COVID-19 News and Discussions

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'Lab Leak,' a flashy page on the virus' origins, replaces government COVID sites

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-heal ... id-origins

White House trumpets Covid lab leak theory on web page that was devoted to health information

https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/18/cov ... d-coverup/

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Updated Covid vaccines for the fall may be in jeopardy under Kennedy's new rules

Source: NBC News

May 1, 2025, 5:48 PM EDT
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The anticipated rollout of updated Covid vaccines this fall might be at risk after a change by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in how vaccines are tested, experts say.

Under the change by Kennedy, according to an HHS spokesperson, all new vaccines will need to go through placebo-controlled clinical trials — where some people get the actual shot and others get something inactive, like a saline shot — to compare the results. Running trials that include a placebo group is already routine for most new vaccines.

The original Covid vaccines, from Pfizer and Moderna, approved in late 2020, went through placebo-controlled trials. But as the virus continued to mutate and the vaccines needed to be updated to match the circulating strain, drugmakers moved to a flu vaccine-like model — using smaller studies to test how well the updated shots triggered an immune response against the variant in question.

Like the annual flu shot, the updated Covid vaccines weren’t treated as entirely new products, since they still used the same formula, with just a tweak to what strain the vaccine would be targeting. The mRNA Covid vaccines were designed so that this change would be particularly easy to make, in the event the shots needed to be quickly updated.

Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-n ... rcna204242

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Read the WSJ report here:

https://archive.ph/mVx9i

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FDA will limit Covid vaccines to people over 65 or at high risk of serious illness, leaders say

Source: STAT

By Helen Branswell, Matthew Herper, and Lizzy LawrenceMay 20, 2025

The Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it will limit access to Covid-19 vaccines going forward to people 65 years of age and older and others who are at high risk of becoming seriously ill if they are infected, and will require manufacturers to conduct clinical trials to show whether the vaccines are of benefit to healthy younger adults and children.

After weeks of signaling a shift in thinking, the new leaders of the FDA and the agency’s division that regulates vaccines published a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine laying out their plan for future use of Covid vaccines.

Read more: https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/20/fda ... ty-makary/

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[firestar464]

More on that by CBS:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vari ... r-vaccine/

"What they're seeing in China, Hong Kong and some other areas where this variant has really surged, is an increase in hospitalization, but that seems to be more to do with just a standard summer surge that we've been seeing," Edwards explained, adding the available data is still preliminary, but that the variant "doesn't seem to be more severe."

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The Covid-19 pandemic may have aged our brains, according to a new study

22 July 2025

A new study, led by experts at the University of Nottingham, has found that the Covid-19 pandemic may have accelerated people’s brain health, even if they were never infected with the virus.

What does it mean to grow older, not just in years, but in terms of brain health? Can stress, isolation, and global disruption leave their mark on people’s minds?

The findings of this new study, which are published in Nature Communications, showed that people who lived through the Covid-19 pandemic showed signs of faster brain ageing over time than those scanned entirely before it. The changes were most noticeable in older individuals, in men, and in people from more disadvantaged backgrounds.

Only participants who were infected by Covid-19 between their scans showed a drop in certain cognitive abilities, such as mental flexibility and processing speed. This may suggest that the pandemic’s brain ageing effect, on its own (without infection) may not cause symptoms. Also, the authors highlight that the observed brain ageing may be reversible.

The study was led by a team of experts from the University’s School of Medicine and was supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre and the Medical Research Council (MRC) DEMISTIFI programme.

Dr Ali-Reza Mohammadi-Nejad led the study, he said: “What surprised me most was that even people who hadn’t had Covid showed significant increases in brain ageing rates. It really shows how much the experience of the pandemic itself, everything from isolation to uncertainty, may have affected our brain health.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1091559

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Global Estimates of Lives and Life-years Saved by COVID-19 Vaccination During 2020-2024
July 25, 2025

Introduction:

(Eureklaert) About The Study: This comparative effectiveness study found that COVID-19 vaccinations averted 2.5 million deaths
during 2020-2024 (sensitivity range estimates, 1.4-4.0 million). Estimates in this study are substantially more conservative than previous calculations focusing mostly on the first year of vaccination, but they still clearly demonstrate a major overall benefit from COVID-19 vaccination during the years 2020-2024. Most benefits in lives and life-years saved was secured for a portion of older persons, a minority of the global population.

Read more of the Eurkealert article here here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1092258

For a presentation of study results as published in Jama Health Forum: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-h ... rm=072525

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How Airborne-communicable Diseases Travel
By
August 6 , 2025

Conclusion:

(Eurekalert) “We wanted to know how the aerosols we breathe out are transported, but it turns out this is very difficult to do in a real waiting line,” says Lou, who is now a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

The ideal situation would be to have real humans standing in a real, moving line to test how their exhalations travel—a far-too risky proposition. Instead, Lou and Van Mooy decided to 3D-print a set of cylinders and human-shaped models and put them on a conveyor belt to see how the plumes moved. Their models “exhaled” colored dyes mimicking sneezes, coughs and regular breathing. They also ran computer simulations in collaboration with the group of Rodolfo Ostilla at the University of Cadiz, in Spain.

“What we found was really surprising,” says Van Mooy.

Since warm air rises, there is a slight updraft surrounding our bodies—and so the team expected to see the aerosol plumes rising. But instead, they observed a “downwash” effect, where the simple act of walking and waiting in a line caused the plumes to sink. Even more surprising was that, if the ambient temperature is close to our body temperature, as would be the case in a non-air-conditioned room in summer, those aerosols could be pushed toward the floor due to air currents. However, in a climate-controlled room, the difference in temperature between what we exhale and the ambient conditions are enough to drive those plumes aloft. If the temperature is in an intermediate range, it is quite possible that the aerosols can hover at just the right height for the next person in the line to inhale them as the line moves forward.

“Ultimately, there are no hard-and-fast rules about social distancing that will keep us safe or unsafe,” says senior author Varghese Mathai, assistant professor of physics at UMass Amherst. “The fluid dynamics of air are marvelously complex and general intuition often misleads, even for something as simple as standing in a line. We need to take space and time into account as we come up with our public health guidelines.”

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1093313

For a presentation of study results as published in Science Advances: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw0985

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Lab-made sugar-coated particle reduces COVID-19 infection rates by 98.6% in human cell tests
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-lab-sugar ... covid.html
by Ffion White, Swansea University

Research led by a Swansea University academic has revealed a synthetic glycosystem—a sugar-coated polymer nanoparticle—that can block COVID-19 from infecting human cells, reducing infection rates by nearly 99%.

The glycosystem is a specially designed particle that mimics natural sugars found on human cells. These sugars, known as polysialosides, are made of repeating units of sialic acid—structures that viruses often target to begin infection. By copying this structure, the synthetic molecule acts as a decoy, binding to the virus's spike protein and preventing it from attaching to real cells.

Unlike vaccines, which trigger immune responses, this molecule acts as a physical shield, offering a novel approach to infection prevention.

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B.C. woman wrongly declared ‘deceased’ by federal Vaccine Injury Support Program

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/video/news/b- ... i-AA1KAJmo

*facepalm*

[wjfox]

Covid-19 seems to age blood vessels - but only among women

Women's arteries seem to be stiffer if they have had covid-19, with the same effect not being found among men

18 August 2025

Covid-19 seems to accelerate the ageing of blood vessels, but perhaps only among women.

The infection has previously been linked to cardiovascular complications, like heart disease, but how it has this effect isn’t entirely clear. To learn more, Rosa Maria Bruno at the Université Paris Cité in France and her colleagues recruited 2390 people, aged 50 on average, from 16 countries – including the UK and US – between September 2020 and February 2022.

Some of them had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, or had antibodies against it despite not being vaccinated, a sign that they had been infected. The others had only ever tested negative for the virus and had no signs of prior infection.

The health of their arteries was assessed by measuring how fast a pressure wave passed between the carotid artery in their neck and the femoral arteries in their legs. This is a measure of artery stiffness, which increases naturally with age, with less flexible arteries raising the risk of heart disease.

The researchers found that among the women in the study, a known SARS-CoV-2 infection was linked to stiffer arteries. This also seemed to increase alongside the severity of their infection. For instance, women who were hospitalised with covid-19 had a vascular age that was around five years older than their uninfected counterparts, rising to 7.5 years among those admitted to intensive care.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/24 ... ong-women/

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Trump and RFK Jr. to Ban COVID-19 Vaccine 'Within Months'

The Trump administration will move to pull the COVID vaccine off the U.S. market “within months,” one of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s closest associates has told the Daily Beast.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who has repeatedly claimed in the face of scientific consensus that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus, told the Daily Beast that Kennedy’s stance is shared by “influential” members of President Donald Trump’s family. Like Kennedy himself, no Trumps hold any scientific qualifications.

Malhotra is a leading adviser to the controversial lobby group Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, which is seen as an external arm of Kennedy’s agenda as Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary.

He told the Beast that many of those closest to RFK Jr. have told him they “cannot understand” why the vaccine continues to be prescribed, and that a decision to remove the vaccine from the U.S. market pending further research will come “within months,” even if it is likely to cause “fear of chaos” and bring with it major legal ramifications.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-tr ... in-months/