About Covid-19 and vaccines
Texas Supreme Court rejects Abbott’s ban on school mask mandates — for now: “The move from the state’s high court happened the same day the Texas Education Agency suspended enforcement of Abbott’s ban in the state’s public school systems. The TEA noted in a public guidance letter that the ongoing court challenges pushed the agency to drop enforcement.”
AstraZeneca to seek approval for Covid antibody cocktail: “The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker said on Friday that its AZD7442 antibody combination showed a 77 per cent reduction in the development of symptomatic Covid compared with a placebo. There were no severe Covid cases or deaths in those treated with the drug, while the placebo arm accrued three cases of severe disease, including two deaths.”
Most private insurers are no longer waiving cost-sharing for COVID-19 treatment: While vaccination and testing costs are free to the public, “ 72% of the two largest insurers in each state and DC (102 health plans) are no longer waiving [treatment] costs, and another 10% of plans are phasing out waivers by the end of October.”
U.S. officials reviewing possibility Moderna vaccine is linked to higher risk of uncommon side effect than previously thought: “Federal health officials are investigating emerging reports that the Moderna coronavirus vaccine may be associated with a higher risk of a heart condition called myocarditis in younger adults than previously believed, according to two people familiar with the review who emphasized the side effect still probably remains uncommon.”
Public Perspectives on Decisions About Emergency Care Seeking for Care Unrelated to COVID-19 During the COVID-19 Pandemic: “In this survey study of 933 US adults, we found that 16.9% and 25.5% of individuals confronted with scenarios consistent with myocardial infarction or appendicitis, respectively, prioritized avoidance of COVID-19 exposure in the emergency department over seeking appropriate care. Sociodemographics, political affiliations, and personal knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs regarding COVID-19 were not factors associated with decision-making regarding emergency care seeking.”
U.S. administers 359.6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines - CDC: “The agency said 199,887,548 people had received at least one dose while 169,592,873 people were fully vaccinated as of Thursday.
The CDC tally includes two-dose vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech, as well as Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine as of 6:00 a.m. ET on Thursday.”
A natural pandemic has been terrible. A synthetic one would be even worse: “The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of the U.S.’s public health preparedness infrastructure when faced with a moderately deadly and moderately transmissible respiratory pathogen. We cannot begin to imagine the devastation — possibly even a threat to civilization — if the country had to face a synthetic pandemic from a virus that had been intentionally engineered to spread as effectively as measles and had the virulence of filoviruses such as Ebola or Marburg.”
A really good article about weaponized viruses and our lack of preparedness to address such an attack.
The CDC Only Tracks a Fraction of Breakthrough COVID-19 Infections, Even as Cases Surge: “The nation is flying blind yet again, critics say, because on May 1 of this year — as the new variant found a foothold in the U.S. — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mostly stopped tracking COVID-19 in vaccinated people, also known as breakthrough cases, unless the illness was severe enough to cause hospitalization or death.
Individual states now set their own criteria for collecting data on breakthrough cases, resulting in a muddled grasp of COVID-19’s impact, leaving experts in the dark as to the true number of infections among the vaccinated, whether or not vaccinated people can develop long-haul illness, and the risks to unvaccinated children as they return to school.”
‘No one wanted to read’ his book on pandemic psychology – then Covid hit: This article is not a book review, but an interview with the author about “pandemic psychology.” One paragraph that especially stood out for me: “He [the author] interpreted that pandemics ‘are essentially a psychological phenomenon and about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people’ and that ‘the psychological footprint is bigger than the medical footprint’.” The entire article is well worth reading.
CDC director says we might not need annual Covid boosters after third shot: “CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday that Americans may not need yearly Covid-19 booster shots, suggesting that a third shot may sufficiently strengthen the long-term protection of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s vaccines.”
By comparison, the Hepatitis B vaccine requires 3 doses and a booster is not needed annually.
New study boosts hopes for a broad vaccine to combat COVID-19 variants and future coronavirus outbreaks: “Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School and National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) found that 2003 SARS survivors who have been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine produced highly potent functional antibodies that are capable of neutralising not only all known SARS-CoV-2 variants of concerns (VOCs) but also other animal coronaviruses that have the potential to cause human infection. This finding, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, is the first time that such cross-neutralising reactivity has been demonstrated in humans, and further boosts hopes of developing an effective and broad-spectrum next-generation vaccine against different coronaviruses.
Among the coronavirus family, one sub-group relies on the ACE2 molecule to enter human cells. Both SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 belong to this group as well as a number of coronaviruses circulating in animals such as bats, pangolins and civets. While the exact route of transmission remains unknown, these viruses have the potential to jump from animals to humans and could start the next pandemic. Collectively, this group of viruses is called sarbecovirus.
’We explored the possibility of inducing pan-sarbecovirus neutralising antibodies that can block the common human ACE2-virus interaction, which will be protective not only against all known and unknown SARS-CoV-2 VOCs, but also future sarbecoviruses,’ said Dr Chee Wah Tan, Senior Research Fellow with Duke-NUS’ Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID) programme and co-first author of this study.”
Israel extends COVID-19 vaccine boosters to people over 40, teachers: “Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said on Twitter that ‘now even people aged 40 and over, and teaching staff, can get a third vaccine dose.’ Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, 49, said he intends to get the third dose as soon as Friday morning.”
CSL bets on self-amplifying mRNA to tackle seasonal, pandemic influenza: “Similar to existing mRNA technology, sa-mRNA instructs cells to make a protein, stimulating the immune response and leaving a blueprint able to recognise and fight future infections. However, as the name suggests, it also amplifies the amount of protein made. ‘This could enable vaccine manufacturers to potentially develop more effective vaccines with a smaller dosage and with lower rates of reactogenicity,’ according to Seqirus. It noted that in preclinical testing, sa-mRNA has shown ‘the potential to raise stronger cellular responses and generate significantly higher antibody titres at the same dose level as mRNA.’”
Pan-protective anti-alphavirus human antibodies target a conserved E1 protein epitope: “Alphaviruses are emerging, mosquito-transmitted pathogens that cause musculoskeletal and neurological disease in humans. Although neutralizing antibodies that inhibit individual alphaviruses have been described, broadly reactive antibodies that protect against both arthritogenic and encephalitic alphaviruses have not been reported. Here, we identify DC2.112 and DC2.315, two pan-protective yet poorly neutralizing human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that avidly bind to viral antigen on the surface of cells infected with arthritogenic and encephalitic alphaviruses…Treatment with DC2.112 or DC2.315 protects mice against infection by both arthritogenic (chikungunya and Mayaro) and encephalitic (Venezuelan, Eastern, and Western equine encephalitis) alphaviruses through multiple mechanisms…”
Philadelphia becomes latest archdiocese to reject religious exemptions for vaccine mandates: “Philadelphia joins at least five other dioceses that have given their priests similar guidance, including San Diego, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu and Camden, N.J. Their stance sharply contrasts with the position of other bishops and Catholic organizations that have supported those seeking exemptions for reasons of conscience…
In a vaccine promotion campaign, Pope Francis on Wednesday called receiving a vaccine ‘an act of love.’”
About aging [Note: “aging” is the American spelling while “ageing” is the English spelling]
What an Older, Slower-Growing U.S. Population Means for the Economy: An “aging population with fewer births is intensifying structural forces underlying new problems spawned by the pandemic. Labor supply has been falling far short of demand as workers deal with child care issues, virus concerns linger, and unemployment benefits have been more generous than normal. The new census report highlights longer-term forces that will continue to weigh on the labor market as economists and investors bank on a return to normal this fall when children head back to school and the $300 in extra weekly jobless pay expires. Whether the Delta variant of Covid-19 and renewed infection rates dash those plans is unclear.”
Evidence that ageing yields improvements as well as declines across attention and executive functions: “Many but not all cognitive abilities decline during ageing. Some even improve due to lifelong experience. The critical capacities of attention and executive functions have been widely posited to decline. However, these capacities are composed of multiple components, so multifaceted ageing outcomes might be expected. Indeed, prior findings suggest that whereas certain attention/executive functions clearly decline, others do not, with hints that some might even improve. We tested ageing effects on the alerting, orienting and executive (inhibitory) networks... [W]hereas the efficiency of the alerting network decreased with age, orienting and executive inhibitory efficiency increased, at least until the mid-to-late 70s…The results suggest variability in age-related changes across attention/executive functions, with some declining while others improve.”
About healthcare IT
Google dismantling health division as chief departs for Cerner: “As Dr. Feinberg is set to leave Google on Sept. 1, it's splitting its health projects and teams across several different parts of the company, according to an Aug. 19 internal memo.
Jeff Dean, the head of Google's research division, sent the memo to employees and said Google Health would no longer function as a unified unit.
Google's CMO, Karen DeSalvo, MD, who leads its clinical initiatives, will now report to the chief legal officer. Google Health's clinician team, which is building an EHR tool, will now report directly to Mr. Dean and its artificial intelligence team, which is working on medical imaging, will report to Google's search and AI team.”
FDA Sends Alert Over Blackberry OS Flaw in Manufacturing Equipment: “Reports of a vulnerability in the Blackberry operating system used in some pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment as well as in certain medical devices and device manufacturing has prompted the FDA to issue a cybersecurity alert.
The software flaw, which affects certain versions of the BlackBerry QNX software development platform, could potentially allow a hacker to disable the software or have it do something it’s not supposed to do.”
About pharma
Prescription of Lipid-Lowering and Antihypertensive Drugs Following Pictorial Information About Subclinical Atherosclerosis: “The findings of this trial demonstrate that provision of pictorial information on vascular age and carotid plaques based on the results of ultrasonographic examination increased physician prescription of lipid-lowering drugs but not antihypertensive drugs within the following 465 days.”
Getting physicians to prescribe more appropriately is an ongoing issue. This method was a targeted solution. One must note, however, that it is a Swedish study, so applicability to other cultures needs to be demonstrated.
About medical malpractice
Redefining "cause of death" meaning would upend medical liability law: “In an opinion, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania said that ‘cause of death’ is ambiguous and interpreted it to mean the ‘conduct the plaintiff alleges led to the decedent's death.’ That definition would allow plaintiffs to file lawsuits beyond the two-year statute of limitations established in the bipartisan Medical Care Availability and Reduction of Error Act (MCARE).”
In other words, the Court said the cause of death is not a medical condition listed on a death certificate, but “conduct the plaintiff alleges led to the decedent's death.”