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China Calls COVID ‘Lab Leak’ Theory a Lie After WHO Report
China on Friday attacked the theory that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated as a leak from a Chinese laboratory as a politically motivated lie, after the World Health Organization recommended in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is needed into whether a lab accident may be to blame.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian also rejected accusations that China had not fully cooperated with investigators, saying it welcomed a science-based probe but rejected any political manipulation.
He also reiterated calls for an investigation into “highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina” in the United States where China has suggested, without evidence, that the U.S. was developing the coronavirus as a bioweapon.
The WHO’s stance in a report released Thursday is a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins. It comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.
Why America Doesn’t Trust the CDC
People don’t trust the CDC. Here’s one example illustrating why. Two weeks ago, with no outcomes data on COVID-19 booster shots for 5-to-11-year-olds, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) vigorously recommended the booster for all 24 million American children in that age group. The CDC cited a small Pfizer study of 140 children that showed boosters elevated their antibody levels — an outcome known to be transitory.
When that study concluded, a Pfizer spokesperson said it did not determine the efficacy of the booster in the 5-to-11-year-olds. But that didn’t matter to the CDC. Seemingly hoping for a different answer, the agency put the matter before its own kangaroo court of curated experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
I listened to the meeting, and couldn’t believe what I heard. At times, the committee members sounded like a group of marketing executives. Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington said “what we really need to do is to be as consistent and clear and simple as possible,” pointing out that the committee needed “a consistent recommendation which is simple.”
From ‘Open-Minded’ to ‘Underwhelming,’ Mixed Reactions Greet Latest COVID Origin Report
“Further studies needed.” That’s the main message in a preliminary report released today by a scientific advisory group convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) to clarify the cloudy origin of COVID-19. But in stark distinction to a report from an earlier WHO committee, which drew controversy in 2021 by all but dismissing that SARS-CoV-2 might have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, this panel recommends more investigations into the lab-leak scenario possibility.
All hypotheses must remain on the table until we have evidence that enables us to rule certain hypotheses in or out,” said WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in a speech today to member states. “This make[s] it all the more urgent that this scientific work be kept separate from politics.”
Initial reactions to the report’s less than conclusive message have been mixed. “It’s open-minded, summarizes what is known but also importantly what still isn’t known, pays attention to source and provenance of data, and suggests some reasonable concrete next steps,” says Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has argued that the lab-leak possibility deserves more serious attention than it has received.
Teen Screen Time Goes Hand in Hand With Wacky Bedtimes During the Pandemic — Girls Spent More Time on Social Media and Boys on Video Games
Early adolescents not only spent more time on screens since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic — they also started going to bed later and sleeping less, according to longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study.
Among this group, recreational screen time was up during the first year of the pandemic, with 45 minutes more spent on social media and 20 minutes more on video games, compared with the pre-COVID era. Girls, in particular, gravitated toward increased social media use, whereas boys tended to be the ones spending more time gaming, reported Orsolya Kiss, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, California.
In turn, greater screen time was associated with later bedtimes during the summer of 2020, when morning wake-up times were delayed before returning to normal upon the return to school in the fall. This resulted in a shorter time in bed in the latter part of 2020 and early 2021, Kiss told the attendees of the annual SLEEP meeting, hosted jointly by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.
Sufficient sleep is important to adolescents still undergoing cognitive, physical, social and emotional development. In a study of teenagers ages 14 to 18, one night’s sleep deprivation resulted in worse neurobehavioral performance and sleepiness the next day.
Marathon U.S. Hearings to Decide Fate of COVID Shots for Tots
Parents anxious to finally vaccinate their youngest children against COVID-19, strap in: A lot is set to happen over the next week. On Wednesday, both Moderna and Pfizer will have to convince what’s essentially a science court — advisers to the Food and Drug Administration — that their shots work well in babies, toddlers and preschoolers.
Kids under 5 are the only group not yet eligible for COVID-19 vaccination in the U.S. If the agency’s advisers endorse one or both shots for them — and the FDA agrees — there’s still another hurdle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must recommend whether all tots need immunization or just those at high risk from the virus.
Adding to the complexity, each company is offering different dose sizes and numbers of shots. And the week won’t even start with the littlest kid debate: Moderna first will ask FDA’s advisers to support its vaccine for older children.
Only a handful of countries, including China and Cuba, have offered different types of COVID-19 vaccinations to children younger than 5. Here’s a primer to help keep all the developments straight.
Diseases Suppressed During COVID Are Coming Back in New and Peculiar Ways
The COVID-19 pandemic has abated in much of the world and, with it, many of the social restrictions implemented to curb its spread, as people have been eager to return to pre-lockdown life.
But in its place have emerged a series of viruses behaving in new and peculiar ways.
Take seasonal influenza, more commonly known as the flu. The 2020 and 2021 U.S. winter flu seasons were some of the mildest on record both in terms of deaths and hospitalizations. Yet cases ticked up in February and climbed further into the spring and summer as COVID restrictions were stripped back.
And flu is just the beginning.
A Negative COVID Test Has Never Been so Meaningless
In early May, 27-year-old Hayley Furmaniuk felt tired and a bit congested, but after rapid-testing negative for the coronavirus two days in a row, she dined indoors with friends. The next morning, her symptoms worsened. Knowing her parents were driving in for Mother’s Day, she tested again — and saw a very bright positive. Which meant three not-so-great things: She needed to cancel with her parents; she had likely exposed her friends; a test had apparently taken three days to register what her vaccinated body had already figured out.
Tests are not and never have been perfect, but since around the rise of Omicron, the problem of delayed positivity has gained some prominence. In recent months, many people have logged strings of negatives — three, four, even five or more days in a row — early in their COVID-symptom course. “I think it’s become more common,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Experts aren’t sure why delayed positives are happening; it’s likely that population immunity, viral mutations, and human behavior all have some role. Regardless, the virus is “acting differently from a symptom perspective for sure,” says Emily Martin, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.
That’s worth paying attention to. The start of symptoms has always been a bit of a two-step: Is it COVID, or not? If SARS-CoV-2 is re-choreographing its moves, we must too — or risk losing our footing.
Does It Seem Like People Are Catching COVID for the First Time Now? Here’s What We Know
The Kansas City Star reported:
Have you recently contracted COVID-19 for the first time during the pandemic? Those who have avoided the virus for more than two years may be disappointed to catch it during the current, relatively mild wave. But there are a variety of factors contributing to this unofficial, anecdotal trend.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, an infectious disease specialist at The University of Kansas Health System, spoke with The Star about these so-called COVID “first-timers” and what we can all do to stay safe. “I’ve heard more and more anecdotes of people who survived two years without having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and now they are getting infected,” he said in a news briefing.
Hawkinson added that while retrospective data about “first-timers” may be available in the future, it would likely take a year or more to gather and report.
Are These Cocoa Krispies-Loving Hamsters a Key to Cracking Long COVID?
In late 2020, Justin Frere, a wiry M.D./Ph.D. student dressed in head-to-toe white Tyvek, picked up a clear pipette, methodically reached into the cages of 30 unsuspecting, sedated hamsters and drip-dropped 1,000 infectious coronavirus particles down each of their nostrils.
Then, he waited. Days for some. A whole month for others.
The waiting was essential. His goal was to make a tool experts say will be critical to understanding and perhaps one day effectively treating long COVID, the debilitating and still scarcely understood constellation of symptoms that afflict many COVID-19 patients long after their initial infection has passed.
Frere and his adviser, New York University virologist Benjamin tenOever, were trying to make one of the first animal models for long COVID. They reported the first results from the experiment this week in Science Translational Medicine, showing the hamsters mimic some symptoms and molecular changes observed in humans and pointing to several plausible explanations for the disease.
U.K. Plans to Burn Billions in Wasted Pandemic Protective Gear
The British government plans to burn billions of pounds (dollars) in unusable personal protective equipment purchased in haste during the coronavirus pandemic, a public spending watchdog said Friday.
The idea of burning the face masks, gowns and other equipment to generate power has not impressed the watchdog committee. The panel is investigating how the government came to spend 4 billion pounds ($5 billion) on protective gear that has to be dumped because it is defective or does not meet U.K. standards.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee said the government planned to dispose of 15,000 pallets a month of the gear “via a combination of recycling and burning to generate power.”
