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Quebec Recommends Booster Only to Vulnerable Never Infected With COVID
Quebec is changing its vaccine strategy: public health officials are now recommending booster shots only for vulnerable people who have never had COVID-19. Quebec public health director Dr. Luc Boileau made the announcement at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Public health is recommending only vulnerable individuals who have never had COVID-19 receive a booster shot, six months after their last dose. Healthy individuals do not need another dose this winter or spring, he said.
“What we are seeing in the surveillance data and the effectiveness data is that people who have been infected even though they were infected prior to the Omicron wave, so that’s over a year ago, we still have good protection against hospitalization and mortality,” said Dr. Caroline Quach-Thanh, a pediatrician and microbiologist-infectious disease expert at CHU Sainte-Justine.
She is also the president of the Quebec immunization committee (CIQ), which has a mandate to advise the Health Ministry on vaccination strategies in Quebec.
GP Suspended for Nine Months After Promoting Vitamins and Iodine for COVID
A GP in private practice has been suspended from the U.K. medical register for nine months for promoting dubious treatments, including putting misleading claims about COVID-19 online.
A medical practitioners tribunal heard that Sarah Myhill posted videos and articles on her website during the pandemic, describing “safe nutritional interventions” which she said were “now so well established that vaccination has been rendered irrelevant.”
The tribunal found that Myhill, who practises in Powys, promoted and endorsed the use of high doses of vitamins C and D and the inhalation of iodine through a salt pipe for the treatment of bacterial and viral infections including COVID. She also promoted the use of ivermectin without articulating the risks and sold an iodine preparation on her website.
Laval U Prof Gets Second Suspension for COVID Vax Comments, 4 Months No Pay
A professor at Laval University in Quebec City has been suspended for the second time by the institution for comments he made regarding the risks associated with COVID-19 vaccination in children.
Patrick Provost, a full professor in the Department of Microbiology, Infectious diseases and Immunology at the Faculty of Medicine, said in a statement the suspension is effective from Jan. 23 to May 23 and will be without pay. He says the decision was communicated to him on Jan. 23 in a letter that states he will get fired if found in contravention again.
Provost had been suspended for eight weeks by the university last summer for comments on vaccination he made in December 2021, saying that the risks for children outweigh the benefits.
“Not only are there risks of myocarditis [heart inflammation] and other side effects, but there’s no real benefit to vaccinate children because they are not inclined to develop complications from COVID,” Provost told The Epoch Times in a previous interview.
WHO, CDC Study: Vast Majority of COVID Deaths Among Older Adults
U.S. News & World Report reported:
More than 80% of COVID-19 global deaths during the first two years of the pandemic were among people aged 60 and older, according to a new study from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The trend held true across countries of all economic backgrounds, the report published Thursday found. But older populations in lower and middle income countries experienced the highest mortality rates and accounted for the majority of global COVID-19 death estimates.
The research also found that the median percentage of adults aged 60 and older who had their primary shots was 76% at the end of 2022, which is significantly short of WHO’s goal to have all at-risk populations fully vaccinated.
Three Important Studies Shed Light on Long COVID
One of the most puzzling and concerning aspects of the coronavirus has been the large number of cases in which symptoms persist for months or even years. Three years into the pandemic, we still have lots of questions about the condition known as long COVID: What is it? What causes it? And how common is it really?
A recent paper published in Nature Medicine attempts to divide the spectrum of symptoms into four groups: cardiac and renal abnormalities; sleep and anxiety problems; musculoskeletal and nervous system concerns; and digestive and respiratory system consequences.
It’s also important to investigate the trends in long COVID over time. A second paper, published in the Lancet, shows the incidence of long COVID was lower during the Omicron surge than in the Delta surge. The difference was striking: People who contracted the coronavirus in the Omicron wave were about half as likely to develop post-COVID symptoms compared with those in the Delta wave.
I’ve saved the most illuminating study for last: A nationwide study from Israel, published a few weeks ago in the British Medical Journal, found that among both children and adults who had post-COVID symptoms, most were resolved within a year of diagnosis.
Deer Carry COVID Variants No Longer Seen in People
U.S. News & World Report reported:
While COVID-19 variants Alpha, Gamma and Delta are no longer circulating among humans, they continue to spread in white-tailed deer. The animals are the most abundant large mammal in North America. Scientists aren’t sure whether the deer could act as long-term reservoirs for these obsolete variants.
In a new study, researchers at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY, collected 5,700 deer lymph node samples from 2020 to 2022 in the state, comparing the genomic sequences of the variants found in deer with sequences of the same variants taken from humans across New York. The investigators found the viruses had mutated in the deer, which suggested the variants had likely been circulating in the animals for many months.
Some of the viruses had up to 80 mutations compared with the human sequences. This provided further evidence that the viruses had likely been circulating in the deer for some time. The virus may have adapted to deer, possibly making it more transmissible among them.
A 2022 study by Diel and others revealed that across five states surveyed in 2021, the COVID-19 virus was found in up to 40% of white-tailed deer. There are 30 million of the animals in the United States. The researchers said more study is needed to confirm whether these variants will disappear in deer over time or spread to other wildlife, such as predators.
China’s CanSino Confident Its mRNA COVID Vaccine as Good as Moderna, Pfizer Shots
CanSino Biologics (6185.HK) Chief Executive Yu Xuefeng said on Friday he was confident his company’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology was as good as shots from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves in China after the country abandoned its zero-COVID policy in December, domestic companies like CanSino are racing to develop mRNA COVID vaccines.
The country — which experienced a wave of infections across its 1.4 billion population after the sudden relaxation of COVID restrictions — has so far declined to use mRNA vaccines from abroad, and has yet to approve a domestic one that uses the technology.
In January, CanSino reported “positive” interim data from its experimental COVID-19 mRNA booster vaccine, CS-2034, in a mid-stage clinical trial.
