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The U.S. Quietly Terminates a Controversial $125 Million Wildlife Virus Hunting Program Amid Safety Fears
A flagship project for the controversial practice of hunting viruses among wildlife in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America to prevent human outbreaks and pandemics is being quietly dropped by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after private and bipartisan criticism over the safety of such research, The BMJ has found.
For more than a decade the U.S. government has been funding international projects engaged in identifying exotic wildlife viruses that might someday infect humans. Although critics have raised concerns over the potentially catastrophic risks of such virus-hunting activities, hundreds of millions of dollars in unabated funding have symbolized a commitment to the effort.
The shuttering of the project, as described in a new congressional budget document and during interviews with scientists and federal policymakers, marks an abrupt retreat by the U.S. government from wildlife virus hunting, an activity that has also been funded by the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.
The turnabout follows early warnings raised by skeptics — including officials in the Biden White House — that the $125m (£99m; €115m) “DEEP VZN” program could inadvertently ignite a pandemic. The misgivings continue to resonate, as the cause of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the world’s deadliest such event in a century, remains unproven.
Arkansas Hospital Sued Thousands of Patients Over Medical Bills During the Pandemic, Including Hundreds of Its Own Employees
As COVID cases spread in 2020, visitors to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences were greeted by a colorful sign put up by grateful neighbors outside the university’s medical center: “Heroes Work Here.” But at least a dozen of the “heroes” that UAMS featured in online advertisements and other videos weren’t just employed by the university — they’ve also been sued by it.
UAMS, Arkansas’ flagship public health sciences university, has been aggressively suing thousands of former patients over medical debt in recent years, including hundreds of its own employees, a CNN investigation found.
Since 2019, UAMS has sued more than 8,000 patients to collect unpaid medical bills, according to court records. It filed more debt collection lawsuits in recent years than any other plaintiff in the Arkansas court system other than the state tax office.
The university’s use of the courts ballooned during the coronavirus pandemic. It filed 35 lawsuits in 2016 but more than 3,000 in 2021 — an average of nearly nine a day.
Long COVID Research: A Pre-Pandemic Common Cold Coronavirus Infection Could Explain Why Some Patients Develop Long COVID
A pre-pandemic common cold coronavirus infection may help set the stage for long COVID, according to Boston researchers who have been looking to explain why some patients end up facing the long-lasting, debilitating symptoms.
The researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital teamed up with experts in immunology and virology to look for clues about long COVID in blood samples from patients with autoimmune rheumatic diseases.
The team found that among these patients, those who developed long COVID were more likely to have expanded, pro-inflammatory antibodies specific to a coronavirus that causes the common cold.
A person’s viral history, especially prior infection and expansion of antibodies against a pre-pandemic coronavirus, could prime the immune system for developing long COVID, according to the researchers.
Study Shows Elite Athletes Suffered No Long-Lasting Heart Damage After COVID
Today in Heart, researchers from Amsterdam University Medical Centers report that elite athletes followed up for 2 years after COVID-19 infections suffered no lasting damage to their hearts and faced no career setbacks because of their illnesses.
Because COVID-19 can cause inflammation of the heart muscles, and elite athletes are more prone to cardiac problems given the intense exertion experienced during their sports, the researchers followed outcomes for up to 27 months after infection to determine if any lasting cardiac damage was suffered.
A total of 259 elite athletes, 40% women, were included in the prospective study. The mean age was 26.5 years. All athletes were 16 years of age or older and included Olympians, Paralympians, and professional athletes who exercised more than 10 hours per week with an emphasis on competition and performance.
In the ICU, Doctors See Rise in COVID Cases but Less Severe Disease
For more than three years, Dr. Christopher Ohl has been treating COVID patients in the intensive care unit at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist in North Carolina.
Lately, however, he’s noticed a change: His patients are nowhere as sick as they used to be. It’s a trend other ICU doctors have noticed, too, even as COVID hospitalizations continue to rise.
The latest Omicron subvariants that have evolved and are now circulating “are not as nasty” as previous variants like Delta, or the original strain that first swept the country, Ohl said.
What’s more, the vast majority of Americans — 95%, according to the CDC — have some level of protective immunity to the virus, whether through vaccination, infection or both.
Long COVID Less Likely After Omicron Than Other Variants, Data Show
Researchers in Sweden report that the risk of getting long COVID after a COVID-19 infection was higher for the wild type, Alpha, and Delta variants compared to Omicron. The study is published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases.
Though prior research has shown that severe COVID-19 is less likely from Omicron infections compared to earlier variants, less is known about how each variant increases the likelihood of developing long COVID, or persistent symptoms lasting 12 or more weeks following acute infections.
The new study is based on cases in Stockholm, Sweden, and includes 3,002 people who received a long-COVID diagnosis any time from 90 to 240 days after first testing positive for SARS-CoV-2. All diagnoses were made after confirmed primary infections with the virus from October 2020 to February 2022.
EXCLUSIVE: FDA Refuses to Provide COVID Vaccine Safety Data to U.S. Senator
U.S. officials are refusing to provide COVID-19 vaccine safety data to a U.S. senator. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the results of analyses on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System in January. The request came after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said none of the safety signals it identified for the COVID-19 vaccines were “unexpected.”
The first time the CDC ran analyses using the method for the COVID-19 vaccines, in 2022, hundreds of signals were triggered, files obtained by The Epoch Times show.
Mr. Johnson demanded answers on that claim, prompting the CDC to point him to the FDA. The FDA recently responded to Mr. Johnson, telling him that it cannot provide the information he seeks.
“FDA’s EB data mining analyses of adverse events contained in VAERS reports for COVID-19 vaccines are currently the subject of pending FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] litigation. FDA is unable to comment on pending litigation or provide information or data that is currently being considered in pending litigation,” the agency told the senator.
COVID Map Shows 9 States Where Positive Tests Are Rising
The highest rates of people testing positive for COVID-19 are in Texas and the states that surround it, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 15% of COVID tests in the U.S. were positive in the week ending August 26, the most recent week of federal data, up 1.4% from the previous week.
Five states — Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas — had the highest test positivity at 20.8%, according to CDC data. In Texas, a ban on mask mandates went into effect earlier in September.
Those states were followed by Nevada, Hawaii, California, and Arizona, which all had 16.1% of tests come back positive that week.
Latest COVID Variant Spreading in U.K., Health Data Suggests
The latest COVID-19 variant, BA.2.86, appears to be spreading in the U.K., health surveillance data suggests.
The variant, nicknamed Pirola, has prompted concern among scientists because of the high number of mutations it carries, which raises the possibility that it could evade the immune system more easily or be more transmissible.
In a briefing note on Friday, the U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said that an outbreak at a care home in Norfolk and other cases across the U.K. indicated there was likely to be community transmission of the strain, but said it was too early to judge the full extent of its spread.
In an outbreak of COVID-19 in a care home in Norfolk at the end of August, 33 out of 38 residents tested positive for the virus, along with 12 members of staff, the UKHSA said. One resident needed hospital treatment but no deaths were reported. Laboratory tests later showed that 22 residents had the BA.2.86 variant, along with six staff.
