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Nicole Audia Says Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Sent Her Health Into a Tailspin
The FDA announced strict new restrictions on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to the risk of rare and life-threatening blood clots. Now it’s only recommended for people who can’t get another vaccine or otherwise won’t be vaccinated at all.
CBS2’s Jessica Moore spoke with a woman who says she wishes she knew about the side effects sooner. From smiling with her family to an agonizing hospital stay, 51-year-old Nicole Audia says the Johnson & Johnson vaccine sent her into a physical tailspin.
“I was in the hospital for six weeks, out of work for 10. My heart will never be the same, and that stinks,” Audia said.
Audia, a mother from Hopewell Junction, says two weeks after getting the J&J vaccine she had a stroke. Her hair fell out in clumps, and doctors injected her with massive amounts of steroids to help calm her body’s extreme reaction.
Data Shows Vaccinated U.S. Citizens Made up More Than 40% of COVID Deaths During Omicron Peak, as Deaths Continue to Rise in Wisconsin
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported:
The state is experiencing an uptick in newly reported deaths, hospitalizations and cases as new data analysis shows that this is not just a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
The pandemic’s toll is no longer falling almost exclusively on those who chose not to or could not get shots, a Washington Post analysis that was published late last month found.
During the Omicron variant surge, the vaccinated made up 42% of deaths in January and February, compared with 23% of the dead in September, the peak of the Delta wave, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationwide data also shows that the majority of COVID deaths are among elderly citizens. Nearly two-thirds of the people who died during the Omicron surge were 75 and older, according to a Post analysis, compared with a third during the Delta wave.
‘I Felt so Alone’: Rising Rates of Suicide, Depression Accelerated by Pandemic Among U.S. Kids
The U.S. surgeon general has called it an ‘urgent public health crisis’ — a devastating decline in the mental health of kids across the country. According to the CDC, the rates of suicide, self-harm, anxiety and depression are up among adolescents — a trend that began before the pandemic.
Tonight, we’ll take you to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a community trying to help its kids navigate a mental health crisis. Wisconsin has the fifth-highest increase of adolescent self-harm and attempted suicide in the country, with rates nearly doubling since before the pandemic.
In the emergency room at Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee, doctors like Michelle Pickett are seeing more kids desperate for mental health help.
Bill Gates: COVID ‘Disease of Elderly,’ ‘Low Fatality Rate’ — ‘Kind of Like the Flu’
Bill Gates isn’t an immunologist and he doesn’t even play one on TV. But the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft has immersed himself in the study of the world’s problems and donated billions of dollars to tackle the scourge of malaria in Africa through his philanthropic foundation. So when he speaks, people listen, which makes what he said last week about COVID-19 interesting.
“It wasn’t until early February, when I was in a meeting, that experts of the foundation, said ‘there’s no way” that COVID-19 could have been contained,” he said. “At that point, we didn’t really understand the fatality rate. We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like the flu, although it’s a bit different than that,” Gates said.
Gates also had something to say about the latest variant of the virus and the efficacy of vaccines. “Once Omicron comes along, the vaccine is not reducing transmission, hardly at all, particularly about three or four months after you take the vaccine,” he said.
His comments came after top officials at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said much the same thing, that COVID-19 is now akin to the flu.
FDA: Americans Should Treat COVID Like the Flu
Several top Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials, including Commissioner Robert Califf, admitted that Americans will now have to accept COVID-19 as another respiratory virus, comparing it to influenza.
Califf, Principal Deputy Commissioner Janet Woodcock, and top vaccine official Dr. Peter Marks wrote for the Journal of the American Medical Association that COVID-19 will be around for the foreseeable future while suggesting that it will require yearly vaccines targeting the most threatening variations of the virus.
The virus “will likely circulate globally for the foreseeable future, taking its place alongside other common respiratory viruses such as influenza. And it likely will require similar annual consideration for vaccine composition updates in consultation with the [FDA],” they continued.
It’s a departure from the rhetoric that was expressed by public health officials in 2020 and 2021. In late October 2020, for example, current White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci said that President Donald Trump’s comparisons to the flu were false, telling NBC at the time “it is not correct to say it’s the same as flu.”
About a year later, Fauci told CBS News that Americans will “likely” have to deal with COVID-19 in a similar manner as influenza.
Preventable by Devi Sridhar Review — Inside the Fog of War on COVID
At the end of her wide-ranging analysis of the pandemic, Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Guardian columnist and Good Morning Britain contributor, raises the dark question of whether COVID-19 will “be the spark for the third world war”.
Sridhar is referring to what might happen if it is ever discovered that China knows much more about the origins of the pandemic than it has so far been willing to let on. How will the rest of the world react?
Sridhar does not mince her words about China’s initial inaction and subsequent indifference to the global spread, nor does she dismiss the possibility that it was a laboratory leak that introduced SARS-CoV-2 to humanity. Still, even if China had acted swiftly and responsibly as soon as evidence emerged of a lethal virus in Wuhan, there is no guarantee that it could have contained it within China’s borders.
It’s Time for a Recovery Lab: How Leaders Can Help Their Teams Process the Pandemic
It’s one thing to physically endure a long-term stressor, and an entirely different experience to endure a long-term mental-emotional-social stressor such as we have through the last few years. As we move through this next phase of the pandemic, we will likely continue to feel varying levels of fatigue.
Continued fatigue is a typical symptom of prolonged stress. However, after two years of straining through the pandemic, social unrest and now the anxieties of war, we are well past the flight-or-fight mode, which is designed to give us strength and energy. Rather, what we are now experiencing is a sense of depletion. Some may even feel as if they are on the verge of exhaustion.
COVID Vaccine Makers Shift Focus to Boosters
COVID-19 vaccine makers are shifting gears and planning for a smaller, more competitive booster shot market after delivering as many doses as fast as they could over the last 18 months.
Executives at the biggest COVID vaccine makers including Pfizer Inc. (PFE.N) and Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) said they believe most people who wanted to get vaccinated against COVID have already done so — more than 5 billion people worldwide.
In the coming year, most COVID vaccinations will be booster shots, or first inoculations for children, which are still gaining regulatory approvals around the world, they said.
Pfizer, which makes its shot with Germany’s BioNTech SE (22UAy.DE), and Moderna still see a major role for themselves in the vaccine market even as overall demand declines.
‘Overwhelming’ Exhaustion: COVID Leaves 66% of Working Parents Burnt out, Study Suggests
From remote school to financial uncertainty, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been an immensely difficult time to raise kids. And more and more parents are burned out.
A new study has found that 66% of working parents meet the criteria for parental burnout — which occurs when chronic stress and exhaustion overwhelm a parent’s ability to function and cope.
The report found that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated stressors and contributed “to epidemic levels of parental burnout and exhaustion.” And burnout isn’t going away anytime soon, the report’s authors said.
White House Warns of COVID Surges in the Winter
COVID cases surged during the last two winters and are likely to again this year — unless the country can prepare and act, White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha said Sunday morning.
“If we don’t get ahead of this thing, we’ll have a lot of waning immunity, this virus continues to evolve and we may see a pretty sizable wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths this fall and winter,” Jha said on ABC’s “This Week.”
The Lucky Few to Never Get Coronavirus Could Teach Us More About It
When her partner tested positive for the coronavirus two days before Christmas, Michelle Green worried she, too, would become ill. Somehow, Green never tested positive.
Scientists around the world are investigating how a dwindling number of people such as Green have managed to dodge the coronavirus for more than two years, even after the highly transmissible Omicron variant drove a record-shattering surge in cases this winter.
Experts hope that studying people who have avoided infection may offer clues — perhaps hidden in their genes — that could prevent others from being infected or more effectively treat those who contract the virus.
