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Dr. Anthony Fauci Plans to Step Down by End of Biden’s First Term, and Says COVID Isn’t Going Anywhere
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he plans to leave his post as the nation’s top health official by the end of President Biden’s first term in office, saying the nation is going to have to live with COVID.
Fauci insisted he wasn’t announcing his retirement but he’d be working for another 24 years if he were to stay on the job until COVID was completely vanquished.
“If somebody says, ‘You’ll leave when we don’t have COVID anymore,’ then I will be 105,’” Fauci, who is 81, told Politico. “I think we’re going to be living with this.”
Thousands Report Unusual Menstruation Patterns After COVID Vaccination
Kathryn Clancy got her first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021 and 10 days later found herself sitting uncomfortably in a work Zoom meeting during one of the heaviest periods she’d experienced. “I had what’s often called menstrual flooding,” says Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Clancy wouldn’t have thought to connect the experience to the Moderna dose she’d received were it not for her graduate student, Katharine Lee, now at Tulane University, who shared a similar tale. “I had the worst cramps of my life” after COVID-19 vaccination, Lee says.
Intrigued, Clancy — who didn’t experience similarly intense symptoms after her second dose — shared her story on Twitter. Hundreds responded with parallel stories, leading her to suspect a potential link to vaccination.
Those suspicions have grown with the completion of a more formal survey in which Clancy, Lee and colleagues gathered thousands of stories of breakthrough bleeding and bleeding more heavily after a COVID-19 vaccine from people around the world.
The Feds Pile up Vaccine ‘Adverse Event’ Reports as They Decry Scaremongering Elsewhere
RealClearInvestigations reported:
Since the Food and Drug Administration authorized the first vaccines for COVID-19 in late 2020, the government and much of the media have insisted that the medicines developed in record time are safe and effective. Those who raised questions about them have been routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
And yet an online database co-administered by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control has compiled more than 1.3 million reports of vaccine-implicated “adverse events” running the gamut from mild to severe, including 29,000 deaths.
These reports are not anecdotes from “anti-vaxxers” on the dark web. They come from the federal government’s open-source log, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. It allows anyone to go online and report a bad reaction that could be linked to any vaccine, including those for COVID-19.
Novavax’s New COVID Vaccine Is Perfect for People Scared of mRNA Tech — but It Won’t Win Over the Unvaccinated
Unvaccinated Americans will soon be able to opt for a new kind of shot to protect themselves from the ever-evolving COVID-19 virus: the Novavax vaccine.
The latecomer COVID shot has raised hopes of wider acceptance among vaccine skeptics. It uses traditional protein-based technology, unlike its mRNA counterparts. But experts say it still may not convince a large number of unwilling holdouts to roll up their sleeves and get vaccinated.
Unvaccinated Americans may perceive protein-based shots as safer than mRNA ones: In a Morning Consult poll last week, about 28% of unvaccinated people surveyed said they viewed protein-based shots as safe, while only 17% said the same about mRNA vaccines.
But 77% still said they wouldn’t get a protein-based COVID shot if it were authorized in the U.S.
COVID Public Health Emergency Extended in the U.S.
The Biden administration on Friday extended the COVID-19 public health emergency for another three months.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra officially renewed the declaration, extending it through October 13, 2022.
The emergency declaration has been in place since January 2020, and the latest renewal comes as the Omicron offshoot BA.5, the most contagious variant yet, continues to stake its claim in the U.S.
Fauci Issues Warning on Monkeypox in U.S.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the White House, signaled that more resources will be dedicated to monkeypox and said that the federal government needs to take it “seriously,” as cases have risen across the world.
The latest U.S. data show the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has tracked at least 1,814 probable or confirmed cases across the country as of July 15.
“This is something we definitely need to take seriously. We don’t know the scope and the potential of it yet, but we have to act like it will have the capability of spreading much more widely than it’s spreading right now,” Fauci told CNN. He didn’t elaborate.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it will hold a meeting this week to address a recent increase in monkeypox cases around the world and signaled it may declare a global health emergency over the virus.
U.S. Officials: States Getting More Monkeypox Vaccine Soon
More than 100,000 monkeypox vaccine doses are being sent to states in the next few days, and several million more are on order in the months ahead, U.S. health officials said Friday.
They also acknowledged the vaccine supply hasn’t kept up with the demand seen in New York, California and other places.
Officials predicted cases will keep rising for at least a few more weeks as the government tries to keep up with a surprising international outbreak accounting for hundreds of newly reported cases every day.
Some public health experts have begun to wonder if the outbreak is becoming widespread enough that monkeypox will become an entrenched sexually transmitted disease.
Birx: COVID ‘Came out of the Box Ready to Infect’
Former top White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Deborah Birx says the coronavirus “came out of the box ready to infect.”
There has been much speculation about the origin of the virus that has killed more than 6.3 million people worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. The virus emerged in Wuhan, China, with speculation that the virus could have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were researching vaccines for other coronaviruses.
COVID “was already more infectious than flu when it first arrived,” said Birx, noting that most viruses take months or even years to become highly infectious to humans.
Birx said the COVID-19 virus showed signs of being experimented on in a lab. “In laboratories you grow the virus in human cells, allowing it to adapt more. Each time it passes through human cells it becomes more adapted,” she said.
BA.5 Spurs New Calls to Fund Next-Generation COVID Vaccines
The rise of the BA.5 variant is spurring new calls for funding for Operation Warp Speed 2.0 to accelerate the development of next-generation COVID-19 vaccines that can better target new variants.
The BA.5 subvariant of Omicron that now makes up the majority of U.S. COVID-19 cases is sparking concern because it has a greater ability to evade the protection of current vaccines than past strains of the virus did.
Pfizer and Moderna are working on updated vaccines that target BA.5 that could be ready this fall, but experts say that by the time they are ready, a new variant very well could have taken hold.
As alternatives to vaccine makers chasing each variant, experts point to research on “pan-coronavirus” vaccines that are “variant-proof,” targeting multiple variants, as well as nasal vaccines that could drastically cut down on the transmission of the virus.
COVID Has Become ‘Too Clever for Us’ and Can ‘Break Past’ Our Protection, WHO Official Says
COVID-19 has become “too clever for us” and can break through protection, a World Health Organization official said, warning that precautions still matter to fight the virus.
WHO special envoy David Nabarro told Sky News on Thursday that the reason for a surge in new COVID-19 cases globally is because the virus “changed yet again, and it’s become too clever for us.”
“This virus is capable of constantly evolving and changing,” he told the outlet. “It can break past our immune defenses, and that’s why the numbers are going up.”
EU Secures 54,000 More Doses of Bavarian Nordic’s Monkeypox Vaccine
The European Commission said on Monday it has secured about 54,000 additional doses of the monkeypox vaccine developed by biotech firm Bavarian Nordic (BAVA.CO) as concern mounts over the disease amid a spike in cases.
The supply deal follows an initial contract signed in June when the European Union ordered about 110,000 doses of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine.
Under the initial order, the EU has so far delivered around 25,000 doses to six member states, the Commission said in a statement.
