Eyam's Monthly News Update (February 2023)

Dear Eyam Subscribers,

In this month's newsletter, I review key news in the public health industry over the last few months.

This past month, we have the acknowledgement from public health experts that they have no idea how many cases of COVID-19 there are or where the outbreaks are occurring right now. Because at-home testing has become the norm, the only cases that are really being counted are the ones registered at the hospital - so many of those are severe cases. We’re now in the quiet phase of the pandemic.

Some may say COVID has become endemic, but that would imply a predictable seasonality which we don’t yet have. Instead, we continue to have quiet surges around the world. Most recently, China opened up and for a couple of weeks was overwhelmed by the number of sick and dying. Because funding has been cut to monitor and track new variants, it’s hard to say yet in what new ways the virus has mutated.

Second, the US Department of Energy is now joining the FBI is coming to the conclusion that COVID-19 may have escaped from the Wuhan Lab. This, of course, raises more questions than it answers and congressional investigations are likely to seek answers to these questions over the next 12-18 months.

Finally on the news front, we continue to monitor the historic and unprecedented spread of the Bird Flu. In past newsletters, we’ve discussed the nearly 60-million chickens that have been culled in the US alone. A few weeks ago, it was reported that a young girl in Cambodia has died of the Bird Flu. What is alarming about this death is that her father has also tested positive for the virus. Scientists are uncertain as to whether or not his infection was the result of the first identified human-to-human transmission (spillover event) and the possibility of a new variant capable of transmission between humans.

Since 2003, there have been 863 known human cases of Bird Flu resulting in the deaths of 457 of those infected. To put this into perspective, this 53% mortality rate is nearly 20x higher than has been experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we’ve learned anything from the last three years, it’s that governments should be investing in a Bird Flu vaccine today in anticipation of a possible spillover event and spread in humans.

If a spillover event does occur, Eyam stands ready to cooperate with health authorities to deploy the Jennerator Bioinformatics Platform to quickly design Bird Flu vaccines that could be rapidly tested and brought into clinical trials.

Let’s hope we don’t get to that point, but if we do, Eyam’s technologies are now pandemic tested and ready to be deployed.

Best,

Ryan M. Thomas, CEO