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Broken Arrow Family Blames COVID Vaccine for Daughter’s Death
Trista graduated from Broken Arrow High School in 2022. That summer she was promoted to a management position at her local Braum’s. She was an active girl who walked her dogs and worked out with her older sister. Trista planned to go to college and her parents said she had a heart for helping others.
The dreams on Trista’s bucket list will never come true. She died on Nov. 9, 2022. This was 12 days after her parents believe she got her second COVID vaccine. They found her vaccination card from her first appointment in her purse after she died. It showed she received the first Pfizer shot on July 20, 2022. Her parents had no idea she had gotten the shot.
A couple of weeks after Trista’s passing, they said they started researching COVID vaccine reactions. “I think this might be what killed her,” her mother, Taylor Martin, said.
Her dad, Allen Martin, said Trista suffered from multiple system organ failure. He said they found other people online around the world describing similar reactions to the vaccine.
“In a way, it was a little comforting to know that we weren’t alone. But at the same time, it was just terrifying. Because it’s, I mean, it’s, they’re still pushing it.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends COVID-19 vaccination for everyone ages 6 months and older in the United States.
‘Fourth Wave’ of Opioid Epidemic Crashes Ashore, Propelled by Fentanyl and Meth
The United States is knee-deep in what some experts call the opioid epidemic’s “fourth wave,” which is not only placing drug users at greater risk but is also complicating efforts to address the nation’s drug problem.
These waves, according to a report out today from Millennium Health, began with the crisis in prescription opioid use, followed by a significant jump in heroin use, then an increase in the use of synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
The latest wave involves using multiple substances at the same time, combining fentanyl mainly with either methamphetamine or cocaine, the report found. “And I’ve yet to see a peak,” said one of the co-authors, Eric Dawson, vice president of clinical affairs at Millennium Health, a specialty laboratory that provides drug testing services to monitor use of prescription medications and illicit drugs.
The report, which takes a deep dive into the nation’s drug trends and breaks usage patterns down by region, is based on 4.1 million urine samples collected from January 2013 to December 2023 from people receiving some kind of drug addiction care.
‘This Can Be Game Changing’: UC Enrolling Patients for Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Trial
The University of Cincinnati Cancer Center is enrolling patients in a new clinical trial to test a vaccine to treat pancreatic cancer, according to a press release. The hospital is the first in the Midwest to participate in the Phase 2 trial, the press release says.
The vaccine being tested builds on the same mRNA technology that was used to develop the vaccines for COVID-19, the press release says.
According to UC, the vaccine is developed in about four to six weeks while patients are recovering from surgery. That personalized vaccine is then used for six weekly injections. The patient then undergoes six months of standard chemotherapy, followed by six more vaccine injectors as booster shots.
Zimbabwe Starts an Emergency Polio Vaccination Drive After Detecting Cases Caused by a Rare Mutation
Zimbabwe began an emergency campaign to inoculate more than 4 million children against polio on Tuesday after health authorities detected three cases caused by the rare mutation of the weakened virus used in oral vaccines, including a 10-year-old girl who was paralyzed in January.
The health ministry said laboratory tests from samples collected from sewage sites in several areas of the capital, Harare, late last year showed the presence of a mutated polio virus that originated in an oral vaccine used in the global eradication effort.
In rare instances, the live polio virus in vaccines can mutate into a form capable of sparking new outbreaks, especially in places with poor sanitation and low vaccination levels.
The number of polio cases globally has dropped by more than 99% since the global effort to wipe out the disease led by the World Health Organization and others began in 1988. But the majority of children being paralyzed by polio these days are being crippled by a virus that was originally linked to a vaccine.
Patients See First Savings From Biden’s Drug Price Push, as Pharma Lines Up Its Lawyers
On Feb. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent pharmaceutical makers opening bids for the first 10 expensive drugs it selected for negotiation. The companies are responding to the bids — while filing nine lawsuits that aim to kill the negotiations altogether, arguing that limiting their profits will strangle the pipeline of lifesaving drugs. A federal court in Texas dismissed one of the suits on Feb. 12, without taking up the substantive legal issue over constitutionality.
Months after drug companies began suing to stop price negotiations, the Biden administration released a framework describing when it could “march in” and essentially seize drugs created through research funded by the National Institutes of Health if they are unreasonably priced.
The timing of the march-in announcement “suggests that it’s about sending a message” to the drug industry, said Robin Feldman, who leads the Center for Innovation at the University of California Law-San Francisco. And so, in a way, does the Inflation Reduction Act itself, she said.
Although the drug industry is spending millions to fight the IRA, the Part D portion of the bill could end up boosting their sales. While it forces the industry to further discount the highest-grossing drugs, the bill makes it easier for Medicare patients to pick up their medicines because they’ll be able to afford them, said Stacie Dusetzina, a Vanderbilt University School of Medicine researcher. She was the lead author of a 2022 study showing that cancer patients who didn’t get income subsidies were about half as likely to fill prescriptions.
Bavarian Nordic Terminates Cancer Vaccine Work
Bavarian Nordic will cease work on an experimental cancer vaccine in early-stage testing and no longer invest in oncology, announcing Wednesday plans to instead prioritize its infectious disease research.
The cancer vaccine it is scrapping, TAEK-VAC, stimulates immune cells to target two proteins, HER2 and brachyury, expressed on tumors. It was being tested in a Phase 1 study in people with either HER2-positive breast cancer or a rare type of bone tumor.
That shot, though, “has reached a stage where clinical expansion and further investments would be required,” according to Bavarian Nordic. The company will instead use those resources to develop vaccines for infectious diseases.
Bavarian Nordic’s decision to abandon oncology comes amid a resurgence in cancer vaccine research. In the last few years, Moderna, BioNTech and Gritstone Oncology have brought these “personalized” shots into clinical testing. Moderna’s vaccine, which is partnered with Merck & Co., is in the lead, having already shown promise in mid-stage testing in melanoma. The shot, which covers 34 neoantigens, is currently in a Phase 3 trial.
Ozempic and Wegovy Sales Are so Hot They’re Powering Denmark’s GDP
A new class of weight loss drugs hasn’t simply expanded the profits of pharmaceutical companies: It’s also expanded economies. Soaring demand for Ozempic and Wegovy, used to treat diabetes and obesity, bolstered Denmark’s gross domestic product by 2% last quarter.
Danish government agency Statistics Denmark reported in a preliminary reading that that the pharmaceutical industry was a driving force for the nation’s growing economy in the fourth quarter of 2023 and the year overall. Denmark’s GDP grew 1.8% in 2023 — and much of its boost is owed to the pharmaceutical industry. Without pharmaceuticals, the agency says, the country’s GDP would have instead fallen 0.1%.
Leading that growth is Denmark-based Novo Nordisk, which makes the diabetes medication Ozempic and the weight-loss drug Wegovy. Known as GLP-1s, the drugs suppress appetite by mimicking a hormone that regulates appetite and blood sugars. Skyrocketing sales of these drugs have made Novo Nordisk the most valuable company in Europe, surpassing luxury conglomerate LVMH last year.
FDA Expands Use of Asthma Drug Xolair to Treat Severe Food Allergies
A medication used to treat asthma can now be used to help people with food allergies avoid severe reactions, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday.
Xolair, the brand name for the drug omalizumab, became the first medication approved to reduce allergic reactions caused by accidental exposure to food triggers. Patients as young as age 1 with allergies can take the drug by injection every two to four weeks, depending on their weight and their body’s response to allergens.
People who use Xolair must continue to avoid the foods that cause them reactions, such as peanuts, cashews, hazelnuts, walnuts, milk products and eggs. The medication allows them to tolerate higher amounts of such foods without causing major reactions.
The FDA decision is based on a study led by Dr. Robert Wood, director of the pediatric allergy division at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, and funded by the National Institutes of Health. It showed that Xolair allowed about 68% of participants with peanut allergies to tolerate about 600 milligrams, or about 1/2 teaspoon, of peanut protein, compared with about 6% of those who received dummy injections.
Dengue Rages Around the Globe. Where Are the Vaccines?
Because there are four different dengue virus strains that often co-circulate in the same geographic region, dengue vaccines are expected to immunize recipients against all of them. The observation that a second infection can be much worse than a first infection also requires that a vaccine provide immunity to all viruses.
Sanofi’s vaccine demonstrated itself to be well tolerated and to significantly reduce the risk of becoming ill with dengue. These initial results were based on a single year of volunteer follow-up and were the basis for acquiring numerous licenses and a massive vaccine rollout in the Philippines.
What happened next shocked the science and vaccine worlds. In the third year of the Sanofi trial researchers observed that vaccinated children who had never been infected with dengue before vaccination had a much higher risk of developing severe or hospitalized dengue compared to children who were not vaccinated.
The exact reason why this occurred remains unknown, but it is likely the vaccine preferentially immunized recipients to only one strain, setting them up for the second infection phenomenon associated with severe cases.
In response to these findings, the World Health Organization changed its earlier vaccine recommendation to include only vaccinating people who were previously infected. Vaccine licensing authorities around the globe followed suit. By this time, however, the Philippines had already vaccinated over 800,000 children. Controversy and scandal ensued, child deaths were blamed on the vaccine and it was ultimately pulled from the Philippine market.
Phage Therapy: Researchers Sharpen Another Arrow in the Quiver Against Antibiotic Resistance
Phages are promising enough that medical researchers and small biotech companies are now working hard to address some of the hurdles that have stood in the way of their more widespread adoption: building “libraries” of thousands of phages, improving the purification process by genetically engineering phages, and running clinical trials so that treatments can finally gain FDA approval, rather than be attempted on a case-by-case basis.
Phage therapy has been around for more than 100 years, but with the advent of antibiotics and a possible influence of an unfavorable review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in the early 1930s, phages fell out of favor and became a distant memory.
That all changed in 2016, when HIV researcher Tom Patterson, infected with antibiotic-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii from a trip some months earlier to Egypt, was cured with phage therapy. His wife, infectious disease epidemiologist Steffanie Strathdee, jumped into action on their return to the U.S., and researchers across the country helped her find the bacteriophage that cured him.
She is now the co-director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH) based out of the University of California, San Diego, which helps streamline the process of securing the right phage for a sick patient as quickly as possible.
