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Category: Health

The vast majority of America’s Covid deaths could have been prevented, says Birx

The vast majority of America’s Covid deaths could have been prevented, says Birx

CNN reports: The US may finally be getting a handle on the coronavirus pandemic, but for so many Americans, it’s too late, and that disconnect is raising fresh questions about why the US couldn’t have done more earlier. Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator under the Trump administration, reveals her chilling conclusion in a new CNN documentary that the number of coronavirus deaths could have been “decreased substantially” if cities and states across the…

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A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals

A collapse foretold: How Brazil’s Covid-19 outbreak overwhelmed hospitals

The New York Times reports: The patients began arriving at hospitals in Porto Alegre far sicker and younger than before. Funeral homes were experiencing a steady uptick in business, while exhausted doctors and nurses pleaded in February for a lockdown to save lives. But Sebastião Melo, Porto Alegre’s mayor, argued there was a greater imperative. “Put your life on the line so that we can save the economy,” Mr. Melo appealed to his constituents in late February. Now Porto Alegre,…

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U.S. Covid response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths, researchers conclude

U.S. Covid response could have avoided hundreds of thousands of deaths, researchers conclude

Reuters reports: The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it. That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort…

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They had mild Covid. Then their serious symptoms kicked in

They had mild Covid. Then their serious symptoms kicked in

The New York Times reports: In the fall, after Samar Khan came down with a mild case of Covid-19, she expected to recover and return to her previous energetic life in Chicago. After all, she was just 25, and healthy. But weeks later, she said, “this weird constellation of symptoms began to set in.” She had blurred vision encircled with strange halos. She had ringing in her ears, and everything began to smell like cigarettes or Lysol. One leg started…

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Fauci ‘stunned’ by AstraZeneca’s release of ‘outdated information’ from Covid-19 vaccine trial

Fauci ‘stunned’ by AstraZeneca’s release of ‘outdated information’ from Covid-19 vaccine trial

STAT reports: U.S. health officials raised concerns early Tuesday that positive results that AstraZeneca announced Monday for its Covid-19 vaccine may have been based on “an incomplete view of the efficacy data” from a clinical trial and relied on “outdated information,” throwing another curveball in the saga of the company’s vaccine. In a statement issued soon after midnight Tuesday morning, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said it had been informed about the data questions by the data…

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The medical system should have been prepared for long Covid

The medical system should have been prepared for long Covid

Vice reports: Last March, Lisa O’Brien began experiencing mild symptoms of what she thought might be COVID-19: scratchy throat, body aches, fatigue. But with no fever and just a hint of a cough, she decided to wait on a COVID test. Then new symptoms appeared, including chills and shortness of breath. After two weeks they were alarming enough for her to get tested: Negative. But the negative result didn’t resolve her health problems. Four weeks out, O’Brien was barely able…

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Rich countries signed away a chance to vaccinate the world

Rich countries signed away a chance to vaccinate the world

The New York Times reports: In the coming days, a patent will finally be issued on a five-year-old invention, a feat of molecular engineering that is at the heart of at least five major Covid-19 vaccines. And the United States government will control that patent. The new patent presents an opportunity — and some argue the last best chance — to exact leverage over the drug companies producing the vaccines and pressure them to expand access to less affluent countries….

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Where Europe went wrong in its vaccine rollout, and why

Where Europe went wrong in its vaccine rollout, and why

The New York Times reports: The calls began in December, as the United States prepared to administer its first batches of Covid-19 vaccine. Even then, it was clear that the European Union was a few weeks behind, and its leaders wanted to know what they could learn from their American counterparts. The questions were the same, from President Emmanuel Macron of France, President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission, and Alexander De Croo, the prime minister of Belgium….

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Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

Five reasons why Covid herd immunity is probably impossible

Nature reports: As COVID-19 vaccination rates pick up around the world, people have reasonably begun to ask: how much longer will this pandemic last? It’s an issue surrounded with uncertainties. But the once-popular idea that enough people will eventually gain immunity to SARS-CoV-2 to block most transmission — a ‘herd-immunity threshold’ — is starting to look unlikely. That threshold is generally achievable only with high vaccination rates, and many scientists had thought that once people started being immunized en masse,…

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Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies

Coronavirus is evolving but so are our antibodies

Antibodies (white) binding to a coronavirus (red and orange). Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock By Sarah L Caddy, University of Cambridge and Meng Wang, University of Cambridge The emergence of “variants of concern” has raised questions about our long-term immunity to the coronavirus. Will the antibodies we make after being infected with or vaccinated against the dominant lineage, called D614G, protect us against future viral variants? To answer this question, scientists have been examining how our antibody responses to the coronavirus develop over…

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U.S. to send millions of vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada

U.S. to send millions of vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada

The New York Times reports: The United States plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada, the White House said Thursday, a notable step into vaccine diplomacy just as the Biden administration is quietly pressing Mexico to curb the stream of migrants coming to the border. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the United States was planning to share 2.5 million doses of the vaccine with Mexico and 1.5 million with Canada,…

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Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science

Europe’s vaccine suspension may be driven more by politics than science

The New York Times reports: After days of touting the safety of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, took a call from his German counterpart on Monday and learned that Germany was concerned enough about a few cases of serious blood clots among some who had received the vaccine to suspend its use. For Italy and its neighbors, that call could not have come at a worse time. Their vaccine rollouts were already lagging because of shortages, and they…

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Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines

Some long-haul covid-19 patients say their symptoms are subsiding after getting vaccines

The Washington Post reports: Arianna Eisenberg endured long-haul covid-19 for eight months, a recurring nightmare of soaking sweats, crushing fatigue, insomnia, brain fog and muscle pain. But Eisenberg’s tale has a happy ending that neither she nor current medical science can explain. Thirty-six hours after her second shot of coronavirus vaccine last month, her symptoms were gone, and they haven’t returned. “I really felt back to myself,” the 34-year-old Brooklyn therapist said, “to a way that I didn’t think was…

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How did so many rich countries get Covid so wrong? How did others get it so right?

How did so many rich countries get Covid so wrong? How did others get it so right?

David Wallace-Wells writes: “I’m bashing my head as well,” says Devi Sridhar. It is January 2021, and the Florida-born, Edinburgh-based professor of global public health is looking back on the pandemic year, marveling and despairing at opportunities lost. From early last winter, Sridhar has been among the most vocal critics of the shambolic U.K. response — urging categorically more pandemic vigilance, which she believed might have yielded a total triumph over the disease, a cause that has picked up the…

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Why the pandemic experts failed

Why the pandemic experts failed

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal write: A few minutes before midnight on March 4, 2020, the two of us emailed every U.S. state and the District of Columbia with a simple question: How many people have been tested in your state, total, for the coronavirus? By then, about 150 people had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the United States, and 11 had died of the disease. Yet the CDC had stopped publicly reporting the number of Americans tested for…

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A year in America’s first Covid epicenter

A year in America’s first Covid epicenter

James Ross Gardner writes: America’s coronavirus nightmare began on the last day of February, in a leap year. On that scarce, quadrennial appendage of a date, the twenty-ninth, we learned of what was then believed to be the first Covid-19 fatality in the U.S. A man in his fifties had died of the virus at a Kirkland hospital, about ten miles northeast of Seattle. Though there had been a few other, as yet non-fatal cases, the death marked an obvious…

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