Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
NBC Pushes ‘Tripledemic’ Fear Mongering — Claims Children at Risk During the Holidays
Fear is a path to control over others and society at large and tends to be a tool used by weak people who cannot assert their ideologies through force of arms. It is also a great way to excite a population into mob impulses; a way to use large mindless crowds as a political weapon.
NBC is spearheading the latest fear narrative with the threat of the “Tripledemic,” a supposed spike in cases involving COVID, the flu and a respiratory illness called RSV. Not surprisingly, the outlet is making the risks to children the focus of its propaganda. This makes perfect sense given the fact that COVID was a non-issue for younger people, and leftists have learned over the past two years that fear is far more effective if the danger involves children.
NBC goes on to suggest that letting unvaccinated people near children should be avoided and that vaccines are the best option for protection. What their “medical expert” does not mention is that there is no vaccine for RSV and COVID vaccination for kids is pointless. But why is NBC trying to tie COVID together with the flu and RSV?
First, because the public at large no longer sees COVID as a reason to isolate, nor a reason to spurn their unvaccinated relatives. So, they need to now lump COVID in with a host of other diseases in order to maintain a sense of urgency.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, is that Big Pharma companies like Moderna are currently promoting the release of a new type of vaccine that combines a flu shot with an RSV and COVID immunization. It’s not a coincidence that the mainstream media is suddenly hyping a “Tripledemic” of those same diseases.
Demand for Mental Healthcare Has U.S. Psychologists Overwhelmed: Survey
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Though the COVID-19 pandemic has eased, a mental health crisis persists, a nationwide survey of U.S. psychologists reveals. And growing demand for help with depression, anxiety and substance use issues means many psychologists across the United States are unable to take on new patients, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2022 COVID-19 Practitioner Impact Survey
In all, 79% said they have seen more patients with anxiety disorders since the pandemic began. About 66% have seen increased demand for depression treatment; 47% for substance use treatment, and 64% for trauma. About two-thirds of psychologists said patients’ symptoms are more severe this year.
Young people, especially 13- to 17-year-olds, represented the largest increases in seeking care. Many psychologists also saw a need for more care in kids under 13 and among 18- to 25-year-olds.
Nearly half of psychologists reported a rising number of healthcare workers seeking treatment since the start of the pandemic.
Pandemic Saw Big Rise in Deaths to Millennials From Multiple Causes
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Americans aged 25 to 44 — so-called millennials — are dying at significantly higher rates from three leading killers than similarly aged people just 10 years ago, the latest government data shows. Looking at data collected between 2000 and 2020, the new report from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) finds the biggest jump in deaths from injuries, heart disease and suicide occurred after 2019, when the pandemic began.
Death rates among millennials for “unintentional injuries” — which would include drug overdoses, fatal accidents and homicides — “experienced the greatest annual increases from 2019 to 2020,” the new report found. Death rates for the number two killer, heart disease, also shot up sharply among millennials, rising about 15% overall between 2019 and 2020, regardless of ethnicity or race.
For suicides — the third leading killer of people aged 25 to 44 — rates rose sharply during the past few years among Black and Hispanic Americans, but not white people, the report found.
Overall, the national trauma of the pandemic seems to have had devastating consequences for the millennial generation, which the researchers say is now “the largest generation group in the United States.”
Biden Would Veto Proposed U.S. Senate Resolution to End COVID National Emergency — White House
President Joe Biden would veto a proposed U.S. Senate resolution that would terminate a national emergency declared in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the White House said on Tuesday.
Republican U.S. Senator Roger Marshall in September called for a vote to end the emergency declaration after Biden told CBS News in an interview that the pandemic was “over.”
The White House later walked back Biden’s comments, saying there had been no change in the administration’s COVID-19 policy.
Hospitalized or Not, COVID Symptoms Persist in Many After 2 Years — Fatigue, Pain and Memory Loss Cited Most Frequently
Over half of patients were still experiencing at least one post-COVID-19 symptom 2 years after acute infection, whether they had been hospitalized or not, a cross-sectional cohort study showed.
Among nearly 700 patients infected during the first wave of the pandemic, 59.7% of those who were hospitalized and 67.5% of those who were not hospitalized still had at least one symptom 2 years later (P=0.01), reported César Fernández-de-las-Peñas, PT, Ph.D., of Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, in Madrid, Spain, and colleagues in JAMA Network Open.
The most prevalent symptoms for hospitalized and nonhospitalized groups at 2-year follow-up were: Fatigue: 44.7% vs 47.7%; Pain (including headache): 35.8% vs 29.9%; Memory loss: 20% vs 15.9%.
BA.5 Is No Longer Dominant in the U.S. For the First Time Since July, as Two New Subvariants Take Over
Two new Omicron subvariants have overtaken BA.5 as the prevailing versions of the coronavirus in the U.S. BA.5 became dominant in July, then consistently accounted for the majority of new COVID infections until last week.
But data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published Friday showed that the new subvariants — called BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 — have taken over. The two together make up around 44% of new COVID infections, whereas BA.5 makes up just 30%.
“BA.5 is essentially declining quickly, probably soon to be gone,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Europe Faces ‘Cancer Epidemic’ After Estimated 1 Million Cases Missed During COVID
Experts have warned that Europe faces a “cancer epidemic” unless urgent action is taken to boost treatment and research, after an estimated 1 million diagnoses were missed during the pandemic.
The impact of COVID-19 and the focus on it has exposed “weaknesses” in cancer health systems and in the cancer research landscape across the continent, which, if not addressed as a matter of urgency, will set back cancer outcomes by almost a decade, leading healthcare and scientific experts say.
A report, European Groundshot — Addressing Europe’s Cancer Research Challenges: a Lancet Oncology Commission, brought together a wide range of patient, scientific, and healthcare experts with detailed knowledge of cancer across Europe.
The report analyzed data and found clinicians saw 1.5 million fewer patients with cancer in the first year of the pandemic, with one in two patients with cancer not receiving surgery or chemotherapy in a timely manner. About 100 million screenings were missed, and it is estimated that as many as 1 million European citizens may have an undiagnosed cancer as a result of the backlog.
This Biotech Entrepreneur Just Raised $10 Million to Develop a Universal Flu Vaccine
Jacob Glanville, CEO of Centivax, founded his San Francisco-based company, which on Wednesday announced it has raised a $10 million seed funding round co-led by NFX and Global Health Investment Corporation.
Centivax’s mission is to develop “universal” vaccines against the flu, COVID and other fast-mutating diseases that provide broad, enduring and “future-proof” protection against viral mutations. Ideally, this could mean fewer or even no boosters in the future. But even if boosters are necessary, they’d be a lot more effective at protecting against infection, because they’d work against the majority of strains, not just the ones that are anticipated to circulate.
With the new investment, says Glanville, “the key thing is that we’re initiating manufacturing” which lays the groundwork to begin human vaccine trials. The capital will also be used to initiate studies of COVID and HIV universal vaccines, as well as support for a few of the company’s other initiatives. Glanville expects this investment will give the company about a year and a half of runway, but he anticipates raising a series A within the next 12 months to continue his company’s development efforts.
This isn’t Glanville’s first foray into biotech entrepreneurship. After working on bioinformatics at U.C. Berkeley, he spent four years as a scientist at Pfizer, applying machine learning models and other bioinformatics tools to the development of antibody treatments. While there, his team published one of the first antibody libraries for humans, providing other researchers with a catalogue of known antibodies that people’s bodies had produced against particular pathogens.
U.S. FDA Authorizes Roche’s Monkeypox Test
The U.S. health regulator on Tuesday issued an emergency use authorization to Roche’s (ROG.S) test for the detection of DNA from monkeypox virus in swab specimens collected from people suspected of the virus infection.
The tests will be conducted on the Swiss company’s cobas systems, which can also detect HIV, hepatitis B and C viruses.
The Food and Drug Administration said testing will be limited to laboratories that meet the requirements to perform moderate or high complexity tests.
The World Health Organization continues to classify the disease as a public health emergency of international concern, which is its highest level of alert. The U.S. has also declared the disease a public health emergency.
WHO: 1st Ebola Vaccines to Arrive in Uganda Next Week
The head of the World Health Organization said Wednesday that he expects the first doses of Ebola vaccine targeting the strain behind an outbreak in Uganda to arrive in the country next week.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said an expert committee convened by the agency had evaluated three experimental Ebola vaccines and decided they should all be tested in Uganda as part of the necessary research before being licensed.
The WHO chief said efforts to slow Ebola in Uganda have been largely successful. He said two districts have not reported any cases for 42 days, which is twice the maximum incubation period, suggesting that the virus is no longer present there.
WHO’s emergencies chief, Dr. Mike Ryan, said Uganda’s outbreak was likely controllable even without vaccines.
