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Excessive Drinking During the Pandemic Increased Alcoholic Liver Disease Death Rates
Excessive drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic increased alcoholic liver disease deaths so much that the condition killed more Californians than car accidents or breast cancer, a KFF Health News analysis has found.
Lockdowns made people feel isolated, depressed, and anxious, leading some to increase their alcohol intake. Alcohol sales rose during the pandemic, with especially large jumps in the consumption of spirits.
While this led to a rise in all sorts of alcohol-related deaths, the number of Californians dying from alcoholic liver disease spiked dramatically, with 14,209 deaths between 2020 and 2022, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Alcoholic liver disease is the most common cause of alcohol-induced deaths nationally. In California, the death rate from the disease during the last three years was 25% higher than in the three years before the pandemic. The rate peaked at 13.2 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2021, nearly double the rate from two decades ago.
The U.S. Scientist at the Heart of COVID Lab Leak Conspiracies Is Still Trying to Save the World From the Next Pandemic
Ralph Baric, who signed onto an open letter published in Science in 2021 demanding a thorough investigation of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, is still frustrated by its slow pace. While he remains unsure on the question, Baric finds particular fault with a joint investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government that was done in 2021, which dismissed the chance of a lab leak as “extremely unlikely.”
That conclusion, Baric says, is premature, given the lack of conclusive data and China’s more relaxed laboratory standards; he points out that while the U.S. restricts gain-of-function work with dangerous pathogens to labs rated at a minimum of BSL-3 (like Baric’s), “the regulations in China are such that you can work with SARS-like bat coronaviruses in BSL-2 [Biosafety level 2] labs,” which require fewer safety features.
In an open letter to the director of the World Health Organization released on Aug. 25, 2021, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations demanded that Baric’s lab be subject to a “transparent investigation with full access” to trace the origins of COVID-19. That placed Baric in rarefied air: a scapegoat for politicians in both the U.S. and China.
The public debate around gain-of-function research has become polarized into two opposing camps, with scientists cast in leading roles as either pandemic-averting heroes or lab-leaking villains. Baric rejects that easy binary. Instead, he points out that gain-of-function experiments, even the most controversial ones, such as the experiment done in 2011 that transformed an avian flu strain into a deadly airborne pathogen (which precipitated a broad shutdown of gain-of-function research by the NIH) are funded by governments.
That, Baric says, makes governments, rather than scientists, primarily responsible for choosing which experiments to run and how closely to monitor them. A draft report from January 2023 by the U.S. National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a federally-appointed committee advising the U.S. government on gain-of-function research, backs up that view: among their recommendations are that government be more open about why certain gain-of-function experiments that might be risky to humans are funded.
Politicians, Scientists Spar Over Alleged NIH Cover-Up Using COVID Origin Paper
Two scientists who are coauthors of a 3-year-old article on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic faced down Republican lawmakers today in what might be the most in-depth discussion ever of a scientific paper in the halls of the U.S. Congress. At a House subcommittee hearing, the Republicans asserted that top officials at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) prompted the researchers to write the paper to try and “kill” the theory that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research and virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University School of Medicine, two of the article’s five co-authors, flatly rejected the allegation.
Both Garry and Andersen strongly objected to assertions that either Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or Francis Collins, the NIH’s director, influenced their writing of the paper or its editing, and they described the change in their thinking as nothing more than the standard scientific process. “You need to look at all the evidence in concert and that’s exactly what we’re doing in Proximal Origin and that is also one of the reasons why our thinking on this particular question evolved over time from early hypotheses to later conclusions published in the paper,” said Andersen.
The hearing touched on a greatest hits of lab-leak possibilities, including potential biosecurity shortcomings at the WIV, miners in China who developed a mysterious respiratory illness in 2012, the role of the Chinese military at WIV, research with pangolins that took place there, and the failure to find an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2 prior to the outbreak surfacing. Democrats and Republicans also wrangled over the conclusions reached by the U.S. intelligence community. It has stated that five of its branches support the natural zoonotic transmission theory while two others do not, but none have high levels of confidence for either theory.
Moderna Mounts 2 New Patent Lawsuits Against mRNA Rivals Pfizer, BioNTech: Report
Caught in a litigation crossfire, Moderna has reportedly opened two new fronts in its COVID-19 vaccine patent war with Pfizer and BioNTech. Seeking damages from Pfizer and BioNTech for alleged infringement, Moderna has lodged new lawsuits at the High Court in Dublin, Ireland, and the Brussels Commercial Court in Belgium, European intellectual property outlet Juve Patent reported Tuesday.
The Irish court, where Moderna is claiming infringement by Pfizer-BioNTech on a pair of Spikevax patents, is set to hear the case in early 2024, according to the publication. Less is known about the status of Moderna’s Belgian lawsuit, Juve points out.
The new lawsuits add to a complex web of ongoing mRNA patent litigation. The legal melee began last August when Moderna filed patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S. and Germany. Separately, Moderna has also sued Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech in the Netherlands, plus the U.K.
Moderna’s goal isn’t to remove Pfizer’s shot Comirnaty from the market, nor is it trying to target Pfizer’s sales in low- and middle-income countries covered by the COVAX initiative, the company insists. Instead, Moderna is pursuing compensation and damages to make up for Pfizer-BioNTech’s alleged trampling of patents detailing lipid nanoparticle delivery, spike protein-encoding and more.
Study: COVID Spread From Deer to Humans Multiple Times
The coronavirus spread from deer to humans at least a few times based on an analysis of samples taken from the animal, according to a new study. The analysis published Monday in the scientific journal Nature revealed that researchers found three possible cases of mutated variants of the virus from deer spreading to humans. Those cases appear to have originally stemmed from the virus spreading from humans to the deer and then mutating and spreading back to humans.
The researchers, several of whom work for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Department of Agriculture, collected 8,830 respiratory samples from free-ranging white-tailed deer from 26 states and Washington, DC, between November 2021 and April 2022.
They identified 282 deer infected with COVID-19 and 34 different lineages of the virus in the samples collected, including those belonging to the Alpha, Gamma and Delta variants that were more common earlier in the pandemic and the Omicron variant that has dominated cases more recently.
An analysis showed that at least 109 individual spillover events happened in which humans spread the virus to deer. That subsequently led to at least 39 incidences of deer-to-deer transmission and three cases of deer-to-human transmission.
Nasal COVID Vaccines: The Latest Tool to Fend Off COVID
A new nasally administered COVID-19 vaccine shows greater promise in protecting patients from both Omicron infection and disease progression than traditional vaccines used throughout the pandemic. A defining feature of the COVID pandemic is the ongoing mutation of the virus to avoid our medical interventions. We may develop a drug or vaccine that neutralizes X version of the virus, but then it mutates to the Y version and escapes neutralization.
One method of vaccine that was before never explored, however, was nasally administered mucosal respiratory vaccines. Omicron, especially later variants such as BA.4 and BA.5, is known to have higher concentrations of the virus in the lungs, meaning that a nasal vaccine could yield stronger protection.
The Chinese Ad5-nCoV nasal vaccine acts as a booster dose similar to the bivalent mRNA booster in the United States. In China, a majority of citizens received two doses of inactivated virus vaccine, a common method of vaccination for other pathogens, though not as effective for COVID-19 as the mRNA vaccines.
Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program Has Paid Out Nearly $7 Million in Claims Since December 2020
Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) has paid out nearly $7 million in claims since it first launched, according to updated bi-annual records.
According to the VISP, a total of 1,859 claims have been received thus far from Canadians who suffered death or injury as a result of vaccines administered in Canada on or after Dec. 8, 2020. A total of 103 claims have been approved to date, with payments totaling $6,695,716.
The VISP was created in December 2020 to ensure that all people in Canada who have experienced “a serious and permanent injury” as a result of receiving a Health Canada-authorized vaccine administered in Canada on or after Dec. 8, 2020, will receive timely and fair financial support. The VISP serves all people vaccinated in Canada, except for those vaccinated in Quebec, who will receive coverage from the province’s longstanding program.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), a total of 98.2 million vaccine doses were administered as of May this year, which resulted in 55,145 “adverse events.” The agency has reported 332 blood clots, 289 strokes, 198 cases of facial paralysis, 149 heart attacks, 88 spontaneous abortions, 79 kidney injuries, and 37 cases of liver damage.
