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Category: Health

Will we always need Covid-19 boosters? Experts have theories

Will we always need Covid-19 boosters? Experts have theories

STAT reports: With the world facing the latest in a seemingly endless stream of coronavirus variants — and with bullish talk from manufacturers about a need for even more vaccine shots — you wouldn’t be alone if you were wondering: Are Covid boosters always going to be a fixture in our future? The simple truth is that, at this point, there’s no definitive answer to that question. But virologists, immunologists, and vaccinologists have opinions that are anchored in an understanding…

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Omicron has all the makings of a massive wave

Omicron has all the makings of a massive wave

David Wallace-Wells writes: For all their limitations, the models right now are flashing bright red. Over the course of the pandemic, again and again, projections based on simplistic extrapolations of current trends have missed the mark when the trajectories turned. Sometimes this has been for the good, with dire warnings looking excessive after waves peaked and declined well before a full penetration of the population; sometimes, unfortunately, the turn has been in the other direction. But right now we don’t…

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Pfizer’s Covid pill works well and is likely to work against Omicron, company confirms in final analysis

Pfizer’s Covid pill works well and is likely to work against Omicron, company confirms in final analysis

The New York Times reports: Pfizer announced on Tuesday that its Covid pill was found to stave off severe disease in a key clinical trial and that it is likely to work against the highly mutated Omicron variant of the virus. The results underscore the promise of the treatment, which health officials and doctors are counting on, to ease the burden on hospitals as the United States braces for a mounting fourth wave of the pandemic. If the Food and…

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Junk food and the brain: How modern diets lacking in micronutrients may contribute to angry rhetoric

Junk food and the brain: How modern diets lacking in micronutrients may contribute to angry rhetoric

Research reveals links between the irritability, explosive rage and unstable moods that have grown more common in recent years, and a lack of micronutrients that are important for brain function. (Shutterstock) Bonnie Kaplan, University of Calgary and Julia J Rucklidge, University of Canterbury Emotional, non-rational, even explosive remarks in public discourse have escalated in recent years. Politicians endure insults during legislative discussions; scientists receive emails and tweets containing verbal abuse and threats. What’s going on? This escalation in angry rhetoric…

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What has the Omicron variant changed?

What has the Omicron variant changed?

Dhruv Khullar writes: The Covid-19 pandemic, like every pandemic before it, is a story of equilibriums: between viral biology and human immune response; between news of the pathogen and fear of it; between the damage it inflicts and the social, economic, and political choices we make. A disease persists as a pandemic as long as these forces remain in flux; it becomes endemic when the balance is, more or less, set. The morning after Thanksgiving, Americans awoke to an unsettling…

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Pfizer two-shot course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron in S. African study

Pfizer two-shot course has 23% efficacy vs. Omicron in S. African study

Bloomberg reports: A two-shot course of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine has just 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection with the omicron variant, but can thwart severe disease, according to laboratory experiments in South Africa. Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban issued additional data on a small study released earlier this week. The research considered blood plasma samples from 12 participants. Scientists found omicron resulted in about a 41-fold reduction in levels of neutralizing antibodies produced by people who had…

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The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

The pandemic of the vaccinated is here

Rachel Gutman writes: Even before the arrival of Omicron, the winter months were going to be tough for parts of the United States. While COVID transmission rates in the South caught fire over the summer, the Northeast and Great Plains states were largely spared thanks to cyclical factors and high vaccination rates. But weather and the patterns of human life were bound to shift the disease burden northward for the holidays—and that was just with Delta. Enter a new variant…

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The coronavirus attacks fat tissue, scientists find

The coronavirus attacks fat tissue, scientists find

The New York Times reports: From the start of the pandemic, the coronavirus seemed to target people carrying extra pounds. Patients who were overweight or obese were more likely to develop severe Covid-19 and more likely to die. Though these patients often have health conditions like diabetes that compound their risk, scientists have become increasingly convinced that their vulnerability has something to do with obesity itself. Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune…

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The world is unprepared for the next pandemic, report says

The world is unprepared for the next pandemic, report says

The New York Times reports: Nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, the world remains “dangerously unprepared” for the next major outbreak, according to a new report. The 2021 Global Health Security Index, released on Wednesday, ranks 195 countries according to their capacity to respond to epidemics and pandemics. The inaugural version of the index, published just months before the first Covid-19 cases were detected, concluded that no nation was ready for such a crisis. Overall, the world is not…

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What’s next for Covid’s viral evolution

What’s next for Covid’s viral evolution

Nature reports: As the world sped towards a pandemic in early 2020, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom gazed into the future of SARS-CoV-2. Like many virus specialists at the time, he predicted that the new pathogen would not be eradicated. Rather, it would become endemic — the fifth coronavirus to permanently establish itself in humans, alongside four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that cause relatively mild colds and have been circulating in humans for decades or more. Bloom, who is based at the Fred…

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Omicron is fast moving, but perhaps less severe, early reports suggest

Omicron is fast moving, but perhaps less severe, early reports suggest

The New York Times reports: The Covid-19 virus is spreading faster than ever in South Africa, the country’s president said Monday, an indication of how the new Omicron variant is driving the pandemic, but there are early indications that Omicron may cause less serious illness than other forms of the virus. Researchers at a major hospital complex in Pretoria reported that their patients with the coronavirus are much less sick than those they have treated before, and that other hospitals…

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Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame

Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame

NPR reports: Since May 2021, people living in counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump during the last presidential election have been nearly three times as likely to die from COVID-19 as those who live in areas that went for now-President Biden. That’s according to a new analysis by NPR that examines how political polarization and misinformation are driving a significant share of the deaths in the pandemic. NPR looked at deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across…

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WHO says no deaths reported from Omicron yet as Covid variant spreads

WHO says no deaths reported from Omicron yet as Covid variant spreads

The Guardian reports: The Omicron variant has been detected in at least 38 countries but no deaths have yet been reported, the World Health Organization has said, amid warnings that it could damage the global economic recovery. The United States and Australia became the latest countries to confirm locally transmitted cases of the variant, as Omicron infections pushed South Africa’s total cases past 3 million. The WHO has warned it could take weeks to determine how infectious the variant is,…

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Second U.S. Omicron case detected in Minnesota man who attended anime event in NYC

Second U.S. Omicron case detected in Minnesota man who attended anime event in NYC

The Daily Beast reports: A second case of the super-mutated Omicron variant of the coronavirus has been detected in the U.S. in a Minnesota resident who recently returned home from an anime convention in New York City, the Minnesota Department of Health said. The person, an adult male living in Hennepin County, is fully vaccinated and only has mild symptoms. He fell ill on Nov. 22 and got tested two days later. He had traveled to New York for the…

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Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?

Science reports: Since South African scientists announced last week they had identified an unsettling new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the world has anxiously awaited clues about how it might change the trajectory of the pandemic. But as big a mystery—if less urgent—is where and how Omicron evolved, and what lessons its emergence holds for avoiding future dangerous variants. Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to…

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Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

Charting changes in a pathogen’s genome yields clues about its past and hints about its future

A virus’s genes hold a record of where it’s traveled, and when. imaginima/E+ via Getty Images By Claire Guinat, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich; Etthel Windels, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Sarah Nadeau, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich More than 250 million people worldwide have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, usually after a diagnostic nose swab. Those swabs aren’t trash once they’ve delivered their positive result, though. For scientists like us they carry additional valuable information about…

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