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COVID Is Back. A Fruitless National Freakout Shouldn’t Come With It.
The current coronavirus numbers are still much lower than previous peaks. Yet even if the numbers rise considerably, the public is not going to accept restrictive coronavirus mitigation measures again, regardless of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or other public health authorities say.
The primacy of individuals’ voluntary decisions is what makes the credibility of public health authorities so important. Even when their guidance is sound, its effectiveness depends on its persuasiveness. And we have reason to believe that the public will give such guidance a more skeptical hearing now than it did in 2020. Trust in the CDC fell during the pandemic, judging from multiple polls.
You don’t have to be anti-vaccination or think that COVID was a hoax (it has killed more than 1.1 million Americans) to believe that the CDC earned that decline. Its guidance on social distancing — first six feet, then three — was arbitrary. It exaggerated the likelihood of outdoor transmission of the virus. Its guidance on masking lagged behind the evidence.
And its approach to COVID generally reflected a degree of risk aversion that not all reasonably health-conscious people share: the same risk aversion that leads the CDC to recommend against consuming rare and medium-rare steak. No matter how low caseloads have fallen, the CDC has never quit recommending masking on planes, trains, buses and subways.
COVID: Brussels Approves Adapted Pfizer’s Vaccine to Combat Omicron Subvariants
The European Commission on Friday approved the adaptation of BioNTech-Pfizer‘s COVID-19 vaccine against the new Omicron XBB.1 coronavirus subvariant.
“The vaccine is licensed for adults, children and infants older than 6 months … this vaccine is another important milestone in the fight against the disease,” the EU executive said in a statement, recalling that this is the third update of the prophylactic. The update of the vaccine used under the trade name Comirnaty is also expected to “increase the breadth of immunity” against current dominant and emerging variants.
Following guidelines from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), adults and children aged 5 years and older who require vaccination “should receive a single dose, regardless of their COVID-19 vaccination history,” the Commission added.
The modification of the contract with BioNTech-Pfizer signed in May 2023 ensures that member states will continue to have access to vaccines adapted to the new COVID-19 variants in the coming years, the European executive said in a statement.
CDC Updates BA.2.86 Assessment as Countries Report More Sequences
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) yesterday updated its initial assessment of the highly mutated BA.2.86 SARS-CoV-2 variant, which said sporadic detections continue to be reported at the global level, including in the United States, where it has been picked up by three different genomic monitoring systems.
In other new developments, France and Scotland reported their first detections and additional sequences were reported from South Africa and the United States.
The CDC said BA.2.86 made up less than 1% of circulating viruses over the past 2 weeks in the United States and emphasized that the country’s rise in COVID hospitalizations is likely fueled by XBB viruses that are similar to the lineage included in the updated vaccine, which it said will be available in mid-September.
The virus has been detected in either patient samples or wastewater from four states: Michigan, Virginia, Ohio, and New York.
Costs Divide Rich, Poor Countries Ahead of WHO Pandemic Treaty Talks
Health officials from around the world, as they gather to discuss a treaty addressing pandemic prevention next week, are struggling to agree on funding for developing countries and measures to thwart jumps by pathogens from animals into humans.
The meeting, starting in Geneva on Monday, is part of ongoing negotiations by the decision-making body of the World Health Organization to tackle pandemic threats in a legally binding accord. Representatives from as many as 194 member countries could take part.
Since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, global health officials have sought to create a “pandemic treaty” to better prepare for future outbreaks. The governing body of the World Health Organization, or WHO chose delegates from each of its six administrative regions worldwide to lead the negotiations. The delegates have met periodically with representatives of member countries and are tasked with forging an agreement by May 2024.
Clotting Proteins Linked to Long COVID’s Brain Fog
Along with physical fatigue, “brain fog” has become one of the best-known manifestations of the condition known as Long COVID. Yet it’s still unclear why some people infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop cognitive problems — which can include trouble concentrating and remembering — and others don’t. Now, a large study of people hospitalized with COVID-19 early in the pandemic has identified two proteins involved in blood clotting, fibrinogen and D-dimer, that are associated with cognitive deficits up to 1-year post-infection.
The findings, published today in Nature Medicine, are an “important advance” for scientists’ understanding of how Long COVID develops, says Steven Deeks, a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) who was not involved in the work.
The study doesn’t establish exactly how the proteins might be causing damage, although Maxime Taquet, a clinical psychiatrist at the University of Oxford, speculates that fibrinogen could be forming blood clots that disrupt circulation in the brain or may even directly interact with receptors in the nervous system. D-dimer may be more likely to reflect clotting in the lungs, he says — which could help explain its link to breathing problems.
