Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
Pandemic Propels Global Effort to Study Rare Vaccine Side Effects
Scientists in more than 20 countries, on every continent save Antarctica, have started to gather data for the largest ever vaccine safety project. Members of the effort, called the Global Vaccine Data Network (GVDN), fruitlessly sought funding after conceiving the project more than 10 years ago.
But the mass vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into the project. With the ability to draw on data from more than 250 million people, the network will investigate rare complications linked to COVID-19 vaccines in hopes of improving the prediction, treatment and potential prevention of these side effects.
“You really need global data in order to understand” rare vaccine side effects, says Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist at the Mayo Clinic. Poland, who’s not involved in GVDN, himself developed severe tinnitus about 90 minutes after his second vaccine dose, which he suspects is related to the shot. Studying potential vaccine complications “is a very neglected area,” he says.
U.S. Renews COVID Public Health Emergency
International Business Times reported:
The United States on Wednesday renewed the COVID-19 public health emergency, allowing millions of Americans to keep getting free tests, vaccines and treatments for at least three more months.
The public health emergency was initially declared in January 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began. It has been renewed each quarter since and was due to expire on April 16.
The public health emergency is one of four pandemic-related nationwide emergencies currently in effect, including a national emergency Biden renewed in March and a separate health emergency that allows the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorizations for COVID-19 treatments, tests and vaccines.
Bill Gates Says He Warned Us About the Pandemic in His 2015 TED Talk — but ‘90% of the Views Were After It Was Too Late’
Bill Gates gave a key note speech at the TED2022 conference on Tuesday, and referenced his 2015 talk in which he warned a pandemic was on the horizon, and we weren’t ready for it.
Today, Gates said he hoped the current COVID-19 crisis would spur his audience at TED2022 in Vancouver, Canada to pay closer attention to his advice about how to prevent another pandemic from wreaking similar havoc on society.
“When I was on this stage in 2015, I was one of many people who said we weren’t ready and we needed to get ready. We didn’t,” Gates said. “The speech actually was watched by a lot of people, but 90% of the views were after it was too late.”
In the 2015 talk, Gates said the world was “not ready for the next epidemic” and viruses pose the “greatest risk of global catastrophe” compared to other threats to humanity. A YouTube video of his 2015 presentation has garnered more than 36 million views so far.
The Public’s Business Ought to Be Public
Last November my organization, Empower Oversight, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around half a dozen other entities have also been forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents public.
Only after suing NIH did we receive any documents. In March, we released hundreds of emails in a report about the NIH deleting the sequences of viruses from a database they operate. These viruses are closely related to the COVID-19 virus. Experts say that analyzing them may help us understand how the pandemic began.
In the last 18 months, two news organizations have taken the NIH to court, where judges forced the agency to release public documents. In early June, Buzzfeed published emails sent and received by Dr. Fauci, who is now chief medical adviser to the president. The public has a right to understand how the government handled a pandemic that has killed so many Americans, but the agency only made the documents public after Buzzfeed sued.
Amid the Nation’s Mental Health Crisis, We Need More Psychiatrists Now
Every day, people call my office looking for help: A loved one has not left their bed in a week. A father is experiencing panic symptoms while preparing his children for school. A young woman is using substances in a way that feels dangerous to her.
Before the pandemic, I could almost always help. I would be able to find time to meet someone for a consultation or make a few calls to secure the right referral. But now, my every available hour — even those that jut into my ability to meet my obligations to my family — is full. My colleagues tell me the same. They are starting work earlier, working later, contending with long waitlists and their own limits. All the while, patients in crisis are going without psychiatric help.
In the most recent Household Pulse Survey, one-third of U.S. adults reported experiencing symptoms of depression or anxiety. This comes on top of the burden experienced by the 40 million Americans living with substance use disorders and the 14 million who live with serious mental illnesses.
Omicron Subvariant Now Almost 90% of U.S. COVID Cases: CDC
Nearly 90% of new COVID-19 cases in the United States are now a more transmissible subvariant of Omicron known as BA.2, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The BA.2 variant is estimated to be about 30% more transmissible than the original Omicron variant, which already spread more easily than earlier variants. Importantly, though, there is not evidence that the BA.2 subvariant evades the vaccines to a greater extent or causes more severe disease.
WHO Says COVID Still a Global Public Health Emergency Even as Deaths Fall to Lowest Level in Two Years
The World Health Organization on Wednesday said COVID-19 remains a global public health emergency despite the fact that deaths from the virus have fallen to their lowest level since the early days of the pandemic.
The world recorded more than 22,000 deaths from COVID during the week ended April 10, the lowest level since March 30, 2020, according to WHO data. The organization first declared COVID a global health emergency on Jan. 30, 2020, just over a month after the virus emerged in Wuhan, China.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said declining COVID deaths is good news, but some countries are still experiencing a spike in cases. Tedros said a WHO committee this week unanimously agreed that COVID remains a public health emergency.
Meet This Year’s Healthcare Billionaires
There may be 87 fewer billionaires on Forbes’ annual ranking of the world’s richest people this year, but healthcare leaders still managed to climb the list.
Thomas Frist Jr., MD, founder of the sprawling, publicly-traded health system Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), topped the U.S. healthcare billionaires on the list, followed by Carl Cook, CEO of the medical device manufacturer Cook Group and Li Ge, Ph.D., co-founder and chair of WuXi AppTec, the R&D and manufacturing services company.
Internationally, Frist was second to Cyrus Poonawalla, Ph.D., chair of the Poonawalla Group that includes the Serum Institute of India, the “world’s largest vaccine maker (by doses),” according to Forbes. Poonawalla ranked 56th on the overall list with a net worth of $24.3 billion.
Others in the vaccine market also did well, such as Jiang Rensheng of China, chair of Chongqing ZFSW Biological Products (net worth $17.7 billion) and twins Andreas and Thomas Struengmann, who were early backers of BioNTech that partnered with Pfizer on a COVID-19 vaccine (net worth $11.9 billion).
COVID Vaccines Didn’t Work for Many Cancer Patients — but Researchers Are Designing a New Shot for Them
Researchers at the University Hospital Tübingen are designing a vaccine to elicit a deeper T cell response than the currently approved vaccines by targeting several key points on viral proteins — epitopes — that are good at stirring up immune T cells.
The researchers, who presented Phase 1/2 clinical data at the American Association for Cancer Research conference on Tuesday, said they hoped their approach would protect immunocompromised patients from COVID, even if they still cannot make antibodies. Other experts said it was an intriguing idea, though whether it’ll actually protect against COVID has yet to be shown.
To create this vaccine, the investigators first scoured the coronavirus genome using an algorithm that would highlight any viral protein fragments or peptides that would cause a T cell to perk up, said Juliane Walz, the medical director of translational immunology at the University Hospital Tübingen and the lead author of the study.
Moderna Sets Sights on Flu Vaccine, Starts Giving Shots to Trial Participants
The Cambridge-based biotech giant that created one of the earliest and most effective COVID-19 vaccines is now looking to develop a flu shot.
Moderna on Monday announced that the first trial participants have been dosed in the Phase 1/2 study of the company’s seasonal influenza vaccine candidates. The biotech is applying its messenger RNA (mRNA) platform to the flu vax.
This Phase 1/2 randomized study will evaluate the safety and immune response of a single dose of mRNA-1020 or mRNA-1030 in healthy adults 18-plus in the U.S. The company intends to enroll about 560 participants in the study.
Coronavirus Pandemic Pushed 77 Million Into ‘Extreme Poverty’: UN
The coronavirus pandemic pushed 77 million people into extreme poverty last year, according to a new report from the United Nations (U.N.) released on Tuesday.
The 208-page report from the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs also says 1 in 5 developing countries will not see a gross domestic product return to 2019 levels within the next year.
Debt has also increased, and the poorest developing countries are paying about 14 percent of revenue on average to pay it off, compared to 3.5 percent for developed countries.
Shionogi to Not Recommend Use of Oral COVID Drug for Pregnant Women
Japanese pharmaceutical firm Shionogi & Co. is considering not recommending the use of its oral COVID-19 drug for pregnant women due to animal testing finding fetal abnormalities after it was administered, a source familiar with the matter told Kyodo News on Tuesday.
The Osaka-based drugmaker applied for approval of the drug with the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry in February. But the finding may indicate a safety management system is needed to prevent pregnant women from taking the drug.
According to the source, the company found abnormalities in fetuses when pregnant rabbits were given the drug, which was higher in concentration compared with that taken by people during clinical trials.
The oral COVID-19 drug Molnupiravir developed by U.S. pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. and approved by the Japanese government last year is not to be administered to pregnant women.
