A manufacturing error at a plant involved in COVID-19 vaccine production affected 15 million doses worth of an ingredient for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, according to two sources familiar with the matter, but the company downplayed the situation and said it met its most recent vaccine delivery target. The issue, which occurred recently at a Baltimore Emergent BioSolutions Inc. facility, was first reported by the New York Times on Wednesday. It isn’t expected to change President Joe Biden’s expectation that the U.S. will have enough vaccine for all adults in May. In a statement, J&J said a batch of drug substance failed its quality test. “This quality control process identified one batch of drug substance that did not meet quality standards at Emergent Biosolutions, a site not yet authorized to manufacture drug substance for our COVID-19 vaccine. This batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process,” J&J said. The company said it addressed the issue with Emergent and reported it to the Food and Drug Administration. Johnson & Johnson said it beat its March delivery target, providing the U.S. government more than 20 million doses, and that it expects to deliver another 24 million by the end of April. Biden has set a goal for almost 100 million doses by the end of May. J&J said it still plans to deliver 100 million by the end of June, “aiming to deliver those doses by the end of May.” J&J is now expanding its presence in the Emergent facility, according to the statement. “Johnson & Johnson is providing additional experts in manufacturing, technical operations and quality to be on-site at Emergent to supervise, direct and support all manufacturing of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine,” it said. Representatives for Emergent declined to comment, deferring to J&J’s statement. Johnson & Johnson has committed to delivering 20 million doses by the end of March, and 100 million by the end of June, though Biden had said that he expected nearly all of those to arrive by the end of May. He relied on that in moving up his timeline on when the U.S. would have enough vaccine to cover all adults. The White House said last week that it expected a surge of 11 million doses this week from Johnson & Johnson. It’s not clear if those are among the affected doses. The two other authorized vaccine producers, Pfizer Inc. and Moderna Inc., are on schedule for their deliveries. from https://ift.tt/3dm10dE Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/
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COVID-19 was the third-most-common cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, contributing to more than 375,000 deaths, and a 16% increase in the national death rate, according to provisional data published today by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). All told, more than 3.3 million people in the U.S. died in 2020, for a rate of about 829 deaths per 100,000 people. That’s up from about 715 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic is a clear culprit. The weeks ending April 11 and December 26 were the deadliest for the U.S. last year, coinciding with two major COVID-19 surges. The virus was listed as an underlying or contributing cause of death for more than 377,000 people in the U.S. in 2020—which is likely an underestimate, if anything, since testing was hard to come by in the spring of 2020. Only heart disease and cancer killed more Americans in 2020. Meanwhile, suicide was pushed out of the top 10 causes of death; unintentional injury, stroke, lower respiratory disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, influenza/pneumonia and kidney disease rounded out the list. Logically enough, death rates were highest among adults 85 or older and lowest among kids ages five to 14. While that was true across causes of death, COVID-19 certainly contributed to that gap. The CDC estimates that COVID-19 death rates are 7,900 times higher among adults older than 85 than they are among kids ages 5 to 17. Death rates were also higher among men than women, again consistent with COVID-19 trends. Death rates varied widely across racial and ethnic groups, too. Overall death rates were highest among Black and American Indian/Alaska Native people, while COVID-19 death rates were highest among American Indian/Alaska Native and Hispanic people. Though these figures are provisional and may change somewhat as the CDC’s data are finalized, they paint a stark picture. Last year marks the first since 2017 that the national death rate rose. It’s too soon to say whether the trend will continue in 2021, but COVID-19 remains a major cause of death both in the U.S. and globally. More than 550,000 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported in the U.S. since the pandemic began, and the virus continues to kill hundreds of people in the U.S. each day. from https://ift.tt/3cARW5s Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ It’s the last news anyone wants to hear: one year after the United States was slammed with its first wave of COVID-19—which was followed by even worse second and third waves—public health experts are worried that the country is headed for a fourth major spike. During a White House coronavirus briefing on Monday, Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, begged Americans to keep following public health guidelines amid small but alarming upticks in cases, hospitalizations and deaths. “Right now, I’m scared,” she said. Other scientists tracking the spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. agree that there’s plenty to be worried about. Cases are rising in the Northeast, Midwest and elsewhere. At the same time, many governors are relaxing measures intended to limit the spread of the virus, such as mask mandates and caps on restaurant capacity. Furthermore, as vaccinations continue across the country, some people are getting more cavalier about mask wearing and social distancing, even though most Americans still haven’t been inoculated. We’re also in the middle of Passover and approaching Easter, and celebratory gatherings could result in further spread. However, even if we’re in the early days of a fourth wave, there’s good reason to think this one might be less disastrous than the previous three. Dr. Mark Roberts, director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Public Health Dynamics lab, points to the relatively small uptick in deaths as a sign that prioritizing high-risk people for vaccination may be resulting in fewer fatalities even as cases increase (though deaths are a lagging indicator, so it may be too early to tell if this is truly the case). He adds that immunity from exposure among people who previously contracted the virus is likely working in conjunction with mass vaccination to limit viral spread. Of course, if there’s another wave, many people may get sick or worse regardless, and even a minor case of COVID-19 can result in long-lasting complications. It’s still too soon to tell whether what we’re seeing in the data will end up being a blip or a bomb, says Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. As Lessler points out, the U.S. is in a race to vaccinate huge numbers of people as quickly as possible before more contagious or deadly variants of the virus proliferate, and as states roll back mitigation measures. Unvaccinated people may be at particularly high risk over the coming weeks, especially as vaccinated people begin to resume more normal lives, increasing everyone’s temptation to throw caution to the wind regardless of their inoculation status. “This is leading to huge uncertainty in how things are going to unfold in the coming weeks and months,” Lessler says. “I would be surprised if we don’t see at least one state with a significant resurgence, though I doubt it will happen everywhere.” What does all this mean for you and me? A fourth surge in cases may be imminent, but the toll of this spike could be blunted by mass vaccination—especially as states across the country continue opening vaccine eligibility to broad swaths of the population. Either way, the public health guidance remains the same. “If individuals and communities continue to exercise caution, we can prevent a major surge,” says Lauren Ancel Meyers, director of the University of Texas at Austin’s COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. “This means wearing face masks, taking sensible precautions—particularly around unvaccinated people—and isolating if we have symptoms or believe we may have been exposed to the virus.” While no one person can stop COVID-19 from surging again, you can still take steps to protect yourself and the people around you. This story originally appeared in The Coronavirus Brief, TIME’s daily COVID-19 newsletter. You can sign up here. from https://ift.tt/3doS471 Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Pfizer-BioNTech says their COVID-19 vaccine is 100% efficacious in protecting adolescents aged 12 to 15 years from COVID-19 disease. On March 31, the companies released a statement summarizing the results of their study of the safety and efficacy of their vaccine, which is already authorized in the U.S. and elsewhere for use in adults 16 years or older, in this younger age group. The results have been highly anticipated as state and local leaders—not to mention parents—are to keen send teens back to in-person school; this study suggests a path towards a return to pre-pandemic learning conditions, in which students won’t spread COVID-19 in the classroom. The trial involved 2,260 adolescents 12 to 15 years old, who were randomly assigned to get two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine or two doses of placebo. During the study, which began earlier this year, 18 teens developed COVID-19, all of them in the placebo group. The researchers found that the levels of virus-fighting antibodies generated by those getting the vaccine were considerably higher than levels among those receiving the placebo. “We share the urgency to expand use of our vaccine to additional populations and are encouraged by the clinical trial data from adolescents between the ages of 12 and 15,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said in the statement. Based on the new data, the companies plan to ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expand emergency use authorization for the vaccine to include 12- to 15-year-olds. Even more encouraging the antibody levels exceeded the levels of those in the 16-25 year old age group in the original adult trial of the shots. And the researchers found no significant side effects from the vaccine among the teens, although they will continue to monitor them for long term efficacy of the shot as well as side effects for two years. Those data will ultimately help to enhance understanding of how COVID-19 affects children. So far, experts say children don’t seem to be affected by the virus as severely as older adults, although protecting them from symptoms of the disease is critical, not least as an additional way to curb spread of the virus. In a recent study of adults published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, scientists found that the mRNA-based vaccine not only protects against symptoms of the disease, but can ward off infection with the virus in the first place. The adolescent study wasn’t designed to confirm this in the younger population as well, but given younger people’s more responsive immune systems, it’s likely they might benefit from the same protection from infection. That would mean vaccinated students are far less likely to spread the virus in a school setting because they’re less likely to get infected to begin with. from https://ift.tt/39vkf3g Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ We Must Treat Gun Violence as a Public Health Crisis. These 4 Steps Will Help Us Reduce Deaths3/30/2021 COVID-19 has taught us many deadly lessons, among them how dangerous it is to approach a health problem as a political problem. We have lost lives, jobs, hope, and an imagined future, all because scoring political points became more important than following the science. This is not the first time that Americans have made this mistake of conflating politics and health. For decades, we have made the same error about firearm injuries. We have not approached gun deaths as an issue of public health. As a result, we have not just failed to contain gun injuries and deaths, we have seen them increase substantially in number and horror. For most Americans “gun violence” surfaces only when there is a mass shooting. The fact is, gun-related injuries are far more common than we think. From 2014 to 2017, death rates from gunshot wounds in the United States increased by approximately 20%. In 2020, preliminary reports suggest that the overall rate of gun homicide and suicide increased 10%. More than 100 people died, and more than 200 were injured, by firearms every single day of 2020. Most of these deaths, as in every other year, were gun suicides. The two public mass shootings in March—in the spas in Atlanta, Georgia, and at the supermarket in Boulder, Colorado--are horrific. But for gun violence in America, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Each firearm-related injury and death leaves a trail of destruction, contagion, post-traumatic stress, future injury, and lost wages behind. We must meet this challenge by approaching firearm injury as a public health epidemic, rather than a debate about gun rights or control. This is what we’ve done for COVID-19—we’ve tested, we’ve identified that being a frontline worker puts you at risk, we’ve proven that masks and vaccines make a difference, and now we’re (finally) spreading these small miracles across the country. We’re on the road to ending that pandemic. History provides us with many other examples. For instance, in the 1970s, car crashes were thought of as inevitable. Since then, death rates have decreased by more than two-thirds—despite there being more and faster cars on the road, and millions of more miles traveled—thanks to the public health approach. Instead of trying to ban cars, we used good public health techniques. We improved car safety through engineering (installing airbags and 3-point seatbelts). We educated parents about the importance of child car seats. We passed laws about drunk driving. And we funded research on how to make us safer. We knew that policy was necessary, but not sufficient. Now compare that to our approach to firearm injury. In 1996, the now infamous Dickey Amendment was passed. It ostensibly banned use of government funds to advocate for gun control (which, by the way, was already illegal). But after its passage, all money that our country’s research institutions had received for firearm injury prevention, dried up. As a result, government-funded research on the public health approach to firearm injury prevention has been 50-100 times smaller by dollars spent than for diseases and injuries that kill a similar number of people. And that means that we have had no reliable data on gun injuries, and minimal data on deaths. We have been relying on the goodness of philanthropy and non-profits to develop new ways to stem the tide. We have also been stuck in tired arguments between banning guns and arming everyone, thinking that policy debates alone were sufficient, instead of doing the hard work to reduce risk and improve safety. Considering the number of guns in private hands in America, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that laws alone will fix this problem. To move forward requires that we really, finally, use a basic, four-step public health approach. First, we need accurate data. The American people deserve to know who is hurt, and where, and why. We deserve to know what makes some firearm owners safe, and others not. We deserve to know which policies are effective, and which aren’t. Second, this approach requires non-partisan money to create answers and drive change. Although a total of $25 million was appropriated to the NIH and CDC in 2020 for firearm injury prevention, this is a drop in the bucket compared to the decades during which this issue was sidelined. As we learned with COVID-19 vaccines, without funding—whether for Operation Warp Speed or for the logistics behind its distribution—there can be no progress. The solutions may involve effective policies, but they may also include changes in the ways that guns are engineered, changes in beliefs about risk, or changes in economic incentives for safety. We need the best and brightest minds in the country working on this problem. Third, once we know what works, we need to scale it up, quickly. A few examples among many: Violence interruption programs like Advance Peace have effectively decreased gun homicides in cities in California; Innovative suicide prevention programs like Lock2Live.org can help ER doctors to counsel suicidal patients on safer storage of guns, and improve safe storage among the military; Turning vacant lots into gardens in high risk neighborhoods decreases crime, stress, and gunshot wounds in surrounding blocks; Physician counseling of parents and teens results in improved safe storage of firearms and reduces future violence. These programs, and others, deserve investment. And with proper research funding, there will be many, many more to come. Finally, a successful public health approach to firearm injury requires that we stop pointing fingers, and instead work together. Some of the most promising approaches to firearm injury prevention (such as the work of AFFIRM Research, a non-profit that I’m affiliated with) are true partnerships between those who are experts in firearms, and those who are experts in health. Because, honestly, both sides of the debate are right. Yes, we would have zero gun deaths if we had zero guns. But a gun does not go off on its own; there is always a person behind it. Ultimately, there are too many guns in the hands of people whose risk changes in an instant. The public health approach requires that we talk about both the object, and the person. It’s time to flip the narrative. These mass shootings, and the 1000s of daily tragedies behind them, are not inevitable. We can reduce gun deaths, just like we did for cars, by acknowledging that firearm injury is, at its root, a health problem—and that solutions are within reach. from https://ift.tt/3sDDP4K Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ In a report published today in the MMWR, scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report more good news from real-world studies of people who have been vaccinated against COVID-19. In the study involving 3,950 health care workers, first responders and other essential workers who were vaccinated between December 2020 and March 2021, the researchers found that the two-dose vaccines are 90% effective in protecting people from getting infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. A single dose of the shot provided 80% protection from infection. The people in the study were vaccinated with one of the first two authorized shots, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which both require two doses and rely on mRNA technology. In the studies that both companies provided to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to earn emergency use authorization, the shots were 94% to 95% efficacious in protecting people from getting sick with COVID-19. What the studies didn’t show was whether vaccinated people were also protected from getting infected with the virus in the first place. These new, real-world findings show that the vaccines also protect against infection itself, a critical extra layer of protection, since anyone who is infected can spread the disease to others, even if they don’t experience any symptoms themselves. In the MMWR study, CDC scientists found that two weeks after getting both doses, people in the trial were nearly fully protected against getting infected with the virus, compared to people who weren’t vaccinated. The study was able to tease this apart by asking each of the participants to take weekly COVID-19 tests by swabbing their noses. Most of the positive tests occurred in people who had no symptoms at the time they were tested, and did not even know they were infected. The fact that the mRNA vaccines are 90% effective in protecting people from infection is an important benefit of the shots. But, say experts, the encouraging news doesn’t mean that vaccinated people can shed their masks. And that’s because of new variants of the virus that have emerged that the vaccines were not designed to target. The study didn’t show whether vaccinated people are also protected from infection with one of the variants now circulating around the world. That means that people vaccinated with either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shots can still get infected, and sick, if they are infected with one of these variants, albeit not as severely sick as they might have if they hadn’t gotten the shots. In addition, they could also still pass along the variant virus to others. “People may interpret these results as meaning, ‘Great, now that I’m vaccinated I don’t need to wear a mask because I’m not at risk of infection,’” says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the FDA advisory committee that reviews vaccines. “The problem with that are the variants. You can still get sick if you are exposed to a variant, and you can still shed and spread the virus.” Plus, while vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected, and therefore much less likely to spread the virus, it’s still not entirely clear that they are not contagious, if they do happen to get infected. “Until there is a lot less transmission in the community, I will continue wearing a mask,” says Dr. Carlos Del Rio professor of medicine at Emory University, who has been vaccinated. “The protection against infection wasn’t perfect—80% to 90%. Can I increase that to closer to 100% by wearing a mask? Yes.” To document whether vaccinated people are less contagious, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases launched a study in March to follow 12,000 college students from 21 universities, and their close contacts. Half of the students will be vaccinated immediately, with the other half vaccinated four months later. All participants will provide detailed information about their close contacts, including roommates, classmates and teammates, and swab their noses daily to test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2. Researchers will follow up anyone with a positive test by testing the close contacts of these individuals to see if they too became infected. By comparing infection rates among the contacts of those who were vaccinated and those who weren’t, scientists can get a better idea of whether vaccinated people can spread the virus. Those results will take about six months, and until then, the CDC is still recommending that even people who are fully vaccinated can only drop their masks if they are indoors with other people who are fully vaccinated in small groups. In the meantime, “I hope people don’t interpret this study wrongly,” says Offit. He’s concerned that since a single dose of the mRNA vaccines was 80% effective in protecting against infection, people might skip the recommended second dose. That would be a bad idea, he says, because “It is clear, crystal clear, that you need the second dose to produce adequate T-cell immunity,” which is the more durable and complete immunity that will help people to mount strong immune responses to not just the original virus but to different variants as well. “T-cell immunity provides cross protection against variants; if you don’t have T-cells you are much less likely to be protected against the variants. I worry these results may push some people to get just one dose.” Instead, the findings should make more people comfortable about the effectiveness of the vaccines, and even help to loosen current CDC social-distancing restrictions. “Hopefully this study will be perceived as even stronger evidence that you can’t get infected if you’ve been vaccinated, and at the end of the day, people want to hear that,” says Del Rio. from https://ift.tt/3rsraAo Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Linda Heim knew her dad didn’t plan to wait for the cancer to kill him. For decades, he’d lived in Montana, which they’d thought was one of the few places where terminally ill people could get a prescription to end their life. After two years of being sick, Heim’s dad got the diagnosis in 2019: stage 4 kidney cancer. His physician offered treatments that might extend his life by months. Instead, the 81-year-old asked the doctor for help dying. Heim said her parents left the appointment in their hometown of Billings with two takeaways: The legality of medically assisted death was questionable in Montana and her father’s physician didn’t seem willing to risk his career to put that question to the test. “My parents knew when they left there that was the end of that conversation,” says Heim, now 54. “My dad was upset and mad.” The day after the appointment, Heim’s mother went grocery shopping. While she was gone, Heim’s dad went to the backyard and fatally shot himself. (Heim asked that her father’s name not be published due to the lingering stigma of suicide.) About a decade earlier, in 2009, the Montana Supreme Court had, in theory, cracked open the door to sanctioned medically assisted death. The court ruled physicians could use a dying patient’s consent as a defense if charged with homicide for prescribing life-ending medication. However, the ruling sidestepped whether terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to that aid. Whether that case made aid in dying legal in Montana has been debated ever since. “There is just no right to medical aid in dying in Montana, at least no right a patient can rely on like in the other states,” says former state Supreme Court Justice Jim Nelson. “Every time a physician does it, the physician rolls the dice.” Every session of the biennial Montana state legislature since then, a lawmaker has proposed a bill to formally criminalize physician-assisted death. Those who back the bills say the aid is morally wrong while opponents say criminalizing the practice would be a backstep for patients’ rights. But so far, lawmakers haven’t gained enough support to pass any legislation on the issue, though it has been close. The latest effort stalled on March 1, on a split vote. Even the terminology to describe the practice is disputed. Some say it’s “suicide” anytime someone intentionally ends their life. Others say it’s “death with dignity” when choosing to expedite a painful end. Such debates have gone on for decades. But Montana remains the sole state stuck in a legal gray zone, even if the practice can still seem taboo in many states with clear laws. Such continued uncertainty makes it especially hard for Montana patients like Heim’s dad and their doctors to navigate what’s allowed. “Doctors are risk-averse,” said Dr. David Orentlicher, director of the health law program at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, who helped write clinical aid-in-dying guidelines published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine in 2016. “The fear of being sued or prosecuted is still there.” Despite that, access to medical aid in dying is gaining momentum across the U.S. Outside Montana, eight states and the District of Columbia allow the life-ending aid—six of them since 2014. So far in 2021, legislators in at least 19 states have pushed aid-in-dying bills, most seeking to legalize the practice and some seeking to drop barriers to existing aid such as expanding which medical professionals can offer it. Many are repeat legalization efforts with some, like in New York, dating as far back as 1995. Only the Montana bill this year specifically sought to criminalize it. North Dakota considered legislation to legalize medically assisted death for the first time. Rep. Pamela Anderson, a Democrat from Fargo who proposed the measure after hearing from a cancer patient, says she wasn’t surprised when the bill failed last month in a 9-85 vote. The state’s medical association said it was “incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.” Angry voters called Anderson asking why she wanted to kill people. “But I heard from just as many people that this was a good bill,” Anderson says. “There is momentum to not let this concept go away.” Back in Montana, now retired state Supreme Court Justice Nelson says he has always regretted joining the majority in the case that allowed the practice because the narrow ruling focused on physicians’ legal defense, not patients’ rights. Having watched a friend die slowly from disease, Nelson, 77, wants the choice himself if ever needed. Despite—or because of—the court decision, some Montana doctors do today feel that they can accommodate such patient decisions. For example, Dr. Colette Kirchhoff, a hospice and palliative care physician, says until she retired from private practice last year she considered patients’ requests for life-ending drugs. Physicians who help in such cases follow well-established guidelines set by other states, Kirchhoff says. A patient must have six months or less to live—a fact corroborated by a second physician—can’t be clinically depressed, needs to ask for the aid and be an adult capable of making health care decisions, which is determined by the attending physician. They must also administer the life-ending medication themselves. “You’re obviously not going to do a case that is vague or nebulous or has family discord,” Kirchhoff says. “The doctors who are prescribing have felt comfortable and that they’re doing the right thing for their patient, alleviating their suffering.” Of her few patients who qualified for a prescription, she says, none actually took the drugs. Kirchhoff notes that, in some cases, getting the prescription seemed to provide comfort to her patients—it was enough knowing they had the option if their illness became unbearable. For the past six legislative sessions—dating back to 2011—a Montana lawmaker has proposed a bill to clarify that state law doesn’t allow physician-assisted death. Republican Sen. Carl Glimm picked up that effort the past two sessions. Glimm says the current status, based on the more than decade-old court decision sends a mixed message in a state that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranks as having among the nation’s highest suicide rates. Glimm said allowing someone to end their life because of pain from a terminal illness could normalize suicide for people living with depression, which is also a form of pain. “It’s really hard because I do sympathize with them,” Glimm says. “What it boils down to is, if you’re going to take your own life, then that’s suicide.” Kim Callinan, president and CEO of national nonprofit Compassion & Choices, says the comparison to suicide is frustrating. “People who are seeking medical aid in dying want to live, but they are stricken with a life-ending illness,” she says. Glimm and his bill’s supporters say that some patients could be pressured into it by family members with something to gain, and doctors could prescribe it more often than they should. But Callinan, whose group advocates for aid in dying, says that since Oregon first legalized it in 1997, no data has shown any merit to the warnings about abuse and coercion. One study showed no evidence of heightened risk of abuse within the practice for vulnerable populations such as the elderly. But critics have said states aren’t doing enough to track the issue. By now, Leslie Mutchler, 60, knows most of the people on all sides of the debate after years of testifying in support of protecting aid in dying. Her dad, Bob Baxter, was a plaintiff in the case that eventually led to the 2009 Montana Supreme Court decision on medically assisted death. After leukemia whittled his body for years, he died in 2008 without the option, the same day a lower court ruled in his favor. Mutchler said she didn’t understand how complicated the Supreme Court’s ultimate ruling was until her son TJ was diagnosed with terminal metastatic pancreatic cancer in 2016. He was 36 and lived in Billings, Montana. By then, the 6-foot-5 man had lost 125 pounds off what had been a 240-pound frame. He couldn’t keep food down and needed a feeding tube for medicine and water. TJ Mutchler wanted to have the choice his grandfather never got. But when he went to his physician and asked for aid in dying, the response was it wasn’t legal. Eventually, Mutchler found a doctor to evaluate her son and write the prescriptions for phenobarbital and amitriptyline. TJ took the drugs more than two months later and died. “People contact me asking how to find someone and it’s difficult,” Mutchler said. “That’s why people end up taking matters into their own hands.” Research into terminally ill populations is limited, but one national study published in 2019 found the risk of someone with cancer taking their own life is four times higher than the general population. For Roberta King, another one of Baxter’s daughters, the ongoing fight over aid in dying in Montana means she knows every other winter she’ll make the more than 200-mile round trip from her Missoula home to the state capital. King, 58, has testified against all six bills that sought to ban aid in dying following her dad’s case. She memorized a speech about how her dad became so thin after his medicine stopped working that it hurt for him to sit. “It’s still terrible, you still have to get up there in front of everybody and they know what you’re going to say because it’s the same people doing the same thing,” King says. But skipping a hearing doesn’t feel like an option. “If something were to happen to this and I didn’t try, I would never forgive myself,” she says. KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation. from https://ift.tt/3sBIBQj Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ BEIJING — A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19 says that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely,” according to a draft copy obtained by The Associated Press. The findings were largely as expected and left many questions unanswered, but the report provided in-depth detail on the reasoning behind the team’s conclusions. The researchers proposed further research in every area except the lab leak hypothesis. The report’s release has been repeatedly delayed, raising questions about whether the Chinese side was trying to skew the conclusions to prevent blame for the pandemic falling on China. A World Health Organization official said late last week that he expected it would be ready for release “in the next few days.” The AP received what appeared to be a near-final version on Monday from a Geneva-based diplomat from a WHO-member country. It wasn’t clear whether the report might still be changed prior to its release. The diplomat did not want to be identified because they were not authorized to release it ahead of publication. The researchers listed four scenarios in order of likelihood for the emergence of the virus named SARS-CoV-2. Topping the list was transmission through a second animal, which they said was likely to very likely. They evaluated direct spread from bats to humans as likely, and said that spread through “cold-chain” food products was possible but not likely. The closest relative of the virus that causes COVID-19 has been found in bats, which are known to carry coronaviruses. However, the report says that “the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated to be several decades, suggesting a missing link.” It said highly similar viruses have been found in pangolins, but also noted that mink and cats are susceptible to the COVID virus, which suggests they could be carriers. The report is based largely on a visit by a WHO team of international experts to Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 was first detected, from mid-January to mid-February. Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO expert who led the Wuhan mission, said Friday that the report had been finalized and was being fact-checked and translated. “I expect that in the next few days, that whole process will be completed and we will be able to release it publicly,” he said. The draft report is inconclusive on whether the outbreak started at a Wuhan seafood market that had one of the earliest clusters of cases in December 2019. The discovery of other cases before the Huanan market outbreak suggests it may have started elsewhere. But the report notes there could have been milder cases that went undetected and that could be a link between the market and earlier cases. “No firm conclusion therefore about the role of the Huanan market in the origin of the outbreak, or how the infection was introduced into the market, can currently be drawn,” the report says. As the pandemic spread globally, China found samples of the virus on the packaging of frozen food coming into the country and, in some cases, have tracked localized outbreaks to them. The report said that the cold chain, as it is known, can be a driver of long-distance virus spread but was skeptical it could have triggered the outbreak. The report says the risk is lower than through human-to-human respiratory infection, and most experts agree. “While there is some evidence for possible reintroduction of SARS-CoV-2 through handling of imported contaminated frozen products in China since the initial pandemic wave, this would be extraordinary in 2019 where the virus was not widely circulating,” the study said. ___ Associated Press writers Victoria Milko in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Jamey Keaten contributed. The AP Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content. from https://ift.tt/3szeads Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to receive a new edition every Sunday. CHASING RAINBOWS (AND VACCINES)We humans are notoriously unreliable, superstitious narrators, always scanning the horizon for signs that validate what our hearts have already told us. Take me, for example. I keep telling people I was vaccinated at Hogwarts’ Manhattan campus under the waxing moon (it was a gibbous moon to be exact). How auspicious! Ok, so my COVID-vax site was really The City College of New York. But stepping through its big old gothic gates to receive a blessing of science was wondrous, maybe a little spiritual. There was even a rainbow-y halo around that big moon, another lucky omen if you’re hungry for such things. I started digging for lore on moons and rainbows and learned that the physics of rainbows doesn’t detract from the mythical place they have in our cultural imaginations. In fact the opposite. Just ask Steven Businger, professor and chair of Atmospheric Sciences Department at University of Hawai’i in Manoa. He’s a co-creator of RainbowChase, an app that alerts users when nearby conditions are conducive to rainbow sightings. And after decades in a state where mind-blowing rainbows are a daily occurrence, Businger still pulls over to take photos of them. “I’m completely spiritually gobsmacked by rainbows,” he says. Most of Businger’s research has to do with hazardous weather, storm evolution, and forecasting. But in this pandemic year, he went on a bit of a glorious tangent to look at the science and mythology behind Hawaii’s prolific rainbows, which he posits are the most spectacular on Earth thanks to the state’s unique geography and weather patterns. “The Hawaiians thought the rainbow was a path to a higher dimension, and in a real sense, it is,” says Businger. <strong>The rainbow plays with our consciousness, and it’s a beautiful interplay. You look at it, you meditate, and boom, you’re in touch with a higher dimension</strong>. The idea of the rainbow as a source of life, or a bridge to another plane, is embedded in cultural traditions across the world, from the ancient Greek rainbow goddess Iris to Aboriginal people of the desert’s stories of the Rainbow Serpent and the mythical Norse rainbow bridge to the land of the gods, Bifrost. If you’re new to It’s Not Just You, subscribe here to receive a fresh edition every Sunday. In Businger’s March 11 article, “The Secrets of the Best Rainbows on Earth,” he points out that there are more than a dozen different words for rainbow in Hawaiian. There are Earth-clinging rainbows (uakoko), standing rainbow shafts (kāhili), and barely visible rainbows (punakea). There is also something called a moonbow, or lunar rainbow, a rare event in which the moon refracts light through water droplets in the air creating a kind of rainbow, similar to what the sun does. And alas, Businger tells me that the colors I saw in the halo around the moon at City College were a moonbow which, like a rainbow, is only seen when the moon or sun is behind you. What I likely saw on my way to get my coronavirus vaccine was a gorgeous lunar corona. And with that, I rest my mystical case. Unfolded by rainbows are the faces of the flowers. –Hawaiian proverb Check out Steven Businger’s interview on Science Friday for more rainbow science. If you’re new to It’s Not Just You, SUBSCRIBE HERE to receive an essay every Sunday. And write to me at: [email protected] COPING KIT ⛱<strong>The sun’s white winds blow through you, there’s nothing above you, you see the earth now as an oval jewel, radiant & seablue with love.</strong>you don’t have to be everything Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves is a gift-worthy collection of 68 poems organized by emotion including works by Amanda Gorman, Sharon Olds, and Margaret Atwood. ―Margaret Atwood, Flying Inside Your Own Body <strong>Empathy is a superpower, most especially in the workplace. It builds connection, makes for less dysfunction, and helps you find your way to the right purpose</strong>.EMPATHY FOR CHANGE is a new guide to cultivating empathy in thought and action, and why it’s an essential 21st-century skill. Author and former White House entrepreneur-in-residence Amy J. Wilson writes: EVIDENCE OF HUMAN KINDNESS❤️Here’s your weekly reminder that creating a community of generosity elevates us all. The Antidote to Pandemic Loneliness<strong>These strangers saved my life.</strong> </span><strong><span data-preserver-spaces="true">In a few weeks, I received thousands of emails and had regular pen pals…people who told me that I mattered and filled my heart with hope and joy. I no longer felt so alone. I realized that everyone feels the way that I did at some point</span></strong>.<span data-preserver-spaces="true"> Denise, a 37-year-old woman from Phoenix, wrote Pandemic of Love last May that being quarantined made her realize how alone she was. She began to wonder if anyone would even notice if she disappeared. POL Founder Shelly Tygielski called her to check-in. Then Tygielski asked her Instagram followers to “FLOOD a special email address with letters for Denise telling her she matters, that she is important, beautiful, and SEEN.” Denise has since received more than 3,000 emails via [email protected]. She writes: Story and images courtesy of Shelly Tygielski, founder of Pandemic of Love, a grassroots organization that matches volunteers, donors, and those in need. COMFORT CREATURES ? ?from https://ift.tt/3dt1i2v Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ Alejandra and Marisol Gerardo are nine years old but already making a little bit of history. The twin sisters are among the first young children to get vaccinated with a COVID-19 shot in Pfizer-BioNTech’s study of its vaccine in kids under age 12. Alejandra and Marisol had their blood drawn in the morning on March 24, then got their first dose of the two-dose vaccine later that afternoon at Duke University Medical Center, one of four study sites in the U.S. for the trial. “Their primary concern was, ‘is it going to hurt,’” says their father, Dr. Charles Gerardo, chief of emergency medicine at Duke University School of Medicine. “They’re not too worried about the long term side effects; they’re looking at the moment, not the future.” Testing the vaccine in younger children will answer critical questions about how much immunity the shots can provide, and potentially give parents and education officials more confidence in re-opening schools. While it appears that younger children don’t get as sick with COVID-19 as older teens and adults do, how these children’s immune systems respond to the virus, and to the vaccine, remains a black box. The trial will also help provide some clarity on those questions. Pfizer-BioNTech says it will test the same vaccine that is currently authorized for emergency use in the U.S. for those 16 years and older, but this time in children aged six months to 11 years. The company is currently wrapping up a study of its two-dose shot in adolescents aged 12 to 15 years in the U.S. and Europe. The latest pediatric trial will follow the same three-phased approach as the adult study, with Phase 1 involving 144 children aged five to 11 years at Duke, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Johns Hopkins, who will all receive the vaccine but be randomly assigned one of three dosages. If the vaccine is safe in this age group, children aged two to four years will be tested, and if safe in that group, the youngest children from six months to two years will get the vaccine. Depending on the immune responses these children generate, the scientists at Pfizer-BioNTech will make a decision about the safest and most effective dose with which to proceed in its Phase 2 and Phase 3 studies. Those will include a total of about 4,500 children broken down in the same age categories, this time randomly assigned to receive either the vaccine or placebo in a 2:1 ratio. The results will be analyzed after six months to determine if the children receiving the vaccine both generated a stronger immune response than those getting placebo, and that the response was on par with responses in vaccinated adults. If that’s the case, then Pfizer-BioNTech will submit the data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expand authorization to younger children, and hopefully start vaccinating them by early next year. Dr. Emmanuel Walter, professor of pediatrics and chief medical officer at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute who is overseeing the trial there, says the study will answer important questions about the safety and dosing of the vaccine for children—specifically whether younger children will need a different dose than adolescents and adults. The trial will test a dose about one-third that of the current adult dose, another that is about half of the adult dose, as well as the adult dose. While the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 shot is the first mRNA technology-based vaccine of any kind to gain FDA authorization, Walter says it’s likely to be safe in children. “I don’t think it’s the platform so much that I would worry about for young children—I feel comfortable giving the mRNA to young children. I think the questions of will they have side effects, will the vaccine be tolerable to children, and do we need to use a smaller dose in young kids, are the biggest things.” So far, Walter says that they have seen an “overwhelming” response to the pediatric trial, with parents like the Gerardos expressing interest in enrolling their children. Both Gerardo and his wife, who is an infectious disease physician at Duke, are vaccinated, and he says before his daughters joined the trial, they discussed volunteering with the girls. “They understand that the results are going to impact other kids, and that’s one of the lessons we wanted to teach them with this experience,” he says. “That this was one of the ways to contribute to help other people.” from https://ift.tt/3vWOQjL Check out https://takiaisfobia.blogspot.com/ |
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