Israeli vaccine chief: “We have made mistakes” Professor Cyrille Cohen is head of Immunology at Bar Ilan University and a member of the advisory committee for vaccines for the Israeli Government. In a wide-ranging and forthright interview, the Professor tells Freddie Sayers: The Green Pass / vaccine passport concept is no longer relevant in the Omicron era and should be phased out (he expects it to be in short order in Israel) He and his colleagues were surprised and disappointed that the vaccines did not prevent transmission, as they had originally hoped The biggest mistake of the pandemic in Israel was closing schools and education – he apologised for that Widespread infection is now an inevitable part of future immunity — otherwise known as herd immunity Omicron has accelerated the pandemic into the endemic phase, in which Covid will be “like flu”
It took the Influenza about +40 years to become seasonal. In the meantime, about +60 million were killed by Influenza because mutations were occurring anytime in any of those years...causing mass casualty, and then it took another +15 years to develop a vaccine for Influenza. My point, it will be many years before Covid becomes seasonal. Until then, we'll just need to learn to live with Variants of Concern being birth any time during the year. Hopefully, we don't get a new VOC that's more pathogenic than Delta combined with the transmissibility of Omicron. Our population is just too unhealthy for Covid to become seasonal anytime soon but the holidays will typically be the hardest hit duration of Covid infections, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths because of the need to travel...greatly appreciated by Covid. wrbtrader
Early Omicron Breakthroughs Show MRNA Vaccines’ Weakness (Bloomberg) -- Booster shots with messenger RNA vaccines such as those made by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE failed to block omicron in a study of some of the first documented breakthrough cases caused by the highly contagious variant. Seven German visitors to Cape Town experienced symptomatic Covid-19 infections between late November and early December despite being boosted, the researchers, whose Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/mrna-boosters-don-t-block-omicron-south-african-study-shows Copyright © BloombergQuint
When the Delta variant dominated, vaccination and prior infection protected against Covid-19, but vaccination was safest, study finds https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/health/covid-vaccine-infection-protection-cdc-study/index.html When the Delta variant was dominant in the United States, both vaccination and prior infection helped protect against Covid-19, but vaccination was the safest way to be protected, according to a study published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The data included in the study was collected before the Omicron wave in the United States, and before boosters were widely available. The CDC says it will publish additional data on Covid-19 vaccines, boosters and the Omicron variant later this week. "Although the epidemiology of COVID-19 might change as new variants emerge, vaccination remains the safest strategy for averting future SARS-CoV-2 infections, hospitalizations, long-term sequelae, and death," the researchers wrote. Researchers analyzed the risk of Covid-19 infection and hospitalization among four groups of individuals: vaccinated with and without prior infection and unvaccinated with and without prior infection. The study case data from about 1.1 million cases in California and New York between the end of May and mid-November 2021. Hospitalization data was available from California only. Overall, Covid-19 case and hospitalization rates were highest among unvaccinated people who did not have a previous diagnosis. (More at above url)
Florida Department of Health Suspends Medical Director for Encouraging Staff to Get Vaccinated January 19th, 2022 Via: Business Insider: Dr. Raul Pino, the director of the Florida Department of Health in Orange County, wrote in a January 4 email that he was concerned that only 219 out of 568 staff members had received two doses of the vaccine, the Associated Press and Central Florida News reported. “I have a hard time understanding how we can be in public health and not practice it,” he added, Central Florida News reported. The Florida Department of Health confirmed that Pino was put on administrative leave and said it will be investigating whether any laws were broken by sending the email. “As the decision to get vaccinated is a personal medical choice that should be made free from coercion and mandates from employers, the employee in question (Pino) has been placed on administrative leave,” Department of Health press secretary Jeremy Redfern said in a statement, News 6 reported https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=63161
It’s very sad that a HEALTH DEPARTMENT suspends an employee for urging people to get vaccinated. But this is DeSantis’ Florida where common sense has no home.
Fauci says FDA could authorize Pfizer’s Covid vaccine for kids under 5 in the next month https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/fau...ccine-for-kids-under-5-in-the-next-month.html
Study involves those vaccinated with Pfizer... Stanford finds a new way to predict who will get severe COVID-19 https://knowridge.com/2022/01/stanford-finds-a-new-way-to-predict-who-will-get-severe-covid-19/ In a new study from Stanford Medicine, researchers found blood drawn from patients shortly after they were infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may indicate who is most likely to land in the hospital. They found that antibodies elicited by an mRNA vaccine—in this case, Pfizer’s—differ in important, beneficial ways from those in people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who later progress to severe symptoms. In the study, the team collected blood samples from 178 adults who had tested positive for COVID-19 upon visiting a Stanford Health Care hospital or clinic. At the time of testing, these individuals’ symptoms were universally mild. As time passed, 15 participants developed symptoms bad enough to land them in the emergency department. The team analyzed the antibodies in blood samples taken from study participants on the day of their coronavirus test and 28 days later. They found some notable differences between those who developed severe symptoms and those who didn’t. The researchers found that while many participants whose symptoms remained mild had healthy levels of neutralizing antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 from the get-go, participants who wound up hospitalized had initially minimal or undetectable levels of neutralizing antibodies, although their immune cells started pumping them out later in the infection’s course. In addition, in participants who progressed to severe COVID-19, sugar chains on certain antibodies targeting SARS-CoV2 were deficient in a variety of sugar called fucose. This deficiency was evident on the day these “progressors” first tested positive. So, it wasn’t a result of severe infection but preceded it. Furthermore, immune cells in these patients featured inordinately high levels of receptors for these fucose-lacking types of antibodies. Such receptors, called CD16a, are known to boost immune cells’ inflammatory activity. The scientists also studied the antibodies elicited in 29 adults after they received the first and second doses of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. They found two vaccine doses led to overall high neutralizing-antibody levels. In addition, antibody fucose content was high in the vaccinated and mildly symptomatic groups but low in the hospitalized individuals. The team says the immunological factors the researchers have identified—a sluggish neutralizing-antibody response, deficient fucose levels on antibody-attached sugar chains, and hyperabundant receptors for fucose-deficient antibodies—were each, on their own, modestly predictive of COVID-19 severity. But taken together, they allowed the scientists to guess the disease’s course with an accuracy of about 80%.