Login
Hospital Refuses Father-to-Son Kidney Transplant Over COVID Jab
A 9-year-old boy is being denied a life-saving kidney transplant because his father is not vaccinated against COVID-19.
Dane Donaldson was found to be a perfect match for his son Tanner back in early 2018 by the Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital before the outbreak of the pandemic. The family decided to wait a little longer before having Tanner undergo the transplant since transplanted kidneys from a live donor only lasted about 20 years.
Then COVID-19 hit and put a freeze on the procedure.Now the hospital is refusing to perform the life-saving father-to-son kidney transplant it agreed to do nearly four years ago over the senior Donaldson’s unvaccinated status.
In a statement released to The Epoch Times, the Cleveland Clinic cited a 2021 policy it adopted requiring all donors and candidates for organ transplants to be fully vaccinated against the virus.
The High-Stakes Push to Get COVID Vaccines to Young Children
As federal health officials debate the logistics of administering fourth coronavirus vaccines to some older Americans, children under five years old remain ineligible for any shots — and it’s unclear when that will change.
Less-than-ideal clinical trial results and growing backlash against children’s vaccinations writ large have complicated what was already a delicate decision-making process. Young children generally aren’t at high risk of severe COVID infections, but some do get seriously ill or, in rare instances, die. Plenty of parents remain anxious to vaccinate their children as soon as possible.
At the same time, vaccine hesitancy is high among parents of young children, and only 27% of children ages 5 to 11 — the most recent age group to become eligible for vaccines — have been fully vaccinated, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Federal officials and drugmakers’ efforts to authorize coronavirus vaccines for young children are running up against the same problem every other age group is having: Two doses don’t work very well at preventing infections with the Omicron variant. And additional shots are out of the question until more data comes in.
FDA Advisers Struggle With How to Move Forward on COVID Boosters
Recognizing that giving COVID-19 booster shots every few months is not a feasible public health strategy, the Food and Drug Administration convened its panel of outside advisers Wednesday to plot out a framework for how to approach future doses of the vaccines.
The FDA sought guidance from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee about what sorts of updates the vaccines may need before a potential winter surge in cases.
The resulting discussion had moments of exasperation, as committee members complained of a lack of information needed to make such decisions, as well as a lack of clarity about what, specifically, the FDA was asking of them.
Ultimately, the panel of vaccine experts were unable to come up with a plan, saying there were a significant number of unknowns, including what strain of the virus the world may be dealing with in the fall and what level of protection was warranted. The FDA said more meetings would be held on the issue before any decisions were made.
Rare Vaccine-Related Blood Clots Tied to Gene; Concentrated Antibodies May Help the Immunosuppressed
New research may help shed light on a rare but serious blood-clotting problem associated with the COVID-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca (AZN.L) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N).
Five unrelated people with this clotting complication, known as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, all had unusually-structured antibodies against a protein called PF4 that is involved in blood clotting, the researchers found.
Furthermore, all five had a specific version of a gene responsible for producing these antibodies, they reported on Monday on medRxiv ahead of peer review. The prevalence of this gene varies and is highest in people of European descent, according to the report.
The finding “paves the way for a potential genetic screening tool to identify patients carrying this gene variant who are at risk of this severe complication” after receipt of these vaccines, said Tom Gordon and Jing Jing Wang of Flinders University of South Australia, two of the study’s authors.
COVID Cases Among Key DC Players Jump After Gridiron Dinner
At least five high-profile Washington players have tested positive for COVID-19 after attending the star-studded Gridiron Club dinner last weekend, one of whom is considered a close contact of Vice President Harris.
Harris’ Communications Director Jamal Simmons, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, and Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) have all tested positive for breakthrough COVID-19 cases after attending Saturday night’s event.
A number of journalists, White House staffers and personnel from the National Security Council have also tested positive for the virus after attending the dinner, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper, however, did not identify the individuals because they have not publicly announced their COVID-19 status.
Attendees at Saturday night’s dinner were required to show proof of vaccination, according to Gridiron President Tom DeFrank of the National Journal.
U.S. Likely to See a Surge of COVID in the Fall, Fauci Says
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Wednesday that he thinks there will be an uptick in cases of COVID-19 over the next few weeks and that it is likely that there could be a surge in the fall.
“I think we should expect, David, that over the next couple of weeks, we are going to see an uptick in cases — and hopefully there is enough background immunity so that we don’t wind up with a lot of hospitalizations,” Fauci said when asked by Bloomberg TV’s David Westin about the prospect of another wave of COVID-19 from BA.2 or another variant, given the level of immunity believed to exist in the U.S. today.
Asked later in the interview whether it should be expected that this fall will look like the past two — and if people should be bracing for something around October — Fauci said that he thinks “it is likely that we will see a surge in the fall.”
COVID Spending Bill Stalls in Senate as GOP, Dems Stalemate
A compromise $10 billion measure buttressing the government’s COVID-19 defenses has stalled in the Senate and seemed all but certainly sidetracked for weeks, victim of a campaign-season fight over the incendiary issue of immigration.
There was abundant finger-pointing Wednesday but no signs the two parties were near resolving their stalemate over a bipartisan pandemic bill that President Joe Biden and top Democrats wanted Congress to approve this week.
With Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., prioritizing the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by week’s end — quite possibly Thursday — the COVID-19 bill seemed sure to slip at least until Congress returns after a two-week recess.
Most People Have Not yet Fully Returned to Their Pre-Pandemic Life, Poll Finds
Most Americans say the way they conduct their lives is still affected to some extent by the pandemic, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll released Wednesday, though fewer say their activities remain dramatically curtailed. A majority also favor continued masking in some public places and say they’ve continued to wear masks in some, though not necessarily all, situations when they’re indoors and in public.
The results — and the marked partisan and demographic splits that characterize them — highlight the nuances and fault lines that mark Americans’ response to COVID-19 more than two years after the start of the pandemic.
A plurality of U.S. adults (42%) says that they’re now doing some but not all of the activities they did pre-pandemic, with 27% saying that they have “basically returned to normal,” and 14% saying that the pandemic never affected their activity level in the first place. Another 17% are still doing very few of the activities they did prior to the pandemic.
Study Reveals How COVID Infections Can Set off Massive Inflammation in the Body
From the early days of the pandemic, doctors noticed that in severe cases of COVID-19 — the ones that landed people in the hospital on ventilators with shredded lungs — most of the internal wreckage wasn’t being directly inflicted by the virus itself but by a blizzard of immune reactions triggered by the body to fight the infection.
Researchers knew that these so-called cytokine storms were damaging, but they didn’t know why the SARS-CoV-2 virus seemed to be so good at setting them off.
A new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature is helping to explain how these immune overreactions happen to COVID-19 patients. The study revealed that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect certain kinds of immune cells called monocytes and macrophages.
