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Pfizer, BioNTech Countersue Moderna Over COVID Vaccine Patents

Reuters reported:

Pfizer Inc. (PFE.N) and its German partner, BioNTech SE (22UAy.DE), fired back at Moderna Inc. (MRNA.O) on Monday in a patent lawsuit over their rival COVID-19 vaccines, seeking dismissal of the lawsuit in Boston federal court and an order that Moderna’s patents are invalid and not infringed.

Moderna first sued Pfizer in August, accusing the company of violating its rights in three patents related to innovations that Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna said it pioneered before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moderna has also filed a related lawsuit against Pfizer and BioNTech in Germany. All three companies are also embroiled in U.S. patent disputes with other companies over the vaccines.

A Pfizer spokesperson said the company and BioNTech are confident in their intellectual property and will “vigorously defend” against Moderna’s claims.

‘Vaguely Familiar?’: Here’s the Fauci Fib That Stood out Most in the Doc’s Dishonest Deposition

The Daily Wire reported:

Dr. Anthony Fauci would wear a mask for the rest of his life just to hide his face if he weren’t vaccinated and triple-boosted for shame.

The octogenarian immunologist who once claimed to be the human embodiment of science put on a clinic of mendacity in a November 23 deposition for a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general for Louisiana and Missouri. Over the course of seven hours, Fauci praised the monstrous regime in China for its COVID response, admonished a court reporter for not wearing a useless mask and invoked some variation of “I don’t recall” nearly 200 times.

But here’s the whopper that scored a John Blutarsky-level 0.0 on the laugh test: “I’m vaguely familiar with the fact that EcoHealth Alliance has been doing research on trying to understand the bat coronavirus emergence,” he told lawyers alleging the feds colluded with social media to chill debate about COVID policies.

That the man who inspired “In Fauci, We Trust” yard signs and St. Fauci votive candles could make that statement with a straight face is a testament to his pathological aversion to the truth. EcoHealth Alliance is the federal grant-grubbing “nonprofit” run by Fauci’s longtime pal, Peter Daszak. Fauci’s National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases gave EcoHealth Alliance a $600,000 grant that wound up funding illegal gain-of-function experiments with bat coronaviruses at a lab in Wuhan, China.

Britain’s Health Regulator Backs COVID Vaccine for Infants From Six Months

Reuters reported:

Britain’s health regulator on Tuesday authorized a COVID-19 vaccine for infants as young as six months, opening the door for vaccinating the country’s youngest children once the U.K.’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) agrees.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) authorized the vaccine — made by Pfizer (PFE.N) and BioNTech (22UAy.DE) — for children aged six months to four years old after it was deemed safe and effective based on an ongoing clinical trial involving 4,526 participants.

Whether the vaccine is eventually deployed in this age group depends on a recommendation from the JCVI, which advises U.K. health departments on which shots should be used as part of the national vaccination program.

The vaccine is tailored for use in this age group — it is a lower dose version than the one used in children aged five to 11 years. It is given as three injections in the upper arm, with the first two doses given three weeks apart, followed by a third dose administered at least two months after the second dose.

Axios-Ipsos Poll: Few COVID Worries for the Holidays

Axios reported:

Americans are entering the holidays for the first time in two years with COVID firmly in the back of their minds, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

The big picture: Public behavior on masking, social distancing and other precautions hasn’t changed significantly since September, and 7 in 10 believe strongly or somewhat that we’re moving to a point where the virus won’t disrupt our daily lives.

Between the lines: Large segments of the public remain distrustful of the government’s pandemic response, including the role of top infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci.

Forty-five percent strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that public health officials lied about how effective COVID-19 vaccines and masks are at preventing the virus’ spread, 39% strongly or somewhat think Fauci should be investigated for his role in the response; and 63% said they trust the Centers for Disease Control a great deal or a fair amount to provide accurate information about COVID, compared to 51% for Fauci and 43% for President Biden.

COVID Boosters Provided Little Added Protection for People With Natural Immunity: Study

The Epoch Times reported:

COVID-19 vaccine boosters provided small boosts for people who have recovered from COVID-19, according to a new study. Measuring the effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer boosters against the BA.1 Omicron subvariant, researchers found that a booster upped protection against infection by just 6.1% for those who had a documented prior infection, or natural immunity.

The effectiveness of a primary series 14 to 149 days after a second dose was pegged as 41% for the group. A booster brought the protection to 47.1%. Excluding people with a documented prior infection, the booster increased infection more.

“While booster vaccination was associated with additional protection against Omicron BA.1 infection in people without a documented prior infection, it was not found to be associated with additional protection among people with a documented prior infection,” researchers said.

A number of studies have analyzed the protection people enjoy after recovering from COVID-19 and found that the protection is higher than that conferred by vaccines. Both forms of protection have waned against infection and to a smaller degree against severe illness, but natural immunity has held up better against both infection and severe disease.

Pfizer Announces $750 Million Expansion of Western Michigan Plant

Associated Press reported:

Pfizer announced a $750 million project Monday toward expanding capacity at the western Michigan pharmaceutical plant where the company first mass-produced its COVID-19 vaccine.

Company officials said the project will boost the plant’s manufacturing of sterile injectable medications and could lead to 300 new jobs at the Portage plant near Kalamazoo which now has about 3,000 workers.

Pfizer executive David Breen said the project will help ensure an uninterrupted supply of medicines and vaccines, including those based on mRNA technology used in its COVID-19 vaccine.

The plant first started shipping the COVID-19 vaccines in December 2020 and President Joe Biden toured the plant two months later to highlight the national vaccination campaign.

Myocarditis After COVID Vaccine Low Among Teens and Young Adults, Large Study Finds

NBC News reported:

The incidence of myocarditis and pericarditis after COVID vaccination is low and most patients make a full recovery, a large international study from Nationwide Children’s Hospital found. Most of the cases occurred in male teens and young adults and usually after the second dose of a primary series of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, according to the study published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics.

Although a majority of the people recovered quickly, 93% of the cases required hospitalization and 23% of the cases were serious enough to require admission to the intensive care unit. No deaths were observed.

While the study’s findings are “reassuring,” the vaccine-associated heart problems “should not be viewed as always mild,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He was not involved in the research.

Most patients recovered with rest and medication. However, 87% had abnormalities on their cardiac MRI, raising the question of whether there may be long-term consequences to the condition, Barouch said.

Ex-FDA Vaccine Inspectors Call for Better Training

Politico reported:

Training in the Food and Drug Administration’s office that oversees licensed vaccines has decreased dramatically in recent years, raising concerns that the team is not equipped to identify quality control issues in manufacturing, according to three former inspectors.

An agency-wide reorganization and an influx of inexperienced inspectors led to an increased workload, particularly during the pandemic, they said. In the last several years, multiple inspectors have left the team, citing internal frustrations over the lack of training and concern that supervisors had little knowledge of the complexities associated with the inspections they oversee.

All three former inspectors worked in one of the FDA’s most critical offices, Team Biologics, which is responsible for inspecting licensed vaccine products, as well as cord blood, allergenic, gene and cell-therapy products.

The former inspectors said they do not know of any instances in which Team Biologics accidentally missed contamination of a vaccine or failed to report a manufacturing issue. However, they said they are concerned about inspectors misidentifying a problem or overlooking a serious issue if more rigorous training is not reinstated and experienced inspectors are not brought on to the team.

NYC’s Pandemic Response Lab to Close as COVID Testing Plummets

Bloomberg reported:

New York City’s Pandemic Response Lab, a much-vaunted effort to increase COVID-19 testing capacity at the height of the pandemic, will close at the end of the month and eliminate all 185 jobs.

ReOpen Diagnostics, the subsidiary of the laboratory automation company Opentrons Labworks Inc. that runs the Queens lab, said Monday it was winding down operations because of a “rapidly changing external environment.”

The elimination of testing capacity follows a global decline in demand for COVID tests, a trend that could limit the ability of public health officials to track new variants and outbreaks, the World Health Organization has warned.

Fewer than 1 million COVID tests were performed by laboratories in New York City last month, according to state data, down from 4.6 million in January.

The Year Without Germs Changed Kids

The Atlantic reported:

In the spring of 2021, Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, offered the world a bold and worrying prediction. “My guess is that five years from now we are going to see a bolus of kids with asthma and obesity,” he told Wired. Those children, he said, would be “the COVID kids”: those born just before or during the height of the crisis, when the coronavirus was everywhere, and we cleaned everything because we didn’t want it to be.

Finlay’s forecast isn’t unfounded. As James Hamblin wrote in The Atlantic last year, our health relies on a constant discourse with trillions of microbes that live on or inside our bodies. The members of the so-called microbiome are crucial for digesting our food, training the immune system and even greasing the wheels of cognitive function; there does not seem to be a bodily system that these tiny tenants do not in some way affect.

These microbe-human dialogues begin in infancy, and the first three or so years of life are absolutely pivotal: Bacteria must colonize babies, then the two parties need to get into physiological sync. Major disruptions during this time “can throw the system out of whack,” says Katherine Amato, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, and raise a kid’s risk of developing allergies, asthma, obesity and other chronic conditions later in life.

The earlier, more intense, and more prolonged the interruptions, the worse. Infants who receive heavy courses of antibiotics — which can nuke microbial diversity — are at greater risk of developing such problems; the same is roughly true for babies who are born by C-section, who formula feed or who grow up in nature-poor environments. If pandemic-era mitigations re-create even an echo of those effects, that could spell trouble for a whole lot of little kids who may have lost out on beneficial microbes in the ongoing effort to keep nasty ones at bay.