Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus
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13 Oct 2022, 9:49 am
‘We are in trouble’: Study raises alarm about impacts of long covid
I thought this part was kind of funny:
"Putrino pointed out that between 16 and 31 percent of the control group also suffered those same symptoms — a figure that is similar to the false negative rate of a PCR test, suggesting some of the control group may have been infected. Pell agreed that it is possible that some people with negative tests could have been infected, serving to reinforce the study’s broader findings."
Yep. No surprise there.
HIV, HSV, SARS-CoV-2 and Ebola Share Long-Term Neuropsychiatric Sequelae
No surprises in this article, either. I think, over time, we're going to find that SARS-CoV-2 shares a lot of commonalities with HIV.
Long Covid is bad enough, but I'm sure, with new symptoms coming and going all of the time, we're going to see some really nasty stuff in the future (if we survive that long). Think about other viruses that reactivate, like how chicken pox causes shingles.
But Covid is already increasing rates of heart disease and stroke, and it's creating Lewy bodies in the brain, so I'm not sure if most of us will live long enough to find out =/
_________________
I'll brave the storm to come, for it surely looks like rain...
ASPartOfMe
Veteran
Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Posts: 36,536
Location: Long Island, New York
13 Oct 2022, 10:20 pm
The next U.S. COVID wave is coming. Why it will be 'much weirder than before.'
Quote:
Unless you’re a real-life virologist — or unless you enjoy playing one on Twitter — it has become pretty much impossible to keep up with all of the latest coronavirus variants.
First they were named after Greek letters, like Omicron. Easy enough. Then came a few short, Star Wars-esque alphanumerics, like BA.5. Fine.
But in recent weeks, COVID trackers have suddenly been subjected to a dizzying barrage of BA.4.6s and BF.7s and BA.2.75.2s and BQ.1.1s. There’s even an ominous new sublineage called XBB.
For most Americans — the bulk of whom appear to be “over” COVID anyway — that’s far too many numbers and letters to grasp. Easier to just tune it all out, they say. Call me when there’s another wave on the way.
Well, now there might be.
The last big variant of concern — the hypertransmissible Omicron offshoot known as BA.5 — peaked in July. Since then, reported U.S. cases have plummeted by 70%. While far too many Americans are still dying of COVID each day — nearly 400, on average — the rate has returned to pre-BA.5 lows. It’s a moment of relative calm.
But under the surface, something new — and potentially dangerous for the most vulnerable among us — has been happening: Omicron has started to “splinter.”
As a result, we may be entering the next phase of the pandemic. Thanks to layers of immunity from vaccination and prior infection — plus lifesaving treatments such as Paxlovid — we will almost certainly never regress to the horrific era of collapsing ICUs and thousands of deaths per day.
Yet the orderly succession of individually dominant variants we’ve come to expect over the last two years — think Alpha, then Beta, then Delta, then Omicron — may also be a thing of the past.
Instead, what scientists are seeing now is a bunch of worrisome Omicron descendants arising simultaneously but independently in different corners of the globe — all with the same set of advantageous mutations that help them dodge our existing immune defenses and drive new waves of infection.
“Although stuff started off in different places — some BA.2, some BA.5 — everything’s going back in the same direction,” Peacock recently told Stat. “They’re getting the same mutations, which implies there’s a very strong selective pressure in the environment right now, which of course is people’s immunity.”
“Clearly,” he added in an interview with Nature, “there’s an optimal way for a variant to look going into this season.”
The problem is that what’s optimal for the coronavirus usually isn’t optimal for us.
Of all 300 post-BA.5 sublineages currently being monitored by the World Health Organization — a group that includes BA.4.6, BF.7 and BA.2.75, which have risen as a proportion of U.S. cases in recent weeks — experts are most concerned about two Omicron spinoffs that have barely even registered in America yet: BQ.1.1 and XBB.
“XBB and BQ.1.1 are 2 of the most important variants [to] watch right now,” Eric Topol, founder of Scripps Translational Institute, tweeted last week.
Why? Because they’re “escape” variants. While earlier sublineages that were jockeying for post-BA.5 supremacy in the U.S. had a few advantageous mutations, XBB, B.Q.1.1 and their ilk — including BN.1 and BA.2.75.2 — now boast at least six changes in just the right places on the virus’s spike protein (leading some researchers to refer to them as the “pentagon” or “hexagon” variants). As a consequence, they now rank as the "most antibody-evasive” strains ever tested, according to Yunlong Richard Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing.
This is troubling for two reasons. The first is that the most vulnerable among us — the immunocompromised and the elderly — tend not to produce as strong or as lasting an antibody response after infection or vaccination. Monoclonal antibody treatments have helped fill the gap and shield them from severe illness.
But many of these treatments were abandoned after prior variants rendered them useless — and now lab experiments have shown that the remaining antibody therapies (bebtelovimab and Evusheld) don’t work against XBB and B.Q.1.1. (Last week, the Food and Drug Administration warned that Evusheld can’t neutralize the latest variants, meaning immunocompromised people may no longer be able to take it for pre-exposure protection.) Once the new escape variants take off, people at high risk for severe COVID are likely to be even more vulnerable than before (though not completely vulnerable as vaccination and prior infection still offer some defense against serious illness.
In turn, the more the virus circulates, the more chances it has to reach people who could get seriously ill — and as U.S. booster rates falter and as earlier vaccine protection wanes, the ranks of the susceptible may grow rather than shrink over the winter.
Finally, the fact that the virus is suddenly evolving in the same evasive direction everywhere at once suggests that most of the world should brace for impact sooner rather than later, regardless of which new sublineage happens to reach our particular patch of the planet. There are plenty of escape variants to go around.
Overseas, the next wave is already building. In the United Kingdom, BQ.1.1 infections are doubling every week, a rate of growth that far exceeds other leading sublineages; overall daily cases have doubled (on average) over the last month as well. Germany, France and Belgium are experiencing similarly rapid B.Q.1.1 growth, with the latter country facing a “wave [that’s] well on track to match or even exceed [its] Omicron BA.1 wave,” according to evolutionary biologist Tom Wenseleers.
Across Europe, from Italy to Austria to Sweden, COVID hospitalizations are already shooting up as the weather cools — and while B.Q.1.1 is outcompeting its rivals, it still has a ton of room for growth. Numbers are likely to get worse before they get better. Meanwhile, XBB is driving steep COVID case surges in Singapore and Bangladesh, two of the first countries where it has achieved dominance.
In the U.S., overall COVID cases are still going down. But XBB and B.Q.1.1 — the latter of which boasts an estimated daily growth advantage over BA.5 of 10% or higher — haven’t really established a foothold here yet. One or both is likely to do just that, just in time for winter. As Cornelius Roemer, a respected tracker of pathogen evolution, recently put it on Twitter, it is becoming quite clear that we will see another “variant wave in Europe and North America before the end of November.”
There’s no reason to think America’s latest winter wave will be as devastating — or even as disruptive — as its predecessors.
But Americans — especially the elderly and the immunocompromised — will be less protected than experts say they should be.
BQ.1.1 is a descendant of BA.5; XBB is a descendent of BA.2. By further broadening immunity, the new bivalent boosters are the best defense we have. CDC data has already shown that vaccine protection against COVID hospitalization fell from more than 80% to roughly 50 to 60% during the various Omicron waves. Without boosters — and with more evasive variants — it’s likely to slip further.
For most U.S. residents, the new escape variants will be more of an inconvenience than a threat this winter. But even now, before they hit, nearly 400 (mostly older) Americans are still dying of COVID each day. That’s almost 150,000 annually — about three times the death count of a bad flu year. How much death are we willing to normalize? And how much more should we tolerate this winter?
Which brings to mind a third reason these new escape variants are troubling: because they show us that, nearly three years in, the virus still has new tricks up its sleeve. Will Pi — another radically new variant like Omicron — come next? Or is this all part of the process of SARS-CoV-2 settling into some sort of cold-like stability? Or can both be true at the same time?
“Something is happening with SARS-CoV-2. Something big,” evolutionary biologist Shay Fleishon wrote on Twitter earlier this month. “Put it this way — there was a range of possible scenarios that we expected for the near future. Positive and negative. The amplitude of that range is getting much (much) bigger.”
“When scientists don’t know [how] to explain stuff, it is the responsible thing to say — We don’t know (yet),” Fleishon's tweet thread continued. “We can make contradicting hypotheses; we can make complicated maps & charts. But something is happening, much weirder than before. And we still don’t know what it means.”
First they were named after Greek letters, like Omicron. Easy enough. Then came a few short, Star Wars-esque alphanumerics, like BA.5. Fine.
But in recent weeks, COVID trackers have suddenly been subjected to a dizzying barrage of BA.4.6s and BF.7s and BA.2.75.2s and BQ.1.1s. There’s even an ominous new sublineage called XBB.
For most Americans — the bulk of whom appear to be “over” COVID anyway — that’s far too many numbers and letters to grasp. Easier to just tune it all out, they say. Call me when there’s another wave on the way.
Well, now there might be.
The last big variant of concern — the hypertransmissible Omicron offshoot known as BA.5 — peaked in July. Since then, reported U.S. cases have plummeted by 70%. While far too many Americans are still dying of COVID each day — nearly 400, on average — the rate has returned to pre-BA.5 lows. It’s a moment of relative calm.
But under the surface, something new — and potentially dangerous for the most vulnerable among us — has been happening: Omicron has started to “splinter.”
As a result, we may be entering the next phase of the pandemic. Thanks to layers of immunity from vaccination and prior infection — plus lifesaving treatments such as Paxlovid — we will almost certainly never regress to the horrific era of collapsing ICUs and thousands of deaths per day.
Yet the orderly succession of individually dominant variants we’ve come to expect over the last two years — think Alpha, then Beta, then Delta, then Omicron — may also be a thing of the past.
Instead, what scientists are seeing now is a bunch of worrisome Omicron descendants arising simultaneously but independently in different corners of the globe — all with the same set of advantageous mutations that help them dodge our existing immune defenses and drive new waves of infection.
“Although stuff started off in different places — some BA.2, some BA.5 — everything’s going back in the same direction,” Peacock recently told Stat. “They’re getting the same mutations, which implies there’s a very strong selective pressure in the environment right now, which of course is people’s immunity.”
“Clearly,” he added in an interview with Nature, “there’s an optimal way for a variant to look going into this season.”
The problem is that what’s optimal for the coronavirus usually isn’t optimal for us.
Of all 300 post-BA.5 sublineages currently being monitored by the World Health Organization — a group that includes BA.4.6, BF.7 and BA.2.75, which have risen as a proportion of U.S. cases in recent weeks — experts are most concerned about two Omicron spinoffs that have barely even registered in America yet: BQ.1.1 and XBB.
“XBB and BQ.1.1 are 2 of the most important variants [to] watch right now,” Eric Topol, founder of Scripps Translational Institute, tweeted last week.
Why? Because they’re “escape” variants. While earlier sublineages that were jockeying for post-BA.5 supremacy in the U.S. had a few advantageous mutations, XBB, B.Q.1.1 and their ilk — including BN.1 and BA.2.75.2 — now boast at least six changes in just the right places on the virus’s spike protein (leading some researchers to refer to them as the “pentagon” or “hexagon” variants). As a consequence, they now rank as the "most antibody-evasive” strains ever tested, according to Yunlong Richard Cao, an immunologist at Peking University in Beijing.
This is troubling for two reasons. The first is that the most vulnerable among us — the immunocompromised and the elderly — tend not to produce as strong or as lasting an antibody response after infection or vaccination. Monoclonal antibody treatments have helped fill the gap and shield them from severe illness.
But many of these treatments were abandoned after prior variants rendered them useless — and now lab experiments have shown that the remaining antibody therapies (bebtelovimab and Evusheld) don’t work against XBB and B.Q.1.1. (Last week, the Food and Drug Administration warned that Evusheld can’t neutralize the latest variants, meaning immunocompromised people may no longer be able to take it for pre-exposure protection.) Once the new escape variants take off, people at high risk for severe COVID are likely to be even more vulnerable than before (though not completely vulnerable as vaccination and prior infection still offer some defense against serious illness.
In turn, the more the virus circulates, the more chances it has to reach people who could get seriously ill — and as U.S. booster rates falter and as earlier vaccine protection wanes, the ranks of the susceptible may grow rather than shrink over the winter.
Finally, the fact that the virus is suddenly evolving in the same evasive direction everywhere at once suggests that most of the world should brace for impact sooner rather than later, regardless of which new sublineage happens to reach our particular patch of the planet. There are plenty of escape variants to go around.
Overseas, the next wave is already building. In the United Kingdom, BQ.1.1 infections are doubling every week, a rate of growth that far exceeds other leading sublineages; overall daily cases have doubled (on average) over the last month as well. Germany, France and Belgium are experiencing similarly rapid B.Q.1.1 growth, with the latter country facing a “wave [that’s] well on track to match or even exceed [its] Omicron BA.1 wave,” according to evolutionary biologist Tom Wenseleers.
Across Europe, from Italy to Austria to Sweden, COVID hospitalizations are already shooting up as the weather cools — and while B.Q.1.1 is outcompeting its rivals, it still has a ton of room for growth. Numbers are likely to get worse before they get better. Meanwhile, XBB is driving steep COVID case surges in Singapore and Bangladesh, two of the first countries where it has achieved dominance.
In the U.S., overall COVID cases are still going down. But XBB and B.Q.1.1 — the latter of which boasts an estimated daily growth advantage over BA.5 of 10% or higher — haven’t really established a foothold here yet. One or both is likely to do just that, just in time for winter. As Cornelius Roemer, a respected tracker of pathogen evolution, recently put it on Twitter, it is becoming quite clear that we will see another “variant wave in Europe and North America before the end of November.”
There’s no reason to think America’s latest winter wave will be as devastating — or even as disruptive — as its predecessors.
But Americans — especially the elderly and the immunocompromised — will be less protected than experts say they should be.
BQ.1.1 is a descendant of BA.5; XBB is a descendent of BA.2. By further broadening immunity, the new bivalent boosters are the best defense we have. CDC data has already shown that vaccine protection against COVID hospitalization fell from more than 80% to roughly 50 to 60% during the various Omicron waves. Without boosters — and with more evasive variants — it’s likely to slip further.
For most U.S. residents, the new escape variants will be more of an inconvenience than a threat this winter. But even now, before they hit, nearly 400 (mostly older) Americans are still dying of COVID each day. That’s almost 150,000 annually — about three times the death count of a bad flu year. How much death are we willing to normalize? And how much more should we tolerate this winter?
Which brings to mind a third reason these new escape variants are troubling: because they show us that, nearly three years in, the virus still has new tricks up its sleeve. Will Pi — another radically new variant like Omicron — come next? Or is this all part of the process of SARS-CoV-2 settling into some sort of cold-like stability? Or can both be true at the same time?
“Something is happening with SARS-CoV-2. Something big,” evolutionary biologist Shay Fleishon wrote on Twitter earlier this month. “Put it this way — there was a range of possible scenarios that we expected for the near future. Positive and negative. The amplitude of that range is getting much (much) bigger.”
“When scientists don’t know [how] to explain stuff, it is the responsible thing to say — We don’t know (yet),” Fleishon's tweet thread continued. “We can make contradicting hypotheses; we can make complicated maps & charts. But something is happening, much weirder than before. And we still don’t know what it means.”
New data is out on COVID vaccine injury claims. What's to make of it?
Quote:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, facing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a vast trove of data about the safety and side-effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, made a pledge in August.
The agency in court papers said that on or before Sept. 30, it would post on its website a “public use” set of data from about 10 million people who signed up for its “v-safe” program -- a smartphone-based system that periodically sends people text messages and web surveys to monitor potential side effects from the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.
But the CDC missed its deadline. A spokesperson cited a delay in “the technical and administrative processes” necessary to post on the agency’s website, but said it hopes to have the information up by late November or early December.
In the meantime, the CDC handed over the v-safe data (minus personal identifying information) to the plaintiff in the FOIA case, the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, a Texas-based nonprofit that says it opposes "medical coercion" in favor of individual healthcare choices.
ICAN crunched the numbers on its own and came up with some statistics that its lawyer says appear to be "alarming."
According to ICAN, 7.7% of the v-safe users -- 782,913 people -- reported seeking medical attention via a telehealth appointment, urgent care clinic, emergency room intervention or hospitalization following a COVID-19 vaccine.
About 25% of v-safe users said they experienced symptoms that required them to miss school or work or prevented them from doing other normal activities, according to ICAN’s “dashboard” that summarizes the results.
There's no way, however, based on the information collected, to determine whether the COVID-19 vaccines actually caused the ailments. ICAN's analysis included responses reported beyond the first seven days post-vaccine and it counted all reports of people seeking medical attention up to a year after receiving the shot. ICAN did not specify when after vaccination they received the care, nor did the data indicate what the care was for.
I asked a CDC spokesperson what the agency made of ICAN's calculations. Are the numbers accurate?
The CDC "cannot comment on analyses conducted outside of the agency that we have not seen," the spokesperson said via email, but added that v-safe data "have shown low rates of medical care after vaccination, particularly hospitalization."
In the first week after getting the shot, the spokesperson continued, "reports of seeking any medical care (including telehealth appointments) range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose)."
She pointed me to a report looking at the first six months of v-safe data to back up the assertion. In addition, another CDC spokesperson said that agency personnel made follow-up calls to any v-safe users who reported seeking medical attention.
But ICAN counsel Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad, who led the FOIA litigation against the agency, said that because some vaccine-related adverse effects (chronic arthritis, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis and more) can appear weeks after vaccination, it's important to broaden the time frame beyond the one-week window in research the CDC cited.
“This is a large and concerning number of negative health impacts,” Siri said of ICAN's conclusions, adding that he's aware of no comparable public data for other vaccines.
A Pfizer media representative in an email said that the company’s vaccine has “a favorable safety profile and high level of protection against severe COVID-19 disease and hospitalization.”
Representatives from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
The agency in court papers said that on or before Sept. 30, it would post on its website a “public use” set of data from about 10 million people who signed up for its “v-safe” program -- a smartphone-based system that periodically sends people text messages and web surveys to monitor potential side effects from the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.
But the CDC missed its deadline. A spokesperson cited a delay in “the technical and administrative processes” necessary to post on the agency’s website, but said it hopes to have the information up by late November or early December.
In the meantime, the CDC handed over the v-safe data (minus personal identifying information) to the plaintiff in the FOIA case, the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, a Texas-based nonprofit that says it opposes "medical coercion" in favor of individual healthcare choices.
ICAN crunched the numbers on its own and came up with some statistics that its lawyer says appear to be "alarming."
According to ICAN, 7.7% of the v-safe users -- 782,913 people -- reported seeking medical attention via a telehealth appointment, urgent care clinic, emergency room intervention or hospitalization following a COVID-19 vaccine.
About 25% of v-safe users said they experienced symptoms that required them to miss school or work or prevented them from doing other normal activities, according to ICAN’s “dashboard” that summarizes the results.
There's no way, however, based on the information collected, to determine whether the COVID-19 vaccines actually caused the ailments. ICAN's analysis included responses reported beyond the first seven days post-vaccine and it counted all reports of people seeking medical attention up to a year after receiving the shot. ICAN did not specify when after vaccination they received the care, nor did the data indicate what the care was for.
I asked a CDC spokesperson what the agency made of ICAN's calculations. Are the numbers accurate?
The CDC "cannot comment on analyses conducted outside of the agency that we have not seen," the spokesperson said via email, but added that v-safe data "have shown low rates of medical care after vaccination, particularly hospitalization."
In the first week after getting the shot, the spokesperson continued, "reports of seeking any medical care (including telehealth appointments) range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose)."
She pointed me to a report looking at the first six months of v-safe data to back up the assertion. In addition, another CDC spokesperson said that agency personnel made follow-up calls to any v-safe users who reported seeking medical attention.
But ICAN counsel Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad, who led the FOIA litigation against the agency, said that because some vaccine-related adverse effects (chronic arthritis, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis and more) can appear weeks after vaccination, it's important to broaden the time frame beyond the one-week window in research the CDC cited.
“This is a large and concerning number of negative health impacts,” Siri said of ICAN's conclusions, adding that he's aware of no comparable public data for other vaccines.
A Pfizer media representative in an email said that the company’s vaccine has “a favorable safety profile and high level of protection against severe COVID-19 disease and hospitalization.”
Representatives from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
14 Oct 2022, 9:18 am
As ASPartOfMe just pointed out:
Across Europe, from Italy to Austria to Sweden, COVID hospitalizations are already shooting up as the weather cools — and while B.Q.1.1 is outcompeting its rivals, it still has a ton of room for growth. Numbers are likely to get worse before they get better. Meanwhile, XBB is driving steep COVID case surges in Singapore and Bangladesh, two of the first countries where it has achieved dominance.
In the U.S., overall COVID cases are still going down. But XBB and B.Q.1.1 — the latter of which boasts an estimated daily growth advantage over BA.5 of 10% or higher — haven’t really established a foothold here yet. One or both is likely to do just that, just in time for winter. As Cornelius Roemer, a respected tracker of pathogen evolution, recently put it on Twitter, it is becoming quite clear that we will see another “variant wave in Europe and North America before the end of November.”
There are many different versions of COVID out there. And it ain't over UNTIL THE FAT LADY SINGS.
What is the fat lady who sings?
Ahhhh, but there are also two sides to a coin. There are two different methods available to protect ourselves from this pandemic. There is a totally different approach.
Rather then focusing on a medical solution, there is the science/engineering approach. Everything that we need to protect ourselves from this pandemic exist and ready to use should we decide to apply it.
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
ASPartOfMe
Veteran
Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Posts: 36,536
Location: Long Island, New York
14 Oct 2022, 5:14 pm
ASPartOfMe wrote:
New data is out on COVID vaccine injury claims. What's to make of it?
Quote:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, facing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a vast trove of data about the safety and side-effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, made a pledge in August.
The agency in court papers said that on or before Sept. 30, it would post on its website a “public use” set of data from about 10 million people who signed up for its “v-safe” program -- a smartphone-based system that periodically sends people text messages and web surveys to monitor potential side effects from the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.
But the CDC missed its deadline. A spokesperson cited a delay in “the technical and administrative processes” necessary to post on the agency’s website, but said it hopes to have the information up by late November or early December.
In the meantime, the CDC handed over the v-safe data (minus personal identifying information) to the plaintiff in the FOIA case, the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, a Texas-based nonprofit that says it opposes "medical coercion" in favor of individual healthcare choices.
ICAN crunched the numbers on its own and came up with some statistics that its lawyer says appear to be "alarming."
According to ICAN, 7.7% of the v-safe users -- 782,913 people -- reported seeking medical attention via a telehealth appointment, urgent care clinic, emergency room intervention or hospitalization following a COVID-19 vaccine.
About 25% of v-safe users said they experienced symptoms that required them to miss school or work or prevented them from doing other normal activities, according to ICAN’s “dashboard” that summarizes the results.
There's no way, however, based on the information collected, to determine whether the COVID-19 vaccines actually caused the ailments. ICAN's analysis included responses reported beyond the first seven days post-vaccine and it counted all reports of people seeking medical attention up to a year after receiving the shot. ICAN did not specify when after vaccination they received the care, nor did the data indicate what the care was for.
I asked a CDC spokesperson what the agency made of ICAN's calculations. Are the numbers accurate?
The CDC "cannot comment on analyses conducted outside of the agency that we have not seen," the spokesperson said via email, but added that v-safe data "have shown low rates of medical care after vaccination, particularly hospitalization."
In the first week after getting the shot, the spokesperson continued, "reports of seeking any medical care (including telehealth appointments) range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose)."
She pointed me to a report looking at the first six months of v-safe data to back up the assertion. In addition, another CDC spokesperson said that agency personnel made follow-up calls to any v-safe users who reported seeking medical attention.
But ICAN counsel Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad, who led the FOIA litigation against the agency, said that because some vaccine-related adverse effects (chronic arthritis, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis and more) can appear weeks after vaccination, it's important to broaden the time frame beyond the one-week window in research the CDC cited.
“This is a large and concerning number of negative health impacts,” Siri said of ICAN's conclusions, adding that he's aware of no comparable public data for other vaccines.
A Pfizer media representative in an email said that the company’s vaccine has “a favorable safety profile and high level of protection against severe COVID-19 disease and hospitalization.”
Representatives from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
The agency in court papers said that on or before Sept. 30, it would post on its website a “public use” set of data from about 10 million people who signed up for its “v-safe” program -- a smartphone-based system that periodically sends people text messages and web surveys to monitor potential side effects from the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines.
But the CDC missed its deadline. A spokesperson cited a delay in “the technical and administrative processes” necessary to post on the agency’s website, but said it hopes to have the information up by late November or early December.
In the meantime, the CDC handed over the v-safe data (minus personal identifying information) to the plaintiff in the FOIA case, the Informed Consent Action Network, or ICAN, a Texas-based nonprofit that says it opposes "medical coercion" in favor of individual healthcare choices.
ICAN crunched the numbers on its own and came up with some statistics that its lawyer says appear to be "alarming."
According to ICAN, 7.7% of the v-safe users -- 782,913 people -- reported seeking medical attention via a telehealth appointment, urgent care clinic, emergency room intervention or hospitalization following a COVID-19 vaccine.
About 25% of v-safe users said they experienced symptoms that required them to miss school or work or prevented them from doing other normal activities, according to ICAN’s “dashboard” that summarizes the results.
There's no way, however, based on the information collected, to determine whether the COVID-19 vaccines actually caused the ailments. ICAN's analysis included responses reported beyond the first seven days post-vaccine and it counted all reports of people seeking medical attention up to a year after receiving the shot. ICAN did not specify when after vaccination they received the care, nor did the data indicate what the care was for.
I asked a CDC spokesperson what the agency made of ICAN's calculations. Are the numbers accurate?
The CDC "cannot comment on analyses conducted outside of the agency that we have not seen," the spokesperson said via email, but added that v-safe data "have shown low rates of medical care after vaccination, particularly hospitalization."
In the first week after getting the shot, the spokesperson continued, "reports of seeking any medical care (including telehealth appointments) range from 1-3% (depending on vaccine, age group and dose)."
She pointed me to a report looking at the first six months of v-safe data to back up the assertion. In addition, another CDC spokesperson said that agency personnel made follow-up calls to any v-safe users who reported seeking medical attention.
But ICAN counsel Aaron Siri of Siri & Glimstad, who led the FOIA litigation against the agency, said that because some vaccine-related adverse effects (chronic arthritis, thrombocytopenia, Guillain-Barré syndrome, myocarditis and more) can appear weeks after vaccination, it's important to broaden the time frame beyond the one-week window in research the CDC cited.
“This is a large and concerning number of negative health impacts,” Siri said of ICAN's conclusions, adding that he's aware of no comparable public data for other vaccines.
A Pfizer media representative in an email said that the company’s vaccine has “a favorable safety profile and high level of protection against severe COVID-19 disease and hospitalization.”
Representatives from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.
Posts mislead on Pfizer COVID vaccine’s impact on transmission
Quote:
CLAIM: Pfizer admitted to the European Parliament that it had not tested the ability of its COVID-19 vaccine to prevent transmission of the virus before it entered the market, proving the company lied about this earlier in the pandemic.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Janine Small, president of international markets at Pfizer, told the European Parliament on Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its COVID-19 vaccine prevented transmission of the virus before it entered the market in December 2020. But Pfizer never claimed to have studied the issue before the vaccine’s market release.
THE FACTS: After Small testified before the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic, misleading claims about whether Pfizer knew the impact of its COVID-19 vaccine on preventing transmission spread widely on social media.
Rob Roos, a Dutch European Parliament member who asked Small a question about transmission at the hearing, tweeted: “BREAKING: In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission. ‘Get vaccinated for others’ was always a lie. The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated. The world needs to know. Share this video!”
The tweet, which included a video showing the exchange between Roos and Small, had received more than 232,000 likes and more than 166,000 shares by Thursday.
Other social media posts about the hearing used the hashtag #PfizerLiedPeopleDied.
At the hearing, Roos asked Small whether Pfizer had tested its COVID-19 vaccine for its ability to prevent transmission of the virus prior to its market release. Small answered: “No. We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.” She went on to explain why Pfizer moved quickly to develop a COVID-19 vaccine as the virus spread worldwide.
While Roos and many others framed this as a new revelation, Pfizer never claimed that its clinical trial, upon which the vaccine was authorized for use, evaluated the shot’s effect on transmission. In fact, shortly before the vaccine’s release, the company’s CEO emphasized that this was still being evaluated.
A study funded by Pfizer and German vaccine maker BioNTech published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Dec. 10, 2020, a day before the Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine emergency use authorization, did not include data about the vaccine’s effectiveness at reducing transmission of the virus.
Instead, it reported that two doses of the vaccine provided 95% protection against contracting symptomatic COVID-19 in people 16 and older. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla also said in a December 2020 interview with NBC News that it was still unclear whether vaccinated individuals could carry the virus and transmit it to others.
“I think this is something that needs to be examined,” he told the network. “We are not certain about that right now.”
The FDA stated in a Dec. 11, 2020, press release announcing the authorization of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that “at this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.”
A Pfizer spokesperson told The Associated Press that its clinical trial was designed to evaluate the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine in preventing disease caused by the COVID-19 virus, including severe illness.
“Stopping transmission was not a study endpoint,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Asked for comment, Roos told the AP that he was not making a point about Pfizer, but about government mandates for the COVID-19 vaccines.
“I take fundamental rights seriously,” Roos wrote in an email. “For governments to infringe on them, they need a massive amount of evidence to prove the necessity. In this case, it was not even a part of the Pfizer trials.” He said that such mandates were based on “no evidence.”
But experts and research say that the COVID-19 vaccines have provided benefits in terms of limiting infections and transmission, at least with earlier variants of the virus and for a period of time after being vaccinated.
Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the vaccine center at Emory University, told the AP that the fact that Pfizer did not address the vaccine’s impact on transmission during clinical trials is not unusual, because transmission is a complex metric to measure.
“It’s much more difficult to evaluate impact on transmission,” Orenstein, a professor of infectious diseases at the Emory School of Medicine, wrote in an email. “What is usually done is a randomized placebo controlled study, in which the recipients are ‘blinded (i.e., do not know whether they received placebo or vaccine.’”
Public officials have suggested on multiple occasions that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission, but that’s an overstatement. For example, in an October 2021 speech in Illinois, President Joe Biden said: “We’re making sure healthcare workers are vaccinated, because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that…the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you. ”
While the vaccines do not eliminate all transmission, they can help. Studies done after distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines began, including research by Pfizer, did find that the company’s shot reduced asymptomatic infections in addition to symptomatic cases with earlier variants of the virus. Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer’s vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants.
“Our study from earlier in the year shows that the Pfizer vaccine reduces transmission from people with breakthrough infections, at least in the 3 months post vaccine which we studied,” Dr. David Eyre, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, wrote in an email.
Experts have told the AP that while the original COVID-19 vaccines provide less protection against infection with the highly contagious omicron variant, they still protect against serious outcomes.
The CDC stated in an August report that receiving only the first one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine “provides minimal protection against infection and transmission” and that being up to date on all recommended booster doses “provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.”
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, explained that while the vaccines do provide neutralizing antibodies, which help protect against infection, those kinds of antibodies quickly wane — even as protection against serious illness continues to last.
“It is fair to say that when you get a vaccine that clearly decreases your chance of getting infected, it does,” said Offit, who is also the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “And therefore it decreases your chance of spreading it to others. But it’s not in any way absolute.”
Offit added that messaging to the public around the vaccines early on was flawed and should have been focused on their core benefit — preventing serious illness and hospitalization — since many would later cast doubt on the vaccines’ success because of “breakthrough infections.”
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Janine Small, president of international markets at Pfizer, told the European Parliament on Monday that Pfizer did not know whether its COVID-19 vaccine prevented transmission of the virus before it entered the market in December 2020. But Pfizer never claimed to have studied the issue before the vaccine’s market release.
THE FACTS: After Small testified before the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the COVID-19 Pandemic, misleading claims about whether Pfizer knew the impact of its COVID-19 vaccine on preventing transmission spread widely on social media.
Rob Roos, a Dutch European Parliament member who asked Small a question about transmission at the hearing, tweeted: “BREAKING: In COVID hearing, #Pfizer director admits: #vaccine was never tested on preventing transmission. ‘Get vaccinated for others’ was always a lie. The only purpose of the #COVID passport: forcing people to get vaccinated. The world needs to know. Share this video!”
The tweet, which included a video showing the exchange between Roos and Small, had received more than 232,000 likes and more than 166,000 shares by Thursday.
Other social media posts about the hearing used the hashtag #PfizerLiedPeopleDied.
At the hearing, Roos asked Small whether Pfizer had tested its COVID-19 vaccine for its ability to prevent transmission of the virus prior to its market release. Small answered: “No. We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.” She went on to explain why Pfizer moved quickly to develop a COVID-19 vaccine as the virus spread worldwide.
While Roos and many others framed this as a new revelation, Pfizer never claimed that its clinical trial, upon which the vaccine was authorized for use, evaluated the shot’s effect on transmission. In fact, shortly before the vaccine’s release, the company’s CEO emphasized that this was still being evaluated.
A study funded by Pfizer and German vaccine maker BioNTech published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Dec. 10, 2020, a day before the Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine emergency use authorization, did not include data about the vaccine’s effectiveness at reducing transmission of the virus.
Instead, it reported that two doses of the vaccine provided 95% protection against contracting symptomatic COVID-19 in people 16 and older. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla also said in a December 2020 interview with NBC News that it was still unclear whether vaccinated individuals could carry the virus and transmit it to others.
“I think this is something that needs to be examined,” he told the network. “We are not certain about that right now.”
The FDA stated in a Dec. 11, 2020, press release announcing the authorization of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine that “at this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.”
A Pfizer spokesperson told The Associated Press that its clinical trial was designed to evaluate the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine in preventing disease caused by the COVID-19 virus, including severe illness.
“Stopping transmission was not a study endpoint,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Asked for comment, Roos told the AP that he was not making a point about Pfizer, but about government mandates for the COVID-19 vaccines.
“I take fundamental rights seriously,” Roos wrote in an email. “For governments to infringe on them, they need a massive amount of evidence to prove the necessity. In this case, it was not even a part of the Pfizer trials.” He said that such mandates were based on “no evidence.”
But experts and research say that the COVID-19 vaccines have provided benefits in terms of limiting infections and transmission, at least with earlier variants of the virus and for a period of time after being vaccinated.
Dr. Walter Orenstein, associate director of the vaccine center at Emory University, told the AP that the fact that Pfizer did not address the vaccine’s impact on transmission during clinical trials is not unusual, because transmission is a complex metric to measure.
“It’s much more difficult to evaluate impact on transmission,” Orenstein, a professor of infectious diseases at the Emory School of Medicine, wrote in an email. “What is usually done is a randomized placebo controlled study, in which the recipients are ‘blinded (i.e., do not know whether they received placebo or vaccine.’”
Public officials have suggested on multiple occasions that COVID-19 vaccines prevent transmission, but that’s an overstatement. For example, in an October 2021 speech in Illinois, President Joe Biden said: “We’re making sure healthcare workers are vaccinated, because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that…the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you. ”
While the vaccines do not eliminate all transmission, they can help. Studies done after distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines began, including research by Pfizer, did find that the company’s shot reduced asymptomatic infections in addition to symptomatic cases with earlier variants of the virus. Researchers in the United Kingdom reported in a February observational study that Pfizer’s vaccine helped cut transmission of the alpha and delta variants.
“Our study from earlier in the year shows that the Pfizer vaccine reduces transmission from people with breakthrough infections, at least in the 3 months post vaccine which we studied,” Dr. David Eyre, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study, wrote in an email.
Experts have told the AP that while the original COVID-19 vaccines provide less protection against infection with the highly contagious omicron variant, they still protect against serious outcomes.
The CDC stated in an August report that receiving only the first one or two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine “provides minimal protection against infection and transmission” and that being up to date on all recommended booster doses “provides a transient period of increased protection against infection and transmission after the most recent dose, although protection can wane over time.”
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, explained that while the vaccines do provide neutralizing antibodies, which help protect against infection, those kinds of antibodies quickly wane — even as protection against serious illness continues to last.
“It is fair to say that when you get a vaccine that clearly decreases your chance of getting infected, it does,” said Offit, who is also the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “And therefore it decreases your chance of spreading it to others. But it’s not in any way absolute.”
Offit added that messaging to the public around the vaccines early on was flawed and should have been focused on their core benefit — preventing serious illness and hospitalization — since many would later cast doubt on the vaccines’ success because of “breakthrough infections.”
_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
15 Oct 2022, 7:18 am
The threat of COVID in the U.S. northern states is fairly simple to understand and to fix.
We live in very efficient heated homes built to provide warmth in the winter at maximum efficiency.
And that is the problem in the U.S.
To gain maximum efficiency, we provided great insulation and sealed the home from the cold winter air.
It works great. But the problem is that it also maximizes the spread of viruses such as COVID.
When they enter our homes and business, in the low humidity environments of winter, COVID is provided a wonderful playground to infect people and spread. That is why the U.S. has been hit so hard.
So what is the solution? Well the solution has been around for many years and it is fairly simple. Keep the humidity within all homes and business and public transportation above 40 percent during the winter. HOW IS THAT DONE? It is done using an air humidifier.
It is an engineering solution. Very simple and very effective.
Then to kill any COVID that my find its way into the home or business, use a UVC filtration system to purify the air and keep it clean.
The solution is that simple.
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
16 Oct 2022, 2:51 am
jimmy m wrote:
But I could be wrong. So it is always wise to keep on target by keeping abreast of where this pandemic is headed. Not because what the government claims is happening, BUT WHAT ACTUALLY IS HAPPENING.
It's hard to know what is actually happening
When all the Authorities that Doctors and Nurses depend on to curate good information, promulgate statements that are not true.
And claim to have seen studies that the drugs manufacturer now admits were never done.
16 Oct 2022, 3:10 am
jimmy m wrote:
It is an engineering solution. Very simple and very effective.
Then to kill any COVID that my find its way into the home or business, use a UVC filtration system to purify the air and keep it clean.
The solution is that simple.
Then to kill any COVID that my find its way into the home or business, use a UVC filtration system to purify the air and keep it clean.
The solution is that simple.
In Australia, their was a proposal to put UV-C in the aircons of nursing homes.
This would have stopped most aerosol infections from spreading from one room to another(Not just covid) so it would have been rather useful and continued to be useful long after covid had passed.
The government that had the worlds longest, harshest and most brutal lockdown, six million people confined to their homes for 270 days.
Said installing a few UV C units in nursing home aircons was just too damn hard.
They don't care about solutions Jimmy.
All this BS was never about keeping people safe.
16 Oct 2022, 7:17 am
SpiceWolf wrote:
jimmy m wrote:
It is an engineering solution. Very simple and very effective.
Then to kill any COVID that my find its way into the home or business, use a UVC filtration system to purify the air and keep it clean.
The solution is that simple.
Then to kill any COVID that my find its way into the home or business, use a UVC filtration system to purify the air and keep it clean.
The solution is that simple.
In Australia, their was a proposal to put UV-C in the aircons of nursing homes.
This would have stopped most aerosol infections from spreading from one room to another(Not just covid) so it would have been rather useful and continued to be useful long after covid had passed.
The government that had the worlds longest, harshest and most brutal lockdown, six million people confined to their homes for 270 days.
Said installing a few UV C units in nursing home aircons was just too damn hard.
They don't care about solutions Jimmy.
All this BS was never about keeping people safe.
In reality, that my be the case. But many people, at least those with some knowledge do. In my church, I brought in a UVC filter two years ago and had it running the entire time, to help keep the congregation safe. I just set it in a corner and let it run full time and clean it once every couple months.
One of the main movie conglomerations in the U.S. called AMC installed a fairly effective filtration system in all their movie theaters in the U.S. It made their theaters very safe to go to during the pandemic. In 2020, I went there every week and watched movies. It was one of the safest places on the planet. But in general their theaters were empty because people were afraid and went into permanent hiding.
As I recall, the school systems in the capital of Indiana, my state, has installed effective filtration systems in their school systems. So many people are making layers of protection but they are just not making a big deal out of it.
There is a totally different way to deal with this pandemic and it works.
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
Double Retired
Veteran
Joined: 31 Jul 2020
Age: 70
Gender: Male
Posts: 6,336
Location: U.S.A. (Mid-Atlantic)
16 Oct 2022, 11:03 am
Yahoo!, attributed to Daily Beast: "The Nightmare COVID Variant That Beats Our Immunity Is Finally Here"
Quote:
A new subvariant of the novel-coronavirus called XBB dramatically announced itself earlier this week, in Singapore. New COVID-19 cases more than doubled in a day, from 4,700 on Monday to 11,700 on Tuesday—and XBB is almost certainly why. The same subvariant just appeared in Hong Kong, too.
A highly mutated descendant of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that drove a record wave of infections starting around a year ago, XBB is in many ways the worst form of the virus so far. It’s more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments.
“It is likely the most immune-evasive and poses problems for current monoclonal antibody-based treatments and prevention strategy,” Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the new “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Pfizer and Moderna seem to work just fine against XBB, even though the original vaccines are less effective against XBB. They won’t prevent all infections and reinfections, but they should significantly reduce the chance of severe infection potentially leading to hospitalization or death. “Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most—severe disease—remains intact,” Adalja said.
A highly mutated descendant of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that drove a record wave of infections starting around a year ago, XBB is in many ways the worst form of the virus so far. It’s more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments.
“It is likely the most immune-evasive and poses problems for current monoclonal antibody-based treatments and prevention strategy,” Amesh Adalja, a public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the new “bivalent” vaccine boosters from Pfizer and Moderna seem to work just fine against XBB, even though the original vaccines are less effective against XBB. They won’t prevent all infections and reinfections, but they should significantly reduce the chance of severe infection potentially leading to hospitalization or death. “Even with immune-evasive variants, vaccine protection against what matters most—severe disease—remains intact,” Adalja said.
_________________
When diagnosed I bought champagne!
I finally knew why people were strange.
17 Oct 2022, 7:56 am
Double Retired wrote:
XBB is in many ways the worst form of the virus so far. It’s more contagious than any previous variant or subvariant. It also evades the antibodies from monoclonal therapies, potentially rendering a whole category of drugs ineffective as COVID treatments.
There are two sides to every coin. XBB is more contageous, but is it more deadly?
The XBB is a new Omicron sub-variant, the BA.2.10 strain. Besides Singapore, it has also been detected in countries such as Australia, Bangladesh, Denmark, India, Japan and the U.S. since August 2022.
There is no evidence of XBB causing more severe illness, the MOH said. So far, the large majority of patients in Singapore continue to report mild symptoms, such as sore throat or slight fever, especially if they have been vaccinated, the ministry said.
Source: XBB variant: How dangerous is the newest COVID-19 strain?
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
20 Oct 2022, 8:34 pm
According to a recent report:
Some 14.8 million people have had a dose of the updated bivalent booster that targets omicron and its subvariants along with the original virus.
Some new variants are showing up in the U.S. including BQ.1 and BQ.1.1
Both these new strains descend from omicron means the new omicron-specific boosters will likely provide some protection. Early clinical trial data suggests that the boosters work well.
Another article states:
“We have a BA.5 bivalent updated vaccine as a booster that we’re pushing people to do. It’s matched against the still-dominant variant, which is BA.5, and almost certainly will have a reasonably good degree of cross-protection against the BQ.1.1 and the others, and yet the uptake of these vaccines, as we are already in the middle of October, is disappointing..
According to the latest data from the CDC, 14.8 million people have gotten an updated bivalent booster six weeks into the campaign promoting it. That’s less than 10% of the population that’s eligible to get one.
The poor uptake of the new boosters, combined with the immune evasiveness of the new variants and the waning of population immunity, is almost surely a recipe for rising cases and hospitalizations in the weeks ahead.
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
23 Oct 2022, 7:26 am
“From the beginning, older people have felt the virus was more of a threat to their safety and health and have been among the earliest adopters of the vaccine and the first round of boosters,” said Mollyann Brodie.
Now Kaiser’s most recent vaccine monitor survey, published last month, has found that only 8 percent of seniors said they had received the updated bivalent booster, and 37 percent said they intended to “as soon as possible.” As a group, older adults were better informed than younger respondents, but almost 40 percent said they had heard little or nothing about the updated bivalent vaccine, and many were unsure whether the C.D.C. had recommended it for them.
Source: Among Seniors, a Declining Interest in Boosters
So now we have a booster shot that will protect us from most of the latest strains of COVID, and the government has gone quiet about getting the latest vaccine.
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
ASPartOfMe
Veteran
Joined: 25 Aug 2013
Age: 67
Gender: Male
Posts: 36,536
Location: Long Island, New York
23 Oct 2022, 9:53 am
CDC director tests positive for Covid-19
Quote:
CDC director Rochelle Walensky has tested positive for Covid-19, according to a statement issued by the agency on Saturday.
Walensky is “up to date with her vaccines,” the statement said, and is experiencing mild symptoms. She is isolating at home, per her agency’s guidance, which recommends quarantining for at least five days after testing positive.
Walensky is “up to date with her vaccines,” the statement said, and is experiencing mild symptoms. She is isolating at home, per her agency’s guidance, which recommends quarantining for at least five days after testing positive.
_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity
“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman
23 Oct 2022, 10:13 am
ASPartOfMe wrote:
Walensky is “up to date with her vaccines,
So if she is up to date in her vaccines (including the new Omicron variant, when did she receive her last shot. It takes two weeks for the shot to become completely effective. This is an important question. Or did she contact a new variant?
I looked a little closer to this question. She wrote on 29 August,
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and colleagues will soon review data for the new bivalent booster shot for COVID; she says it relates to very small changes in the mRNA sequence and that “shouldn’t impact safety at all…if we wait for those data to emerge in human data…not just mice data but human data…we would be using what I would consider to be a potentially outdated vaccine…it’s best to use a vaccine that’s tailored to the variant we have right now.”
Still, Dr. Walensky urges anyone who’s eligible to get the current booster right now while the U.S. government reviews the bivalent research. She points out that most of the cases of severe disease and death from COVID are unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people. “We have now given over 600 million doses of this vaccine in this country so we have an extraordinary safety profile, probably unlike any we’ve seen with any vaccine in history.”
That would make me believe that she did receive the new vaccine with the Omicron variant as soon as it became available. If that is the case, I would come to two conclusions. First, the new variants of COVID can overcome the latest shots. Second, getting these versions of COVID appear to produce very mild infections. (Highly contagious but much less deadly.)
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
24 Oct 2022, 9:22 am
So where are we headed as we approach the winter in the Northern States of the U.S.?
In the U.S., weekly cases have been falling recently, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The amount of coronavirus found in wastewater samples tested by Biobot Analytics has been basically flat around the United States over the last six weeks. Wastewater samples often predict possible spikes in COVID-19 ahead of the CDC data.
So the trend lines look good for finally finding some peace this winter.
New variants are monitored closely by regulators and vaccine manufacturers in case they start to evade protection offered by current shots. The World Health Organization this week said BQ.1.1 is circulating in at least 29 countries. U.S. health regulators on Friday estimated that BQ.1 and closely related BQ.1.1 accounted for 16.6% of coronavirus variants in the country (U.S.), nearly doubling from last week, while Europe expects them to become the dominant variants in a month.
Source: Cases of BQ.1, BQ.1.1 COVID variants double in U.S. as Europe warns of rise
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
24 Oct 2022, 9:54 am
This is an interesting graph. It shows the COVID Omicron variant hot spots over the entire planet going into the coming winter.
Share of SARS - CoV-2 sequences that are the omicron variant, Oct 24, 2022
_________________
Author of Practical Preparations for a Coronavirus Pandemic.
A very unique plan. As Dr. Paul Thompson wrote, "This is the very best paper on the virus I have ever seen."
