Always was, and no kisses, please:
“It will be impossible for family members to know whether it’s the common cold or whether it’s COVID without calling their primary care provider and asking to be tested for COVID. A lot of the symptoms are very similar in children, as well as adults.”
So they can be falsely diagnosed infectious off a flawed method regarding a test not meant to detect such a thing, and the Globe choose to convey this information on page B4:
"Colds, flu decline among children. ‘Even 3-year-olds are good at wearing masks’" by Diana Bravo Globe Correspondent, February 10, 2021
Pediatricians are seeing fewer respiratory illnesses this winter among young children, even those who are attending day care and preschool, suggesting that measures meant to prevent the spread of COVID-19 have a side benefit.
The common infections typically peak during December, January, and February, and are usually spread in group settings like school and day care.
“Whether it’s due from colds, [or] the flu, we really have not seen as much this year,” said Dr. Shirley Huang, chief of general pediatrics at Tufts Medical Center.
They think we are stupid and are trying to say it is because of the unhealthy measures of oppression for other reasons that is responsible for no cold or flu cases.... because those are now called CV!
Dr. Eileen Costello, chief of ambulatory pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, said the drop is likely the result of many young students learning remotely as well as mask-wearing and social distancing in group settings. In addition, the state mandated flu vaccines for all children 6 months or older who are enrolled in day care or preschool.
They removed that after threat of lawsuit.
Costello said BMC has had only three cases of the flu this year, all adults. The hospital has also seen just one adult case of respiratory syncytial virus, a common and potentially serious illness for infants.
Costello said that the trend seems to hold up with children attending day care and preschool in person.
“I mean, even 3-year-olds are good at wearing masks,” she said. “That’s the shocking thing: I don’t think anyone believes that a 3-year-old would keep on a mask, but they do. It’s amazing.”
I'm sorry, but she is absolutely sickening and sadly criminal.
So much of the medical profe$$ion is either an on-the-take propagandi$t or been bullied into submission.
Huang said since data indicate that it’s safe for children to go to school, day care, and camps without contracting COVID-19, the same should hold true for similar illnesses. Even if small children do contract COVID-19, they aren’t very effective at spreading the virus, Costello added.
“We know that little guys are not big spreaders of COVID. They don’t generate [much force] when they cough, they’re too little,” Costello said.
Huang said that if a child comes down with a non-COVID respiratory illness, parents should still exercise caution and contact a pediatrician.
“It will be impossible for family members to know whether it’s the common cold or whether it’s COVID without calling their primary care provider and asking to be tested for COVID,” Huang said. “A lot of the symptoms are very similar in children, as well as adults.”
Both doctors said they hope that after the pandemic ends their patients will take what they have learned and apply it to normal cold and flu seasons.
“We know how to prevent flu, but it’s not by living a normal life, which we will all go back to,” Costello said, “but I’m hoping that people will agree to wear masks if they have a bad cold, and [that] people will wash their hands more, and use Purell more, and understand to stay away from people when they’re sick.”
This has reached the level of sickening insult and it is time to stop now.
Even the New York Times admitted it:
"The future of the coronavirus? An annoying childhood infection" by Apoorva Mandavilli New York Times, January 12, 2021
As millions are inoculated against the coronavirus, and the pandemic’s end finally seems to glimmer into view, scientists are envisioning what a postvaccine world might look like — and what they see is comforting.
The coronavirus is here to stay, but once most adults are immune — following natural infection or vaccination — the virus will be no more of a threat than the common cold, according to a study published in the journal Science on Tuesday.
Because THAT IS WHAT IT ALWAYS WAS!
The virus is a grim menace now because it is an unfamiliar pathogen that can overwhelm the adult immune system, which has not been trained to fight it. That will no longer be the case once everyone has been exposed to either the virus or vaccine.
Children, on the other hand, are constantly challenged by pathogens that are new to their bodies, and that is one reason they are more adept than adults at fending off the coronavirus. Eventually, the study suggests, the virus will be of concern only in children younger than 5, subjecting even them to mere sniffles — or no symptoms at all.
In other words, the coronavirus will become “endemic,” a pathogen that circulates at low levels and only rarely causes serious illness.
“The timing of how long it takes to get to this sort of endemic state depends on how quickly the disease is spreading, and how quickly vaccination is rolled out,” said Jennie Lavine, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, who led the study.
“So really, the name of the game is getting everyone exposed for the first time to the vaccine as quickly as possible.”
One question: WHY?
If there own numbers are to be believed, herd immunity has already been achieved.
The she says it makes it sound like the VIRU$ is actually IN the VA¢¢INE -- something the alternative media has suggested and uncovered already!
The plot is diabolical, and so is the pre$$ that is pu$hing it.
Lavine and her colleagues looked to the six other human coronaviruses — four that cause the common cold, plus the SARS and MERS viruses — for clues to the fate of the new pathogen.
The four common cold coronaviruses are endemic, and produce only mild symptoms. Severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East respiratory syndrome, which surfaced in 2003 and 2012, respectively, made people severely ill, but they did not spread widely.
While all of these coronaviruses produce a similar immune response, the new virus is most similar to the endemic common cold coronaviruses, Lavine and her colleagues hypothesized.
Re-analyzing data from a previous study, they found that the first infection with common cold coronaviruses occurs on average at 3 to 5 years of age. After that age, people may become infected again and again, boosting their immunity, and keeping the viruses circulating, but they don’t become ill.
The researchers foresee a similar future for the new coronavirus.
Depending on how fast the virus spreads, and on the strength and longevity of the immune response, it would take a few years to decades of natural infections for the coronavirus to become endemic, Lavine said.
Without a vaccine, the fastest path to endemic status is also the worst. The price for population immunity would be widespread illness and death along the way.
Vaccines completely alter that calculus. The faster people can be immunized, the better. An efficient vaccination rollout could shorten the timeline to a year, or even just six months, for the coronavirus to become an endemic infection; still, the vaccines are unlikely to eradicate the coronavirus, Lavine predicted. The virus will become a permanent, albeit more benign, inhabitant in our environment.
SIGH!
Just like seasonal cold and flu, which is all it ever was since the "new virus" was never isolated in a laboratory despite agenda-pu$hiong pre$$ claims.
Other experts said this scenario was not just plausible but likely.
Shane Crotty, a virus expert at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego, said, if the vaccines prevent people from transmitting the virus, “then it becomes a lot more like the measles scenario, where you vaccinate everybody, including kids, and you really don’t see the virus infecting people anymore,” Crotty said.
It is more plausible that the vaccines will prevent illness — but not necessarily infection and transmission, he added. And that means the coronavirus will continue to circulate.
Then there is NO NEED TO TAKE IT, and what do you mean IF?!
“It’s unlikely that the vaccines we have right now are going to provide sterilizing immunity,” the kind needed to prevent infection, said Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto.
Natural infection with the coronavirus produces a strong immune response in the nose and throat, but with the current vaccines, Gommerman said, “you’re not getting a natural immune response in the actual upper respiratory tract, you’re getting an injection in the arm.” That raises the likelihood that infections will still occur, even after vaccination.
Ultimately, Lavine’s model rests on the assumption that the new coronavirus is similar to the common cold coronaviruses, but that assumption may not hold up, cautioned Marc Lipsitch, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.
Oh, God, our lives in the hands of another inconsistent and wildly inaccurate pre$$ model!
“Other coronavirus infections may or may not be applicable, because we haven’t seen what those coronaviruses can do to an older, naive person,” Lipsitch said. (Naive refers to an adult whose immune system has not been exposed to the virus.)
Another plausible scenario, he said, is that the virus may come to resemble the seasonal flu, which is mild some years and more lethal in others. New variants of the coronavirus that evade the immune response may also complicate the picture.
“Their prediction of it’s becoming like common cold coronaviruses is where I’d put a lot of my money,” Lipsitch said, “but I don’t think it’s absolutely guaranteed.”
Lip service from Lip$hit.
I can't take this insulting and, aaah, aaah, ah-choo, cough, sickening $hit much longer. Sorry.
"With drastic measures in place, flu ‘twindemic’ averted so far" by Gal Tziperman Lotan Globe Staff, January 6, 2021
As summer faded into fall, public health officials started sounding the alarm: If this flu season were anything like previous ones, hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients could, without drastic intervention, face a catastrophic influx of illnesses.
That intervention primarily focused on containing the coronavirus through a range of restrictions and advisories. Governor Charlie Baker also issued a first-in-the-nation mandate requiring flu vaccines for almost all students under age 30.
“The more people who get the flu shot don’t get the flu and don’t wind up in the ER,” Baker said in August, and while coronavirus cases have skyrocketed, the “twindemic” has so far been averted. Cases of influenza are low, both in Massachusetts and nationally.
The success in limiting the flu spread is likely due to a combination of factors, specialists said. While it’s hard to be certain, the steps people have taken to lower their risk of contracting the coronavirus are likely helping them avoid the flu as well, said Dr. Benjamin Linas, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Boston University School of Medicine. The public health emphasis on flu vaccines also has likely contributed.
“Everything that we’re doing for COVID should also help us with the flu,” he said. “If we can completely change the shape of the flu curve, I think we can really credit COVID mitigation for that.”
Is weasel wording a disease?
Influenza and COVID-19 are both upper respiratory viruses, transmitted in about the same way. That means an infected person wearing a mask over the nose and mouth can lower the risk of spreading the virus to others. Physical distancing and extra awareness of hand-washing and sanitizing can lower that risk as well.
“It’s a big help right now,” Linas said. “Our hospitals are being taxed, and to the extent that they’re also not being taxed by influenza, that’s helpful.”
Health officials also suspect that the dearth of international travel helped tamp down the flu this year, as the virus usually travels around the planet from one winter to another.
That means flu-like symptoms — high fever, coughing, fatigue, and the like — are more likely to be COVID-19 this year, said Dr. David Hooper, chief of the Infection Control Unit and associate chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital.
People experiencing those symptoms should quarantine and get tested. Some labs may be able to test a single sample for both the coronavirus and the flu, Hooper said.
They got us jumping hoops!
I'm sorry, but NONE of this GARBAGE passes the COMMON SENSE and SCIENTIFIC SMELL TEST!
From fall 2019 to spring 2020, the Centers for Disease Control estimated that influenza was likely associated with 38 million illnesses, 18 million medical visits, 405,000 hospitalizations, and about 22,000 deaths.
During the last week of 2020, the CDC tested more than 25,000 samples for influenza. Just 74 — 0.3 percent — came back positive.
In Massachusetts, the Department of Public Health classified flu risk as minimal during the last week of December. Just 1.1 percent of visits to health care providers were for possible flu, according to the department’s statistics. That’s significantly lower than the 2.5 percent of visits in the last week of 2019, which was roughly on par with the two previous years.
In future years, when COVID-19 cases are less common, the methods used to keep the pandemic under control also can be effective against the flu, Hooper said. He pointed to countries like Japan, where mask-wearing during flu season is more common, but whether Americans are willing to keep masking up in the fall and winter remains to be seen.
Well on "our" way.
“I suspect there will be little appetite for doing the masking routinely” in public settings, he said, though hospitals will likely maintain more stringent protocols. “There is eagerness to get back to pre-COVID times, when we didn’t do that routinely.”
Still, the post-pandemic future might have people getting an annual flu shot and an annual coronavirus vaccine.
“Influenza’s been around, well, for a long, long time,” Hooper said. “It’s not going to go away, and the general feeling is that SARS-CoV-2 is not going to go away, either.”
It is to be ONE INOCULATION after ANOTHER in the HELL they are proposing.
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Well, since the fall, the state has seen an alarming resurgence of the deadly virus in which case counts have soared to record heights and the daily death numbers are also rising, though they are still below those seen in the devastating spring as the state — and the nation — are scrambling to get people vaccinated to stop the pandemic, and this doctor begs to differ with him:
"Despite the horrifying surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States right now, one bit of good news is emerging this winter: It looks unlikely that the country will endure a “twindemic” of both flu and the coronavirus at the same time. That comes as a profound relief to public health officials who predicted as far back as April that thousands of flu victims with pneumonia could pour into hospitals this winter, competing with equally desperate COVID-19 pneumonia victims for scarce ventilators. “Overall flu activity is low, and lower than we usually see at this time of year,” said Dr. Daniel B. Jernigan, director of the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I don’t think we can definitively say there will be no twindemic; I’ve been working with flu for a long time, and I’ve been burned, but flu is atypically low.” Since September, the CDC “FluView” — its weekly report on influenza surveillance — has shown all 50 states in shades of green and chartreuse, indicating “minimal” or “low” flu activity. Normally by December, at least some states are painted in oranges and reds for “moderate” and “high.” A combination of factors is responsible for the remarkably quiet flu season, experts said. In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June through August, widespread mask-wearing, rigorous lockdowns, and other precautions against COVID-19 transmission drove flu down to record-low levels. In the United States, the cancellation of large indoor gatherings, closings of schools, and use of masks to prevent coronavirus transmission have also driven down levels of all respiratory diseases, including influenza. That has buoyed the spirits of flu experts."
The primary one is lies by the profe$$ionals and their agents in the pre$$.
"Of 232,452 swabs from across the country that have been tested for flu, only 496, or 0.2 percent, have come up positive. Dr. William Schaffner, medical director for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, which promotes flu shots, said he was recently on a telephone discussion with other preventive medicine specialists. “Everybody was in quiet awe about how low flu is,” he said. “Somebody said: ‘Shh, don’t talk about it. The virus will hear us.’ ”
They think we are children, or they are immature a$$holes!
Flu numbers are likely to remain low for many more weeks, predicted Kinsa Health, a company that uses cellphone-connected thermometers and historical databases to forecast flu trends. “Going forward, we don’t expect influenza-like illness to go high,” said Inder Singh, Kinsa’s founder and chief executive. “It looks like the twindemic isn’t going to happen.” Southern Hemisphere countries help “reseed” influenza viruses in the Northern Hemisphere each year, Jernigan said. Also, to keep COVID-19 out, New Zealand and Australia have closed their borders either to all noncitizens or to Americans, so there has been very little air traffic from those Southern Hemisphere countries. In addition, Jernigan said, a “phenomenal number” of flu shots were manufactured and shipped to pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices in August, a month earlier than usual. As of late November, 188 million doses had been shipped; the old record was 175 million doses shipped last year. Spot shortages were quickly reported in some cities, so experts assumed that large numbers of Americans took them; however, there is not yet enough data to confirm that assumption.
When you assume, you make an ass of u and me!
According to a preliminary tally released Dec. 9, about 70 million adults had received the shots through pharmacies or doctors’ offices as of mid-November, compared with 58 million last year. Although that appears to be a substantial increase, the CDC does not know how many Americans who normally get their flu shots at work were unable to do so this year because of stay-at-home orders, said Dr. Ram Koppaka, the agency’s associate director for adult immunization. There was a big increase in flu shots delivered by pharmacies, and that may represent people who normally would have received the shots at work. “The best we can say is that it appears that we are now about where we were last year,” Koppaka said. Although Koppaka strongly encouraged unvaccinated Americans to get flu shots, the threat of a two-headed pandemic monster appears to be fading. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the CDC is not currently posting forecasts on its FluSight page, where it predicts the future course of the flu season.
Can it be any more in our face?
Kinsa Health, by contrast, is predicting that flu will stay at historic lows through February, when the season typically peaks. The company has a record of accurately predicting flu seasons several weeks ahead of the CDC. CDC surveillance data is based on weekly reports from doctors’ offices and hospitals noting the percentage of patient visits that are for flu symptoms. Because there are delays in reporting, sometimes for weeks, there is a lag between the time a flu arrives in a county and the agency’s confirmation that it is there. Also, people who catch flu but never see a doctor are not captured in the CDC’s surveillance net.
Stay OUT of the CDC "surveillance net" if you can!
People avoid doctors for many reasons, including a lack of insurance or because, this year, they are afraid of catching the coronavirus. Kinsa receives about 100,000 readings each day from about 2 million thermometers connected to smartphones; the company claims it can detect local fever spikes down to the ZIP code level. Currently, flu is at less than half its typical level for early December, Singh said. By February, when cases typically shoot to a sharp peak, its numbers should be down to about one-quarter of a typical seasonal apex, he predicted. “In theory, the flu virus could be taking a year off,” said Dr. Arthur Reingold, head of epidemiology at the School of Public Health of the University of California Berkeley. He recently asked a friend who was treating COVID-19 cases at the University of California San Francisco hospital how many flu cases she had seen this year. “The answer was zero,” he said. “That’s a relief, and certainly a relief to my friends who do clinical work.”
The "theory" is that seasonal cold and flu is TAKING the YEAR OFF!?!
OMFG!!
They are literally driving me batty!
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Of course, there are variants!
"UK virus variant is probably deadlier, scientists say" by Benjamin Mueller and Carl Zimmer New York Times, February 13, 2021
Probably?
LONDON — British government scientists are increasingly finding the coronavirus variant first detected in Britain to be deadlier than the original virus, a devastating trend that highlights the serious risks of this new phase of the pandemic.
Exactly as called for by the SCRIPT!
The scientists said last month that there was a “realistic possibility” that the variant was more lethal. Now, they say in a new document that it is “likely” that the variant is connected to an increased risk of hospitalization and death.
The British government did not publicly announce the updated findings, which are based on roughly twice as many studies as their earlier assessment and include more deaths from cases of COVID-19 caused by the new variant, known as B.1.1.7. It posted the document on a government website Friday and said that it had been considered at a meeting of government advisers the day before.
The variant is known to be in 82 countries, including the United States. American scientists recently estimated that it was spreading rapidly there, doubling roughly every 10 days, and have said that it could be the dominant version of the virus in the United States by March.
It's ALL PRE-PROGRAMMED NARRATIVE!
“Calculating when we can lift restrictions has to be influenced by this,” Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said of the new findings. “It provides extra evidence that this variant is more lethal than the one we dealt with last time.”
Most COVID-19 cases, even those caused by the new variant, are not fatal, and the government scientists were relying on studies that examined a small proportion of overall deaths, making it difficult to pinpoint how much increased risk may be associated with the new variant, but the strongest studies they relied on estimated that the variant could be 30% to 70% more lethal than the original virus, and the government scientists, part of a committee known as the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, wrote that the latest studies had helped them control for factors such as the influence of overrun hospitals.
Tired of being lied to when the hospitals are all goddamn f**king empty.
It's all could be, if, maybe.
As an example of the mounting evidence for the variant’s lethality, the government scientists cited a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.....
PFFFFFFFFFFT!
Related:
"UK imposes harsher lockdown on London, citing new version of virus" by Mark Landler and Stephen Castle New York Times, December 19, 2020
LONDON — Alarmed by a what he called a faster-spreading variant of the coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson abruptly reversed course on Saturday and imposed a wholesale lockdown on London and most of England’s southeast.
The decision, which Johnson announced after an emergency meeting of his Cabinet, came after the government got new evidence of a variant first detected several weeks ago in Kent, southeast of London, which the prime minister asserted was 70% more transmissible than previous versions.
The new measures, which take effect at the end of Saturday night, are designed, in effect, to cut off the capital and its surrounding counties from the rest of England. They are the most severe measures the government has taken since it imposed a lockdown on the country in March, and they reflect a fear that the new variant could supercharge transmission of the virus as winter takes hold.
“When the virus changes its method of attack, we must change our method of defense,” a somber Johnson said at a Saturday afternoon news conference. “We have to act on information as we have it, because this is now spreading very fast.”
And if you are wrong or faulty, you lying sack of shit?
How many lives are you destroying?
Viral mutations are not unusual, and this variant — known as VUI 202012/01 — has been detected in a handful of other countries, but some medical experts expressed alarm about its apparent infectiousness. Some argued that it reinforced the urgency for the government to tighten social restrictions to try to eliminate the virus altogether.
“Elimination is more and more optimal,” said Devi Sridhar, head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh. “More virus circulating means more variants and mutations.”
Other scientists cautioned that the rapid spread of the variant did not necessarily mean that it was more transmissible.
The drastic new measures were taken after Cabinet ministers were told that cases had nearly doubled in the last week in London, with the new variant accounting for 60% of them.
British ministers have been told that there is no evidence that the new variant is inherently more deadly, or that it is more resistant to vaccines than others, but that it is significantly easier to transmit.
That, however, raises the prospect of case numbers growing faster, leading to more hospitalizations and fatalities. The British government said it had notified the World Health Organization about the prevalence of the new variant.
The new lockdown zone includes all of Greater London and much of the surrounding southeast of the country, a densely populated area encompassing nearly 20 million people, a third of England’s population. The restrictions will remain in place for at least two weeks, and will be reviewed on Dec. 30.
WHERE have we HEARD THAT BEFORE, huh?
The government told people in this region to stay at home except for a few reasons, including urgent travel, medical appointments and outdoor exercise. Those outside this zone were advised not to travel into it, and those living inside will not be permitted to travel outside overnight. Nonessential shops will close, as will gyms, cinemas, hairdressers and nail salons, and, though Johnson said just a few days ago that it would be “inhuman” to cancel Christmas, that will be the practical effect on much of the population with new restrictions on social mixing. A plan to allow three households to meet together over the holiday will be scrapped in London and the southeast, with no household mixing permitted at all.
In other parts of the country, three households will be allowed to gather, but only on Christmas Day, and not for the extended five-day period once envisaged.
The announcement on Saturday is an admission that England’s existing system of restrictions, under which the country was divided into three “tiers” with different rules, has not been sufficient to control the spread of the virus. The new area of lockdown will constitute a new, and tougher, fourth tier.
Johnson already has the legal power to tighten rules, and there is no current plan to recall Parliament.
The coronavirus has mutated many times since it emerged in China in 2019, according to public health researchers. On Friday, South Africa reported it had identified a new variant, which it said was driving a new wave of infections there. It is not clear whether it is same variant as the one identified in Britain.
They never identified the last one, the fucking liars!
Most of these variants are not significant or widespread, but as the number of people who have been infected — and, presumably, have developed some immunity — increases, the pressure on the pathogen to mutate also increases. Some of the new variants can be more transmissible or lead to more severe illness than earlier versions of the virus.
This is what seasonal colds and flus do, dammit!
“This is potentially serious,” Jeremy Farrar, an infectious disease expert who is director of the Wellcome Trust, said in a statement last week. “The surveillance and research must continue, and we must take the necessary steps to stay ahead of the virus.”
You will never gue$$ who are the tru$tees.
For weeks, Johnson has struggled to balance his response to the virus with pressure not to further damage the economy. The government instituted a graduated scale of tiers, placing Manchester, Liverpool and other northern cities, where the infection rates were higher, in the most restrictive tier. Life in London remained mostly unchanged.
In November, as infection rates began to climb across the country, Johnson imposed a new nationwide lockdown. That ignited speculation in British tabloids that he would be forced to “cancel Christmas.” Instead, he vowed to relax restrictions on social mixing for a five-day period around Christmas to allow families to get together, but last week, amid signs that London had become a new hot spot, Johnson placed the capital and most of the southeast in Tier 3, the highest level of restrictions. He clung to his promise of a Christmas reprieve from Dec. 23 to Dec. 27, even as he implored people to keep family gatherings brief and small.
“Have yourself a merry little Christmas,” Johnson said last week, announcing the half measures, “but this year alas, preferably a very little Christmas.”
Time to give that fucker the King Charles treatment.
"More EU nations ban travel from UK, fearing virus variant; France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Ireland, and Bulgaria all announced restrictions on UK travel" by Kirsten Grieshaber and Sylvia Hui The Associated Press, December 20, 2020
BERLIN — A growing list of European Union nations barred travel from the United Kingdom on Sunday, and others were considering similar action, in a bid to block a new strain of coronavirus sweeping across southern England from spreading to the continent.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Saturday that a fast-moving new variant of the virus that is 70 percent more transmissible than existing strains appeared to be driving the rapid spread of new infections in London and southern England in recent weeks, but he stressed “there’s no evidence to suggest it is more lethal or causes more severe illness,” or that vaccines will be less effective against it.
On Sunday, British Health Secretary Matt Hancock added to the alarm when he said “the new variant is out of control.” The UK recorded 35,928 further confirmed cases, around double the number from a week ago.
Germany, which holds the rotating EU presidency, called a special crisis meeting on Monday to coordinate the response to the virus news among the bloc's 27 member states. The Netherlands banned flights from the UK for at least the rest of the year. Ireland issued a 48-hour flight ban. Italy said it would block flights from the UK until Jan.6, and an order signed Sunday prohibits entry into Italy by anyone who has been in the UK in the last 14 days. The Czech Republic imposed stricter quarantine measures for people arriving from Britain.
Take a glimpse into horrors of Ireland where they are only doing God’s work.
Beyond Europe, Israel also said it was banning flights from Britain, Denmark, and South Africa because those were the countries where the mutation is found.
The World Health Organization tweeted late Saturday that it was “in close contact with UK officials on the new #COVID19 virus variant” and promised to update governments and the public as more is learned.
The new strain was identified in southeastern England in September and has been spreading in the area ever since, a WHO official told the BBC on Sunday.
JUST HEARING ABOUT IT NOW and it must have spread further, RIGHT?
Viruses mutate regularly, and scientists have found thousands of different mutations among samples of the virus causing COVID-19. Many of these changes have no effect on how easily the virus spreads or how severe symptoms are.
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTT!
“What we understand is that it does have increased transmissibility, in terms of its ability to spread,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19.
Studies are underway to better understand how fast it spreads and and whether “it’s related to the variant itself, or a combination of factors with behavior,” she added.
She said the strain had also been identified in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Australia, where there was one case that didn’t spread further.
“The longer this virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to change,” she said. “So we really need to do everything we can right now to prevent spread."
British health authorities said that while the variant has been circulating since September, it wasn’t until the last week that officials felt they had enough evidence to declare that it has higher transmissibility than other circulating coronaviruses.
Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, said officials are concerned about the new variant because it contained 23 different changes, “an unusually large number of variants” affecting how the virus binds to and enters cells in the body.
Officials aren’t certain whether it originated in the UK, Vallance added, but by December, he said it was causing more than 60 percent of infections in London.
US President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for US surgeon general said Sunday that the emergence of the new strain doesn’t change the public health guidance on precautions for reducing the spread of the virus, such as wearing masks, social distancing, and washing hands.
“While it seems to be more easily transmissible, we do not have evidence yet that this is a more deadly virus to an individual who acquires it,” Vivek Murthy said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “There’s no reason to believe that the vaccines that have been developed will not be effective against this virus, as well.”
How could they be?
Europe has been walloped this fall by soaring new infections and deaths due to a resurgence of the virus, and many nations have reimposed a series of restrictions to reign in their outbreaks.
Britain has seen more than 67,000 deaths in the pandemic, the second-highest confirmed toll in Europe after Italy. Europe as a whole has recorded nearly 499,000 virus deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University that experts believe is an undercount, due to limited testing and missed cases.
The European Medicines Agency, meanwhile, is meeting Monday to approve the first COVID-19 vaccine for the European Union’s 27 nations, bringing vaccinations closer for millions of EU citizens. The vaccine made by German pharmaceutical company BioNTech and American drug maker Pfizer is already in use in the United States, Britain, Canada, and other countries.
The EMA moved up its assessment of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by a week after heavy pressure from EU governments, especially Germany, which has said that after the EMA approval it could start vaccinating citizens as early as next Sunday.
In an urgent address to the nation on Saturday, Johnson ordered all nonessential shops, hairdressers, and gyms in London and large parts of southern England closed and told Britons to reorganize their holiday plans. No mixing of households is allowed indoors in the region, and only essential travel is permitted. In the rest of England, people will be allowed to meet in Christmas bubbles for just one day instead of the five that were planned.
After he spoke, videos emerged online showing crowds of people at London’s train stations, apparently making a dash for places in the UK with less stringent coronavirus restrictions. Health Secretary Matt Hancock called those scenes “totally irresponsible.”
While Hancock insisted officials had acted “very quickly and decisively,” critics said Britain's Conservative government should have moved against rising infections much earlier.
“The alarms bells have been ringing for weeks, but the prime minister chose to ignore them,” said Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party. “It is an act of gross negligence by a prime minister who, once again, has been caught behind the curve.”
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You can't really blame him:
"Scientists say they are concerned but not surprised by variants in the coronavirus like the one that prompted officials in Britain to sound an urgent alarm on Saturday, declaring that a highly contagious new version of the virus had begun circulating in England. That announcement resonated worldwide: Shortly afterward, a number of countries, including the Netherlands and Germany, banned travel from Britain. The new variant represents a rare event; it carries more than a dozen unique mutations, many more than its predecessors, and its swift emergence is not likely to be a matter of luck alone. It has displaced competing variants that have been circulating for months in southern parts of the country — a crowded field, unlike early in the pandemic. A preliminary analysis of the variant, by members of the Covid-19 U.K. Genomics Consortium, carried enormous weight. When the U.K. consortium flags a variant, others start searching their own data; already, officials in Italy have reported one new case of the British variant, with no evidence of community spread, but the coronavirus is a continual shape-shifter, like all viruses, and given the worldwide spread of the virus, rare events like this one were bound to happen, experts said. In a cautionary note, a separate panel of British scientists expressed only “moderate confidence” that the newly identified variant was more transmissible. Still, scientists are continually watching for mutations that enhance the virus. One concern is that the vaccination of millions of people and growing immunity in human populations may exert enormous pressure on the virus to evolve so-called escape mutations that evade the immune response, setting back the global fight by years. Several experts urged calm, saying it would take years, not months, for the virus to evolve enough to render the current vaccines impotent. “No one should worry that there is going to be a single catastrophic mutation that suddenly renders all immunity and antibodies useless,” said Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “It is going to be a process that occurs over the time scale of multiple years and requires the accumulation of multiple viral mutations,” he added. “It’s not going to be like an on-off switch.” In South Africa, where a similar variant has been found, scientists were also quick to note that human behavior was driving the epidemic, not mutations whose effect on transmissibility has yet to be quantified. Escape from immunity requires that a virus accumulate a series of mutations, each allowing the pathogen to erode the effectiveness of the body’s defenses. Some viruses, like influenza, amass those changes relatively quickly, but others, like the measles virus, collect hardly any of the alterations. Immunizing about 60 percent of a population within about a year, and keeping the number of cases down while that happens, will help minimize the chances of the virus mutating significantly, said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland."
So the New York Times says the coronavirus is mutating and asks what does that mean for us?
They then answer their own question by saying daily cases have swelled to unimaginable levels and we could be on verge of another significant surge as US deaths in 2020 topped 3 million, by far most ever counted, the deadliest year in US history — due mainly to the coronavirus pandemic.
Of course, the BioNTech CEO is confident his vaccine will work on the UK variant in a notebook that doubted travel bans can stop new variant so they are not banning them just like in the spring when COVID-19 spread!!
Thus, the UK tightened restrictions as alarm about virus variant grews and officials struggled to slow the spread of a coronavirus variant that is potentially more infectious than those that have already wreaked havoc around the world while several countries found cases of the new coronavirus variant and some family doctors in Britain said on Thursday that they would defy the government’s instructions to postpone patients’ appointments for a second dose of coronavirus vaccine, a signal of unease in the medical community over Britain’s new plan to delay second shots as a way of giving more people the partial protection of a single dose. British doctors, who have been instructed to begin rescheduling second-dose appointments that had been set for next week, said they were loath to ask older, vulnerable patients to wait an extra two months for their booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Not to mix you up(?) but while that was going on, the government put a tax on women’s sanitary products and quietly began customs checks at UK ports as a new era began without much fuss and Britain lept into the unknown with more lockdown measures as the virus soared.
Then the highly infectious and easily transmissible new variants made it here, dousing the glimmer of hope even though the variant is not known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease, but the dire warning — hedged by limited data about just how prevalent the variant first identified in Britain has become — landed in a week when the nation’s nascent vaccination campaign was hampered by confusion and limited supplies and global death toll topped 2 million just over a year after the coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan and Minnesota marked its first detection of the Brazil variant.
Thus, the state’s second surge of cases appears to be subsiding, but dozens of deaths are still reported every day, and officials and experts are concerned that new coronavirus variants, including one that emerged in Britain, could drive up cases again, so in Boston, City Councilor Michelle Wu called for at least one vaccination site in each of the city’s residential zip codes -- although since the fall, the state has seen an alarming rise in cases of the deadly virus, accompanied by a smaller rise in the number of deaths, and in recent days, the surge seems to have lost momentum, but concerns are rising about a new coronavirus variant that, according to experts, could fuel another spike in cases and deaths.
Fortunately, the “efficacy of the vaccine is so good and so high that we have a little bit of a cushion” even as Britain was swamped by a fast-spreading coronavirus variant and desperate to keep other mutations out of the country, requiring British citizens arriving from 22 high-risk countries to quarantine in hotels for 10 days at their own expense and President Biden’s coronavirus czar said that the United States was woefully behind other nations in tracking potentially dangerous variants of the virus, and used the first White House public health briefing to issue a stark warning that Americans will remain vulnerable to the deadly pandemic unless Congress acts while $cienti$ts have warned that with no robust system to identify genetic variations of the coronavirus, the United States is ill equipped to track dangerous new mutants, leaving health officials blind as they try to combat the grave threat with the vaccine shortages a setback in the race for immunization.
The special breed that has been spawned is being closely watched by authorities and the amount of coronavirus detected in wastewater at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s Deer Island treatment plant had been falling, but in the most recent tests it ticked up slightly and the new results come as the state is climbing down off its second surge, but there are concerns that new coronavirus variants arriving from overseas could push cases back up and officials say that underscores the need to get the state’s residents vaccinated after the case counts skyrocketed in the fall, while death counts increased less dramatically and in the past couple of weeks, the surge appears to have lost its steam, but experts are concerned, however, that new coronavirus variants may fuel another increase in cases and deaths, and they’re urging people to get vaccinated before that happens.
The Globe says that even as the surge subsides, dozens of people are still dying every day from the virus -- as they would be in any event!
The Globe acts like no one dying any day is normal.
I'm getting tired of chasing after the third case of the British variant has been detected in Massachusetts. Baker says we will beat this virus despite the exponential spread, but experts and public health officials are concerned, however, that new fast-spreading coronavirus variants may fuel another surge and the U.K.’s health minister warned that coronavirus vaccines may be less effective against new variants of the disease, such as those found in South Africa and Brazil, and that stricter border controls are justified. “We don’t know the degree of that,” Matt Hancock said in an interview on Sky News on Sunday, commenting on the extent of any potential reduced efficacy of the vaccines.
Btw, did you know that more people died in Britain last year than in any year in the past century, surpassing even the toll during the 1918 pandemic?
Of course, the British economy suffered its biggest decline in more than 300 years in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic closed shops and restaurants, devastated the travel industry and curtailed manufacturing, and the data comes as Britain’s economy remains shackled by restrictions designed to combat COVID-19.
At least the variant has silenced the foes of lockdown as Johnson ordered a new national coronavirus lockdown, and what if you never get better from Covid-19?
Also see:
They are testing whether the vaccines work against the COVID-19 variant , and as the vaccination campaign picks up speed around the world the South African variant was seen in Maryland even though South Africa imposed strict new rules as it surpasses 1 million COVID-19 cases and halted the use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford coronavirus vaccine after evidence emerged that the vaccine did not protect clinical trial volunteers from mild or moderate illness, a devastating blow to the country’s efforts to combat the pandemic.
"The University of Oxford plans to test its AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in children for the first time, becoming the latest vaccine developer to assess whether its coronavirus shot is effective in young people. The trial announced Saturday seeks to recruit 300 volunteers between the ages of 6 and 17, with up to 240 receiving the COVID-19 vaccine and the remainder a control meningitis vaccine. Andrew Pollard, chief researcher on the Oxford vaccine trial, says while most children don’t get severely ill from COVID-19, “it is important to establish the safety and immune response to the vaccine in children and young people as some children may benefit from vaccination.’' Regulators in more than 50 countries have authorized widespread use of the Oxford vaccine, which is being produced and distributed by AstraZeneca, for use in people over age 18. Other drug companies are also testing the COVID-19 vaccines in children. Pfizer, whose vaccine has already been authorized for use in people 16 and older, began testing its shot in children as young as 12 in October. Moderna in December began testing its vaccine on children as young as 12. Pollard says the Oxford trial should help policymakers decide whether at some point they want to extend mass vaccination programs to children as they seek to ensure schools are safe and combat the spread of the virus in the wider population. “For most children, for themselves, COVID is really not a big problem, “however, it is certainly possible that wider use to try and curb the progress of the pandemic might be considered in the future, so here we’re just trying to establish the data that would support that if indeed policymakers wanted to go in that direction,’' Pollard told The Associated Press."
In other words, they are going to tailor the intelligence, 'er, data around the preconceived outcome they wish in a "new study."
Thus the WHO recommended the AstraZeneca vaccine despite variant concerns and the EU recommended authorization of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine as the UK ramped up inoculations while
AstraZeneca acquired Alexion for $39 billion, a tremendous opportunity that would give AstraZeneca another toehold in the lucrative business of treating rare disorders, where high-priced medicines can generate billions in sales from a relatively small group of patients.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Meanwhile, back in the states the vaccine rollout is improving in every state after a sluggish start even though the meatpacking union says more vaccines needed, even if they are Russian.
"Schools with in-person classes have seen scant transmission of the coronavirus, particularly when masks and distancing are employed, but some indoor athletics have led to infections and should be curtailed for safety, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers concluded in papers published Tuesday. The CDC team reviewed data from studies in the United States and abroad and found schools differed from nursing homes and high-density work sites where rapid spread has occurred. ’'The preponderance of available evidence from the fall school semester has been reassuring,’' wrote three CDC researchers in a piece published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ’'There has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.’' The review, which echoes other researchers’ conclusions, comes as many school districts continue to wrestle with whether and how to reopen schools and as President Biden makes a return to in-person learning one of his top pandemic-related priorities. A new CDC study, also published Tuesday, looked at 17 rural K-12 schools in Wisconsin and found just seven out of 191 coronavirus cases resulted from in-school transmission. Researchers noted that students and staff in these schools wore masks almost all the time. ’'The conclusion here is with proper prevention efforts . . . we can keep transmission in schools and educational settings quite low,’' said Margaret A. Honein, lead author of the JAMA report. ’'We didn’t know that at the beginning of the year, but the data has really accumulated.’' Specifically, the CDC recommends that schools require masks, allow for a distance of six feet between people, and keep students in cohorts to limit the number of people who must quarantine in the case of exposure. It also recommends screening tests to identify asymptomatic infected people, and increased air ventilation."
Even Fraudci said asymptomatic spread was rare before flip-flopping, so.... please explain to me why the kids are incarcerated at college.
Oh, the irony of it all:
"Former student sues Portsmouth Abbey, claiming she was abused by a teacher and duped by the school" by Zoe Greenberg Globe Staff, December 8, 2020
In the spring, an archaeology professor in New Mexico received a strange note from an unknown e-mail address. The author was Michael Bowen Smith, a former teacher at Portsmouth Abbey, a prestigious Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island.
In the e-mail, which The Boston Globe obtained, Smith said he was writing to discuss a student he had taught in high school a few years earlier.
“[E.] and I were lovers,” he wrote to the professor, his former student’s mentor whom he had never met. “I was a married man with children and an award-winning career. She was a superstar academic yearning for some kind of freedom from her painfully constricted life. We were drawn together as rebel intellectuals . . .”
Smith initiated sexual contact with E. when she was a 15-year-old sophomore at the Abbey, according to two new lawsuits and interviews with her. He was her 48-year-old teacher. They exchanged hundreds of e-mails, some of which the Globe reviewed, and met up across school grounds for the next two years. And as the letter illustrated, even after she broke things off in her freshman year of college, Smith pursued her into adulthood, but E.’s troubles went far beyond her former teacher, according to the lawsuits, implicating leaders at the wealthy religious school that offered to help when she finally reported what happened. The lawsuits refer to her as “Jane Doe,” and the Globe is identifying her by the first letter of her name. Smith did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
E.’s struggle to get free of Smith and hold her former school accountable spanned five years and multiple states. Her story suggests that even after a recent reckoning in New England private schools over decades of sexual abuse at the hands of faculty, the challenges for a student in her position remain high. Portsmouth Abbey in 2017 apologized for sexual abuse that occurred more than 30 years earlier, but according to the lawsuits, that same year the school dodged legal responsibility for a much more recent allegation of abuse.
Portsmouth Abbey did not respond to requests for comment or to a detailed list of questions.....
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Related:
He was a nanotechnology researcher?
Had he been vaccinated yet, and what did he know about those?
Are they in the vaccines?
He is a white, male University of New Hampshire chemistry professor has resigned after being accused of posing as a female immigrant of color on Twitter to make racist and sexist comments.
Meanwhile, the distribution of the vaccine to college campuses comes as frustrations mount over the slow rollout of the vaccine in Massachusetts and fears grow that a new variant makes COVID far more transmissible that could soon overwhelm hospitals -- which is why they are moving teachers up in the line in South Carolina (you know, where all the racists and rednecks live).
"Colby College launches machine learning institute" by Deirdre Fernandes Globe Staff, January 29, 2021
Just as the COVID surge reached Maine, even its most remote counties.
Colby College, known for its economics and environmental science programs, now wants to become a leader in artificial intelligence education.
The small Maine college this week announced plans to launch the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which will teach students to incorporate the new technology into their liberal arts education. In the summer, the new institute will also train faculty from other colleges on machine learning.
College graduates, even those majoring in the humanities, increasingly need more computer science experience to succeed in an evolving job market, said David A. Greene, Colby’s president.
Earlier this week, Amazon announced it plans to expand its presence in Boston by creating 3,000 jobs, including in software development, artificial intelligence, machine learning, management, HR, and finance, but most AI and machine learning programs are based at the large engineering schools, such as MIT, Georgia Tech, and Stanford University, Greene said.
Colby wants its English, history, and biology students to have some understanding of how machine learning can be applied to their fields, Greene said.
“We need to have a democratization of AI, and it needs to be moved to different types of colleges,” Greene said. “Other sectors of higher education have to have a strong foothold here.”
In 2018, MIT established a College of Computing to tackle the latest developments in AI, with a $350 million gift from Stephen Schwarzman, the head of Blackstone Group, a global private equity firm.
Colby is starting its institute this fall with a far smaller sum: $30 million from Andrew Davis, an investment manager and former college trustee, and his family foundation.
Colby plans to hire a director and six faculty members for its institute in the coming year, Greene said.
Once again, A.I. will decide -- in this case who lives and dies based on the whims of Great Re$et globali$ts.
Also see:
"More than 1,100 undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University have pledged to withhold their tuition for the spring semester to demand a discount for what they see as a lost spring term. While some universities have brought students back to campus, Columbia has mostly offered online instruction for students and allowed only a sliver of them to live on campus or attend in-person classes. In response, students are asking the university to reduce their total costs. “It’s a reasonable demand,” said Matthew Gamero, 19, a sophomore who is one of the strike organizers. “This is about the university providing an education of its worth, and to have it online is certainly not what we’re paying for.” “This is a moment when an active reappraisal of the status quo is understandable, and we expect nothing less from our students,” the university said in a statement. “Their voices are heard by Columbia’s leadership, and their views on strengthening the University are welcomed.”
Maybe you can come on up to the Big House:
"The University of Michigan’s Big House has been transformed into The Big Vaccine Clinic. A few hundred University of Michigan medical professionals and students who work in health care settings received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday at Michigan Stadium, one of the nation’s largest sporting venues. The Michigan Stadium clinic is not open to the public. Those who visited on Thursday’s opening day did so by appointment only and fall into the vaccine priority group Phase 1A category. The university says its employees and students will receive a Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine dose at the football stadium clinic, which hosted up to 100,000 people on football Saturdays and has plenty of parking. The rollout of vaccines started earlier this month across the state. Michigan reported more than 4,200 new virus cases Wednesday and 51 deaths. More than 12,000 residents have died since March."
This is no time to party:
"As the coronavirus spread, tourism was one of the first activities to disappear. That is no more evident than during the Mardi Gras season, which typically brings in millions of dollars to New Orleans starting every year. The loss of parades is both financial and spiritual. Since the first Mardi Gras in New Orleans in 1857, elaborate floats have paraded through the city on the last Tuesday before Lent. Thousands of people fill the streets, and marching bands and dance teams come from all over to perform, their horns and drums echoing off buildings. Social clubs and groups of artists and organizers — that go by names like the Krewe of Orpheus and Krewe of Muses — spend practically every month of the year preparing floats and celebrations, but not this time. Marching bands will not march. Bars throughout the city are closed. When parades were canceled, dozens of float artists and carpenters were laid off, but the city was not ready to give up......"
Well, I am -- at least as far as it comes to this.
"‘There’s light at the end of the tunnel’ for life to return to something like normal" by David Abel Globe Staff, February 13, 2021
Here’s the rosy scenario: By Labor Day, if all goes well, nearly every adult in the United States who wants a COVID-19 vaccine will have received one. Deaths and hospitalizations from the coronavirus will have fallen sharply; transmission will have plummeted as the population reaches herd immunity. Everything from schools to restaurants will have fully reopened, allowing for something approximating pre-pandemic life to resume.
There is also, regrettably, a far bleaker scenario for the coming months: The virus remains implacable, mutating in ways that either end-run the protection of vaccines or keep it contagious enough to sicken a large portion of the population, including younger people at lower risk from previous strains and the millions who refuse to be vaccinated. As drug makers race to tailor vaccines to the variants, the country might remain trapped in a purgatory of stressed hospitals, shuttered businesses, and remote learning.
I think we all know which one is coming as they prepare you for it.
Dr. Edward Nardell, a professor at Harvard Medical School who studies infectious diseases, prefers to think we’re heading toward the rosy outcome. He is already planning to attend a cabaret festival in Provincetown in June, and hopes to resume organizing concerts this fall at his condominium complex in Brookline.
“My natural tendency is to be optimistic and believe things by the fall will be dramatically better,” said Nardell, who on Thursday received his second dose of vaccine,“but what makes me concerned is that there could be a tsunami offshore in the form of variants of the virus that could dramatically increase transmission. We’re in a strange period of apprehension, and nobody has a crystal ball about what will happen.”
Actually, the Globe does and despite the shocking toll across the state, there’s hope with the coming of the new year as cities around the world rang in 2021 while toasting 2020 goodbye— and here is what the Globe editorial board will track in 2021 as we get moving.
As the pace of vaccinations accelerates, there has been a spate of encouraging virus news. Cases in the United States have fallen substantially — nearly 60 percent from the peak last month. Hospitalizations have declined by 36 percent and deaths have fallen 23 percent, but those declines must be considered in context. They follow a catastrophic surge of the virus, which has left about 475,000 Americans dead, nearly 100,000 of them in the past month. The seven-day average of new infections this week remained at more than 100,000 a day, a level that would have been unthinkable last spring. On Feb. 10, at least 3,255 people died as a result of COVID-19 — more than all of those who died as a result of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — while 77,000 people were hospitalized.
The rampant spread of the virus over the past year has had this side effect: a significant number of Americans with immunity to the virus, at least to the initial strain that emerged from China. In January, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that more than 83 million Americans had been infected, which includes unconfirmed cases. With 35 million Americans having received at least one dose of the vaccine, that would mean at least 36 percent of the population has some measure of immunity.
That number is likely to increase significantly in the coming months as vaccinations become more universally available, public health officials say.
“By the time we get to April, that will be what I would call, for better wording, ‘open season,’ namely, virtually everybody and anybody in any category could start to get vaccinated,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, but herd immunity — which occurs when so many people have been immunized, either by illness or vaccination, that transmission of the virus effectively stops — is likely to require at least 80 percent of the population to be vaccinated or protected as a result of a previous infection, Fauci has said.
He sees a glimmer of hope.
It’s unclear how long that will take, or indeed whether it’s possible. Achieving herd immunity depends on how many people choose to be vaccinated and how well the vaccines stand up to potentially more virulent variants. It also will depend on a host of unanswered questions, such as how long natural immunity lasts, whether natural immunity extends to the variants, and whether those who are immunized can, nonetheless, transmit the virus to others.
Then what is the point of taking the jab?
“I do think that herd immunity is still possible, but it is not guaranteed that we can achieve it without some possible future modifications to our vaccines,” said Dr. Paul Biddinger, medical director for emergency preparedness at Mass General Brigham and chairman of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine advisory group. “It may be that people will need booster shots of modified vaccines in the future to help us reach our goals.”
He has made it crystal clear that “the goal is really to vaccinate every eligible person” as he downplays the severity of side effects from the vaccine and hopes to accelerate beyond that relatively quickly.
He is the man with all the answers despite the glitches, and says the key to getting past the pandemic is more testing (thus more false positives), something in which he has great confidence, and he thinks “what’s most important right now from a management perspective is to identify where there are problems and find solutions and fix them.”
He mainly attributed the recent decline in new cases to more people wearing masks and the time that has passed since the holidays, when millions of Americans traveled and gathered with relatives against the advice of health officials, but that progress could be reversed, especially if, as seems likely, the more contagious variant that emerged in the United Kingdom becomes the dominant strain in the United States, as it has in other countries. On Wednesday, health authorities said the variant had been detected in Maine for the first time, less than a month after it was discovered in Massachusetts, and as cases decline, the move to increase capacity limits in restaurants, gyms, and other businesses, as is already happening in Massachusetts, could also spur the spread of the virus.
“We may still see large surges of infections in the coming months,” said Erin Bromage, a biology professor who studies infectious diseases at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “We are in for a rough ride.”
When asked whether it was wise for Governor Charlie Baker to relax restrictions in Massachusetts, he noted that similar actions in the United Kingdom and elsewhere had led to a resurgence of the virus.
“I am torn with this decision,” he said. “I really don’t want us to repeat what happened in London. Their November lockdown worked wonderfully, but as soon as they reopened, B1.17 [the UK variant] infection took off, and they saw a wave of infections and deaths that was much larger than their earlier surges.”
With the virus spreading more among younger people now — few of whom have been vaccinated — Bromage said he expects infections will remain high but fewer people will die or require treatment at a hospital.
Dr. Christopher Gill, an associate professor of global health and infectious disease specialist at the Boston University School of Public Health, said those who are fully vaccinated should be able to start to live a more worry-free life, going to restaurants and theaters, accompanied by others who have been vaccinated.
“It should be safe to do these things,” he said. “Is it possible that some transmission could still occur, say, due to the South African variant? Of course, but the question really is how much tolerance do we have for varying degrees of risk?”
He said the risks of going to a bar with someone who is vaccinated are likely to be similar to the risks of getting the flu in more ordinary times. What’s unclear, however, is the risks of bringing the virus home or to a job, where others aren’t vaccinated.
You insulting sack of garbage!
That's what we have been saying since BEFORE LOCKDOWN, you damn bastards!
For that reason, health officials are advising the public to continue wearing masks for months to come, even well after they’ve been vaccinated.
“We need to get to a much lower level of viral prevalence in the community, and a much higher level of vaccination of the population,” before people should stop wearing masks, Biddinger said. “It could be by the fall or winter, but I think it’s too soon to estimate with confidence.”
F**k you, terrorist!
Although there remain many reasons to be concerned about potential setbacks, Nardell thinks there are grounds for cautious optimism.
The vaccines are proving to be as remarkably effective as they were in clinical trials, with no one who has been fully immunized known to have died or become gravely ill.
That is an OUTRIGHT LIE!!!
See:
It gets even better:
"More than 34 million Americans have received COVID vaccines, but the much-touted system that the government designed to monitor any dangerous reactions won’t be capable of analyzing safety data for weeks or months, according to numerous federal health officials. For now, federal regulators are counting on a patchwork of existing programs that they acknowledge are inadequate because of small sample sizes, missing critical data or other problems. Clinical trials have shown both of the vaccines authorized in the United States — Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s — to be highly protective against the coronavirus and safe, but even the best trials have limited ability to detect adverse reactions that are rare, that occur only in certain population groups, or that happen beyond the trials’ three-month period. In interviews, FDA officials acknowledged that a promised monitoring system, formally called the Biologics Evaluation Safety Initiative but more widely known as BEST, is still in development. They expect it to start analyzing vaccine safety data soon, but probably not for another month or two. The government is now relying mostly on a 30-year-old monitoring system that relies on self-reporting from patients and health care providers, known as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, and a smartphone app that people who get vaccinated can download and use to report problems. So far, few serious problems have been reported through these channels and no deaths have conclusively been linked to the vaccines. There have been a few severe allergic reactions, but they are treatable and considered rare. To date, the rate at which the potentially fatal reaction called anaphylaxis has occurred — 4.7 cases in every million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, and 2.5 cases per million for Moderna’s — are in line with the rates of other widely used vaccines. Bruising and bleeding caused by lowered platelet counts have also been reported, though that could be coincidental. In total, 9,000 adverse events were reported, with 979 serious and the rest classified as nonserious, according to the most recent CDC report available. In interviews, public health experts, including current and former officials at the FDA and the CDC, said that funding shortages, turf wars and bureaucratic hurdles had slowed BEST’s progress, but even BEST will suffer from a data problem that hinders existing systems. Because there is a dearth of health insurance claims to show who got which vaccine and when — information crucial to tracking vaccine safety."
Yeah, you are being LIED TO!
HOW SICK is THAT!?
The federal government is ramping up vaccinations, with President Biden announcing this week that the United States will have enough supply to immunize 300 million Americans by the end of July, and spring is coming, when warmer weather should reduce the spread of the virus.
That is NOT WHAT THEY SAID LAST SPRING!
Nardell, who was infected with COVID-19 shortly after the pandemic began, looks forward to a day soon when he’ll feel comfortable having friends over for dinner.
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
Brought to you by the former president who accepts blame for reduced vaccine doses while creating new confusion about quality control.
Time to grab something to eat and retire.
