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Fauci’s Calendar Raises Questions About COVID Response + More
Fauci’s Calendar Raises Questions About COVID Response
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on American society and the world at large, from small businesses to mental health to childhood education. As we emerge from it, public health experts, academics and journalists will piece together the history of our national response, of how personal grief intertwined with social consequences.
Last week, an important piece of that puzzle became publicly available. Dr. Anthony Fauci‘s official calendar from late 2019 and early 2020, until now hidden, is available at OpenTheBooks.com for the world to scrutinize. It should serve to inform lawmakers whose duty is to exercise oversight and hold public servants accountable. New details of meetings, names and dates allow for — and demand — more focused questions, so that we can sort out what saved lives and what caused undue damage.
A part of the calendar that cries out for more clarity is Fauci‘s conversation with Dr. James LeDuc, who runs a Biosafety Level 4 research facility in Texas. BSL4 is the highest security level to prevent the spread of dangerous diseases, and LeDuc had personally trained the Wuhan scientists on those procedures. He was having back-channel communications with the Wuhan lab director, as well as with Dr. Shi Zhengli, who became colloquially known as the “bat lady.” Zhengli experimented with coronaviruses as part of the U.S.-backed EcoHealth project.
Energy and Commerce GOP Leaders Press Boston University on COVID Research
The top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are pressing the president of Boston University for more information about the institution’s recent COVID-19 research.
Earlier this month, researchers from the Boston University School of Medicine published findings from a pre-print study in which they combined the ancestral coronavirus with genetic data from the circulating Omicron strain.
The National Institutes of Health said it did not review nor issue awards for the experiments described in the article, and is examining the matter to determine whether the research should have been subject to agency guidelines.
Boston University has stated that the research did not have to be cleared because the experiments were carried out with funds from the university and that there was no gain of function with the research.
The Updated COVID Boosters Could Have Been Better — From Design to Implementation, Our Bivalent Shots Missed the Mark
In August, the FDA authorized updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters containing an equal mix of the ancestral vaccine and a component tailored against the Omicron BA.4/5 subvariants. It rejected the idea of yet another booster of the original vaccine — which the U.S. has in abundant supply — or authorizing a monovalent Omicron-only booster. In our view, this decision was not clear-cut and may have been the wrong one.
European countries made different choices based on similar information, opting instead for a bivalent vaccine containing an equal mix of the ancestral vaccine and one designed against the Omicron BA.1 subvariant.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) committee recently noted that “…currently available data are not sufficient to support the issuance of any preferential recommendation for bivalent variant-containing vaccine boosters over ancestral-virus-only boosters….The bulk of the benefit is from the provision of a booster dose, irrespective of whether it is a monovalent or bivalent vaccine.”
Where Did Omicron Come From? Maybe Its First Host Was Mice
It’s one of the perplexing mysteries of the COVID pandemic: Where did Omicron emerge from, almost one year ago? The fast-moving, extremely contagious variant arrived just after Thanksgiving 2021, bristling with weird mutations. When scientists untangled the array, they found that Omicron wasn’t related to Delta or Alpha, the two waves that preceded it. Instead, its divergence from its closest common ancestor dated back more than a year, to the first few months of the pandemic — practically a geologic era in viral-replication time.
That was a conundrum. How could something be so communicable that it ripped through more than 120 countries in two months, yet have evaded detection for so long? Within the riddle lurked a puzzle: If Omicron developed not from earlier variants but in parallel to them, where was it hiding out all that time?
Now a new study from a research team at the University of Minnesota is giving that debate fresh energy. Their analysis suggests that Omicron adapted to mice, where it developed its mutational array before it passed into humans.
Model Predicts COVID Deaths Will Flatline This Winter — IHME Foresees Almost Eight-Fold Reduction in COVID Deaths Compared With Last Winter
The U.S. probably won’t see a major surge in COVID deaths this winter, according to new models from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle.
By Feb. 1, 2023, daily deaths are projected to be at a high point of 335, which pales in comparison to the approximate 2,500 daily deaths seen during the Omicron surge around the same time last year, according to a recently published IHME policy brief. The report estimates the COVID-19 infection-fatality rate (IFR) to be below 0.2% as of October 17.
“Many people have been exposed to COVID-19, either through infection or through vaccination, [so we don’t expect] a high hospitalization rate and high mortality rate,” Ali Mokdad, Ph.D., a professor at IHME and chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington, told MedPage Today. “We will see a little bit of a rise, but it will not be as high as what we have seen in the past.”
Also contributing to that flattening of the deaths curve is the fact that current and emerging variants appear less severe and unable to thwart humoral and cellular immunity — though Mokdad warned that the appearance of a new variant that is more severe and immune-evasive could change those predictions. Nonetheless, he said, the probability of that happening is small.
African Health Official: Ebola in Uganda Is Under Control
Uganda’s Ebola outbreak is under control, a top public health official in Africa said Thursday, noting that local health authorities are doing well to trace most contacts.
“The situation is not getting out of control,” said Dr. Ahmed Ogwell, acting director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We have good visibility of all the contacts.”
About 98% of 2,694 documented contacts — people exposed to Ebola by a confirmed patient — are being monitored, Ogwell said, adding that it “gives comfort that we know the evolution of this particular outbreak.”
Moderna Nears U.S. Deal to Develop Shots for Ebola, Other Biological Threats
Moderna Inc. is close to clinching a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop messenger RNA vaccines targeting a range of biological threats such as the Ebola virus.
The contract will see Moderna work with researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston to build on the company’s mRNA technology that was used to rapidly make COVID-19 vaccines, according to people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to speak on the deal because it has not yet been finalized. Ebola has returned to the fore as a vaccine-resistant strain of the deadly virus spawned an outbreak in Uganda that began in September.
While talks between Moderna, UTMB and the Defense Department began well before the Uganda outbreak, Moderna’s vaccine aims to target the strain spreading there, called Sudan ebolavirus, as well as the more-common Zaire strain and related Marburg virus, according to one of the people. However, it’s unlikely Moderna’s candidate would be ready to use in time to address the burst of cases in Uganda. So far 95 people have been infected in that country, according to its Ministry of Health.
Court Orders Israeli Authorities to Provide Vaccination Status of People Who Died During Pandemic + More
Court Orders Israeli Authorities to Provide Vaccination Status of People Who Died During Pandemic
Following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from an Israeli citizen, the Jerusalem District Court has ordered the Ministry of Health to provide information on the vaccination status of deceased people and other information.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) has until mid-November to provide: total mortality, for any reason, including COVID-19, noting the vaccination status of the deceased, the vaccine doses and recoveries; data about child mortality from COVID-19, noting whether the deceased did or did not have comorbidities; and COVID-19 mortality with the data segmented by comorbidities and according to vaccination status.
The order came after David Shuldman, a systems analyst and an economist, filed an FOI request in 2021 for mortality data broken down by vaccination status. He also asked that deaths among people who recovered from COVID-19 be noted. Shuldman told The Epoch Times that he hoped the MoH would publish the data but since they didn’t, he decided to try to get it and publish it himself.
Three days after the court order, Kan 11, an Israeli state-owned broadcaster, announced the MoH is going to study excess mortality to see whether the higher-than-normal deaths recorded during the pandemic are linked to COVID-19 vaccinations.
The Problems With President Biden’s Future Pandemic Plan
What if the coronavirus pandemic was not a once-in-a-century event but the beginning of a new era of regular deadly respiratory viral pandemics? The Biden administration is already planning for this future. Last week it unveiled a national strategy to develop pharmaceutical firms’ capacity to create vaccines within 130 days of a pandemic emergency declaration.
The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population “safe.”
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, it took about a year for governments to deploy the jab at scale after scientists sequenced the virus. Scientists identified a vaccine target — fragments of the spike protein that the virus uses to access cells — by early January 2020, even before the WHO declared a worldwide pandemic.
This rapid response was only possible because some scientists already knew much about the novel virus. Despite heavy regulations limiting the work, the U.S. National Institutes of Health had funded collaborations between the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They collected bat viruses from the wild, enhanced their function to study their potential and designed vaccines before the viruses infected humans.
New COVID Boosters Aren’t Better Than Old Ones, Study Finds
Bivalent booster shots from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. failed to raise levels of protective proteins called neutralizing antibodies against the dominant Omicron strains any more than four doses of the original COVID vaccine, according to an early independent study on a small group of people.
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Michigan compared levels of neutralizing antibodies in blood samples from 21 people who got a fourth shot of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech SE bivalent boosters against antibody levels in 19 people who got four shots of the original vaccines.
Three to five weeks after a fourth shot, those people who received the new boosters aimed at BA.4 and BA.5 variants “had similar neutralizing antibody titers as those receiving a fourth monovalent mRNA vaccine,” the authors conclude in a manuscript posted on the preprint server bioRxiv.org. This held true for antibodies that protect against BA.4, BA.5 and older variants such as the original Omicron strain, according to the study.
Biden Gets 5th COVID Shot, Says Virus Still Threat Weeks After Calling Pandemic ‘Over’
President Biden on Tuesday received his fifth COVID-19 vaccine shot while warning Americans that the virus was still a threat — despite calling the pandemic “over” more than a month ago.
Biden has not formally ended the national emergency declaration that gives the government special powers to address the virus — despite saying in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Sept. 18 that “the pandemic is over.”
Biden said Tuesday that COVID-19 deaths would increase this winter, but that almost all are preventable, even though the share of vaccinated people among the pandemic dead increased significantly this year.
States Opting out of a Federal Program That Tracks Teen Behavior as Youth Mental Health Worsens
As the COVID-19 pandemic worsened a mental health crisis among America’s young people, a small group of states quietly withdrew from the nation’s largest public effort to track concerning behaviors in high school students.
Colorado, Florida and Idaho will not participate in a key part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior surveys that reaches more than 80,000 students. Over the past 30 years, the state-level surveys, conducted anonymously during each odd-numbered year, have helped elucidate the mental health stressors and safety risks for high school students.
Each state has its own rationale for opting out, but their withdrawal — when suicides and feelings of hopelessness are up — has caught the attention of school psychologists and federal and state health officials.
The reduction in the number of states that participate in the state-level CDC survey will make it harder for those states to track the conditions and behaviors that signal poor mental health, like depression, drug and alcohol misuse and suicidal ideation, experts said.
COVID Research Is Free to Access — but for How Long?
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific journals rushed to make related research free to read — temporarily, at least. Work on the disease or the virus SARS-CoV-2 would be free “at least for the duration of the outbreak,” publishers of subscription journals declared in a statement issued on January 31, 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus outbreak a ‘public health emergency of international concern,’ or PHEIC.
Now the pandemic is in its third year, and reports are circulating that the end of free-to-access COVID-19 research is nigh. If so, that would suggest publishers have decided that the COVID-19 emergency is over before world health authorities have. But is that the case?
The alarm was sounded in August when a prominent open-access advocate warned that COVID-related research was going back behind paywalls. “This is both disappointing and worrying,” wrote Robert Kiley, who is head of strategy at cOAlition S in Strasbourg, France, the group of funders that supports the open-access Plan S initiative.
Global COVID Cases Will Increase in Coming Months, but at a Slower Pace, Analysis Says
Daily global COVID-19 infections are projected to rise slowly to about 18.7 million by February from the current 16.7 million average daily cases, driven by the northern hemisphere’s winter months, the University of Washington said in an analysis.
Far fewer infections are expected than last winter’s estimated peak daily average of about 80 million cases in January of 2022 which was driven by the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, according to the report.
The increase in cases is not expected to cause a surge in deaths, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said. IHME estimates that daily infections in the United States will increase by a third to more than a million, driven by students back in schools and cold weather-related indoor gatherings.
How Concerned Should You Be About COVID ‘Scrabble’ Variants? Here’s What We Know so Far
Though BA.5 still accounts for most U.S. COVID-19 cases, percentages are rising for the other Omicron variants circulating throughout the country, per the CDC.
“The ones that are particularly concerning are BQ.1 and another related one called BQ.1.1. Those are two that are expanding fairly rapidly in the United States,” according to Roy Gulick, chief of the division of infectious disease at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Internationally, another concerning variant, XBB, which first emerged in Singapore and hasn’t been detected in the U.S., is being closely watched worldwide as it spreads quickly in other countries.
COVID Pandemic Sparks Rise in Deadly Fungal Infections
The Telegraph via MSN reported:
The COVID pandemic has sparked a rise in deadly fungal infections, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned, as it published its first list of species posing the biggest threat to health.
Since 2020, experts have noticed an increase in deadly fungal disease, with up to 39% of COVID patients on ventilators in intensive care picking up a secondary infection.
The number of weekly diagnostic tests sent to the U.K. National Mycology Reference Laboratory (MRL) nearly doubled from 1,217 to 2,124 during the COVID peak in February 2021.
Specialists in hospitals have reported that the incidence of comorbid aspergillosis, candidemia and mucormycosis — sometimes known as black fungus — rose significantly during the pandemic. The fungi can spread into the sinuses, bones, brain and eyes, leaving people blind even if they manage to survive the infection.
Afraid of Needles? China Using Inhalable COVID Vaccine
The Chinese city of Shanghai started administering an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday in what appears to be a world first.
The vaccine, a mist that is sucked in through the mouth, is being offered for free as a booster dose for previously vaccinated people, according to an announcement on an official city social media account.
Scientists hope that such “needle-free” vaccines will make vaccination more accessible in countries with fragile health systems because they are easier to administer. They also may persuade people who don’t like getting a shot in the arm to get inoculated.
FDA Urged to Publish Follow-up Studies on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals + More
FDA Urged to Publish Follow-up Studies on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals
In July 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly disclosed findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had had Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia and pulmonary embolism. Little detail was provided, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and no press release or other alert was sent to doctors or the public. The FDA promised it would “share further updates and information with the public as they become available.”
Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document (or protocol) outlining a follow-up epidemiological study intended to investigate the matter more thoroughly. This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. (Neither absolute risk increases nor confidence intervals were provided.)
More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown. The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine’s product label.
“To keep this information from the scientific community and prevent us from analyzing it ourselves, is irresponsible. It presumes that these organizations are perfect and cannot benefit from independent scrutiny,” says Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans, who recently carried out a reanalysis of serious adverse events in Pfizer’s and Moderna’s randomized trials.
Patients Died From COVID Drug Treatment at Two California Hospitals, Suits Allege
Two women have filed lawsuits alleging their husbands died from negligence at Inland Empire hospitals after doctors prescribed remdesivir to treat COVID-19 and then failed to tell them about the dangerous side effects of the anti-viral drug.
The lawsuits, filed last month in state court against Kaiser Permanente Riverside Medical Center and Redlands Community Hospital and several of their physicians, allege doctors engaged in fraud by prescribing each of the men remdesivir without their knowledge or consent. Doctors also allegedly failed to explain that the drug is ineffective in treating COVID-19, is toxic to kidneys and can cause death, the complaints say.
The World Health Organization issued a recommendation in November 2020 against the use of remdesivir regardless of disease severity, saying there is no evidence the drug improves survival or shortens recovery.
Additionally, the National Institutes of Health said individuals with kidney impairment or failure may experience liver or kidney toxicity due to the release of sulfobutylether beta-cyclodextrin sodium contained in remdesivir.
Seniors Becoming Less Interested in Getting COVID Vaccine Boosters
Older Americans are most likely to have received the initial COVID-19 vaccines but their interest in boosters appears to be declining. According to the CDC, about 71% of seniors received the first recommended booster, but only 44% received the second.
And a Kaiser Family Foundation survey published last month found only 8% of seniors said they had received the updated bivalent booster which became available in September, though almost half said they planned to.
Yet a significant number of seniors said they hadn’t heard about the newest booster and didn’t know it was recommended for them.
Extremely Low Booster Rates Suggest NYC Area Has No COVID Cares Left to Give
The updated COVID-19 booster vaccines don’t seem to be at the forefront of people’s minds — even as the autumn surge creeps toward the U.S. It’s hard even to find how many people are taking the shots.
As of Monday morning, neither the COVID-19 dashboards for New York City nor New Jersey were displaying the numbers of bivalent boosters, which are designed to fight newer coronavirus variants. That’s despite the bivalents becoming the go-to booster for anyone over the age of 12 nearly two months ago, on Sept. 2.
This data is valuable because it can help convey how much general interest there is in the shots — and what areas might be at-risk as new variants emerge. Its absence also speaks to a larger trend of people not really knowing if they should care about COVID-19 anymore, health experts said.
Cory Franklin: The Key to Unlocking the Mysteries of COVID Is Understanding Immunity
Among the many medical puzzles about COVID-19 that continue to confound experts: Why does one spouse contract COVID-19 while in many cases the other does not? Why does the African continent have far fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths per capita than the other continents? Why does Singapore have more COVID-19 cases per capita than the U.S. but less than one-tenth the per capita death rate? What protects you better from future COVID-19 infection, previous infection or vaccination?
The real key to demystifying the COVID-19 pandemic is immunity — explaining why some individuals are able to resist infection, while others are susceptible and still others are especially vulnerable. Unfortunately, even our best immunologists have little more than a rudimentary understanding of how immunity in COVID-19 works.
Immunity is basically how the body defends itself from germs, and it is a complicated phenomenon. We are born with certain types of immunity, we acquire some immunity through vaccination and some is developed through exposure to various infectious agents.
One theory about why Africa has been relatively protected from COVID-19 is the outdoor population’s greater exposure to germs — the so-called hygiene hypothesis. The lower mortality from COVID-19 in East Asia may be the result of contact with earlier COVID-19-related coronaviruses in these countries, which would have conferred some protective immunity.
First on CNN: Most People Feel Socially Connected as COVID Precautions Ease, but Many Still Need Support, Survey Finds
Lots of research has been done on links between loneliness, social connection, health and well-being, but a new international survey by the analytics firm Gallup and Facebook’s parent company, Meta, aims to shed some light on exactly how connected people feel and how they connect with others.
They found that most people around the world feel a sense of social connection as COVID-19 precautions ease, but many still need support or help from others — and the factors that drive feelings of connection vary by country.
The report is a glimpse into how people have adapted to pandemic-related changes, said Telli Davoodi, a senior social science researcher at Gallup and lead researcher on the project.
A majority of respondents in each country said they felt “very” or “fairly” emotionally connected to others, especially in Egypt, where nearly 9 out of 10 people said they felt connected. Sense of connection was lowest in Brazil (53%), while the U.S. landed in the middle (75%). However, at least a third of respondents in each country said that they had needed support or help from someone “often” or “sometimes” in the previous month.
Stay Fit & Your COVID Shot May Work Even Better
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The more often you work out, the more effective your COVID-19 vaccination will be, a new study suggests. Fully vaccinated folks who clocked high weekly levels of physical activity were nearly three times less likely to land in the hospital with COVID, compared to those who got the jab but didn’t exercise often, researchers found.
Participants were placed in three different physical activity categories — high, medium or low — based on the average weekly amount they worked out during the two years prior to the start of the study. The research team then tracked the outcomes of those who contracted COVID.
High-level exercisers who got more than 150 minutes of physical activity every week were 86% less likely to have a case of COVID contracted following their vaccination land them in the hospital, researchers found. Likewise, people who averaged 60 to 149 minutes of physical activity weekly — the medium category — had a 72% reduced risk of hospitalization from COVID.
But the vaccine was only 60% effective in those with the lowest levels of exercise, under 60 minutes a week, researchers found. It’s not clear why physical activity might enhance COVID vaccination, the researchers wrote.
COVID Vaccine Study Links Side Effects With Greater Antibody Response
People who reported experiencing side effects to the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines such as fever, chills or muscle pain tended to have a greater antibody response following vaccination, according to new research.
Having such symptoms after vaccination is associated with greater antibody responses compared with having only pain or rash at the injection site or no symptoms at all, suggests the paper published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Gain-of-Function Experiments Create a Deadly New COVID Virus. Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? + More
Gain-of-Function Experiments at Boston University Create a Deadly New COVID Virus. Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?
After all the controversy over the past few years about gain-of-function research on viruses, especially the COVID-19 virus, I thought this kind of work was on hold, at least in the U.S. Indeed, the controversy grew so hot that NIH issued a statement in May of 2021 declaring that it wouldn’t support such work.
Nonetheless, some scientists continue to pursue gain-of-function work. In a new study, just released on the preprint server bioRxiv, a group of virologists at Boston University did the following. They took the Spike protein from the Omicron BA.1 strain of SARS-CoV-2 (that’s the strain that spread throughout the world last winter, often slipping past the protection offered by vaccines) and combined it with an early 2020 strain of the COVID-19 virus.
This experiment gave them a brand-new, never-before-seen strain of COVID-19. Was it more deadly? You bet!
This, dear readers is what we mean by “gain-of-function” research. The scientists took sequences from two different strains of the COVID-19 virus, one of which was relatively mild, and created a new strain that is far more infectious and far more deadly. As many scientists (and others) have pointed out, research like this carries great risks, foremost among them the chance that an accidental lab leak could create a new pandemic, killing millions of people.
And the benefits? There must be some pretty major benefits to offset this risk, right? Well, not exactly. The researchers say that these experiments show that the pathogenicity of the COVID virus is determined primarily by something other than the Spike protein. That’s a pretty narrow finding, and the authors don’t seem to consider that they might have learned this without creating an entirely new, more-lethal virus.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky Tests Positive for COVID Month After Getting Updated Booster Shot
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Saturday that Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky had tested positive for COVID-19. She is experiencing mild symptoms and is up to date with her vaccines.
In September, the director received her bivalent, Omicron-specific COVID-19 booster shot. In a CVS Health tweet, she was seen posing for a photo following the shot with a thumbs up.
Walensky and health officials have warned the American public about an upcoming winter surge of COVID-19 infections.
Pfizer COVID Vaccine Price Hike to Boost Revenue for Years, Rivals May Follow
Pfizer‘s plan to as much as quadruple U.S. prices for its COVID-19 vaccine next year is beyond Wall Street’s expectations and will spur its revenue for years despite weaker than anticipated demand for the new booster shot so far, analysts said.
Analysts said the move could lead to price hikes by rivals. Pfizer shares were up 4.3% at $44.77 in afternoon trading. Expected price hikes sent shares of rivals Moderna (MRNA.O) and Novavax (NVAX.O) surging 9% and 11%, respectively.
Wells Fargo analyst Mohit Bansal said the new pricing range for the vaccine could add around $2.5 billion to $3 billion in annual revenue for Pfizer.
The price range announced by Pfizer represented a more than 10,000% markup over what experts have estimated it costs the vaccine makers to produce the shots, said the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a global vaccine access group.
The Main COVID Symptoms Have Changed, Research Shows
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, patients have reported dozens of different symptoms, ranging from cold and flu-like symptoms to more unique ones, including “COVID tongue.” But like all viruses, the primary symptoms associated with COVID have changed and can vary based on your vaccination status, according to a new list released last week.
The ZOE Health Study — a joint effort by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, King’s College London, Stanford University School of Medicine and the health app ZOE — shared an updated list of the top COVID symptoms currently being reported by its participants.
Researchers have found that for participants in all three groups — fully vaccinated, those who received just one dose and those unvaccinated — four of the five most commonly reported symptoms are the same: sore throat, runny nose, persistent cough and headache.
Their prevalences across the groups, however, vary, as does the fifth symptom. For those who are vaccinated, a blocked nose is the third-most frequently reported symptom. Among the partially vaccinated, it’s sneezing, and the unvaccinated, fever.
Autumn COVID Numbers Peak at Lower Levels — but Flu Cases Are on the Up
Britain’s current wave of COVID-19 cases appears to be peaking at a lower level than previous outbreaks of the Omicron variant of the disease, researchers have revealed.
According to last week’s ONS survey, COVID case numbers have flattened out or are falling in five of nine English regions, as well as in Northern Ireland and Scotland. At the same time, children now have the lowest prevalence of the disease for some weeks.
Scientists have also warned that the nation faces the prospect of a parallel flu epidemic this winter, one that could be fuelled by low immunity levels in a population that has lost protection during COVID pandemic restrictions. This was raised last week when it was revealed that flu cases had climbed in England — though levels are relatively low overall.
Omicron Subvariants Pose a New Threat to People With Immune Deficiencies
People with compromised immune systems face a new winter of discontent as the ever-mutating Omicron virus threatens to outrun the preventive monoclonal antibody cocktail that hundreds of thousands of them have relied upon for extra protection against COVID.
Troubling recent reports reveal the emergence of new Omicron subvariants that not only evade AstraZeneca’s Evusheld, the antibody-drug authorized to prevent COVID infection, but also the sole antibody drug that has retained effectiveness as a treatment for COVID, Eli Lilly’s bebtelovimab.
CDC Is Discussing Using Oral Polio Vaccine for First Time in 20 Years to Stop New York Outbreak
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering using an oral polio vaccine for the first time in more than 20 years to stop an outbreak in the greater New York City metropolitan area that left an adult paralyzed over the summer.
“We are in discussions with our New York State and New York City colleagues about the use of nOPV,” said Dr. Janell Routh, the CDC’s team leader for domestic polio, referring to the novel oral polio vaccine. The oral vaccine the CDC is considering is a newer form that is more stable and carries less risk of mutation. The New York State Department of Health, in a statement, said it is collaborating with the CDC on potential future options to respond to the outbreak.
U.S. drug regulators pulled the oral vaccine off shelves in 2000 because it contains a live — but weakened — strain of the virus that can, in rare circumstances, mutate into a virulent form that is contagious and can potentially paralyze people who are not vaccinated.
Merck Locates Frozen Batch of Undisclosed Ebola Vaccine, Will Donate for Testing in Uganda’s Outbreak
In a revelation that may help Uganda combat its outbreak of Ebola, the pharmaceutical giant Merck has acknowledged to Science — after repeated inquiries — that it has up to 100,000 doses of an experimental vaccine for the deadly viral disease in its freezers in Pennsylvania and will donate them. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Ugandan government are discussing if and how these doses can be incorporated into one or more clinical trials of other candidate Ebola vaccines that could launch as soon as next month.
The Merck vaccine targets Sudan ebolavirus, the pathogen currently circulating in Uganda. Merck quietly made the product in 2015 and 2016, soon after it had a landmark success with a similar vaccine against Zaire ebolavirus, a different virus that caused a big epidemic in West Africa between 2014 and 2016.
The company froze the Sudan Ebola vaccine in bulk form and never tested it on people. But it has been shown to protect monkeys challenged with Sudan ebolavirus, and given the efficacy of Merck’s Zaire Ebola vaccine, scientists have high hopes that the Sudan Ebola shots will be safe and effective as well.