanoparticle technologies to deliver mRNA that could make mRNA vaccines such as the COVID-19 vaccines less costly, with fewer side-effects and more available worldwide.

Vaccines with mRNA use lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to protect the mRNA and facilitate the immune system’s response to protect people against infection by viruses. This technology has flattened the COVID-19 curve in Western industrialized nations, but the vaccine will need to evolve to reduce side effects and permit worldwide vaccination to eradicate the disease.

Working with ��AV’s Office of Tech Transfer (OTT) to form the start-up AexeRNA Therapeutics Inc., Buschmann and his team have licensed the commercial rights of four patent applications to the company. The patents address two major LNP technology issues related to novel lipid molecules and novel methods of LNP manufacturing.

“Our solutions seek to make the vaccine more efficient, less costly, and decrease its adverse effects,” said Buschmann, the chair of the Bioengineering Department within Mason’s College of Engineering and Computing.

By modifying the structure and composition of the LNPs, the researchers were able to make the vaccine more efficient, less toxic and easier to make, handle and distribute.

They look forward to now sharing their discovery and helping in the fight against a global pandemic that has killed more than four million people around the world, including more than 600,000 Americans. The current success of mRNA vaccines also paves the way for their use in many other infectious diseases.

“OTT ensures the protection of the intellectual property and works with start-ups like AexeRNA to bring the scientific discoveries to the marketplace,” said Hina Mehta, director of the Office of Technology Transfer.

Buschmann and his partners see tremendous potential for mRNA and vaccines as they may hold the keys to unlocking the technology to fight variants of COVID, influenza, HIV and many other viral pathogens.

Buschmann, Mikell Page from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry within Mason’s College of Science and Drew Weissman, Professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are the scientific founders of the Mason/University of Pennsylvania spin-off. The group also includes Mason postdoctoral research associate Suman Alishetty and PhD student Manuel Carrasco, University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral research associate Mohamad Alameh and venture capitalist and intellectual property lawyer Thomas Axel Haag.

“We’re excited to move this technology into further preclinical development and scale-up so that mRNA vaccines can be more widely and effectively used in pandemic and non-pandemic settings,” Buschmann said.

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Podcast - EP18: Creating a safer return to campus

Kristin Heydt — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:40:09 +0000

Podcast - EP18: Creating a safer return to campus Kristin Heydt Fri, 01/29/2021 - 13:40

On Jan. 22, Mason President Gregory Washington spoke with Mason scientists Lance Liotta and Virginia Espina, who head the university’s effort to push the boundaries of technologies that are keeping its three university campuses safe from COVID-19. That includes a rapid-result, saliva test and development of an antibody test that can track a body’s response to the virus and vaccine.

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Podcast Episode

podcast

coronavirus; covid-19