A place to discuss the now-global coronavirus outbreak.
That's totally what happened to Diamond. Yup. She got infected with the vaccine!
A leading cause, not the, except among infectious diseases. Not seeing anything particularly surprising about this.
The COVID Truther Movement Has Found Its True Enemy—the COVID Truther Movement
When the pandemic began and a mass of COVID-“skeptical” self-proclaimed experts began appearing on the scene, they had a shared set of goals. Together, they opposed vaccine mandates, fearmongered about the vaccines themselves, promoted unproven or discredited treatments, and, in general, created a tidy little self-sustaining alternate universe. Their mutual support was important: They constantly praised one another as brave, heterodox experts, appeared on each other’s podcasts, hyped each other’s work on Twitter, and linked to each other’s Substacks. Now, though, the cracks are beginning to show, the beefs are increasingly public, and lawsuits are being filed. The COVID truther movement has discovered the true enemy and it is, predictably, within.
It's, uh.... a lot.
I mean I guess it will help the 2nd amendment nuts to say guns weren't the leading cause of death for kids finally for one year.
The study showed COVID caused 2% of the deaths. Injuries, assault, and suicide were still way more deaths. I am betting the detail shows gun-related deaths were still higher than COVID.
That should be the real headline; "Guns kill more kids than COVID even at peak COVID". Of course Republicans would just interpret that to mean COVID is not that bad.
While other causes of death, such as unintentional injuries (18.4%), assault (6.9%), and suicide (6.8%) represented a large percentage of all causes of death, COVID-19 ranked fifth in disease-related causes of deaths (excluding unintentional injuries, assault, and suicide), and first in deaths caused by infectious and respiratory diseases.
Ah misleading headline FTW. "is a leading cause", not "is the leading cause". Yay you cracked the top 10.
They're going to pretend Trump didn't praise the vaccine and take credit for it?
They're going to pretend Trump didn't praise the vaccine and take credit for it?
The MAGA crowd has always been at war with Eastasia.
Low immunity, overwhelmed hospitals fuel Covid-19 deaths in ageing Japan
This is why conspiracy weirdos confuse me. Japan, notably, has a problem with an aging society. Why try to kill them with the vax, when you can just let COVID do it? That'd be the conspiracy!
Low immunity against Covid-19 and a growing population of frail elderly is driving a surge in coronavirus deaths in Japan which had, for a long time, upheld some of the strictest pandemic restrictions.
Japan once boasted one of the lowest Covid mortality rates, but the figure has been trending upwards since the end of 2022.
It hit an all-time high on 20 January this year, surpassing the UK, US and South Korea, according to Oxford University's Our World in Data.
Japan was largely closed to foreign visitors from 2020 till mid-June last year. It opened its borders cautiously - at first, travellers had to be part of a package tour, buy medical insurance, and be masked in all public places.
Some schoolchildren had meals in silence for over two years as schools imposed bans on lunchtime conversations.
As restrictions are eased, however, the population's low Covid immunity may be causing infections to spike, local health experts told the BBC.
Most of the latest Covid fatalities are elderly people with underlying medical conditions, experts said. This contrasts with the initial spate of deaths that were due to pneumonia and were often treated in intensive care.
"It is also difficult to prevent these deaths by treatment," says Hitoshi Osh*tani, one of Japan's leading virologists, adding that Covid was only the trigger.
"Due to the emergence of immune-escaping variants and sub-variants and the waning of immunity, it is getting more difficult to prevent infections," he says.
‘Died suddenly’ posts twist tragedies to push vaccine lies
Results from 6-year-old Anastasia Weaver’s autopsy may take weeks. But online anti-vaccine activists needed only hours after her funeral this week to baselessly blame the COVID-19 vaccine.
A prolific Twitter account posted Anastasia’s name and smiling dance portrait in a tweet with a syringe emoji. A Facebook user messaged her mother, Jessica Day-Weaver, to call her a “murderer” for having her child vaccinated.
In reality, the Ohio kindergartner had experienced lifelong health problems since her premature birth, including epilepsy, asthma and frequent hospitalizations with respiratory viruses. “The doctors haven’t given us any information other than it was due to all of her chronic conditions. ... There was never a thought that it could be from the vaccine,” Day-Weaver said of her daughter’s death.
But those facts didn’t matter online, where Anastasia was swiftly added to a growing list of hundreds of children, teens, athletes and celebrities whose unexpected deaths and injuries have been incorrectly blamed on COVID-19 shots. Using the hashtag #diedsuddenly, online conspiracy theorists have flooded social media with news reports, obituaries and GoFundMe pages in recent months, leaving grieving families to wrestle with the lies.
There’s the 37-year-old Brazilian television host who collapsed live on air because of a congenital heart problem. The 18-year-old unvaccinated bull rider who died from a rare disease. The 32-year-old actress who died from bacterial infection complications.
The use of “died suddenly” — or a misspelled version of it — has surged more than 740% in tweets about vaccines over the past two months compared with the two previous months, the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs found in an analysis conducted for The Associated Press. The phrase’s explosion began with the late November debut of an online “documentary” by the same name, giving power to what experts say is a new and damaging shorthand.
“It’s kind of in-group language, kind of a wink wink, nudge nudge,” said Renee DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. “They’re taking something that is a relatively routine way of describing something — people do, in fact, die unexpectedly — and then by assigning a hashtag to it, they aggregate all of these incidents in one place.”
The campaign causes harm beyond just the internet, epidemiologist Dr. Katelyn Jetelina said.
“The real danger is that it ultimately leads to real world actions such as not vaccinating,” said Jetelina, who tracks and breaks down COVID data for her blog, “Your Local Epidemiologist.”
Rigorous study and real-world evidence from hundreds of millions of administered shots prove that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Deaths caused by vaccination are extremely rare and the risks associated with not getting vaccinated are far higher than the risks of vaccination. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from lobbing a variety of untrue accusations at the vaccines.
The “Died Suddenly” film features a montage of headlines found on Google to falsely suggest they prove that sudden deaths have “never happened like this until now.” The film has amassed more than 20 million views on an alternative video sharing website, and its companion Twitter account posts about more deaths and injuries daily.
An AP review of more than 100 tweets from the account in December and January found that claims about the cases being vaccine related were largely unsubstantiated and, in some cases, contradicted by public information. Some of the people featured died of genetic disorders, drug overdoses, flu complications or suicide. One died in a surfing accident.
The filmmakers did not respond to specific questions from the AP, but instead issued a statement that referenced a “surge in sudden deaths” and a “PROVEN rate of excess deaths,” without providing data.
The number of overall deaths in the U.S. has been higher than what would be expected since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because of the virus, overdoses and other causes. COVID-19 vaccines prevented nearly 2 million U.S. deaths in just their first year of use.
Some deaths exploited in the film predate the pandemic. California writer Dolores Cruz published an essay in 2022 about grieving for her son, who died in a car crash in 2017. “Died Suddenly” used a screenshot of the headline in the film, portraying his death as vaccine related.
I shouldn't be surprised anymore by this stuff, but the relentless dishonesty of what they know are lies and half-truths, said with total confidence is still just so alien to me.
Era of ‘Free’ Covid Vaccines, Test Kits, and Treatments Is Ending. Who Will Pay the Tab Now?
Time is running out for free-to-consumer covid vaccines, at-home test kits, and even some treatments.The White House announced this month that the national public health emergency, first declared in early 2020 in response to the pandemic, is set to expire May 11. When it ends, so will many of the policies designed to combat the virus’s spread.
Take vaccines. Until now, the federal government has been purchasing covid-19 shots. It recently bought 105 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech bivalent booster for about $30.48 a dose, and 66 million doses of Moderna’s version for $26.36 a dose. (These are among the companies that developed the first covid vaccines sold in the United States.)
People will be able to get these vaccines at low or no cost as long as the government-purchased supplies last. But even before the end date for the public emergency was set, Congress opted not to provide more money to increase the government’s dwindling stockpile. As a result, Pfizer and Moderna were already planning their moves into the commercial market. Both have indicated they will raise prices, somewhere in the range of $110 to $130 per dose, though insurers and government health programs could negotiate lower rates.
“We see a double-digit billion[-dollar] market opportunity,” investors were told at a JPMorgan conference in San Francisco recently by Ryan Richardson, chief strategy officer for BioNTech. The company expects a gross price — the full price before any discounts — of $110 a dose, which, Richardson said, “is more than justified from a health economics perspective.”
That could translate to tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the manufacturers, even if uptake of the vaccines is slow. And consumers would foot the bill, either directly or indirectly.
If half of adults — about the same percentage as those who opt for an annual flu shot — get covid boosters at the new, higher prices, a recent KFF report estimated, insurers, employers, and other payors would shell out $12.4 billion to $14.8 billion. That’s up to nearly twice as much as what it would have cost for every adult in the U.S. to get a bivalent booster at the average price paid by the federal government.
As for covid treatments, an August blog post by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response noted that government-purchased supplies of the drug Paxlovid are expected to last through midyear before the private sector takes over. The government’s bulk purchase price from manufacturer Pfizer was $530 for a course of treatment, and it isn’t yet known what the companies will charge once government supplies run out.
How Much of That Pinch Will Consumers Feel?
One thing is certain: How much, if any, of the boosted costs are passed on to consumers will depend on their health coverage.
Medicare beneficiaries, those enrolled in Medicaid — the state-federal health insurance program for people with low incomes — and people with Affordable Care Act coverage will continue to get covid vaccines without cost sharing, even when the public health emergency ends and the government-purchased vaccines run out. Many people with job-based insurance will also likely not face copayments for vaccines, unless they go out of network for their vaccinations. People with limited-benefit or short-term insurance policies might have to pay for all or part of their vaccinations. And people who don’t have insurance will need to either pay the full cost out-of-pocket or seek no- or low-cost vaccinations from community clinics or other providers. If they cannot find a free or low-cost option, some uninsured patients may be forced to skip vaccinations or testing.
Coming up with what could be $100 or more for vaccination will be especially hard “if you are uninsured or underinsured; that’s where these price hikes could drive additional disparities,” said Sean Robbins, executive vice president of external affairs for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Those increases, he said, will also affect people with insurance, as the costs “flow through to premiums.”
Meanwhile, public policy experts say many private insurers will continue to cover Paxlovid, although patients may face a copayment, at least until they meet their deductible, just as they do for other medications. Medicaid will continue to cover it without cost to patients until at least 2024. But Medicare coverage will be limited until the treatment goes through the regular FDA process, which takes longer than the emergency use authorization it has been marketed under.
Another complication: The rolls of the uninsured are likely to climb over the next year, as states are poised to reinstate the process of regularly determining Medicaid eligibility, which was halted during the pandemic. Starting in April, states will begin reassessing whether Medicaid enrollees meet income and other qualifying factors.
An estimated 5 million to 14 million people nationwide might lose coverage.
“This is our No. 1 concern” right now, said John Baackes, CEO of L.A. Care, the nation’s largest publicly operated health plan with 2.7 million members.
“They may not realize they’ve lost coverage until they go to fill a prescription” or seek other medical care, including vaccinations, he said.
What About Covid Test Kits?
Rules remain in place for insurers, including Medicare and Affordable Care Act plans, to cover the cost of up to eight in-home test kits a month for each person on the plan, until the public health emergency ends.
For consumers — including those without insurance — a government website is still offering up to four test kits per household, until they run out. The Biden administration shifted funding to purchase additional kits and made them available in late December.
Starting in May, though, beneficiaries in original Medicare and many people with private, job-based insurance will have to start paying out-of-pocket for the rapid antigen test kits. Some Medicare Advantage plans, which are an alternative to original Medicare, might opt to continue covering them without a copayment. Policies will vary, so check with your insurer. And Medicaid enrollees can continue to get the test kits without cost for a little over a year.
State rules also can vary, and continued coverage without cost sharing for covid tests, treatments, and vaccines after the health emergency ends might be available with some health plans.
Overall, the future of covid tests, vaccines, and treatments will reflect the complicated mix of coverage consumers already navigate for most other types of care.
“From a consumer perspective, vaccines will still be free, but for treatments and test kits, a lot of people will face cost sharing,” said Jen Kates, a senior vice president at KFF. “We’re taking what was universal access and now saying we’re going back to how it is in the regular U.S. health system.”
KHN correspondent Darius Tahir contributed to this report.
Australian researchers have found a protein in the lungs that sticks to the Covid-19 virus like velcro and immobilises it, which may explain why some people never become sick with the virus while others suffer serious illness.The research was led by Greg Neely, a professor of functional genomics with the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre in collaboration with Dr Lipin Loo, a postdoctoral researcher and Matthew Waller, a PhD student. Their findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology on Friday.
The team used human cells in tissue culture to search the whole human genome for proteins that can bind to Sars-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19.....
Unbelievable 
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023...
A bout of COVID-19 is known to increase a person's long-term risks of having a major cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke. But being fully vaccinated or even partially vaccinated appears to bring that risk down, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.The study, led by researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, drew on medical records from over 1.9 million patients who were infected with COVID-19 between March 2020 and February 2022. Of those 1.9 million patients, a "major adverse cardiac event," namely a heart attack, stroke, or another cardiac event, was identified in 13,948 patients, and 3,175 died following the event.
Overall, the researchers found that being vaccinated—fully or partially—was linked to fewer cardiac events in the six months following a case of COVID-19. After adjusting for demographics, comorbidities, and time since the pandemic began, the researchers found that being fully vaccinated reduced the risk of having a major cardiac event by about 41 percent, while being partially vaccinated reduced the risk by about 24 percent.
For those who had a major cardiac event, the median time of the event was 17 days after the start of a COVID-19 infection and 212 days (roughly seven months) since the last vaccine dose. Overall, the people most at risk of having a cardiac event after an infection, regardless of vaccination status, were older males with other underlying health conditions. Previous cardiac events increased the risk the most, but diabetes, liver disease, obesity, and high cholesterol were also significant risk factors.
The study has some limitations. Namely, it couldn't account for reinfections or possible differences from infections with different SARS-CoV-2 variants. But, its findings back up results from previous reports, including a similar study done using a Korean medical database. It also adds some new data to the literature by including partially vaccinated patients—defined as those who had only received one dose of a two-dose mRNA vaccine series at the time of their infection or were within the 14-day window after a single J&J shot.
In a statement, the study's first author, Joy Jiang, noted that the researchers were surprised that even partial vaccination lowered the risk of major cardiac events. "Given the magnitude of SARS-CoV-2 infection worldwide, we hope our findings could help improve vaccination rates, especially in individuals with coexisting conditions," she added.
Yeah, not at all surprised there. Only been two months since I had covid, but I still feel quite terrible. And that is with vaccines, as well as, presumably, one of the "mild" variants of covid.
Yeah, been a month since I've had it. I feel fine as long as I don't use my lungs.
That is to say if I do anything that disrupts my normal breathing, such as exercising or just holding my breath for a bit, I seem to end up with an annoying cough for a few hours.
So, The Department of Energy has concluded, with "low confidence," that covid-19 probably, maybe, resulted from an unintentional leak from the Chinese lab that studies such viruses, a lab that is a couple miles from a few animal markets. For the life of me, I can't think of a single person whose hill to die on was "covid did not originate from a lab," yet the reactionary right is acting like Trump just got reinstated to office. I suppose after seven years of being handed unending streams of "i told you sos" from the left, they'll hang their hat on anything.
I conclude a lot of things with "low confidence". I keep those things to myself though so I don't look like a moron when they turn out to be wrong.
For the life of me, I can't think of a single person whose hill to die on was "covid did not originate from a lab,"
You can't? Because I remember when Jon Stewart started floating the mere idea that it might be possible, a lot of people reacting as if he'd suddenly declared his support for the Trump White House.
Not that "low confidence" is some kind of slam dunk smoking gun or anything, but it's interesting to see how the reactions to these things go from pearl-clutching, anyone who speaks the very words must be a terrible anti-science traitor, to, "oh yeah, well obviously it was always a possibility or whatever" without ever actually acknowledging that a change in attitude has taken place.
You can't? Because I remember when Jon Stewart started floating the mere idea that it might be possible, a lot of people reacting as if he'd suddenly declared his support for the Trump White House.
Yup. I still see the lab leak theory pilloried on Twitter as a "racist conspiracy theory," like we're still in June of 2020. To be fair, back then I was also fully willing to believe that it was a racist conspiracy theory, so I'm mostly angry at myself for being a credulous fool.
Why would I be interested in what the Department of Energy has to say about this, and why would they say anything at all instead of leaving it to the more applicable agencies? Seems pretty outside their purview.
Why would I be interested in what the Department of Energy has to say about this, and why would they say anything at all instead of leaving it to the more applicable agencies? Seems pretty outside their purview.
Agreed- I immediately wondered WTF are they doing delivering a report like this and (because I'm suspicious/cynical by nature) what conservative in the DOE was the one that did this in order to score points?
From one of the source articles
Officials would not disclose what the intelligence was. But many of the Energy Department’s insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.
Which, doesn't really tell us anything.
So a casual comment on a network wide slack channel for their virtual D&D game probably.
hbi2k wrote:You can't? Because I remember when Jon Stewart started floating the mere idea that it might be possible, a lot of people reacting as if he'd suddenly declared his support for the Trump White House.
Yup. I still see the lab leak theory pilloried on Twitter as a "racist conspiracy theory," like we're still in June of 2020. To be fair, back then I was also fully willing to believe that it was a racist conspiracy theory, so I'm mostly angry at myself for being a credulous fool.
Always good to see the blind spots in my media world. Appreciate it!
Seth wrote:For the life of me, I can't think of a single person whose hill to die on was "covid did not originate from a lab,"
You can't? Because I remember when Jon Stewart started floating the mere idea that it might be possible, a lot of people reacting as if he'd suddenly declared his support for the Trump White House.
Are you talking about when he was trying to "play Colbert" on the Late Show with Colbert? Because that was clearly satire.
Or did it happen some other time?
hbi2k wrote:You can't? Because I remember when Jon Stewart started floating the mere idea that it might be possible, a lot of people reacting as if he'd suddenly declared his support for the Trump White House.
Yup. I still see the lab leak theory pilloried on Twitter as a "racist conspiracy theory," like we're still in June of 2020. To be fair, back then I was also fully willing to believe that it was a racist conspiracy theory, so I'm mostly angry at myself for being a credulous fool.
In mid-2021 it was reported that the Trump administration decided to blame China for COVID in the early days of the pandemic and heavily cherrypicked what little actual intelligence that was available at the time to push the story that it was cooked up in a Wuhan laboratory (an accusation carefully cultivated to heavily blur the lines between "this was legitimate research on emerging diseases and an accident happened" and "this was the evil Chinese government developing biological weapons that got out of their control").
And given the source for this accusation was Mr. "China/Chinese Virus" himself, yeah, it was also steeped in racism. The dramatic increase in hate crimes by the red hat crowd against Asians that followed is clear evidence they fully bought into the racism Trump was putting out there.
And Stewart didn't "merely float" the idea that COVID was created in a lab. He said "science has, in many ways, eased the suffering of this pandemic, uh, that was more than likely caused by science."
When pressed by Colbert who said there "was a chance" COVID came from a lab Stewart mockingly responded "A chance!?! There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know what we can do? We can ask the Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab! That's just a little too weird, right? And then they asked those scientists 'So wait a minute. You work at the Wuhan Novel Respiratory Coronavirus lab. How did this happen?' And they're like 'A penguin kissed a turtle?' And they're like 'No!' The name of your lab, if you look at the name! Let me see your business card! Show me your business card! It says 'I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan.' Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan. How did that happen? 'Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turtle and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have coronavirus?'"
The actual name of the Wuhan lab is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Unsurprisingly it studies emerging viruses and had been studying SARS-related coronaviruses for 15 years at the time (ironically studying how certain domestic bats were acting as a natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses).
Stewart doesn't get a pass for his sh*t take, which, mind you, is solidly based on the logical foundation of "the disease has the same name I just made up for the lab."
And Stewart' sh*t take is just slightly less terrible than Trump's blame-shifting racist take that still gets any kernel of possible truth that COVID came from a lab leak insanely wrong because it still heavily implies Chinese scientists were f*cking around with things they shouldn't be f*cking around with and COVID wouldn't have happened otherwise.
The most credible hypotheses that COVID might have been caused by a lab leak were that either samples from the field or samples from the wet market were somehow improperly handled. But central to those hypotheses was COVID was already a disease that had crossed over to humans from its wild animal reservoir and was actively infecting people. Science didn't cause the suffering of the pandemic. It told us where it came from. Which, even though the last several scary respiratory diseases had come from the diseases jumping from animals to humans, Stewart still presented as something so crazy as to be nothing more than comedic fodder.
And, at this point, does it matter where it originated? Let’s say it was a lab leak. What is the world going to do? Sue China?
The toothpaste is out of the tube and there will be another pandemic. Either man-made or through nature’s evolution. I don’t see the point in trying to assign blame. Instead, we need to be learning how to quickly prevent the next one. And if we can’t prevent it, figure out how to act and address the next one faster.
That obviously doesn’t square with the ever angry, racist, conservative population. I’m sure this whole thing will be one of those never ending conspiracy theories like the moon landing.
/preachingtothechoir
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