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Children in China Diagnosed With Leukemia After Taking Chinese Vaccines
After receiving her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, Li Jun’s 4-year-old developed a fever and cough, which quickly subsided after intravenous therapy at the hospital. But after the second shot, the father could tell something was wrong.
Swelling appeared around his daughter’s eyes and did not go away. For weeks, the girl complained about pains on her legs, where bruises started to emerge seemingly out of nowhere. In January, a few weeks after the second dose, the 4-year-old was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
He is among hundreds of Chinese that belong to a social media group claiming to be suffering from or have a household member suffering from leukemia, developed after taking Chinese vaccines. Eight of them confirmed the situation when reached by The Epoch Times. Names of the interviewees have been withheld to protect their safety.
The leukemia cases span across different age groups from all parts of China. But Li and others particularly pointed to a rise in patients from the younger age group in the last few months, coinciding with the regime’s push to inoculate children between 3 and 11 years old beginning last October.
Two Years Into the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci Hopes the World Will Not Forget Lessons From a ‘Catastrophic Experience’
As the two-year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic declaration approached last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci was in no mood to predict the future.
“The answer is: we don’t know. I mean, that’s it,” Fauci told CNBC when asked what may come next for COVID vaccinations. Given the durability of protection from the shots, “it is likely that we’re not done with this when it comes to vaccines,” he said.
While he acknowledged “we are going in the right direction” as cases, hospitalizations and deaths decline after the Omicron surge, he pointed out “we have gone in the right direction in four other variants” before the pandemic took a devastating turn.
For These Young People, the Pandemic Has Been Harsh. Here Are Their Hopes for the Future.
In 2021, as the pandemic showed no signs of abating, young people across the country were dealing with isolation and altered dreams, and were trying to figure out what their futures would be like. We were among them — two college students who wanted to see how our generation was coping.
For six months, we crisscrossed 23 states and interviewed more than 80 young people suspended in that transitional time between adolescence and adulthood.
Yet, like us, they hung on to hopes for a future free of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. We asked members of this “Generation Pandemic” to respond to the open-ended statement “After the pandemic, I want to … ” Here is how they responded, in their own writing:
About 1 in 6 U.S. Couples Disagrees on COVID Vaccination
U.S. News & World Report reported:
A new study found that about 1 in 6 U.S. couples have one partner who is vaccinated against COVID-19 and one who is not, and there are several reasons why.
The study involved a survey of 1,300 people who lived with a significant other and most said either both they and their partner were vaccinated (63.3%) or unvaccinated (21%). But 15.6% said one partner was vaccinated and the other was not (discordant couples).
Survey participants from those discordant couples were asked to rank 10 common reasons for being unvaccinated on a scale of 0 to 10. And people on both sides of the vaccine divide ranked safety as the No. 1 reason why they or their partners have said no to the shots.
NYC’s Schools Forever Changed by COVID
New York City schools are forever changed since COVID-19′s March 2020 arrival — and some ways are just becoming clear two years later. A forced year-and-a-half-long experiment in remote learning and the cascading economic, medical and emotional fallout of the pandemic left an indelible mark on the nation’s largest school system.
Some of the changes can be measured in numbers: 73,000 fewer K-12 students on school rosters after a pandemic-fueled enrollment decline; an extra $9 billion in the Education Department’s budget this year thanks to a flood of state and federal recovery dollars, and the exodus of more than 1,000 school safety agents and 3,800 classroom paraprofessionals since summer 2020.
Other changes are harder to quantify: A new embrace of technology in schools after a forced shift to remote learning; an upending of academic measures that schools have relied on for decades; a greater appreciation for the small joys of the student-teacher bond; lingering trauma and loss that will shape the lives of kids and educators for years to come.
Pandemic Isolation Harmed Kids’ Social Skills. How One Cincinnati Provider Is Helping.
It is a coronavirus pandemic side effect: Children who haven’t mastered social and emotional skills they need to interact in a classroom and kids with mental and behavioral health conditions gone unseen because of isolation.
“It’s not just about, do they know their colors, do they know their numbers,” said Angenita Brown, manager of Success by Six, a collaborative launched by United Way of Greater Cincinnati. “But do they know how to stand in line? Do they know how to raise their hand?”
Best Point is providing intervention that many of these children in the Cincinnati area need. The biggest surge in referrals to the nonprofit’s outpatient services since the pandemic started in 2020 has been for children ages 3 to 6 years old. The kids in the age group 3 to 9 need the highest level of treatment care that Best Point provides, said April Kandil, director of campus-based programs at Best Point Education and Behavioral Health.
Five COVID Challenges on the Two-Year Anniversary of the Pandemic
Two years ago Friday, the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus a pandemic. In that time, there have been nearly 1 million American deaths. But while cases are plummeting, and many Americans are getting on with their lives, there are still challenges ahead.
Here are five of them.
Obama Tests Positive for COVID, Says He’s ‘Feeling Fine’
Former President Barack Obama said on Sunday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, though he’s feeling relatively healthy and his wife, Michelle, tested negative.
“I’ve had a scratchy throat for a couple days, but am feeling fine otherwise,” Obama said on Twitter. “Michelle and I are grateful to be vaccinated and boosted.”
Obama encouraged more Americans to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, despite the declining infection rate in the U.S.
Exclusive: U.S. Seeks to Expand Trump-Era COVID Data Collection Under CDC
The Biden administration wants to expand a federal COVID-19 tracking system created during the pandemic to provide a more detailed view of how respiratory and other infectious diseases are affecting patients and hospital resources, according to a draft of proposed rules reviewed by Reuters.
The plan would build upon a hospital data collection system designed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Trump administration. Management of the program was transferred last month to HHS’s lead public health agency, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The hospitals would be required to provide data — without names — on patients’ vaccination status, pre-existing conditions, age, ethnicity and other details that would shed light on health outcomes among various populations.
CDC Wants to Monitor Poop: States Aren’t All on Board
There’s just one problem with the Biden administration’s plan to monitor the nation’s sewage in the hopes of preventing the next pandemic: Many states are not yet on board.
California, Florida, Texas and Pennsylvania only have clusters of collection sites up and running primarily in major population centers. Minnesota and New Jersey are unsure of how large their programs will be. North Dakota and Wyoming don’t plan to participate.
State health officials and wastewater experts told POLITICO that sewage surveillance operations in some areas have grappled with privacy concerns and logistical challenges, such as figuring out how to coordinate dozens of treatment plants routinely sending in sewage samples to a handful of labs and standardizing processing protocols.
COVID Antigen Test Recalled After Officials Say It Was Counterfeit, Not FDA Approved
A coronavirus antigen test has been recalled after officials discovered that it was a counterfeit and not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in the United States.
ACON Laboratories Inc., which legally manufacturers the FDA-approved Flowflex COVID-19 Antigen Home Test, discovered “the U.S. distribution of unauthorized, adulterated and misbranded counterfeit product having the trade name Flowflex SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test (Self-Testing),” according to the recall notice posted by the FDA.
ACON says it’s not importing the “Flowflex SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test (Self-Testing)” into the United States and that it’s “only authorized for sale in Europe and other markets, under the CE mark.”
New COVID Coronavirus Wave in Europe May Have Already Begun, Data Suggests
When it comes to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, things may be looking up again in Europe, but not in a good way. The past week has seen yet another upswing in reported COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in countries such as the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy.
On Saturday, Eric Topol, MD, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, tweeted, “The next wave in Europe has begun,” along with graphs of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations over time from Our World in Data:
This European upswing is coming about a month after various countries and locations in Europe began lifting COVID-19 precautions such as face mask requirements for indoor public locations.
