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CDC Director Orders Agency Overhaul, Admitting Flawed COVID Response
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is launching an overhaul of its structure and operations in an attempt to modernize the agency and rehabilitate its reputation following intense criticism of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and, more recently, the growing monkeypox outbreak.
On Wednesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky shared a series of changes with CDC leadership and staff designed to “transform” the organization and its work culture by improving how the agency shares information, develops public health guidance and communicates with the American public.
There is consensus within the CDC that it “needs to make some changes for how it communicates and how it operates — to be faster, to be nimbler, to use more plain-spoken language,” said a CDC official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the changes before they were announced.
Biden Administration Will Stop Buying COVID Vaccines, Treatments and Tests as Early as This Fall, Jha Says
The Biden administration has been planning for how to get past the crisis phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and will stop buying vaccines, treatments and tests as early as this fall, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said on Tuesday.
“My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products. Some of that is actually going to begin this fall, in the days and weeks ahead. You’re going to see the commercialization of some of these things,” he said.
Availability of those products would transition to the regular healthcare system, Jha said, so if you need a vaccine or an antiviral treatment, you’d get it from your doctor or from a hospital.
Jha said the transition to commercialization is complicated. It involves regulatory issues, market dynamic issues and equity issues, but the administration is working carefully and thoughtfully to get it right.
Scientists Have Re-Created the Deadly 1918 Flu Virus. Why?
With all the controversy about gain-of-function research and all the concerns about how dangerous it is, you might think that scientists have stopped doing that kind of work. Well, no.
In the latest news, a team of scientists in Canada and the U.S. report that they have re-created the 1918 influenza virus and used it to infect macaques. Let’s be clear here: the 1918 flu vanished from the Earth, long ago. It’s simply not a threat, or at least it wasn’t until someone figured out a way to bring it back.
Why do they do it? All of the papers give essentially the same reason: these experiments, they say, will help us develop animal models in which we can test vaccines. These same justifications have been used for decades, but flu vaccines haven’t improved one whit, as far as I can tell.
But hold on a minute! Even if you accept their argument that infecting macaques and other animals with the influenza virus will help develop better vaccines, why use the 1918 influenza virus at all?
They don’t answer that question, because there really is no good answer. The fact is that the experiments will be more relevant if they use currently circulating flu strains — because those are the strains that we need vaccines against.
Lab Rat Offspring Got Rib Malformations From COVID Vaccine: Moderna Trial Documents
Moderna documents regarding its COVID vaccine trial on animals, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, showed that some of the rats that were tested with the Moderna mRNA shot developed rib malformations.
The 700 pages contain a portion of the formal Biologics Licensing Application (BLA) package that a manufacturer is required to submit to the FDA for approval.
The documents have not yet been made public but were analyzed by former pharma executive Alexandra Latypova and reviewed by The Epoch Times. Included in the documents are test results that show that Moderna mRNA shots caused statistically significant skeletal malformations in the offspring of the rats that took the mRNA-1273 (Spikevax mRNA) doses.
Despite the abovementioned lab results, the FDA issued a statement on Jan. 30 saying that there were no adverse effects on postnatal developments.
COVID Public Health Emergency Appears to Be Headed for Extension
The Biden administration appears headed toward extending the COVID-19 public health emergency for another three months, allowing special powers and programs to continue past the midterm election.
HHS had extended the emergency declaration through Oct. 13 and pledged it would give states and health providers 60 days’ notice before it ends. Lifting the emergency would bring major policy shifts to insurance markets, drug approvals and telehealth.
After a long plateau, the number of new COVID cases has been falling and wastewater surveillance data has shown declines for three straight weeks, per Evercore ISI.
What You Need to Know About Moderna’s New ‘Bivalent’ COVID Vaccine
Moderna Inc. has just received approval from the U.K. for a COVID-19 booster shot that targets Omicron, the version of the virus that’s now the world’s most widespread. The snappily-named Spikevax Bivalent Original/Omicron has been given the green light for use in the U.K. and is expected to be rolled out in other countries soon.
The new shot targets two separate strains of COVID-19 — the original version of the virus that emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan along with the BA.1 subvariant, the earliest version of Omicron.
Other versions of Omicron, BA.4 and BA.5, are now more prevalent, but the virus is evolving faster than new vaccines can be formulated and tested, and this is the closest match available that has received clearance. Moderna has another shot available that targets the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, which has been ordered by the U.S., but not yet cleared.
Is Oxygen the Answer to Long COVID?
She was dead tired but couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think straight and could barely walk. The muscle pain in her arms and legs was so bad that she spent days in bed. When she did get up, she used a wheelchair. And she couldn’t focus on even the most trivial tasks, let alone work. But doctors couldn’t agree on what was wrong with 41-year-old Maya Doari.
The sac-like tissues surrounding her heart were inflamed, of that they were sure, so she was diagnosed with pericarditis. But when her left hand turned blue — on and off for months — her physicians told her “don’t try to understand,” because they no longer could.
Yet today, a year after her long COVID symptoms arrived, Doari says they are “98% gone,” a turnaround tied to new research that may have uncovered a promising long-COVID treatment.
It’s called hyperbaric oxygen therapy, and in July Israeli researchers published a study — in which Doari participated — that showed using this technique to deliver massive amounts of oxygen to the body appears to alleviate many of COVID’s cognitive and physical after-effects.
Merck Jumps Into a $3.7 Billion mRNA Collaboration
Merck has been a laggard among its peers in the COVID-era race to invest in messenger RNA technology, but on Tuesday it announced a deal worth as much as $3.7 billion with a private biotech to collaborate on mRNA-based vaccines and therapeutics.
Merck made the deal with year-old Cambridge-based biotech called Orna Therapeutics, which has a novel take on mRNA. The company calls the approach oRNA, and it involves modifying mRNA strands so that they form a circle rather than a line. The company says that will make them work better as medicines.
Doctor Warns of Suspicious Pattern Behind Monkeypox Outbreak
There has been much speculation that the novel coronavirus was a bioweapon developed in a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lab. Now, an American doctor has a theory that the new monkeypox outbreak may also have similar nefarious origins.
Dr. Syed Haider told The Epoch Times that the development of the monkeypox outbreak seems identical to the way COVID-19 was introduced to the world.
“It’s an unusual variant,” Haider said. “We’ve never had a variant of monkeypox that primarily spreads between gay men.” Haider said there are other signs that lead him to believe the current strain of monkeypox was engineered.
He said the monkeypox virus mutates very slowly and that the last known precursor to this variant is so different that it could not have happened naturally, adding that there just wasn’t enough time for natural evolution to create the variant spreading right now.
WHO Says Monkeypox Vaccine ‘Not a Silver Bullet’ as Breakthrough Cases Reported
The World Health Organization said Wednesday that the monkeypox vaccine is not a “silver bullet,” with the health body beginning to receive reports of breakthrough cases after people have received the vaccine.
“The fact that we’re beginning to see some breakthrough cases is also really important information because it tells us that the vaccine is not 100% effective in any given circumstance, whether preventive or post-exposure,” said Rosamund Lewis, the WHO’s technical lead for monkeypox.
“We have known from the beginning that this vaccine would not be a silver bullet, that it would not meet all the expectations that are being put on it.”
The only approved vaccine for monkeypox is from developer Bavarian Nordic and is being used as both a preventative vaccine, as well as to protect people recently exposed to the virus. Monkeypox, which spreads through close physical contact, was declared last month by the WHO to be a public health emergency of international concern.
An HIV Vaccine May Be Closer Than Ever — Thanks, in Part, to COVID
Despite nearly forty years of research, there’s still no vaccine to combat HIV/AIDS. However, recent discussions at the 24th International AIDS Conference in Montreal provided some hope that that situation might change.
Roughly a year after the world first became aware of COVID-19, two vaccines that effectively reduce the risk of this disease were approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration. Lessons learned during the development of those vaccines may spur efforts to develop a vaccine against HIV/AIDS.
As I’ve described before, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 differ in myriad ways. HIV and SARS-CoV-2 are different viruses that are transmitted in different ways and cause vastly different diseases. Additionally, structural and biological differences between these two viruses have impacted our ability to develop effective vaccines.
The search for an effective HIV vaccine has been a slow, arduous process. But the 40-year struggle has benefited the vaccine field in many ways. We understand the human immune system better because of the work done on HIV. Arguably, the COVID-19 vaccines were developed so rapidly in part because of lessons learned from HIV. Now, perhaps, lessons learned from COVID-19 will impact the development of an HIV vaccine.
