Tag: vaccines

Covid will stop expanding around the world when we’re all immune

16 Comments


Ilyas El Omari

So far, SARS-CoV-2’s most devastating impacts have been in developed countries. The U.S., U.K. and European Union have accounted for about a third of deaths, compared to their roughly 10% share of the world’s population. However, it’s been in the BRICS grouping of fast-growing middle- income nations where an outsized share of new variants of concern have been isolated and analyzed for the first time. From the original strain in China, to the Delta lineage picked up in India, the Gamma variety isolated in Brazil and the Beta and latest Nu strains from South Africa, only the U.K.-related Alpha variant has emerged outside these countries.

In part, that’s just a reflection of the fact that two out of five people in the planet live in one of the BRICS nations. It’s also no coincidence that new variants were first identified in countries with the sophisticated scientific infrastructure needed to spot them. The BRICS are some of the biggest players in the global market for generic drugs, and the likes of India and South Africa have performed a key role in debates over intellectual property waivers to increase access to medicines…

As natural and vaccine-derived immunity rises, viral evolution will have to get more and more ingenious to evade our defenses. So far, scarcely more than half of the world’s population has had a dose of a Covid vaccine. That means there’s still more than 3.4 billion people out there whose bodies the virus can treat as laboratories in which to develop new mutations. Until we reduce that number further, the odds aren’t as strongly in our favor as we’d like to think.

Read both linked article. El Omari link is below the image up top. Link in the first paragraph takes you to David Fickling, this article in Bloomberg…which requires a subscription much of the time.

The coronavirus vaccines have surpassed expectations

Leave a comment

The big picture: The pandemic isn’t over. There are still big threats ahead of us and big problems to solve. But for all the things that have gone wrong over the past year, the vaccines themselves have shattered even the most ambitious expectations.

The vaccines represent a “stunning scientific achievement for the world … unprecedented in the history of vaccinology,” said Dan Barouch, an expert on virology and vaccines at Harvard, who worked on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine…

Most importantly, all the leading vaccines work extremely well.

All four vaccines or vaccine candidates in the U.S. — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — appear to prevent coronavirus deaths, and to offer total or near-total protection against serious illness.

RTFA. Engage with scientific facts and practice. Please, please, don’t wander off into the pop culture of profiteers, economic and ideological, who seek to line their pockets by encouraging fear and foolishness.

Pfizer, Moderna, skip White House vaccine summit

3 Comments

Pfizer and Moderna, the two pharmaceutical companies closest to gaining U.S. clearance for a Covid-19 vaccine, won’t attend a White House summit intended to build confidence in the shots.

With the Food and Drug Administration expected to decide on whether to allow the companies’ vaccines to be distributed in the coming days, there was worry that regulators and executives shouldn’t be seen rubbing elbows at the Tuesday meeting.

…The focus of the gathering shifted after Peter Marks, the head of the FDA center that reviews vaccines, volunteered to make a presentation…Since it would be would inappropriate to have vaccine company executives touting their shots while in the same room with their regulator, a decision was made not to include any drugmakers in the meeting, the official said on a call with reporters on Monday.

Predictably, Trump’s setup their “summit” to try to make it appear they had done something right in the fight against COVID-19. And fumbled the ball.

RTFA, though. Pfizer had already notified organizers they wouldn’t be attending. Something similar from Moderna. Both of these firms should be making announcements over the next week or two.

Transparency note: I own shares in Moderna in my retirement investment account.

Another anti-vaccine excuse fades away

8 Comments

Children and adults with egg allergies do not need to avoid flu shots or take special precautions, and healthcare providers need not ask if patients are allergic to eggs before giving a flu shot, allergy experts said.

Updated practice guidelines from the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) and the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI) state that people with egg allergies should receive an annual flu shot and that no special precautions are required…

A joint ACAAI and AAAAI task force reviewed findings from recent studies involving thousands of patients with egg allergies, and those studies uniformly showed egg allergic patients to have a similar risk for flu shot reactions as people without egg allergies…

The studies showed no benefit to taking special precautions, such as pre-vaccine skin testing or stepwise challenge, in egg allergic children and adults, and John Kelso of the Scripps Clinic in San Diego said the risks associated with not being vaccinated are now clear.

“There are hundreds of thousands of influenza hospitalizations in the U.S. each year, and tens of thousands of deaths,” he said. “There has been a growing recognition that not vaccinating poses a special risk. The vast majority of egg allergies are in young children and young children are more susceptible to flu.”

You can say “amen” to another copout. If only it was that easy to rid public health questions of superstition and ignorance.

US not capable of handling a flu pandemic

22 Comments


influenza ward, US Naval Hospital, Mare Island, California, December 1918

Despite countless breakthroughs in medicine since the 1918 flu pandemic, one key advance continues to elude researchers.

Without a universal vaccine to combat ever-changing flu strains, another pandemic threatens to overwhelm the U.S. health care system, warns Tom Inglesby, MD, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health…

A 2006 study at the Center for Health Security examined the potential impact of a 1918-type pandemic a century later, based on updated U.S. population figures and the current health care system.

“At the peak of the pandemic in the U.S., we’d have seven times more people in need of ventilation than we have ventilators, and seven times the number of people needing intensive care than we have intensive care beds,” Inglesby said.

The relatively mild pandemics of 1957, 1968 and 2009 killed between 12,000 and 70,000 in the U.S. The severe 1918 pandemic killed up to an estimated 50-100 million people worldwide, including about 675,000 in the U.S. Deaths a century ago were primarily attributed to lack of a flu vaccine, lack of antibiotics to treat superimposed bacterial pneumonia, and the absence of basic medical supplies that we take for granted now, like oxygen, IV fluids and mechanical ventilation.

Since then, improvements include effective treatments for pneumonia and emergence of vaccines that can generally be developed for a new flu strain within six months. Studies show that vaccines reduce flu risk from 40 to 60 percent—and scientists constantly seek to make them faster and more effective.

RTFA. It might also be useful to have a Congress with elected officials who care more about healthcare than squeezing out another few buck$ in tax breaks for our biggest corporations, wealthiest denizens of Wall Street.

Of course, that would require more than the 2-Party dead end we get lost in every couple of years.

Why are measles coming back?

7 Comments

❝ We eliminated measles in the U.S. in 2000. Somebody should tell the measles. Because even though the virus has no permanent home stateside, it keeps getting in—more and more, it seems.

❝ If you were born in the U.S. after about 1968, you’ve lived your entire life with virtually no interaction with the measles. Consider yourself lucky. The virus causes fevers over 104°F, inflamed eyes, a cough, plus a rash that begins as tiny white spots and becomes an itchy red mass spreading outward from the head to cover your entire body. And that’s just your basic measles encounter. About 30 percent of measles patients get extra complications, including diarrhea, pneumonia, brain inflammation, and permanent blindness. In healthy areas, few people died of the disease—only about 0.3 percent—but in impoverished or malnourished populations that figure jumps up to around 30 percent.

❝ Before the measles vaccine, 3 to 4 million people got the disease every year and basically everyone had gotten it by age 15. That might sound like pretty good news. If everyone gets it as a kid, surely it’s like chicken pox—you get it, then you’re over it. In some ways, that’s right. But it also means that the potentially permanent complications (and the fatalities) disproportionately affect little kids.

❝ We’ve kind of forgotten what it’s like to live in a world where young children regularly get serious diseases. It’s difficult to notice an absence of deaths, so here’s some perspective: from 2000-2012, the measles vaccine saved about 13.8 million lives. If we continue the way we’re going, though, we might get a different perspective. From 1989-1991, measles saw a huge comeback because people weren’t getting vaccinated enough—and we may not be too far from that happening all over again.

We’re losing herd immunity and that’s sufficient to allow this childhood killer back. RTFA for sensible discussion. By now – if you’re a regular reader of this blog – I take it down to two questions: ignorance or stupidity.

In this instance, I’d say both. I grew up before vaccines were common in the US. Every spring the kids in our factory town sooner or later got round to figuring out who died over winter…and from what. I had measles and waltzed right through. My kid sister wasn’t so lucky. Ended up in hospital in an oxygen tent with pneumonia before she kicked it.

We also had to contend with scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, rheumatic fever and more. The summer was saved for polio.

The evidence for vaccine safety is abundant. That will be $100,000…

2 Comments

❝ At what point does a body of evidence become massive enough to count as proof? When has a question been answered enough times that it can be put to rest?

When it comes to the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, it sometimes seems as though public health advocates must constantly roll the burden of proof toward a mountaintop that never comes into view.

❝ The latest salvo against vaccinations came courtesy of Robert Kennedy Jr. and Robert De Niro. At a joint appearance this week, Kennedy offered $100,000 to anyone who could turn up a study showing that it is safe to administer vaccines to children and pregnant women, with a specific call out to concerns about mercury. De Niro was there to lend his endorsement and a patina of Oscar-winning gravitas.

The article is clear and accurate on the unreliability of either in producing science that backs up their foolishness.

❝ Like most people, I can think of many handy uses for a spare hundred grand, and would gladly sit down and share my experience as a pediatrician with De Niro and Kennedy at great length. It’s nearing two decades since I graduated from medical school, and in that span of time I’ve immunized thousands of patients. Not once have I encountered a case where those immunizations could be plausibly linked with autism.

In the off chance that my word alone isn’t sufficient to collect the $100,000, I’m happy to proffer lots of studies that support the safety of vaccines. Studies never seem to settle the question for anti-vaccine activists, but they are the best evidence we could ever have, based on millions of people and using many different types of comparisons, that vaccination is safe for kids…

❝ All of this information is readily available to anyone who chooses to look for it — 350 health organizations recently reaffirmed the safety of vaccines and highlighted more than 40 of the most respected studies in an open letter to President Trump — and yet still Kennedy and De Niro are happy to pretend none of it exists.

❝ However, if either De Niro or Kennedy read this article and change their mind, I’m happy to take the $100,000 anyhow.

I’ll second that emotion. I grew up when most of today’s vaccines hadn’t yet been designed and produced. Every spring, kids in the factory town where I grew up would compare notes about who was missing, who died over the winter.

Mumps, scarlet fever, rubella, diphtheria vaccination was just becoming universal — polio was waiting for us in the summer.

We’re getting healthier, living longer – and no one really knows why!

Leave a comment

evolution_of_woman

Something strange is going on in medicine. Major diseases, like colon cancer, dementia and heart disease, are waning in wealthy countries, and improved diagnosis and treatment cannot fully explain it.

Scientists marvel at this good news, a medical mystery of the best sort and one that is often overlooked as advocacy groups emphasize the toll of diseases and the need for more funds. Still, many are puzzled.

Of course, these diseases are far from gone. They still cause enormous suffering and kill millions each year.

But it looks as if people in the United States and some other wealthy countries are, unexpectedly, starting to beat back the diseases of aging. The leading killers are still the leading killers — cancer, heart disease, stroke — but they are occurring later in life, and people in general are living longer in good health.

Colon cancer is the latest conundrum. While the overall cancer death rate has been declining since the early 1990s, the plunge in colon cancer deaths is especially perplexing: The rate has fallen by nearly 50 percent since its peak in the 1980s, noted Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and Dr. Douglas J. Robertson…in a recent paper…

Screening, they say, is only part of the story. “The magnitude of the changes alone suggests that other factors must be involved,” they wrote. None of the studies showing the effect of increased screening for colon cancer have indicated a 50 percent reduction in mortality, they wrote, “nor have trials for screening for any type of cancer.”

The discussion is ongoing throughout the scientific world. Physicians, researchers, pharmaceutical types – of course. Most specialists are trying to discover if their specialty gets credit. I’m of the school that presumes a truly complex dialectic of improvements in lifestyle provide the base for this change.

I look at this over the span of 60 years or more. What I’ve witnessed in my adult life:

Causes outside of lifestyle innovation include vaccines – removing the stresses of illnesses from diphtheria, measles, mumps, scarlet fever, influenza, etc.. Add in fluoridation of water – fewer dental stressors, removing lead from gasoline, diminishing acid rain, ending coal in home heating.

Causes within lifestyle personal choice include aerobic exercise – especially jogging and walking – fitness including lifetime sports [this more so outside the US excepting racquet sports], myriad of diets – even fad diets – all mostly increase dietary fibre.

The sum of all this is a healthier lifestyle in the United States. A change taking place over a longer scale than most examinations. While other smaller countries may surpass the US model – for the same reasons – medium and large educated nations are fast accomplishing the same. And we affect each other – again, reinforcing the dialectic sum.

Fewer ear infections for US babies – and why?

Leave a comment

Can't you see I'm busy

❝ Increases in breastfeeding, decreases in parental smoking, and vaccination against pneumonia and influenza were linked to the reduced incidence of ear infections among U.S. babies in their first year of life…

Rates of acute otitis media have dropped significantly since the 1980s and 1990s, reported Tasnee Chonmaitree, MD, of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and colleagues.

❝ Nearly half – 46% – of the 367 babies followed between 2008 and 2014 had an ear infection in their first year of life, compared with around three out of five babies in studies conducted 2 and 3 decades ago, they wrote in Pediatrics.

Breastfeeding exclusively for 6 months or more was associated with a significantly lower risk for upper respiratory infection, while day care attendance and having multiple siblings were both associated with an increased risk for the infections in the study.

❝ Ear infections remain the leading cause of physician visits, antibiotic use, and surgery among babies and young children. The findings suggest that factors such as the introduction of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines for infants, increased breastfeeding, and declines in infant secondhand smoke exposure have all contributed to lower ear infection incidence…

“These findings are reassuring,” she said. “Breastfeeding specifically was shown to be associated with a lower risk for common cold, which leads to ear infections.”…

❝ Chonmaitree said the introduction of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine almost 2 decades ago, and the recent recommendation that babies receive the influenza vaccine starting at the age of 6 months, may have had the biggest impact on AOM incidence.

Reduced exposure to secondhand smoke from parents is also a likely contributor to lower AOM rates, although the study was too small to show this, she added.

All good science and healthful findings. Now, if we could convince the political hacks of America that helping folks to raise healthy children is good for the nation, our economy, our future, they’d back off from the stupidity of [their side of] class warfare and lose budgets and regulations that confine healthy pediatrics only to those who can afford it.