Tomorrow the US government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research, The National Institutes of Health, will shut down its Covid-19 ‘special populations’ website.
This site hosts a huge amount of information about how to treat covid and long covid in the immunocompromised and in people with HIV, cancer and similar immune supressing conditions – so-called ‘special populations.’
The site is going totally offline.
Comments closedThe 2024 Olympic Games are serving up some less-than-subtle metaphors for how poorly we handle public health. Just after winning a bronze medal in the much-anticipated men’s 200-meter race, U.S. sprinter Noah Lyles collapsed on the track in exhaustion — not just because he’d completed a brutal run in just 19.7 seconds, finishing third, but also because he was sick with COVID-19, a diagnosis that he’d concealed from others. He had been favored to take home gold, as he did in the 100-meter race a few days earlier.
But seeing an American Olympic star sprawled out and gasping on the track, and then taken away in a wheelchair, was more than a shocking image. It also represented the general “mission accomplished” attitude toward SARS-CoV-2: We think we’ve won against this virus and we haven’t.
COVID isn’t just spreading like wildfire through the Olympic Village in Paris — we are undergoing surges across the globe, with the World Health Organization tracking steep rises in infections in 84 countries. After more than four years fighting this thing, it is still knocking us out.
Comments closedComments closedAnother blow to understanding the spread of COVID-19 is now slated to happen on July 31. That’s when funding ends for Ontario’s extensive wastewater surveillance program. It’s a technology that can detect viral particles up to seven days before people develop symptoms. It costs $15 million annually to check 58 sites throughout Ontario. But the cost of losing this hard-won technology is far greater. No longer having its data means that hospitals, long-term-care facilities, schools and communities will lose critical advanced warning of a potential outbreak. That gives them less time to prepare with masks, air filtration and vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday mothballed its longstanding COVID isolation guidance, announcing that people no longer need to isolate for five days after catching the coronavirus. Instead, per the CDC, they should stay home if they feel sick but can leave home and resume normal activities as soon as their symptoms are getting better and its been a day since they had a fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication). That means that the CDC is now both streamlining and simplifying its recommendations and advising people to treat their COVID infections like they would the flu or any other respiratory illness — even though the novel coronavirus is nothing like the flu or other common respiratory viruses.
Many public-health experts are backing the move, which is the first major change the CDC has made to the guidance since it reduced the isolation period from ten days to five in late 2021 and had been previewed last month in a report by the Washington Post. The CDC and the experts supporting the plan have noted that it makes sense for the agency to align its isolation guidance with how everyone is now living with COVID, four years after the start of the pandemic. That new normal is that COVID isn’t going away and people are still catching it, but the threat it poses and harm is causes continues to decline thanks to virtually everyone having some form of immunity owing to prior infection or the administration of widely available vaccines, in addition to the availability of effective life-saving antiviral treatments like Paxlovid.
Comments closedShortly before Joseph Ladapo was sworn in as Florida’s surgeon general in 2022, the New Yorker ran a short column welcoming the vaccine-skeptic doctor to his new role, and highlighting his advocacy for the use of leeches in public health.
It was satire of course, a teasing of the Harvard-educated physician for his unorthodox medical views, which include a steadfast belief that life-saving Covid shots are the work of the devil, and that opening a window is the preferred treatment for the inhalation of toxic fumes from gas stoves.
But now, with an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.
Comments closedA federal judge says the Liberal government’s use of the Emergencies Act in early 2022 to clear convoy protesters was unreasonable.
“I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable and ultra vires,” Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley wrote in a Tuesday decision. “Ultra vires” is a Latin term used by courts to refer to actions beyond the scope of the law.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland told reporters at a cabinet retreat in Montreal that the government plans to appeal the decision.
Comments closedThe answers lie in poop. Based on the latest national sample of wastewater taken on January 13, 2024, the concentration of the SARS-Cov-2 virus is 1,132 copies/mL of sewage, an alarming increase compared to 280 copies/mL six months ago. This is one sign that cases of COVID infections have been rising, resulting in more hospitalizations, deaths, and people developing long COVID.
Like millions of other high-risk people who are service workers, older, chronically ill, disabled, or immunocompromised, I have done everything I can to remain as safe as possible. Due to neuromuscular disability and respiratory failure, my chances of surviving an infection are slim to none. With the latest JN.1 variant likely even more contagious – or better practiced at evading immune system defenses – than previous ones, I wonder if this is the surge when I will become infected, which is terrifying.
Comments closedWhen the pandemic hit American soil, the country faced a tragic lack of leadership in President Donald Trump, a man who famously did not bother to read his daily briefs. He also spent a lot of time on Twitter, and not only religiously watched Fox News but took policy cues from it. In the emerging crisis — which happened to coincide with Trump’s reelection campaign gearing up — while scientific experts couldn’t get the ear of the president, social media and right-wing media very much could and did.
Trump, who had promised the pandemic would simply disappear, came to embrace a too-good-to-be-true pandemic “solution” in the form of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which had captured the excitement of Silicon Valley — and the attention of Elon Musk on Twitter. Though the repurposing of existing drugs is not inherently a bad idea, Team Trump was not interested in engaging in the scientific process to test for safety and efficacy. And it certainly wasn’t the only time Musk or Trump recklessly took off with an idea because they wanted it to be true.
Comments closedA judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice has dismissed former MPP Randy Hillier’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge against Reopening Ontario Act charges laid against him in the spring of 2021.
Comments closedThe Earth is flat. We have been secretly contacted by intelligent beings from other planets. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did not land on the moon in 1969. They may sound like bizarre statements, but a new poll suggests a sizable number of Canadians believe in these and other conspiracy theories.
Comments closedA headline shared online falsely claims that Iceland has banned COVID-19 vaccines and cites sudden deaths for which there is no evidence, according to the Icelandic national health authority.
Iceland has not banned COVID vaccines and “there are no soaring sudden deaths,” Guðrún Aspelund, chief epidemiologist at the Icelandic Directorate of Health, told Reuters in a Nov. 29 email.
Comments closedThe right-wing godfather’s Alberta government report promotes politicians over scientists and doctors.
Comments closedAlthough many Canadians act as though the pandemic has ended, the airborne virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve at an amazing pace with devastating consequences for both individuals and the public at large.
Comments closedKatherine Wells wants to urge her Lubbock, Texas, community to get vaccinated against Covid-19. “That could really save people from severe illness,” said Wells, the city’s public health director.
But she can’t.
Comments closedSARS-CoV-2 is now circulating out of control worldwide. The only major limitation on transmission is the immune environment the virus faces. The disease it causes, COVID‑19, is now a risk faced by most people as part of daily life.
Comments closedA British Columbia judge has sentenced a Vancouver Island woman to 18 months of probation for deliberately coughing in the face of a grocery store employee and shoving her shopping cart into another worker during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Comments closedIt has been well noted that, whatever their starting points, conspiracy theorists sooner or later get around to blaming the Jews.
During a press dinner in New York last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is hoping to convert his portfolio of chuckleheaded conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and all sorts of other things into the semblance of a presidential campaign, went there last week.
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