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Poll: 1 in 7 Parents Have Not Talked About Vaccines With Their Child’s Doctor
Some parents have completely avoided talking about their children’s vaccines during the pandemic, new research shows. One in seven parents in the United States says they have not talked about vaccines with their child’s doctor since the pandemic started, according to a new poll.
Researchers at the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan conducted a survey of 2,023 people with children ranging from months old to 18 years old between August and September of this year. But the report is based on the responses given by 1,483 parents with at least one child between the ages of six and 18 years old.
Rupali Limaye, the deputy director of the Internal Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Schools of Public Health, believes that the low rate of parents discussing the COVID-19 vaccine with a pediatrician is linked to early messaging from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the disease.
“The messaging generally from the government and the CDC was that COVID was mild in children,” said Limaye.
Authorities Looking Into Oregon Report That Falsely Claims Sky-High Child COVID Hospitalization Rates
Authorities in Oregon say they’re looking into a report they published that falsely claims sky-high COVID-19 hospitalization rates among children.
The 725-page report includes multiple instances of misinformation, including the false claim that COVID-19 hospitalization rates among children were as high as 47.4%. In a graph, the report depicts the hospitalization rates as above 30% for all childhood age groups, with the highest being 47.4% among children aged 12 to 17 as of June.
According to Oregon Health Authority, the hospitalization rate in 2021 among children aged 0 to 9 was just 0.9% and the hospitalization rate among those aged 10 to 19 was 0.6%. A report issued in July looking at the first six months of 2021 had the percentages at 0.6 and 0.3, respectively.
States across the country, as well as federal officials and media outlets, have repeatedly put forth COVID-19 misinformation during the pandemic, including exaggerating the risk the disease poses to people and hyping vaccine effectiveness.
COVID Variant BQ.1.1 Resistant to All Monoclonal Antibody Treatments
If you’re expecting monoclonal antibody treatments to save you from getting more severe outcomes like death should you get COVID-19, it’s time to rethink that strategy. A letter published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Nov. 18 detailed how many of the currently spreading Omicron subvariants, namely the BA.4.6, BA.2.75.2 and BJ.1 ones, appear to be resistant to most available monoclonal antibody treatments.
And the BQ.1.1 Omicron subvariant, which has become one of the two dominant versions of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the U.S., seems resistant to all of the available monoclonal antibody treatments. Yes, all of them as in every single one.
BQ certainly doesn’t stand for “be quiet,” as the BQ.1.1 subvariant is now causing a commotion, being responsible for an estimated 24.2% of all new reported COVID-19 cases over the past week while the not-too-different BQ.1 subvariant has been the culprit behind 25.5% of them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
If you do the math, that means that these two Omicron subvariants are now comprising over half of all reported COVID-19 cases, meaning that they have overtaken the BA.5 as the “alpha-dog” of SARS-CoV-2 versions. Therefore, you can probably no longer rely on any type of monoclonal antibody should you get COVID-19.
Coronavirus Variants Are Dodging Antibody Treatments. New Lab-Made Options May Help.
In the evolutionary chess match between the coronavirus and humans, scientists’ next move can’t come soon enough for the millions of Americans relying on treatments known as monoclonal antibodies. These lab-made therapies are rapidly losing their healing power, forcing researchers around the world to devise new antibodies that are both more potent and more resistant to new variants.
One new antibody cocktail developed by the Sherbrooke, Quebec, biotechnology company Immune Biosolutions is in clinical trials in South Africa and Brazil. Participants receive the treatment as a mist sprayed into their mouths for about three minutes while they breathe normally.
Two of the three antibodies in the cocktail, known as IBO123, take aim at a familiar region of the spike protein where the virus attaches to a human cell. This region is an obvious place to block the virus, but scientists have discovered a drawback. The target changes frequently, allowing the virus to slip away from the roadblocks researchers put in its way.
That’s why the third antibody in Immune Biosolutions’ cocktail attacks the opposite end of the protein, called the stem helix. This region is what allows viral and human cell membranes to fuse together during the infection process. The new antibody acts like a set of hands strangling the stem helix.
FDA Says Telling People Not to Take Ivermectin for COVID Was Just a Recommendation
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) telling people to “stop” taking ivermectin for COVID-19 was informal and just a recommendation, government lawyers argued during a recent hearing.
The hearing was held in a case brought by three doctors who say the FDA illegally interfered with their ability to prescribe medicine to their patients when it issued statements on ivermectin, an anti-parasitic that has shown positive results in some trials against COVID-19.
Ivermectin is approved by the FDA but not for COVID-19. Drugs are commonly used for non-approved purposes in the United States; the practice is known as an off-label treatment.
The FDA created a webpage in 2021 titled “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19” and later posted a link to the page on Twitter while writing: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” A second post stated: “Hold your horses, y’all. Ivermectin may be trending, but it still isn’t authorized or approved to treat COVID-19.”
How Does Reinfection Impact Long COVID? Here’s What We Know so Far.
Now that most people in the U.S. have been infected at least once with COVID-19, some complacency may be setting in; but even if another round of SARS-CoV-2 infection may start to feel old hat, experts warn that the possibility of long COVID is still a threat Americans should be wary of — even if they’ve managed to avoid long COVID in the past.
There is no single agreed-upon definition of long COVID or any agreed-upon method for defining and diagnosing it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in June that nearly 1 in 5 Americans who had COVID-19 still have symptoms of long COVID, which the CDC defines as symptoms lasting more than three months post-infection that were not present earlier.
Long COVID symptoms vary — from respiratory and heart symptoms to neurological symptoms to general ailments such as fatigue or muscle aches — and the CDC says that while long COVID is more common in people who suffered a severe bout of COVID-19, even people who experienced mild or asymptomatic cases can suffer from “post-COVID conditions.”
More research is still needed on how reinfection impacts those already suffering from long COVID, but self-reported cases can provide some insight. In a recent online survey conducted in the United Kingdom, 80% of those who described themselves as still having long COVID symptoms reported that another case of COVID-19 exacerbated their symptoms.
Meet a Woman Suffering From Long COVID Who Quit Her Job, Spent $11,000 on Treatments, but Still Can’t Get Disability Insurance
Jenna Dreier, 55, never thought she’d be forced to stop working before retirement age. But as a professional insurance agent, she prepared for the scenario, just in case. She contracted the virus in January and is still suffering 11 months later. After experiencing a mild case of COVID, Dreier became exhausted all the time, perennially nauseous and “even small exertions” sent her to the emergency room, she said.
At first, she took a leave of absence and started to receive payouts from her short-term disability insurance allowance. However, when it became time to transition into the long-term allowance of the policy — which guarantees benefits for longer, but at a reduced portion of her previous salary — her company denied the claim.
She’s since been treated for long COVID symptoms by multiple doctors and is currently getting help from a long COVID clinic, according to medical records viewed by Insider. But she never took an official test, and she was vaccinated. That’s what hurt her in securing long-term disability, according to the rejection letter from her insurance company.
Now, she has a few months to appeal the insurance company’s decision. If they deny her again, she can make the appeal in court. But she’s spoken to lawyers about that potential scenario, and legal fees are high — usually one-third of her first 18 months of pay if she wins, she said.
They Said We Would ‘Build Back Better’ After COVID. What Breathtaking Deceit
The COVID-19 era is not yet over. The worst might have long since receded — though deaths linked to the virus go on — and for most of us, infection now means nothing more serious than a few days in bed. But the pandemic’s grim and complex legacy is becoming clearer, in continuing tragedies that still seem cruelly overlooked: the prevalence of long COVID, a stark crisis of mental health and developmental problems among children who spent long months deprived of the most basic human experiences.
Partly because the NHS was so consumed by the pandemic, we now seem to be facing an upsurge in deaths from conditions such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes that were left undetected or untreated. COVID has hugely accelerated an exodus of adults from the workforce that is causing ministers no end of anxiety. More generally, millions of people are still living with the effects of two long years full of bereavement, fear and loneliness.
Trauma, as we all know, is only made worse if it festers in silence. But as the omertà on Brexit also proves, this is a country led by people who seemingly do not want us to talk about the most important aspects of the U.K.’s recent history in case it deepens their political problems. So we have not really been allowed to discuss the pandemic and its effects, apart from in the most inappropriate places.
Meanwhile, the government has served notice that almost none of the things we were promised during the pandemic’s worst periods are going to materialize. The country’s suffering, let us not forget, was meant to be honored with a huge drive to “build back better.” To quote from a Boris Johnson speech made in the summer of 2020, the COVID crisis was “the moment to address the problems in our country that we have failed to tackle for decades”: the impossibility of our social care system, rising exasperation about how long it takes to see a GP and more.
