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The CDC said the number was revised March 15 due to a “coding logic error,” according to a footnote on the agency’s COVID Data Tracker. Pediatric death counts were not the only ones to be lowered — total deaths were reduced by roughly 70,000.
“An adjustment was made to COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 involving the removal of 72,277 — including 416 pediatric deaths — deaths previously reported across 26 states because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related,” Jasmine Reed, a spokesperson for the CDC, told the Washington Examiner. “Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported.”
According to the CDC’s weekly provisional data, only 921 children have died for reasons “involving COVID-19,” an even lower number than the official data tracker now presents. The provisional data reported by the CDC typically lags by some period of time. //
The CDC has encountered other issues with data reporting before. The agency was criticized in February after The New York Times reported that a large portion of the data being collected by the agency regarding COVID-19 was not being made available to the public. Earlier this year, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that hospitalization data for kids could also be misleading, as many of the children hospitalized with COVID-19 were there for reasons other than the virus.
The CDC has “revised” pediatric deaths from COVID-19 down 24 percent, after a “mistake” was discovered. This per The Daily Caller.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised its data this week to reduce pediatric deaths from COVID-19 by nearly 24%.
On Tuesday, the agency was reporting on its COVID Data Tracker that 1,755 Americans under age 18 had died from the virus since the pandemic began in spring 2020. Now, it is reporting 1,341 deaths in that category.
The CDC said the number was revised March 15 due to a “coding logic error,” according to a footnote on the agency’s COVID Data Tracker. Pediatric death counts were not the only ones to be lowered — total deaths were reduced by roughly 70,000.
https://dailycaller.com/2022/03/18/cdc-data-kids-pediatric-covid-coronavirus-deaths/ //
How does a screw-up like that happen at a multi-billion-dollar funded, government entity? And it only gets “corrected” after the FDA rejects vaccination for small children? It’s just all a bit too convenient.
Recent studies have however shown that this might not be the case, with some adults needing as little as four hours sleep to wake up feeling refreshed.
Research from experts in Washington, US, found that having too much sleep could actually interfere with your cognitive function.
The experts found that people who slept less than 4.5 hours a night, and those who slept more than 6.5 hours each night had a greater risk of cognitive decline over time.
It’s key to note that all of these participants also struggled with poor quality sleep. //
the findings of the Washington study are surprising, as most health bodies, including the NHS in the UK and the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US, all state that people should be having more than six hours each night.
“The study showed that sleeping longer than 6.5 hours was associated with cognitive decline over time – this is low when we consider that older adults are recommended to get between seven and eight hours of sleep every night.
“It could be the case that it isn’t necessarily the length of the sleep that matters, but the quality of that sleep when it comes to risk of developing dementia”, he said.
He did however state that it’s key to remember that the 100 participants in the study who slept for longer may have been suffering with issues that were not picked up on the tests.
According to Botanical Medicine, the anti-inflammatory actions of glycyrrhizin (GL) may stem from suppression of cytokines:
“As testimony to its anti-inflammatory properties, glycyrrhizin alleviated allergic asthma in an experimental mouse model, increased the IL-4 and IL-5 levels, decreased eosinophil counts and IgE levels, and upregulated total IgG2a in serum.
These results indicated that glycyrrhizin interfered with the production of IgE by decreasing the IgE-stimulating cytokines. It also attenuated lung inflammation and mucus production in mice.”
Over 170 million U.S.-born people who were adults in 2015 were exposed to harmful levels of lead as children, a new study estimates.
Researchers used blood-lead level, census and leaded gasoline consumption data to examine how widespread early childhood lead exposure was in the country between 1940 and 2015.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, they estimated that half the U.S. adult population in 2015 had been exposed to lead levels surpassing five micrograms per deciliter — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threshold for harmful lead exposure at the time.
We estimate that over 170 million Americans alive today were exposed to high-lead levels in early childhood, several million of whom were exposed to five-plus times the current reference level. Our estimates allow future work to plan for the health needs of these Americans and to inform estimation of the true contributions of lead exposure to population health. We estimate population-level effects on IQ loss and find that lead is responsible for the loss of 824,097,690 IQ points as of 2015.
By refusing to acknowledge the harms of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccination, the CDC has brought everlasting shame to itself. There is clear evidence these types of interventions carry measurable risk.
A better approach would have been to honestly discuss the risks and benefits with the public, much like I discuss surgical risks and benefits with my patients. This is the very tenet of informed consent, and better communication always results in a better relationship. //
The consequences of lying about Covid-19 will spill into other areas of health care. Millions of Americans have lost trust in our hospitals and institutions and are now resorting to “under the table” health care. In health care, loss of trust equals lack of access. The CDC must return to the basics of evidence-based medicine to overcome its crisis of legitimacy.
The antiparasitic drug ivermectin failed to treat COVID-19 in yet another randomized clinical trial, but the drug remains popular amid the pandemic thanks to Republican politics. That's the takeaway from two separate studies published Friday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Together, the studies raise yet more concerns for the use of ivermectin against the pandemic virus—as well as the reasons behind its use, which appear politically motivated.
"Political affiliation should not be a factor in clinical treatment decisions," the Harvard researchers behind one of the studies concluded. "Our findings raise concerns for public trust in a non-partisan health care system."
Changing the blood type of donated organs could shorten transplant wait times. //
In a plastic-domed case at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, researchers gave a pair of lungs a new identity. When the lungs first arrived in the lab, they were from someone with type A blood, meaning that there were certain tiny markers, called antigens, attached to the lung tissue and blood cells. But when the lungs left the lab, those antigens were almost entirely gone. In just one hour, the researchers had effectively transformed the lungs into type O. //
There are four major blood type groups: A, B, O, and AB. Think of type O as the base model. It has no antigens that attach to it. The A and B blood types each have extra antigens that attach to that core, and AB blood has both types of antigens.
For an organ transplant to work, the donor and recipient have to have compatible blood types. If someone with type O or B blood receives a donation from someone with type A blood, for example, those A antigens will trigger the recipient’s immune system to attack the transplanted organ, which is perceived as a foreign invader. This process, called rejection, can be deadly.
But because type O blood has no antigens, people with O are considered “universal donors.” Their blood and tissue won’t set off an immune response for recipients of any blood type. //
This study is just a proof of concept, meant to show that such a feat is possible, cost-effective, and takes effect quickly enough to work in a real-life transplant scenario. But they didn’t try transplanting the tissue, and they focused their work on only the A antigen. (The team is currently looking for the right enzymes to perform that same search-and-snip function on B antigens.) One question is whether the body will immediately reject the modified lung. Another is whether those A antigens will regrow and trigger that dangerous immune response when they do.
A bioethicist claims there are no moral reasons for disallowing skin cells to be turned into ova and sperm (in vitro gametogenesis, IVG) — already done in mice — so as to allow open-ended means of having children. When coupled with other emerging biotechnologies, there would be few impossibilities! From, “Is There a Valid Ethical Objection to the Clinical Use of In Vitro-Derived Gametes?”:
IVG affords biological parenthood to more family constructions than does natural conception. Concerns regarding this fact constitute a large proportion of those found in the literature. Biological parenthood could conceivably be made accessible to the deceased; postmenopausal women; single individuals; same-sex couples; groups of more than two individuals; children, fetuses and embryos. //
Ethicists discourage objections based on natural law as they have been illustrated to be flawed and morally prejudiced. Even if this were not the case, an attack on the unnatural is a prima facie move which targets the entire medical profession, including medicines, vaccines and other ARTs. This is something that, one must assume, is not the intention of proponents of such a view.
Therefore, one may say instead that reproductive IVG somehow crosses a line and is more unnatural than other medical interventions but even this is difficult to justify. When one is less accustomed to a certain practice, it may attract more distrust or criticism than is warranted; this is a manifestation of the mere-exposure effect, a cognitive bias that renders individuals more averse to the unfamiliar. //
The West is engaged in the most radical remaking of the basic structure of the family in human history — enabled by the most powerful technologies ever devised — methods that can literally change our genomes down the generations and erase fundamental family definitions.
And we are inert in the face of the chaos that could (would, in my view) result therefrom. Not only are we not creating reasonable boundaries; we aren’t even talking about it.
No standards! No norms! Anything goes! These are the seeds of our destruction.
Analyses of both COVID-19 convalescent and diagnostic cohorts strongly support the use of RBD antibody levels as an excellent surrogate to biochemical neutralization activities. Data further revealed that the samples from mRNA vaccinated individuals had a median of 17 times higher RBD antibody levels and a similar degree of increased neutralization activities against RBD-ACE2 binding than those from natural infections. Our data showed that N501Y RBD had fivefold higher ACE2 binding than the original variant. While some antisera from naturally infected subjects had substantially reduced neutralization ability against N501Y RBD, all blood samples from vaccinated individuals were highly effective in neutralizing it. Thus, our data indicates that mRNA vaccination may generate more neutralizing RBD antibodies than natural immunity. It further suggests a potential need to maintain high RBD antibody levels to control the more infectious SARS-CoV-2 variants. //
Received
25 June 2021
Accepted
17 January 2022
Published
16 February 2022
Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KHOU 11 that researchers are unsure what immunity the omicron variant gives people.
“It’s unclear, at this point, what level of immunity occurs after an omicron infection. I suspect over time, yes, you probably can get reinfected. But we don’t have that data yet because omicron has only been around since October/November.”
However, the omicron variant might offer immunity for other COVID-19 variants. For example, a study suggests that the omicron variant of the coronavirus can give immunity to the delta variant, which means the delta variant could soon lose its hold on the American people, according to Reuters.
At the same time, recent research — published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association — found that breakthrough infections of the delta variant created “a robust immune response against the delta variant.”
Researchers said this level of immunity “is likely to be highly effective against other variants as the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate.” Though the data was about the delta variant, it was suggested that this could apply to the omicron variant, too.
Another brief review of the literature by Kojima and Klausner in The Lancet Infectious Diseases had a different conclusion; “Given the evidence of immunity from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, however, policy makers should consider recovery from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection equal to immunity from vaccination for purposes related to entry to public events, businesses, and the workplace, or travel requirements.”
Therein lies much of the data and the crux of the debate. Is Prior Covid as good as vaccination and why are people with confirmed Covid getting mandated to be vaccinated? //
Which brings us to hybrid immunity. The vaccine immunity is specific to the spike protein, whereas the immunity from infection is directed to the whole virus, and it is clear they are complementary. Every study, and there are more than 25, that has looked at neutralizing antibodies and memory B and T cells has showed there is additivity of the immune response when a person has both forms of immunity. The Science Magazine succinct review by Shane Crotty is outstanding, with the summary Figure below
COVID will affect cardiovascular health, health care for years to come, authors say.
A bout of COVID-19 can take a hefty toll on the heart and blood vessels; people who recover from the infection have substantially higher risks of developing any of 20 serious cardiovascular disorders in the year following their recovery. Those disorders include heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), and blood clots in the lungs.
Cardiovascular risks increase with the severity of an infection—that is, people who need intensive care for COVID-19 face the highest cardiovascular risks. But, overall, the pandemic virus appears to be indiscriminate, wreaking havoc on cardiovascular systems and increasing risks in all groups of patients, from those with mild disease, to the young, to those without underlying conditions or pre-existing cardiovascular diseases.
Spinal cord injuries are life-altering, as they prevent the transmission of nerve impulses past the point of injury. That means no sensory inputs make it to the brain, and no signals from the brain make it to the muscles normally controlled by the brain. But improvements in our understanding of neurobiology have raised the hope that we can eventually restore some control over paralyzed limbs.
Some of these efforts focus purely on nerve cells, attempting to get them to grow through the damage at the site of injury and restore a functional spinal cord. Others attempt to use electronics to bypass the injury entirely. Today, there was very good news for the electronics-focused effort: researchers have designed a spinal implant that can control the leg muscles of paralyzed individuals, allowing those individuals to walk with assistance within hours of the implant being activated. //
An alternative to that type of biological repair is what you might consider an electronic bypass. In its most sophisticated form, a bypass would involve an implant that registers neural activity, located either in the brain or in the spinal cord closer to the brain than the injury. This is then paired with some sort of hardware—potentially another implant—on the far side of the injury that stimulates the nerves based on the information read by the other implant.
A less sophisticated version of this is to simply have preprogrammed behaviors you want to control, such as the leg movements involved in walking. That is the approach used in the recent work. But, as will become very clear, "less sophisticated" leaves a wide-open space for some very sophisticated work. //
The results were astonishing. Prior to activating the implant, none of the three participants could initiate any sort of muscle activity when attempting to take a step. The same day that the model was trained, all of the subjects could take steps on a treadmill if they were supported. The model was able to generate the right series of currents to stimulate the leg muscles appropriately.
Out for a walk and more
With three days of fine-tuning, the participants were able to walk around a room if given sufficient support. Eventually, they were able to stand unaided and walk supported only by a walker—their legs were controlled via an implant in their abdomen, which responded to triggers on the handles of the walker. One volunteer was even able to go up stairs.
Separate programs were also developed that allowed the subjects to ride recumbent bicycles or to paddle a kayak.
One striking thing is that two of the subjects actually regained the ability to exert a bit of voluntary muscle control in their formerly paralyzed limbs. Apparently, a bit of weak connectivity was still present but unable to provide a signal strong enough to trigger muscle activity. With extended activity, those weak connections were gradually strengthened, providing a complete pathway from brain to muscle.
The study, published in PLOS One last week, tested a variety of masks and additional materials that might help improve the masks’ efficacy. Along with the pantyhose-over-the-mask trick, researchers tested other “fit hacks” including using rubber bands to shape the mask over the face and taping down the edges of the mask to the face. //
But the most effective approach may also be one of the most intolerable, as participants reported “high levels of discomfort” while wearing the pantyhose, though none of the mask combos tested saw high marks for wearability.
Still, these hacks are “accessible to the general public,” researchers emphasized, and they encouraged health care and other essential workers to consider boosting their protective-gear game.
The Johns Hopkins researchers concluded that the lockdowns "had enormous economic and social costs," however. The report says lockdowns in Europe and the United States reduced covid mortality by only 0.2% on average.
Fox News: Lockdowns Only Reduced COVID-19 Mortality By .2%, Study Finds: 'Lockdowns Should Be Rejected Out Of Hand'
The researchers – Johns Hopkins University economics professor Steve Hanke, Lund University economics professor Lars Jonung, and special advisor at Copenhagen's Center for Political Studies Jonas Herby – analyzed the effects of lockdown measures such as school shutdowns, business closures, and mask mandates on COVID-19 deaths. "We find little to no evidence that mandated lockdowns in Europe and the United States had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality rates," the researchers wrote. The researchers also examined shelter-in-place orders, finding that they reduced COVID-19 mortality by 2.9%. (Best, 2/1)
Read the full Johns Hopkins analysis —
A Literature Review And Meta-Analysis Of The Effects Of Lockdowns On Covid-19 Mortality
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IMMUNE RESPONSE | COVID-19
How past pandemics may have caused Parkinson's
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(Image credit: Alamy)
MRI image of the brain (Credit: Alamy)
By David Cox
31st January 2022
Surviving a pandemic isn't always the end of the story – some viruses can have health effects that linger on for decades, eventually leading to a range of devastating diseases.
Article continues below
I
In the 1960s, epidemiologists studying the long-term prognosis of survivors of the 1918 Spanish Influenza began to notice an unusual trend. Those who were born between 1888 and 1924 – meaning they were either infants or in young adulthood at the time of the pandemic – appeared to have been two or three times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease at some point in their life than those born at different times.
It was a striking finding. For while the potential neurological consequences of flu infections have been documented by doctors for centuries – there are medical reports of this which date back to 1385 – the sheer scale of the Spanish Flu, which infected around 500 million people globally, meant scientists could link a heightened risk of disease to the pandemic. //
Neurologists attempting to understand why this happens believe that each of these viruses are capable of crossing into the brain, and in some cases damaging the fragile structures which control the co-ordination of movement, known as the basal ganglia, initiating a process of degeneration which can lead to Parkinson's. //
"There are several studies highlighting that people who have recovered from Covid often have long-term central nervous system deficits including loss of sense of smell and taste, brain fog, depression, and anxiety. The numbers are troubling."
While Sars-CoV-2 can invade brain tissue, the scientific jury remains open on whether it will contribute to neurodegenerative disease. Coronaviruses are generally known as "hit and run viruses", because they tend to cause fairly short disease, even if this proves deadly in some cases. In contrast, DNA viruses such as Epstein-Barr can linger permanently in the body and are more associated with long-term illness.
Actually multiple shots, not all vaccines
Eric Topol
Jan 29
Eric Topol @EricTopol
Not a very encouraging title or report:
"#SARSCoV2 invades cognitive centers of the brain and induces Alzheimer's-like neuropathology"
https://biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.31.478476v1
(based on 5 cases; whether and how often the virus directly infects neurons is a controversy)