H3N8 Avian Flu Virus Has Strong Transmission Potential With Risk Of Major Outbreak

 by Teresa Zhang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

There have been several cases of human infection with the H3N8 avian influenza virus in China, with one patient succumbing to pneumonia due to the infection in March. A recent study published in the renowned scientific journal Cell revealed that human isolates of the H3N8 virus can be transmitted through the air among ferrets. This is just one step away from breaking the barrier of inter-human transmission; thus, close monitoring is necessary.

The researchers utilized laboratory-cultivated human respiratory organoid models to investigate the infectivity of the H3N8 virus in humans. The results revealed that the H3N8 virus can infect and replicate in human bronchial and lung epithelial cells. Furthermore, the infectivity of the human-isolated virus is significantly higher than that of the avian-origin virus, leading to severe pneumonia and viral encephalitis.

In mammalian models, while the avian-origin H3N8 virus can infect ferrets, it is not efficiently transmitted among them. On the other hand, the H3N8 virus isolated from humans can effectively transmit among ferrets, even forming virus-laden aerosols in the air. This suggests that the H3N8 avian influenza virus can rapidly adapt to mammalian hosts, leading to infection and illness.

Deep sequencing analysis indicated that the virus can rapidly undergo genetic tuning and accumulate adaptive mutations after spreading among ferrets. Additionally, it can quickly undergo mutations within the human host, demonstrating the potential for human-to-human transmission.

The H3N8 avian influenza virus currently cannot be transmitted from person to person due to the insufficient acid stability of its hemagglutinin (HA) protein. The upper respiratory tract environment in humans is mildly acidic, making it challenging for the virus to infect respiratory cells. Researchers believe that if the virus' HA protein undergoes mutations that increase its stability in acidic environments, the risk of a large-scale outbreak will significantly increase.

Effectiveness of Current Influenza Vaccines Against H3N8 Virus

Researchers sampled 30 individuals who had received the trivalent influenza vaccine and 394 individuals from the general population. The results revealed a general lack of antibodies against the novel H3N8 virus, indicating that the seasonal influenza vaccine is ineffective against the H3N8 virus.

It is worth noting that avian H3 subtypes of influenza viruses primarily circulate during the cold winter and spring seasons, overlapping with the seasonal influenza virus in humans. If both types of viruses infect humans or intermediate hosts like pigs or ferrets simultaneously, it may lead to reassortment of the viruses, potentially resulting in strains no longer effectively targeted by existing vaccine antibodies. For example, new strains with "outer shells" derived from avian H3 influenza viruses and "inner core" genes from H1N1 or H3N2 may pose a risk of causing large-scale outbreaks.

In China, the detection rate of the H3N8 avian influenza virus remains consistently high in poultry. So how should we address the risk of a potential large-scale outbreak of H3N8 and other reassortant viruses? Researchers believe that the key lies in source control—that is, managing the virus' prevalence in poultry. This can be achieved through systematic H3 avian influenza monitoring in poultry populations to gain insights into the virus' prevalence.

From 2022 to 2023, China reported three human H3N8 virus infection cases. In April 2022, Henan Province reported the first case involving a 4-year-old boy who exhibited acute respiratory distress syndrome but later recovered. In May 2022, a 5-year-old boy in Hunan Province tested positive, exhibiting mild symptoms like fever, chills, sore throat, and a runny nose; his symptoms resolved after seven days. In March, a 56-year-old woman in Guangdong Province was infected with the H3N8 avian influenza virus and was hospitalized due to severe pneumonia, leading to her death.

A descriptive study published in The Lancet Microbe revealed that the novel H3N8 virus responsible for human infections was first detected in December 2021 in a chicken farm in Guangdong Province. Subsequently, it emerged in multiple provinces across China. Sequence analyses indicated that the virus had undergone numerous reassortment events.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/h3n8-avian-flu-virus-has-strong-transmission-potential-risk-major-outbreak

Adams arrives in Mexico to kick off his migrant discouragement tour

 Mayor Eric Adams touched down in Mexico’s capital city Wednesday evening for the first leg of his four-day tour in Latin America, where he will try to dissuade migrants from coming to the Big Apple.

Adams said before takeoff he plans “to speak with [Central and South American] leaders there to really start the process of understanding the flow of migrants here to New York City and throughout the entire country.”

“This is the type of conversation we believe we need to have both local, national and international to come up with a resolution,” the mayor whispered in a social media video from his aisle seat while again sporting a hat for the one-win Jets.

Hizzoner arrived ahead of schedule just before 7 p.m. local time and headed to the Historic Center of Mexico City, where he was scheduled to speak to business leaders and investors at the North Capital Forum.

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Adams said before takeoff he plans “to speak with [Central and South American] leaders there to really start the process of understanding the flow of migrants here to New York City and throughout the entire country.”

Stephen Yang

Following the event, Adams will do a private tour of the Basilica de Guadalupe.

The mayor plans to use his trip, which includes stops in Ecuador and Colombia, to inform migrants of the realities they would face if they decide to head to New York City.

He also intends to learn more about the dangerous path asylum seekers are taking to get to the southern border.

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Eric Adams arrived in Mexico Wednesday night.

Stephen Yang

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“This is the type of conversation we believe we need to have both local, national and international to come up with a resolution,” the mayor whispered in a social media video from his aisle seat.

Stephen Yang

“We are going to tell them that coming to New York doesn’t mean you want to stay in a five-star hotel,” Adams said on Tuesday.

“It doesn’t mean that when you come here, you automatically are going to be allowed to work.”

“I want to give the people of those areas a real story of what is happening in New York City,” he added.

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Following the event, Adams will do a private tour of the Basilica de Guadalupe.

Stephen Yang

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The mayor plans to use his trip, which includes stops in Ecuador and Colombia, to inform migrants of the realities they would face if they decide to head to New York City.

Stephen Yang

The trip comes as the daily number of asylum seekers arriving soars, with the city recording 800 more migrants in a single day, twice the prior average.

The administration has floated scheduling a trip to raise the profile of the crisis that has overwhelmed New York City’s shelter system but has been previously shot down.

On Thursday, the mayor will visit migrant sites south of the border at Puebla, Mexico, before jetting to Quito, Ecuador, the following day.

He will spend his final day in Bogotá, Colombia, where he plans to head to the Darién Gap, a dangerous jungle path that smugglers use to bring many asylum seekers from South to North America.

https://nypost.com/2023/10/04/adams-arrives-in-mexico-to-kick-off-migrant-discouragement-tour/

USPSTF Urged to Reconsider Recommendation to Lower Mammogram Age

 The updated draft recommendation from the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) that would lower the recommended start age for routine screening mammograms by a decade for all average-risk women is not justified, experts argue in a "dissenting view" published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The proposed change would affect more than 20 million US women, and it's "hard to see any potential benefits associated with lowering the starting age," coauthor Steven Woloshin, MD, with the Dartmouth Cancer Center, Lebanon, New Hampshire, said in an NEJM podcast.

Back in May, when USPSTF released the draft recommendation, task force member John Wong, MD, with Tufts Medical Center, Boston, told Medscape, "It is now clear that screening every other year starting at age 40 has the potential to save about 20% more lives among all women."

But, according to Woloshin, there is no recent evidence that mortality from breast cancer is increasing in young women.

In fact, the US has seen a steady decrease in breast cancer mortality, especially among younger women. Breast cancer mortality among women under 50 "has been cut in half over the past 30 years," Woloshin, alongside Karsten Juhl Jørgensen, MD, DMedSci; Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH; and H. Gilbert Welch, MD, MPH, explained.

Another wrinkle: The task force did not base its recent recommendation on randomized trial data. In fact, there have been no new randomized trials of screening mammography for women in their 40s since 2016. Instead, the task force relied on statistical models to "estimate what might happen if the starting age were lowered," Woloshin and colleagues said.

Relying on a statistical model, however, "is problematic because it has some very optimistic assumptions about the benefit of mammography," Woloshin said in the podcast. For instance, the models assume that screening mammography reduces breast cancer mortality by about 25%.

That 25% reduction, he noted, is "far greater than what's reported in the meta-analyses of the available randomized trials," Woloshin explained. The meta-analyses report about a 16% reduction for all the trials combined and an estimated 13% for trials at low risk of bias. But "even these meta-analyses are likely to overstate the effect of screening since the trials were done before the major advances in treatment," Woloshin added.

In their own calculations, Woloshin and colleagues found that lowering the screening age to 40 came with a small potential benefit and a substantial risk for harm.

Combing data from the National Cancer Institute, the team reported that the risk for death for women in their 40s from any cause over the next 10 years was about 3% whether or not they received their biennial mammogram.

The risk for death from breast cancer in that time was 0.23% with mammograms — about 2 in every 1000 women — and 0.31% without. "That's 1 less breast cancer death per 1000 women screened for 10 years," Woloshin said.

Put another way, with mammography screening, "the chance of not dying from breast cancer over the next 10 years increases from 99.7% to 99.8%," Woloshin said.

The benefit is arguably small, while the harms appear quite significant, Woloshin said.

About 36% of women who begin screening at age 40 would have at least one false alarm over 10 years, and almost 7% would have a false alarm requiring a biopsy in that timeframe.

Ease or Exacerbate Racial Disparity?

Another argument that the USPSTF highlighted for lowering the screening age: Research indicates that Black women get breast cancer at younger ages and are more likely to die of the disease compared with White women.

Woloshin and coauthors, however, also took issue with the view that lowering the screening age could reduce disparities between Black and White women.

"There's no question that there are substantial differences between Black and White women in terms of breast cancer mortality, but there's actually very little disparity in breast cancer screening — about 60% of Black and White women in their 40s are screened regularly in the United States," Woloshin explained in the podcast.

Therefore, it's "really hard to imagine" how recommending the same intervention to both groups could possibly reduce the disparity, he said.

"The disparity is not a reflection of screening. It reflects differences in cancer biology," he added. "Black women are at higher risk for more aggressive, fast-growing cancers that are less likely to be caught by screening and unfortunately are less likely to benefit from treatment."

Earlier screening would also not address the problems facing poor women, who tend to be disproportionately Black, such as lower quality of available medical services, follow-up delays after abnormal scans, treatment delays, and less use of adjuvant therapy, Woloshin cautioned.

In Woloshin's view, lowering the screening age, which broadens the eligible population, may actually "exacerbate problems contributing to disparity by diverting resources toward expanded screening rather than doing what we know works by ensuring that high-quality treatments are more readily accessible to poor women with breast cancer."

Reconsider the Change?

Because task force recommendations are so influential, Woloshin and his colleagues worry that mammography screening for women in their 40s will probably become a performance measure.

"Our concern is that rather than fostering informed decisions, clinicians and practices are going to be judged and rewarded and punished based on compliance with this quality metric," Woloshin said.

That's a problem, he noted, "because women should be able to make the decision for themselves rather than having this be a public health imperative, which is imposed by physicians and practices who are incentivized to meet a quality metric."

The hope, said Woloshin, is that this prospective piece will help influence the task force to "reconsider the recommendation, because we think that the bottom line is that their models are insufficient to support a new imperative. The benefits are really limited, and there are really common and important harms for healthy women."

The comment period for the draft recommendation is now closed, and a final decision from the task force is forthcoming.

This research had no funding. Woloshin has no relevant disclosures.

N Engl J Med. Published September 21, 2023. Full text

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/997073

CDC Journal And Five Others Rejected Key Paper On COVID Vaccines, Heart Inflammation

 by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Six medical journals rejected a key paper on COVID-19 vaccines and heart inflammation, a condition the vaccines cause, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)'s journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), was one of them.

CDC officials falsely told the paper's authors that the paper did not add anything to a previously published CDC report, which estimated more COVID-19 hospitalizations would be prevented than cases of heart inflammation, or myocarditis, caused.

"I ran this by the MMWR lead editorial staff members; they felt that while the report was interesting, they did not feel that there was anything that was not already relayed," Dr. Jacqueline Gindler, one of the officials, said in an Aug. 10, 2021, email.

The CDC a month earlier in a non-peer-reviewed paper estimated that among males aged 12 to 17, one million second Pfizer doses would cause up to 69 myocarditis cases but prevent some 5,700 COVID-19 cases and 215 COVID-19 hospitalizations.

The new paper clarified the risk-benefit calculus by separating children without serious underlying conditions such as obesity from children with one or more of the problems. It broke down the age group into two parts, 12- to 15 and 16- to 17. And it subtracted incidental hospitalizations, or hospitalizations where people test positive for COVID-19 but are actually being treated for other conditions.

The researchers estimated, using similar methods as the CDC, that one million doses would cause more cardiac adverse events in healthy boys than COVID-19 hospitalizations prevented. Among boys aged 12 to 15 without comorbidities, they calculated up to 6.1 times more adverse events among the vaccinated.

Both the CDC and the new paper utilized reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which the CDC co-manages.

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, one of the paper's co-authors, said that the CDC's position that the paper did not add anything "was laughable."

"What we added was stratification for non high-risk vs high-risk children, which was new," Dr. Hoeg told The Epoch Times in an email. "We also reported a higher rate in 12-17 year olds than CDC had been reporting in males after dose two. Finally we removed incidental COVID-19 hospitalizations, when estimating potential vaccine benefits, which CDC had not been doing up to that point."

Benjamin Hayes, a CDC spokesman who answered a query sent to Dr. Gindler, told The Epoch Times in an email that MMWR had to be "highly selective" due to receiving many submissions during the pandemic.

The paper from Dr. Hoeg's group "included some additional analyses," Mr. Hayes said, but "did not provide information that would have caused the conclusions from the previous report to be refined or modified."

Other Rejections

Five other journals also rejected the paper, which was crafted after the CDC finally acknowledged vaccines likely cause myocarditis.

The New England Journal of Medicine dismissed the paper after having peers review it. One reviewer falsely said that with pre-pandemic myocarditis, adolescents were not known to experience lingering cardiac problems. In fact, deaths and a serious condition called dilated cardiomyopathy have been documented in such patients. Another reviewer said that a major concern was the social consequences of publishing the paper. A third falsely said most post-vaccination cases do not require hospitalization, asserting that offering a risk-benefit analysis based on hospitalization was inappropriate.

"Your paper was evaluated by four external reviewers and a statistical consultant and was discussed among the editors," John Jarcho, the journal's deputy editor, informed the paper's authors. "Although it is interesting, I am sorry to say it was not accepted for publication. This was an editorial decision and reflects an assessment of the merits of your manuscript as compared with the many others we receive."

The statistical reviewer did convey helpful feedback that resulted in adjustments to the paper, authors said.

Dr. Elizabeth Loder, a British Medical Journal, later rejected the paper, offering a similar rationale as the CDC.

"In comparison with the many other papers we have to consider, this one is a lower priority for us. I've reviewed the paper along with another senior editor, and we do not have confidence in the comparison you make in the paper," Dr. Loder said. "The raised risk of myocarditis has been noted before based on this database and the novelty is in the comparison.  That calculation will depend on the prevalence of COVID at the time and it was low in May/June 2021."

A spokesperson for the journal told The Epoch Times in an email: "We are unable to comment in detail about a specific paper, as this is a confidential matter. However, we can say that in general, papers are considered on matters of methodology, potential importance, interest to our broad readership, and on what they add to the established literature. Every paper is thoroughly assessed to ensure that any claims made are supported by robust methods and definitive conclusions before a decision is made."

Dr. Brahmajee Nallamothu, editor-in-chief of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, told the authors that he shared their paper with several editors and experts.

"Many of us appreciated you tackling this critical topic, and lending your analytical skills as well as important voices to this debate. However, at the end of the day our concerns were really around the substantial uncertainty of calculating incident estimates using VAERS," he wrote.

Two American Medical Association journals also turned down the paper. One said it was better for a pediatric journal.

The paper was first submitted to journals in July 2021.

Preprint

The authors were surprised by all the rejections.

"It was really the first time in my life that I was getting this sense the journals were afraid of taking a chance on publishing something," Dr. Hoeg said. "This was particularly frustrating, not because of my own academic career, but because the consequences of them choosing not to publish our findings were adolescents and their families would not be fully informed about the risks of myocarditis from the Pfizer vaccine."

Dr. John Mandrola, a cardiac electrophysiologist based in Kentucky and another co-author, said it was unusual but not unheard of to be rejected by so many journals.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/cdc-journal-and-five-others-rejected-key-paper-covid-vaccines-heart-inflammation

Mayorkas: "Acute & Immediate Need" To Build Border Wall In Texas

 In a stunning reversal of everything that was said over the last 7 years by the left, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is citing an "acute and immediate need" to waive dozens of federal laws in order to build a border wall in south Texas as the illegal immigration crisis grows utterly out of control.

"The Secretary of Homeland Security has determined, pursuant to law, that it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements in order to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County, Texas," reads a notice posted to the U.S. Federal Registry that Fox News obtained.

In light of the surge in illegal immigration, Mayorkas found that there exists an "acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas."

No, this is not Babylon Bee.

As Ben Whedon reports at JustTheNews.com, The former president's campaign team took Mayorkas's decision as a vindication, telling Fox News that:"

"President Trump is always right. That’s why he built close to 500 miles of powerful new wall on the border and it would have been finished by now. Instead, Crooked Joe Biden turned our country into one giant sanctuary for dangerous criminal aliens."

In total, Mayorkas plans to waive a total of 26 federal laws to expedite construction.

It's going to fun to see the Democrats and their MSM lackeys squirm out of this one...

Doe the Biden administration want to remind Latinos that they are not welcome?

Is the Biden administration building a monument to White Supremacy....

Is the Biden administration's wall "xenophobic and racist"?

There are a million more examples...

These 3 words seem to sum things up perfectly "Too Freaking Late!"

...and cue the "we never said it was racist" or "it was racist because Trump wanted it" narrative spin incoming...

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/too-freaking-late-mayorkas-finally-admits-acute-immediate-need-build-border-wall-texas