#cdc director

[feminist-space]

Please join us in sending a letter to congress via Resistbot, to maintain masking in healthcare settings.

Please text PRIKQU to 50409 and the Resistbot will take care of getting the letter sent on your behalf.

Demand Masks in Healthcare

As my representatives in Congress, I am asking you to intervene with the CDC and with all levels of the Administration in regards to Covid-19.

We MUST have N95 masks or equivalent worn by all staff with patient contact in healthcare facilities-hospitals, outpatient centers, and nursing homes.

The HICPAC advisory committee to the CDC is proposing to weaken infection control measures. They are incorrectly saying that surgical masks are as protective as N95s, cherry-picked their data, and ignored abundant evidence to the contrary.

Further, some hospitals (like MGH) are not honoring requests from patients that staff wear a mask. This would appear a violation of ADA standards for accommodation and is unconscionable, resulting in patients delaying necessary care because they risk a deadly hospital-acquired Covid infection.

Dr. Cohen like the rest of the Administration is pretending that Covid is over and is focusing on the "urgency of normal." They are pushing people to go back to unmasked offices with inadequate ventilation, when teleworking has worked very well.

On July 20, 900 experts sent a letter to Dr. Cohen asking her and HICPAC to make their processes transparent, to seek the input of a variety of stakeholders, and to listen to experts in ventilation and aerosols. See https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10482911231195898. This has fallen on deaf ears.

On 8/25, in "The Check-in with Dr. Cohen," a Q&A session, Dr. Cohen tells people to wash their hands and stresses "it's important to use all the tools we have in our toolbox to protect ourselves." Not once did she mention masks or ventilation, both critically important since we know that Covid is primarily transmitted by aerosols.

The CDC states its mission is Saving Lives, Protecting People.TM They have abdicated in meeting their responsibility.

[wolfspaw]

[chena-h]

Reminding yall that this strain of bird flu has a 52% mortality rate in humans. (Source)

Also, I would like to point out that the teenager in British Columbia who got infected - no pre-existing conditions, mind you - wound up hospitalized and needed oxygen for just over a month (source).

So, this spin on the death of that person in Louisiana isn't just god awful, it's not even that reassuring in light of the facts.

“in Louisiana, there has been the first human fatality due to the most recent outbreak of bird flu but they were over 65 and had underlying health conditions and contracted it from a backyard flock so don’t worry” someone’s cool grandma or grandpa or friend or neighbor who kept chickens died of a terrible strain of influenza that is spreading rapidly amongst livestock. that was a human being first, not an age and underlying condition.

[dissident777]

CDC Director Says They’re Making An Updated Convid Vaccine for the Fall (It’s Only March!?)

[freddyfreeman]

Speaking of twitter, I found this poster on there… lol

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall Free

"The Food and Drug Administration approved new mRNA coronavirus vaccines Thursday [August 22, 2024], clearing the way for shots manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to start hitting pharmacy shelves and doctor’s offices within a week.

Health officials encourage annual vaccination against the coronavirus, similar to yearly flu shots. Everyone 6 months and older should receive a new vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.

The FDA has yet to approve an updated vaccine from Novavax, which uses a more conventional vaccine development method but has faced financial challenges.

Our scientific understanding of coronavirus vaccines has evolved since they debuted in late 2020. Here’s what to know about the new vaccines.

Why are there new vaccines?

The coronavirus keeps evolving to overcome our immune defenses, and the shield offered by vaccines weakens over time. That’s why federal health officials want people to get an annual updated coronavirus vaccine designed to target the latest variants. They approve them for release in late summer or early fall to coincide with flu shots that Americans are already used to getting.

The underlying vaccine technology and manufacturing process are the same, but components change to account for how the virus morphs. The new vaccines target the KP.2 variant because most recent covid cases are caused by that strain or closely related ones...

Do the vaccines prevent infection?

You probably know by now that vaccinated people can still get covid. But the shots do offer some protection against infection, just not the kind of protection you get from highly effective vaccines for other diseases such as measles.

The 2023-2024 vaccine provided 54 percent increased protection against symptomatic covid infections, according to a CDC study of people who tested for the coronavirus at pharmacies during the first four months after that year’s shot was released...

A nasal vaccine could be better at stopping infections outright by increasing immunity where they take hold, and one is being studied in a trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

If you really want to dodge covid, don’t rely on the vaccine alone and take other precautions such as masking or avoiding crowds...

Do the vaccines help prevent transmission?

You may remember from early coverage of coronavirus vaccines that it was unclear whether shots would reduce transmission. Now, scientists say the answer is yes — even if you’re actively shedding virus.

That’s because the vaccine creates antibodies that reduce the amount of virus entering your cells, limiting how much the virus can replicate and make you even sicker. When vaccination prevents symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, people expel fewer respiratory droplets carrying the virus. When it reduces the viral load in an infected person, people become less contagious.

That’s why Peter Hotez, a physician and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said he feels more comfortable in a crowded medical conference, where attendees are probably up to date on their vaccines, than in a crowded airport.

“By having so many vaccinated people, it’s decreasing the number of days you are shedding virus if you get a breakthrough infection, and it decreases the amount of virus you are shedding,” Hotez said.

Do vaccines prevent long covid?

While the threat of acute serious respiratory covid disease has faded, developing the lingering symptoms of “long covid” remains a concern for people who have had even mild cases. The CDC says vaccination is the “best available tool” to reduce the risk of long covid in children and adults. The exact mechanism is unclear, but experts theorize that vaccines help by reducing the severity of illness, which is a major risk factor for long covid.

When is the best time to get a new coronavirus vaccine?

It depends on your circumstances, including risk factors for severe disease, when you were last infected or vaccinated, and plans for the months ahead. It’s best to talk these issues through with a doctor.

If you are at high risk and have not recently been vaccinated or infected, you may want to get a shot as soon as possible while cases remain high. The summer wave has shown signs of peaking, but cases can still be elevated and take weeks to return to low levels. It’s hard to predict when a winter wave will begin....

Where do I find vaccines?

CVS said its expects to start administering them within days, and Walgreens said that it would start scheduling appointments to receive shots after Sept. 6 and that customers can walk in before then.

Availability at doctor’s offices might take longer. Finding shots for infants and toddlers could be more difficult because many pharmacies do not administer them and not every pediatrician’s office will stock them given low demand and limited storage space.

This year’s updated coronavirus vaccines are supposed to have a longer shelf life, which eases the financial pressures of stocking them.

The CDC plans to relaunch its vaccine locator when the new vaccines are widely available, and similar services are offered by Moderna and Pfizer."

-via The Washington Post, August 22, 2024

[askshivanulegacy]

It's super important to recognize that the CDC is no longer a science- and evidence- based organization, and they haven't been for a WHILE. It's a group of spineless, mentally-diseased limp minnows who bow to airlines and capitalism over a topic that inherently has nothing to do with that or politics.

Covid is not and never was a political topic. But the CDC no longer cares about facts or trends. The guidelines weren't even mandates, so there was not a single reason to dial them back, and every reason to remain firm, so you could have a science-based benchmark for whether your organization was acting properly or not.

But now they're giving everyone a free pass.

Know that you have the ability to be MORE RESTRICTIVE with yourself and your organization and anyone you supervise, regardless of what the CDC says. Keep yourself safe.

[lapdogchase]

in 2020 when vanessa hudgens said "people will die, which is terrible, but like, inevitable," she was rightfully criticized by a ton of people, but now that's how almost everyone approaches covid. in 2022 when the then-director of the cdc rochelle walensky said it was "really encouraging" that mostly "people who were unwell to begin with" were the ones dying and not abled people, she was also widely criticized (though mostly by more left-leaning people and disability justice advocates). both of those statements were considered horrific things to say and devaluing the lives of people who were dying from covid.

but covid didn't stop spreading, it didn't stop mutating, it didn't stop killing and disabling people, the vaccines don't fully prevent it, you can catch it even if you're not uniquely vulnerable- and having had a covid infection before makes you more vulnerable, anyway. regardless of what the cdc or your boss wants you to think it's not safe to unmask just because everyone else is doing it.

i understand that the cdc and politicians have been minimizing covid for years, i understand most people don't know you need a kn95/kf95/n95/etc mask to stop the virus, i understand most people don't know that you can spread covid asymptomatically or presymptomatically, i understand that there's been a complete failure to communicate the dangers of covid to the public, i understand most people don't even know what long covid is or how covid can completely ruin your life without killing you. i understand that a lot of people don't know, but there are also people who do know and they don't care. or who are vaguely aware of the dangers of covid but choose not to pay attention to it because it's scary or inconvenient.

but we're five years into the pandemic and people have, for the most part, given up on caring, and i'm running out of patience and understanding and the ability to be nice about it. bc if you're not masking in your day to day life, that means that you've on some level accepted that "people will die, which is terrible, but like, inevitable," and that you're fine with contributing to that. i feel like one morning i woke up in a world that went from condemning that sentiment to fully embracing it overnight. and that's something i don't think i can ever really understand or sympathize with.

[reality-detective]

“There Is No SARS-CoV-2, There Is No COVID-19, and There Are No Variants” - "No Spike Proteins"

Poornima Wagh claims to have 2x PhDs from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, that she had tested 154 vials and found hydrogel, graphene oxide, lipid nanoparticles, heavy metals... But didn't find any “spike protein or mRNA in the vials."

Poorinma also claims she has tested 1,500 or 756 'covid-19' patient samples for the CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, finding no “SARS CoV-2��� in any of them.

Poornima Wagh: "They didn't find SARS CoV-2, they didn't find the genome, they didn't find anything. Nothing was found.

"We called Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, to show him the findings. He said 'I don't care what you find, just call it SARS-Cov-2'

"We asked the CDC to send us a sample of the isolated virus. They said they didn't have them, they stopped responding to our calls, but then the FBI raided our lab. 🤔

[charlesoberonn]

President-elect Trump Nominates Stage 4 Lung Cancer as CDC Director

"The move is in line with GOP priorities of deregulation and expansion of coal" said Speaker Mike Johnson "I look forward to Director Cancer leading this country in a new era of disease." the Speaker refused to elaborate on if he meant 'fighting diseases'.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

By Bill Shaw

The latest wastewater surveillance data show that the COVID-19 pandemic has entered its tenth wave in the United States. Last week’s spike in wastewater was the highest percentage increase in transmission in almost three years, though these figures could be revised downwards and the full severity of the wave will only become clear in the coming weeks. One reason for the rapid jump appears to be a later start for the “winter surge” than is typical, and thus the virus could be quickly rising to a level that has now become typical for this time of year.

The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) model estimates that 1.6 percent of Americans are presently infected and capable of transmitting the virus to others. That is 1 in 64 people and represents nearly 750,000 new COVID-19 cases per day. That means that on a flight of 100 people, there is an 80 percent chance that at least one person is infectious; on a flight of 300 people that rises to a 99 percent chance.

This level of transmission exceeds the levels for 73 percent of the duration of the pandemic to date. Given the known incidence of Long COVID, the current levels of transmission are generating an estimated 200,000 new cases of Long COVID per week.

Not a word about this latest COVID-19 wave has been uttered by the Biden administration or any major outlet in the corporate media. The entire political establishment is in agreement on the need to enforce the pro-corporate policy of “forever COVID,” in which the working class and broad layers of society as a whole are condemned to unending waves of mass infection, death and debilitation with Long COVID.

The PMC model projects that the current winter surge could peak between New Year’s Day and January 7. Because COVID-19 transmission followed a completely different pattern in 2024 than any other year of the pandemic, it is more difficult to forecast transmission during the current surge. This year’s summer surge was unusually late and sustained, while also declining abnormally rapidly, and the lull between the summer and winter surges was atypically long.

The latest data on test positivity and emergency department visits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show both these indicators on the increase. Hospitalizations and deaths are typically lagging indicators, and although they have not yet increased, they are likely to rise as well in the coming week or two.

The new XEC variant continues to increase as a percentage of COVID-19 infections, now estimated at 44 percent, compared to 33 percent a week ago. It is now the most common variant, having surpassed the KP3.1.1 variant per the most recent data.

Given the total absence of governmental support for the renovation of infrastructure to ensure that indoor air is purified in public spaces, the only defenses against COVID-19 continue to be vaccines and non-pharmaceutical measures, such as social distancing and masking. Vaccination additionally protects against the most adverse outcomes of COVID-19, including death and hospitalization, while providing moderate protection against Long COVID.

Unfortunately, misinformation coupled with the potential expense of paying for a costly vaccine have resulted in extremely low vaccination rates for COVID-19. Per the latest CDC data, only 21.0 percent of American adults reported that they have received the latest vaccine released at the beginning of the Fall. Coverage of children is even worse at 10.6 percent, or approximately half the rate of adults.

Dr. Alexander Sloboda, medical director of immunizations for the Chicago Department of Public Health, said:

There’s still a lot of misinformation, disinformation, particularly around the COVID vaccine, so just trying to overcome the misinformation, disinformation that’s out there with correct information is what we’re trying to do. Obviously, it’s a kind of an uphill battle.

In another development this week related to the science of COVID-19 treatment, a study from 2020 that purported to show that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment was finally retracted. According to the journal’s retraction notice, the paper was pulled because of ethical transgressions and major flaws in methodology.

Even though numerous scientists immediately spotted and exposed the flaws of the study, it took four years of campaigning before the journal editors finally relented and retracted the paper this month. In fact, a lead author on the study, Didier Raoult, at one point threatened legal action against the whistleblowers who challenged the study. One of the journal editors was a co-author of the study, likely a factor in the long time period between the paper being discredited and it being retracted.

The scientific discourse over the study included subsequent identification of additional serious methodological flaws in 2023. Recently, three of the study’s authors wrote a letter to the journal requesting a retraction, acknowledging that no confidence could be placed in the “results” and stating explicitly that they no longer wished to be associated with the paper.

Notably, Raoult has so far had 28 papers retracted, including this one. Raoult leads the French Hospital Institute of Marseille Mediterranean Infection (IHU). Overall, 32 papers authored by IHU members, including Raoult, have been retracted. Investigations are underway on at least 100 more papers by this group, mostly due to concerns that the studies violated ethical standards.

The discredited hydroxychloroquine study spawned massive misinformation promoting the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. The most infamous episodes involved then-President Donald Trump, who in a period of two months in 2020 made 11 tweets about unproven therapies for COVID-19 and mentioned them 65 times in White House briefings. Trump repeatedly referenced this now-retracted study, even after it had been discredited. During that time, purchases of hydroxychloroquine on Amazon surged by 200 percent.

With Trump returning to the presidency and having nominated a slate of anti-science quacks to every public health-related leadership position in the federal government—overseen by the notorious purveyor of anti-vaccine disinformation Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the working class must heighten its vigilance against medical misinformation and follow the advice of principled scientists. Any one of Trump’s nominees is damaging, but collectively it will be catastrophic when their pseudo-science becomes official policy.

Official policy under Biden already is criminally permitting the pandemic to continue to cause death and disability virtually unchecked. The constant emergence of new variants, including at least three major new variants this year alone, is a product of the dismantling of public health measures to contain the virus. Protecting the public’s health requires more than just vigilance. The working class must organize on its own political program to replace capitalism with socialism, a social system that prioritizes human health over private profit.

[feminist-space]

"What we have done is take something that should never have established itself in human communities in the first place and have built a public health consensus around the concept of repeated mass infection.

So, yes, this is what failure looks like. And that sort of normalization of infectious disease is something that we are facing the consequences of now, societally, because those attitudes have crept into other aspects of our society as well. This idea that vaccines are bad, and infections are good. Conflating the idea of coexistence with nature with coexistence with pathogens is a dangerous mess—it will take years to undo this. Honestly, we haven’t had attitudes like this about infections since before biblical times.

There really is no historical precedent for this. No society in the world ever said, “Oh, you’re infected? Let’s let it spread.” This whole concept of pox parties being a thing is ludicrous. But that’s exactly where we are today. Quarantines used to happen in the 14th century with plague. This uncritical acceptance of infectious disease as a sort of lord and savior is brand new.

And it couldn’t happen at a worse time. We’re now extremely interconnected. There are more people on the planet than ever before, and diseases can spread rapidly. And the only people that you can really lay this at the door of is public health. Where public health should have been out there saying, “These are the risks of getting COVID. These are the repeated risks of COVID,” for which the science is extremely unambiguous. (There are tens of thousands of papers on these topics).

Instead, Public Health was saying, “Masks are the scarlet letter of the pandemic,” in the words of former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. Or “If you have been vaccinated, the pandemic is over for you,” which is what Biden said. Trump and his people based their playbook on the phrase, “The cure cannot be worse than the disease.” I’m using the US as an example, but you can do the same thing with other countries like Britain, Canada or pretty much any other country in the world. And every single time both public health and politicians have served as cheerleaders for an infectious disease that has clear-cut long-term consequences. None of this was necessary."

[wolfspaw]

[mariacallous]

Updated vaccines against Covid-19 are coming, just as hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus are steadily ticking up again.

Today, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized new mRNA booster shots from Moderna and Pfizer, and a panel of outside experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to recommend the shots to everyone in the United States ages 6 months and older. Once Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Mandy Cohen signs off on the recommendations and the vaccines are shipped, people can start getting the boosters.

The recommendation is projected to prevent about 400,000 hospitalizations and 40,000 deaths over the next two years, according to data presented at the meeting by CDC epidemiologist Megan Wallace.

This year’s mRNA vaccines are different from the 2022 booster in a key way. Last year’s shot was a bivalent vaccine, meaning it covered two variants: the original one that emerged in China in 2019, plus the Omicron subvariant BA.5, which was circulating during much of 2022. This fall’s booster drops the original variant, which is no longer circulating and is unlikely to return. It targets just the Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which was dominant throughout much of 2023.

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines work by introducing a tiny piece of genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA, that carries instructions for making SARS-CoV-2’s characteristic spike protein. Once it is injected, cells in the body use those instructions to temporarily make the spike protein. The immune system recognizes the protein as foreign and generates antibodies against it. Those antibodies stick around so that if they encounter that foreign invader again, they will mount a response against it.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus has acquired new mutations in its spike protein and elsewhere. These mutations result in new variants and subvariants that diverge from the original virus. When enough mutations accumulate, these new versions can more easily evade the antibodies created by previous vaccine doses or infections.

The constantly evolving nature of the virus is the reason health regulators decided last year to update the original mRNA vaccines, which were designed against the version of the virus that first appeared in 2019. This year, once again, the virus has changed enough to warrant an updated booster.

In June, an advisory committee to the FDA recommended that this fall’s booster be a monovalent vaccine—targeting only the then-dominant XBB.1.5 subvariant.

At that meeting, committee members reviewed evidence suggesting that the inclusion of the original variant may hamper the booster’s effectiveness against newer offshoots. “The previous bivalent vaccine contained the ancestral spike and thus skewed immune responses to the old spike,” says David Ho, a professor of microbiology at Columbia University whose research, which is not yet peer-reviewed, was among the evidence the FDA panel reviewed. “This is what we call immunological imprinting, and it results in lack of immune responses to the new spike.” He thinks taking out the old variant should optimize the immune response.

But over the past few months, even newer Omicron offshoots have arrived. Currently, EG.5.1, or Eris, is the dominant one in the United States, United Kingdom, and China. Meanwhile, a variant called BA.2.86, or Pirola, has been detected in several countries. Pirola has raised alarm bells because it has more than 30 new mutations compared to XBB.1.5.

Even though the new boosters were formulated against XBB.1.5, they’re still expected to provide protection against these new variants. “The reason is, while antibodies are important in protection against mild disease, the critical part of the immune response that’s important for protecting against severe disease is T cells,” says Paul Offit, a professor of vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania and member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee.

These cells are a different part of the immune response. Unlike antibodies, which neutralize a pathogen by preventing it from infecting cells, T cells work by eliminating the cells that have already been invaded and boosting creation of more antibodies. Both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccines produce long-lasting T cells in addition to antibodies.

It’s why, Offit says, when the Omicron wave hit in late 2021 and peaked in January 2022, the US didn’t see a dramatic increase in hospitalizations and deaths even as cases rose significantly: People’s T cells kicked into gear, even when their antibodies didn’t recognize the Omicron variant.

“In some ways,” says Offit, when it comes to vaccine booster development, “it almost doesn’t matter what we pick to target” because the coronavirus has yet to evolve away from T cell recognition. “Everything works.”

Scientists think T cells are able to protect against severe Covid because they’re recognizing parts of the virus that have remained unchanged throughout the pandemic. “I suspect that as we continue to vaccinate, there are some conserved regions [of the virus],” says Jacqueline Miller, Moderna’s head of infectious diseases. “So even with the accumulation of mutations, we’re still building on previous immunity.”

People who have hybrid immunity—that is, have had a Covid infection and have also been vaccinated—seem to have the best immune responses to new variants, she says, which suggests that previous exposure shapes and improves immune responses to new variants. Preliminary studies show that antibodies generated by previous infections and vaccinations should be capable of neutralizing Pirola.

Earlier this month, Moderna issued a press release saying that clinical trial data showed that its updated booster generated a strong immune response against Pirola, as well as the more prevalent Eris variant.

In a statement to WIRED, Pfizer spokesperson Jerica Pitts said the company continues to closely monitor emerging variants and conduct tests of its updated monovalent booster against them. Data presented at Tuesday’s CDC meeting showed that Pfizer-BioNTech’s updated booster elicited a strong neutralizing antibody response against both Eris and Pirola.

The FDA expects that Covid-19 vaccines will continue to be updated on an annual basis, unless a completely new variant emerges that requires a different approach. “We will always be a little behind the virus,” says Ho. “In this instance, we won’t suffer too much, but that might not be the case going forward. Surveillance is imperative.”

[dissident777]

CDC Director Says They’re Making An Updated Convid Vaccine for the Fall (It’s Only March!?)

[freddyfreeman]

Think I'm going to be insane and buy a portable HEPA filter to bring with me to classes, next semester