President Joe Biden wants the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to have all the resources it will need to enforce the employer vaccine mandate he unveiled on Thursday, the White House said on Friday.
Saturday, September 11, 2021
White House Says Biden, Xi Discussed Origins of COVID Probe
U.S. President Joe Biden discussed the investigation into the origins of COVID-19 during a call on Thursday with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, according to the White House.
"They did discuss a range of trans-national issues including COVID-19, and understanding its origins is of course a primary concern for this administration," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. "Yes, it was a topic raised, but I'm not going to go into further detail."
Biden vowed last month to press China for answers over the origins of a pandemic that has now killed https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps 4.8 million people worldwide. Intelligence agencies said they could not resolve https://www.reuters.com/world/us-intelligence-community-still-divided-covid-19s-origin-summary-2021-08-27 a debate over whether the virus emerged from a Chinese research laboratory without Beijing's help.
Beijing denies the U.S. accusation that it has not cooperated with the pandemic source investigation.
Thursday's 90-minute call was the first talks https://www.reuters.com/world/china/biden-chinas-xi-discuss-managing-competition-avoiding-conflict-call-2021-09-10 for the two leaders' first in seven months amid cool relations between the countries.
For his part, Xi told Biden that the two countries should respect each other's core concerns and properly manage differences, China's official Xinhua News Agency reported.
The outlet reported that Xi suggested to Biden that the countries should continue with contact and dialogue and cooperate on issues including epidemic prevention and control and economic recovery, as well as major international and regional issues like climate change.
Psaki described the call as respectful and candid, not lecturing or condescending, intended at keeping channels of communication open between the countries.
Climate and human rights were among the topics, she said, and though economic matters were discussed they were "not a major part" of the call.
"It wasn't a call that was intended to produce final outcomes," according to Psaki.
COVID-19 vaccines hold strong against Delta, protection waning in older adults
Three U.S. studies suggest COVID-19 vaccines offer strong protection against hospitalization and death, even in the face of the highly transmissible Delta variant, but vaccine protection appears to be waning among older populations, especially among those 75 and older.
U.S. data on hospitalization from nine states during the period when the Delta variant was dominant also suggests that the Moderna Inc vaccine was more effective at preventing hospitalizations among individuals of all ages than vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer Inc or Johnson & Johnson .
In that study of more than 32,000 visits to urgent care centers, emergency rooms and hospitals, Moderna's vaccine was 95% effective at preventing hospitalization compared with 80% for Pfizer and 60% for J&J.
Overall, the findings, released on Friday in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) weekly report on death and disease show that vaccines continue to offer strong protection from COVID-19.
One of the studies involved more than 600,000 COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in 13 states and large cities from April through mid-July.
It found that during the past two months, a period that includes the impact of the Delta variant, unvaccinated individuals were about 4.5 times more likely to get COVID-19, 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die from the disease than those who were fully vaccinated.
In a White House COVID-19 briefing on Friday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said the data show that "vaccination works and will protect us from the severe complications of COVID-19."
While protection against hospitalized disease and death remained strong against Delta, the study also confirms an increase in milder COVID-19 infections among fully vaccinated people, which the authors said reflected "potential waning of vaccine-induced population immunity."
Another study looked specifically at the performance of mRNA vaccines - such as the shots from Pfizer and Moderna - in patients at five Veterans Affairs medical centers, a racially diverse group made up largely of older male patients with higher rates of underlying disease.
Of the more than 1,000 COVID-19 hospitalizations in that study, researchers found that combined both vaccines were 86.8% effective against hospitalization - even against the Delta variant. But vaccine effectiveness fell to 79.8% among veterans 65 and older.
The third study, which looked at medical encounters in nine states, overall vaccine effectiveness remained high at 86% against hospitalization and 82% against visits to the emergency room or an urgent care center. However, vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization was "significantly lower" among adults aged 75 and older, falling to 76% - the first time a drop had been observed in this data set.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-covid-19-vaccines-hold-180502241.html
Vaccine mandates spread, protests follow — some spurred by nurses
A few hundred protesters lined the sidewalk Monday outside Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego to rally against California’s impending vaccination mandates for health care workers. And to the disappointment of many medical professionals, some of the protesters were nurses wearing hospital scrubs.
It was the kind of protest that was common earlier in the pandemic but lost steam this year as restrictions eased. But a resurgent coronavirus and sluggish vaccine uptake have led to a push for vaccination mandates and masking rules — and renewed protests.
Vaccination mandates have given new focus to some Covid deniers and anti-vaccination activists, helping to align disparate “liberty” groups around a single cause, as lockdowns did earlier in the pandemic. Among them are nurses who have been vocal opponents of various pandemic mitigation efforts, some of whom have become adept at garnering social media attention, mainly on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
It’s a dynamic that experts warn can have an outsize impact on vaccination discourse, particularly as the nurses’ messages can go far beyond the protests or their limited social media audiences and carry a veneer of medical industry credibility.
“It’s not that the nurses necessarily themselves have a really big reach, but their videos always seem to be found by people who are anti-vax, who then duet or reshare it and use the credibility of that medical professional to bolster the argument that they’ve been correct all along,” said Rachel Moran, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who studies misinformation on the internet.
The protest in San Diego, where some participants chanted repurposed pro-abortion rights slogans like “our body, our choice,” was one of more than a dozen organized outside California hospitals in recent days, organized by a group called America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom and promoted through a new, anonymous Instagram account with 5,500 followers made up of a stable of registered nurses who are also anti-vaccination influencers on the app.
Other recent protests have gotten similar boosts on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. Calling themselves “freedom keepers,” at least six individual accounts have spent the last week promoting America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom protests, posting flyers for rallies, among other posts, which feature vaccination misinformation dressed in a feminine aesthetic well-known to wellness and lifestyle influencers, including pastel colors and trendy cursive fonts.
The individual accounts present a hodgepodge of vaccination misinformation, including distorted data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, to suggest that the vaccines are killing thousands of people.
A Facebook spokesperson said the company was looking into the accounts and would take action if they violated the company's policies.
As part of a sweeping set of mandates across the state, California’s Public Health Department has required its more than 2 million health care workers in hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and doctor’s offices to be fully vaccinated against Covid by Sept. 30. The pop-up protests come at a time when hospitals throughout the country are increasingly implementing mandates to combat stalled vaccination efforts among health care workers, even as the delta variant threatens to overload intensive care units again.
Like other protests against lockdowns, masks and other measures to mitigate Covid’s spread, the events, ostensibly for health care workers, attracted other participants, including some who are stringently against all childhood vaccinations and others who are seemingly politically motivated to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom. In livestreams from this week’s events, the protesters’ signs, which included QAnon slogans and the text of the Nuremberg Code (a guideline for ethical medical research), gave clues to the myriad motivations of participants.
The small but vocal group of activists behind America’s Healthcare Workers for Medical Freedom include the account’s newsletter host, Lauren Mochizuki, an emergency room nurse and personal finance blogger in Orange County, California, who also runs the Instagram account nurses4informedconsent, a private account with just 1,800 followers. Mochizuki, who made news at the start of the pandemic for bringing attention to the struggle of front-line health care workers, did not reply to a request for comment.
Heather Knapp, 35, a registered home health nurse in Riverside, California, posted videos from several of the protests to her 33,000-follower Instagram account, Nurses4freedom. She said the recent rallies were an effort to bring awareness to the concerns of health care professionals who, despite the scientific consensus, question the safety of vaccines.
“I’m not an anti-vaxxer,” Knapp said. “Our organization is anti-mandate.”
Health care workers have never been immune from anti-vaccination views. Online groups like Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines were early participants in the modern anti-vaccination movement and have been known to rally behind health care professionals who refuse yearly flu shots. Since the pandemic began, Covid and vaccine misinformation has permeated mainstream nursing groups and led professional groups like the American Nurses Association to announce support for the vaccines and warn against online misinformation that erodes public trust.
Moran said viral videos of anti-vaccination nurses are “leveraging the credibility of medical professionals” to create a false impression that there is considerable debate about Covid vaccines among doctors and nurses when, in reality, there is a consensus about their efficacy and safety.
“There’s a hypocritical argument where anti-vaxxers for a long time have spread distrust in institutions and science and medicine,” Moran said. “But on the flip side, when there is a doctor or someone with an advanced degree or medical experience who says something that aligns with their anti-vax message — suddenly that institutional expertise is credible again.”
Knapp said that she and others were concerned about unknown “long-term safety effects,” including to women’s fertility, and that information about treatments like ivermectin, a drug used to prevent parasites in animals, was being “censored.”
Knapp also said her organization was expanding to include firefighters and law enforcement agents.
“We’re not giving in,” she said, adding that more rallies in additional states were scheduled for next week.
While more than 96 percent of practicing doctors in the U.S. have been fully vaccinated, according to an American Medical Association survey, some other health care workers are more hesitant. One in 4 hospital workers with direct contact with patients had not received a single dose of a Covid vaccine by the end of May, according to a WebMD and Medscape Medical News estimate using data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Some health care workers are going online to evade the impending mandates. In HealthCare Workers for Freedom, a new, separate private Facebook group with 3,000 members, self-identified health care workers offer support and trade tips for filing requests for religious exemptions and contacts for lawyers who would represent vaccine refusers. The group was buzzing Wednesday morning about a proposed walkout to protest the mandates, although some members expressed hesitation. “I hope no one is abandoning patients to walk out,” a member posted.
Facebook and its photo-sharing app, Instagram, have struggled to curb the spread of misinformation about vaccines on both platforms, despite numerous policy updates and other measures aimed at removing anti-vaccination content.
TikTok has similarly tried to limit the spread of misinformation, but the app has also become an important outlet for people looking to push back against mandates and spread vaccine hesitancy.
Moran said the nurses are consistently going viral on TikTok, which anti-vaccination influencers scour for credible-seeming messengers and where use TikTok’s sharing function, called “dueting,” to expand their audiences.
Moran said TikTok creates a vicious cycle of disinformation and debunking on TikTok. The nurses’ videos are debunked by well-meaning users in duets, which are then rebutted by anti-vaccination proponents, creating a false sense of ambiguity and debate about the vaccines’ safety.
“At the end of the day, all it does is push this impression that there is this 1:1 argument that’s going on where 50 percent of nurses agree with this and 50 percent don’t, and it’s nothing of the sort,” Moran said.
U.S. FDA may authorize COVID-19 vaccine for kids based on two months of safety data
U.S. heath regulators said children in clinical trials testing COVID-19 vaccines should be monitored for at least two months for side effects, suggesting that the agency is considering a quicker path to authorize the shot for emergency use than full approval.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Friday it was looking to complete the data review as quickly as possible, likely in a matter of weeks rather than months.
The FDA granted full approval last month for the use of Pfizer Inc's vaccine in people over the age of 16 based on a six-month follow-up from the trial. The shot was authorized in December for emergency use based on a shorter, two-month follow up.
The agency is under pressure to approve a vaccine for children below 12 years of age amid a surge in infections fueled by the spread of the Delta coronavirus variant, which has disrupted the reopening of schools.
Pfizer and partner BioNTech SE as well as Moderna Inc are racing to submit clinical data seeking regulatory approval for their vaccines in children below 12 years of age.
Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine has been currently authorized for children aged 12 to 15 in the United States.
Pfizer said it expects to report data needed for approval in five and 11 year olds sometime this month and could potentially submit an application for emergency use shortly after. The drugmaker said data for kids aged two and under five could arrive soon after.
For children between six months and two years, Pfizer has said it could have a safety and immunogenicity data as early as October or November.
Moderna on Thursday said it has fully enrolled participants in a trial testing its shot in children between six and 11 years and that it was still conducting dose selection studies for younger age groups.
https://news.yahoo.com/u-fda-says-robust-safety-143003533.html
Delta’s ability to replicate threw new twists into Covid pandemic
One of the key reasons the Delta variant has ignited new surges of Covid-19 infections across the United States is its remarkable ability to make copies of itself.
That skill has helped make Delta far more transmissible than any other iteration of the coronavirus seen thus far. But its replication prowess could also be at the heart of the other twists Delta has thrown into the pandemic, including the increase in breakthrough infections with the variant and why it potentially causes severe Covid-19 more often.
Delta’s breakneck proliferation isn’t its only trick tied to the increase in infections — and symptomatic infections — in people who’ve been vaccinated. With the mutations the variant picked up as it evolved, it can partially cloak itself from the immune system’s antibodies. That gives the variant a better chance of sneaking past that first line of defense to start an infection compared to earlier forms of the virus. (The vaccines, however, haven’t lost any significant step in protecting against severe outcomes from the coronavirus. They are also still preventing many infections entirely.)
But experts say a crucial factor in Delta’s spread even to vaccinated people is that those infected with the variant seem to be “shedding” comparatively massive amounts of virus, exposing others to much higher levels. An oft-cited statistic is that, with Delta, people have 1,000 times as much virus in their upper airways early on in their infections compared to with the strain that emerged in China in 2019. Some experts quibble with that exact estimate, but the point remains that people who contract Delta have lots more virus in their noses and throats, and are in turn emitting lots more virus. That influx of virus into others’ airways seems to be able to overwhelm the antibodies that aim to guard the cells from infection.
Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, offered an analogy. “It’s like trying to light a wet pile of hay on fire,” he explained. The body’s immune system is keeping the tinder damp, but if you throw more and more sparks on that wet hay, “eventually one of them catches.”
Delta also seems particularly attuned at cracking into cells to start an infection. Once it has a toehold, it starts cranking out copies of itself like the viral version of the brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” which can then go on to infect neighboring cells, quickly driving the viral load up beyond what other variants can do and outpacing the body’s initial response.
“All it takes is to get into a few cells to start a cascade of infection events,” Kamil said.
As the virus gets into more cells, it can bring on symptoms, which is why you’ve likely heard from friends or family about how they’ve felt sick for a few days after getting a breakthrough infection. But soon after the infection onset, the immune system — trained by the vaccine (or an earlier infection) to recognize and fight off the coronavirus — brings in the big guns, with an onslaught of additional antibodies and immune cells that can clear out the virus before it leads to more serious consequences. This is why, even if Delta is causing infections in some people who are vaccinated, in nearly all cases, it is causing only up to moderate disease — the goal the shots were designed to achieve.
There are other factors outside of Delta’s traits that are likely contributing to the increase in breakthrough infections, experts caution. For one, mitigation efforts have largely lapsed and people have restarted their social lives, leaving us more likely to come into contact with the virus.
Beyond that, it was always going to be difficult to completely ward off a pathogen that first infects the upper airway. The strong immune response generated by the vaccines that is so powerfully protecting people from severe Covid-19 is much harder to generate and sustain in the nose and throat.
“It’s a very tall order to ask a shot in your arm to protect the cells in your nose or in your mouth,” said immunologist Michal Tal, who has affiliations at Stanford and MIT.
What’s more, the antibodies generated by the vaccines, which are the body’s front line fighters in trying to block infections, wane months out from getting immunized. This is what happens with antibodies generally, and does not mean that people are more susceptible to getting severe disease. But it does mean that people could be more vulnerable to an infection months out from their last dose.
“The combination of not as much antibody being there, and the virus so quickly getting into cells,” helps explain the increase in breakthrough infections, said longtime coronavirus researcher Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa.
It’s a different story in people who are unvaccinated and don’t have immune protection. And some research has indicated that, among these people, Delta is more likely to cause disease severe enough to put them in the hospital than earlier forms of the virus — though the evidence is divided.
A study out of the United Kingdom, for example, found people infected with Delta faced twice the risk of hospital admission compared to people infected with the Alpha variant, which was echoed by research out of Denmark. A study out of Norway, however, found no such difference, and a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week noted that “it is not clear whether the Delta variant causes more severe illness in adult or pediatric populations.”
Researchers note it’s hard to compare disease severity from one point in the pandemic to another and from one variant to another, given all the variables involved: the demographics of people getting infected, the burden on the health system, improvements in care over time, and more. And many experts argue that the cases overwhelming hospitals in some states are just a reflection of the uncontrolled spread of the virus, not anything particular about this version.
But if Delta does cause severe disease more frequently than other forms of the virus, one possible explanation is how quickly its levels explode, experts said. If there are such high levels of virus in the nose and throat, the thinking goes, then it’s more likely that the virus will be able to infiltrate into the lungs, which is when more serious consequences can occur.
“If you have much more virus in the nose, why wouldn’t you have much more virus in the lungs as well?” Perlman said.
https://www.statnews.com/2021/09/09/covid19-delta-variant-transmission/
Pandemic from 1889-1891 commonly called Russian flu might have been earlier coronavirus
Harald Brüssow, Lutz Brüssow
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.13889PDF: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1751-7915.13889
Summary
Contemporary medical reports from Britain and Germany on patients suffering from a pandemic infection between 1889 and 1891, which was historically referred to as the Russian flu, share a number of characteristics with COVID-19. Most notable are aspects of multisystem affections comprising respiratory, gastrointestinal and neurological symptoms including loss of taste and smell perception; a protracted recovery resembling long covid and pathology observations of thrombosis in multiple organs, inflammation and rheumatic affections. As in COVID-19 and unlike in influenza, mortality was seen in elderly subjects while children were only weakly affected. Contemporary reports noted trans-species infection between pet animals or horses and humans, which would concur with a cross-infection by a broad host range bovine coronavirus dated by molecular clock arguments to an about 1890 cross-species infection event.
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889
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