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Immune sensor ZBP1 links interferon treatment and dangerous inflammatory cell death during COVID-19

Scientists from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have shown that the innate immune sensor, ZBP1, and its associated inflammatory cell death pathway, PANoptosis, are major contributors to the negative effects of interferon treatment and high interferon levels in some COVID-19 patients. The...

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Immune sensor ZBP1 links interferon treatment and dangerous inflammatory cell death during COVID-19
by St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
May 19, 2022

Scientists from St. Jude Children's Research Hospital have shown that the innate immune sensor, ZBP1, and its associated inflammatory cell death pathway, PANoptosis, are major contributors to the negative effects of interferon treatment and high interferon levels in some COVID-19 patients. The work was published today in Science Immunology.

For viral infections, interferon therapy is a proposed treatment that should help the immune system efficiently clear viruses. But in patients with established SARS-CoV-2 infections, interferon therapy has produced mixed results, in some cases even increasing mortality, which appears to be mediated by ZBP1.

"Our study improves our fundamental understanding of innate immunity and inflammatory cell death pathways and shows how modulating these processes during coronavirus infection could be used to improve patient outcomes," said corresponding author Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Immunology vice-chair.

"Interferons induce the expression of interferon-stimulated genes. Some of these genes show antiviral function while some drive cell death," she said. "One such interferon-stimulated gene is ZBP1. Interferon induces robust expression of ZBP1, which can then sense SARS-CoV-2 and drive inflammatory cell death. This cell death is detrimental for patient outcomes."

Screening for a gene

The scientists wanted to find out which genes sensed SARS-CoV-2 and contributed the most to poor outcomes in COVID-19 patients treated with interferon. To find these genes, they used a CRISPR-Cas9 screen that knocked out genes in macrophages infected with coronavirus. Researchers then observed which genes were missing in the surviving cells. These genes were likely critical for sensing the virus and driving cell death, since their deletion resulted in the cells surviving the infection. This unbiased screening method identified ZBP1 as one such gene. ZBP1 was also expressed at higher levels in the immune cells of patients with worse outcomes during COVID-19 than those who fully recovered.

Kanneganti's group has been studying ZBP1 and its role in cell death for many years. The group initially identified ZBP1 as an innate immune sensor of influenza virus that activates PANoptosis. PANoptosis is an inflammatory cell death pathway discovered by Kanneganti's lab. It integrates components from—but is also distinct from—other cell death pathways such as pyroptosis, apoptosis and necroptosis.

ZBP1 is upregulated by interferon to sense and respond to viral infections. The researchers showed that deleting the gene ZBP1 in mice infected with coronavirus prevented cell death and mortality during interferon therapy. Additionally, cell death was prevented in human cells in response to SARS-CoV-2 infection by knocking down the expression of ZBP1.

Preventing inflammatory cytokine storms

The scientists showed that the body's antiviral inflammatory response was the cause of poor outcomes during coronavirus infection. The interferon response is a natural mechanism the immune system uses to combat infections. This response starts local inflammation at the site of viral infection to draw immune cells to the area and prevent viral spread.

Interferon also activates interferon-stimulated genes such as ZBP1 that cause cell death to prevent viral spread. In patients with poor outcomes, this response becomes uncontrolled. Cell death causes the production of cytokines, powerful immune signaling molecules. Cytokine production causes more cell death, which causes more cytokine production. This cycle creates a positive feedback loop that ultimately leads to a dangerous immune event known as a cytokine storm.

Cytokines are produced in large quantities during a cytokine storm, causing an overreaction throughout the body. This overreaction activates signaling cascades that cause serious issues, including multi-organ failure. Cytokine storms are connected to COVID-19 severity and mortality.

An overstimulated cell death pathway

The group documented that the proteins associated with inflammatory cell death, PANoptosis, were activated in SARS-CoV-2-infected macrophages treated with interferon, compared to untreated macrophages. The researchers found similar results when coronavirus-infected mice were treated with interferon. The cell death was accompanied by the release of proinflammatory cytokines. This provided the researchers with a mechanistic understanding of how ZBP1 could lead to a cytokine storm during a coronavirus infection.

"It appears inflammatory cell death can be beneficial if it occurs in the early phase of infection," said co-first author Rajendra Karki, Ph.D., St. Jude Department of Immunology. "However, once the infection is established, the ZBP1-mediated PANoptosis inflammatory cell death mechanism promoted by interferon therapy becomes detrimental by resulting in cytokine storm, inducing tissue damage, morbidity and mortality."

These results have important implications not only for COVID-19, but also for potential therapies for other infectious and inflammatory diseases where interferons drive pathology.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Studies reveal key clues about COVID-19 immunity, immune recall

How does the immune system remember and recognize viral invaders it has encountered in the past? A trio of newly published studies of people infected with SARS-CoV-2, vaccinated against the virus, or both are providing tantalizing new clues about the factors that influence the speed and...

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Studies reveal key clues about COVID-19 immunity, immune recall
by Brigham and Women's Hospital
May 19, 2022

How does the immune system remember and recognize viral invaders it has encountered in the past? A trio of newly published studies of people infected with SARS-CoV-2, vaccinated against the virus, or both are providing tantalizing new clues about the factors that influence the speed and magnitude of the immune system's response to subsequent infection with variants of SARS-CoV-2.

These insights could help researchers work backward to further improve vaccines, with the ultimate goal of creating either a multi-variant vaccine that could shield people from multiple strains or even a pan-coronavirus vaccine that could provide protection against variants that have yet to emerge.

The three studies, published in Science Immunology and led by investigators at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, provide intriguing answers about how long COVID-19 immunity lasts and the nature of immune recall after infection, vaccination or both.

"If we want to ask more of our immune system, we need to know what it is capable of," said Duane Wesemann, associate professor of immunology HMS and a researcher at the Brigham's Division of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. Wesemann is one of the senior authors on two of the papers and a co-author on the third.

"Our findings suggest that there are differences between people—some people have antibody responses that are relatively more sustained with greater breadth than others, and that may contribute to greater protection against future infection," he added. "If we can understand and tap into what gives some people an immunological edge, we may be able to coax the immune system through improved vaccine strategies to give a little more."

In one study, Wesemann and colleagues looked at immunity after infection with the original strain of the SARS-CoV-2, first identified in Wuhan, China. The team assessed 73 antibodies made in response to infection with the ancestral strain to determine which, if any, were effective against five variants—Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron. They found that certain antibodies generated from infection with the original strain could neutralize variants of concern—results that confirm why vaccines formulated against the original strain can still provide protection against variants.

Using sophisticated imaging techniques, the researchers were able to track how the shapeshifting structure of the mutating virus engages with the immune system. They pinpointed mutation-prone sites of the viral spike protein that the pathogen uses to invade human cells, and to visualize how these sites interact with sites on antibodies that neutralize the virus and prevent it from entering cells.

In a second paper, investigators looked at immune recall—the process of summoning up memory cells into action to fight repeat invasions with the same pathogen. The team analyzed the immune system's response after infection, vaccination and boosting by studying blood samples from individuals with different medical trajectories—those who had recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection but were not vaccinated, those who recovered from infection and were then vaccinated against COVID-19, or those who were never infected but had been vaccinated and boosted. The team found evidence that people who had been infected and vaccinated as well as people who had been vaccinated and boosted could mount a strong and broad response across variants, including Omicron. In addition, the researchers found evidence suggesting that memory of prior infection with common cold coronaviruses—mild viruses that circulated before SARS-CoV-2—might be responsible for the robust, sustained immune response in a small subset of unvaccinated individuals who recover from COVID-19. These individuals, known as "sustainers," experience swift resolution of COVID-19 symptoms and have a prolonged, sustained antibody response.

"We're very excited about this idea that some people sustain their antibodies and have memory B cells that can react across variants—it raises some interesting possibilities as we think about a pan-coronavirus vaccine," said Wesemann.

In a third study led by Andrew Luster, MD, Ph.D., and James Moon, Ph.D., both of the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases and Division of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology at MGH, investigators sought to better understand the role of CD4+ T cells in COVID-19 immunity by directly identifying those that recognize SARS-CoV-2. Analyzing blood samples from patients who had recovered from infection during the first wave of the pandemic in Boston, they found that certain CD4+ T cell subsets—circulating T follicular helper (Tfh) cells and T helper-1 (Th1) cells—were more common in individuals who had milder disease and did not require hospitalization. This cellular response appeared to persist for several months, potentially giving the immune system an advantage for subsequent exposure to SARS-CoV-2, including variants. In addition, T follicular helper cells specific for SARS-CoV-2 were found to be more common in the same group of antibody "sustainers" observed in the Wesemann study, suggesting a link between these T cells and more prolonged antibody responses.

"Our study demonstrates that the quality of the CD4+ T cell response to SARS-CoV-2 was better in patients with less severe infections, and that this was reflected by the presence of sustained antibodies. This supports the general immunological theory that optimal antibody responses require robust CD4+ T cell help and that vaccines should be designed to also maximize responses by this component of the adaptive immune system," said Luster.

Wesemann, Luster, Moon and their collaborators are continuing to analyze samples from people who have been infected with or vaccinated against COVID-19 to identify immunological features that may confer the broadest possible immunity against coronaviruses and variants.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Genomic differences selected through evolution may offer clues as to why COVID-19 outcomes vary widely

Though underlying medical conditions play an important role, many aspects of why COVID-19 severity can differ vastly from one patient to another have remained unclear.

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Genomic differences selected through evolution may offer clues as to why COVID-19 outcomes vary widely
by Katherine Unger Baillie, University of Pennsylvania
May 19, 2022

Though underlying medical conditions play an important role, many aspects of why COVID-19 severity can differ vastly from one patient to another have remained unclear.

A new study identifies dozens of genomic variations that may drive these hard-to-predict differences in clinical outcomes. According to work led by University of Pennsylvania scientists, genomic variants in four genes that are critical to SARS-CoV-2 infection, including the ACE2 gene, were targets of natural selection and associated with health conditions seen in COVID-19 patients.

The investigation, which used genomic data from diverse global populations, suggests that these variants may have evolved in response to past encounters with viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2. The research team published its findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This study exemplifies my lab's approach to genomic studies: We use what happens in nature and signatures of natural selection to identify functionally important variants that impact health and disease," says Sarah Tishkoff, a co-corresponding author on the work and a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor with appointments in the Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Arts & Sciences. "Nature has already done a lot of the screening and can give us clues as to what parts of a gene like ACE2 are important for infection."

While other groups have conducted genome-wide association studies to identify genetic variants associated with COVID-19 severity, this is the first to include ethnically diverse Africans and a highly diverse dataset from the Penn Medicine BioBank. Including these often-overlooked groups revealed new variants that may be clinically significant.

Signals of selection

Before COVID-19 was even declared a pandemic, Giorgio Sirugo of the Perelman School of Medicine hypothesized that there was a genetic basis for susceptibility to or protection from more severe outcomes.

"The idea is really a classic one, that infectious diseases have a host genetic component," says Sirugo, a co-corresponding author on the paper. He reached out to Tishkoff and other colleagues to begin to address the question with a population genetics approach.

The researchers focused on a handful of genes known to play a role in how SARS-CoV-2 enters cells: ACE2, TMPRSS2, DPP4, and LY6E. They used genomic data from 2,012 ethnically diverse Africans, including people who practice traditional hunter-gatherer, pastoralist, and agriculturalist lifestyles, as well as 15,977 people of European and African heritage from the Penn Medicine BioBank, all of whom had associated electronic health record data available.

Looking for variations in these genes that showed evidence of being selected through evolutionary time, the researchers found 41 variants in the ACE2 gene that affected the amino acid sequence of the protein. Although these variants were rare when the team looked at the pooled global population, among a population of Central African hunter-gatherers three variants were common.

"This really stood out to us," says Tishkoff. "This is a group that lives in a tropical environment and continues to forage for bush meat, spending a lot of time in the forest. They're likely exposed to all kinds of viruses introduced from animals. And, of course, SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have jumped from an animal to humans. So even though this population wouldn't have been exposed to this exact virus in the past, they could have been exposed to similar types of viruses."

These variants, in other words, might have evolved because they offered a protective effect against viruses with similarities to SARS-CoV-2. These variants showed signs of being positively selected, more evidence that they confer a fitness advantage.

Signs of natural selection were not only present in the parts of the genome that code for ACE2 and other genes but also in what are known as regulatory regions, which affect how and where those genes are expressed. Many of these variants appeared to have been subject to what's known as purifying selection, which occurs when evolutionary forces select for the removal of variants with negative impacts on fitness.

"We saw significant signals of natural selection in the regulatory regions of ACE2," says Chao Zhang, a postdoc in Tishkoff's lab and co-lead author. "I personally think that is going to be really important in thinking about clinical outcomes."

"From an African and specifically Central African perspective, the discovery of three non-synonymous variants at ACE2 in Cameroonian indigenous populations is significant," says Alfred K. Njamnshi, a co-author and professor of neurology and neuroscience at Cameroon's University of Yaoundé. "The regulatory variants found at ACE2 do suggest targets of recent natural selection in some African populations, and this may have important disease risk or resistance implications that warrant further investigation."

Rare variants are also likely playing a role in health outcomes, the team notes, accounting for individual-to-individual variation in disease severity. In East Asian populations, they found variations in the ACE2 regulatory region that may increase ACE2 expression, which could influence the degree to which SARS-CoV-2 infects host cells.

"To know for sure, we need to test the function of this variant and see whether we can get some indication that changes in this region are related to COVID infection susceptibility and severity," says Yuanqing Feng, another Tishkoff lab postdoc who shared first authorship on the paper.

These variations in noncoding regions of the genome could also influence on which organs the genes are expressed in, a relevant characteristic given COVID-19's known effects on the heart, brain, lung, kidney, and other organs. In addition, the ACE2 receptor does not only play a role in binding to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein; it is also involved in blood pressure regulation, and thus variants may affect health outside of just COVID infection.

Beyond ACE2, signals of natural selection were also apparent in the coding and regulatory regions of the TMPRSS2 gene, including variations that appear to have evolved after early human populations divided from other great apes. "There are a lot of human-specific substitutions in that protein, which is really intriguing," says Tishkoff, a suggestion that natural selection acted on these sites during human evolutionary history after the divergence from the ancestor of chimpanzees more than 5 million years ago. The team identified dozens more variants in the DPP4 and LY6E genes as well.

Genome-health connections

To get at the clinical relevance of these variants, the researchers made use of Penn Medicine BioBank data. The analysis was conducted in large part before the pandemic swept through the United States, and thus outcomes of COVID-19 disease were not part of patient medical records at the time. But because the biobank data contain genetic-sequencing information, the researchers were able to look at the genetic variants they had just identified and see if there were any links with medical conditions that were considered relevant to COVID-19 infection.

"With our data, we can look at the variants that were identified by Sarah's team and link those with clinical data," says Anurag Verma of Penn's Perelman School of Medicine, a co-first author on the paper.

The team found certain variants of the coding regions they had identified were indeed associated with conditions with connections to or overlap with COVID-19, including respiratory disorders, infection with respiratory syncytial virus, and liver disease.

Building on these initial findings, the researchers say further exploration of key genetic variants could reveal a lot about how proteins function in the context of COVID-19 or other diseases.

"From a medical point of view, you could identify novel therapeutic targets, or even provide some personalized medicine depending on which variants a person had," Sirugo says.

The team underscores the importance of looking in diverse populations for genome studies, as some of the newly identified variants that could be clinically significant were only identified in African populations that had not been investigated in this way previously.

"That is a deeply important and unique aspect of this study," Tishkoff says.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Looking at human behavior is key to building a better long-term COVID forecast

From extreme weather to another wave of COVID-19, forecasts give decision makers valuable time to prepare. When it comes to COVID, though, long-term forecasting is a challenge, because it involves human behavior.

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Looking at human behavior is key to building a better long-term COVID forecast
by Elaina Hancock, University of Connecticut
May 19, 2022

From extreme weather to another wave of COVID-19, forecasts give decision makers valuable time to prepare. When it comes to COVID, though, long-term forecasting is a challenge, because it involves human behavior.

While it can sometimes seem like there is no logic to human behavior, new research is working to improve COVID forecasts by incorporating that behavior into prediction models.

UConn College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources Allied Health researcher Ran Xu, along with collaborators Hazhir Rahmandad from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Navid Ghaffarzadegan from Virginia Tech, have a paper out today in PLOS Computational Biology in which they detail how they applied relatively simple but nuanced variables to enhance modeling capabilities, with the result that their approach outperformed a majority of the models currently used to inform decisions made by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Xu explains that he and his collaborators are methodologists, and they were interested in examining which parameters impacted the forecasting accuracy of the COVID prediction models. To begin, they turned to the CDC prediction hub, which serves as a repository of models from across the United States.

"Currently there are over 70 different models, mostly from universities and some from companies, that are updated weekly," says Xu. "Each week, these models give predictions for cases and number of deaths in the next couple of weeks. The CDC uses this information to inform their decisions; for example, where to strategically focus their efforts or whether to advise people to do social distancing."

The human factor

The data was a culmination of over 490,000 point forecasts for weekly death incidents across 57 US locations over the course of one year. The researchers analyzed the length of prediction and how relatively accurate the predictions were across a period of 14 weeks. On further analysis, Xu says they noticed something interesting when they categorized the models based on their methodologies: "For purely data-driven models, like machine learning and curve-fitting models, we found they do a better job predicting in the short-term, whereas theory-driven models do a better job predicting in the longer term."



At first, this may seem strange, but Xu explains that the difference comes down to human behavior.

"It's weird and not weird, per se," Xu says. "If you don't have theory and the models are just working with a bunch of data and machine learning, of course they are going to do a good job in the shorter term. But what really matters in the mid- to long-term is you need to have a theory explaining why people do the things they do."

Incorporating the behavioral component into the model was relatively simple, says Xu.

"When we looked at all those 60-70 models, we felt like there was a key behavior mechanism missing. That mechanism is when people see more death or they perceive COVID infections to be dangerous, then they voluntarily reduce their mobility or do social distancing. However, once the death rate decreases, people go back to their normal activity. In looking through the models, few of them are modeling this endogenous feedback loop."

Insights for the future

The researchers argue that this feedback loop, though largely overlooked by other models, offers the greatest benefit for mid- to long-term predictions.

Rahmandad says the research suggests the key to modeling for long-term predictions is not necessarily creating more complicated models, but strategically incorporating the right elements.

"To create a predictive model that is successful in the long-term, we can start small, using a simple, mechanistic model," says Rahmandad. "We can then incorporate key mechanistic features—particularly the endogenous representation of human behavior in interaction with the evolving pandemic."

When examining the models on the CDC hub, some do have behavioral components, says Xu, but few consider how they change over time or change as a function of how disease progresses.

"I think incorporating behaviors in infectious disease modeling and developing relevant behavioral theories is still an area that needs more research and we currently do not have comprehensive theories explaining how people behave during pandemic/infectious disease outbreak," Xu says. "This requires collaboration among multiple disciplines, such as social scientists, epidemiologists, and methodologists."

After incorporating the feedback loop, the researchers found the model performs very well at predicting the trajectory of COVID, and Xu emphasizes that this shows how important it is to incorporate behavioral dynamics into infectious disease modeling.

"The purpose of developing this model is not to offer real-time predictions, but it may offer insights for future prediction models. This simple model is doing even better, especially in the longer term."

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Study shines light on longevity of COVID-19 immune response

By uniting research from eight cohorts across the U.S., a group of researchers has accelerated collection of data integral in answering questions about immune responses needed for long lasting protection from SARS-CoV-2. The description of the cohorts, the assays used and the definitions for...

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Study shines light on longevity of COVID-19 immune response
by American Society for Microbiology
May 19, 2022

By uniting research from eight cohorts across the U.S., a group of researchers has accelerated collection of data integral in answering questions about immune responses needed for long lasting protection from SARS-CoV-2. The description of the cohorts, the assays used and the definitions for events were reported recently in the journal mSphere, an open access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

Longitudinal observation studies (studies that employ continuous or repeated measures to follow particular individuals over time) are essential to answer important questions on durability and effectiveness of immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. Often individual cohorts have limited longitudinal data or participant numbers to draw robust conclusions. To overcome these limitations, harmonized yet independent cohorts were established in different geographic locations of the U.S.—the PARIS (Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2) and SPARTA (SARS SeroPrevalence and Respiratory Tract Assessment) cohorts. These cohorts offer a nimble and rapid approach to stand up a network suitable to collect biospecimens and other data.

"We started the PARIS cohort at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai because we wanted to know three things: how long antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 last during infection, whether antibody responses protect against reinfection and how much antibody an individual needs to be protected," said senior study author Florian Krammer, Ph.D., a professor of Microbiology and Pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

"It is very important when you have an emerging virus to study the immune responses to the infection itself over time, to look at the protective effects of immune responses induced by infection, and also study what happens when people get vaccinated," added lead study author Viviana Simon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of Microbiology, Infectious Diseases and Pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

In the new study, to understand re-infection rates and correlates of protection for SARS-CoV-2, the researchers established eight different longitudinal cohorts in 2020 under the umbrella of the PARIS /SPARTA studies. The cohorts included seropositive and seronegative participants at high risk for infection. The initial PARIS study focused on health care workers in New York City, one of the early epicenters of the pandemic in the U.S., but the other cohorts targeted not only healthcare workers, but other populations including communities of color, first responders and students.

With the rapid SARS-CoV-2 vaccine rollouts starting in mid-December 2020 in the United States, many of the cohorts also now track immune responses to vaccination in individuals both seronegative and seropositive at the time of immunization. There were 8,741 participants in the eight cohorts. In all eight cohorts, the researchers followed individuals with and without COVID-19 by collecting data as well as biospecimens to measure immune responses (e.g., antibody responses to the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2) at least every two months.

"We saw that the antibody response in previously infected individual was relatively stable, and they were protected from re-infection unless the new infection was the Omicron variant," said Dr. Krammer. The team studied how immune responses behaved in previously infected individuals versus those who hadn't yet been infected. The researchers showed that previously infected individuals mounted very rapid immune responses even after a single vaccine dose. "Vaccination boosts your protection and provides better immunity," said Dr. Krammer.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

COVID-19 registry finds significant increased risk of in-hospital mortality for STEMI patients compared to pre-pandemic

The latest analysis from The North American COVID-19 STEMI (NACMI) was presented today as late-breaking clinical research at the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions (SCAI) 2022 Scientific Sessions. The findings show clinical characteristics and management strategies differ by...

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COVID-19 registry finds significant increased risk of in-hospital mortality for STEMI patients compared to pre-pandemic
by Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions
May 19, 2022

The latest analysis from The North American COVID-19 STEMI (NACMI) was presented today as late-breaking clinical research at the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions (SCAI) 2022 Scientific Sessions. The findings show clinical characteristics and management strategies differ by gender, but in-hospital mortality rates remained high among both groups. The findings were simultaneously published in JSCAI.

In the United States, someone experiences a heart attack every 40 seconds (CDC). Of these patients, more than 25% will experience a more severe type of heart attack, an ST-elevated myocardial infarction, or STEMI caused by the sudden, total blockage of a coronary artery. Pre-COVID-19 mortality in STEMI patients was below 5%. Research is underway to better understand the effects of COVID-19 on cardiovascular diseases and outcomes.

In this analysis, the authors compared clinical characteristics, management strategies and outcomes of male and female STEMI patients with COVID-19 patients. Among 585 with STEMI and COVID-19, 154 (26.3%) were female.

Compared to males, females were significantly older, had higher rates of diabetes and stroke/TIA and statin on admission. Males were more likely to present with chest pain whereas females presented with dyspnea, or labored breathing. Females more often had STEMI without an identified culprit lesion. Use of primary percutenous coronatry intervention (PCI) was significantly higher in males, whereas medical therapy was higher in females. In-hospital mortality was 33% for females and 27% for males (p=0.217); there were also no significant sex differences in-hospital stroke or re-infarction, or composite primary endpoint.

"The significant increase in mortality among both men and women in this study highlights the need for continued research to better understand the long-term effects of COVID-19 on cardiovascular health," said Odayme Quesada, MD, Medical Director at The Christ Hospital Women's Heart Center in Cincinnati, OH. "Our study also points to the lack of research and clear guidance on how to treat STEMI patients without an identified culprit lesion, many of which are women. We hope additional analysis of these patient characteristics will help further inform clinicians on best the treatment approach and ultimately improve patient outcomes."

The NACMI registry is a collaboration between SCAI, the American College of Cardiology and the Canadian Association of Interventional Cardiology. The registry was established in 2020 with the aim to define baseline characteristics and management strategies and outcome data for COVID-19 patients presenting with STEMI. More than 60 medical centers across North America and Canada contributed data to the registry.

Researchers note that further investigation is needed to better understand sex-differences in the underlaying etiology of STEMI.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

URGENT: The most powerful evidence yet that mRNA vaccines hurt long-term immunity to Covid after infection

A bombshell study - from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna, no less - should end debate

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URGENT: The most powerful evidence yet that mRNA vaccines hurt long-term immunity to Covid after infection
A bombshell study - from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna, no less - should end debate
Alex Berenson
11 hr ago

Unvaccinated people are much more likely to develop broad antibody immunity after Covid infections than people who have received mRNA shots, a new study shows.

The gap remains large whether people had mild, moderate, or severe Covid infections, the study showed - undercutting a crucial argument that vaccine advocates have made to defend the shots.

The research draws on data from Moderna’s 30,000-person clinical trial for its mRNA shots. It may help explain why so many Americans now suffer multiple Covid infections, sometimes within months.

Researchers already knew that many vaccinated people do not gain antibodies to the entire coronavirus after they are infected with Covid.

Unvaccinated people nearly always gain antibodies to the nucleocapsid protein, which covers the virus’s core of RNA, as well as its spike protein, which allows the virus to attack our cells. Vaccinated people often lack those anti-nucleocapsid antibodies and only have spike protein antibodies.

—

Vaccine advocates claim the lack of nucleocapsid antibodies may occur because the mRNA shots prime people to fight off the Covid infections more quickly and have lower viral loads. In this view, the narrow immune response is a feature, not a bug - vaccinated people are less seriously infected and so do not need to generate anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.
This study essentially demolishes that theory.

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Moderna quietly posted the paper a month ago as a pre-print, but it has received little attention despite its import.

The researchers examined the development of anti-nucleocapsid antibodies in people who had been part of Moderna’s clinical trial and were infected with Covid. As they expected, the scientists found that the vaccinated people were far less likely to develop the anti-nucleocapsid antibodies. Only 40 percent of people who received the shots had antibodies, compared to 93 percent of those who did not.

But they then went a step further. Because the infected people had been in the trial, their viral loads had been precisely measured when they were found to have Covid. So the researchers were able to compare vaccinated and unvaccinated people who had the same amounts of virus in their blood.

Once again, they found that unvaccinated people were far more likely to develop anti-nucleocapsid antibodies than the jabbed. An unvaccinated person with a mild infection had a 71 percent chance of mounting an immune response that included those antibodies. A vaccinated person had about a 15 percent chance.

Only in cases of severe infection and very high viral loads did the difference narrow significantly; in those cases all unvaccinated people and most of the vaccinated had anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

The chart that should worry the vaccinated: the yellow line shows the odds that an unvaccinated person will develop anti-nucleocapsid antibodies to Sars-Cov-2, stratified by viral load. The blue line shows the same odds for a person who received an mRNA shot.

An unvaccinated person has an almost 60 percent chance of developing antibodies even with an extremely mild infection; a vaccinated person needs almost 100,000 times as much virus in his blood to have the same chance.


SOURCE

The researchers also tried to correlate the development of anti-nucleocapsid antibodies with viral load over time. Theoretically, if vaccinated people cleared the virus more quickly, they might have fewer antibodies - another version of the “it’s-a-feature-not-a-bug” defense. But they found the opposite - again, vaccination status and not the duration of infection was what mattered.

The “likely explanation is a vaccine-induced reduction in seroconversion [the production of antibodies],” the researchers wrote.

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The study all-but-proves the mRNA shots themselves — and not whatever reduction in viral loads they may cause — are impeding the development of the anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

Still, the long-term immunological and medical significance of the lack of those antibodies is less clear. The reason that drugmakers targeted the spike protein rather than the nucleocapsid in the first place is that Sars-Cov-2 depends on its spike for its crucial initial attack on the exterior of human cells. It exposes the nucleocapsid protein only after it has dumped its mRNA inside the cell itself.

Yet there is some evidence that antibodies to the nucleocapsid play an important role later in our immune response.
And the coronavirus’s spike protein mutates rapidly, potentially rendering antibodies it against useless. For example, Omicron’s spike is markedly different than that of earlier variants. The nucleocapsid protein mutates far more slowly, offering a potential second line of defense.

Answering these questions and figuring out what if any harm the lack of anti-nucleocapsid antibodies may cause will require a concerted research effort. But it is precisely this kind of work - work that might reveal long-term damage from the vaccines - that government and academic scientists are studiously avoiding.

In the meantime, expect lots more stories like this:



And expect those articles to avoid the most important question of all - whether unvaccinated people are being reinfected, or only the vaccinated.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Government and WHO CORONA Lies

This is not subtle. Incompetence or Nefarious Evil Intent? Hard to tell the difference.

rwmalonemd.substack.com

(fair use applies)

Government and WHO CORONA Lies
This is not subtle. Incompetence or Nefarious Evil Intent? Hard to tell the difference.
Robert W Malone MD, MS
12 hr ago

As the sitting POTUS and his entourage is about to head over to the UN and WHO for a little quality time and a vote on circumventing the constitution, this seems a good time to briefly review the current state of affairs.

Ask yourself, have these people earned our trust? Do they have any right to set and police global health policies? Apparently Joe Biden (or whoever is his current puppet master) and Tony Fauci think so.




A brief list of some of the COVID lies we have heard over the last couple of years (with thanks and acknowledgment to Dr. Scott Atlas):

1. SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a far higher fatality rate than influenza virus by several orders of magnitude
2. Everyone has a significant risk of death from COVID-19.
3. No one has immunity, because this virus is new (“novel”) and so expedited vaccine development and deployment is essential.
4. Everyone is dangerous and spreads the infection
5. Asymptomatic people are major drivers of the spread of disease.
6. Locking down- closing schools and businesses, confining people to their homes, stopping non-COVID medical care, and eliminating travel will stop/eliminate the virus.
7. Masks will protect everyone and stop the spread.
8. Immune protection can only be obtained with a vaccine.
9. Natural immunity conferred by infection and recovery is short lived and inferior to vaccine-induced immunity.

Who was responsible for these lies?

1. Deborah Birx (who was trained by Anthony Fauci).
   She wrote virtually all official White House guidance to state Governors.
   This usurped constitutional authority of states to set public health policies.
2. Anthony Fauci
3. Francis Collins

What were their policy decisions?

1. “Flatten the Curve”… Then “Stop all cases”
2. No masks. All masked.
3. Lockdowns: School closures, business shutdowns, limits on medical care, a host of restrictions, mandates and quarantines.
4. Perverse financial incentives for hospitals to over diagnose COVID-19, over use Remdesivir and ventilation, and cause a massive wave of iatrogenic (drug/doctor caused) excess death.
5. Stop early treatment and block repurposed drug use.
6. “come back to the hospital when your lips are blue”

What was the effect of their policy decisions?

1. Virus? >1,000,000 American deaths attributed to the virus. One of this highest mortality rates per capita in the world.
2. Lockdowns? Caused massive deaths and severely harmed millions of families and children, especially working class and poor.

The better alternative was known by March, 2020, known as “targeted protection”

Ioannidis STAT March 17 2020.


Katz, NY Times March 20 2020


Atlas, Washington Times, March 26, 2020


Kulldorf, CNN em Espanol 20 Aug 2020 (he could not get it published in English..)


What were the alternative policies proposed?

1. Increase the protection of the high-risk groups with an unprecedented focus
2. Reopen society, including medical care, schools, businesses and hospitals
3. Carefully monitor hospital capacity and supplement when needed

This set of policy recommendations was codified on October 04, 2020 as the Great Barrington Declaration.

According to Wikipedia:

“The Great Barrington Declaration was an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns.[1][2] It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise continued functioning normally.[3] The envisaged result was herd immunity in three months as SARS-CoV-2 swept through.[1][2][3] Authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was drafted at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, signed there on 4 October 2020, and published on 5 October.[2][4] The document presumes without evidence that the disease burden of mass infection can be tolerated, that any infection confers long term sterilizing immunity, and makes no mention of physical distancing, masks, contact tracing,[5] or long COVID, which has left patients suffering from debilitating symptoms months after the initial infection.”​

Why did the public believe the Lockdowners"?

1. Culture of trust (of the credentialed class)
2. Fear (actively weaponized against the public by the government, WHO, and legacy media)
3. Demonization of opposing views (globally coordinated propaganda and censorship campaign)
4. Legacy media, social media, and political campaigns

Key messaging to support the lies.

1. If you are against lockdowns, you are selfish and choosing the economy over lives
2. If you are against lockdowns, you are for allowing the infection to spread without mitigation and therefore in favor of unnecessary and preventable deaths

Active Destruction and Denial of fundamental public health ethics.

“If a school is implementing a testing strategy, testing should be offered on a voluntary basis. It is unethical and illegal to test someone who does not want to be tested, including students whose parents or guardians do not want them to be tested” CDC, October 13, 2020​

​

Mandating vaccines for Children

“But we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”​

Eric Rubin, MD. Editor in Chief, New England Journal of Medicine. October 26, 2021​

FDA Advisory meeting on vaccine approval in children.​

How to restore trust in Science?

1. Admit errors in public forums
2. Change Leadership
3. Strengthen conflict of interest rules and add term limits on government agency leadership positions
4. Clarify definition of “public health emergency” with strict time limits, adding legislative action requirement to extend
5. Restore appropriate roles of health agencies to advise, rather than set rules
6. Fact check the media
7. Decentralize research funding
8. Introduce new transparency and accountability
   1. De anonymize reviews of papers and grants
   2. Increase independent oversight to government agencies and committees
   3. Evaluate universities regarding ethics, free debate
   4. New training programs, including logic and ethics for journalists, doctors, and scientists

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Boosters - Criminally Negligent Homicide or Pre-Meditated Murder?

Alberta Updated Data

sheldonyakiwchuk.substack.com

(fair use applies)

Boosters - Criminally Negligent Homicide or Pre-Meditated Murder?
Alberta Updated Data
Sheldon Yakiwchuk
10 hr ago

Yesterday, I posted a video response from Justin Trudeau, where he openly states that Current COVID deaths are Higher now than have been in the same time during the last 2 years - View Here.

His solution, of course, is to keep doing what we’re already doing in continuing a failed segregation program in place for the Unvaccinated because - “SCIENCE”.

Expecting this to work when it has been a complete and utter failure over the last 17 months and seeing the Highest Case rates historical, when only the Fully Vaccinated were allowed to be included in public events and unrestricted travel, is completely illogical and borderline insane.

Welp…latest data that we see coming out of Alberta proves that he is either Criminally Negligent in his actions or that he is Criminally Responsible for the outcomes that we are seeing. Driving and even allowing PHAC to continue to provide boosters to our Most Vulnerable Populations is exactly producing this exact outcome.

Having drilled out the trends previously, I’ve shown exactly how the vaccines drive wave counts - you can view this →Here.

In addition to this, I’ve also used the data to show how the Waning Immunity from Dose 2 has driven additional waves →Here.

What we are seeing now is even more troubling.

On previous trends, there was a diminishing impact following each dose where there was an initial spike in Cases, Hospitalizations and Mortalities but would eventually peak with the volume of population in these Vaccine Driven COVID waves and fall off. What is visible now is that this is no longer tapering off and is more of a prolonged period of driving hospitalizations, ICU admissions and Mortality.

These alarming trends following cases rates were available on a Heat Map that Alberta used to provide on their Dashboard until the case rates had spiked so high that they didn’t fit the chart nor the narrative anymore. By January 12, 2022 they looked like this:



But of course, we already knew that the vaccines couldn’t stop COVID transmission…and yet we still persisted with the Vaccine Mandates on Travel, Employment, Employment Insurance and Leaving Canada…because, “SCIENCE”.

What we are seeing now is that the Hospitalizations, in a time when mortality was historically less than half of what it is currently, is in our Boosted Communities. It has been a persistent trend, mentioned in previous substacks where as of the most recent Data from May 16th, 2022, the boosted now make up more than 50% of the Current Hospitalizations, in a period where Vaccinated from one dose to 3 make up 81% of the current hospitalizations. Side by side in a week over week looks like this:



Yikes!

Even though the province has removed the previous heat maps, there is still a trending that you can follow through Vaccines and into Hospitalizations and ICU admissions…but it takes a little understanding of the Mapping to fully comprehend. In selecting just the individual doses (Dose 1, Dose 2, Dose 3, Dose 4), and doing the same in watching the impact to hospitalizations and ICU admissions, this is what we see:


The absolute Clearest Picture that the Vaccines greatly impacted the Hospitalizations and ICU admissions, prior to the 14 days that it takes to be considered “Partially Vaccinated”.

This isn’t just correlation, it’s full on CAUSATION!

The First Jabs definitely drove hospitalizations and ICU admissions and in this, our weakest populations…also drove mortality.

Why nobody looked at this and warned people getting vaccinated that they were at an absolute higher risk from COVID in just taking their first jab is beyond me…but were long past where the majority of the most vulnerables are getting these jabs, so is moot.

Issue is, we are still seeing the Most Vulnerable Dying at a higher Rate and this directly follows their booster shots and is shown in the snapshot over 120 days of Mortality in Alberta.

At current, Alberta is 37.8% Boosted:



And the majority of these being most vulnerable by age and pre-existing conditions. In the 120 snap shot of COVID death provided by the dashboard, we see that the Boosted Make up 474 of the 1005 deaths counted on this chart - Note, the chart says 1039 but does not include Dose 1 Deaths.

37.8% of the population makes up 47% of the deaths.

And when we look to the roll-out of Booster Doses and see the impacts on Hospitalizations and ICU admissions, we see this:



That within 14 days after taking dose 3, hospitalizations and ICU admissions followed the exact pattern of doses, showing the causation that it was definitely Dose 3 driving these cases…and after the doses tapered off, so have the hospitalizations and ICU admissions.

Hold on to your butts!

Because what we see for “Protection” in those who have been boosted looks a lot worse. Check it:



After the tapering effect wore off on those who got their booster shot and COVID within 14 days…those that got COVID after they were considered Boosted - 3 dose + 14 days, these cases continued to RISE and haven’t tapered off - same with ICU Admissions.

And to fully get a sense of what this is saying you have to appreciate that the Highest Risk populations by Age - 70+, over the last 120 reporting days made up 237 ICU admissions, (43% of them boosted - highest rates of ICU Admission in all 3 ranges)…



Also made up 421 of the 794 deaths in this age group:



53% of the mortality comes from the Boosted!

237 ICU admissions, where there were 421 Deaths in this group.

The people that don’t show up on the previous ICU Mapping are the people that DIED from COVID after having their 3rd Jab…while there is still a massive and still increasing impact on our ICU from those who just had the boosters.

It’s impossible to look at the information and believe that More Doses is a solution. It’s impossible to look at the data and graphs and not realize that Boosters are directly increasing risk to hospitalizations, ICU admissions and death from COVID.

When Dr. Deena Hinshaw and Justin Trudeau both recognize an increase in Hospitalizations, ICU admissions and Deaths in COVID this year over the previous 2 years, they are 100% correct. This is Caused by their recommendations of getting Boosted.

This information is publicly posted - by official Government Sources.

They have this information, so either they are not paying attention and are guilty of Criminally Negligent Homicide…

Or they’ve looked at it, know exactly what is happening and are guilty of Pre-Meditated Murder.

There’s no 3rd option.

 

[Zoner]

Thanks! I watched the whole thing. A lot of similar ground covered. The woman interviewer was really stuck on the upcoming WHO treaty, she interrupted him at least twice to complain about it, (annoyingly, because what can Geert do about it, and she interrupted his train of thought more than once). Finally Geert told her it won't matter what the WHO wants to do, the virus is in control, not man and they'll be too busy dealing with what's coming to do anything else. I don't know when the interview was actually conducted, sometimes they're done a few days or even a week before being posted - I was hoping for a question about NK and their possible experiment in herd immunity - and a question about Monkey Pox and whether the now weaker immune system of the vaxxed will contribute to its spread. But neither was asked...

HD

Thanks HD
It seems the more he talks about what is coming the more sure he is that it’s coming and soon.

He said when this thing hits it’s going to explode suddein one of the heavily vaccinated countries and the health system will just crash. Then it will quickly move on to the other heavily vaccinated Nations.

it sounded to me like he knows that the know but that they won’t do anything or say anything because they will lose face. He even castigated Bill Gates for going along with WHO and the CDC. I think he sounds at a loss for how these people don’t seem to care about people dying.
And he clearly said that bringing industry into the health concern is what has put money before the health of the people. Such evil.

Geert said the virus is in charge of the world now and it won’t be long before this pandemic breaks out into a death wave of the vaccinated. Sounded like he was pretty sure it will occur this summer.

Maybe that’s why Russia invaded the Ukraine because the Ukraine is a bread basket. and Russia and China know this deadly wave is coming is creating shortages. Geert can’t be the only one who knows what’s coming.

This makes me want to super prepare.

if you’re not prepared to die you’re really not prepared.

I really hope everyone here knows Jesus and have received Him into your life. Psalm 91

 

[psychgirl]

almost like they know what's coming....

Yes, I’d bet that they do.
Or they’ve been watching Dr VB videos on the sly.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

101 Subway Stations Closed in Beijing Due to New Outbreak of COVID-19

Beijing has closed 101 subway stations in the capital city due to the worsening of a new wave ...

www.theepochtimes.com

(fair use applies)

101 Subway Stations Closed in Beijing Due to New Outbreak of COVID-19
Infection clusters occurred in universities under lockdown
By Alex Wu
May 20, 2022

Beijing has closed 101 subway stations in the capital city due to the worsening of a new wave of COVID-19 outbreak. Infection clusters occurred in universities under lockdown, and many neighborhoods have been locked down without any official announcement.

The epidemic in Beijing continues to heat up since late April, with official daily reports of infections in the dozens. The authorities have upgraded control measures, locking down universities and many areas in the city, causing public criticism and protests.

On May 17, the authorities closed Dayayao subway station and Qilizhuang subway station due to the spread of COVID-19, bringing up the number of closed subway stations in Beijing to 101 in May, among a total of 459 stations in the city. All subway stations in Fangshan District, Shunyi District, and the southern part of Chaoyang District are also closed.

Meanwhile, more than 158 bus lines have been suspended due to the outbreak since May 5. Many citizens have to ride bikes to work, making Beijing’s streets look like how it was in the 1980s.

On May 19, Liu Xiaofeng, deputy director of the Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that from May 18 to May 19, there were 64 new cases of local infection reported. Among them, 7 were college students located in Yancun town, Fangshan district. According to an official announcement, a total of 11 cases have been confirmed at the Fangshan campus of Beijing Institute of Technology.

China’s official data released throughout the pandemic has been deemed highly unreliable, as political pressure compels authorities to underreport deaths and cases.

Since early May, universities in Beijing have been put in a “closed-loop” pandemic control system by the authorities, triggering student protests against the lockdown.

Students living on campus are not allowed to leave, while students who commute are transported in specially assigned buses.

The Epoch Times obtained a video showing students in Beijing University protesting against the lockdown on May 15.

Since May 17, a 7-day lockdown has been implemented in areas in Fengtai district; during which all residential communities in the areas are closed, residents are ordered to stay at home, and all indoor cultural entertainment, sports and fitness, and various training venues in the areas are closed for business.

The authorities stated that the specific time to lift the lockdown “will be dynamically adjusted according to the COVID-19 nucleic acid test results and the epidemic situation.”

Meanwhile, mass testing has been conducted across the city. Beijing citizens also revealed in posts on social media that many more areas in the city have been locked down than officially announced.

One post reads, “So many people lining up to do nucleic acid tests is like a large site for cross infection!” Another complains, “The subway closed, the buses pass without stopping, how could we go to work?”

Another post reads, “the area I live in has been locked down, but the government didn’t announce it. My workplace thought I made it up to skip work.”

Residents in other areas of the city also complained about the unannounced lockdowns: “I live in the Beidajie near Fengtai Garden. The area has been locked down without any announcement. The government is so powerful, they lock down the whole district, and the common people couldn’t say anything. But why did they lock it down but not announce it to the public?”

Xia Song contributed to the report.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Australian Prime Minister Supports Extended WHO Powers

Prime Minister (PM) Scott Morrison has shown support for granting the World Health Organisation (WHO) greater powers to ...

www.theepochtimes.com

(fair use applies)

Australian Prime Minister Supports Extended WHO Powers
By Steve Milne
May 20, 2022

Prime Minister (PM) Scott Morrison has shown support for granting the World Health Organisation (WHO) greater powers to assist countries in managing pandemics.

However, minor parties have expressed concerns that this would amount to compromising Australia’s health sovereignty.

This comes after the World Health Assembly, consisting of 194 member countries, agreed in December 2021 to set up a global process to draft and negotiate a convention or treaty under the Constitution of the World Health Organisation to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.

Included in the potential framework of the convention is to “mobilize collective international efforts necessary to prevent, rapidly detect and effectively respond to outbreaks of disease with pandemic potential” and “support global coordination through a stronger WHO, as ‘the directing and coordinating authority on international health work,’ including for pandemic preparedness and response”.

Speaking at a press conference, the prime minister was asked about the upcoming World Health Assembly, running from May 22 t0 28, where WHO member countries will be discussing the proposed treaty and whether he would support it.

“I’ve always been supportive right from the outset and was criticised heavily, and I stress heavily, mocked in fact, by the Labor Party for saying the WHO should have those powers and those authorities to be able to go and deal with pandemic situations, because we all know what happened at the start of this pandemic,” Morrison said.

In April 2020, the Morrison government pushed for an independent inquiry into China’s handling of the initial COVID-19 outbreak after reports emerged in 2020 that the authorities in China were aware of the outbreak for weeks prior to the official declaration on Dec. 31, 2019. Early reports about an outbreak of the virus appeared in Wuhan in November 2019, when a cluster of cases was reported by state-controlled media.

“And I was the one calling to ensure that we had an independent process to understand what happened so it couldn’t be repeated,” Morrison said.

“So I have been in the vanguard of those moves internationally to ensure that there is greater protection for world health to ensure that those world health authorities can come and understand what’s going on and be able to assist countries to be able to prevent the spread and outbreak of major infectious diseases.”

However, members of One Nation and the United Australia Party have both said that signing on to such a treaty would pose a risk of the WHO dictating to Australia when and how to respond to global or regional health threats.

One Nation senator Pauline Hanson said on Wednesday that under the guidelines set out by the WHO, and supported by the PM, the WHO would have the power to pressure nations to implement measures such as lockdowns, hard borders around quarantine zones, vaccine passports, mandatory removal and quarantine, and mandatory vaccinations.

“To make matters worse, the World Health Organisation can declare a pandemic without justifying or even publishing its reasons. There is no appeal, no transparency, no fairness,” she said.

Meanwhile, founder of the United Australia Party (UAP) and senate candidate Clive Palmer, said it is well known that China is a major contributor to the WHO and has a high degree of influence over the organisation.

“The WHO has been rightly criticised for pro-China bias in the past,” he said.

“It should be concerning to all Australians who value freedom and democracy that our health policies could fall under the influence of communist China.”

Despite supporting the extended powers of the WHO, Morrison stressed that he would have to look closely at the details of what the treaty involves before agreeing to it.

Meanwhile, Labor leader Anthony Albanese refused to declare if he would sign the treaty, instead stating that “we need to clearly strengthen the WHO and the way that it operates.”

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Newstream | KCNA Watch

kcnawatch.org

(fair use applies)

Epidemic Spread and Treatment Results in DPRK
Date: 21/05/2022 | Source: KCNA.kp (En) | Read original version at source

Pyongyang, May 21 (KCNA) -- According to information of the state emergency epidemic prevention headquarters, more than 219,030 persons with fever, over 281,350 recoveries and one death were reported from 18:00 of May 19 to 18:00 of May 20 throughout the country.

As of 18:00 of May 20 since late April, the total number of persons with fever is over 2,460,640, of which more than 1,768,080 have recovered and at least 692,480 are under medical treatment.

The death toll stands at 66. -0-

www.kcna.kp (Juche111.5.21.)

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SsxmswNo4Y
Europe, BA 5 and monkeypox next
19 min 15 sec
May 20, 2022
Dr. John Campbell

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control BA.4 and BA.5 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-1... https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-ev... 12th May, ECDC reclassified omicron subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5 as VOCs First detected in South Africa in January and February 2022 Now dominant in SA Both lineages contain L452R, F486V, and R493Q in the spike receptor binding domain Significant change in antigenic properties of BA.4 and BA.5 compared to BA.1 and BA.2 Portugal BA.5, increasing trend in variant proportions With increase in case numbers and test positivity rate Portuguese National Institute of Health BA.5 already accounted for ~37% of positive cases as of 8 May Daily growth advantage for BA.5 over BA.2 is 13% (SA estimated 12% daily growth advantage) BA.5 will become the dominant variant in Portugal by 22 May 2022 Growth advantage for BA.4 and BA.5 Evade immune protection induced by prior infection and/or vaccination, particularly if this has waned over time BA.4 and BA.5 are capable of escaping immune protection induced by infection with BA.1 No indication of any change in severity for BA.4/BA.5 compared to previous Omicron lineages. These variants could cause a significant overall increase in cases in Europe If COVID-19 case numbers increase substantially, some level of increased hospital Countries should have plans in place for the rapid deployment of booster doses in these population groups. Our world in data https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus US variant nowcast https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-trac... South Africa https://www.nicd.ac.za/diseases-a-z-i... SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants under investigation in England Technical briefing 41 https://assets.publishing.service.gov... V-22APR-03 (Omicron sub-lineage BA.4) and V-22APR-04 (Omicron sub-lineage BA.5) As of 3 May 2022 BA.4 40 genomes BA.5 19 genomes Monkeypox update https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23142... Massachusetts public health officials confirm case of monkeypox https://www.mass.gov/news/massachuset... An adult male with recent travel to Canada Australia https://www.theguardian.com/australia... Victoria, man 30s traveller from UK NSW, man 40s traveller from Europe Jennifer McQuiston at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention https://www.statnews.com/2022/05/18/s... We’re seeing this expansion of confirmed and suspect cases globally We have a sense that no one has their arms around this to know how large and expansive it might be Maria Van Kerkhove, emerging diseases and zoonoses unit, World Health Organization Positive cases identified in the U.K., Portugal, and Spain (Sweden) And we expect there will be others

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Worldwide Effort To Create “Digital Twin” Inspired by COVID Pandemic

Virtual Immune System Roadmap Unveiled A step-by-step plan for an international effort to create a digital twin of the human immune system will be presented in an article to be published today (May 20, 2022) in the journal njp Digital Medicine. “This paper outlines a road map that the scientific

scitechdaily.com

(fair use applies)

Worldwide Effort To Create “Digital Twin” Inspired by COVID Pandemic
By University of Nebraska–Lincoln
May 20, 2022

Virtual Immune System Roadmap Unveiled

A step-by-step plan for an international effort to create a digital twin of the human immune system will be presented in an article to be published today (May 20, 2022) in the journal njp Digital Medicine.

“This paper outlines a road map that the scientific community should take in building, developing, and applying a digital twin of the immune system,” said Tomas Helikar, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln biochemist who is one of 10 co-authors from six universities from around the world. Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health renewed a five-year $1.8 million grant for Helikar to continue his work in the area.

“This is an effort that will require the collaboration of computational biologists, immunologists, clinicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists,” he said. “Trying to break down this complexity into measurable and achievable steps has been a challenge. This paper is addressing that."

A digital twin of the immune system would be a breakthrough that could offer precision medicine for a wide array of ailments, including cancer, autoimmune disease, and viral infections like COVID-19.

Helikar’s involvement has been inspired in part by his 7-year-old son, who required a lung transplant as an infant. This has resulted in a life-long careful balancing of his immune system through powerful immunosuppression drugs to prevent organ rejection while keeping infections and other diseases at bay.

While the first step is to create a generic model that reflects common biological mechanisms, the eventual goal is to make virtual models at the individual level. That would enable doctors to deliver treatments precisely designed for the individual.

“The dream and goal are for it to be used for precision medicine at the level of an individual,” Helikar said. “Importantly, we change over time. Our immune system is programmed, reprogrammed, and tweaked over time. It develops from birth and as we get older, it continues developing, often in ways we don’t like. It becomes weaker, we have cancers and our immune system is not keeping up. Our goal is to create digital twins that are not just specific to ourselves, but specific to that point in time – taking into consideration all of our past.”

The authors of “Building Digital Twins of the Human Immune System: Toward a Roadmap” are part of an umbrella working group of about 200 scientists organized for multiscale modeling of viral pandemics. The inter-agency working group is led by Reinhard Laubenbacher of the University of Florida and James Glazier of Indiana University, both co-authors of the May 20 report. Since May, Helikar has been co-leading the working group with Glazier.

Other co-authors include Gary An of the University of Vermont, Anna Niakaris of Université Paris-Saclay, and Rahuman S. Malik Sheriff of the European Bioinformatics Institute.

“Digital twins, customized simulation models pioneered in industry, are beginning to be deployed in medicine and healthcare, with some major successes in cardiovascular diagnostics and in insulin pump control,” the article says. “More advanced medical digital twins will be essential to making precision medicine a reality. Because the immune system plays an important role in such a wide range of diseases and health conditions, from fighting pathogens to autoimmune disorders, digital twins of the immune system will have especially high impact.”

While the quest could take years and hundreds of millions of dollars, Hellikar believes it is achievable.

“I think we have enough data and technological advancements in terms of methods and software tools, that the first draft or first version of the virtual immune system could be built with data that already exists. It may not be personalizable yet, but you could start with it as a working prototype.”

Helikar is committed to completing the project.

“As long as there’s a possibility that this can be done, if it can help my son, that’s my mission,” he said.

Reference: “Building Digital Twins of the Human Immune System: Toward a Roadmap” 20 May 2022, npj Digital Medicine.

DOI: 10.1038/s41476-022-00610-z

Funding: NIH/National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Scientists May Have Discovered the Mechanism Behind Mysterious COVID-19 Symptoms

In patients with serious and long-term COVID-19, disrupted blood coagulation has often been observed. Now, researchers at Linköping University (LiU), Sweden, have discovered that the body’s immune system can affect the spike protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading to the production o

scitechdaily.com

(fair use applies)

Scientists May Have Discovered the Mechanism Behind Mysterious COVID-19 Symptoms
By Linköping University
May 20, 2022

In patients with serious and long-term COVID-19, disrupted blood coagulation has often been observed. Now, researchers at Linköping University (LiU), Sweden, have discovered that the body’s immune system can affect the spike protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, leading to the production of a misfolded spike protein called amyloid. The discovery of a possible connection between harmful amyloid production and symptoms of COVID-19 has now been published in the Journal of American Chemical Society.

In people who have serious and long-term COVID-19, organs other than the lungs can be gravely affected. Complex symptoms and damage in, for example, the heart, kidneys, eyes, nose, and brain, as well as disturbed blood coagulation, can sometimes persist. Why the illness affects the body in this way has largely been a mystery. Now, researchers at LiU have found a biological mechanism that has never been described before, and which can be a part of the explanation.

The research team studies illnesses caused by misfolded proteins, of which Alzheimer’s disease in the brain is the most well-known example. The scientists noted that there are many similarities between COVID-19-related symptoms and those which are observed in illnesses caused by misfolded proteins.

The functions of proteins are strongly affected by the fact that proteins are folded in specific ways that give rise to a specific three-dimensional structure. As well as this shape, a protein can also assume an alternative shape. Over 30 different proteins are known to have this kind of alternative form, which is associated with illness. This alternative folded protein is known as amyloid. The LiU researchers wondered whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, contains a protein that can create amyloid. They were specifically interested in the spike protein on the surface of the virus, which the virus uses to interact with the body’s cells and infect them.

Using computer simulations, the researchers discovered that the coronavirus’ spike protein contained seven different sequences which could potentially produce amyloid. Three of the seven sequences met the researchers’ criteria for being counted as amyloid-producing sequences when experimentally tested. They produced, among other things, so-called fibrils, which look like long threads when examined under an electron microscope.

But do these fibrils arise spontaneously? It is well known that many illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s, are preceded by a process where the body cuts up large proteins into smaller pieces, which can in turn produce the harmful amyloid. In their study, the researchers show that an enzyme from immune system’s white blood cells can cut up coronavirus’ spike protein. When the spike protein is cut up, it produces the exact piece of protein which, according to the researchers’ analysis, is most likely to produce amyloid. This enzyme is released in large quantities from one type of white blood cells, neutrophils, which are released early on during infections such as COVID-19. When the researchers mixed pure spike protein with this enzyme, called neutrophil elastase, unusual fibrils were produced.

“We have never seen such perfect, but scary, fibrils as these ones from the amyloid-producing SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and pieces thereof. The fibrils starting from the full-sized spike protein branched out like limbs on a body. Amyloids don’t usually branch out like that. We believe that it is due to the characteristics of the spike protein”, says Per Hammarström, professor at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM) at Linköping University.

Previous research, including a study by South African researchers, has indicated that the spike protein may be involved in the production of small blood clots. The blood contains the fibrin protein, which helps the blood to coagulate when a vessel is damaged, so that the hole seals again and stops bleeding. When the injury has begun to heal, the coagulate is supposed to be broken up by plasmin, which is also found in blood.

The researchers at LiU mixed amyloid-producing protein pieces from the spike protein together with these bodily substances in test tubes, and saw that the fibrin coagulate which was then produced could not be broken down in the usual way by plasmin. This newly discovered mechanism may lie behind the production of similar micro blood clots that have been observed in both serious and long-term COVID-19. Disturbed blood coagulation is also seen in many amyloid-related illnesses.

“We can see that the spike protein, when affected by our own immune system, can produce amyloid structures, and that this can potentially affect our blood coagulation. We believe that this discovery is significant for many fields of research, and we hope that other researchers will examine the questions that it raises”, says Sofie Nyström, who is an associate professor at IFM and the other author on the study.

Reference: “Amyloidogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein” by Sofie Nyström and Per Hammarström, 17 May 2022, Journal of the American Chemical Society.

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c03925

The research has been funded by the Swedish Research Council.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Thousands of Covid-negative Beijing residents sent to quarantine

Thousands of Covid-negative Beijing residents were relocated to quarantine hotels overnight due to a handful of infections, as the capital begins to take more extreme control measures resembling virus-hit Shanghai.

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Thousands of Covid-negative Beijing residents sent to quarantine
May 21, 2022

Thousands of COVID-negative Beijing residents were forcibly relocated to quarantine hotels overnight due to a handful of infections, as the capital begins to take more extreme control measures resembling virus-hit Shanghai.

Beijing has been battling its worst outbreak since the pandemic started. The Omicron variant has infected over 1,300 since late April, leading city restaurants, schools and tourist attractions to be closed indefinitely.

China's strategy to achieve zero COVID cases includes strict border closures, lengthy quarantines, mass testing and rapid, targeted lockdowns.

Over 13,000 residents of the locked-down Nanxinyuan residential compound in southeast Beijing were relocated to quarantine hotels overnight Friday due to 26 new infections discovered in recent days, according to photos and a government notice widely shared on social media.

"Experts have determined that all Nanxinyuan residents undergo centralised quarantine beginning midnight May 21 for seven days," authorities from Chaoyang district said Friday.

"Please cooperate, otherwise you will bear the corresponding legal consequences."

Social media photos showed hundreds of residents with luggage queueing in the dark to board coaches parked outside the compound.

"Some of us have been locked down for 28 days since April 23, and we all tested negative throughout," wrote one resident on the Twitter-like Weibo.

"A lot of my neighbours are elderly or have young children."

"The transfer really makes us feel like we're in a wartime scene," resident and real estate blogger Liu Guangyu posted on Weibo early Saturday.

Residents were told to pack their clothes and essential belongings, and that their homes would be disinfected afterwards, according to screenshots shared on Weibo.

Last month, thousands of negative Shanghai residents were bussed to makeshift quarantine centres hundreds of kilometres away as the metropolis of 25 million doubled down on efforts to contain the spread of the virus.

Weibo users expressed widespread anxiety that Beijing authorities were taking a similar approach to Shanghai, where residents have chafed under a months-long lockdown that has denied many people adequate access to food and medical care.

The Weibo hashtag "All residents of Nanxinyuan compound were dragged to quarantine" was blocked by Saturday morning.

"This is exactly the same as Shanghai, the first step is to cut off water and electricity, then demand keys... then disinfect homes. Electrical appliances, wooden furniture, clothes, food—they're all done for," read one comment.

Beijing authorities on Saturday extended work from home guidance to one more district, one day after halting the vast majority of public bus and subway services.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Resolution time of COVID vaccine-related lymphadenopathy

According to ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), axillary lymphadenopathy detected by breast ultrasound after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination lasts longer than reported in initial vaccine clinical trials.

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Resolution time of COVID vaccine-related lymphadenopathy
by American Roentgen Ray Society
May 20, 2022

According to ARRS' American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), axillary lymphadenopathy detected by breast ultrasound after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination lasts longer than reported in initial vaccine clinical trials.

"The prolonged resolution time supports a follow-up interval of at least 12 weeks for suspected vaccine-related lymphadenopathy and avoidance of delaying screening mammography after vaccination," wrote corresponding author Michele B. Drotman, MD.

Drotman and the Weill Cornell Medicine team extracted health record data for 111 patients (mean age, 52 years) with unilateral axillary lymphadenopathy ipsilateral to administration of Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine—performed within 8 weeks prior and detected on breast ultrasound (January 1–October 1, 2021) that underwent follow-up ultrasound examinations at 4–12 weeks.

In this single-center study, axillary lymphadenopathy ipsilateral to COVID-19 mRNA vaccination resolved after a mean of 97 days since detection by breast imaging and 127 days since the first dose. Longer times to resolution were observed with Moderna (rather than Pfizer) vaccination, receipt of second dose after presentation, and thicker cortical thickness at presentation.

"The presence of subclinical lymphadenopathy and the long resolution time of lymphadenopathy," the authors of this AJR article noted, "should reassure radiologists and patients when lymph nodes suspected to be vaccine-related persist over multiple visits."

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Despite the uncertainty, there is hope for long COVID patients

It's estimated one in 10 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will have lingering symptoms, but most people will improve over time.

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Despite the uncertainty, there is hope for long COVID patients
by Emi Berry, University of New South Wales
May 20, 2022

It's estimated one in 10 people infected with SARS-CoV-2 will have lingering symptoms, but most people will improve over time.

As the world came to grips with the news of the pandemic unfolding in early 2020, online chatter among patients who were experiencing lingering symptoms after contracting COVID-19 began to spring up on social media.

The term "long COVID" was first used by Dr. Elisa Perego in Lombardy, Italy as a Twitter hashtag in May 2020 to describe her experience of COVID-19 infection as cyclical, progressive, and multiphasic. In other words, it was taking longer than anticipated for her to recover with symptoms that would come and go.

Further evidence of COVID-19 survivors experiencing similar long-term symptoms resulted in support groups popping up on other social media platforms such as Facebook.

To date, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates one in 10 people who have had the virus continues to feel unwell after 12 weeks. While the WHO uses the term "post-COVID-19" to describe lingering symptoms after initial infection from contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus, their definition states this condition occurs usually three months from the onset of COVID-19 with symptoms that last for at least two months and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis.

"I think we're still learning a lot about long COVID. But we've come a long way from where we were in mid-2020, which is when long COVID first started to be talked about especially among patients themselves to start off with. The medical and research community caught up with what was going on, on social media, with patients realizing they were taking a long time to recover, and experiencing a wide range of symptoms, some months after having an initial COVID-19 infection," explains Professor Gail Matthews who is head of the Therapeutic Vaccine and Research Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney and an Infectious Diseases physician at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney.

The first Australian long COVID study

"The ADAPT study is interesting because we commenced that research very soon after the beginning of the pandemic around April 2020 and we were able to get it going quickly through a major collaborative effort within St. Vincent's Hospital in Sydney. We started following people who had COVID-19 infections at the time, but we didn't know there was anything like long COVID," says Prof Matthews.

As the team began to follow their patients, the researchers soon became aware a proportion of people in the study—about 30 percent of people who were managed in the community—were not recovering at four months post-infection.

"And in fact, that group had still not recovered at eight months post-infection. So, that was the first important recognition of long COVID occurring in Australia. We were seeing similar reports coming out of the U.S. and the U.K., but ADAPT was the first Australian study to really document very clearly that this was an issue," explains Prof Matthews.

The most common symptoms patients displayed included persistent fatigue; respiratory symptoms such as a persistent cough; shortness of breath, particularly in patients who were in hospital with pneumonia or in ICU; brain fog and difficulty concentrating. Some patients experienced high heart rates that didn't settle.

"But really, there's a whole range of symptoms. In fact, up to 100 different symptoms have been described as part of the long COVID spectrum. Some of our patients who've been very unwell when they've been in hospital with COVID-19 have certainly taken a long time to recover. It could be because they've got scarring in their lungs, or just because they've been very sick in hospital. And that's not too surprising.

"But we also see many people with long COVID, who, in fact, were never hospitalized. They may have had some symptoms at home, but they were managed in the community. It was not severe enough to go to hospital, but they still have symptoms some months afterwards," explains Prof Matthews.

Immune cells still activated in long COVID patients

The ADAPT study looks at a range of different outcomes in patients including neurological function, cardiac function, respiratory function, and mental health. But one important finding the study revealed was that immune cells were still activated in long COVID patients who still displayed symptoms.

"The long COVID patients were showing abnormal immune signals at about eight months post-infection. And we wouldn't expect to see that in somebody who had recovered from a viral illness. So this was an important finding, because it showed unequivocally, that biologically, people who had long COVID were different from those who'd had COVID and fully recovered," explains Prof Matthews.

"This is only one piece of a big puzzle. We haven't found the answer to long COVID, but what we have found is a signal. And what that means is, when you have influenza, or any viral illness, your immune system switches on and it produces several signals, called cytokines—markers in the blood—which tell your immune system, there's a problem, there's a virus here. And that's often what's responsible for some of the symptoms we get when we're sick such as fever or feeling unwell."

After recovering from a viral illness, the immune system settles back down to a "resting state."

"And that's what we saw in the people who recovered from COVID. But in the people who had long COVID, the signals from the immune system suggested it was still trying to activate. It was still trying to get rid of something that shouldn't be there eight months after having had the initial infection," explains Prof Matthews.

"Certainly at first, there was a lot of skepticism about the existence of long COVID. And I think a lot of people felt that individuals were just either traumatized or just taking the time to recover. I think gradually, the public has come to realize that it is a real syndrome and our research helps back that up by showing this. I feel the public still doesn't really understand what it is and that's very understandable because I don't think we understand what it is fully, either.

"The good thing is that we're starting to collect more evidence that being vaccinated, for example, will certainly reduce your risk of getting long COVID. So that's an important public health message for the community."

Long COVID clinic

UNSW conjoint Associate Professor Anthony Byrne is a clinician at the new long COVID clinic at St. Vincent's Hospital. "We see about eight patients in the respiratory arm of the clinic and another eight patients in the rehab arm," he explains. He is thankful to management for having the foresight to set up and establish a new clinic to treat long COVID patients.

Each week, A/Prof Byrne attends a multidisciplinary meeting to discuss the complex cases. They are considered complex because the patients have several organs affected by SARS-CoV-2. "We're fortunate here at St. Vincent's because we've got in our tertiary center, lots of experts in many different specialties. We can refer cardiologists, psychiatrists, or immunologists, depending on what the main problem is."

Common symptoms he sees in his patients include fatigue, lethargy, tiredness, sleep disturbance, and in those who had severe initial disease, breathlessness. "We know people who have been hospitalized with COVID—usually due to what's called hypoxic respiratory failure, pneumonitis, bilateral pneumonia—are more likely to go on to have breathlessness," explains A/Prof Byrne.

"But that said, we also know that there are people that have not had severe disease who have persistent breathlessness many weeks and months after COVID. Sometimes we scan their lungs and find reasons why that might be. They may have some mild sort of pneumonitis (inflammation of lung tissue). But sometimes the lungs look structurally normal, so this may suggest there are probably nerves that are affected in these patients."

A/Prof Byrne cautions that while there will still be people with long COVID for months, and potentially years to come, many researchers have put significant efforts into better understanding this condition.

"We'll have more of an understanding of the different symptoms and what specific cytokine abnormalities are and that will allow us to better target treatments. So that for those people that experience long COVID, we will have an armory to treat them."

A challenge of a lifetime

Prof Matthews says the trajectory of long COVID and how it improves over time is still to be fully explored.

"The data suggests that even if you develop long COVID, most people will improve over time. We're about to do a two-year follow up of people who were infected in March 2020 and what we hope to see is that most people have recovered without significant long term impacts to their health."

From a personal perspective, Prof Matthews says the last few years have been challenging. "In some ways, it's the challenge of a lifetime to work with colleagues nationally and internationally to try and understand long COVID. It's fascinating from an infectious disease perspective and such a fascinating period in history."

"It does take its toll, but it's also an amazing time to be an infectious disease researcher. Infectious diseases have been with us and affecting humanity since the start of time. There have always been huge challenges to our populations, and this will continue to be so undoubtedly into the future."

Referring to the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Prof Matthews reminds us we have come a long way. "I think the great thing about infectious diseases, from my perspective, is that we are making huge strides in our understanding of how to manage chronic infections successfully such as with HIV, and even cure others as with hepatitis C."

There is hope.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Vaccines may lessen long COVID for some, but more study is needed

Vaccination after infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, is associated with a decrease in the likelihood of long COVID symptoms, finds a large study of U.K. adults published today by the BMJ .

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Vaccines may lessen long COVID for some, but more study is needed
by British Medical Journal
May 20, 2022

Vaccination after infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, is associated with a decrease in the likelihood of long COVID symptoms, finds a large study of U.K. adults published today by the BMJ .

They stress that causality cannot be inferred from this observational evidence, but say vaccination "may contribute to a reduction in the population health burden of long COVID, at least in the first few months after vaccination."

Vaccines against COVID-19 are effective at reducing rates of coronavirus infection, transmission, hospital admission, and death. Evidence also suggests that long COVID is reduced in those who are infected after vaccination, but the effectiveness of vaccination on pre-existing long COVID is less clear.

The latest survey by the U.K.'s Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows that 44% of people who report long COVID have had symptoms for at least one year, two thirds of whom report symptoms severe enough to limit their day-to-day activities.

So a team of researchers set out to estimate associations between COVID-19 vaccination and long COVID symptoms in adults with SARS-CoV-2 infection before vaccination.

They drew on ONS data for 28,356 adults aged 18–69 years (average age 46; 56% women; 89% white) who received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose after testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection.

They then tracked the presence of long COVID symptoms over a seven month follow-up period (February to September 2021).

Long COVID symptoms of any severity were reported by 6,729 participants (24%) at least once during follow-up.

Before vaccination, the odds of experiencing long COVID changed little over time.

A first vaccine dose was associated with an initial 13% decrease in the odds of long COVID, but it is unclear from the data whether this improvement was sustained over the following 12 weeks, until a second vaccine dose was given.

Receiving a second vaccine dose was associated with a further 9% decrease in the odds of long COVID, and this improvement was sustained at least over an average follow-up of nine weeks.

Similar results were also found when the focus was on long COVID severe enough to result in limitation of day-to-day activities.

Due to the study's observational design, causality cannot be inferred, nor can the researchers rule out the possibility that other unmeasured factors, such as those related to take-up of a second vaccine dose, may have affected their results.

However, results were consistent after taking account of sociodemographic characteristics, health related factors, vaccine type, or duration from infection to vaccination, suggesting that they withstand scrutiny.

As such, the researchers say: "Our results suggest that vaccination of people previously infected may be associated with a reduction in the burden of long COVID on population health, at least in the first few months after vaccination."

They call for further research into the long term relationship between vaccination and long COVID, and studies "to understand the biological mechanisms underpinning any improvements in symptoms after vaccination, which may contribute to the development of therapeutics for long COVID."

"Are vaccines a potential treatment for long COVID?" ask researchers in a linked editorial.

They acknowledge that benefits are possible in some individuals not all, and say the mechanisms underpinning changes in long COVID symptoms after vaccination are still not fully understood.

Until a clear explanation is found, they say vaccination to reduce risk of reinfection remains important for people with long COVID, and evidence so far suggests that benefits are likely to outweigh any harms.

"Unfortunately, many unknowns remain about the long term prognosis of long COVID, including the effect of booster vaccines or recurrent COVID-19," they write, and they call for more research "before we can hope to predict the effects of vaccination on individuals."

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Low concentrations of a specific metabolite in diabetics may explain why they are more susceptible to COVID symptoms

A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions in China, has found that low concentrations of a certain metabolite in diabetic patients may explain why they are more susceptible to COVID symptoms. In their paper published in the journal Nature Metabolism, the group...

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Low concentrations of a specific metabolite in diabetics may explain why they are more susceptible to COVID symptoms
by Bob Yirka, Medical Xpress
May 20, 2022


Screening of human serum metabolites against SARS-CoV-2 infection. a,b, Roles of human serum metabolites in SARS-CoV-2 infection. Schematic diagram of the study design (a). Incubation with human serum-derived filtrates impaired SARS-CoV-2 replication (b). Negative control: cells incubated with cell medium without SARS-CoV-2 infection. For the upper liquid group and lower liquid group, each dot represents one donor (n = 8 healthy donors). P = 0.0001 for upper liquid versus lower liquid, P < 0.0001 for cell medium versus upper liquid, cell medium versus lower liquid. c,d, Identification of the human serum metabolite(s) that prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection. Schematic diagram of the screening experimental design (c). The role of human serum metabolite(s) in SARS-CoV-2 infection (d). The amount of viral RNA was normalized to human GAPDH. The dot is the mean value. e, Assessing the antiviral activities of six metabolites from human serum by immunofluorescence staining. The nucleocapsid was stained with Alexa Fluor 546-conjugated anti-rabbit IgG (red). The nuclei were stained with To-Pro-3 iodide (blue). The stained cells were examined using a Zeiss LSM 880 meta confocal microscope in multitrack mode (i). Representative of three confocal immunofluorescence images from three biological replicates was shown. Scale bars, 20 μm. (ii) Mean fluorescence intensity in differently treated cells. Three images stained with nucleocapsid and Alexa Fluor 546-conjugated anti-rabbit IgG individually selected from three biological replicates were used to determine the mean fluorescence intensity with ImageJ (National Institutes of Health). AU, arbitrary units. P < 0.0001 for vehicle versus 1,5-AG, vehicle versus 1-napthol, vehicle versus 4-HA, vehicle versus 5-MT, vehicle versus CDCA, vehicle versus ellagic acid. f,g, Measurement of the half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) of these candidate metabolites. Half maximal inhibitory concentrations of these metabolites (f). The viral loads in the cell supernatant were detected with a plaque-formation assay at 40 h post-infection. The gray dotted line represents the 50% inhibition ratio (n = 3 biological independent samples). Biological characterizations of candidate metabolic component(s) (g). Data are presented as the mean ± s.e.m. (b,e,f). Data were analyzed using a two-tailed Student's t-test. P values were adjusted using Dunnett's test. ***P < 0.001, ****P < 0.0001. Experiments were performed independently at least three biological replicates with comparable results. Credit: Nature Metabolism (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s42255-022-00567-z

A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions in China, has found that low concentrations of a certain metabolite in diabetic patients may explain why they are more susceptible to COVID symptoms. In their paper published in the journal Nature Metabolism, the group describes their work in searching for and comparing metabolites in people with and without diabetes and then how they tested incubated cells from them against a SARS-CoV-2 infection and what they learned by doing so.

Not long after the global pandemic began, doctors began noticing that some people were more susceptible to more extreme symptoms when infected, and one of those groups included people who had diabetes. In this new effort, the researchers have found what they believe is a likely reason for that.

To find out why diabetics were more susceptible to COVID, the researchers conducted a search of metabolites that differed between people with and without diabetes. In so doing, they found 484, of which 222 have been created artificially and are dispensed commercially. The researchers incubated samples of all 222 of the metabolites and then exposed them to samples of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In so doing, they noted which if any reduced the ability of the virus to infect other cells because they were binding with the metabolite instead. That narrowed the list of metabolites down to seven and further testing reduced it to just one: 1,5-AG. The researchers note that, when produced in the body, it is filtered into the kidneys and reabsorbed into the blood. But in people with diabetes, the reabsorption does not work as well and it winds up in their urine, which means they have less of it in their blood.

In testing infection rates of cells mixed with 1,5-AG, the researchers found higher loads of viral infection in cases where 1,5-AG levels were lower. They also found that artificially adding sera containing 1,5-AG to cell mixes resulted in lowered viral load levels. The researchers also tried giving diabetic mouse models serum with 1,5-AG mixed in and found that doing so resulted in lowered viral loads after infection.

The researchers suggest their work indicates that lower levels of 1,5-AG in diabetic patients is the reason they are more susceptible to symptoms from SARS-CoV-2. More work will need to be done, however, to determine if giving such patients serum with 1,5-AG can reduce their symptoms.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Politicians should not manage drug and vaccine regulation

Their horizon is too short; they will screw it up

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Politicians should not manage drug and vaccine regulation
Their horizon is too short; they will screw it up
Vinay Prasad
15 hr ago

One of the core structural failures of American politics is that the time horizons are so short. Bad monetary or education policy may take years or decades to manifest, but by then accountable individuals are either long gone or long distanced from the issue.

The months preceding elections are vital. Politicians care far more about the two weeks before the vote than the two weeks after. These realities make managing biomedical issues complicated, particularly around drug and vaccine regulation.

Anyone who looks thoughtfully at the recent decision by FDA and CDC to authorize a booster for healthy 5 to 11 year olds will scratch their head. 75% of kids in this demographic have had COVID. The risks to a healthy unvaccinated child from COVID are very very low, and lower than seasonal flu. After the child has had covid, how can anyone claim that it is better to get 3 than 2 doses? Even 2 vs 0 is an open question. As for kids who haven't had COVID, the best answer is no one knows a booster is in their best interest.

Yet the administration marches on. Pushing this vaccine at these ages. Why? One answer is regulatory capture. The White House advisors & FDA are the bench for Pfizer and Moderna. I guarantee that after their term is over, we will see massive revolving door politics. I believe we should explicitly prohibit this to prevent outright corruption.

But another reason is the impending election. There will be soon be an explosion in cases in young people. That's inevitable. But the white House needs them to happen in late November and not October.

Let me be clear. The inevitable cases in kids will be mostly cold like illnesses. I am not particularly worried about that. Yet, these colds will be massively disruptive to school and parent's lives and will piss off half the electorate. We have created fragile systems where a red line in a plastic test can stop education-- that means cases will disrupt life.

If the White House get explosive cases in kids in October, they will hemorrhage even more seats than otherwise (either way, they will hemorrhage) If the cases happen in December, they will care far less and lose fewer seats.

Yet, if you didn't care about election, you might pursue the opposite strategy. The more cases in the summer and early fall, the better the late fall and winter will be.

It's the Winter that doctors fear, but politicians fear October. That is a core imbalance and why politicians should not be able to puppet the FDA.

This White House did what Trump did not. It put so much pressure on Gruber and Krause that they resigned, and now it appears to be dictating the FDAs agenda.

This is a bad precedent. Politicians should not run drug regulation. They are too short sighted to do it well. They will screw it up.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Gut Microbiome Disrupted by SARS-CoV-2 - Study by Italian Dr. Carlo Brogna

Italian researchers have discovered a whole new act in the SARS-CoV-2 saga starring the secret world inside your gut. Yes, the same people who brought us Snake Venom have another paper all about poo.

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Gut Microbiome Disrupted by SARS-CoV-2 - Study by Italian Dr. Carlo Brogna
Italian researchers have discovered a whole new act in the SARS-CoV-2 saga starring the secret world inside your gut. Yes, the same people who brought us Snake Venom have another paper all about poo.
Ann Bromley
9 hr ago

The microbiome is like a whole universe of bacteria that live in and outside our bodies. Although scientists have been researching it for 350 years, it is only recently that mainstream medicine has started to understand the importance of its role in our overall health.

The microbiome is made up of bacteria, some of which are helpful, and some harmful, but normally there is a balance between them. So when a virus, like SARS-CoV-2 disrupts the good bacteria, we can have unwanted effects, and that is significant for our understanding of the nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.


Here is Dr. Mobeen Syed’s video discussion on the subject:

Yes GUT Microbiome Is Disrupted by SARS-COV-2 - Italian Study (Dr. Carlo Brogna)
33min 14sec

Seriously folks, this is a really good study…read on

Dr. Carlo Brogna and his colleagues, the authors of this paper, used immunofluorescence and electron microscopy of the bacteria present in stool samples of SARS-CoV-2 patients and healthy controls to determine if the proteins from the virus could be found inside the bacteria. And they proved it… they saw SARS-COV-2 in the bacteria, which indicates that the virus has the potential to disrupt the microbiome of the gut.

That means SARS-CoV-2 is a bacteriophage! “Who knew?” (anon)

A bacteriophage is a virus that can infect a bacteria.

(Bacteriophage)viruses have long been considered neutral to animals and humans because specific receptors for bacteriophages on eukaryotic cells are lacking… The aim of our study was to elucidate the interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and human gut microbiota. The data will help to suggest specific therapeutic approaches to support the current vaccines and improve the vaccination campaign.(emph mine)1​

Before we go down that rabbit hole, let’s look at what this paper is telling us and what we can do to protect our gut health…

1. SARS-CoV-2 can infect our gut bacteria and disrupt them, impacting gut health;
2. We can have a more severe outcome from COVID infection because of poor gut health; and
3. Other diseases, immune dysregulation, and autoimmune disorders, could appear because SARS-CoV-2 caused a problem with the gut bacteria.

Home Remedy: Probiotics and Prebiotics

Foods like yogurt, and sauerkraut, among others, have been staples in many cultures (pun intended) for centuries. These are the probiotics.

The secret is fermentation. And the bacteria produced in that process complement and fortify the gut microbiome.
Prebiotics are the foods that feed and support the microbiome: Bananas, whole grains, greens, onions, garlic, soybeans and artichokes to name a few.

Not exactly the favorite diet of fast-food loving Americans! When last did you see sauerkraut on the menu at a long term care home?

Even though scientists have been studying the microbiome for several hundred years, It is only in the last few decades that the benefits of a healthy gut have been recognized by the “mainstream.” It has even been likened to a “second brain”.

Good advice would be to check out your pre and probiotic options for a healthier microbiome.

Back to the rabbit hole…

Many studies since the beginning of the pandemic have focused on the interaction between the ACE2 receptor and the virus spike glycoprotein [2], how the enzyme furin works, and how it plays a critical role between the eukaryotic host cell and the viral particle [3].2​

Other studies cited in the paper, have shown that SARS-CoV-2 replicates in the gut, but this one is the first to prove that SARS-CoV-2 can actually infect the bacteria of the gut. To do that, the researchers isolated bacteria from stool samples, and using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), immunogold labeling and immunofluorescence they were able to actually see the virus in the bacteria. The virus in the culture disappeared after 30 days, but still lingered in the bacteria.

Even though tracking of outbreaks has for many months used analysis of wastewater as an indicator, the epidemiological focus so far has been on airborne transmission. The findings of this study point to the need to revisit the fecal-oral route of transmission. A meta analysis dated August 2020, and found on the NIH website concluded:

Viral shedding of SARS-CoV-2 in stool samples occurs in a substantial proportion of patients, making faecal-oral transmission plausible. Furthermore, detection in stool samples or anal swabs can persist long after negative respiratory testing. Therefore, stool sample or anal swab testing should be (re)considered in relation to decisions for isolating or discharging a patient.3​

How does the virus enter a bacterial cell with no receptors like ACE2?

Remember the snake toxin? It’s not, but close…

The interaction between bacteria and SARS-CoV-2 does not necessarily occur with native viral surface proteins,(in this case spike) but most likely with a surface reworked by proteases and toxins [6] produced by bacteria.4​

​

It goes like this: The bacteria sense the presence of the SARS-CoV-2, and release toxins and proteolytic enzymes to protect themselves. These toxins and enzymes erode the surface of the virus, making it possible to stick to the bacteria and enter them. This mechanism is unique to SARS-CoV-2 because other known bacteriophage viruses have specific receptors to gain entry. Ver-r-ry sneaky.


The damage to the bacteria caused by the virus can be clearly seen from these electron microscope images. The red arrows point at lysis. The yellow are the virus indicators. The bottom left is a healthy control. Photo : Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0

The process is both lytic, and lysogenic. In lysis, the virus’ genetic material enters the bacteria and begins replicating, breaking down the bacteria’s DNA resulting in total breakdown, releasing the newly formed viruses. In the lysogenic phase the genetic material of the virus can be integrated with that of the bacteria, multiplying “silently” along with the bacteria as it divides. Under stress, this viral material (plasmids) will be released, and attack the bacteria again, restarting the lytic cycle. Silent infections are implicated in many diseases, like hepatitis-C and STD’s.

Meanwhile, the populations of bacteria in the culture could be seen changing; some dying off while others were proliferating to take their place.

A cascade follows lysis, the dying off of certain populations of bacteria is the mechanism in vivo that causes the dysregulation of the microbiome, causing problems with the immune system, digestive issues, and overall health issues. And, as they suggest, this could be connected to the severity of COVID as well.

... Based on…available data showing a decline in the population of these bacteria in the elderly, it has also been proposed that some commensal bacteria of the upper respiratory tract prevent SARS-CoV-2 infectivity and that a decrease in these bacteria contributes to infection severity [11].5​

But that’s not all…

Understanding that a virus also binds to, interacts with, and infects bacteria and that fecal-oral transmission is an additional source of spread, completely changes the epidemiological scenario of SARS-CoV-2. It changes how to intervene, how to give policy input, how to treat COVID-19 patients at the onset of symptoms, how to prevent, and perhaps another possible solution could be the vaccine as Sabin did: “an attenuated virus for oral administration, probably justified by the need of the bacteria of the microbiota to interact with the virus.”6​

A vaccine for the bacteria. Now that’s thinking outside the box.

An attenuated virus that we take as drops will be taken up by the bacteria and sustain the health of the bacteria.

​

…It is crucial to consider that once we have observed the replication of this virus in bacteria and understood that the route of transmission is also fecal-oral, it could be possible to control the virus spread and contribute with other specific pharmacological therapies to support current vaccines in order to improve the vaccination campaign.7​

Many oral and nasal vaccines aimed at protection of the epithelial cells of the mucosa are
underway, but targeting the microbiome would be a new angle.

Further study is needed to confirm the results of this study, but action can be taken NOW to fortify the health of the vulnerable knowing what we do about the interaction of SARS-CoV-2 and the universe of the microbiome.

Question: What are the potential implications for long COVID from this discovery?

Here is a tip from the comments:
Friendly gut bacteria speeds long Covid recovery

1 Could SARS-CoV-2 Have Bacteriophage Behavior or Induce the Activity of Other Bacteriophages?
2 Could SARS-CoV-2 Have Bacteriophage Behavior or Induce the Activity of Other Bacteriophages?
3 Systematic review with meta‐analysis: SARS‐CoV‐2 stool testing and the potential for faecal‐oral transmission
4 Could SARS-CoV-2 Have Bacteriophage Behavior or Induce the Activity of Other Bacteriophages?
5 ibid
6 ibid
7 ibid

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Thanks HD
It seems the more he talks about what is coming the more sure he is that it’s coming and soon.

He said when this thing hits it’s going to explode suddein one of the heavily vaccinated countries and the health system will just crash. Then it will quickly move on to the other heavily vaccinated Nations.

it sounded to me like he knows that the know but that they won’t do anything or say anything because they will lose face. He even castigated Bill Gates for going along with WHO and the CDC. I think he sounds at a loss for how these people don’t seem to care about people dying.
And he clearly said that bringing industry into the health concern is what has put money before the health of the people. Such evil.

Geert said the virus is in charge of the world now and it won’t be long before this pandemic breaks out into a death wave of the vaccinated. Sounded like he was pretty sure it will occur this summer.

Maybe that’s why Russia invaded the Ukraine because the Ukraine is a bread basket. and Russia and China know this deadly wave is coming is creating shortages. Geert can’t be the only one who knows what’s coming.

This makes me want to super prepare.

if you’re not prepared to die you’re really not prepared.

I really hope everyone here knows Jesus and have received Him into your life. Psalm 91

In the last few days I posted some articles that seemed to contradict what Geert is saying - specifically the articles that measure antibodies in blood and in vials and do comparisons and which conclude the vaccinated blood does better. Geert was asked about this in the interview with Syed and said that you can't measure the innate and acquired antibody reaction that will occur in the unvaxxed if exposed in the vial and that those are what protect the unvaccinated. I try to post the medical articles I find whether or not I agree with them because this is a archive thread and an aggregate news thread, I just wanted to answer that question in case it came up for anyone reading (why is HD posting articles that debunk and say the opposite of what Geert is saying). I also am not going to censor articles that disagree with Geert, everyone should have all the information to come to their own conclusions!

Geert had yet another interview posted, this one is relatively short so if anyone hasn't had time to watch the longer ones, this is a great opportunity to at least see what he's saying for yourself. This was from a zoom call on May 17th - no questions about NK or monkeypox unfortunately.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtTof1gyFew
"And Then They Came For Canadians" Conference - Geert Vander Bossche (Bill Gates Foundation)
18 min 55 sec
May 17, 2022
We Unify Canada

Aired on Zoom 17 May 2022. Please follow @We Unify Canada https://www.actforcanada.ca/l/and-the...

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

I have decided not to post monkeypox articles in this thread. It takes enough time just to gather the covid articles. I have found a lot in my covid search. I have my questions, like I assume everyone who still folows COVID on this thread does. The fact that it's popping up all over the globe at once, and the fact that it seems to now be a lot more contagious than it has been in the past, certainly raises the question of whether this is a deliberate, possibly lab tinkered with, release. If so - terrorists? deep state/WEF/WHO? russia? false flag to blame russia? All are possibilities I'm also sure others have considered. I'll add three more to the mix - which are as much a possilibity for me as the others (not more of a possibility, just as much of a possibility). First, that the depressed immune systems of vaccinated individuals is making them more susceptible to viruses they ordinarily would've fought off. For all we know money pox has been out there in the wild and until now the innate immune system of most people has been handling the encounter without getting sick. Second possibility - that they know what's coming with covid and they want a distraction so have a new pandemic out there to focus everyone's attention on, especially if all the vax start get very sick from covid, it'll be classified as monkey pox, as they'll say not everyone gets the pox on their skin, or something of that sort. The anger that the masses would have if they found out they are dying now from the vax will be dispelled because it will be blamed on monkeypox. Or 3, they want to blame a new vax long term side effect on something else.. that the vax is now months later causing some sort of rash and they dont' want the vax to be blamed for causing it. See these two studies for example. These blisters occured right after vaccination. But what if they are now happening a year later? Just putting the possibility out there because frankly we live in bizarro world these days - with all kinds of craziness happening all at once that used to be only found in sci-fi movies.

Autoimmune mucocutaneous blistering diseases after SARS-Cov-2 vaccination: A Case report of Pemphigus Vulgaris and a literature review - PubMed

Clinicians should be aware of the potential, though rare, occurrence of AIBDs as a possible adverse event after the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. However, notwithstanding, they should encourage their patients to obtain the vaccination in order to assist the public health systems to overcome the...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Autoimmune mucocutaneous blistering diseases after SARS-Cov-2 vaccination: A Case report of Pemphigus Vulgaris and a literature review
March 5, 2022

Bullous pemphigoid after second dose of mRNA- (Pfizer-BioNTech) Covid-19 vaccine: A case report

Messenger RNA vaccines, commonly known as mRNA vaccines, are the first COVID-19 vaccines that have been authorized and licensed in the United States. Two mRNA vaccines, BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) are available. Mass vaccination ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Bullous pemphigoid after second dose of mRNA- (Pfizer-BioNTech) Covid-19 vaccine: A case report
March 1, 2022
some images from this paper, see if they look familiar:


AFTER STEROIDS

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Sort of covid related so posting these two from the same substack here but as a general rule I won't be posting monkeypox on this thread.

This is a few days old, but he posted another one tonight (next post).

Is Monkeypox Hype a Paid Media Campaign?

One Case in the US Gets Enormous Media Attention

igorchudov.substack.com

(fair use applies)

Is Monkeypox Hype a Paid Media Campaign?
One Case in the US Gets Enormous Media Attention
Igor Chudov
May 19

I love reading news and I know that I tend to be too alarmist. Thus, the recent monkeypox talk, that is all over the liberal press and Twitter, piqued my interest.

Is there a new terrible pandemic coming? Will it kill 10% of our population? Do we need to trust science, as always, and urgently inject ourselves with a recently developed “monkeypox vaccine”, that is definitely safe and effective? Should we forget Covid vaccination lies and abuses, endless illness among the boosted, etc, and again look at “health authorities” as our saviors, swallowing every word?

Or, perhaps, this is just noise and the media trying to distract us from something? Is someone paying off the media to sell us a new concern and new “treatments”?

Let’s look.

Monkeypox is Not Endemic to Humans and is Not New

Read this excellent article written before 2022, about monkeypox. Monkeypox is a virus with some genetic similarities to smallpox, that has somewhat similar presentation to smallpox through pus filled pustules.



It is not easy for humans to get infected with monkeypox. It is an animal disease, present among African rodents and other animals, that usually requires close human-animal contact to establish transmission. Thus, it is usually confined to rural Africa where people contact wild animals or butcher bushmeat.

Transmission of monkeypox is usually by direct contact with infected animals or possibly by eating poorly cooked meat from an infected rodent or monkey. Cutaneous or mucosal lesions on the infected animals are a likely source of transmission to humans, especially when the human skin is broken due to bites, scratches, or other trauma -- are a likely source for virus infection. Human-to-human transfer, probably by infected respiratory droplets, is possible but is not often documented. One study suggested that only about 8%-15% of infections occurred through human-to-human transmission among close family members.​

There were numerous outbreaks of monkeypox in the past, all receiving scant attention from the press.

How bad is the current monkeypox outbreak in the US? Only one person in the US was diagnosed with monkeypox as of May 18, 2022. (Read this again) Despite that, dozens of news articles in the corporate press were devoted to monkeypox and this one case.



Monkeypox is Still not Easily Transmissible

Provoking the ire of the LGBTQIA community, UKHSA reported that most of the several UK cases of monkeypox occur among men who have sex with men. While we should equally care about all citizens regardless of their sexual proclivities, the fact that monkeypox is confined to a specific sexual community suggests that there is something in that community that enables the (extremely limited) spread of monkeypox, but at the same time, it proves that monkeypox is still not airborne and does not spread between randomly chosen persons.

What could facilitate the spread of monkeypox among gay men? I do not know. As most past monkeypox outbreaks were associated with rodents, we first need to see if these men shared or used any rodents or had them as pets or some such.

Past Outbreaks of Monkeypox were Not Hyped Up

In 2003, 71 persons in the US were infected with monkeypox. That incident was also rodent driven, had very limited human-to-human transmission, and fizzled out as soon as it was identified and the rodents were taken care of.

This incident deservedly received very little coverage, mostly in the local press, and was forgotten as soon as it ended.

So what?

Despite literally zero indication that monkeypox deserves as much media attention as it receives, it could somehow become the next global plague just because anything is possible. Despite knowing that anything is possible, I see nothing concrete in this monkeypox talk other than a concerted media attempt at bringing attention to a topic that almost nobody should care about.

I was one of the numerous other people who realized that Covid-19 will be a global disaster in January 2020. I bought food, toilet paper etc, and had all money in cash (other than Berkshire Hathaway I never sell). I majorly shifted money into stocks on April 24, 2020, because I thought that we will get through Covid. To add something, I sold stocks too early in late 2020 due to overpricing concerns, and I do not normally trade to time markets. I am not and never was a market timer who would trade more than once a year or so. It was just a one-time deal due to the unusual Covid pandemic that I started following closely. This is just to say that I am trying to be realistic and have money on the line.

As of this day, May 18, 2022, I believe that monkeypox will not be the global disaster of the future. If I may predict what will, it is VAIDS and Chronic Covid and numerous economic dislocations and geopolitical problems, and endless war. (I do not try to predict bioterrorism such as Sars-Cov-2 because it is unpredictable). The bottom line is, bad times lie ahead, but monkeypox will remain a historical footnote.

To clarify, despite likely seeing bad times ahead, humanity will heal, thrive, and continue on, perhaps experiencing a population reduction that will not end the human race.

Why the Hype?

What is the reason “monkeypox awareness” is now promoted? I have no idea and I am willing to just wait until we find out. It could be:

• Self fed media hysterics
• Bill Gates promoting more vaccines
• Paving a way for smallpox outbreaks
• A way to distract us from boosted people dying from Covid
• There is a possibility that Covid vaccination made gay people uniquely susceptible to monkeypox. If that is the case, it will be covered up, but will eventually come out.

My article is not attempting to prove a conspiracy theory about why exactly monkeypox is so elevated in the news coverage. I just want to point out that it does not deserve to be in the news so much.

What do you think? Who benefits from this monkeypox business?

EDIT May 20: The Spain outbreak was also tracked to one specific sauna, where people had a lot of fun together.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Monkeypox "Preparedness Exercise" has Pandemic Start Date as May 15 2022

Totally a coincidence

igorchudov.substack.com

(fair use applies)

Monkeypox "Preparedness Exercise" has Pandemic Start Date as May 15 2022
Totally a coincidence
Igor Chudov
14 hr ago

Here’s something interesting that is discussed on Twitter right now (hat tip Edward Dowd).

There was a monkeypox preparedness exercise held in March 2021.

Apparently, it “simulated” a start date of a pandemic, to be May 15, 2022.



Guess when the actual monkeypox media hype started this May? Around the same day!

The exercise “simulated” a vaccine-resistant monkeypox outbreak that was a biological warfare attack. Who were the participants? Same old people from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, China CDC, and so on.



Lots of overlap between these participants and the infamous “Event 201” simulation, which also eerily predicted our Covid-19 pandemic. Chris Elias from BMGF, Mr. Gao from China CDC, and possibly more (I will update this paragraph).

Here are the Event 201 participants, with the overlap highlighted:



Also check out what “2nd Smarterst Guy in the World” is saying, threadsirish, and the infamous El Gato’s thoughts on monkeypox and even more recent events:

bad cattitude​

pandemic? blame the cats.​

hey, let’s play a pandemic wargame and blame leopards…​

10 hours ago · 164 likes · 71 comments · el gato malo​

Stay tuned!

 

[Zoner]

In the last few days I posted some articles that seemed to contradict what Geert is saying - specifically the articles that measure antibodies in blood and in vials and do comparisons and which conclude the vaccinated blood does better. Geert was asked about this in the interview with Syed and said that you can't measure the innate and acquired antibody reaction that will occur in the unvaxxed if exposed in the vial and that those are what protect the unvaccinated. I try to post the medical articles I find whether or not I agree with them because this is a archive thread and an aggregate news thread, I just wanted to answer that question in case it came up for anyone reading (why is HD posting articles that debunk and say the opposite of what Geert is saying). I also am not going to censor articles that disagree with Geert, everyone should have all the information to come to their own conclusions!

Geert had yet another interview posted, this one is relatively short so if anyone hasn't had time to watch the longer ones, this is a great opportunity to at least see what he's saying for yourself. This was from a zoom call on May 17th - no questions about NK or monkeypox unfortunately.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtTof1gyFew
"And Then They Came For Canadians" Conference - Geert Vander Bossche (Bill Gates Foundation)
18 min 55 sec
May 17, 2022
We Unify Canada

Aired on Zoom 17 May 2022. Please follow @We Unify Canada https://www.actforcanada.ca/l/and-the...

Thanks for the interview post.

What I'm looking for are others like Dr. vander Bossche who are in agreement with him. I thought that roundtable you posted with Del Bigtree who asked the round table for their thoughts on Geert was interesting. They are top experts in this virus as well and they didn't disagree with him, but only hoped it didn't happen. It made we wonder if they even read his research. Geert said there are experts who agree with him. No doubt he has circulated his papers and thoughts for peer review. I think if he had any doubts at all he wouldn't be saying what he's saying. Evidently no one he has talked to has changed his mind but only strengthened his convictions. My question is who is sponsoring the tests you posted? Secondly, what do these tests have to do with immune escape against a virus that still hasn't manifested yet? The virus that is coming will manifest in direct correlation to the vaccine. So tests against a current variant does not change what vander bossche is saying since his warning is about the vaccines, not about how they work against the virus.
I'm sorry HD, but I don't trust anybody in the health community who doesn't side with Malone, McCollough, vander Bossche, and the frontline doctors organizations. Big Pharma has Big Money and they have every interest to boost their "products" as viable and working. Sorry, we know the deaths and injuries they are causing and how they simply are not working against Omnicron. Vander Bossche is careful not to call out names because he wants discussion, but he did call out Fauci and Gates. He knows that herd immunity is the only way to stop a pandemic and not vaccines.
So let the members and readers on this board think what they want. I read the titles of what you post and if it interests me I'll read it. So thanks again for the material. Post away. You do a service to the board. Everyone has to do their own due diligence.

 

[inskanoot]

Politicians should not manage drug and vaccine regulation

Their horizon is too short; they will screw it up

vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com

(fair use applies)

Politicians should not manage drug and vaccine regulation
Their horizon is too short; they will screw it up
Vinay Prasad
15 hr ago

One of the core structural failures of American politics is that the time horizons are so short. Bad monetary or education policy may take years or decades to manifest, but by then accountable individuals are either long gone or long distanced from the issue.

The months preceding elections are vital. Politicians care far more about the two weeks before the vote than the two weeks after. These realities make managing biomedical issues complicated, particularly around drug and vaccine regulation.

Anyone who looks thoughtfully at the recent decision by FDA and CDC to authorize a booster for healthy 5 to 11 year olds will scratch their head. 75% of kids in this demographic have had COVID. The risks to a healthy unvaccinated child from COVID are very very low, and lower than seasonal flu. After the child has had covid, how can anyone claim that it is better to get 3 than 2 doses? Even 2 vs 0 is an open question. As for kids who haven't had COVID, the best answer is no one knows a booster is in their best interest.

Yet the administration marches on. Pushing this vaccine at these ages. Why? One answer is regulatory capture. The White House advisors & FDA are the bench for Pfizer and Moderna. I guarantee that after their term is over, we will see massive revolving door politics. I believe we should explicitly prohibit this to prevent outright corruption.

But another reason is the impending election. There will be soon be an explosion in cases in young people. That's inevitable. But the white House needs them to happen in late November and not October.

Let me be clear. The inevitable cases in kids will be mostly cold like illnesses. I am not particularly worried about that. Yet, these colds will be massively disruptive to school and parent's lives and will piss off half the electorate. We have created fragile systems where a red line in a plastic test can stop education-- that means cases will disrupt life.

If the White House get explosive cases in kids in October, they will hemorrhage even more seats than otherwise (either way, they will hemorrhage) If the cases happen in December, they will care far less and lose fewer seats.

Yet, if you didn't care about election, you might pursue the opposite strategy. The more cases in the summer and early fall, the better the late fall and winter will be.

It's the Winter that doctors fear, but politicians fear October. That is a core imbalance and why politicians should not be able to puppet the FDA.

This White House did what Trump did not. It put so much pressure on Gruber and Krause that they resigned, and now it appears to be dictating the FDAs agenda.

This is a bad precedent. Politicians should not run drug regulation. They are too short sighted to do it well. They will screw it up.

The docs & so-called scientists abdicated their responsibility. They’re owned and arrogant.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

My question is who is sponsoring the tests you posted? Secondly, what do these tests have to do with immune escape against a virus that still hasn't manifested yet? The virus that is coming will manifest in direct correlation to the vaccine. So tests against a current variant does not change what vander bossche is saying since his warning is about the vaccines, not about how they work against the virus.

Every night when I post, I check the medical journal reporting pages. Both sites I check report all the new medical journal articles for the day, I look for the COVID ones. So the answer to your question is that most of them are from the medical 'establishment'. As I've said before on this thread, I would click 'dislike' on a lot of the posts I made but you can't dislike your own posts. Especially the ones that advocate vaccines for pregnant women. I don't post these articles because I agree with them, I post them because as I said, this is an archive thread, not a 'what is HD'S opinion on Covid' thread. I think it's important to keep a running historical archive of what is being reported and when it was being reported. The articles that appear to be anti-Geert are not directed at him or his research, they're just studies that if you read them appear to negate what he is saying. I pointed them out because I give Geert a lot of credence and those 'medical establishment' studies contradict him. I read them carefully and I thought he was asked about them and explained why they were wrong so wanted to point that out in a separate, non-news, my opinion only post. [ETA: but after thinking about it some more, I don't think he addressed all my concerns, see next paragraph]

As for your last point in the above quote, actually it does. Because Geert is saying the neutralizing antibodies of the vaxx no longer neutralize Omicron and the articles that presented tests of the vaccines say the blood of vaxxed did neutralize Omicron. That's a direct contradiction and if he got that wrong, maybe his theory is wrong. Geert did answer why the non-vaxxed's blood doesn't kill the virus in a test tube - he said it's because the innate and acquired antibodies are the ones that will protect the unvaxxed, and those lay low until confronted, and are reactive so won't show up in an already drawn blood sample which is confronted with virus in that test tube (vs. the body). But actually the more I think about it (and this is my 3rd edit of this paragraph) if his theory is correct, the vaxxed blood in the test tube should not be working against omicron in the test tube because he says the vaxx recognizes the wuhan strain but not so much the omicron strain. So I don't have an answer to this. i'm not a scientist and this is really confusing!. Maybe you can figure it out and help me out here.... [ETA: this is the 3rd edit of this paragraph as I try to figure this out]

I'm sorry HD, but I don't trust anybody in the health community who doesn't side with Malone, McCollough, vander Bossche, and the frontline doctors organizations. Big Pharma has Big Money and they have every interest to boost their "products" as viable and working. Sorry, we know the deaths and injuries they are causing and how they simply are not working against Omnicron. Vander Bossche is careful not to call out names because he wants discussion, but he did call out Fauci and Gates. He knows that herd immunity is the only way to stop a pandemic and not vaccines.

I agree with you, you won't get an argument from me on this.

So let the members and readers on this board think what they want. I read the titles of what you post and if it interests me I'll read it. So thanks again for the material. Post away. You do a service to the board. Everyone has to do their own due diligence.

Agree on this too. and thank you. I found 3 articles that totally trash Geert. I will post them later on down the thread. I didn't even read them, but maybe there is a reader of this thread who wants to know the counter argument, and for posterity sake I am posting them. We'll see who is right in a few months....

HD

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Officials expected to decide on new COVID-19 vaccine design in early July

Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said the decision would likely come from the FDA shortly after its advisory committee meets on June 28 to review data from the vaccine companies about the versions of next-generation vaccines they're testing. The FDA will then make a...

news.yahoo.com

(fair use applies)

Officials expected to decide on new COVID-19 vaccine design in early July
CHEYENNE HASLETT - GMA
Fri, May 20, 2022, 10:39 AM

Federal regulators are expected to decide on a new COVID-19 vaccine design in early July, which would allow vaccine companies to begin production for rollout this fall and winter, a top official told ABC News.

Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks said the decision would likely come from the FDA shortly after its advisory committee meets on June 28 to review data from the vaccine companies about the versions of next-generation vaccines they're testing.

The FDA will then make a decision on which type of vaccine the companies should go ahead with, an estimation they'll base on what could offer the best protection even in the face of new variants this fall and winter, similar to how the flu vaccine is concocted ahead of flu season.

"We'll have to make some decision by early July to make sure that the manufacturers know what we're looking to do, so that they know what they have to start producing in large quantities," Marks, who serves as director of the department that oversees vaccines within the FDA, told ABC News in an interview.

Under consideration is how to give people "the longest duration of a high level of protection" with their vaccines, not just because it's unrealistic to keep boosting every few months, but also because experts predict another surge in the colder months.

Second boosters for wider age-range?

Already at play, however, is the current surge. Cases are rising and nearly a third of the country is currently at medium- or high-risk community COVID levels, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That's why, in the meantime, the FDA is also internally discussing whether to open up second boosters to a wider age-range to mitigate rising cases, Marks said. They're currently only available for people over 50, or people over 12 who are immunocompromised.

The FDA would have to come to a decision in the next few weeks to intervene effectively, as cases are already on the rise, Marks said.

"I can tell you that that discussion is already happening internally -- it's just that I can't tell you what the outcome will be at this point," he said.

"We would not be doing our job as public health professionals if we weren't thinking about it, and thinking about the benefits and risks," he added.

For example, hospitalization rates for people under 50 who have received their first booster are still relatively low, Marks said, indicating boosters might not be necessary for younger people. But the FDA is also looking into the risks from even mild infections, like long COVID, and whether booster shots would mitigate that.

Opening up second boosters to more people would just be a stop gap measure, though. The vaccines for the fall are intended to offer a more lengthy, durable protection.

"We'd be looking at things like at least 10% higher in terms of immune response, if not more, against the currently circulating virus," Marks said, laying out the criteria the FDA is looking for in the future vaccines.

The vaccines would have to be superior, at least against the current variants like omicron and its subvariants, to make it worthwhile to switch over from the vaccines in use now.

Who would get a new vaccine?

Though it could change when the advisory committees meet, Marks said he expects the next-generation boosters to be available for all age groups.

As far as timing, all ages should become eligible around the same time, Marks said, unlike the lengthy waiting periods of months between older and younger age groups with the current vaccines.

And the FDA also hopes to get both vaccine companies, Pfizer and Moderna, to produce vaccines that target the same strains.

"People are very confused about everything, to have different compositions for different vaccines will get things even more confusing," Marks said.

Booster fatigue a factor

Just 43% of those 65 and older have gotten a vaccine dose in the last six months, be it a first or second booster, according to the CDC, even though nearly 90% of people in that age group got their initial vaccination series.

"From a public health standpoint, what we've seen is if it only lasts three or four months, it may be that there's a recommendation that you get another one, but the vast majority of people are not going to keep coming in and getting more boosters," said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

"With each one, we lose some more people," Wachter said.

Come fall, that fatigue could be exacerbated by calls for yet another booster.

If the vaccine is more effective, though, that could help to convince people it's worth another round.

Experts are wary that the vaccine this fall will last a full year, but expect it will at least be more effective in its protection because it will be updated with more of the recent variants, whereas the current vaccine is based on the first strain of COVID from 2019.

Dr. Paul Goepfert, director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic, is overseeing research on the new vaccines as part of the National Institute of Health study. They're looking into vaccines that target just one new variant, like omicron, and vaccines that target a handful of the variants from the past two years, like omicron and delta, both in one shot.

"By the end of all that, for the fall, we're going to know which of these vaccine combinations gives us the highest antibody response towards the most new and improved variants," Goepfert said.

He expects the new vaccine will better protect against severe disease, but cautions that stopping all infections is a lofty goal."

I am hopeful that maybe we could have a yearly vaccine rather than this every few months go back to get the vaccine boost," Goepfert said, but that's probably "one or two more tries" away.

Resources in question

Of course, the overarching issue of resources still remains. Who will pay for these new vaccines, or the ones after them?
Congress has yet to strike a deal with the White House for more COVID funding, even as other countries move ahead with negotiations with the vaccine companies.

White House COVID response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha warned on Wednesday that if Congress doesn't agree to billions in new COVID funding, not every American who wants a vaccine this fall will be able to get one.

Should the FDA decide that not everyone needs a vaccine -- that only people over 50, or over 65, need another booster shot -- that wouldn't be an issue. But Marks said he's hopeful that if "the right thing to do medically" is to recommend them to everyone, of all ages, the country will be able to purchase those doses.

"I'm not worried about who's paying for what. I'm worried about making sure that our recommendations that come out of FDA are the right thing by the people of this country in terms of their health," Marks said.

"So we will make a recommendation that, based on all of the available evidence, comports with what we see would do the best by public health in the coming year."

Officials expected to decide on new COVID-19 vaccine design in early July originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Nearly every state expected to see increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, forecast shows

The forecast now predicts that nearly every U.S. state and territory is projected to see increases in new hospitalizations over the next two weeks.

abcnews.go.com

(fair use applies)

BOLDING IS MINE

Nearly every state expected to see increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations, forecast shows
There are now 24,000 COVID-positive Americans receiving care in the U.S.
By Arielle Mitropoulos
May 18, 2022, 3:51 PM


As the nation's COVID-19 resurgence reaches its highest point since mid-February, daily hospital admission levels and new COVID-19 related deaths in the U.S. are projected to continue increasing over the next four weeks, according to newly updated forecast models used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The forecast now predicts that nearly every U.S. state and territory is projected to see increases in new hospitalizations over the next two weeks.

Models also show that about 5,300 deaths will occur over the next two weeks. California, New York, Georgia and Florida are projected to see the largest death tolls in the weeks to come.

In the weeks after the U.S. surpassed 1 million confirmed COVID-19 related deaths, models estimate that a total of 1,010,800 fatalities will be recorded by June 11.

The projected increases come as infection rates continue to rise across the country, with a growing number of COVID-19 positive patients, once again, entering hospitals and requiring care, federal data shows.

There are now more than 24,300 virus-positive Americans currently receiving care in the U.S. — the highest total since mid-March, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Although totals remain significantly lower than during other parts of the pandemic, when there were more than 160,000 patients hospitalized with the virus, more than 3,000 virus-positive Americans are entering the hospital each day — an average that has increased by 18.7% in the last week, and approximately doubled in the last month.

Admission levels are now on the rise in every region of the country, and the number of virus-related emergency room visits are now at their highest point since February.

Pediatric hospital admissions have also increased by about 70% over the last month.

Nationally, new infection rates have reached their highest point in nearly three months. An average of 94,000 new cases are being officially reported each day, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. In the last six weeks, new cases nationally have nearly quadrupled.

In the last week alone, the U.S. has reported nearly 660,000 new cases.

Hospital workers cover a body of a COVID-19 patient with a sheet at Providence Holy Cr...
President Joe Biden’s new coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, acknowledged during a White House press briefing on Wednesday that the U.S. is currently seeing “a lot of infections,” which he said is largely the result of highly infectious omicron subvariants spreading across the country.

“Right now, [there are] some areas of increased infection and hospitalization in the Northeast and Eastern corridor as well as in the Upper Midwest,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Wednesday. “But we've seen with prior increases, different waves of infection have demonstrated that this travels across the country and has the potential to travel across the country.”

The Northeast remains the nation’s most notable COVID-19 hotspot. Many of the states with the highest case rate per capita over the last week — Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and New York — are located in the Northeast. Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Hawaii, have also all seen high case rates.

According to the CDC’s community levels, 32% of Americans live in an area with a medium or high COVID-19 community level. Since the prior week, an additional 8% of the US population is living in a county with the medium or high COVID-19 community level, Walensky reported.

The high community level suggests there is a "high potential for healthcare system strain" and a "high level of severe disease," and thus, the CDC recommends that people wear a mask in public indoor settings, including schools.

Officials noted that with more at-home COVID-19 tests now available, most Americans are not reporting their results to

“We know that the number of infections is actually substantially higher than that. It's hard to know exactly how many but we know that a lot of people are getting diagnosed using home tests,” Jha explained.

However, even with the rise in infections and hospitalizations, Jha stressed that the U.S. is “in way better place than where we were two years ago,” thanks to key tools such as vaccines, therapeutics and testing access.

“We've got to keep using [those tools] as the virus evolves and as the virus continues to do what it's doing,” Jha said, noting that he remains concerned about the U.S. outlook for the fall and winter, as he reiterated his call for Congress to approve $22.5 billion in COVID-19 funding.

“There's a range of models out there of what we might see in the fall and winter," Jha said. "We have got a plan for a range of scenarios...we have to plan for a scenario where we don't get any more resources from Congress. I think it'd be terrible. I think we'd see a lot of unnecessary loss of life, if that were to happen. But we're looking at all the scenarios, and planning for all of them.”

 

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Newstream | KCNA Watch

kcnawatch.org

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Epidemic Spread and Treatment Results in DPRK

Date: 22/05/2022 | Source: KCNA.kp (En) | Read original version at source

Pyongyang, May 22 (KCNA) -- According to information of the state emergency epidemic prevention headquarters, more than 186,090 persons with fever (more than 32,940 reduced for the previous day), over 299,80 recoveries (over 17,830 increased for the previous day) and one death were reported from 18:00 of May 20 to 18:00 of May 21 throughout the country.

As of 18:00 of May 21 since late April, the total number of fevered persons is over 2,646,730, of which more than 2,067,270 (78.107%) have recovered and at least 579,390 (21.89%) are under medical treatment.

The death toll stands at 67 and the fatality is 0.003%. -0-

 

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North Korea reports 220,000 new cases of COVID as Kim Jon-un claims 'positive progress'

North Korea on May 21 registered roughly 220,000 more people with feverish symptoms, even as Kim Jong-un claimed progress in reducing the spread of COVID-19.

www.republicworld.com

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North Korea Reports 220,000 New Cases Of COVID As Kim Jon-un Claims 'positive Progress'
North Korea on May 21 registered roughly 220,000 more people with feverish symptoms, even as Kim Jong-un claimed progress in reducing the spread of COVID-19.
Written By Aparna Shandilya
Last Updated: 21st May, 2022 13:52 IST

North Korea on May 21, registered roughly 220,000 more people with feverish symptoms, even as leader Kim Jong-un claimed progress in reducing the spread of COVID-19 among the country's 26 million unvaccinated citizens. The outbreak has raised fears of catastrophic disasters in the impoverished, isolated country, which has one of the poorest health-care systems in the world and a high tolerance for civilian suffering.

However, on May 21, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un claimed that the country has "made positive progress" in battling the virus due to the party's leadership and the country's socialist system, NK News reported. Nevertheless, he also stated that numerous "issues" with the national response still persist. Moreover, experts believe North Korea is almost certainly misinterpreting the real figures of the viral outbreak, including an unexpectedly low death toll, in order to soften the political blow to Kim as he navigates the most difficult period of his decade-long rule.

According to the North's Korean Central News Agency, which credited the figure to the government's anti-virus headquarters, over 219,030 North Koreans with fevers were recognised in the 24 hours leading up to 6 p.m. on May 20. Since an unnamed fever began rapidly spreading in late April, North Korea claims more than 2.4 million people have become ill and 66 have died, albeit the country has only been able to identify a fraction of those instances as COVID-19 due to a paucity of testing supplies.

North Korea admitted to omicron cases this week

North Korea admitted to omicron infections this week, after claiming for two and a half years that it had perfectly barred the virus from entering its territory. Despite a lack of public health resources, the North has organised over a million health professionals to locate persons with fevers and place them in quarantine facilities. Kim also imposed stringent travel restrictions between cities and towns and recruited hundreds of troops to assist with the delivery of medicine to pharmacies in Pyongyang, the country's capital and the epicentre of the outbreak.

Kim stated during a ruling party Politburo meeting on May 21 that North Korea was beginning to manage the epidemic and asked for increased vigilance to continue the "positive trend" in the anti-virus effort, according to KCNA. However, Kim appeared to hint at easing his pandemic reaction in order to alleviate his economic troubles, urging authorities to actively adapt the country's preventive measures in response to changing virus conditions and to devise various methods to rebuild the national economy.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Joe Biden says US ready to offer COVID vaccines to North Korea amid virus outbreak

Following a meeting in Seoul with South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl, US President Biden said, “We have offered vaccines to North Korea and also to China.”

www.republicworld.com

(fair use applies)

Joe Biden Says US Ready To Offer COVID Vaccines To North Korea Amid Virus Outbreak
Following a meeting in Seoul with South Korean President Yoon Seok-youl, US President Biden said, “We have offered vaccines to North Korea and also to China.”
Written By Anwesha Majumdar
Last Updated: 21st May, 2022 16:17 IST

The United States has offered to provide North Korea coronavirus vaccines as a fresh COVID-19 wave wreaks havoc on the country. According to a TASS report, a similar proposal has also been given to China. Notably, the proposal comes at a time when Joe Biden is on a trip to Asia for the first time after taking office as US President.

Addressing a joint press conference following a meeting in Seoul with the President of South Korea, Yoon Seok-youl, Biden said, “We have offered vaccines to North Korea and also to China.” However, the US President did not clarify which company's vaccines he was referring to, TASS reported.

On May 12, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported the very first coronavirus infection in North Korea, which emerged over two years after the COVID outbreak started. Following that, a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea was called, and Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of the nation, was present. He ordered the implementation of lockdowns in all cities and counties across the country.

Kim had also criticised health officials and ordered the nation's army to help with drug delivery. According to official media, North Korea's leader had instructed the military to stabilise COVID-19 medical distribution in the capital, Pyongyang.

North Korea documented around 220,000 additional cases with feverish symptoms

Meanwhile, even as the North Korean leader claimed progress in curbing the transmission of COVID-19 among the nation's 26 million unvaccinated inhabitants, on May 21, the country's health ministry documented around 220,000 additional individuals with feverish symptoms. Fears of catastrophic disasters have been raised in the impoverished country, which has one of the world's worst health-care systems and a high tolerance for human suffering, as per media reports.

According to an NK News report, Kim Jong-un said on May 21 that the country had "made positive progress" in combatting the virus as a result of the party's leadership and the nation's socialist system. Nonetheless, he said that there are still significant "issues" with the national approach. Apart from this, analysts believe North Korea is almost probably misinterpreting the true number of the virus outbreak, including a surprisingly low death toll, in order to cushion Kim's political blow as he navigates the most difficult era of his decade-long leadership.

Approximately 219,030 North Koreans with fever-like symptoms were identified in the 24 hours leading up to 6 p.m. on May 20, according to the KCNA, which credited the number to the government's anti-virus headquarters. North Korea says that almost 2.4 million people have been ill and 66 have died since an unexplained fever began spreading fast in late April, although the nation has only been able to determine a portion of those cases as COVID-19 because of the lack of testing materials.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG9Al7vnv0Q
TWiV 901: COVID-19 clinical update #115 with Dr. Daniel Griffin
1 hr 48 sec
May 21, 2022
Vincent Racaniello

In COVID-19 clinical update #115, Dr. Griffin reviews cross-variant immunity without vaccination, EUA for boosters in 5-11 year olds, B.1.1.529 attack rate, scent dogs, Omicron and pets, Paxlovid, Veklury, Fluvoxamine, antigen positivity after isolation, inflammasome activation and severe disease, and GI persistence and fecal shedding. Show notes at https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-901/

 

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Two Years After Infection, Half of People Hospitalized With COVID-19 Still Have at Least One Symptom

Study of 1,192 participants hospitalized with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, between January 7th and May 29th, 2020, followed up at six months, 12 months, and two years after discharge. Physical and mental health improved over time regardless of initial disease severity, with 55% reporting at least on

scitechdaily.com

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Two Years After Infection, Half of People Hospitalized With COVID-19 Still Have at Least One Symptom
By The Lancet
May 21, 2022

Half of the patients who were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 still have at least one symptom two years later.

• Study of 1,192 participants hospitalized with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, between January 7th and May 29th, 2020, followed up at six months, 12 months, and two years after discharge.
• Physical and mental health improved over time regardless of initial disease severity, with 55% reporting at least one symptom caused by the initial COVID-19 infection at two years compared to 68% at six months.
• In general, patients recovered from COVID-19 tend to be in poorer health two years after the initial infection compared to the general population, indicating some patients need more time to recover fully.
• Around half of study participants had symptoms of long COVID – such as fatigue and sleep difficulties – at two years, and experienced poorer quality of life and ability to exercise, more mental health issues, and increased use of health-care services compared to those without symptoms of long COVID.

Two years after infection with COVID-19, half of the patients who were admitted to the hospital still have at least one symptom, according to the longest follow-up study to date, published on May 11, 2 in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

The research study followed 1,192 participants in China infected with SARS-CoV-2 during the first phase of the pandemic in 2020.

While physical and mental health generally improved over time, the analysis suggests that COVID-19 patients still tend to have poorer health and quality of life than the general population. This is especially the case for participants with long COVID, who typically still have at least one symptom including fatigue, shortness of breath, and sleep difficulties two years after initially falling ill.[1]

The long-term health impacts of COVID-19 have remained largely unknown, as the longest follow-up studies to date have spanned around one year.[2] The lack of pre-COVID-19 health status baselines and comparisons with the general population in most studies have also made it difficult to determine how well patients with COVID-19 have recovered.

Lead author Professor Bin Cao, of the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, China, says: “Our findings indicate that for a certain proportion of hospitalized COVID-19 survivors, while they may have cleared the initial infection, more than two years is needed to recover fully from COVID-19. Ongoing follow-up of COVID-19 survivors, particularly those with symptoms of long COVID, is essential to understand the longer course of the illness, as is further exploration of the benefits of rehabilitation programs for recovery. There is a clear need to provide continued support to a significant proportion of people who’ve had COVID-19, and to understand how vaccines, emerging treatments, and variants affect long-term health outcomes.”

The authors of the new study sought to analyze the long-term health outcomes of hospitalized COVID-19 survivors, as well as specific health impacts of long COVID. They evaluated the health of 1,192 participants with acute COVID-19 treated at Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan, China, between January 7th and May 29th, 2020, at six months, 12 months, and two years.

Assessments involved a six-minute walking test, laboratory tests, and questionnaires on symptoms, mental health, health-related quality of life, if they had returned to work, and health-care use after discharge. The negative effects of long COVID on quality of life, exercise capacity, mental health, and health-care use were determined by comparing participants with and without long COVID symptoms. Health outcomes at two years were determined using an age-, sex-, and comorbidities-matched control group of people in the general population with no history of COVID-19 infection.

The median age of participants at discharge was 57 years, and 54% (n=641) were men. Six months after initially falling ill, 68% (777/1,149) of participants reported at least one long COVID symptom. By two years after infection, reports of symptoms had fallen to 55% (650/1,190). Fatigue or muscle weakness were the symptoms most often reported and fell from 52% (593/1,151) at six months to 30% (357/1,190) at two years. Regardless of the severity of their initial illness, 89% (438/494) of participants had returned to their original work at two years.

Two years after initially falling ill, patients with COVID-19 are generally in poorer health than the general population, with 31% (351/1,127) reporting fatigue or muscle weakness and 31% (354/1,127) reporting sleep difficulties. The proportion of non-COVID-19 participants reporting these symptoms was 5% (55/1,127) and 14% (153/1,127), respectively. COVID-19 patients were also more likely to report a number of other symptoms including joint pain, palpitations, dizziness, and headaches. In quality of life questionnaires, COVID-19 patients also more often reported pain or discomfort (23% [254/1,127]) and anxiety or depression (12% [131/1,127]) than non-COVID-19 participants (5% [57/1,127] and 5% [61/1,127], respectively).

Around half of study participants (650/1,190) had symptoms of long COVID at two years, and reported lower quality of life than those without long COVID. In mental health questionnaires, 35% (228/650) reported pain or discomfort and 19% (123/650) reported anxiety or depression. The proportion of COVID-19 patients without long COVID reporting these symptoms was 10% (55/540) and 4% (19/540) at two years, respectively. Long COVID participants also more often reported problems with their mobility (5% [33/650]) or activity levels (4% [24/540]) than those without long COVID (1% [8/540] and 2% [10/540], respectively).

Mental health assessments of long COVID participants found 13% (83/650) display symptoms of anxiety and 11% (70/649) displayed symptoms of depression, while for non-long COVID participants the proportions were 3% (15/536) and 1% (5/540), respectively. Long COVID participants more often used health-care services after being discharged, with 26% (169/648) reporting an outpatient clinic visit compared to 11% (57/538) of non-long COVID participants. At 17% (107/648), hospitalisation among long COVID participants was higher than the 10% (52/538) reported by participants without long COVID.

Notes

1. A clinical case definition of post COVID-19 condition by a Delphi consensus, 6 October 2021
2. The Lancet: 1-year outcomes in hospital survivors with COVID-19: a longitudinal cohort study, DEFINE_ME

Reference: “Health outcomes in people 2 years after surviving hospitalisation with COVID-19: a longitudinal cohort study” by Lixue Huang, MD; Xia Li, MD; Xiaoying Gu, PhD; Hui Zhang, MD; LiLi Ren, PhD; Li Guo, PhD; Min Liu, MD; Yimin Wang, MD; Dan Cui, MD; Yeming Wang, MD; Xueyang Zhang, MD; Lianhan Shang, MD; Jingchuan Zhong, MS; Xinming Wang, MS; Jianwei Wang, PhD and Prof Bin Cao, MD, 11 May 2022, The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.

DOI: 10.1016/S2213-2600(22)00126-6

The authors acknowledge limitations to their study. Without a control group of hospital survivors unrelated to COVID-19 infection, it is hard to determine whether observed abnormalities are specific to COVID-19. While the moderate response rate may introduce selection bias, most baseline characteristics were balanced between COVID-19 survivors who were included in the analysis and those who were not. The slightly increased proportion of participants included in the analysis who received oxygen leads to the possibility that those who did not participate in the study had fewer symptoms than those who did. This may result in an overestimate of the prevalence of long COVID symptoms. Being a single-center study from early in the pandemic, the findings may not directly extend to the long-term health outcomes of patients infected with later variants. Like most COVID-19 follow-up studies, there is also the potential for information bias when analyzing self-reported health outcomes. Some outcome measures, including work status and health-care use after discharge, were not recorded at all visits, meaning only partial analysis of long-term impacts on these outcomes was possible.

This study was funded by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Key Research and Development Program of China, National Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Major Projects of National Science and Technology on New Drug Creation and Development of Pulmonary Tuberculosis, China Evergrande Group, Jack Ma Foundation, Sino Biopharmaceutical, Ping An Insurance (Group), and New Sunshine Charity Foundation. It was conducted by researchers from the Capital medical university, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Harbin Medical University, and Tsinghua University-Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences, China.

 

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US sees risk of COVID supply rationing without more funds

The White House is planning for "dire" contingencies that could include rationing supplies of vaccines and treatments this fall if Congress doesn't approve more money for fighting COVID-19.

medicalxpress.com

(fair use applies)

US sees risk of COVID supply rationing without more funds
by Zeke Miller
May 21, 2022

The White House is planning for "dire" contingencies that could include rationing supplies of vaccines and treatments this fall if Congress doesn't approve more money for fighting COVID-19.

In public comments and private meetings on Capitol Hill, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus coordinator, has painted a dark picture in which the U.S. could be forced to cede many of the advances made against the coronavirus over the last two years and even the most vulnerable could face supply shortages.

Biden administration officials have been warning for weeks that the country has spent nearly all the money in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan that was dedicated directly to COVID-19 response.

A small pool of money remains, and the administration faces critical decisions about how to spend it. That means tough decisions, like weighing whether to use it to secure the next generation of vaccines to protect the highest risk populations or giving priority to a supply of highly effective therapies that dramatically reduce the risks of severe illness and death.
That decision may be made in the coming week, according to the administration, as the White House faces imminent deadlines to begin placing orders for vaccines and treatments before other nations jump ahead of the U.S. in accessing supply.

Jha has warned that without more money, vaccines will be harder to come by, tests will once again be scarce, and the therapeutics that are helping the country weather the current omicron-driven surge in cases without a commensurate increase in deaths could be sold overseas before Americans can access them.

"I think we would see a lot of unnecessary loss of life if that were to happen," Jha said this past week. "But we're looking at all the scenarios and planning for all of them."

He said the administration was "getting much more into the scenario-planning business to make sure that we know what may be ahead of us so we can plan for it and obviously also lay those out in front of Congress."

Jha, who declined to put a specific projection on potential loss of life, has become the face of the Biden administration's efforts to persuade Congress to approve an additional $22.5 billion for COVID-19 response.

"The scenarios that we're planning for are for things like what if Congress gives us no money and we don't have adequate vaccines," Jha told the AP in a May 12 interview. "We run out of therapies. We don't have enough tests. What might things look like? Obviously, that's a pretty dire situation."

Already, the domestic production of at-home testing is slowing, with workers beginning to be laid off. In the coming weeks, Jha said, manufacturers will sell off equipment and "get out of this business," leaving the U.S. once again dependent on overseas suppliers for rapid test.

Drug manufactures and the Food and Drug Administration, meanwhile, are working on evaluating the next generation of vaccines, potentially including ones that are targeted at the dominant omicron strain. But getting them ready before the predicted case surge in the fall means placing orders now, since they take two to three months to produce.

Jha said this week that the U.S. has yet to start negotiations with drugmakers because of the lack of money.

"We've had some very preliminary conversations with the manufacturers," he said. "But the negotiations around it have not yet begun, partly because we're waiting for resources." He added: "The truth is that other countries are in conversations with the manufacturers and starting to kind of advance their negotiations."

The U.S., he said, doesn't have enough money to purchase additional booster vaccines for anyone who wants one. Instead, the supplies of those vaccines may be restricted to just the most vulnerable—not unlike the chaotic early days of the COVID-10 vaccine roll-out.

"Without additional funding from Congress, we will not be able to buy enough vaccines for every American who wants one once these new generation of vaccines come out in the fall and winter," he said.

And while the U.S. has built up a stockpile of the antiviral pill Paxlovid, which has been widely effective at reducing severe disease and death, it's running out of money to purchase new doses—or other, even more effective therapies that are in the final stages of development.

"If we don't get more resources from Congress, what we will find in the fall and winter is we will find a period of time where Americans can look around and see their friends in other countries—in Europe and Canada—with access to these treatments that Americans will not have," Jha said.

A congressional deal for a slimmed-down COVID-19 response package of about $10 billion fell apart in March over the Biden administration's plans to lift virus-related restrictions on migration at U.S. borders. But a federal judge on Friday put that plan on hold, just days before it was to take effect on Monday.

There is no guarantee of swift action on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers—particularly Republicans—have grown newly wary of deficit spending. On Thursday, a $40 billion measure to assist restaurants that struggled during the pandemic failed on those grounds. GOP lawmakers have also objected to additional funding for the global pandemic response, and called for any new virus response funding to come from unspent economic relief money in the $1.9 trillion rescue plan.

The administration is preparing to lay the blame on lawmakers if there are tough consequences this fall due to lack of money. Still, it could be perilous for Biden, who has struggled to fulfill his promise to voters to get control of the pandemic.

 

[Heliobas Disciple]

Spain eases Covid entry for unvaccinated tourists

Spain on Saturday eased Covid entry rules for unvaccinated tourists from outside the European Union, in a boost for the key tourism sector ahead of the peak summer holidays.

medicalxpress.com

(fair use applies)

Spain eases Covid entry for unvaccinated tourists
May 21, 2022

Spain on Saturday eased Covid entry rules for unvaccinated tourists from outside the European Union, in a boost for the key tourism sector ahead of the peak summer holidays.

Until now travellers from outside the bloc—including Spain's main tourism market Britain—could only enter with proof of vaccination or recovery from Covid-19.

But as of Saturday visitors from outside of the EU will also be allowed to enter Spain with a negative Covid test result, the transport ministry said in a statement.

PCR tests must be carried out in the 72 hours prior to departure to Spain or an antigen test 24 hours prior to departure.
Tourism Minister Maria Reyes Maroto said the "new phase of the pandemic" meant the country was able to relax the rules by equating non-EU travellers with those of the bloc.

"This is excellent news, much awaited by the tourism sector, which will make it easier for tourists outside of Europe to visit us during the high season," she added in the statement.

Children under the age of 12 are exempt from submitting any type of certificate.

With sunny beaches and a rich architectural heritage, Spain was the world's second most visited country before the pandemic, with 83.5 million foreign visitors in 2019.

But international travel restrictions related to the pandemic brought Spain's tourism sector to its knees in 2020 as it welcomed just 19 million tourists.

The figure rose to 31.1 million in 2021, far below the government forecast of 45 million arrivals.