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COVID Origins: Investigating a ‘Complex and Grave Situation’ Inside a Wuhan Lab

Vanity Fair reported:

It was Toy Reid’s career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Senator Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans.

An interim report, released last Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

COVID Vaccination a Cause of Guillain-Barré Syndrome? A Case Series

Cureus reported:

Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare autoimmune neuropathic disorder of peripheral nerves usually following an infection or on rarer occasions following vaccinations, but the exact underlying pathophysiology is still unclear.

GBS as an adverse effect of COVID-19 vaccination was not reported by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), but an update was later released in the course of the pandemic from FDA news, reporting several patients developing GBS after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. In this case series, we discuss five cases that developed the GBS post-COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine, along with its pathophysiology, management and outcome.

The five cases were reported to the Emergency Medicine Department (EMD) of Acharya Vinoba Bhave Rural Hospital (AVBRH), a tertiary care rural hospital situated in central India majorly catering to the population of the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India. All five patients received a non-replicating viral-vector Oxford/AstraZeneca ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (AZD1222) COVID-19 vaccine.

By the Next RSV Season, the U.S. May Have Its First Vaccine

CNN Health reported:

After decades of disappointment, four new RSV vaccines may be nearing review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and more than a dozen others are in testing.

There’s also hope around a promising long-acting injection designed to be given right after birth to protect infants from the virus for as long as six months. In a recent clinical trial, the antibody shot was 75% effective at heading off RSV infections that required medical attention. And the relief could come soon: Dr. Ashish Jha, who leads the White House COVID-19 Response Task Force, told CNN that he’s “hopeful” there will be an RSV vaccine by next fall.

Babies have to be at least 6 months old to enter the trial, which is testing a vaccine developed at the National Institutes of Health — the result of decades of scientific research.

Forget About a Single Strain: The New COVID Calculus Is All About Viral Families

Fortune reported:

Gone are the simple early COVID pandemic days of 2020 — in terms of viral evolution, at least. The transfer of power used to be relatively straightforward from variant to variant, from the original strain to Alpha, to Delta, to Omicron — one washing over the world before another took over.

Now, it’s a battle royale between prominent viral “families” warring to keep power within the lineage. No single family — BA.5, XBB nor BQ — has achieved global success this fall. Not yet, at least.

As the virus behind COVID — namely the Omicron variety — mutates at an unprecedented rate, the focus of scientists has shifted from single strains to related groups of them.

Case in point: XBB, a combination of two different Omicron spawns that began surging in Singapore and Bangladesh in recent weeks. It has yet to arrive in the U.S., at least officially. But its grandchildren, XBB.1.1 and XBB.1.3 have, according to data from GISAID, an international research organization that tracks changes in COVID and the flu virus.

FDA Says Two Studies Showing Omicron Boosters Weren’t Much Better Than Old COVID Shots Were Too Small to Come to Any Conclusions

CNBC reported:

The Food and Drug Administration said two studies showing that the new Omicron boosters weren’t that much better than the old shots were too small to come to any real conclusions.

Scientists at Columbia and Harvard, in two independent studies, found the new boosters and the old shots basically performed the same against Omicron BA.5, raising doubts about whether the vaccines will live up to high expectations set by the Biden administration. The antibody responses were slightly higher with the Omicron boosters, though the studies concluded the difference wasn’t significant.

Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s vaccine division, said the studies are small and subject to limitations. Data from larger well-controlled studies are expected in the near future, he said. Pfizer and Moderna are conducting clinical trials on the new boosters and are expected to provide data later this year.

Why Does the U.S. Always Seem to Get Coronavirus Variants After Europe Does?

Slate reported:

COVID cases have recently spiked in Europe, fueled by dropping temperatures, indoor socializing and an unwelcome brood of antibody-dodging Omicron subvariants. European health officials believe this may only be a taste of what’s to come this winter. Experts are warning these upticks overseas portend a wave in America, and not just because we’re more likely to get sick when we stay inside close to others.

The variants B.Q.1. and B.Q.1.1, which first showed up overseas, could specifically help drive the spread. “In the past, what’s happened in Europe often has been a harbinger for what’s about to happen in the United States,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, tells NPR. “So I think the bottom line message for us in this country is: We have to be prepared for what they are beginning to see in Europe.”

For much of the pandemic, events in Europe have indeed seemed to be a divination of what will happen next in the U.S. At the pandemic’s onset, the virus ripped through an unprepared Italy just a few weeks before it devasted New York City.

Why the Europe-to-U.S. trend persists is complex, say experts I spoke with, and they emphasized that there’s no definitive answer. “There are a lot of hypotheses out there that could explain it,” says Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas in Austin. One major factor is global travel patterns.

The End of Evusheld

The Atlantic reported:

In the United States, BA.5 — dominant since the end of spring — is slowly yielding to a slew of its siblings, among them BA.4.6, BF.7, BQ.1, and BQ.1.1; another subvariant, XBB, threatens to steal the spotlight from overseas. Whether all of these will divvy up infections in the next few months, or whether they’ll be pushed aside by something new, is still anyone’s guess.

Either way, the forecast looks a little grim. None of the new variants will completely circumvent the full set of immune defenses that human bodies, schooled by vaccines or past infections, can launch. Yet all of them seem pretty good at dodging a hefty subset of our existing antibodies.

For anyone who gets infected, such evasions could make the difference between being asymptomatic and feeling pretty terrible. And for the subset of people who become sick enough to need clinical care, the consequences could get even worse. Some of our best COVID treatments are made from single antibodies tailored to the virus, which may simply cease to work as SARS-CoV-2 switches up its form.

Past variants have already knocked out several such concoctions — among them, REGEN-COV, sotrovimab and bamlanivimab/etesevimab — from the U.S. arsenal. The only two left are bebtelovimab, a treatment for people who have already been infected, and Evusheld, a crucial supplement to vaccination for those who are moderately or severely immunocompromised; both are still deployed in hospitals countrywide.

But should another swarm of variants take over, these two lone antibody therapies could also be obsolete within months, if not weeks.

How to Solve the COVID Testing Data Problem

Bloomberg reported:

It’s not just fatigue that’s setting in, but something else — we’re no longer being advised to hold off on normal life for just a few more months, as many did until vaccines, until Delta subsided, until the first and second Omicron waves receded. At a recent symposium hosted by Harvard Medical School, biologists tracking the COVID pandemic forecast a long purgatory — the situation is much better than in 2020, but there’s no end in sight for the stream of new variants that keep evolving ways to evade immunity.

The only good news here is that technology is advancing, and people aren’t tired of adopting innovations. One of the best technologies for helping us assess local risk is sewage analysis. It’s emerged as the fastest and most reliable source of information about the surges and lulls in the pandemic, as well as which variants are taking over in which regions.

Popular sites for tracking the pandemic such as The New York Times COVID tracker have become less useful because they rely on PCR testing; most infected people, if they do test, are using antigen tests at home and not reporting the results.