Covid-19 News and Discussions

[Yommie]

Doctors Warn More Young Children Catching COVID-19 in Latest Outbreak | TaiwanPlus News​

 

[Yommie]

BREAKING REPORT: ARMY Admits Debilitating Heart Conditions Linked to Covid Vax!​

 

[Yommie]

Supreme Court rejects COVID-vaccine cases, including two brought by group founded by RFK Jr.

The Supreme Court let stand challenges the Children's Health Defense brought to the COVID-19 vaccine and to Rutgers' vaccination rules.

www.usatoday.com

 

[Yommie]

Latest XBB COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against hospitalization, deaths

www.cidrap.umn.edu

Latest XBB COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against hospitalization, deaths​

Stephanie Soucheray, MA

Today at 3:28 p.m.
COVID-19

Teka77/iStock

Today, JAMA Internal Medicine published a study calculating the protection offered by the latest Pfizer COVID-19 XBB vaccine compared to older vaccines against COVID-associated hospitalization and emergency department (ED) or urgent care (UC) visits.
The test-negative case-control study of the BNT162b2 XBB vaccine was performed among adults in the Kaiser Permanente Southern California health system from October 10 to December 10, 2023. XBB was the dominant strain of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States at that time but has since been supplanted by JN.1.
The study included patients who presented with an acute respiratory illness and had a positive SARS-CoV-2 polymerase chain reaction test and controls who had an acute respiratory illness but tested negative for SARS-CoV-2. A total of 2,854 cases and 15,345 controls (median age, 56) were included in the studies.
The authors compared outcomes among those who had received an updated XBB vaccine and those who had not received an XBB vaccine of any kind, regardless of prior COVID-19 vaccination or infection history.
"Receipt of prior (non-XBB) versions of COVID-19 vaccines was also compared with being unvaccinated to estimate remaining protection from older vaccines," the authors said.

62% protection against hospitalization​

Compared to those who had not received an updated XBB vaccine, recipients had 62% protection against COVID-19 hospitalization (95% confidence interval [CI], 32% to 79%). Protection was 58% against ED/UC visits (95% CI, 48% to 67%).
A history of vaccination with pre-XBB vaccines did not significantly reduce the risk of COVID-19 outcomes, including hospital admission, and outcomes were similar to those of unvaccinated patients.
The median time between vaccination with a non-XBB vaccine and illness was 1 to 2 years, while the median time between vaccination with an XBB vaccine and illness was 34 days.

The combination of waning vaccine-induced immunity and continuous SARS-CoV-2 strain evolution eventually renders prior versions of vaccines ineffective.

"The present findings help reaffirm current recommendations for broad age-based use of annually updated COVID-19 vaccines in the US to improve protection against COVID-19 each year prior to likely winter peaks in disease activity," the authors concluded. "The combination of waning vaccine-induced immunity and continuous SARS-CoV-2 strain evolution eventually renders prior versions of vaccines ineffective."
In an invited commentary on the study, Gopi Mohan, MD, PhD, of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and others, write, "These findings illuminate the issue of waning immunity and point to the importance of regular boosting in addition to updating vaccine formulations."

 

[Yommie]

Covid-19 latest: 34 deaths, 4788 reported new cases

There were 4788 new cases of Covid-19 reported in New Zealand in the week to Sunday.

www.rnz.co.nz

Covid-19 latest: 34 deaths, 4788 reported new cases​

4:11 pm on 17 June 2024

The seven-day rolling average of new cases was 509. Photo: NOBEASTSOFIERCE/SCIENCE PHOTO LI
There were 4788 new cases of Covid-19 reported in New Zealand in the week to Sunday, and 34 more deaths attributed to the virus.
Of the new cases, 3021 were reinfections.
There were 279 cases in hospital and none in intensive care, as of midnight on Sunday.
Last week,
the ministry reported 5230 new cases of Covid-19 and 20 further deaths.
The seven-day rolling average of reported new cases was 509, down from last week.
The latest figures came after a warning from epidemiologist Michael Baker that the inability of world leaders to agree on how to fight future pandemics was making another more likely.
The confirmed death toll to date is 4120, from 2.66 million reported infections.
The latest deaths included nine from Auckland, six from Wellington, four from Waikato, four from Canterbury, four from Southern, two from Lakes, two from Nelson-Marlborough one from Tai Rawhiti, one from South Canterbury.
Fifteen were in their 80s, nine in their 70s, four in their 90s, three in their 60s, two in their 50s and one in their 20s.

 

[Yommie]

Covid-19: 8943 new cases, 25 further deaths

There have been 8943 new cases of Covid-19 reported in New Zealand over the week to Sunday and 25 deaths.

www.rnz.co.nz

24 Jun 2024

Covid-19: 8943 new cases, 25 further deaths​

3:18 pm on 24 June 2024

Photo: 123rf.com / Composite Image - RNZ

There have been 8943 new cases of Covid-19 reported in New Zealand over the week to Sunday, and 25 further deaths attributed to the virus.
Of the new cases, 5389 were reinfections.
There were 241 cases in hospital and none in intensive care, as of midnight on Sunday.

The seven-day rolling average of reported new cases was 510, slightly up from last week.
Last week, the ministry reported 4788 new cases of Covid-19 and 34 further deaths.

 

[Yommie]

Lab Leak Mania

Why did the New York Times publish an op-ed supporting the lab leak theory?

pauloffit.substack.com

Lab Leak Mania​

Why did the New York Times publish an op-ed supporting the lab leak theory?​

PAUL OFFIT
JUN 24, 2024
55
58
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On June 3, 2024, the New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.” The article was written by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Boston. Chan had also written a book titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, which also supported the notion that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a Wuhan laboratory. Chan’s book has been roundly criticized by scientists who investigated the events in Wuhan. Nonetheless, two thirds of the American public, independent of political affiliation, believe that SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
Why is it important to understand the origin of SARS-CoV-2? In 2002, SARS-1 virus, the first pandemic coronavirus, caused 8,000 cases and 774 deaths. Ten years later, in 2012, MERS, the second pandemic coronavirus, caused 2,600 cases and 941 deaths. These statistics paled in comparison to SARS-CoV-2, first detected in 2019, which caused 700 million cases and more than 7 million deaths. In other words, three pandemic coronaviruses have swept across the world in the last 20 years. It is safe to assume that this won’t be the end of it. We need to understand the source of these pandemic viruses so that we can better prevent the next one.
In her op-ed, Chan wrote, “Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.” Chan was wrong to claim the existence of a “growing body of evidence.” On the contrary, her op-ed contained only conspiracies, innuendos, and blatantly false claims. Although several scientists have stepped forward to counter Chan’s claims, the best single take-down was by Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a virologist who hosts a popular podcast called This Week in Virology (TWiV).
In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.
Chan’s first “Key Points”: Chan’s stated that “bat coronavirus spillover events into humans are rare.” While pandemics are relatively rare, bat coronavirus spillover events into humans are common. About 1 in 40 people in China who live in close association with bats but were unaffected by the SARS-1 pandemic have antibodies to bat coronaviruses. Less commonly, these spillover events turn into pandemics. Why are animal-to-human spillover events so common. Take civets, for example, which were at the center of the SARS-1 pandemic in 2002. A live, infected civet sold in a wet market in Wuhan would average 7 human contacts per hour. This would allow the civet to infect more than 50 people a day. Animal-human spillover events aren’t limited to coronaviruses. Influenza virus (birds), human immunodeficiency virus (chimps), Ebola virus (bats), mpox (rodents), and the coronaviruses SARS-1 (bats) and MERS (bats) were all originally animal viruses. Indeed, about 70 percent of human viruses and bacteria have their origins in animals.
Chan’s second “Key Points”: Chan wrote that the Wuhan laboratory, “took coronaviruses from bats and other animals as well as from sick people [and] pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious.” The Wuhan laboratory studied a coronavirus strain called WIV1: a bat coronavirus like SARS-1 that could grow in monkey cells in the laboratory but didn’t cause disease in people. The WIV1 strain bears no resemblance to SARS-CoV-2. The laboratory combined WIV1 with each of eight different bat coronaviruses that had been found in caves in and around Wuhan. None of the combination viruses that were created, however, could cause disease in people. These studies were irrelevant to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.
Chan wrote, “It remains unclear whether researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology possessed the precursor of the pandemic virus.” It is now quite clear that they did not possess any such precursor. The only remote evidence of a precursor to SARS-CoV-2 was a virus called RATG13, which is 1,200 base pairs different from SARS-CoV-2, far from a precursor. Further, two U.S. intelligence reports in 2020 and 2023, now declassified, showed that the Wuhan laboratory was unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the start of the outbreak.
Chan wrote that, “Scientists on the [Wuhan] team fell ill with COVID in the fall of 2019.” While it was true that some of the scientists had a respiratory illness in the fall of 2019—it was, after all, winter respiratory virus season—none of them tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. A U.S. intelligence assessment in 2023 confirmed that there was no evidence of researchers sick with COVID prior to the outbreak.
Chan’s third “Key Points”: Chan wrote that, “The Wuhan lab pursued this work under low biosafety conditions that would not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2.” Research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was routinely carried out under Biosafety Laboratory-2 (BSL-2) conditions. Biosafety conditions, which range from BSL-1 to BSL-4, differ in the degree of personal protective equipment and engineering measures to increase containment. First, Wuhan researchers weren’t working with SARS-CoV-2 virus. Second, even if they were working with SARS-CoV-2, BSL-2 containment is considered adequate. Indeed, for laboratories working with measles virus—which is far more contagious than SARS-CoV-2—BSL-2 containment is acceptable.
Chan wrote, “If the virus had escaped from the lab in 2019, it most likely would have gone undetected until too late.” If the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, then most, if not all, the early cases should have been around the Institute, not 9 miles away on the other side of the Yangtze River in a place where an animal-to-human spillover event would most likely have occurred.
Chan’s fourth “Key Points”: Chan wrote, “The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market is not supported by strong evidence. [We] can’t distinguish between the market and a human superspreader.” It is at this point that Chan’s op-ed defies common sense. Two different lineages of SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected early in the outbreak. Chan would have us believe that two different SARS-CoV-2 viruses were created in the laboratory and then taken directly by human superspreaders to the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market exactly where you would have expected an animal-to-human spillover event to occur. Why didn’t one or both superspreaders go to any of the 10,000 other places in Wuhan to begin a pandemic.
Chan wrote, “Not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.” When the outbreak began, Chinese authorities shut down the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, disinfected the area, and killed the animals likely to have served as intermediates between bats and humans. In other words, no animals were available to test. This was in direct contrast to SARS-1, another animal-to-human spillover event that originated in a Foshan, China, wet market. In that case, the market continued to operate. For that reason, animals that were the likely source of SARS-1 were available for testing. This is perhaps Chan’s most disingenuous comment. You can’t go back in time and test animals that no longer exist.
Chan’s fifth “Key Points”: Chan wrote, “Chinese authorities have not done an intense search for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2.” True. Mostly because all the animals in the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market were immediately slaughtered. Researchers did, however, find genetic evidence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in carts, drains, a feather-and-hair remover, a metal cage, and machines that process animals after they’ve been slaughtered in wet market stalls that were at the epicenter of the outbreak. In the same specimens, they found mammalian DNA consistent with raccoon dogs, bamboo rats, and palm civets, all likely intermediate hosts as bat coronaviruses spilled into the human population.
Now that overwhelming evidence supports the fact that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a wet market in Wuhan, it’s time to make sure this doesn’t happen again. First, we need to hold the Chinese government accountable for failing to supervise wet markets that were selling mammals susceptible to coronaviruses illegally under non-hygienic conditions. Between May 2017 and November 2019, market vendors sold 47,000 live animals across 38 species, 31 of which were protected under Chinese law and were, therefore, being sold illegally. This is now the second time that a pandemic coronavirus has arisen in a Chinese wet market. Also, the international community should not have had to rely on a whistleblower in China (Dr. Li Wenliang, who would later succumb to the disease) to inform the world that a virus causing fatal pneumonias was circulating in Wuhan. Finally, Chinese health officials must allow international teams of scientists into their country the moment a possible pandemic virus raises its head, instead of barring entry, which only fuels conspiracy theories, like those advanced by Alina Chan.
It is time we put aside the fruitless, dead-end hypothesis of a lab leak and do the work that is necessary to prevent the next pandemic.

 

[Yommie]

COVID infection endangers pregnancies and newborns. Why aren't parents being warned?

From conception to birth, COVID infections increase risks to parent and baby. Prenatal education is ignoring it.

www.thegauntlet.news

COVID infection endangers pregnancies and newborns. Why aren't parents being warned?​

From conception to birth, COVID infections increase risks to parent and baby. Prenatal education is ignoring it.​

JULIA DOUBLEDAY
JUN 21, 2024
69
5
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In the movie Knocked Up, Seth Rogan’s character refers to the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting as “basically a giant list of things you can't do.” It’s a line that pokes fun at the seemingly ever-expanding list of foods, behaviors and hazards that pregnant people are encouraged to avoid in order to reduce health risks to themselves and their babies.
Despite pre-natal education’s reputation for warning new mothers of every possible danger from jumping on trampolines to eating soft cheeses, contracting a vascular virus that increases risk of pre-eclampsia, pre-term birth, miscarriage and stillbirth is being ignored. Let’s look at the evidence.
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Risks to Pregnancy
​

Studies demonstrating the harm of COVID in pregnancy are thick on the ground; I’ll discuss just a few.
As reported in Forbes, a 2023 Lancet study found that:

SARS-CoV-2 infections during pregnancy are associated with placental lesions from vascular malperfusion, which can result in increased rates of fetal growth restriction, pre-labor membrane rupture, and miscarriage.

A study published in Placenta in 2023 begins by stating “we deduced that COVID-19 pregnancies were oxygen deficient, which could further result in other pregnancy-related complications like preeclampsia and IUGR.”
From a 2023 study published in the Journal of Personalized Medicine:

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues into its third year, there is accumulating evidence on the consequences of maternal infection. Emerging data indicate increased obstetrics risks, including maternal complications, preterm births, impaired intrauterine fetal growth, hypertensive disorders, stillbirth, gestational diabetes, and a risk of developmental defects in neonates.

As reported by CIDRAP, a large study published in JAMA Network Open found that “SARS-CoV-2 infection is tied to increased preterm birth (PTB), high blood pressure during pregnancy, and severe maternal morbidity.”
Another 2023 study found that pregnant women who tested positive for COVID on a PCR were more likely to develop preeclampsia/eclampsia, more likely to need a C-section, and more likely to experience a postpartum hemorrhage, among other risks.
In summary, a wide array of studies find an increased risk of high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, pre-term birth, miscarriage, low birth weight, birth defects and more in women who contract COVID while pregnant.
However, like other medical specialties, OB/GYNs often downplay or ignore risks entirely. A 2022 analysis found that the prevalence of gestational diabetes increased by almost 40% since COVID at a single academic center, with the study reporting that:

Delivery during the pandemic remained a significant predictor of gestational diabetes when controlling for maternal age, prepregnancy BMI and gestational weight gain.

In the reporting about this study on Healio, one of the study authors, herself an OB student, states, “This emphasizes the importance of appropriate antenatal counseling on healthy diet and lifestyle….This also spurs the question of what exactly may be causing these increased rates, whether it is COVID-19 directly or the effects of the quarantine.”
The doctor’s own study found that the pandemic was a predictor of gestational diabetes when controlling for pre-pregnancy BMI and weight gain, yet her question seems to indicate that she is more concerned about “healthy diet” than the variable that actually spiked diabetes rates. (COVID has been shown to spike your risk of diabetes generally, by the way.)
This tendency to blame “lockdowns” for clear post-COVID health effects continues to weaken public support for necessary public health interventions and disease mitigations generally. Only two major changes can be responsible for ongoing post-COVID health effects; when you minimize the effects of COVID, you throw vaccines, isolation guidelines, and masks under the bus as the only alternative explanation for the harm we’re seeing at a population level, intentionally or not.
It’s important to note that study after study finds that all of the above risks are reduced by COVID-19 vaccination. This information is particularly important to highlight given the tendency for COVID minimizers and denialists to attribute harm to vaccines and other interventions (masks, lockdowns). However, reduced risk does not mean zero risk; no one would encourage a pregnant mom to contract any other virus due to her vaccination status, nor are other risk factors with less potential for poor outcomes ignored.
And the risks of COVID exposure don’t end when babies are born. Babies exposed to COVID both before and after birth are at risk for a wide array of negative health outcomes and cannot be vaccinated before 6 months of age (although maternal vaccination does reduce risk to babies somewhat, with the linked study finding a 35% reduced risk of hospitalization for infants with COVID-vaccinated mothers).

Risks to Babies
​

One of the persistent myths of the pandemic has been that COVID is harmless to kids; this myth is itself false as we can see in the many cases of Long COVID in children, and the fact that COVID is a leading cause of death in children, killing more kids in the US annually than any other infectious disease. The falsehood of COVID’s harmlessness to kids has somehow transformed into the even more inaccurate idea that “therefore COVID is harmless to unborn and newborn babies”.
In fact, infants are six times more likely to be hospitalized for a COVID infection than other children under five, and have had the second highest hospitalization rate after seniors above 65 during the Omicron waves. After declining each year since 2007, infant mortality in the US increased from 2020 to 2021, and from 2021 to 2022, 2% and 3% respectively. [Note: data from 2023 is not yet available.] Both respiratory distress deaths (up 11% in 2022) and bacterial sepsis deaths (up 14% in 2022)- which can be brought on by COVID infections- have increased significantly.
When health guidance instructs that vulnerable groups should “make their own risk assessments,” babies under 6 months old are some of the people being empowered with personal health decisions rather than collective disease mitigations.
Parents have been advised to keep newborn babies at home for many decades prior to COVID. Babies are notoriously susceptible to infections. Historically, nearly half of children died before reaching adulthood, with under 5s being the most vulnerable subset, and new babies being more vulnerable yet. Protecting newborns was something we treated as common knowledge prior to COVID normalization policies. From a 2011 WebMD article titled “Protecting Your Baby From Other People's Germs”:

Keep in mind that germs like cold and flu viruses that are pretty benign in adults can cause problems in young babies. For that …. parents should be very careful to protect their babies from germs in the first three months -- and if possible, the first six.

Now, with a much deadlier virus circulating year-round at sky-high rates, there seems to be little communication to parents and the public at large about disease mitigation around babies. Additionally, during the pre-pandemic era, viruses like the flu and colds were thought to be spread via droplets, meaning that we believed viral particles would quickly fall to the ground rather than hang in the air. Now that we know they are fully airborne, health recommendations should be updated to reflect the reality of airborne transmission, meaning mask wearing for individuals, and clean air at the population level.
Both pre-natal exposure and exposure after birth are damaging to infants and carry an assortment of risks, including respiratory problems, delayed development, and more.
A 2022 study published in The Lancet found that “fetal lung volume was significantly reduced” in babies born to mothers who had mild COVID infections during their pregnancy. Infection prior to birth carries longer term risks to kids. Another recent study published in Nature Communications and covered at NBC News found that:

Babies born to mothers who had Covid during pregnancy had "unusually high rates" of respiratory distress at birth or shortly thereafter…The authors defined respiratory distress as having at least two out of four symptoms: a slow breathing rate, pale or bluish skin, flaring nostrils or a retraction of the chest with each breath.

Yet another looked at “whether SARS-CoV-2 exposure during pregnancy impacted the longer-term development and breathing of babies, and whether they suffered more health problems than children who were not exposed.” From an article published by University of Leicester:

The team found that overall development at two years of age did not differ between the children who were exposed and not-exposed to SARS-CoV-2. However, on a group level, the exposed cohort were at greater risk of slightly delayed social-emotional development.
Importantly, children exposed to the virus in the perinatal period also had more problems with breathing and used health care services more, including more inpatient, outpatient and GP attendances by two years of age when compared with the non-exposed cohort.

In other words, kids who were exposed to COVID before birth were still using more healthcare services at age 2.
A 2022 Trends in Molecular Medicine study of fetal brain development states that “given the potential for profound maternal immune activation (MIA), impact on the developing fetal brain is likely.” A 2024 study looking at pregnancies between 2022-2023 (the post-vaccine period) found that COVID infection significantly increased risk of fetal situs inversus, a rare birth defect that causes organs to be mirror-image transposed and is linked to congenital heart defects. Yet another 2024 study found impaired cardiac function in babies whose mothers contracted COVID in the second trimester. I could go on.
In summary, ongoing research finds a wide array of impacts on infant development when contracted in the womb or shortly after birth.

---

We’ve established that contracting SARS-COV-2 is a risk to both pregnancy and infant. So, are we seeing OBs recommend that pregnant women wear masks? Are we seeing parents being told to keep newborn infants home because of the unending COVID soup we find ourselves stewing in? Are family members of new parents being instructed to wear masks in public spaces so they don’t give new babies a COVID infection?
Like much of the medical industry, prenatal care is largely ignoring COVID. The topics listed on the CDC’s “During Pregnancy” page include: folic acid, vaccines, cigarettes, alcohol, cannabis, safer food choices, STIs, toxoplasmosis, HIV and West Nile. Not a word about the leading infectious disease cause of death in the US, an entire section on West Nile, of which there were a whopping 2,406 cases total in 2023.
The reason health bodies and therefore many medical professionals try to bury, ignore, and minimize COVID are political, psychological and social.
Politically, governments decided to sell a “we beat the pandemic” narrative to the public after vaccines failed to produce herd immunity as promised. For this reason, political health bodies like the CDC began putting out guidance from the very top encouraging people to accept the “new normal” of unending reinfections. Acceptance of constant reinfections relies heavily on the perception that COVID infections are a truly neutral event for your health- something that no research, and no study, has ever concluded.
In the winter of 2021, the CDC reduced the COVID isolation period at the behest of the CEO of Delta Airlines, who couldn’t keep flights staffed adequately due to high levels of illness. Since then, they body has continued to ignore science in favor of political and economic considerations; our current isolation period is “one day if you want to,” something that does not accord with any science about COVID transmission, but does accomplish the CDC’s political goal of forcing sick people back to work.
Bodies like HICPAC- the infection control advisory body to the CDC- continue to put out infection control guidelines that do not control COVID infections, while resorting to ever-more bewildering excuses for letting COVID run rampant in hospitals. (“We can’t mandate masks because people won’t wear them” is an actual consideration, ignoring that both handwashing and glove-wearing protocols took years if not decades to achieve full adherence, and that infection control guidance is not supposed to pander to people who don’t want to do infection control).
Similarly, the WHO’s self-contradicting document about airborne transmission released earlier this year both finally acknowledges that COVID is fully airborne, then encourages healthcare settings to make their own decisions about whether or not they feel like implementing airborne infection control, and, ya know, controlling infections.
All of this produces tremendous top-down pressure on medical practitioners to view COVID as mild and even a health-neutral event. If infection control experts and disease control bodies are encouraging medical professionals to allow COVID to spread in healthcare settings, the moral injury to doctors and nurses watching patients get infected is immense. That is, unless COVID is not bad for you and cannot harm you. This is where psychological and social motivations come into play.
Even politically motivated bodies like the CDC and WHO have never come out and said that COVID is not harmful for vulnerable groups. In fact, their normalizing propaganda relies on the offloading of harmful effects on to a perma-outgroup, “the vulnerable,” which expands to admit anyone who develops Long COVID or is otherwise harmed by COVID. According to their own logic, the tens of thousands of preventable deaths of COVID last year were all of “vulnerable” people. Wouldn’t it then follow that vulnerable people, like pregnant women and infants, should then be the most protected, with more mitigations and safety measures?
Sadly, this is where the CDC’s self-contradicting logic collapses in on itself. Hospital settings, where vulnerable people have to exist amidst uncontrolled COVID, create cognitive dissonance for observers. According to “back to normal,” everyone can simply make their own risk calculations every day when they leave home. Using the handy government data that continues to be stripped away and is based on tests people can no longer access, vulnerable people are supposed to make educated guesses about how likely they are to be killed by entering a public space each morning. But in a hospital, suddenly this entire concept- vulnerable people can just totally isolate themselves from everyone else in society- completely falls apart. The CDC, HICPAC, and WHO guidance doesn’t protect vulnerable people at all from infections in healthcare.
The reality is that if there are no airborne infection control protocols in place and COVID is spreading at high levels throughout society, you’re likely to get exposed to COVID in a healthcare setting. Instead of doing that mental math and thinking “hey, if COVID harms people, maybe it’s a good idea to get the unmitigated spread of COVID under control in society as a whole,” many medical professionals do the mental math the other way: “if unmitigated spread is being allowed in society as a whole, it must be that COVID doesn’t harm people.”
Pregnant people and newborn babies are vulnerable members of our society, just like elderly people. The difference is that the eugenics-first campaign to abandon vulnerable people to infections prefers to use elderly people as its poster children, because the public is more easily convinced to allow elderly people to be harmed. Disabled people are also better sacrificial lambs for the “back to normal” campaign, which likes to claim that only those who “deserve” to be harmed will be harmed by unmitigated disease spread. Because of widespread ableism, much of the public is okay with being told that their behaviors are killing old and disabled people. But as it turns out, no one really likes to think about their behavior as harming newborn infants and pregnant people. Therefore, our collective approach to addressing this harm, from doctors to family members, is to pretend it isn’t happening.
Once health practitioners and family members start to understand the importance of mitigating COVID for newborn babies, mightn’t they start to demand a better public response to disease spread than “let it rip”? Mightn’t they stop to think about the reality that COVID is not, as we’ve been encouraged to believe, completely inevitable and completely harmless?
Unfortunately, the widespread reluctance to even speak the word “COVID” leaves expectant parents out of the loop as they attempt to navigate their “personal risk assessments” during pregnancy. Pregnant people deserve honest information about the risks of COVID infection, as well as education about how best to avoid infections and mitigate risks. And the public deserves to know that our instructions to allow the vulnerable to “fall by the wayside” includes newborn babies.

 

[Yommie]

'The Total Destruction of Our Economy Was A Political Choice' | COVID Lockdowns SLAMMED​

 

[Yommie]

COVID Is Surging Right Now. Here's What Alarms Doctors The Most.

Infectious disease experts share what's different about this latest wave and what to know about the new variants.

www.huffpost.com

COVID Is Surging Right Now. Here's What Alarms Doctors The Most.​

Infectious disease experts share what's different about this latest wave and what to know about the new variants.

By Julia Ries
Jun 25, 2024, 03:00 AM EDT

AGROBACTER VIA GETTY IMAGES

Since the pandemic started, we've seen a surge of COVID infections during the summer months.
We don’t typically associate hot weather with viral illnesses, but COVID has thwarted that in recent years. This summer seems to be no exception: Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that COVID test positivity rates and emergency room visits are steadily rising, especially along both coasts.
The culprit: the FLiRT variants. This family of variants, which evolved from omicron, took off in the spring. Now, they account for over 50% of infections.

According to Dr. Robert H. Hopkins, Jr., the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, this year’s summer wave got an early start ― and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon. “I suspect it’s going to increase,” Hopkins told HuffPost. “It seems like we’re seeing more and more states showing increased levels of activity.”
Here’s what to know about the summer COVID spike:

What’s up with the new FLiRT variants?​

The FLiRT variants are offshoots of JN.1, which was the dominant variant in the U.S. this past winter.

Here is the Reason We Tend to Get Motion Sickness in a Cab

This family of variants appears to be very contagious, thanks to mutations in the spike protein that may improve the virus’s ability to bind to human cells. “When we look at their molecular profile, some of those mutations potentially could allow the [virus] to escape from previous immunity,” Hopkins explained.
According to Dr. Nikhil Bhayani, an assistant professor in the department of internal medicine at the Burnett School of Medicine at Texas Christian University, one variant in particular is gaining steam right now: KP.3. It’s currently responsible for roughly 25% of cases.

Two other variants in the FLiRT family, KP.2 and KP.1.1, make up 22.5% and 7.5% of infections, respectively. Research from Japan found that KP.2, the dominant variant this past spring, was more transmissible than its predecessors and potentially better at outsmarting our vaccines.
Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like the illness will be any different with the FLiRT variants, according to Hopkins. He suspects they’ll trigger the typical COVID symptoms: Fever, cough, congestion, sore throat, body aches and, though less common these days, loss of taste and smell.
The increase in cases also doesn’t appear to be causing an uptick in hospitalizations. “There’s no evidence they’re more severe than what we’ve been dealing with,” Hopkins said.

What concerns experts about this wave of infections?​

We’ve seen summertime increases in COVID infections every year during the pandemic, according to Hopkins, so this isn’t too out of the ordinary. What does alarm him, however, is how early we’re seeing the summer wave kick off this year.
According to Aubree Gordon, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Michigan Center for Infectious Disease Threats & Pandemic Preparedness in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, variants gain traction when they evolve to evade the immunity we achieved through past infections and vaccinations.

The current wave is “probably predominately [caused] by those changes in the virus that are probably resulting in it being able to better get around preexisting immunity,” Gordon told HuffPost.
It doesn’t help that it’s likely been a while since many people were last vaccinated. In May, the CDC revealed that only 22% of adults had received an updated COVID shot since it was released in September 2023.
This dip in immunity, combined with the FLiRT variants’ advantageous mutations, could be fueling the spread. Recent gatherings marking the start of summertime, including Memorial Day Weekend and Father’s Day, may be contributing, too, according to Hopkins. It’s known, after all, that social gatherings are a huge source of disease transmission.

Is now a good time to get a booster shot?​

It’s expected that all main vaccine manufacturers will have an updated shot available in the fall that, most likely, will target the KP.2 strain. If you’re wondering whether you should get another jab now or hold off until the new booster’s here, know this: There’s really no wrong time to get a booster shot, Bhayani said.
While the updated shot will likely better target circulating strains, the currently available vaccines will likely still provide good protection against getting sick, and more important, winding up in a hospital or dying, research suggests.

The timing of your next dose depends on your overall health and when you got your previous booster or were last infected. In general, health experts recommend spacing doses out by at least four months.
If you were infected or got vaccinated in the past few months, it might make the most sense to hold off until the new shot’s out later this year, Gordon said. “I’d recommend they delay vaccination just because they’re not going to benefit from it too much at this point,” she said.
That said, Hopkins recommends that people 65 and older who didn’t receive the latest vaccine to go out and get another shot now. The same goes for people who are immunocompromised and haven’t had a shot in the past two months.
“Why take a chance with this current surge if we’ve got something that is going to reduce your severity of illness?” Hopkins said.

Here’s what to do if you get COVID this summer.​

If you contract COVID, it’s a good idea to first test yourself at home with an antigen test. If your test is negative, Hopkins recommended testing yourself again in 24 hours because it can take a few days for the virus to become detectable in your sinuses.

If you’re concerned about your symptoms, reach out to your primary care physician or visit an urgent care to get a PCR test ― these are more sensitive and catch a higher percentage of cases.
Older adults, people who are immunocompromised and those with chronic illnesses face a higher risk of severe disease. Hopkins advised anyone in these groups to contact a health care provider as soon as they feel sick. There are effective oral antivirals ― Paxlovid and molnupiravir ― that can shorten the duration of your illness and reduce the severity of it. But here’s the kicker: They work best when given within five days after symptoms appear.
As for otherwise healthy individuals who test positive, the same tried-and-true measures still work well. Acetaminophen and anti-inflammatories, like ibuprofen and naproxen, can reduce a fever, nasal sprays alleviate congestion, drinking fluids prevents dehydration and getting plenty of rest will aid your overall recovery, Hopkins said.
Finally, keep a distance from other people for five days or until your symptoms are improving. If you do go out, the CDC recommends masking up until the 11th day of your sickness.
These new variants might be adept at skirting our immunity, but getting another booster shot and wearing a high-quality mask in crowded spaces are still the very best ways to stay healthy this summer.

 

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Why Are Some People Seemingly Immune to Covid-19? Scientists May Now Have an Answer

Researchers tracked the immune responses of 16 people intentionally exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and pinpointed a gene that seems to help resist the virus before it can take hold

www.smithsonianmag.com

Why Are Some People Seemingly Immune to Covid-19? Scientists May Now Have an Answer​

Researchers tracked the immune responses of 16 people intentionally exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and pinpointed a gene that seems to help resist the virus before it can take hold

Christian Thorsberg
Daily Correspondent
June 24, 2024

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A new study sheds light on the timeline of the human immune response when confronted with SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases. Ergin Yalcin via Getty Images

More than four years after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic that has since totaled more than 775 million cumulative cases worldwide, scientists are shedding light on the specific immune responses that have made some people seemingly resistant to catching the virus.
New research emerging from the United Kingdom, conducted as part of the Covid-19 Human Challenge Study and the Human Cell Atlas project, has found that a combination of robust nasal cell defense and high activity of a particular gene work together to ward off the virus in some individuals before it can take hold.

The research, published last week in the journal Nature, provides clarity on the timeline of the human body’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases.
“These findings shed new light on the crucial early events that either allow the virus to take hold or rapidly clear it before symptoms develop,” Marko Nikolić, the study’s senior author and an honorary consultant in respiratory medicine at University College London (UCL), says in a statement. “We now have a much greater understanding of the full range of immune responses, which could provide a basis for developing potential treatments and vaccines that mimic these natural protective responses.”
Conducted in 2021, the study began with the researchers spraying a low dosage of the original SARS-CoV-2 variant up the noses of 36 healthy adult volunteers who were both unvaccinated and had never had the virus before.
From this group, researchers collected 16 volunteers’ nasal and blood samples on multiple occasions—before exposure and several times in the following 28 days—to track the spread of the virus and the participants’ immune responses. Sequencing these samples, the team produced a data set containing more than 600,000 individual cells and their behaviors before, during and after exposure.

The volunteers’ responses fell into three distinct categories. Six people became ill and displayed symptoms; three people briefly tested positive for Covid-19 but were asymptomatic, known as a transient infection; and seven people consistently tested negative and displayed no symptoms, but built up an immune response to the virus—what the team called an abortive infection.
In these latter two groups, participants showed high baseline activity of a gene called HLA-DQA2, which helps to efficiently alert the immune system to potential threats.
“These cells will take a little bit of the virus and show it to immune cells and say: ‘This is foreign: You need to go and sort it out,’” Kaylee Worlock, a molecular biologist and post-doctoral research fellow at UCL, tells the Guardian’s Hannah Devlin.
Another common trait among people in the two latter groups related to the production of interferon, or proteins that help bolster the body’s immune system. For these volunteers, interferon was produced in the blood before it appeared in the upper nasal region.
The people with transient and abortive responses developed a quick immune response—built up within about one day—inside their noses. Meanwhile, those who tested positive for Covid-19 took an average of five days to build up a nasal immune response.

Notably, the participants were not immune to getting Covid-19—some later caught the virus in the community, after the research concluded. And now, several other variants of SARS-CoV-2 are circulating—not just the original variant that was tested. But scientists say the research offers important clues to immune resistance.
“This study serves as a unique resource of previously uninfected SARS-CoV-2 participants due to its carefully controlled design and real understanding of ‘time zero’ for when the infection took place in order to measure the immune responses that follow,” José Ordovas-Montanes, an immunologist at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute who was not involved in the research, tells New Scientist’s Sonali Roy

 

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"No evidence" new COVID variant LB.1 causes more severe disease, CDC says

The LB.1 variant makes up close to 1 in 5 new COVID cases, the CDC estimates.

www.cbsnews.com

"No evidence" new COVID variant LB.1 causes more severe disease, CDC says​

By Alexander Tin
Edited By Paula Cohen
June 25, 2024 / 5:10 PM EDT / CBS News

There are no signs so far that the new LB.1 variant is causing more severe disease in COVID-19 patients, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, as infections have begun to accelerate in this summer's wave around the country.

The LB.1 variant currently makes up 17.5% of new COVID cases, the CDC projected Friday, and could be on track to overtake its sibling, the KP.3 variant, which has also been growing in recent weeks.

"There is currently no evidence that KP.3 or LB.1 cause more severe disease. CDC will continue to track SARS-CoV-2 variants and is working to better understand the potential impact on public health," CDC spokesperson David Daigle said in a statement.

The reason behind any potential shifts to the symptoms or severity of disease caused by new variants is complex, affected by people's underlying immunity from a mix of past infections and vaccinations as well as changes to the virus itself.

The CDC has said in the past that it closely tracks the toll inflicted by the latest strains largely based on data and studies from hospitals, comparing trends from places where new variants have emerged first.

Only a fraction of facilities are still reporting figures on hospitalizations and ICU admissions to the CDC, after a pandemic-era requirement lapsed earlier this year. A proposal by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to incorporate the data reporting into routine requirements is not scheduled to take effect until October.

Instead, the agency has turned to other sources like a network of hospitals that still report more detailed data about patients to the agency as well as emergency room visits to track the virus.

Where is LB.1 rising fastest?​

In California, one of the states that saw trends of the virus rise earliest this summer in wastewater to "high" levels, the CDC's COVID-NET data shows hospitalizations were near levels not seen there since February.

More recent data from emergency rooms in California also shows rates of COVID-19 patients have risen to levels not seen since February.

But the KP.3 variant — not LB.1 — made up the largest proportion of cases during that early surge, estimates from the CDC as well as California's health department suggest.

Just 7.8% of cases in HHS Region 9, which spans California and some other western states, were projected to be from the LB.1 variant through June 8.

Instead, LB.1's prevalence looks to be largest in HHS Region 2, which includes New York and New Jersey. Through June 8, 30.9% of cases are estimated to have been caused by LB.1.

What's different about LB.1?​

Compared to highly mutated SARS-CoV-2 variants that showed up earlier during the pandemic, experts say LB.1's changes are relatively small compared to its parent variant JN.1, which was dominant during this past winter's wave.

LB.1 is also closely related to KP.3, which is also a descendant of the JN.1 variant. Unlike KP.3, LB.1 has a key mutation that scientists call S:S31del that looks to be helping it spread faster.

Research by scientists in Japan this month, which was released as a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, found that this mutation seemed to be more infectious and better at evading the immune system.

 

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What to know about the so-called COVID 'flirt' variants​

 

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Soldier claims COVID vaccine caused heart attacks, stroke | Cuomo​

 

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Anthony Fauci: Long COVID is real