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Fauci Expected COVID to Be ‘Behind Us’ After Biden’s First Year

Bloomberg reported:

White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci expected the U.S. would have moved past the COVID-19 pandemic after the first year of the Biden administration, but the disruption from the virus has lingered longer than the infectious disease expert anticipated.

“I thought after yet again another year we would have COVID behind us, but as it turns out that’s not the case,” he said in a taped interview that will appear at noon New York time on Bloomberg Television and Radio’s “Balance of Power” with David Westin.

The U.S. needs to learn the lessons of COVID to be ready for future outbreaks, he said, calling the culture at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “not optimal” for responding to a global pandemic. “The good news is they now realize that,” he said.

Moderna Sues Pfizer, BioNTech Over COVID Vaccine Patents

Associated Press reported:

COVID-19 vaccine maker Moderna is suing Pfizer and the German drugmaker BioNTech, accusing its main competitors of copying Moderna’s technology in order to make their own vaccine.

Moderna said Friday that Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine Comirnaty infringes on patents Moderna filed several years ago protecting the technology behind its preventive shot, Spikevax. The company filed patent infringement lawsuits in both U.S. federal court and a German court.

Moderna and Pfizer’s two-shot vaccines both use mRNA technology to help patients fight the coronavirus.

Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a prepared statement that the vaccine developer pioneered that technology and invested billions of dollars in creating it. The company said it believes its rivals’ vaccine infringes on patents Moderna filed between 2010 and 2016.

Britain Approves Novavax COVID Shot for 12-17 Year-Olds

Reuters reported:

Britain’s medicines regulator on Friday approved Novavax‘s (NVAX.O) COVID-19 vaccine for children aged between 12 and 17 years.

The mRNA vaccines made by Moderna as well as the partnership between Pfizer-BioNTech are also cleared for use by this age group, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said.

Britain in February cleared Novavax’s two-dose vaccine, Nuvaxovid, for use in adults.

Pfizer’s Paxlovid COVID Pill Showed No Measurable Benefit in Adults 40 to 65: Study

The Epoch Times reported:

Researchers in the Israel-based study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, examined over 109,000 patients between Jan. 9 and March 31 of this year.

Among the 109,254 patients in the study 3,902 (4 percent) received at least one dose of nirmatrelvir during the study period, including 2,484 of 42,821 patients (6 percent) who were 65 years of age or older and deemed high risk and 1,418 of 66,433 patients (2 percent) who were 40 to 64 years of age.

People between the ages of 40 and 64 who were at high risk saw no measurable benefit, according to the analysis of medical records.

Among the 66,433 patients who were 40 to 64 years of age, hospitalization due to COVID-19 occurred in 7 treated patients (15.2 cases per 100,000 person-days) and in 327 untreated patients (15.8 cases per 100,000 person-days), which is not such a significant difference. Among those patients, death due to COVID-19 occurred in 1 of 1,418 treated patients and in 16 of 65,015 untreated patients.

COVID Revealed the Tragic Truth About Student Reading

Newsweek reported:

Millions of American students fell far behind in their education during the past two pandemic years. But many of the problems affecting U.S. public education predated COVID-19 and are largely self-inflicted.

The biggest problem is that many students can’t read.

This catastrophe cannot be remedied so long as the education establishment remains in denial — or, more to the point, remains complicit. Many of today’s public school students can’t read because their teachers aren’t given the proper training or an effective curriculum.

Teaching reading successfully is a straightforward, well-documented process, and most children, with proper instruction, should be successful readers by the end of kindergarten.

Exclusive: Pfizer Vaccine Whistleblower Responds to Motion to Dismiss False Claims Suit

The Epoch Times reported:

Pfizer cannot use the government as a shield from liability for making false claims about its COVID-19 vaccine, lawyers for a whistleblower argued in response to Pfizer’s motion to dismiss a False Claims Act lawsuit.

“Respondents claim fraudulent certifications, false statements, doctored data, contaminated clinical trials and firing of whistleblowers can be ignored based on the theory that they contracted their way around the fraud,” lawyers for Brook Jackson, who worked as regional director at one of the clinical trials used to develop the Pfizer vaccine, wrote in their Aug. 22 response.

“A drug company cannot induce the taxpayers to pay billions of dollars for a product,” they countered, “that honest data would show poses more risks than benefits, and that ignores the actual contract and the law itself.”

Jackson’s lawsuit alleges that Pfizer and two of its subcontractors violated the False Claims Act by providing bogus clinical trial results to garner the FDA approval of its COVID-19 vaccine.

One of Jackson’s attorneys, Warner Mendenhall, told The Epoch Times that the payout could be as much as $3.3 trillion. “It would be enough to bankrupt Pfizer,” Mendenhall said.

Unraveling the Interplay of Omicron, Reinfections and Long COVID

Kaiser Health News reported:

The latest COVID-19 surge, caused by a shifting mix of quickly evolving Omicron subvariants, appears to be waning, with cases and hospitalizations beginning to fall.

Like past COVID waves, this one will leave a lingering imprint in the form of long COVID, an ill-defined catchall term for a set of symptoms that can include debilitating fatigue, difficulty breathing, chest pain and brain fog.

Although Omicron infections are proving milder overall than those caused by last summer’s Delta variant, Omicron has also proved capable of triggering long-term symptoms and organ damage. But whether Omicron causes long COVID symptoms as often — and as severe — as previous variants is a matter of heated study.

Scientists have just begun to compare variants head to head, with varying results. While one recent study in The Lancet suggests that Omicron is less likely to cause long COVID, another found the same rate of neurological problems after Omicron and Delta infections.

‘We’re Losing Our People’: COVID Ravaged Indigenous Tribes in New Mexico. Did Uranium Mining Set the Stage?

USA TODAY reported:

As a young girl, Arlene Juanico would rush to gather the laundry before the explosions started. When the alarms sounded, Juanico would hustle to grab the clean garments off the clothesline before she was enveloped by dust clouds. But Juanico’s little legs usually couldn’t get her back to shelter in time.

That’s when the yellow-flecked dust — emerging from detonations in the sacred mesa the Laguna tribe knows as Squirrel Mountain — would catch up to her. That’s when it would enter Juanico’s throat, burrowing deep into her lungs.

And it’s the dust that would persist in her lungs, kidneys and bones. There, hidden in the dark recesses of her chest, the particles lay until one day decades later a CT scan would show Juanico and people like her why they hadn’t been able to take a full breath in decades. They’d get a similar diagnosis — idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis — one mangled lung at a time.

As a result, when COVID-19 struck in 2020, the Laguna, already afflicted by diseases that made it hard to walk, speak or breathe, was set up for severe COVID-19, said Loretta Anderson, a home health aide who is Laguna. So many of her people succumbed during the pandemic that the tribe enlarged its graveyard.

Thai King’s Medical Firm Reports Record Profit After Vaccine Deal With AstraZeneca

Reuters reported:

Thai drugmaker Siam Bioscience, owned by the country’s king, reported a near 50-fold increase in annual profit in 2021 when it began producing AstraZeneca Plc’s (AZN.L) COVID-19 vaccine, government data shows.

The company is part of King Maha Vajiralongkorn’s vast fortune, which includes land and property estimated at between $30 billion and $60 billion. Its business improved sharply last year, as it began manufacturing vaccines for the first time.

Profit soared a whopping 4,650% to 1.69 billion baht and revenues increased by 1,500% to a record 4.9 billion baht, aided by its contract to manufacture 200 million doses of the Anglo-Swedish firm’s COVID-19 vaccine.

The deal came under fire from a prominent Thai opposition politician who questioned why the contract went to a company that was owned by the king and had never made vaccines before. He now faces up to 20 years in prison following his indictment earlier this year for insulting the king and violating a cyber law.

Fauci Compares Monkeypox Outbreak to HIV Epidemic, Advises Against Making the Same Assumptions

The Hill reported:

The White House’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci advised against making the same assumptions about the current monkeypox outbreak that were made during the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Fauci and H. Clifford Lane, deputy director for clinical research and special projects at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday in which they reflected on the similarities between the monkeypox outbreak and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which both men spent much of their careers studying.

The two researchers noted the obvious similarities, namely that most monkeypox cases have so far been detected among men who have sex with men. While the main mode of transmission for monkeypox is believed to be through prolonged skin-to-skin contact, they observed that some early data has suggested sexual transmission may play a role in the spread of the virus.