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Covid News Watch
U.S. Cardiologist Defends Novak Djokovic’s Vaccine Stance: Can’t Risk Heart Damage + More
U.S. Cardiologist Defends Novak Djokovic’s Vaccine Stance: Can’t Risk Heart Damage
American cardiologist Doctor Peter McCullough has defended Novak Djokovic‘s vaccine stance as he claims the COVID-19 vaccines can cause heart damage. Djokovic, 35, hasn’t been vaccinated against COVID-19 and he is in danger of missing out on the U.S. Open because of his vaccination status.
“The COVID-19 vaccines, all of them, in the medical literature, there are over 200 papers, they all cause heart damage and that is the last thing that an athlete can possibly risk,” Doctor McCullough said in a conversation with Dave Martin on NTD News, as quoted on Sportskeeda.
“Heart damage can lead to heart failure or tragically, sudden death. He has clearly made the right choice and the vaccine injuries extend beyond the heart. There can be damage to the skeletal muscle, the nerves and the brain, so much of what an elite tennis player is, is at risk when they take a COVID-19 vaccine.
“They shouldn’t have any more restrictions than the general public. There was a paper published by NCAA athletes on testing that was done on a routine basis. The athletes have a lower rate of COVID-19 than the general student population,” Doctor McCullough added.
A CDC Panel Has Endorsed Novavax’s COVID Vaccine
An influential scientific panel on Tuesday recommended that a newly authorized vaccine from Novavax, a Maryland pharmaceutical company, be used as an option for adults seeking a primary immunization against the coronavirus.
The next step will be for the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, to accept the panel’s recommendations, which typically happens swiftly. That will be the final regulatory hurdle for the fourth COVID-19 shot authorized in the United States.
The Novavax vaccine is expected to play a limited role in the country’s immunization campaign, at least initially. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration authorized it as a primary immunization for adults but has not yet considered it for a booster shot.
The 12 voting members of the CDC panel, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, voted unanimously to endorse the vaccine.
CDC Stops Reporting Coronavirus Cases on Cruise Ships
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped reporting coronavirus levels for cruise ships in U.S. waters, ending a pandemic-era program that allowed the public to monitor the spread of the virus at sea.
A notice posted on the CDC website for cruise travel said the program ended Monday. A sortable color-coded chart and spreadsheet that detailed the level of spread on ships is no longer viewable on the webpage, the agency confirmed.
CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said cruise lines “will determine their own specific COVID-19-related requirements for cruise travel, as well as safety measures and protocols for passengers traveling on board based on CDC recommendations for reducing the risk of COVID-19.”
COVID Czar Cautiously Optimistic Sixth Wave Will Recede Soon
Despite the discovery of a new COVID subvariant in Israel this week, coronavirus czar Salman Zarka sounded a note of calm on Monday, suggesting the current wave would soon be subsiding.
Two weeks after he urged the public to wear masks indoors and said health officials were weighing reintroducing a mask mandate, Zarka told North Radio 104.5FM that he did not think such a move was necessary. Israel canceled its indoor face mask requirement in April after having made them mandatory for close to two years, barring a two-week period in 2021.
The discovery of three new cases of the BA2.75 subvariant in Israel on Sunday did not prevent Zarka from maintaining a positive outlook, though he noted that any time a new variant arises there is “cause for concern.”
Nicknamed “Centaurus,” the relatively new variant has been detected in other countries as well, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands.
We’ll Never Be Rid of COVID
Nearly eight in 10 Americans think we won’t be rid of COVID-19 in our lifetimes, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.
The poll is new evidence that most Americans have moved past the pandemic, and are likelier to be focused on inflation and making ends meet than what variant is spreading or what COVID treatments are available.
Seventy-eight percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement, “We will never fully be rid of the coronavirus in my lifetime.”
Study: Student Gains Last Year Narrowed COVID Learning Gap
Despite a year of disruptions, students largely made academic gains this past year that paralleled their growth pre-pandemic and outpaced the previous school year, according to new research released Tuesday from NWEA, a nonprofit research group that administers standardized tests.
The results are a measured sign of hope for academic recovery from COVID-19. But sustained effort and investment in education remain crucial.
The study used data from more than 8 million students who took the MAP Growth assessment in reading and math during the three school years impacted by COVID. Those numbers were then compared with data from three years before the pandemic.
The BA.4 and BA.5 Subvariants Now Dominate Worldwide
In the past year, the rapid mutation of the coronavirus has triggered new variants, which have swept across the world: Delta last summer, then Omicron in winter and more recently Omicron’s subvariants BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5.
The last pair has quickly become the world’s dominant forms of the coronavirus, as recorded in the GISAID international repository of coronavirus genetic sequences analyzed by The Washington Post.
Blood Thickness May Play Role in Risk of COVID Death
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The thickness of a person’s blood can be a matter of life or death if they contract COVID-19, a new study suggests.
Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 who have higher blood viscosity are at greater risk of dying from COVID-related complications, the researchers found.
This was the first large-scale study to try to use blood viscosity to predict death risk among COVID-19 patients, the researchers said. For this study, the investigators analyzed data from more than 5,600 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 between February 2020 and November 2021.
The researchers found that hospitalized patients with higher blood viscosity in their arteries had a 60% higher death rate, while thicker blood in the smallest vessels increased death risk by 32%.
DC Leads the Nation in Monkeypox Cases per Capita
DC has more cases of monkeypox per capita than any state, prompting public health officials to launch an aggressive vaccination campaign aimed at blanketing the most at-risk communities.
Although not considered a pandemic, a global outbreak of monkeypox has touched more than 60 countries, including the United States, where more than 1,800 cases have been reported since the first one in mid-May in Massachusetts.
The District has received about 8,300 doses, most of which arrived last week, and about 2,600 first doses of the two-dose regimen have been administered, she said.
Australia Provisionally Approves Moderna’s COVID Shot for Children Under 5
Moderna Inc. (MRNA.O) said late on Monday Australia’s drug regulator Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has provisionally approved its mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, Spikevax, for use in children aged six months to five years.
So far, the shot was provisionally approved in the country for individuals aged six years and older and as a booster dose for those aged 18 years and older, TGA said in a separate statement.
Last week, Argentina and Canada also approved Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for kids aged six months to five years.
Japan’s Shionogi Starts COVID Vaccine Trial Among Children
Japan’s Shionogi & Co Ltd (4507.T) said on Tuesday it started a clinical trial of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate among children aged 5 to 11.
The phase I/II/III clinical trial of the recombinant protein-based vaccine known as S-268019 will be carried out among 48 children in Japan, the company said in a release.
The vaccine has not yet been approved by Japanese regulators for use among adults.
Fauci Plans to Step Down by End of Biden’s First Term, Says COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere + More
Dr. Anthony Fauci Plans to Step Down by End of Biden’s First Term, and Says COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he plans to leave his post as the nation’s top health official by the end of President Biden’s first term in office, saying the nation is going to have to live with COVID.
Fauci insisted he wasn’t announcing his retirement but he’d be working for another 24 years if he were to stay on the job until COVID was completely vanquished.
“If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105,’” Fauci, who is 81, told Politico. “I think we’re going to be living with this.”
Thousands Report Unusual Menstruation Patterns After COVID Vaccination
Kathryn Clancy got her first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021 and 10 days later found herself sitting uncomfortably in a work Zoom meeting during one of the heaviest periods she’d experienced. “I had what’s often called menstrual flooding,” says Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Clancy wouldn’t have thought to connect the experience to the Moderna dose she’d received were it not for her graduate student, Katharine Lee, now at Tulane University, who shared a similar tale. “I had the worst cramps of my life” after COVID-19 vaccination, Lee says.
Intrigued, Clancy — who didn’t experience similarly intense symptoms after her second dose — shared her story on Twitter. Hundreds responded with parallel stories, leading her to suspect a potential link to vaccination.
Those suspicions have grown with the completion of a more formal survey in which Clancy, Lee and colleagues gathered thousands of stories of breakthrough bleeding and bleeding more heavily after a COVID-19 vaccine from people around the world.
The Feds Pile up Vaccine ‘Adverse Event’ Reports as They Decry Scaremongering Elsewhere
RealClearInvestigations reported:
Since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first vaccines for COVID-19 in late 2020, the government and much of the media have insisted that the medicines developed in record time are safe and effective. Those who raised questions about them have been routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
And yet an online database co-administered by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control has compiled more than 1.3 million reports of vaccine-implicated “adverse events” running the gamut from mild to severe, including 29,000 deaths.
These reports are not anecdotes from “anti-vaxxers” on the dark web. They come from the federal government’s open-source log, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It allows anyone to go online and report a bad reaction that could be linked to any vaccine, including those for COVID-19.
Novavax’s New COVID Vaccine Is Perfect for People Scared of mRNA Tech — but It Won’t Win Over the Unvaccinated
Unvaccinated Americans will soon be able to opt for a new kind of shot to protect themselves from the ever-evolving COVID-19 virus: the Novavax vaccine.
The latecomer COVID shot has raised hopes of wider acceptance among vaccine skeptics. It uses traditional protein-based technology, unlike its mRNA counterparts. But experts say it still may not convince a large number of unwilling holdouts to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated.
Unvaccinated Americans may perceive protein-based shots as safer than mRNA ones: In a Morning Consult poll last week, about 28% of unvaccinated people surveyed said they viewed protein-based shots as safe, while only 17% said the same about mRNA vaccines.
But 77% still said they wouldn’t get a protein-based COVID shot if it were authorized in the U.S.
COVID Public Health Emergency Extended in the U.S.
The Biden administration on Friday extended the COVID-19 public health emergency for another three months.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra officially renewed the declaration, extending it through October 13, 2022.
The emergency declaration has been in place since January 2020, and the latest renewal comes as the Omicron offshoot BA.5, the most contagious variant yet, continues to stake its claim in the U.S.
Fauci Issues Warning on Monkeypox in U.S.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the White House, signaled that more resources will be dedicated to monkeypox and said that the federal government needs to take it “seriously,” as cases have risen across the world.
The latest U.S. data show the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has tracked at least 1,814 probable or confirmed cases across the country as of July 15.
“This is something we definitely need to take seriously. We don’t know the scope and the potential of it yet, but we have to act like it will have the capability of spreading much more widely than it’s spreading right now,” Fauci told CNN. He didn’t elaborate.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it will hold a meeting this week to address a recent increase in monkeypox cases around the world and signaled it may declare a global health emergency over the virus.
U.S. Officials: States Getting More Monkeypox Vaccine Soon
More than 100,000 monkeypox vaccine doses are being sent to states in the next few days, and several million more are on order in the months ahead, U.S. health officials said Friday.
They also acknowledged the vaccine supply hasn’t kept up with the demand seen in New York, California and other places.
Officials predicted cases will keep rising for at least a few more weeks as the government tries to keep up with a surprising international outbreak accounting for hundreds of newly reported cases every day.
Some public health experts have begun to wonder if the outbreak is becoming widespread enough that monkeypox will become an entrenched sexually transmitted disease.
Birx: COVID ‘Came out of the Box Ready to Infect’
Former top White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Deborah Birx says the coronavirus “came out of the box ready to infect.”
There has been much speculation about the origin of the virus that has killed more than 6.3 million people worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China, with speculation that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were researching vaccines for other coronaviruses.
COVID “was already more infectious than flu when it first arrived,” said Birx, noting that most viruses take months or even years to become highly infectious to humans.
Birx said the COVID-19 virus showed signs of being experimented on in a lab. “In laboratories you grow the virus in human cells, allowing it to adapt more. Each time it passes through human cells it becomes more adapted,” she said.
BA.5 Spurs New Calls to Fund Next-Generation COVID Vaccines
The rise of the BA.5 variant is spurring new calls for funding for Operation Warp Speed 2.0 to accelerate the development of next-generation COVID-19 vaccines that can better target new variants.
The BA.5 subvariant of Omicron that now makes up the majority of U.S. COVID-19 cases is sparking concern because it has a greater ability to evade the protection of current vaccines than past strains of the virus did.
Pfizer and Moderna are working on updated vaccines that target BA.5 that could be ready this fall, but experts say that by the time they are ready, a new variant very well could have taken hold.
As alternatives to vaccine makers chasing each variant, experts point to research on “pan-coronavirus” vaccines that are “variant-proof,” targeting multiple variants, as well as nasal vaccines that could drastically cut down on the transmission of the virus.
COVID Has Become ‘Too Clever for Us’ and Can ‘Break Past’ Our Protection, WHO Official Says
COVID-19 has become “too clever for us” and can break through protection, a World Health Organization official said, warning that precautions still matter to fight the virus.
WHO special envoy David Nabarro told Sky News on Thursday that the reason for a surge in new COVID-19 cases globally is because the virus “changed yet again, and it’s become too clever for us.”
“This virus is capable of constantly evolving and changing,” he told the outlet. “It can break past our immune defenses, and that’s why the numbers are going up.”
EU Secures 54,000 More Doses of Bavarian Nordic’s Monkeypox Vaccine
The European Commission said on Monday it has secured about 54,000 additional doses of the monkeypox vaccine developed by biotech firm Bavarian Nordic (BAVA.CO) as concern mounts over the disease amid a spike in cases.
The supply deal follows an initial contract signed in June when the European Union ordered about 110,000 doses of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine.
Under the initial order, the EU has so far delivered around 25,000 doses to six member states, the Commission said in a statement.
Latest Omicron Sub-Variant Four Times More Vaccine-Resistant + More
New Study Suggests Latest Omicron Sub-Variant Four Times More Vaccine-Resistant
A new study in the U.S. suggests that the latest Omicron sub-variant that is the most prevalent in the country, is four times more resistant to current vaccines.
The announcement by the Mayo Clinic on Friday, July 15 will be of concern to health authorities around the world who are banking on updated vaccines to protect their citizens from another pandemic.
The BA.5 Omicron sub-variant, which is considered “hyper contagious,” is more resistant to mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna. Worryingly, the variant accounts for around two-thirds of all infections in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Head of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group Dr. Gregory Poland said: “Let me make a clear, clear point here that’s a little tough to hear: Whether you’ve been vaccinated, whether you’ve been previously infected, whether you’ve been previously infected and vaccinated, you have very little protection against BA.5 in terms of getting infected or having a mild-to-moderate infection.
EU Adds Severe Allergies as Side Effect of Novavax COVID Vaccine
The European Medicines Agency on Thursday identified severe allergic reactions as potential side effects of Novavax Inc.’s (NVAX.O) COVID-19 vaccine.
The vaccine was authorized by U.S. regulators on Wednesday, and its product label in the United States warns against administering the shot to people with a history of allergic reactions to any components of the shot.
Shares of Novavax fell 20.3% to $55.72 in morning trading, along with the broader market and other COVID-19 vaccine makers. Novavax shares are usually volatile.
The EMA said it would also update the product information for the vaccine to add unusual or decreased feeling in the skin as a new side effect.
25 Million Kids Missed Routine Vaccinations Because of COVID
About 25 million children worldwide have missed out on routine immunizations against common diseases like diptheria, largely because the coronavirus pandemic disrupted regular health services or triggered misinformation about vaccines, according to the U.N.
In a new report published Friday, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said their figures show 25 million children last year failed to get vaccinated against diptheria, tetanus and pertussis, a marker for childhood immunization coverage, continuing a downward trend that began in 2019.
Mr. Biden, Are We in a Public Health Emergency or Not?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continue to contradict themselves regarding COVID-19.
The Biden administration obviously still considers the COVID-19 pandemic a “public health emergency.” In June the FDA pushed forward with a series of aggressive COVID-19 vaccine administration actions under its emergency use authorization power.
First, the agency approved the emergency use of a novel vaccine, which was engineered for the original 2019 version of COVID. The Novavax vaccine received an emergency use recommendation from the FDA’s advisory committee despite having the same cardiovascular side effect concerns as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Indeed, the approval of these injections by the regulatory bodies responsible for our public health, based on the pharmaceutical companies’ own clinical trial data, demonstrates an appalling abandonment of basic drug approval norms.
Then, the FDA Advisory Committee approved emergency use for a primary series for the Pfizer and then Moderna vaccines for all children as young as 6 months old, despite children being at extremely low risk.
More Than a Third of U.S. Counties in COVID ‘Red’ Zone, According to CDC
More than a third of U.S. counties are in a COVID-19 “red” zone, indicating high levels of community transmission and hospitalization, while less than a quarter of counties are in the “green zone,” a marker of low community transmission and hospitalization levels, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control, as the new Omicron BA.5 variant continues to spread rapidly.
Roughly 35.5% of U.S. counties (1,143 counties total) have high community levels of COVID, up nearly 15% from the week before, while 40% of counties have medium community COVID community levels, a 2% increase from the week before, according to the CDC.
COVID deaths in the U.S. have remained low, however, hovering around 300 per day since April.
The Food and Drug Administration is asking pharmaceutical companies to target the new BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants in a retooled COVID booster shot drug companies hope will be available in October. But CDC experts are cautioning that high-risk individuals should not wait until the fall to get the updated shot, instead urging them to get a booster as soon as possible.
U.S. Monkeypox Cases Top 1K
Confirmed monkeypox and orthopoxvirus cases in the U.S. have surpassed the 1,000 mark.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are now 1,053 cases in 41 states and Puerto Rico.
Three states have more than 150 confirmed monkeypox cases including California, New York and Illinois.
Data from the agency shows cases worldwide now exceeding 11,000.
‘Unprecedented’ Spread of Monkeypox Spurs Call for Faster Response
The federal and state response to the escalating monkeypox outbreak is lacking access to enough vaccines, testing and treatments to keep up with the virus’ spread, infectious disease experts are warning.
Public health officials are racing to halt the spread before the disease becomes endemic in more countries. Cases are rising quickly — New York City, for example, has seen a tripling in patients over the past week.
Some experts say this outbreak echoes the start of the HIV epidemic that also first appeared in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM), but NIAID director Anthony Fauci says there are “fundamental differences” from that traumatic time when there was an unknown agent killing patients rapidly.
While this outbreak of monkeypox outside endemic countries is “unprecedented” in its rate of human-to-human spread, the virus for monkeypox has been identified, isn’t nearly as deadly and there are potential vaccines and treatments already in existence, Fauci tells Axios.
Don’t Use Luvox, Colchicine to Fight COVID, WHO Experts Say
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The antidepressant drug fluvoxamine (Luvox) and the gout drug colchicine are commonly used and inexpensive drugs that have received considerable interest as potential COVID-19 treatments.
However, there is insufficient evidence that either drug improves important outcomes for patients, according to a WHO report produced by a panel of experts and recently published online in The BMJ.
Cholera Found in Turtles at Wet Market in COVID Epicenter Wuhan
Wuhan detected cholera-causing bacteria in samples taken from softshell turtles at a food market, sparking comparisons among some Chinese social media users to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Baishazhou wet market has been disinfected and shops related to the turtles closed for three days, according to a statement from local health authorities late on Thursday.
No cases of cholera have been found in people who came into contact with the animals, and the strain isn’t related to the case confirmed this week in a Wuhan University student, they said.
Cholera is a virulent illness that’s spread through contaminated food and water and causes acute diarrhea. China classifies it as a ‘Class A’ disease, the strongest designation and one shared by only the bubonic plague, with its detection spurring an emergency response from health officials.
U.K. Weekly COVID Infections Rise, Booster Jab Program Announced
An estimated 3.5 million people in Britain had COVID-19 in the latest week of available data, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Friday, up nearly 30% on the 2.7 million recorded in the previous week.
Separately, the government announced that a new COVID booster jab program would begin later this year.
The government said the vaccine booster program would begin in “early autumn” and be offered to people aged 50 and over, residents and staff at care homes, individuals in clinical risk groups, people who are immunosuppressed and frontline workers.
Eight-Year-Old Boy Dies After Receiving COVID Vaccine in Mexico + More
Eight-Year-Old Boy Dies After Receiving COVID Vaccine in Mexico Claims Family
The family of the eight-year-old boy reported the child died after receiving the Pfizer COVID vaccine on July 5, resulting in symptoms such as a fever, that got progressively worse. Due to his deteriorating health, an ambulance was called, which took him to a nearby hospital, where hours later, his death was announced.
Family members claim that the child died as a result of the vaccine and the symptoms he had suffered.
The death was confirmed by the Secretary of Health of the state of Oaxaca, Virginia Sanchez, and reported that “there is already an investigation to find out the causes of the child’s death.”
Nearly 800,000 Doses of Monkeypox Vaccine May Be in U.S. By End of July
Nearly 800,000 more doses of monkeypox vaccine could be ready for distribution in the United States by the end of July following a Food and Drug Administration inspection of a Danish vaccine plant and the expected authorization of the facility, part of an effort to control a record U.S. outbreak of the disease, according to the federal government.
About 780,000 doses are at the supplier in Denmark, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the national stockpile where the vaccines are maintained. The shots have been stored in Denmark awaiting the completion of the FDA on-the-ground inspection and authorization.
“We are working diligently and as fast as we can, and we are aspiring to have that process completed by the end of July,” Peter Marks, who oversees vaccines at the FDA, said in an interview Wednesday.
Canada Approves Moderna COVID Shot for Preschoolers
Canadian regulators on Thursday authorized Moderna’s COVID-19 shots for infants and preschoolers.
Health Canada said the Moderna vaccine can be given to children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years in doses one-quarter the size of that approved for adults.
U.S. regulators authorized the first COVID-19 shots from Moderna and Pfizer for infants and preschoolers last month.
Pfizer’s pediatric COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 6 months to 5 years was submitted to Health Canada last month and is still under review.
Novavax’s COVID Vaccine Finally Wins FDA Authorization for Use in Unvaccinated
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday issued a long-awaited authorization for Novavax‘s COVID-19 vaccine. It is the fourth COVID-19 vaccine to gain authorization in the U.S., but it’s the first to use a more conventional protein-subunit design.
For now, the two-dose vaccine is mainly aimed at the roughly 72 million Americans who have yet to receive one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA’s emergency use authorization only allows for its use as a primary series, not a booster for those already vaccinated.
Though Novavax is expected to seek booster authorization later, the company and the FDA hope that the vaccine’s traditional formulation will entice vaccination holdouts now, particularly as BA.5 sweeps the country.
Some consider the vaccine’s protein-subunit design to be a more tried-and-true design relative to the newer mRNA-based platform used in the leading COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
Low Demand for Young Kids’ COVID Vaccines Is Alarming Doctors
States where parents have hesitated to inoculate their children against COVID-19 are now ordering fewer doses of the vaccines for children under 5 than others, underscoring the challenge facing the Biden administration as a highly transmissible variant sweeps the nation.
Experts broadly agree states shouldn’t order more doses than they think they’ll use. But they worry the low demand in states such as Alabama and Mississippi is a warning sign of the widening ambivalence among many parents about the benefits of vaccinating children against the virus and continuing politicization of healthcare.
“Never before have we had a vaccine available for young children that has been in billions of people before it was given to a young child,” said Kawsar Talaat, a vaccine expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The distrust in government, the distrust in public health and the distrust in science is growing and is very, very worrisome.”
World Health Organization Warns COVID ‘Nowhere Near Over’
Most Americans are done with COVID — the lockdowns, the masks, the fear — but apparently, the virus isn’t quite done with us.
The latest unpleasant news comes from the World Health Organization (WHO) as a new subvariant of Omicron known as BA.5 continues its spread across the U.S. and the world.
“The virus is running freely,” the WHO said. “New waves of the virus demonstrate again that COVID-19 is nowhere near over,” according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The BA.5 Wave Is What COVID Normal Looks Like
After two-plus years of erupting into distinguishable peaks, the American coronavirus-case curve has a new topography: a long, never-ending plateau. Waves are now so frequent that they’re colliding and uplifting like tectonic plates, the valleys between them filling with virological rubble.
With cases quite high and still drastically undercounted, and hospitalizations lilting up, this lofty mesa is a disconcerting place to be. The subvariants keep coming. Immunity is solid against severe disease, but porous to infection and the resulting chaos.
Some people are getting the virus for the first time, others for the second, third or more, occasionally just weeks apart. And we could remain at this elevation for some time.
With BA.5, Are You More Likely to Lose Your Sense of Smell?
While far fewer patients reported a loss of the sense of smell during the first Omicron wave compared to earlier waves, the peculiar COVID symptom seems to be making a comeback.
Doctors note that what they’re seeing during the current rise in cases — fueled by the hyper infectious BA.5 Omicron subvariant — is still based on anecdotal evidence.
But healthcare providers like Valentina Parma, a psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, who works with COVID patients, are noticing more patients reporting loss of smell. “What I am seeing in my corner of the world is a spike,” she said. “There seems to be more requests than earlier this year but still significantly less than with Delta.”
Until now, each variant and subvariant of concern has appeared to carry a lesser risk of loss of smell than the last.
Fresh COVID Wave Sweeps Asia; New Zealand Warns of Pressure on Hospitals
A new wave of coronavirus infections is rapidly spreading through Asia, prompting warnings for residents from New Zealand to Japan to take precautions to slow the outbreak and help prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed.
The renewed surge in cases, mostly of the BA.4/5 Omicron variants, provides a further challenge for authorities grappling with the economic fallout of earlier waves of the pandemic while trying to avoid extending or reintroducing unpopular restrictions.
Asthma Drug Fluticasone Fails as Potential COVID Treatment
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The asthma drug fluticasone furoate is yet another medication that doesn’t work for mild-to-moderate COVID-19, a new study finds.
The finding comes from a nationwide study of nearly 5,000 participants that continues to evaluate the potential benefit of existing drugs to treat mild-to-moderate COVID-19. Fluticasone furoate is one of three FDA-approved repurposed medications currently being tested against COVID-19.
Fluticasone furoate is an inhaled corticosteroid used to treat asthma, but it is not approved to treat COVID-19. This drug was tested because corticosteroids had seemed potentially beneficial for treating COVID-19 among non-hospitalized patients.
Based on their findings, fluticasone furoate should not be used to treat COVID-19, the researchers stressed. The report was published online on July 13 in medRxiv, which publishes studies before they have been peer-reviewed.