COVID-19 News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

Florida surgeon general altered key findings in study on Covid-19 vaccine safety
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/2 ... e-00093510

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo personally altered a state-driven study about Covid-19 vaccines last year to suggest that some doses pose a significantly higher health risk for young men than had been established by the broader medical community, according to a newly obtained document.

Ladapo’s changes, released as part of a public records request, presented the risks of cardiac death to be more severe than previous versions of the study. He later used the final document in October to bolster disputed claims that Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were dangerous to young men.

The surgeon general, a well-known Covid-19 vaccine skeptic, faced a backlash from the medical community after he made the assertions, which go against guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and American Academy of Pediatrics. But Ladapo’s statements aligned well with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ stance against mandatory Covid-19 vaccination.

Researchers with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and University of Florida, who viewed Ladapo’s edits on the study and have followed the issue closely, criticized the surgeon general for making the changes. One said it appears Ladapo altered the study out of political — not scientific — concerns...

[wjfox]

Mild Covid can lead to long-term impact on cardiovascular health, study claims

Scientists compared pre- and post-Covid infection levels of arterial stiffness, which can indicate cardiovascular health.

23 hours ago

Mild cases of Covid-19 can have long-term detrimental effects on cardiovascular health, according to new research.

A team of scientists including those from the University of Portsmouth were part of the study which compared pre- and post-Covid infection levels of arterial stiffness which can highlight ageing and how healthy the arteries are.

[...]

Professor Ana Jeroncic, from the University of Split, who led the study, said: “Given the number of people infected with Covid-19 worldwide, the fact that infection can have harmful effects on cardiovascular health in young people who had a mild form of the disease warrants close monitoring.

“The question remains as to whether this harmful effect is irreversible or permanent, and if not, for how long it lasts.”

Dr Perissiou added: “This study, while small, does support the prediction amongst vascular physiologists that we’ll have an increase in cardiovascular disease in the future as a result of Covid-19 infections.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/health/ ... 76840.html

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

WHO says Covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency

Updated 9:44 AM EDT, Fri May 5, 2023

CNN — Covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee discussed the pandemic on Thursday at its 15th meeting on Covid-19, and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus concurred that the public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC, declaration should end.

“For more than a year the pandemic has been on a downward trend,” Tedros said at a news conference Friday.

“This trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before Covid-19,” Tedros said. “Yesterday, the emergency committee met for the 15th time and recommended to me that I declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern. I have accepted that advice.”

The organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020, about six weeks before characterizing it as a pandemic.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/05/heal ... index.html

[wjfox]

Worth noting that WHO didn't remove the "pandemic" classification, just that it's no longer an emergency.

[raklian]

Worth noting that WHO didn't remove the "pandemic" classification, just that it's no longer an emergency.

Very weird.

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

What is long covid? For the first time, a new study defines it.

The findings are expected to help standardize the definition of long covid and influence how the condition is diagnosed and studied

May 25, 2023 at 11:00 a.m. EDT

More than 200 lingering symptoms have been reported in patients who suffer ongoing health problems after a covid infection. Now a new study has identified 12 key symptoms that best define the debilitating condition known as long covid.

The findings, published Thursday in JAMA, are based on 9,764 participants in a study called the RECOVER initiative, which stands for researching covid to enhance recovery, a four-year, $1.15 billion study of long covid funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The research is expected to help standardize the definition of long covid and have a significant impact on how the condition is diagnosed and studied, said Leora Horwitz, a physician and co-principal investigator for the RECOVER Clinical Science Core at NYU Langone Health.

“If you look up simple questions like ‘how many people get long covid,’ the answers are all over the place because people define it differently,” Horwitz said. “To really advance the science, we need a common language.”

In addition to identifying the key symptoms of long covid, the study used a point scoring system based on how likely the symptom was a true signal of long covid versus another condition.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness ... -4fVAtHdq4

[JamesWilson]

The World Health Organization ended the global emergency status for COVID-19 more than three years after its original declaration, but I can say that some people still continue wearing masks. In my city, I see people with masks every day. And on Wednesday, I had a long trip from Poland to France by bus, and there were a few people wearing masks the whole trip. And it's curious how long it will continue. I mean, it's understandable that COVID is still here, and I think it will never disappear, but it's just like the flu or other diseases. You can't wear masks forever, and it will not actually save you.

[toromash]

In my city (it's a capital), i have seen probably 4 or 5 persons with masks throughout 2023. half of them were asian turists, and half were elderly people. Covid is non existent in life, in conversations, in politics, everywhere. Only outside of my country does it seem to matter.

[weatheriscool]

China Might Have 65 Million COVID Cases a Week by June. How Worried Should the World Be?
Source: time

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China has been facing a new COVID-19 wave fueled by the XBB variant since April. Data from Zhong Nanshan—a respiratory disease doctor who was among the first to confirm COVID-19’s easy transmissibility—provided a rare insight into how the disease could possibly be spreading in China almost six months after Beijing abruptly ended its draconian zero-COVID strategy.


Since pivoting to “living with the virus” policy from early December, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention stopped updating weekly infections. But the sudden relaxation of anti-epidemic protocols also led to an estimated 37 million new infections a day weeks later. By January, experts said they believed almost 80% of China’s 1.4 billion population had already been infected in this first wave.

For the second wave since April, Zhong’s modeling revealed that the XBB variant is expected to cause 40 million infections weekly by May, going up to 65 million in June. This goes against the grain of Chinese health officials’ estimate that the wave had peaked in April. In Beijing, the number of new infections recorded between May 15 and 21 grew four times in four weeks.

Chinese data a concern

With the virus continuing to circulate in China coupled with a waning public immunity, the possibility of a new, more dangerous sub-variant emerging still exists, Bennett adds, although the likelihood is much smaller now. The latest mutations in the genetic makeup of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have not been significantly different from the last major variant, Omicron, and the symptoms of infections are relatively milder. “It’s somewhat reassuring, thus, now a year and a half into Omicron, that we haven’t seen a major shift that’s either undermined our immunity, our testing capability, and importantly, antivirals,” Bennett adds..................

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Read more: https://time.com/6283257/china-xbb-covid-outbreak/

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[raklian]

They're soooo close to finally getting it.

[weatheriscool]

CDC: COVID-19 infected more than 75% of Americans 16 and older
Source: UPI

While a little more than half of American adults think they've had COVID-19, the reality is about 77.5% have been infected at least once, new government data shows. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released final estimates for people ages 16 and up for 2022.

About 96.7% of adults had antibodies to the virus either from infection, vaccination or a combination of the two, the CDC reported. But U.S. census data shows that only 54.9% of Americans think they have had COVID-19.

While young adults and teens had the highest percentage of prior infection at 87.1%, seniors were the least likely to have had a prior infection, with about 56.5% of those over 65 having had COVID-19, the CDC found. The teen and young adult category includes those ages 16 to 29.

"It's become very difficult to measure prior infection in vaccine effectiveness studies. So, if you think about the typical person being hospitalized that's picked up in one of these studies, they may have had half a dozen prior infections that they did a nasal swab at home and were never reported," the CDC's Ruth Link-Gelles said at a meeting of its outside advisors recently, CBS News reported.

Read more: https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2023/07 ... 688562687/

[caltrek]

Humans Gave Deer Covid-19 — And There Could Be Serious Future Consequences
by Miriam Fauzia
July 12, 2023

Introduction:

(Inverse) Covid-19 isn’t only a human infectious disease. The pandemic, the origin of which is believed to be zoonotic, saw many other animals infected, like cats, dogs, horses, and now even deer.

According to a study published Monday in Nature Communications, humans transmitted Covid-19 to white-tailed deer hundreds of times in late 2021 and early 2022. The study, which was spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), collected over 8,000 respiratory samples from free-ranging white-tailed deer across 26 states and Washington, DC. The researchers identified over 280 viruses, a great portion of which from 109 independent spillover events from humans. Some of these infections led to 39 cases of deer-to-deer transmission and potential spillover back to humans.

While deer don’t pose a great Covid-19 threat to us yet, there’s the worry these animals could become a breeding ground for Covid-19, allowing the virus’ spike protein to evolve and mutate. The study found that variants that are not currently circulating in humans, such as the Alpha, Beta, and Delta strains, were still being swapped back and forth amongst deer. The Omicron variant was also found among the viral mix.

From deer, the virus may even jump to other animals, as has been proposed at the outset of the pandemic. Moving on to a new host would catalyze even more viral mutations and adaptions that could make Covid-19 nastier and more intractable to treat.

In this scenario, there’s the likelihood a newly evolved variant could get transmitted to us. A separate 2022 study published in Nature Microbiology found evidence of a "highly divergent lineage of SARS-CoV-2" that spread from deer to humans. The new study also found several cases in North Carolina and Massachusetts where humans were infected with these newly mutated versions of Covid-19 in deer.

Read more of the Inverse article here: https://www.inverse.com/health/humans- ... -backfire

Read the results of the study as presented in Nature Communications here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39782

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

'Dangerous Denials of Reality': Ex-NYT Editor Regrets Taking RFK Jr. Call
by Maya Bodie
July 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Alternet) In an op-ed published by The Guardian Tuesday, July 18, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan reflects on a phone call she took from conspiracy theorist and Democratic 2024 hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ten years ago.

Originally spooked by the fact RFK Jr. was on the other end of the line, Sullivan writes she "quickly realized, of course, that the caller was the former New York senator's son, an environmental attorney then in his late 50s.

The Guardian columnist continued, "Given his prominence, I took the call, only to endure an unpleasant screed from this anti-vaccine crusader. Once Kennedy had my ear, he spun out his pseudo-scientific theories, mostly about the causal relationship between childhood vaccines and autism. Though these notions had been debunked, he was relentless in wanting the New York Times to give them more credence."

The Guardian published Sullivan's op-ed the same day over 100 House Democrats urged House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in a letter to rescind Kennedy's invitation to testify before Congress this week, days after New York Post published a video, "in which Mr. Kennedy asserted that COVID-19 was bioengineered to target certain races."

The letter emphasized, "Specifically, Mr. Kennedy floated the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was purposely bioengineered in a lab to target Caucasians and Black people—but to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. These false claims echo centuries of Jews being scapegoated and held collectively responsible for illnesses like the Black Plague—often as a precursor for massacres and pogroms, and Chinese immigrants being blamed for plague outbreaks since the mid-1800s."

Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/ex-nyt-editor-rfk-call/

[note from Raklian] - removed Twitter link because it's now unavailable

As eacao referenced in mChat, “he was likely referencing this: https://www.alternet.org/ex-nyt-editor-rfk-call/ "

Also, in all a fairness to RFK, in the video he indicates that the targeting of COVID19 to certain racial groups may not have been “intentional.”

The real frustration I have with Kennedy’s pronouncements is what seems to be the utter lack of a discussion of alternative factors, such as the relatively poor quality of medical services provided to minorities and other such socio-economic considerations. This results in a very unbalanced treatment of the subject by RFK, Jr.

[caltrek]

This Gene Mutation May Hold the Clue to Why Some People Don't Get Covid-19
by Miriam Fauza
July 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Inverse) Like many scientists during the Covid-19 pandemic, Jill Hollenbach was stumped by why some folks appeared to dodge the worst of the virus while others did not. But as an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, she had a hunch about a set of proteins called human leukocyte antigen (or HLA). These proteins dot each and every one of our body’s cells. When a virus slips inside during an infection, our cells use HLAs to display pieces of viral protein to passing immune cells, much like a waiter with a tray of cocktail drinks.

“In general, most of the studies [looking at HLA] have focused on more severe disease. Good reasons for that is that we want to figure out how to prevent people from getting very ill and understanding what underlies that,” Hollenbach tells Inverse.

But with 20 percent of those infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind Covid-19, developing no symptoms at all — what’s called asymptomatic infection — it was equally crucial to parsing out this conundrum. What was it about the HLA of these individuals and, by extension, their immune systems granting invincibility against such a treacherous virus?

Researchers think it could be a genetic mutation in one type of HLA called HLA-B, helping the immune system wipe out the virus before it can do damage. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Hollenbach and her colleagues at UCSF and various research institutions across the US, UK, Brazil, and Australia, found that individuals carrying the mutation HLA-B*15:01 appeared to have pre-existing immunity to other seasonal coronaviruses and were up to eight times more likely to experience asymptomatic Covid-19.

While these findings don’t entirely explain why Covid-19 severity strikes unevenly within a population — there are other factors like age and pre-existing conditions — studies like Hollenbach’s further our understanding of the complex genetics behind Covid-19 susceptibility. They also point to ways we can beef up the immune gap, whether with vaccines or personalized medicine.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/health/gene-mu ... covid-19

[caltrek]

RFK Jr. Wants to Make It Easier for Doctors to Spread Medical Lies
by Kierra Butler
July 19, 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Here is a bit of news involving Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that, unlike his antisemitic remarks and the unfortunate soundtrack during one of his appearances, didn’t exactly go viral. Earlier this week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in a case against a California law that was passed last year to prohibit physicians from spreading misinformation about Covid. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a key figure in the fight against this law.

It’s not hard to see why this wasn’t exactly headline material. The pandemic officially ended in May, but Covid news fatigue set in long before that. Yet this particular case is worth paying attention to because the people who oppose California’s Covid misinformation law have expanded their areas of interest. Their efforts could lay the groundwork to give contrarian physicians broad authority to go rogue on all kinds of medical issues, from the administration of routine childhood vaccinations to reproductive health, gender-affirming care, and beyond.

To understand why, you need some context. In early 2022, California state assembly member Evan Low introduced AB 2098, a bill that would allow the state medical board to discipline doctors who promoted false information about Covid—say, by claiming that unproven treatments could cure or prevent the disease, or that the vaccines were dangerous. The bill garnered broad support from the healthcare sector, including from the California Medical Association, the state lobbying group that represents physicians. California governor Gavin Newsom signed it into law last September.

That level of support is remarkable since physicians don’t typically love being told that there are certain things they can’t say.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... -doctors

caltrek’s comment: Oh what a friggin headache. This is a classic example of the question of who guards the guardians?

The fact, as I understand it, is that physicians are already heavily constrained from prescribing a large number of alternative treatments for a wide variety of medical problems. In my readings, a common theme emerges: big business does not want to test and verify that cheap solutions not involving their patents that might actually be effective.

Newsome may rightly believe that this particular bill is very narrow in its focus. Still his assertion that “discussing emerging ideas or treatments, including risks and benefits, ‘does not constitute misinformation or disinformation under this bill’s criteria.’”

Just how in the hell does one differentiate the two?

Relying on the FDA in that regard is a highly dubious solution. It is essentially a government bureaucracy subject to political pressure. That agency’s conclusions may not be as science based as one would like. Even if they act in good faith on the evidence presented to them, the question arises as to how that evidence is developed and presented?

If big pharma and other establishment institutions only allow research where they see a possibility for profit, then a heavy distortion mechanism is in place. We arrive at a very perverse system in which an incentive is given for finding the most expensive solutions to a problem.

Why?

Because the most expensive solution also presents the greatest opportunity for corporate profit.

On the other side of the ledger, if there is no quality control mechanism in place, then all manner of quacks, charlatans, and opportunistic snake oil salesmen will rush into the breach. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. may be an easy target for those types, but that does not totally invalidate his skepticism on the subject.