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Category: Health

Reports of severe Covid or death after vaccination are rare, but not unexpected

Reports of severe Covid or death after vaccination are rare, but not unexpected

The New York Times reports: Over the last few months, a steady drumbeat of headlines has highlighted the astounding real-world effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines, especially the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. The vaccines, study after study has shown, are more than 90 percent effective at preventing the worst outcomes, including hospitalization and death. But alongside this good news have been rare reports of severe Covid in people who had been fully vaccinated. On June 3, for instance,…

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Why are women more prone to long Covid?

Why are women more prone to long Covid?

The Observer reports: In June 2020, as the first reports of long Covid began to filter through the medical community, doctors attempting to grapple with this mysterious malaise began to notice an unusual trend. While acute cases of Covid-19 – particularly those hospitalised with the disease – tended to be mostly male and over 50, long Covid sufferers were, by contrast, both relatively young and overwhelmingly female. Early reports of long Covid at a Paris hospital between May and July…

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The newly approved drug that could break American health care

The newly approved drug that could break American health care

Nicholas Bagley and Rachel Sachs write: Earlier this week, the Food and Drug Administration overruled—to much criticism—its own scientific advisory committee and approved the Alzheimer’s treatment Aduhelm. The agency made this decision despite thin evidence of the drug’s clinical efficacy and despite its serious side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding. As a result, a serious risk now exists that millions of people will be prescribed a drug that does more harm than good. Less appreciated is how the drug’s…

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The grave implications for the world if China covered up the origins of Covid

The grave implications for the world if China covered up the origins of Covid

John Gray writes: If … it becomes clear that the pandemic originated in failures of the Chinese state, the damage to its model of government will be irreparable. At the same time, the West would be faced with the uncomfortable fact that Xi Jinping’s China is a totalitarian regime. Secrecy and cover-ups are normal in such systems. Only in 1990 did the Soviet state formally accept responsibility for the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940, carried…

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America still undervalues public health

America still undervalues public health

Ed Yong writes: During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. No field should understand that more deeply than public health, a discipline distinct from medicine. Whereas doctors and nurses treat sick individuals in front of them, public-health practitioners work to prevent sickness in entire populations. They are expected to think big. They know that infectious diseases are always collective problems because they are infectious. An individual’s choices can ripple outward to affect cities, countries, and…

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If we can vaccinate the world, we can beat the climate crisis

If we can vaccinate the world, we can beat the climate crisis

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo write: It would only cost $50bn to ensure 40% of the world’s population is vaccinated by the end of the year, and 60% by the first half of 2022. This is a recent estimate from the IMF, the latest institution to join a chorus of voices calling for a global vaccination programme to bring Covid-19 under control. The IMF has highlighted the economic benefits of global vaccines, which would be huge. But there is another…

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The evidence still suggests the virus came from nature

The evidence still suggests the virus came from nature

Angela L. Rasmussen and Stephen A. Goldstein write: In March 2020, a group of renowned evolutionary virologists analyzed the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and found it was overwhelmingly likely that this virus had never been manipulated in any laboratory. Like the earlier coronaviruses SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, they theorized, it “spilled over” from its natural reservoir host (bats) to a new one (humans). Viruses jump species frequently, with unpredictable consequences. Often a virus hits an evolutionary dead end if it cannot…

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Fauci calls on China to release medical records of Wuhan lab researchers

Fauci calls on China to release medical records of Wuhan lab researchers

The Financial Times reports that President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, has called on China to release the medical records of nine people whose illnesses might provide vital clues into whether Covid-19 first emerged as the result of a lab leak. He told the FT that the records could help resolve the debate over the origins of a disease that has killed more than 3.5 million people worldwide. The records concern three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of…

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Attacks on Fauci grow more intense, personal and conspiratorial

Attacks on Fauci grow more intense, personal and conspiratorial

Politico reports: For over a year, Anthony Fauci has been a bogeyman for conservatives, who have questioned his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of quietly undermining then-President Donald Trump. But those attacks took on a whole new level of vitriol this week, to the point that one social media analysis described it as highly misleading and at least one platform pulled down some posts, citing false content. It all stemmed from a tranche of Fauci’s emails that…

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The mRNA vaccine revolution is just beginning

The mRNA vaccine revolution is just beginning

Stephen Buranyi writes: No one expected the first Covid-19 vaccine to be as good as it was. “We were hoping for around 70 per cent, that’s a success,” says Dr Ann Falsey, a professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, New York, who ran a 150-person trial site for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in 2020. Even Uğur Şahin, the co-founder and CEO of BioNTech, who had shepherded the drug from its earliest stages, had some doubts. All the preliminary laboratory…

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Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Once again, America is becoming a nation of drunks

Kate Julian writes: Few things are more American than drinking heavily. But worrying about how heavily other Americans are drinking is one of them. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock because, the crew feared, the Pilgrims were going through the beer too quickly. The ship had been headed for the mouth of the Hudson River, until its sailors (who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water) panicked at the possibility of running out before they got home,…

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The lab-leak theory: Inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

The lab-leak theory: Inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

Katherine Eban writes: Gilles Demaneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland. He was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome ten years ago, and believes it gives him a professional advantage. “I’m very good at finding patterns in data, when other people see nothing,” he says. Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demaneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease….

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The necessity for global vaccine equity

The necessity for global vaccine equity

Sue Halpern writes: A race to vaccinate the world is not an effort to achieve herd immunity. At least in this country, that goal was a kind of marketing device, a way of inspiring people to abide by masking and social-distancing rules while waiting for a vaccine, and then to encourage everyone to do their part by getting immunized once vaccines were available. In the beginning, public-health officials, including Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and…

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How urban planning and housing policy helped create ‘food apartheid’ in U.S. cities

How urban planning and housing policy helped create ‘food apartheid’ in U.S. cities

Black neighborhoods have a higher density of fast-food outlets than in white districts. David McNew/Getty Images By Julian Agyeman, Tufts University Hunger is not evenly spread across the U.S., nor within its cities. Even in the the richest parts of urban America there are pockets of deep food insecurity, and more often than not it is Black and Latino communities that are hit hardest. As an urban planning academic who teaches a course on food justice, I’m aware that this…

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New evidence that sedentary lifestyles result in shrinking brains

New evidence that sedentary lifestyles result in shrinking brains

Science Alert reports:The Tsimane, an indigenous people who live in the Bolivian peripheries of the Amazon rainforest, lead lives that are very different to ours. They seem to be much healthier for it. This tribal and largely isolated population of forager-horticulturalists still lives today by traditional ways of farming, hunting, gathering, and fishing – continuing the practices of their ancestors, established in a time long before industrialization and urbanization transformed most of the world. For the Tsimane, the advantages are…

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Donated by India, vaccines languish and may expire in Afghanistan

Donated by India, vaccines languish and may expire in Afghanistan

By Ruchi Kumar, Undark, May 27, 2021 Mohammad Rahmani is not a Covid-19 denier. He wears a mask and practices social distancing. But the 24-year-old software engineer from Kabul, Afghanistan is deeply skeptical of Covid-19 vaccines. Online videos — created in Afghanistan and neighboring countries, then uploaded on social media — have convinced him that SARS-CoV-2 and the vaccine that protects against it are part of a large conspiracy to reduce the global population. This kind of skepticism is common…

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