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Court Orders Israeli Authorities to Provide Vaccination Status of People Who Died During Pandemic
Following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from an Israeli citizen, the Jerusalem District Court has ordered the Ministry of Health to provide information on the vaccination status of deceased people and other information.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) has until mid-November to provide: total mortality, for any reason, including COVID-19, noting the vaccination status of the deceased, the vaccine doses and recoveries; data about child mortality from COVID-19, noting whether the deceased did or did not have comorbidities; and COVID-19 mortality with the data segmented by comorbidities and according to vaccination status.
The order came after David Shuldman, a systems analyst and an economist, filed an FOI request in 2021 for mortality data broken down by vaccination status. He also asked that deaths among people who recovered from COVID-19 be noted. Shuldman told The Epoch Times that he hoped the MoH would publish the data but since they didn’t, he decided to try to get it and publish it himself.
Three days after the court order, Kan 11, an Israeli state-owned broadcaster, announced the MoH is going to study excess mortality to see whether the higher-than-normal deaths recorded during the pandemic are linked to COVID-19 vaccinations.
The Problems With President Biden’s Future Pandemic Plan
What if the coronavirus pandemic was not a once-in-a-century event but the beginning of a new era of regular deadly respiratory viral pandemics? The Biden administration is already planning for this future. Last week it unveiled a national strategy to develop pharmaceutical firms’ capacity to create vaccines within 130 days of a pandemic emergency declaration.
The Biden plan enshrines former president Donald Trump‘s Operation Warp Speed as the model response to the next century of pandemics. Left unsaid is that, for the new pandemic plan to work as envisioned, it will require us to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research. It will also require cutting corners in the evaluation of the safety and efficacy of novel vaccines. And while the studies are underway, politicians will face tremendous pressure to impose draconian lockdowns to keep the population “safe.”
In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, it took about a year for governments to deploy the jab at scale after scientists sequenced the virus. Scientists identified a vaccine target — fragments of the spike protein that the virus uses to access cells — by early January 2020, even before the WHO declared a worldwide pandemic.
This rapid response was only possible because some scientists already knew much about the novel virus. Despite heavy regulations limiting the work, the U.S. National Institutes of Health had funded collaborations between the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They collected bat viruses from the wild, enhanced their function to study their potential and designed vaccines before the viruses infected humans.
New COVID Boosters Aren’t Better Than Old Ones, Study Finds
Bivalent booster shots from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. failed to raise levels of protective proteins called neutralizing antibodies against the dominant Omicron strains any more than four doses of the original COVID vaccine, according to an early independent study on a small group of people.
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Michigan compared levels of neutralizing antibodies in blood samples from 21 people who got a fourth shot of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech SE bivalent boosters against antibody levels in 19 people who got four shots of the original vaccines.
Three to five weeks after a fourth shot, those people who received the new boosters aimed at BA.4 and BA.5 variants “had similar neutralizing antibody titers as those receiving a fourth monovalent mRNA vaccine,” the authors conclude in a manuscript posted on the preprint server bioRxiv.org. This held true for antibodies that protect against BA.4, BA.5 and older variants such as the original Omicron strain, according to the study.
Biden Gets 5th COVID Shot, Says Virus Still Threat Weeks After Calling Pandemic ‘Over’
President Biden on Tuesday received his fifth COVID-19 vaccine shot while warning Americans that the virus was still a threat — despite calling the pandemic “over” more than a month ago.
Biden has not formally ended the national emergency declaration that gives the government special powers to address the virus — despite saying in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on Sept. 18 that “the pandemic is over.”
Biden said Tuesday that COVID-19 deaths would increase this winter, but that almost all are preventable, even though the share of vaccinated people among the pandemic dead increased significantly this year.
States Opting out of a Federal Program That Tracks Teen Behavior as Youth Mental Health Worsens
As the COVID-19 pandemic worsened a mental health crisis among America’s young people, a small group of states quietly withdrew from the nation’s largest public effort to track concerning behaviors in high school students.
Colorado, Florida and Idaho will not participate in a key part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior surveys that reaches more than 80,000 students. Over the past 30 years, the state-level surveys, conducted anonymously during each odd-numbered year, have helped elucidate the mental health stressors and safety risks for high school students.
Each state has its own rationale for opting out, but their withdrawal — when suicides and feelings of hopelessness are up — has caught the attention of school psychologists and federal and state health officials.
The reduction in the number of states that participate in the state-level CDC survey will make it harder for those states to track the conditions and behaviors that signal poor mental health, like depression, drug and alcohol misuse and suicidal ideation, experts said.
COVID Research Is Free to Access — but for How Long?
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific journals rushed to make related research free to read — temporarily, at least. Work on the disease or the virus SARS-CoV-2 would be free “at least for the duration of the outbreak,” publishers of subscription journals declared in a statement issued on January 31, 2020, the day after the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus outbreak a ‘public health emergency of international concern,’ or PHEIC.
Now the pandemic is in its third year, and reports are circulating that the end of free-to-access COVID-19 research is nigh. If so, that would suggest publishers have decided that the COVID-19 emergency is over before world health authorities have. But is that the case?
The alarm was sounded in August when a prominent open-access advocate warned that COVID-related research was going back behind paywalls. “This is both disappointing and worrying,” wrote Robert Kiley, who is head of strategy at cOAlition S in Strasbourg, France, the group of funders that supports the open-access Plan S initiative.
Global COVID Cases Will Increase in Coming Months, but at a Slower Pace, Analysis Says
Daily global COVID-19 infections are projected to rise slowly to about 18.7 million by February from the current 16.7 million average daily cases, driven by the northern hemisphere’s winter months, the University of Washington said in an analysis.
Far fewer infections are expected than last winter’s estimated peak daily average of about 80 million cases in January of 2022 which was driven by the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, according to the report.
The increase in cases is not expected to cause a surge in deaths, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said. IHME estimates that daily infections in the United States will increase by a third to more than a million, driven by students back in schools and cold weather-related indoor gatherings.
How Concerned Should You Be About COVID ‘Scrabble’ Variants? Here’s What We Know so Far
Though BA.5 still accounts for most U.S. COVID-19 cases, percentages are rising for the other Omicron variants circulating throughout the country, per the CDC.
“The ones that are particularly concerning are BQ.1 and another related one called BQ.1.1. Those are two that are expanding fairly rapidly in the United States,” according to Roy Gulick, chief of the division of infectious disease at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Internationally, another concerning variant, XBB, which first emerged in Singapore and hasn’t been detected in the U.S., is being closely watched worldwide as it spreads quickly in other countries.
COVID Pandemic Sparks Rise in Deadly Fungal Infections
The Telegraph via MSN reported:
The COVID pandemic has sparked a rise in deadly fungal infections, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned, as it published its first list of species posing the biggest threat to health.
Since 2020, experts have noticed an increase in deadly fungal disease, with up to 39% of COVID patients on ventilators in intensive care picking up a secondary infection.
The number of weekly diagnostic tests sent to the U.K. National Mycology Reference Laboratory (MRL) nearly doubled from 1,217 to 2,124 during the COVID peak in February 2021.
Specialists in hospitals have reported that the incidence of comorbid aspergillosis, candidemia and mucormycosis — sometimes known as black fungus — rose significantly during the pandemic. The fungi can spread into the sinuses, bones, brain and eyes, leaving people blind even if they manage to survive the infection.
Afraid of Needles? China Using Inhalable COVID Vaccine
The Chinese city of Shanghai started administering an inhalable COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday in what appears to be a world first.
The vaccine, a mist that is sucked in through the mouth, is being offered for free as a booster dose for previously vaccinated people, according to an announcement on an official city social media account.
Scientists hope that such “needle-free” vaccines will make vaccination more accessible in countries with fragile health systems because they are easier to administer. They also may persuade people who don’t like getting a shot in the arm to get inoculated.
