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The Checkup With Dr. Wen: We Need an Honest Accounting of COVID’s Toll
My column last week on how we are overcounting COVID hospitalizations and deaths drew outrage from both sides. Right-wing commentators claimed that the admission came “two and a half years late.” Some on the left insisted that, based on excess mortality data, COVID-19 deaths are being undercounted.
I agree with both sets of critics in one crucial respect: We must have honest accounting and transparent reporting. That requires acknowledging that data changed over time and that deaths due to the pandemic are not necessarily the same as deaths due to COVID.
This is why we need more rigorous research like what Shira Doron from Tufts Medical Center is spearheading. Hospitals and health departments should use a uniform set of criteria to classify COVID hospitalizations and deaths. The accounting should also be retrospective so that we can put to bed the criticism that severe illness was overcounted all along.
Such analysis is more precise than the often-cited excess mortality data, which measures the number of deaths that surpass the expected number in a given period. It’s tempting to compare the current level of deaths to pre-pandemic mortality and attribute all additional deaths to COVID. But this confuses correlation with causation.
HHS Policy for Monitoring Gain-of-Function Virus Research Unclear, GAO Says
A congressional watchdog agency has determined that the oversight carried out by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for research involving highly transmissible viruses such as the coronavirus lacks clarity when it comes to the requirements for such studies and is recommending that the department develop new standards for assessing risk.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a study of its own looking into federal monitoring of gain-of-function research. This inquiry was prompted by a provision included in the CARES Act that tasked the agency with looking into ongoing efforts to prepare for, respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The GAO said in its report that the oversight carried out under the 2017 framework “does not fully meet key elements of effective oversight.” The framework fell short in terms of transparency and performing reviews, according to the watchdog.
The GAO’s report identified vague language that failed to clearly identify expectations. For instance, even though the framework requires agencies to submit proposals on studies that are “reasonably anticipated to create, transfer or use enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” it does not explain what “reasonably anticipated” means.
‘Utterly Unprepared’: Larry Summers Says Another COVID-Scale Problem Is a Top Economic Risk
Economist Larry Summers would place better than 50-50 odds on the world being shaken by another COVID-scale event within the next 15 years.
The Harvard professor and former U.S. treasury secretary shared what he believes are the world’s biggest near-term risks during a CNBC-moderated panel on the last day of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
They included the possibility of the COVID-19 virus mutating again, which he noted that no other panelist had brought up when discussing the global economic outlook.
“I would note that the odds in my view are better than 50-50 that there will be a COVID-scale problem within the next 15 years and that the world is utterly unprepared for that eventuality,” he said.
Unredacted NIH E-Mails Show Efforts to Rule Out a Lab Origin of COVID
As COVID-19 was spreading fear and spurring lockdowns across the United States in March 2020, the scientific journal Nature Medicine published a paper titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Written by five renowned academic scientists, it played an important early role in shaping the debate about a fiercely controversial topic: the origin of the virus that has killed millions since it emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. Did it spill from animals to humans in nature, on a farm or in a market? Or did it leak from a lab like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading center of coronavirus research in China?
Drawing on “comparative analysis of genomic data,” the paper’s authors wrote that “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated construct.” Toward the end of the paper, they added, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” in explaining the origin of the virus. Instead, the scientists strongly favored a natural origin, arguing that the virus likely spilled from bats into humans, possibly by way of an intermediate animal host.
One of the paper’s authors, Robert Garry, and several of the paper’s other coauthors were initially suspicious that SARS-CoV-2 may have emerged from a lab. They communicated their suspicions to Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and others in late January and early February 2020, and what ensued was a period of intense and confidential deliberation about the origin of the virus.
Unredacted records obtained by The Nation and The Intercept offer detailed insights into those confidential deliberations. The documents show that in the early days of the pandemic, Fauci and Collins took part in a series of e-mail exchanges and telephone calls in which several leading virologists expressed concern that SARS-CoV-2 looked potentially “engineered.”
Top Pharma CEO Says COVID Likely to Become Endemic, Urges Investment in Pandemic Preparedness
The chief executive of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis on Thursday warned the coronavirus pandemic will likely settle into an endemic phase and renewed calls for policymakers to sufficiently finance pandemic preparedness.
“If you look over the last two years, we have populations that have built up immunity, you have a virus that’s continuing to make shifts, but I think what we’re going to settle into is more of an endemic environment with respect to coronaviruses and the COVID virus specifically,” Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Narasimhan, who has previously warned that future pandemics are bound to happen, made clear that world leaders must learn from the coronavirus crisis to be in a better place for future pandemics. “I think what is really important now is we turn our attention to pandemic preparedness for the future,” Narasimhan said.
What to Know About XBB, the New COVID Variant
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The new coronavirus continues to dodge, duck, dip and dive, mutating again and again to find its way past people’s immune defenses. The latest COVID variant to gain a foothold in America is called XBB.1.5, which has rapidly started to crowd out other competing variants.
XBB.1.5 is the first recombinant COVID variant expected to become dominant in the United States, according to the viral surveillance company Helix. This variant is called “recombinant” because it was created by two Omicron subvariants merging through evolution.
The new strain also took two evolutionary steps instead of just one, gaining a mutation for immune evasion as well as an unsuppressed ability to bind to and infect human cells, Helix said in its report.
The XBB.1 variants are dramatically better at evading the neutralizing antibodies in humans that protect against initial infection, according to a new study published on Jan. 18 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Biden’s Push for COVID Boosters in Nursing Homes Had Modest Impact. What Happened?
Heading into the winter months when COVID-19 cases spike, the Biden administration knew they had a problem. Less than half of nursing home residents across the country, who are at higher risk of serious illness and death from COVID, were up to date on their vaccines.
While offering assistance to get more seniors in senior facilities boosted, the federal government reminded nursing homes they’re required to offer all vaccines, including boosters, to residents and staff and educate them on their benefits. Failure to do so could lead nursing homes to face greater oversight and enforcement actions, the Biden administration said.
Meanwhile, state regulators reported only 378 instances of homes not meeting this requirement during 2022, according to a USA TODAY tabulation of violation reports. Enforcement occurs at the state level, with inspections happening about once a year on a rolling basis for the nation’s more than 15,000 nursing homes.
For most of the year, inspectors issued an average of 36 citations per month for not providing required vaccine education. Just 23 were issued in November and only 7 in December when the White House was pushing this initiative.
WA Medical Board: Idaho Doctor Peddled False COVID Claims
The Washington State Medical Commission has accused a medical doctor in Idaho of violating standards related to COVID-19 and patient care.
The commission said Wednesday it had issued a statement of disciplinary charges against Dr. Ryan Cole of Idaho, who has a license in Washington state as a physician and surgeon. Cole lives in Idaho, has a medical license there and is currently one of Ada County’s appointed members of the Central District Board of Health, KTVB-TV reported.
Cole made false and misleading statements related to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, treatments and masks, according to the Washington Medical Commission’s statement of charges.
Republicans Introduce ‘Pandemic Is Over’ Act After Biden’s ‘Unacceptable’ Extension of COVID Emergency
More than a dozen House Republicans introduced legislation declaring that the COVID-19 pandemic is over. The Pandemic Is Over Act, from Rep. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., simply states that the public health emergency declared by the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2020 in response to COVID “shall terminate on the date of enactment of this Act.”
Guthrie proposed the bill less than a week after HHS extended the COVID emergency until mid-April. HHS has now maintained the emergency declaration for three years and said last week that a public health emergency exists as a result of the “continued consequences” of COVID.
That decision came more than three months after President Joe Biden declared in an interview that “the pandemic is over.” He also added, however, that America still has a “problem with COVID” and that the administration is “doing a lot of work on it.”
