Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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After a successful reopening just one day ago, the hit Broadway show "Aladdin" announced a sudden cancellation due to COVID-19 cases reported within the musical's company — proving once again that the pandemic has left everyone living in "A Whole New World."

Just before curtains were set to go up on Wednesday, the popular Disney musical tweeted that "through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected within the company of Aladdin at The New Amsterdam Theatre.

The show offered refunds for those who purchased tickets, and said they will "communicate the status of future performances tomorrow."

It was a worrying sign for Broadway's recovery. It was the first Broadway COVID-19 cancellation since shows resumed with Bruce Springsteen's concert returning in July and “Pass Over” as the first play to debut in August.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is leaning toward authorizing half-dose booster shots of the Moderna Inc. coronavirus vaccine, satisfied that it’s effective in shoring up protection, people familiar with the matter said.

The people spoke on the condition of anonymity, before a potential announcement. It’s not clear when an announcement will come.

Any authorization would also introduce different dosage levels for boosters. Moderna’s initial inoculations contained 100-microgram doses, and the company’s submission to regulators amounted to a push to authorize a half-dose booster.

Pfizer’s shot, for comparison, has 30-microgram initial doses and a 30-microgram booster. Boosters are so far being given with, or planned for, the same vaccine that a person received initially, though studies are ongoing about whether to mix vaccines.

Proceeding with a 50-microgram dose could reduce the risk of side effects from a booster, and would also allow Moderna to produce more doses globally in the near-term. That would ease supply constraints and potentially blunt criticisms of rich countries beginning sprawling booster campaigns before many nations have given widespread first shots.

In a potential leap forward in the global fight against the pandemic, drugmaker Merck said Friday that its experimental pill for people sick with COVID-19 reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half.

If cleared by regulators, it would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19, adding a whole new, easy-to-use weapon to an arsenal that already includes the vaccine.

The company said it will soon ask health officials in the U.S. and around the world to authorize the pill’s use. A decision from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could come within weeks after that, and the drug, if it gets the OK, could be distributed quickly soon afterward.

The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who were considered high risk for severe disease because of health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease. The results have not been reviewed by outside experts, the usual procedure for vetting new medical research.

Among patients taking molnupiravir, 7.3% were either hospitalized or died at the end of 30 days, compared with 14.1% of those getting the dummy pill. After that time period, there were no deaths among those who received the drug, compared with eight in the placebo group, according to Merck.

The results were so strong that an independent group of medical experts monitoring the trial recommended stopping it early.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh has tested positive for Covid-19, the Supreme Court said Friday, the first publicly known case of coronavirus among the high court's justices.

Kavanaugh, who is fully vaccinated, tested positive on Thursday night, the court said in a statement. The justice's immediate family tested negative and he has no symptoms.

Kavanaugh underwent a routine Covid test Thursday ahead of fellow Justice Amy Coney Barrett's investiture ceremony Friday, which he will no longer be attending out of precaution, the court said.

His positive diagnosis for coronavirus may mean he won't be on the bench Monday, the start of the new term and what would be the first in-person session with all nine justices

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has denied a request from New York City teachers hoping to get a last minute injunction to stop the city's vaccine mandate for educators and school staff.

New York City's roughly 148,000 school employees had until 5 p.m. to get at least their first COVID-19 vaccine shot, or face suspension without pay when schools open on Monday.

But Mayor Bill de Blasio says the number of unvaccinated employees is shrinking -- as of Friday morning, 90% of Department of Education employees, 93% of teachers and 98% of principals have had at least one dose of a vaccine. For teachers in particular, that's up three percentage points from just last Monday.

A pre-print study which claimed that there is a 1 in 1,000 risk of contracting a heart inflammation condition known as myocarditis has since been retracted due to a calculation.

The study which was conducted by researchers at The University of Ottawa Heart Institute, was featured in numerous blogs and social media posts as proof that the COVID-19 vaccine is unsafe for use.

“New Study Shows 1 in 1000 Develop Heart Inflammation After Covid Vaccination; Myocarditis and Other Related Heart Conditions Have Increased Death Rate Within 5 Years,” the headline of an article published on September 21 on The Gateway Pundit reads ( archive.is/t0XC3 ).

The study had calculated an incidence rate of myocarditis in the Ottawa region post-vaccination by dividing the number of occurrences of the heart inflammation condition over a two-month period (June and July 2021) in Ottawa (32) by the total number of vaccinations in the area (reported as 32,379 in the pre-print).

The incidence rate of myocarditis, using these figures, equates to 10 for every 10,000 doses of the vaccine.

The pre-print paper had used an incorrect figure for the number of doses administered in Ottawa over that two-month period, however.

In response to the retracted pre-print, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) sent Reuters a study released on September 3 which monitored adverse events following mRNA vaccines between December 14, 2020, and June 26, 2021, with data from Vaccine Safety Datalink.

“Analyses of all ages combined did not detect a significant association between myocarditis/pericarditis and mRNA vaccines,” the report noted, although adding that there was evidence of “an association between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis/pericarditis in younger individuals”.

The latest CDC guidance states that young men are at greater risk of getting myocarditis after the second dose of an mRNA vaccine, although the benefits of the vaccine still outweigh risk

There has been a lot of confusion about breakthrough COVID-19 infections recently — what it means to test positive after being fully vaccinated, what the risk for developing “long COVID” is and how vaccinated people can spread the coronavirus.

The truth is that scientists are still learning about post-vaccination infections and are still digging for answers to these questions, including how long people with breakthrough injections are contagious. But given the data available so far, most infectious disease specialist agree it is most certainly less than unvaccinated people who get COVID-19.

Numerous studies have found that vaccinated people who test positive generally clear the virus out much faster than unvaccinated people who are infected, suggesting that those with breakthrough cases are most likely contagious for a shorter period of time.

Some evidence suggests that vaccinated people, on average, clear the virus out within five to six days, whereas it generally takes unvaccinated people seven to 10 days.

But to get a solid sense of how long people with breakthrough infections are contagious, we need real-world data on transmission events, which we don’t have much of. “We don’t actually know the degree of spread from vaccinated because you really do have to do a good contract-tracing study,” Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told HuffPost.

But we don’t have many contract-tracing studies looking at breakthrough cases and transmission events yet. Many of the insights we have on the contagiousness of breakthrough cases are gleaned from laboratory studies and PCR tests that usually only tell us if there’s virus in a person’s body, not whether it’s infectious and for how long it might be infectious

“The people who have worse symptoms — who are coughing more and who have more snot pouring out of their nose — are more contagious just on the basis of that,” Ratner said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still advises that anyone who tests positive for COVID-19, regardless of whether they’ve been vaccinated or are symptomatic, should isolate for 10 days. Ratner said that until there’s more concrete data about how long people with breakthrough cases shed the virus for, the most prudent thing is to adhere to the 10-day isolation rule.

It's strange to read so much praise for a pill that is essentially Ivermectin with a different name.

Amid persistent concerns that the protection offered by COVID-19 vaccines may be waning, a report released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that America’s workhorse shot is significantly less effective at preventing severe cases of disease over the long term than many experts had realized.

Data collected from 18 states between March and August suggest the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine reduces the risk of being hospitalized with COVID-19 by 91% in the first four months after receiving the second dose. Beyond 120 days, however, that vaccine efficacy drops to 77%.

Meanwhile, Moderna’s vaccine was 93% effective at reducing the short-term risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and remained 92% effective after 120 days.

Overall, 54% of fully vaccinated Americans have been immunized with the Pfizer shot.

Researchers in the United States have been warning for months that the immunity afforded by COVID-19 vaccines might be waning. The CDC reported that in late July, close to three-quarters of the 469 people swept up in a Massachusetts outbreak were fully vaccinated. And the agency has launched several studies aimed at detecting changes in vaccine effectiveness in healthcare workers and others who were vaccinated early.

But virtually all of those infections appeared to be mild. And health officials eager to induce vaccine skeptics to step up for their shot — including Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — have repeatedly praised the vaccines for keeping most fully vaccinated people out of hospitals.

The new report on waning vaccine efficacy challenges that expectation.

Researchers from around the country found striking differences between two mRNA vaccines long thought to be interchangeable.

When the Moderna vaccine received emergency use authorization in December, the company reported that 30 people in its clinical trial developed severe cases of COVID-19, including nine who required hospitalization. All 30 patients were in the placebo group, resulting in a vaccine efficacy against severe disease of 100%.

Ten people in Pfizer’s initial clinical trial developed severe cases of COVID-19. Nine of them were in the placebo group, including seven who were hospitalized, resulting in a vaccine efficacy against severe disease of 88.9%.

Once the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were rolled out to the public, their records of preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations in the first four months were neck and neck — 93% and 91% effective, respectively. But the degree of protection diverged after that.

When they focused specifically on the period 120 days beyond the second dose, the study authors found that the Moderna vaccine remained 92% effective at preventing COVID-19 hospitalizations. But the equivalent figure for the Pfizer vaccine was 77.

Moderna’s shot contains 100 micrograms of vaccine, more than three times the 30 micrograms in the Pfizer shot. And Pfizer’s two doses are given three weeks apart, while Moderna’s two-shot regimen is administered with a four-week gap.

Brewer also pointed to evidence that the Moderna vaccine seemed to elicit higher levels of a key antibody than the Pfizer vaccine.

“We know from other studies the neutralizing antibody levels will decay over time, so starting at a higher level will mean that you have farther to go before you decay to a point where efficacy drops off,” he said.

The Delta variant’s arrival this summer delivered a blow to the nation’s entire coronavirus arsenal, but its impact on the champion of last year’s vaccine race—Pfizer—has been particularly humbling. Compared with Moderna’s competing shot, Pfizer’s vaccine seems to induce half the amount of virus-fighting antibodies, and is associated with nearly twice as many breakthrough infections, according to two recent studies. Pfizer’s shots remain highly protective against hospitalization, but the latest numbers from the CDC suggest that their effectiveness has dropped from 87 percent to 80 percent during the Delta wave, while that of Moderna’s shots remains in the 90s.

As a term of these investments, any company taking Warp Speed money would have to plan its Phase 3 clinical trials with the input of scientists from the NIH and other agencies. I quickly learned that these negotiations were often contentious and sometimes protracted. Moderna was forced to push back the start date of its Phase 3 trial by several weeks, from July 9 to July 27, because of protocol changes demanded by the Warp Speed team. Pfizer, by contrast, was playing catch-up and decided that it didn’t want to be hamstrung by government bureaucracy. Instead, it sank $2 billion into its own development efforts and refused Warp Speed handouts.

Moving fast meant navigating significant uncertainties. Dosing was a particularly fraught issue, and the prospects for producing a successful mRNA drug or vaccine hinged on getting it right. A smaller dose would be easier to manufacture and less likely to produce side effects. At the same time, previous experimental mRNA vaccines had not been shown to induce the kind of long-lasting cellular immunity one could get from, say, an adenovirus vector vaccine, such as Johnson & Johnson’s. Back in 2019, Moderna published data from a Phase 1 trial of two mRNA-based bird-flu vaccines: The results had looked solid in the first month or two, but antibody levels dropped back toward baseline by month six. The two doses of those vaccines had been spaced just three weeks apart, which may have limited the body’s immune memory. John Mascola, the head of the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH, told me that durability was going to be a big unknown with all of the COVID-19 vaccines, and the Moderna team “wanted to be conservative” in selecting sufficiently large doses and spacing those doses at four weeks. They knew from early-stage trials that with just 25 micrograms, the immune response declines by one-fourth after a month. A 250-microgram dose seemed too high. In the end, they settled on 100 micrograms.

In the meantime, Pfizer and BioNTech were still scrambling to choose among four possible mRNA-vaccine candidates. At first, the internal favorite of the scientific team was one named BNT162b1, which consisted of just a fragment of the coronavirus spike protein, known as the receptor-binding domain. (Moderna was using the full spike for its vaccine.) As was the case for Moderna, the Pfizer-BioNTech team had to figure out the right dose. Across Phase 1 trials in Germany and the U.S., the companies had tested that candidate at doses of 10, 20, 30, and 100 micrograms, injected in volunteers at just three weeks apart, compared with Moderna’s four. The highest dose produced such severe side effects, including fever and chills, that it was dropped from the trial. That’s what vaccine makers call a “hot” reaction, and it’s something Dolsten’s team wanted to steer well clear of.

Then Pfizer and BioNTech tested their own version of the full-length spike vaccine, BNT162b2—this time going up to only 30 micrograms. Because the full-length spike’s gene sequence was about five times as long as the fragment’s, each microgram of vaccine contained one-fifth the number of copies. It was immediately obvious that the side effects were less intense as a result, but the antibody response might end up being smaller too. That would take several weeks to assess—and the clock was ticking.

Moderna had now published its antibody data, and the company’s trial with a 100-microgram dose was scheduled to start any day now. According to Dolsten, the dilemma for Pfizer’s scientists was that they still had more human data on their first candidate (the fragment) than on their second (the full-length spike). The two candidates looked comparable, but the team still didn’t know how much of an immune response the full-length spike would produce among the most vulnerable, elderly subjects. Those first data points wouldn’t reveal the durability of the response, simply whether it was on par with the one seen among people who had recovered from COVID. Waiting a few weeks for those data (and potentially adding a higher dose or changing the dose spacing), as one might do during a more relaxed vaccine-development process, was out of the question.

Although Dolsten told me that Pfizer wasn’t necessarily looking over its shoulder, such a delay would certainly have set its Phase 3 efficacy trial back on a timeline akin to AstraZeneca’s or Johnson & Johnson’s. By the end of the meeting, Dolsten and Pfizer’s CEO, Albert Bourla, had persuaded the vaccine team to follow Moderna’s lead and advance the full-length sequence, but at Pfizer’s lower dose of 30 micrograms. That would likely give Pfizer’s vaccine a safer profile in terms of side effects. It would also be cheaper and easier to manufacture, though Dolsten said the scientific team didn’t weigh that in its decision.

At Pfizer’s request, the FDA made a rare allowance, agreeing to let the company add a fall-back measure to its statistical analysis plan, scoring the vaccine at 14 days, like the other companies.

In the end, that last-minute change didn’t affect the final result, as the vaccine proved to have more than 90 percent efficacy at preventing symptomatic COVID infections just 11 days after the first dose. The FDA granted it emergency authorization on December 11, 2020. As the first COVID-19 vaccine on the market, Pfizer’s shots were deployed to hard-hit nursing homes and senior-living facilities, both in the U.S. and around the world. Pfizer soon became the “hot-person vaccine,” grabbing the largest market share in countries that could afford it.

What no one could have predicted at the time was just how fleeting Pfizer’s status at the top of the pack would prove. Phase 3 trials of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine produced very similar efficacy numbers; the only hint of a difference was that Moderna’s more potent shot produced more complaints of fever and headaches. Indeed, until the latest observational studies came out, most scientists figured that the two vaccines were equivalent in terms of real-world effectiveness. “It’s surprising that this enormous group of patients already needs a new dose of Pfizer,” says Deborah Steensels, a microbiologist at East Limburg Hospital, in Genk, Belgium, who led the recent study comparing antibody levels generated by the two vaccines. If seniors who received the Pfizer vaccine had gotten Moderna instead, she notes, “we might have had an impact on the duration of protection.”

Shane Crotty, the immunologist, said that Pfizer’s dosing might not have been the optimal choice for the durability of an individual’s immune response, but that doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision for public health. “The decision process was very much about what’s the fastest we could vaccinate people and be successful,” he said. There were clearly benefits to stretching out the limited mRNA supply during a pandemic. Three doses of Pfizer, at 30 micrograms each, still amount to less material than a single, 100-microgram dose of Moderna. That means more lives saved for every droplet of vaccine. Indeed, Moderna may have erred in the other direction: The company has now asked the FDA to consider a half dose for its own potential booster.

New Zealand’s government acknowledged Monday what most other countries did long ago: It can no longer completely get rid of the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced a cautious plan to ease lockdown restrictions in Auckland, despite an outbreak there that continues to simmer.

Since early in the pandemic, New Zealand had pursued an unusual zero-tolerance approach to the virus through strict lockdowns and aggressive contact tracing.

Until recently, that elimination strategy had worked remarkably well for the country of 5 million, which has reported just 27 virus deaths.

While other nations faced rising death tolls and disrupted lives, New Zealanders went back to workplaces, school yards and sports stadiums safe from any community spread.

But that all changed when the more contagious delta variant somehow escaped from a quarantine facility in August after it was brought into the country from a traveler returning from Australia.

Despite New Zealand going into the strictest form of lockdown after just a single local case was detected, it ultimately wasn’t enough to crush the outbreak entirely.

The outbreak has grown to more than 1,300 cases, with 29 more detected on Monday. A few cases have been found outside of Auckland.

The government’s elimination approach had been broadly supported by New Zealanders but was facing increasing criticism. Over the weekend, hundreds of people turned out to rallies protesting the lockdown.

Seen this too .. TY for info.. sorry but could not resist being punny with this: Simple answer ?
stop drinking Corona beer ? or chinese fish?

It is overhyped. Be more worried about the flu...

Another post that didn't age well...

Molnupiravir works a lot like the antiviral drug remdesivir (-vir is a suffix commonly used for antiviral drugs). The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, makes copies of itself by encoding instructions on RNA, which is made up of “base” molecules identified by the letters A, C, U, and G. While remdesivir imitates A (adenosine), molnupiravir can mimic U (uracil) or C (cytosine).

“One of the biggest things keeping people from going back to work is the recrudescent nature of long-term Covid — meaning that it has this relapsing and remitting pattern for many people,” says Diana Berrent, who founded Survivor Corps in March 2020. “It’s very hard for people to predict when they can return to work or make any sort of promises on dates and times when they don’t know how they’re going to feel.”

People With Long Covid Are Risking Their Health Going Back to the Office
For many people who got Covid-19, symptoms and “brain fog” come back unexpectedly, making commutes and in-office work difficult. How will employers handle this new cohort?

Really good article from Rolling Stone, of all places.
I think what gets me the most, is this part:


There's no way I could go back to work, because I never know when I'm going to feel 75%, and when I'm going to be laying on the floor for hours. I can't just lay on the floor at work, and I definitely can't call in sick every time I have am unpredictable flare-up.
Even non-work related dates are difficult to schedule...I basically say "Eh, we'll plan for this date, and if I don't feel good, I'll just deal with it as best I can."

Fear of Long Covid is why I am taking mitigation measures more suitable for the unvaccinated then a vaccinated person like myself.

As extensive as that article was long covid among vaccinated people received not a word, AGAIN.