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Are there any risks associated with the COVID-19 vaccines currently authorized on an emergency use basis by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Presently three genetic-based vaccines have been authorized via the emergency order including two mRNA-based vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech) as well as the adenovirus-based Johnson and Johnson product. Developed at historical speed under Operation Warp Speed, the mRNA-based technology foretells enormous implications for healthcare including the prospect of vaccines for cancer. An amazing research prowess has unfolded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic heralding profound breakthroughs that’ll benefit society for years to come. Governmental authorities have declared...

Sky News have the following summary: The Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats in cages, new footage from inside the facility has revealed, disproving denials from World Health Organisation investigators who claimed the suggestion was a “conspiracy”. An official Chinese Academy of Sciences video to mark the launch of the new biosafety level 4 laboratory in May 2017 speaks about the security precautions that are in place if “an accident” occurs and reveals there had been “intense clashes” with the French Government during the construction of the laboratory. The video shows bats being held in a cage at the...

The New York Times said on March 17, 2020, under the headline “Hundreds of Scientists Scramble to Find a Coronavirus Treatment.” It was day seven of the pandemic, when the global death toll was 7,138. “When people get infected,” the Times said, “the best that doctors can offer is supportive care—" ... The global death toll was more than 3.3 million as this story went to press, ... The NIH and WHO are still recommending Tylenol and water in 2021. ... Even with the rollout of vaccines, they are “not the whole answer,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the NIH,...

Just three weeks after adding Ivermectin, Delhi now leads India out of the deadly second surge of the COVID pandemic. Cases that had peaked at 28,395 on April 20 plummeted nearly 80% to just 6,430 on May 15. Deaths peaked May 4, and now they are also down 25%. On May 10, the Indian State of Goa adopted an even more ambitious policy of preemptive Ivermectin for all adults in the state. The Chief Minister of Goa is Dr. Pramod Sawant, a progressive 49-year-old physician persuaded by science. In particular, he read Dr. Pierre Kory's Dr. Tess Lawrie's and Dr....

There's no transcript, but here's the youtube text under the video In this 80th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode, we once again discuss the “lab leak” hypothesis for the origins of SARS-CoV2, as this week a letter published in Science has helped it gain yet more credibility in mainstream scientific circles. We then discuss ivermectin, a decades-old drug with a well-established history of efficacy against many human pathogens. What is its mechanism of action? What...

India, Brazil, and most other countries all rely on COVID treatment guidance from the two organizations that people most trust for medical advice, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the World Health Organization (WHO). Yet following the COVID guidance of these organizations is failing to prevent the unnecessary death of millions of people worldwide. Is the guidance provided by these organizations correct? Or is there a possibility it could be harmful to follow their guidance? This is now a matter of urgent public interest because India recently adopted ivermectin as standard of care for early treatment of COVID, which...

MEXICO CITY (apro) .- The use of Ivermectin in people with covid-19 who underwent treatment at home reduced the probability of having severe symptoms and going to the hospital by up to 76%, according to the analysis of public policy that applied by the government of Mexico City since the end of December 2020. The Secretary of Health, Oliva López, explained that during the study no negative effects on the health of patients were detected and that the drug will continue to be delivered to people who go to the macro kiosks and health centers to take the rapid test...

The State Department’s former lead investigator who oversaw the Task Force into the COVID-19 virus origin tells Fox News that he not only believes the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese military, or People’s Liberation Army, was doing on a bioweapon. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” David Asher, ... “It was operating a secret, classified program. In my view, and I’m just one person, my view is it was a biological weapons program.” “And if you believe, as...

Virus cultures were negative for all asymptomatic positive and repositive cases, indicating no “viable virus” in positive cases detected in this study. All asymptomatic positive cases, repositive cases and their close contacts were isolated for at least 2 weeks until the results of nucleic acid testing were negative. None of detected positive cases or their close contacts became symptomatic or newly confirmed with COVID-19 during the isolation period. In this screening programme, single and mixed testing was performed, respectively, for 76.7% and 23.3% of the collected samples. The asymptomatic positive rates were 0.321 (95% CI 0.282–0.364)/10,000 and 0.243 (95% CI...

Although Africa reported its millionth official COVID-19 case last week, it seems to have weathered the pandemic relatively well so far, with fewer than one confirmed case for every thousand people and just 23,000 deaths. Yet several antibody surveys suggest far more Africans have been infected with the coronavirus—a discrepancy that is puzzling scientists around the continent. “We do not have an answer,” says immunologist Sophie Uyoga of the Kenya Medical Research Institute–Wellcome Trust Research Programme. After testing more than 3000 blood donors, Uyoga and colleagues estimated in a preprint last month that one in 20 Kenyans aged 15 to...

America’s number one health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, because of those ballgame photos, should be the most notorious unmasked person since the Phantom of the Opera. But, he insisted to Fox News “I had my mask around my chin. I had taken it down. I was totally dehydrated and I was drinking water, trying to rehydrate myself,” Fauci. Actually, the published ones either show his hands together or wrapped around a cell phone. Further, in a virtually empty stadium, he also found no room for “social distancing,” sitting between two others seat-to-seat. Still, it may be hard to accuse the...

Could a simple drug that has been on the market for decades be used to treat COVID-19? A research team led by Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)'s Professor Yaakov Nahmias says that early research looks promising; their findings appear in this week's Cell Press Sneak Peak. Over the last three months, Nahmias and Dr. Benjamin tenOever at New York's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have focused on the ways in which the SARS-CoV-2 changes patients' lungs in order to reproduce itself. Their major finding? This virus prevents the routine burning of carbohydrates. As a result, large amounts of...

Even as global studies on Covid-19 treatment are yet to arrive on a consensus on the benefits of administration of Hydroxychloro-quine (HCQ) to contain the transmission of coronavirus, the Vadodara administration has begun analysing the effects of the drug in containing the cases in the city. The Vadodara health department has prepared a report analysing its drive of administering HCQ since April, taking a sample of over one lakh residents who took a course of the anti-malarial drug as prophylactic. Until Wednesday, the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC) has administered the drug to 3.42 lakh persons, including health workers and other...

Given that the majority of people who get the virus are asymptomatic, we can no longer assume that even the serology tests are capturing anywhere near the full number of people who already got the virus, because many who had the virus test negative for antibodies. Earlier this month, a study from the University of California found, “Growing evidence suggests that asymptomatic and mild SARS-CoV-2 infections, together comprising >95% of all infections, may be associated with lower antibody titers than severe infections.” They estimate that only 40% of asymptomatic patients would retain antibodies for 180 days, 60% of mildly symptomatic,...

Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744).

We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial across the United States and parts of Canada testing hydroxychloroquine as postexposure prophylaxis. We enrolled adults who had household or occupational exposure to someone with confirmed Covid-19 at a distance of less than 6 ft for more than 10 minutes while wearing neither a face mask nor an eye shield (high-risk exposure) or while wearing a face mask but no eye shield (moderate-risk exposure). Within 4 days after exposure, we randomly assigned participants to receive either placebo or hydroxychloroquine (800 mg once, followed by 600 mg in 6 to 8 hours, then 600...

If you’re following at all the search for COVID-19 treatments, and possibly even if not, you will have seen the flurry of media coverage for the observational study in The Lancet, ‘Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis’. It made the news not least because hydroxychloroquine is the drug President Donald Trump says he is taking in the belief that it will reduce his chance of catching COVID-19. ... The data in that study, and in at least one preprint on a second treatment, were provided by an Illinois firm called...

Summary Background Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, often in combination with a second-generation macrolide, are being widely used for treatment of COVID-19, despite no conclusive evidence of their benefit. Although generally safe when used for approved indications such as autoimmune disease or malaria, the safety and benefit of these treatment regimens are poorly evaluated in COVID-19. Methods We did a multinational registry analysis of the use of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19. The registry comprised data from 671 hospitals in six continents. We included patients hospitalised between Dec 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020, with...

The pandemic did this? Even the content alone shows that fear of disease pales in comparison to economic hardship in driving suicide. In addition, there is another huge factor: mandatory social separation is a psychological disaster. “It’s a natural experiment, in a way,” said Matthew Nock, a psychology professor at Harvard. “There’s not only an increase in anxiety, but the more important piece is social isolation.” He added, “We’ve never had anything like this — and we know social isolation is related to suicide.” So, yes, this can generate terrifying but predictable results. Again, the problem is material but, more...

China failed to contain the coronavirus in its early days. In fact, Beijing did not quickly notify and work with international bodies like the World Health Organization and the rest of the international community. Had China acted it could have prevented a local outbreak in Hubei province from becoming a global pandemic. All of this shows that despite its outsize power and influence on the global stage, Beijing is not a responsible player. And now America finds itself with remarkably little power to do anything about it. For three decades, Americans have allowed themselves to become increasingly economically dependent on...