J&J vaccine protects monkeys with one shot

Johnson & Johnson on Thursday kicked off US human safety trials for its Coivd-19 vaccine after releasing details of a study in monkeys that showed its best-performing vaccine candidate offered strong protection in a single dose.

When exposed to the virus, six out of six animals who got the vaccine candidate were completely protected from lung disease and five out of six were protected from infection as measured by the presence of virus in nasal swabs, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

“This gives us confidence that we can test a single-shot vaccine in this epidemic and learn whether it has a protective effect in humans,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The drugmaker said it had started early-stage human trials in the United States and Belgium and would test its vaccine candidate in more than 1,000 healthy adults aged 18 to 55 years, as well as adults aged 65 years and older.

The US government is backing J&J’s vaccine effort with $456 million in funding as part of a spending spree aimed at speeding production of a vaccine.

New Delhi, July 30: A government audit of India’s flagship payments processor last year found more than 40 security vulnerabilities, including several it called “critical” and “high” risk, according to an internal government document seen by Reuters.

The audit, which took place over four months to February 2019, highlighted a lack of encryption of personal data at the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which forms the backbone of the country’s digital payments system and operates the RuPay card network championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The March 2019 government document cited the storing of 16-digit card numbers and other personal information such as customer names, account numbers and national identity numbers in “plain text” in some databases, leaving the data unprotected if the system was breached.

The NPCI said in a statement to Reuters it is regularly audited in the interests of security and senior management reviews all findings, which are then “remediated to (the) satisfaction of the auditors”.

National cyber security coordinator Rajesh Pant, whose office coordinated the audit, also said in a statement to Reuters that “all observations raised in last year’s report have been confirmed as resolved by the NPCI”.

The audit was undertaken to provide the National Security Council with an overview of the NPCI’s defences against cyberattacks. The PMO and the finance ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The audit’s findings underscore the data-security challenges faced by the NPCI which processes billions of dollars daily via services that include inter-bank fund transfers, ATM transactions and digital payments.

Set up in 2008, the NPCI is a not-for-profit company, which as of March 2019, counted 56 banks as its shareholders, including the State Bank of India, Citibank and HSBC.

RuPay has grown to account for almost twothirds of nearly 900 million debit and credit cards issued in India as of October, according to NPCI and central bank data.

The audit followed a Reserve Bank of India inspection report on the NPCI in July 2017 that found lapses in its internal auditing practices, operational risks and improper whistleblower policies.

There was “lack awareness of risks of and risk culture in the institution,” according to a mostly redacted version of the 37-page report that was obtained by Reuters via the Right to Information Act (RTI) last year.

The 2019 government document about the audit also noted: “There is a strong need for proper governance.”

The RBI conducted another inspection between November and December 2019. A 33-page report on that audit included its assessment of NPCI’s governance and operational and credit risks. But most of the report, also obtained by Reuters via the RTI Act, was redacted by the central bank, which cited the need to protect India’s and the NPCI’s economic interests.

The March 2019 government document said a variety of card numbers were unencrypted within the NPCI database for the country’s network of almost 250,000 ATMs, while unencrypted RuPay card numbers could also be seen in the organisation’s server logs.