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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.
