Category: Health

Categories
Health

U.S. Authorities Search Paperwork From Troubled Covid Vaccine Producer

U.S. Authorities Seek Documents From Troubled Covid Vaccine Manufacturer

That decision does not mean the F.D.A. has broadly authorized Johnson & Johnson to distribute doses made by Emergent on an emergency basis. The F.D.A. signed off on previous batches of vaccine made at the Baltimore factory but with a warning that it could not guarantee the company had followed good manufacturing practices. The agency has cleared the equivalent of up to 75 million doses, but tens of millions remain in limbo.

In a conference call with investors on Thursday, Emergent executives announced a $41.5 million hit from being forced to discard doses the F.D.A. had deemed unusable, and said the company had spent another $12.4 million to address manufacturing issues in Baltimore.

The newly disclosed inquiries from federal and state agencies underscore a dramatic reversal of fortune for a company that has spent much of the last two decades effectively cornering the market for biodefense, becoming the government’s go-to contractor for products to protect against bioterrorism and infectious disease outbreaks.

For most of the last decade, the government has spent nearly half of the annual budget of the nation’s emergency medical reserve, the Strategic National Stockpile, on Emergent’s anthrax vaccine alone, crowding out investments in products such as masks that were in short supply during the pandemic, a New York Times investigation found.

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the government turned to Emergent to produce vaccines and treatments. Thanks to a lucrative deal struck in May 2020, Emergent earned record profits and awarded executives record bonuses.

Out of public view, however, concern about the company’s ability to deliver was mounting, as The Times has reported. A series of audits by customers, federal officials and the company’s own evaluators found repeated shortcomings in efforts to disinfect and prevent contamination, and a top federal official warned that the company would have to be “monitored closely.”

After it was discovered in late March that a batch of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been cross-contaminated with material from the AstraZeneca vaccine, federal inspectors descended on the factory, and members of Congress launched an investigation into both the company’s Covid-19 manufacturing work and its contracts with the stockpile.

Categories
Health

CDC research reveals 74% of individuals contaminated in Massachusetts Covid outbreak had been absolutely vaccinated

CDC study shows 74% of people infected in Massachusetts Covid outbreak were fully vaccinated

Boston EMS medics work to resuscitate a patient on the way to the ambulance amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Boston, Massachusetts, April 27, 2020.

Brian Snyder | Reuters

About three-fourths of people infected in a Massachusetts Covid-19 outbreak were fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to new data published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new data, published in the U.S. agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, also found that fully vaccinated people who get infected carry as much of the virus in their nose as unvaccinated people, and could spread it to other individuals.

“This finding is concerning and was a pivotal discovery leading to CDC’s updated mask recommendation,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a statement. “The masking recommendation was updated to ensure the vaccinated public would not unknowingly transmit virus to others, including their unvaccinated or immunocompromised loved ones.”

On Tuesday, the CDC reversed course on its prior guidance and recommended fully vaccinated Americans who live in areas with high Covid infection rates resume wearing face masks indoors. The guidelines cover about two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to a CNBC analysis.

While the delta variant continues to hit unvaccinated people the hardest, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and are potentially transmitting it to others, Walensky told reporters on a call Tuesday. She added the variant behaves “uniquely differently from past strains of the virus.”

A CDC document that was reviewed by CNBC warned that the delta variant sweeping across the country is as contagious as chickenpox, has a longer transmission window than the original Covid strain and may make older people sicker, even if they’ve been fully vaccinated.

Delta, now in at least 132 countries and already the dominant form of the disease in the United States, is more transmissible than the common cold, the 1918 Spanish flu, smallpox, Ebola, MERS and SARS, according to the document. Only measles appears to spread faster than the variant.

The data published Friday was based on 469 cases of Covid associated with multiple summer events and large public gatherings held in July in Barnstable County, Mass., according to the CDC. The events were held in an unnamed town in Barnstable, which encompasses Cape Cod and is just outside Martha’s Vineyard. Approximately three quarters, or 74%, of the cases occurred in fully vaccinated people who had completed a two-dose course of the mRNA vaccines or received a single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s.

Overall, 274 vaccinated patients with a breakthrough infection were symptomatic, according to the CDC. The most common side effects were cough, headache, sore throat, muscle pain and fever. Among five Covid patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated, according to the agency. No deaths were reported.

Testing identified the delta variant in 90% of specimens from 133 patients.

The CDC the data has limitations. The agency noted that as population-level vaccination coverage increases, vaccinated persons are likely to represent a larger proportion of Covid cases. Additionally, asymptomatic breakthrough infections might be underrepresented because of detection bias, the agency said.

The CDC also said the report is “insufficient” to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the authorized vaccines against Covid, including the delta variant, during this outbreak.

Categories
Health

How Disabled Individuals Are Pushing to Overhaul a Key Advantages Program

How Disabled Americans Are Pushing to Overhaul a Key Benefits Program

Once, this recipient said she was too sick to leave home for two months, and as her daily expenses fell, her account balance went from just under $ 2,000 to $ 2,135 without her realizing it. When the Social Security Agency found out about this, they had to repay all of their SSI benefit for those months, which lasted two years.

The organizers of #DemolishDisabledPoverty also want Congress to increase funding for home and community-based services; Abolish a law that allows companies to pay some disabled workers far less than the minimum wage; and update Social Security Disability Insurance or SSDI which is different from SSI but has many similar limitations.

Melanie Waldman, 30, who has lupus, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and an amputated arm, has been unemployed since she left a job that she said “destroyed my body”. She receives about $ 800 a month from SSDI

She has a background in theater and said she wanted to pursue roles but would have to ask for a lower salary. She is allowed to make $ 10,000 a year in external income and, prior to joining SSDI, earned about $ 13,000 from acting. Although SSDI pays less, she cannot afford to lose it as it would mean loss of health care.

Mr Cortland said the current legislative initiative is focused on SSI because it can be changed through a budget reconciliation while SSDI cannot legally. But he stressed on the virtual forum last week that proponents would also be working to improve SSDI

The forum, organized by the Century Foundation, was attended by Mr. Bowman and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat, who both urged the 17,000 or so audience to put pressure on Congress and the White House.

Categories
Health

Dr. Scott Gottlieb estimates as much as 1 million Individuals contaminated with Covid every day as delta spreads

Dr. Scott Gottlieb estimates up to 1 million Americans infected with Covid daily as delta spreads

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration

Getty Images

Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Friday he believes the coronavirus is significantly more widespread in the U.S. than official case counts reflect as the highly contagious delta variant sweeps the nation.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if, on the whole, we’re infecting up to a million people a day right now, and we’re just picking up maybe a 10th of that or less than a 10th of that,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner said in an interview on “Squawk Box.” Gottlieb now serves on the board of Covid vaccine maker Pfizer.

The current seven-day average of new daily coronavirus cases in the U.S. is roughly 67,000, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. That’s up 53% compared with a week ago, as the country grapples with a surge in new infections driven largely by delta, first discovered in India and now the dominant variant in the U.S.

The highest seven-day day average of new Covid cases recorded in the U.S. was roughly 251,000 on Jan. 8, according to CNBC’s analysis. Case counts had dropped off dramatically in the spring as the country’s vaccination campaign picked up speed.

But in recent weeks, as U.S. cases again started to accelerate, Gottlieb has said a large number of coronavirus infections were likely going unreported because the testing landscape is different now than at earlier stages in the pandemic.

For example, he previously told CNBC people can now complete at-home tests and those results are unlikely to make their way to health authorities and then show up in official case counts.

Additionally, Gottlieb has said vaccinated Americans who may become infected are likely to have a mild case or remain entirely asymptomatic, making them less likely to seek out a Covid test than they would’ve been before they were inoculated against the disease.

— CNBC’s Nate Rattner contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a member of the boards of Pfizer, genetic testing start-up Tempus, health-care tech company Aetion Inc. and biotech company Illumina. He also serves as co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings’ and Royal Caribbean’s “Healthy Sail Panel.”

Categories
Health

Is Nostril Hair Important to Combating Off Colds and Different Viral Diseases?

Is Nose Hair Essential to Fighting Off Colds and Other Viral Illnesses?

Is nose hair important to ward off colds and other viral diseases? I ask that as a woman who raised her eyebrows before the pandemic. The person doing the wax would always recommend waxing my nose hairs.

A medical truism says that nasal hairs filter the air we breathe and thus protect us from infection by airborne viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. But as is so often the case with truisms, his story is more venerable than confirmed.

The idea that our nasal hairs, medically called vibrissae, could offer protection against infectious germs goes back more than a century. In 1896, two English doctors stated in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet:

The interior of most normal nasal cavities is completely aseptic [sterile]. On the other side are the vestibules of the nostrils [nostrils], the vibrissae that line them and any crusts that form there are generally populated by bacteria. These two facts seem to demonstrate that the vibrissae act as a filter and that large numbers of microbes find their fate in the damp webs of hair that surround the vestibule.

The conclusion of the English doctors may sound logical, but at the time no one had investigated whether trimming nasal hair could make it easier for germs to enter the airways.

It was not until 2011 that the density of nasal hairs was intensively investigated as a possible disease correlate. In a study of 233 patients published in the International Archives of Allergy and Immunology, a team of researchers from Turkey found that people with thicker nasal hair are less likely to have asthma. The researchers attributed this finding to the filter function of the nasal hair.

Your observation was interesting, but it was an observational study that cannot prove cause and effect, and asthma is not an infection. The researchers also didn’t conduct any follow-up studies to assess how trimming the hairs of the nose might affect the risk of asthma or infection.

It was not until 2015 that doctors at the Mayo Clinic conducted the first and, to date, only study examining the effects of trimming nasal hair. The researchers measured nasal airflow in 30 patients before and after trimming their nasal hairs and found that trimming resulted in improvements in both subjective and objective measurements of nasal airflow. The improvements were greatest in those who initially had the most nasal hairs. The results were published in the American Journal of Rhinology and Allergy.

An interesting conclusion here, too, but does better nasal breathing correlate with a higher risk of infection?

None of the studies addressed this question directly. But dr. David Stoddard, lead author of the Mayo study, noted that when someone is working with drywall, for example, “I can tell by the white dust in the hair on their nose that they have just come home. But it’s the larger particles that get stuck in the hairs of the nose. Viruses are much smaller. They’re so small that they’ll likely go through your nose one way or another. I don’t think trimming the hair on the nose would increase the risk of a respiratory infection. “

Based on the limited study of nose hair, there is no evidence that trimming or waxing increases the risk of respiratory infections. And as at least one expert who has worked in the field has speculated, this is likely not the case.

Categories
Health

Malaysia day by day circumstances per million folks amongst highest globally

Malaysia daily cases per million people among highest globally

A man wearing a face mask as a preventive measure against Covid-19 walks down an empty street in Chinatown.

Wong Fok Loy | SOPA pictures | LightRocket via Getty Images

The Covid-19 outbreak in Malaysia has become one of the worst in the world.

On a seven-day moving average, Malaysia recorded 483.72 confirmed Covid infections per million people on Wednesday – the eighth highest in the world and the top in Asia, according to the latest data compiled by the online repository Our World in Data.

Meanwhile, the country’s daily reported Covid-related deaths on Tuesday averaged about 4.90 per million people on a seven-day moving average. That’s the 19th highest in the world and the third highest in Asia, the data showed.

Our World in Data is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Oxford and the UK non-profit Global Change Data Lab.

Malaysia has managed to keep the number of infections low for much of 2020. However, the country has struggled to tame a surge in cases despite several restrictions and a state of emergency.

Political analysts blame the government’s mistreatment of the outbreak as it worsened.

“Malaysia’s response is hampered by chaotic governance and ongoing political power struggles,” wrote Joshua Kurlantzick, Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Think Tank Council on Foreign Relations, in a report.

Malaysia’s political crisis

The Southeast Asian country found itself in political turmoil when former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad unexpectedly resigned in February last year. It paved the way for Muhyiddin to form a government by cobbling together a fragile coalition.

Political opponents have long challenged Muhyiddin’s claim to majority support in the country’s 222-seat parliament. Calls for the Prime Minister’s resignation – including among his allies – became louder after the Malaysian king issued a rare reprimand on Thursday about the government’s handling of the state of emergency.

The king had Muhyiddin’s application for a state of emergency from January to January 1.

Many analysts viewed the move as an attempt by the embattled prime minister to maintain his political position, particularly when parliament was suspended due to the state of emergency and elections could not be held.

When parliament convened again this week, the government surprised the nation by announcing that it had decided to end the state of emergency effective July 21. The king said the government’s unilateral revocation was inconsistent with constitutional procedure.

Since coming to power, Muhyiddin has tried to avoid parliamentary votes that his political opponents could use as a proxy for a vote of no confidence in his leadership. The Malaysian parliament has never voted on a motion of censure.

Covid vaccinations are increasing

Despite the political tussle, the Malaysian authorities have accelerated the pace of vaccinations in recent weeks. According to Our World in Data, more than 18% of the country’s 32 million people are fully vaccinated.

Economists at the British bank Barclays estimate that Malaysia – along with Singapore and South Korea – will be among the Asian countries this year to achieve “critical levels” of vaccinations.

The Malaysian government announced that it would vaccinate most of the adult population by the end of the year.

Still, economists said the worsening outbreak and ongoing social distancing measures have hurt Malaysia’s growth prospects.

Barclays cut its growth forecast for 2021 from 5.5% to 5% last month. That is well below the Malaysian central bank’s forecast range of 6% to 7.5%.

Categories
Health

Biden Seeks to Revive Vaccine Effort With New Guidelines and Incentives

Biden Seeks to Revive Vaccine Effort With New Rules and Incentives

WASHINGTON — President Biden on Thursday sought to revive the nation’s stalled push to vaccinate Americans against the surging Delta variant of the coronavirus, announcing new requirements for federal workers to be vaccinated and urging local and state governments to offer $100 to anyone willing to get a shot voluntarily.

His announcement included only federal civilian employees, but hours later the Pentagon said members of the military would also be subject to the same rules: Get vaccinated or face regular testing, social distancing, mask wearing and limits on official travel.

Although those steps fall short of a mandate, Mr. Biden also ordered the Defense Department to move rapidly toward one for all members of the military, a step that would affect almost 1.5 million troops, many of whom have resisted taking a shot that is highly effective against a disease that has claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Americans.

The announcement marked the first time he has suggested that a mandate could come for active-duty members of the military before any of the three federally authorized vaccines receives full approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

In a speech from the East Room of the White House, Mr. Biden effectively conceded that the worst-in-a-century viral scourge he once thought was under control had come roaring back, threatening public health and the economic recovery that is central to the promise of his presidency.

But after months of trying to persuade and cajole, the president on Thursday cast the crisis as one that pits the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, and said those refusing to get a coronavirus shot should expect inconveniences as long as they decline a vaccine that protects them and others from illness and death.

“This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Mr. Biden said, calling it an “American tragedy” and talking directly to the 90 million Americans who are eligible for a vaccine but have not gotten one. “People are dying and will die who don’t have to die. If you’re out there unvaccinated, you don’t have to die. Read the news.”

Mr. Biden said that federal workers who remained unvaccinated would have to submit to the extra inconveniences — essentially creating a two-tier system for the government’s more than four million employees and hundreds of thousands of private contractors who work at federal facilities around the world.

The president’s move stopped short of a vaccine mandate for federal workers. But the president said he hoped that by imposing new requirements on daily work life, more unvaccinated federal employees will choose to get a shot.

Mr. Biden said he was ordering agencies to find ways to ensure that all federal contractors — even those working for private businesses out of their own offices — could be required to be vaccinated as a condition of their work with the federal government. That could extend the president’s plan to millions more workers, including those in places where vaccination rates are stubbornly low.

“If you want to do business with the federal government, get your workers vaccinated,” the president said bluntly.

Mr. Biden urged companies and local governments to mimic his new vaccine requirements for federal employees, which he noted had the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The group said on Thursday that the president’s new rules were “prudent steps to protect public health.”

But the administration’s move quickly sparked consternation from some of the federal government’s largest unions representing teachers, police officers and postal workers, who called for negotiations on the subject.

“Forcing people to undertake a medical procedure is not the American way and is a clear civil rights violation no matter how proponents may seek to justify it,” Larry Cosme, the president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said in a statement.

The president also announced that small and medium-size businesses would be reimbursed for providing paid leave so employees and their families could get vaccinated. He called on school districts to host a “pop-up vaccination clinic” to get children vaccinated before the start of school. And he urged private businesses, sport leagues and other institutions to get their employees vaccinated.

Appealing directly to Americans who are “unvaccinated, unbothered and unconvinced,” Mr. Biden asked them to recall the depths of the lockdowns during 2020 and to “really remember just how dark that winter was.”

“With incentives and mandates, we can make a huge difference and save a lot of lives,” he said.

Coronavirus vaccines are available to Americans ages 12 and older. But as of Thursday, just 57.7 percent of those eligible were fully vaccinated, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The figure is much higher among the oldest Americans; nearly 80 percent of Americans 65 or older are fully vaccinated.

Updated 

July 29, 2021, 10:02 p.m. ET

During his campaign against former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden promised that he could vanquish the virus despite the polarized politics of the country he inherited. Just weeks ago, Mr. Biden hosted a Fourth of July party at the White House to declare “independence” from the virus. Now, he must reckon with rising caseloads and hospitalizations that are threatening a return to work and school in the fall.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Biden’s top public health officials have been deliberating for weeks, including in daily calls, about the best way to push more people to get vaccinated without prompting legal challenges or an anti-vaccine backlash.

A July 27 internal assessment for the senior leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services delivered the grim news about the trajectory of the pandemic: deaths up 45 percent from the previous week, hospitalizations up 46 percent and cases surging. “Since the lowest value observed on June 19, 2021, cases have increased 440 percent,” the assessment concluded.

Aides said the president hoped his solution could become a model for state and local governments and businesses around the country. But his announcement on Thursday lagged the efforts of many of those very institutions, which moved more quickly than the Biden administration to grapple with the issue.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California both announced on Monday that they would require hundreds of thousands of government workers to get inoculations or face weekly testing. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York soon followed suit.

Numerous businesses — including Netflix, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Washington Post, Ascension Health, Lyft, Google and Morgan Stanley — all announced get-tough policies that require their workers to get shots as a condition of employment. Unvaccinated workers at MGM casinos will be tested regularly, at their own cost, and if they test positive they will be required to quarantine.

In a joint statement this week, dozens of medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, called for all health care and long-term care workers to be vaccinated. The Department of Veterans Affairs became the first federal agency to require many of its employees to get a shot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its earlier stance and recommended that vaccinated people wear masks indoors in areas where rates of transmission are high.

Understand the State of Vaccine Mandates in the U.S.

“This is a very fluid situation,” said Dr. Richard E. Besser, the chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the C.D.C. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and change.”

Few in Mr. Biden’s administration doubted that the president could force federal employees to take the vaccine as a condition of employment. But a heavy-handed mandate was more likely to backfire, most argued.

The solution Mr. Biden announced on Thursday is aimed at sidestepping accusations that the president is using the power of his office to force shots in people’s arms. Instead, officials hope the new workplace rules will make employees want to become vaccinated.

When it comes to the military, Mr. Biden signaled that he could take a tougher stance, placing the armed forces firmly at the center of an escalating debate over vaccine mandates.

As commander in chief, the president has the authority to order the troops to take an experimental vaccine — a move that would have a deep reach into areas of the country with low rates of vaccination. The bulk of federal workers live in the Washington region, including the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, where rates of vaccination are already high.

“I think it would have a much bigger impact in parts of the country that have low vaccination rates and also get into populations that have been reluctant and hopefully show them that getting a vaccine is not problematic,” said Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who advised Mr. Biden during his transition.

Members of the military are regularly given vaccines, and unvaccinated service members are sometimes not allowed to deploy abroad and face other restrictions. But as a political matter, forcing vaccines on the military would be all but certain to set off a firestorm among Mr. Biden’s critics.

Many members of the military have been reluctant to take coronavirus vaccines. Dr. Besser said he was surprised the administration has not required them to do so sooner. Military leaders cannot require the shots because they are currently authorized on an emergency basis. Mr. Biden could order them, but has been reluctant to exercise that authority.

The White House was already taken aback, some military officials said, by the blowback to its door-to-door vaccine information campaign and has since treaded carefully on mandates, especially for troops.

Younger troops have been most hesitant to get the shot, calculating that their symptoms would be mild if they caught virus. But the Delta variant has been hitting younger patients, and with more force.

Dr. Besser said Mr. Biden’s move “makes sense,” adding, “It’s highly contagious, people in the military are in very close quarters with each other, and in terms of force readiness you wouldn’t want to see Covid ripping through unvaccinated soldiers.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader and a polio survivor, encouraged people to get the vaccine. With the virus on the rise in conservative swaths of the country, Mr. McConnell is among a handful of Republican leaders who are now explicitly calling for vaccination.

“Honestly, it never occurred to me we’d have difficulty getting people to take the vaccine,” he said.

Dr. Patrick Godbey, the president of the College of American Pathologists, which is advocating for greater use of Covid-19 testing, said even before Mr. Biden spoke that the events of this week had changed the discussion. His own medical institution, in Brunswick, Ga., has not yet required workers to get vaccinated, he said.

“People are now looking at it; they are evaluating it in their own institutions, and that’s an important step forward,” he said, adding, “It’s a real line in the sand when the federal government comes out and does it.”

Jennifer Steinhauer and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.

Categories
Health

Delta variant ‘completely’ driving Covid breakthrough circumstances, says physician

Delta variant ‘absolutely’ driving Covid breakthrough cases, says doctor

Professional sports leagues are uniquely positioned to track breakthrough Covid cases because they test thousands of athletes consistently, according to Dr. Robby Sikka, a physician who has worked with numerous NBA and NFL teams.

Sikka told CNBC that the highly transmissible delta variant is “absolutely” driving most of the Covid breakthrough cases he’s studied.

“Delta is driving this,” said Sikka, the founder of Sports Medicine Analytics Research Team, an organization that assists numerous professional sports leagues with injury data.

“We know that the delta variant has a higher viral load, it’s more infectious, it’s more contagious, and it is driving cases in the community. There’s an extremely high viral burden in the community.”

As Covid cases surge nationwide, new research is showing that fully vaccinated people can transmit the virus as asymptomatic carriers. More than 5,900 fully vaccinated Americans have either died or been hospitalized with Covid breakthrough infections through July 19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent data. The website also notes that 1,821 of those cases were either “asymptomatic or not related to Covid-19.”

Sikka told “The News with Shepard Smith” that vaccines do work to prevent severe illness when it comes to Covid and the delta variant, and that a key takeaway from sports is that vaccinated athletes come back sooner than those who are unvaccinated. 

“The athletes that have gotten Covid, despite being vaccinated, by and large, returned and have done well and been able to return and perform at a high level,” said Sikka. 

Categories
Health

Behind the Masks, a Thriller: How Usually Do the Vaccinated Unfold the Virus?

Behind the Masks, a Mystery: How Often Do the Vaccinated Spread the Virus?

The recommendation that vaccinated people dust their masks off in some parts of the country was based, according to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is largely based on a problematic finding.

New research showed that vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carry tremendous amounts of the virus in their noses and throats, she said in an email in response to questions from the New York Times.

The finding contradicts what scientists had observed in vaccinated people who were infected with previous versions of the virus and who mostly appeared unable to infect others.

This conclusion dealt a severe blow to Americans: people with what are known as breakthrough infections – cases that occur despite being fully vaccinated – of the Delta variant can be just as contagious as unvaccinated people, even if they have no symptoms.

This means that fully vaccinated people with young children, aging parents, or friends and family with weak immune systems need to renew their vigilance, especially in communities with high transmission. Vaccinated Americans may need to wear masks not only to protect themselves but everyone around them.

In the US, there are an average of 67,000 new cases per day as of Thursday. If vaccinated people transmit the Delta variant, they can contribute to the increases – albeit likely to a far lesser extent than those who were not vaccinated.

The CDC has not yet released its data, frustrating experts who want to understand the basis for the change of heart with masks. But four scientists familiar with the research said it was imperative, and based the CDC’s advice, that those vaccinated again wear masks in public indoor spaces.

The study was conducted by a group outside the CDC, the scientists said, and the agency is working quickly to analyze and publish the results.

It is still unclear how common breakthrough infections are and how long the virus stays in the body in these cases, said Dr. Walensky. Breakthroughs are rare and unvaccinated people are responsible for the majority of virus transmission, she said.

Regardless, the data the CDC is reviewing suggests that even fully immunized people can be unwilling vectors for the virus. “We believe this can be done on an individual level, which is why we have updated our recommendation,” said Dr. Walensky in her email to the Times.

The conclusion also suggests that vaccinated people exposed to the virus should get tested even if they feel fine. (In the UK, vaccinated individuals who come into contact with a known case are required to isolate themselves for 10 days.)

The new data doesn’t mean the vaccines are ineffective. The vaccines are still effective in preventing serious illness and death as they were intended, and people with breakthrough infections very rarely end up in hospital.

Updated

July 29, 2021, 5:53 p.m. ET

According to data from the CDC, around 97 percent of people hospitalized with Covid-19 are unvaccinated. (Immunity to a natural infection can offer even less protection.)

Earlier versions of the virus rarely broke the immunization barrier, prompting the CDC to advise in May that vaccinated people could go mask-free indoors. But the usual rules don’t seem to apply to the delta variant.

The variant is twice as contagious as the original virus, and one study found that the amount of virus in unvaccinated people infected with Delta could be a thousand times higher than in people infected with the original version of the virus. The CDC data support this finding, said an expert familiar with the results.

Anecdotes of clusters of breakthrough infections are becoming more common, with groups of those vaccinated reporting runny nose, headache, sore throat, or loss of taste or smell – symptoms of an upper respiratory infection.

The overwhelming majority, however, do not need intensive care because the immune system created by the vaccine destroys the virus before it can reach the lungs.

Understand the state of vaccine mandates in the United States

“We’re still going to see a huge, huge impact on disease severity and hospitalization,” said Michal Tal, an immunologist at Stanford University. “That’s what the vaccine was really made for.”

The coronavirus vaccines are injected into the muscle, and most of the antibodies produced in response remain in the blood. Some antibodies can get into the nose, the main entry point for the virus, but not enough to block it.

“The vaccines – they’re beautiful, they work, they’re amazing,” said Frances Lund, a viral immunologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. “But they won’t give you that local immunity.”

When people are exposed to a respiratory pathogen, it can gain a foothold in the lining of the nose – without causing any further damage. “If you walked down the street and wiped people, you’d find people with viruses in their lining that were asymptomatic,” said Dr. Michael Marks, epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Our immune systems fight these things most of the time.”

But the Delta variant seems to thrive in the nose, and its abundance could explain why more people than scientists expected are experiencing breakthrough infections and cold-like symptoms.

However, when the virus tries to snake its way into the lungs, the immune cells in vaccinated people are fired up and quickly clear the infection before it does any major damage. That means vaccinated people should be infected and contagious for a much shorter period of time than unvaccinated people, said Dr. Lund.

“But that doesn’t mean they can’t pass it on to someone else for the first few days when they’re infected,” she added.

To stop the virus right where it enters, some experts have recommended nasal spray vaccines that would prevent the intruder from entering the upper respiratory tract. “Vaccine 1.0 is designed to prevent death and hospitalization. Vaccine 2.0 should prevent transmission, ”said Dr. Valley. “We just need one more iteration.”

Categories
Health

Israel to provide Pfizer Covid booster pictures to aged

Israel to give Pfizer Covid booster shots to elderly

A man receives his third dose of COVID19 vaccine at Sheba Medical Center on July 14, 2021 in Ramat Gan, Israel.

Amir Levy | Getty Images

Israeli health officials plan to offer booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to people over age 60 as the shot’s effectiveness appears to wane as the delta variant spreads across the world, NBC News confirmed Thursday.

The heads of health maintenance organizations that have been administering the Pfizer vaccine will begin administering third shots Sunday, according to NBC News. The booster shots are available for patients above 60 who have already received their second shot at least five months earlier.

The country’s Health Ministry reported last week that the two-dose vaccine is now just 39% effective in Israel where the highly transmissible delta variant is the dominant strain. The shot still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, Israeli officials said, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness.

The data out of Israel, which began vaccinating its population ahead of many other countries, is bolstering arguments from drugmakers that people will eventually need to get booster shots to protect against emerging variants.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla on Wednesday doubled down on his comments that people will need a third dose of the vaccine to maintain its high level of protection against the virus. The U.S. drugmaker published new data Wednesday from a company-funded study that showed the vaccine’s efficacy dropped to about 84% after four to six months.

“We have seen also data from Israel that there is a waning of immunity and that starts impacting what used to be what was 100% against hospitalization. Now, after the six-month period, is becoming low 90s and mid-to-high 80s,” Bourla said on CNBC’s “The Exchange.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization have said they don’t recommend Covid booster shots at this time, citing a lack of data. U.S. and world health officials have said they are looking at the Israeli research, which was not peer-reviewed and was scant on details.

“We have to be mindful that, with time, the effectiveness of these vaccines may wane,” Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease professor at the University of Toronto, said in a recent interview.

He stressed that the shots still appear to be highly effective in preventing severe infection, helping hospital systems not get too overwhelmed heading into the colder months. That being said, “we’re still in the Covid era and anything can happen,” he said.

“We have to be prepared and we have to be nimble that people may need a booster at some point,” he added. “This close surveillance that’s happening in countries like Israel, the U.K. and other parts of the world is going to be very helpful in driving policy if and when we do need boosters.

Israel’s plans to boost its population come two days after the CDC reversed course on its prior guidance and recommended fully vaccinated Americans who live in areas with high Covid infection rates begin to wear face masks indoors again. The guidelines cover about two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to a CNBC analysis.

While the delta variant is hitting unvaccinated people the hardest, some vaccinated people could be carrying higher levels of the virus than previously understood and are potentially transmitting it to others, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday.

Walensky added new data shows the variant behaves “uniquely differently from past strains of the virus,” indicating that some vaccinated people infected with the delta variant “may be contagious and spread the virus to others.”

“This pandemic continues to pose a serious threat to the health of all Americans,” Walensky told reporters on a call. “Today, we have new science related to the delta variant that requires us to update the guidance regarding what you can do when you are fully vaccinated.”

– CNBC’s Kevin Stankiewicz contributed to this report.