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Unvaccinated Dad Loses Custody of Kids, Including Immunocompromised Child
An unvaccinated father in New Brunswick, Canada, lost custody of his three children, one of which is a 10-year-old immunocompromised child, according to reports from the CBC.
The father presented research to the judge that he believed questioned the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but the judge ruled against it.
The order allows the father to interact with the children over Zoom and reevaluate the sentencing if he does get vaccinated, but the mother can overrule his lack of parental consent to get her children vaccinated, according to the ruling, CBC reports.
No Evidence COVID Vaccine Led to Teen’s Death, Probe Reveals
Officials say they’ve found no links between the COVID-19 vaccine and the death of a 13-year-old Michigan boy who died days after getting the shot, WJRT reported.
According to reports, Jacob Clynick died on June 16, 2021, just days after he got his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine at a Walgreens store. “He passed away in the middle of the night at home,” Tammy Burages, Clynick’s aunt, said. She claimed Jacob was healthy and had no known underlying medical issues.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed it was investigating his death to see whether the vaccine had played any role.
The medical examiner’s office conducted an autopsy and reported their findings to the CDC. The boy’s family said an autopsy showed his heart was enlarged when he died and had fluid around it. The FDA is currently reviewing the risk of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), which has mostly affected young men who got Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Protesters Gather Outside Brigham and Women’s Hospital Over Patient Dropped From Transplant List
About 100 protesters gathered outside Brigham and Women’s Hospital Sunday afternoon in support of a Massachusetts man whose family has said he was dropped from its heart transplant waitlist because he hasn’t been vaccinated for COVID-19.
David Ferguson Jr., who is known as D.J., has been hospitalized since November, according to an online fund-raiser. His mother, Tracey Ferguson, has said he has been suffering complications from atrial fibrillation and deteriorating heart failure and has been treated at hospitals around Boston.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital has told Ferguson that he was ineligible for a transplant because he was not vaccinated against COVID-19, according to his family. Ferguson’s father, David, told WBZ last month that vaccination against COVID-19 went against his son’s “basic principles. He doesn’t believe in it.”
COVID Infection May Boost Antibodies for up to 20 Months
U.S. News & World Report reported:
If you’ve already had COVID-19, your natural antibodies may last as long as 20 months, a new study suggests.
“Almost everyone with a documented COVID-19 infection had antibodies, and these antibodies seem to persist for quite a long time,” said study author Dr. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. “We really need to start incorporating antibodies from natural immunity into the context of immunity evaluation, moving from vaccine verification to immunity verification.”
Still, he cautioned, no level of antibody is a guarantee that you won’t get reinfected. Segev’s findings were published online Feb. 3 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Save the COVID Generation — and Our Country
Every American should be worried about the COVID Generation. Over the past two years, our country’s children have lost a huge part of their education — and they’re now at risk of losing their futures.
What’s happening to kids breaks my heart. Even before the pandemic, they were struggling to find the best shot at the best life. Pre-COVID, two-thirds of America’s elementary and middle-school students weren’t proficient in reading. Nearly the same number weren’t proficient at math. Yet instead of helping kids get ahead, the past two years pushed them further behind.
School lockdowns and virtual learning have been a total disaster. It’s now clear that school lockdowns had nearly zero effect on saving lives, but they did dramatic damage to student’s lives.
The Kids’ Vaccine Dilemma
Federal health regulators will soon face their next controversial vaccine decision: whether to authorize Pfizer‘s vaccine for children younger than 5, despite ongoing questions around dosing and effectiveness.
At the request of the agency, Pfizer has asked the FDA for two doses of its coronavirus vaccine to be authorized for emergency use in children between 6 months and 5 years old, even though the plan is for the vaccine to eventually be given as a three-dose series.
An FDA advisory board will meet Feb. 15 to consider whether to recommend authorizing two doses of the vaccine. The FDA will then have to decide whether to authorize it, and the CDC will weigh in as well.
Vitamin D Could Be a Piece of COVID’s ‘Complex Puzzle’, Israeli Scientists Say, After a New Study Finds a Link Between Deficiency and Severe Illness
Israeli scientists said they found “striking” differences in the chances of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 when they compared patients who had sufficient vitamin D levels prior to contracting the disease, with those who didn’t.
A study published Thursday in research journal PLOS One found that about half of people who were vitamin D deficient before getting COVID-19 developed severe illness, compared to less than 10% of people who had sufficient levels of the vitamin in their blood.
The latest research was the first to examine vitamin D levels in individuals prior to them contracting COVID-19, the study authors said.
Bill Maher Says Some COVID Misinformation Has Come From Medical Industry
Bill Maher has ripped the medical industry over its handling of the pandemic, arguing that a lot of COVID-19 misinformation has actually come from those who represent “the science.”
“The same people, who in private care, always say ‘get a second opinion’ want to only allow one in the public debate,” Maher said on Friday’s episode of “Real Time With Bill Maher.”
“The medical-industrial complex has not earned the right to claim monopoly status on information about this virus or medicine in general. Yes, free speech has allowed people to hear misinformation sometimes — and a lot of it was yours.” The 65-year-old comedian railed against the medical industry as he insisted it was time for the U.S. to go back to living normally because there’ll always be another COVID-19 variant.
Kevin McCarthy Says He’ll Probe COVID Origins and Investigate Allegations That the Bidens Have Made Millions From Deals With China if the GOP Wins the House in 2022
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he would set up a committee on China to investigate the origins of COVID-19 if the Republicans were to take a majority in Congress in 2022.
McCarthy added that a GOP majority in the House would probe whether the Biden family made millions in dealings with the Chinese government while Biden was vice president. He cited a claim by Peter Schweizer, president of the conservative think tank Government Accountability Institute, that the Bidens have benefited from Chinese funds.
In a Jan. 23 interview on the Fox News talk show “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Schweizer said that the Biden family received “some $31 million from Chinese individuals who are linked to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence” while Joe Biden was vice president.
CDC Weighs Increasing Time Between Vaccine Doses to Lower Risk of Heart Inflammation
U.S. health officials are considering new changes to vaccine guidance that would lengthen the amount of time between doses in order to lower the risk of heart inflammation for immunocompromised people.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told a panel of outside advisers on Friday these proposed changes would apply to the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Immunocompromised people, who generally don’t respond as well to vaccines, are the only population advised to get four vaccine jabs.
CDC guidance suggests this group should receive three vaccine doses within two months and a fourth dose around five months after the third. The CDC is now suggesting that immunocompromised people should get their fourth shot as soon as three months after the third.
Study Suggests Omicron-Specific Booster May Not Provide More Protection
A new study conducted in primates suggests there may not be a benefit from updating COVID-19 vaccines to target the Omicron variant at this time.
The work, by scientists at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s Vaccine Research Center, shows that animals boosted with the original vaccine had similar levels of protection against disease in the lungs as did primates that received an updated booster based on the Omicron strain. The work was done with Moderna’s licensed vaccine and a booster shot based on the Omicron variant.
Study of blood from the animals showed that many of the measurable immune responses — rises in neutralizing antibody levels, for instance — were not substantially different, regardless of which booster shot they were given.
