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Man Says He Has Been ‘Left to Rot’ After Covid Vaccine
On Dec. 15, 2021, Larry Lowe’s life changed. He was 54, rarely ill, fit, healthy and running 10km most days — until he got the Pfizer COVID-19 booster.
Within days he developed numbness in the right side of his face and started experiencing pain. “I had lost all the feeling in my face, teeth, nose, tongue, eye, that whole side of my head,” he said. These symptoms have spread through his body and intensified over the years, with doctors across the U.K. saying the vaccine is to blame.
Pfizer said patient safety was paramount and it took reports of adverse reactions very seriously. It said hundreds of millions of doses had been administered globally “and the benefit-risk profile of the vaccine remains positive for all authorized indications and age groups.”
Mr. Lowe, who is from Omagh in Northern Ireland, said that while he was not opposed to vaccines, his life had been destroyed.
‘I Was Quite Isolated’: Children Share Their Covid Experiences
The Scottish COVID-19 Inquiry is asking children and young people across the country to share their experiences of the pandemic.
The inquiry’s next phase of public hearings, which will begin in Edinburgh in November, will look at its impact on education.
Aisha is one of the primary seven pupils at Law Primary in North Berwick who took part in the 15-minute survey, which asks them about their experience during the pandemic.
She says she remembers being scared. “Just hearing about it on the news, what people had been going through having COVID-19, and the tests people had to do and all the injections — I didn’t like thinking about that,” she says. “I was quite isolated and I felt like I had no-one to play with apart from my sister. I just sat around, and it was boring because there was nothing to do all day.”
Her classmate Molly also struggled with social isolation and says it still affects her today.
“I didn’t like to talk to people as much, because we didn’t get to talk to people,” she says. “It made me less talkative because it was a lot harder. I’m still not as talkative as I usually would have been.”
Kids and Teens Who Get Covid More Prone to Diabetes, Study Finds
Children and teenagers infected with the coronavirus are significantly more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than their peers afflicted with other respiratory illnesses, according to research published Monday.
As the public heads into another viral season, health experts said the findings highlight how the virus continues to reveal new ways to pose detrimental long-term consequences.
Children were 50% more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes at the six-month mark if they had endured a coronavirus infection compared with children who had another respiratory infection, according to findings published in JAMA Network Open.
The subset of patients in the study who were obese were 100% more likely to have a Type 2 diabetes diagnosis compared with their peers beset with other respiratory infections.
Researchers used electronic health records from Jan. 2020 to Dec. 2022 of more than 600,000 children 10 to 19 years old and categorized them into two equal groups: those with a coronavirus infection and others with all other respiratory infections such as influenza and rhinovirus.
“This is a huge spike,” said Pauline Terebuh, the study’s lead author and epidemiologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. “If a child is getting diagnosed with diabetes, they have a long life to carry that chronic disease.”
Terebuh said public health interventions, including vaccines, may decrease the risk of developing complications or a chronic illness from the coronavirus but added that further research is needed.
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Research Uncovers Disparities in US All-Cause Deaths During COVID Pandemic
Today in JAMA Network Open, a Mass General Brigham-led research team reports that U.S. all-cause excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected several minoritized populations, with the largest relative increase in adults aged 25 to 64 years — which the authors said implies lasting downstream consequences.
The researchers characterized overall and age-specific excess mortality by race by analyzing all U.S. all-cause deaths related to the COVID-19 public health emergency (March 2020 to May 2023).
They also evaluated whether measured differences reflected changes from racial disparities before the pandemic.
More than 1.38 million all-cause excess deaths (observed-to-expected ratio, 1.15) occurred, corresponding to about 23 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) during the pandemic. Excess deaths included roughly 9,000 Black (542,000 YPLL), 6,000 Hispanic (395,000 YPLL), 400 American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN; 24,000 YPLL), and 100 Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander people (7,500 YPLL).
130,000 U.S. Cancer Cases Went Undiagnosed in Covid Pandemic, Study Finds
When the U.S. healthcare system pivoted to meet COVID-19 in 2020, routine health visits and screenings where many cancer cases would have been caught didn’t happen. It wasn’t ideal, but many health experts thought that as the country opened back up, screenings would help “catch up” to these missed cases.
A new paper published Monday in JAMA Network Open suggests that didn’t happen as quickly as experts had hoped.
Instead, the new analysis suggests that cancer diagnoses recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021 — but didn’t make up for any of the lost cases from earlier in the pandemic.
That leaves a troubling mystery for epidemiologists, as it means experts still don’t know what happened with the roughly 130,000 cancer cases that were missed in 2020.
Long COVID Study: Persistent Infection Could Explain Long-Haul Symptoms in Some People
A new long COVID study shows that a persistent infection could explain why some people experience long-haul symptoms, according to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The Brigham team found that people with wide-ranging long COVID symptoms were twice as likely to have virus proteins in their blood, compared to those without long COVID symptoms.
“If we can identify a subset of people who have persistent viral symptoms because of a reservoir of virus in the body, we may be able to treat them with antivirals to alleviate their symptoms,” said lead author Zoe Swank, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham.
Compared to people who didn’t report long COVID symptoms, those who reported persisting symptoms affecting heart and lung, brain and musculoskeletal systems were twice as likely to have virus proteins circulating in their blood.
Death Rates for Working-Age and Young Black People Rose During Pandemic
The likelihood of death for Black people under the age of 25 and working-age adults increased significantly during the coronavirus pandemic, according to new research on mortality rates published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The study reviewed deaths across age, race and ethnicity and highlights how the pandemic disproportionately affected the nation’s core adult population alongside historically underserved racial and ethnic communities. It found that disparities in mortality were not simply replicated during the pandemic — they were exacerbated.
“When there’s a crisis, we need to mobilize our resources towards the groups who are most at risk because that means that every action you take will save that many more lives,” said Jeremy Faust, lead author on the paper and emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
