Covid-19 News

Have Australian researchers developed an effective COVID-19 treatment? Potentially, but we need to wait for human trials

https://theconversation.com/am…t-for-human-trials-161085

The world is now 18 months into the COVID-19 pandemic and we’ve yet to find a single drug that can stop the virus. At best, we can treat the effects of the virus through oxygen therapy for those who can’t breathe, and with drugs that reduce the inflammation associated with the infection.

But an Australian-United States research team, led by Griffith University’s Menzies Health Institute, have shown promising results in their mouse trials of a new treatment for COVID-19.

The technology is based on “short interfering RNA”, which prevents the virus from replicating inside human cells. They found a 99.9% drop in the number of virus particles in the mice they studied.

The researchers hypothesise the drug could be injected into patients daily for up to five days, for example for sick patients in hospital, or as a once-off if someone has just been exposed to the coronavirus; however, there’s no data on this specifically, so it’s speculative for now.

While the results are very promising, the technology has only been tested in mice. Human clinical trials will take some time to complete before we know whether a drug will be approved by the government

How viruses work

Viruses are tricky to treat because they are biological molecules made of the same types of materials as the human body. Virus particles are just packets of information on how to make more virus, encoded in a molecule called “ribonucleic acid” or RNA (although some contain DNA instead) within a protein coating.

Once a virus particle penetrates into a cell, it either hijacks the machinery of the cell to make copies of itself, or in some cases, has its RNA copied into the host cell’s DNA. Either way, the cell becomes a manufacturing facility making hundreds and thousands of copies of the virus.

So the best way to stop a virus is to stop its RNA information being copied and transcribed by the cell.

We already have drugs capable of doing this for specific viruses. A drug called PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is available as a prophylactic against infection with HIV and the development of AIDS. A prophylactic can prevent a disease before it takes hold in the body.

The PrEP medicine works because the two active ingredients it contains, tenofovir and emtricitabine, block a molecule called reverse transcriptase which the virus needs to be replicated. Unfortunately, neither drug works to block COVID-19.

Short interfering RNA

Unlike PrEP, the new technology is particularly clever because it uses a molecule called short/small interfering RNA or “siRNA” to prevent the reading and copying of the virus information. This siRNA was specifically designed to recognise a sequence of the coronavirus’ own RNA that is common across COVID-variants.

This means the siRNA can seek out and lock onto the viral RNA because it perfectly complements it, regardless of the COVID-19 strain. When it locks with the virus RNA, the viral information becomes trapped and can’t be copied, or it causes the RNA to be cut and degraded.

At this point there is no virus production, and our immune system can just mop up the small number of virus particles floating around the body.

To prove their technology, the researchers enclosed their siRNA in lipid nanoparticles, which are essentially tiny fat-like particles. Without this protective coating, the siRNA would be destroyed in the blood stream before it could lock onto the virus. Lipid nanoparticles are also used in the formulation of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.

With the protective nanoparticle shell, the siRNA could then be delivered via a water-based injection into veins.

When the researchers administered the siRNA to mice that had been infected with COVID-19, they found the mice didn’t lose as much weight when compared with untreated mice. Weight loss was an indicator of how sick the mice were.

The researchers also found a 99.9% drop in the number of virus particles in the mice.

On occasion, when biological molecules are injected into the blood stream, this can trigger a severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Importantly, the researchers found their siRNA didn’t trigger an immune response in the mice, and therefore will be unlikely to cause anaphylaxis.

So as well as being effective, the technology appears to be relatively safe.

Will this drug be available soon?

As promising as the results are, we shouldn’t get our hopes up that a drug will be available any time soon. Data derived from animal tests doesn’t always translate to success in humans. Often, the way an animal’s body processes a drug can be different from the human body, and it ends up being ineffective.

Also, animal tests are just the first step in a long regulatory process to prove a drug works and is safe. Even with accelerated clinical trials and fast-tracked assessment from governments, an approved drug is still a year or more away.

Quote from Fm1

The technology is based on “short interfering RNA”, which prevents the virus from replicating inside human cells.

Ivermectin does the same, is tested for 40 years now and absolutely safe . But you get no research grant for this as you cannot sell it....

How many idiots spend their live time to cheat (kill) people and rob their money?

Of course basic research has a high value, but the same time suppressing the truth simply is criminal.

So did they compare it with Ivermectin?

Quote from Wyttenbach

Ivermectin does the same, is tested for 40 years now and absolutely safe . But you get no research grant for this as you cannot sell it....

How many idiots spend their live time to cheat (kill) people and rob their money?

Of course basic research has a high value, but the same time suppressing the truth simply is criminal.

So did they compare it with Ivermectin?

Maybe your question should be, how do we change the system. The FLCCC has talked of forming an agency similar to the WHO.

A plant-based COVID-19 vaccine from a GlaxoSmithKline alliance with Medicago shows strong antibody response

https://www.marketwatch.com/am…body-response-11621349865

Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline GSK and Canadian vaccine maker Medicago have reported promising results from a Phase 2 clinical trial of their COVID-19 vaccine candidate.

In a joint statement posted on Tuesday, the companies say the study shows trial participants have 10 times more antibodies in their systems than patients recovering from COVID-19. They reported that there were no severe adverse reactions among trial participants.

It will be good news for GSK, which has been overshadowed by vaccine progress made by rivals, and it may relieve pressure on Chief Executive Emma Walmsley after Elliott Management, an activist investor, took a recent stake in the business.

This COVID-19 collaboration involves Medicago providing the plant-derived vaccine candidate, which is tested in combination with GSK’s pandemic adjuvant, a substance intended to increases of otherwise affect an immune response to a vaccine. It is different because most proteins for vaccines are grown in the cells of insects, while Medicago’s protein is grown in plants.

Dr. Thomas Breuer, chief medical officer of GSK’s vaccine division, said: “We are delighted to see that the results suggest a very strong immune response. Medicago’s COVID-19 vaccine candidate combined with GSK’s pandemic adjuvant was also well tolerated, reinforcing its potential benefits. We now look forward to the outcome of the ongoing Phase 3 trial of this refrigerator-stable vaccine candidate as the next step forward in our contribution to the global response to the pandemic.”

Phase 3 of the trial started in March, involving volunteers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Brazil, with additional sites expected to be added in the coming weeks. The vaccine candidate has received fast-track designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and Health Canada has initiated a review of Medicago’s COVID-19 rolling submission.

Meanwhile, Austria’s health minister, Wolfgang Mückstein, said in a in a television interview that the country would phase out use of AstraZeneca’s AZN COVID-19 vaccine. He told Puls 24 that the reason was delivery issues, and some citizens were worried about using this vaccine because of reports of rare side effects.

Quote from Fm1

In a joint statement posted on Tuesday, the companies say the study shows trial participants have 10 times more antibodies in their systems than patients recovering from COVID-19. They reported that there were no severe adverse reactions among trial participants.

As said: The type of antibodies are important. Certainly not ACE-2 locks. Even more important the T-Cell memory...

And no side effects please else

Poor guy has been skipped during vaccination...

Quote from JedRothwell

Canada is catching up to U.S. in vaccinations, and cases are starting to fall rapidly:

And here I thought the fall in cases might be because of the ongoing closure of basketball courts, tennis courts, baseball, soccer, golf, marinas, etc. Or perhaps it was the arrests of Christian pastors, and the coronavirus took pity? Or maybe it was because casual travel between provinces was blocked by police? In any event our Premier is proud that we are the most locked down part of the world, even while our current Covid positive deaths per capita are comparable to Texas, Florida and California.

Nanofiber filter captures almost 100% of coronavirus aerosols

The filter could help curb airborne spread of COVID-19 virus

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub…021-05/uoc--nfc051821.php

A filter made from polymer nanothreads blew three kinds of commercial masks out of the water by capturing 99.9% of coronavirus aerosols in an experiment.

"Our work is the first study to use coronavirus aerosols for evaluating filtration efficiency of face masks and air filters," said corresponding author Yun Shen, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering. "Previous studies have used surrogates of saline solution, polystyrene beads, and bacteriophages -- a group of viruses that infect bacteria."

The study, led by engineers at UC Riverside and The George Washington University, compared the effectiveness of surgical and cotton masks, a neck gaiter, and electrospun nanofiber membranes at removing coronavirus aerosols to prevent airborne transmission. The cotton mask and neck gaiter only removed about 45%-73% of the aerosols. The surgical mask did much better, removing 98% of coronavirus aerosols. But the nanofiber filter removed almost all of the coronavirus aerosols.

The World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control have both recognized aerosols as a major mechanism of COVID-19 virus transmission. Aerosols are tiny particles of water or other matter that can remain suspended in air for long periods of time and are small enough to penetrate the respiratory system.

People release aerosols whenever they breathe, cough, talk, shout, or sing. If they are infected with COVID-19, these aerosols can also contain the virus. Inhaling a sufficient quantity of coronavirus-laden aerosols can make people sick. Efforts to curb aerosol spread of COVID-19 focus on minimizing individual exposure and reducing the overall quantity of aerosols in an environment by asking people to wear masks and by improving indoor ventilation and air filtration systems.

Studying a contagious new virus is dangerous and done in labs with the highest biosecurity ratings, which are relatively rare. To date, all studies during the pandemic on mask or filter efficiency have used other materials thought to mimic the size and behavior of coronavirus aerosols. The new study improved on this by testing both aerosolized saline solution and an aerosol that contained a coronavirus in the same family as the virus that causes COVID-19, but only infects mice.

Shen and George Washington University colleague Danmeng Shuai produced a nanofiber filter by sending a high electrical voltage through a drop of liquid polyvinylidene fluoride to spin threads about 300 nanometers in diameter -- about 167 times thinner than a human hair. The process created pores only a couple of micrometers in diameter on the nanofiber's surfaces, which helped them capture 99.9% of coronavirus aerosols.

The production technique, known as electrospinning, is cost effective and could be used to mass produce nanofiber filters for personal protective equipment and air filtration systems. Electrospinning also leaves the nanofibers with an electrostatic charge that enhances their ability to capture aerosols, and their high porosity makes it easier to breathe wearing electrospun nanofiber filters.

"Electrospinning can advance the design and fabrication of face masks and air filters," said Shen. "Developing new masks and air filters by electrospinning is promising because of its high performance in filtration, economic feasibility, and scalability, and it can meet on-site needs of the masks and air filters."

###

The paper, "Development of electrospun nanofibrous filters for controlling coronavirus aerosols," is published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters. Other authors include Hongchen Shen, Zhe Zhou, Haihuan Wang, Mengyang Zhang, Minghao Han, and David P. Durkin. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation.

more from previous November post, they are still rising!

Zombie mink slaughtered due to coronavirus are 'rising' from mass graves

https://www.livescience.com/am…ass-grave-excavation.html

Last year, Denmark culled millions of farmed mink after coronavirus infections broke out amongst the animals. But in the following months, hastily buried mink carcasses began rising up from the ground, propelled skyward by the gases seeping from their decomposing flesh, according to news reports.

In November 2020, Danish authorities announced a plan to cull all farmed mink in the country after more than 200 farms reported SARS-CoV-2 infections among their animals, Live Science previously reported. The virus, which causes COVID-19 in humans, had picked up mutations while spreading among the mink, and the Danish authorities worried that the mutant virus might spill over to humans and worsen the pandemic.

"The other area to be concerned about is having this virus spill into an animal host that becomes a regional or local reservoir for viral infections," Jonathan Runstadler, professor in the department of infectious disease and global health at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine in Massachusetts, told NBC News in December. A few thousand mink escape Danish farms each year, so some infected mink could have potentially ventured into the wild and passed the virus to other animals, Live Science previously reported.

Citing these concerns, the Danish government issued its order in early November 2020, and by Nov. 25, "mink on all 289 affected mink farms, and farms within an assigned zone, were culled," according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Most of the roughly 17 million mink carcasses were burned in waste incinerators, but due to limited capacity, about 4 million mink were instead buried in military areas in western Denmark, Reuters reported.

One of the mass graves lies near a swimming lake and the other near a drinking water source, which raised concerns of water contamination from local residents, Reuters reported. And not long after their initial burial, the mink carcasses began poking up through the ground, like a scene pulled from a bad zombie flick, NBC News reported.

In response to this disaster, the Danish government decided to excavate the mass mink graves, starting in May 2021, and that plan is now finally underway, Reuters reported. Per the plan, the 4 million mink will be dug up and burned at 13 central heating plants around Denmark by mid-July

How COVID is changing the study of human behaviour

The pandemic is teaching us key lessons about crisis, communication and misinformation, and is spurring changes in the way scientists study public-health questions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01317-z

During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist at New York University, wanted to identify the social factors that best predict a person’s support for public-health measures, such as physical distancing or closing restaurants. He had a handful of collaborators ready to collect survey data. But because the pandemic was going on everywhere, he wondered whether he could scale up the project. So he tried something he’d never done before.

He posted a description of the study on Twitter in April, with an invitation for other researchers to join. “Maybe I’ll get ten more people and some more data points,” he recalls thinking at the time. Instead, the response floored him. More than 200 scientists from 67 countries joined the effort. In the end, the researchers were able to collect data on more than 46,000 people. “It was a massive collaboration,” he says. The team showed how, on the whole, people who reported that national identity was important to them were more likely to support public-health policies1. The work is currently being peer reviewed.

For social scientists, the COVID-19 pandemic has presented a unique opportunity — a natural experiment that “cuts across all cultures and socio-economic groups”, says Andreas Olsson, a psychologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Everyone is facing similar threats to their health and livelihoods, “so we can see how people respond differently to this depending on culture, social groups and individual differences”, he says. Researchers have been able to compare people’s behaviours before and after large policy changes, for example, or to study the flow of information and misinformation more easily.

The pandemic’s global scope has brought groups together from around the world as never before. And with so much simultaneous interest, researchers can test ideas and interventions more rapidly than before. It has also forced many social scientists to adapt their methods during a time when in-person interviews and experiments have been next to impossible. Some expect that innovations spurred by the pandemic could outlive the current crisis and might even permanently change the field.

For example, with the technology that’s now tried and tested, Van Bavel says, it’s much easier to build an international team. “Now that we’ve got the infrastructure and experience, we’ll be able to do this for all kinds of things,” he says.

Social vaccine boosters

Before Van Bavel’s massive collaboration, he and a group of more than 40 researchers got together to outline the ways in which behavioural research might inform and improve the response to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a time when people are scared, sceptical and inundated by information. They outlined previous research in the field that might influence policy, and identified potential projects on threat perception, decision-making and science communication, among other things2.

Many were eager to apply their work towards understanding the public response to practices such as lockdowns and mask mandates. In the survey of more than 46,000 people, Van Bavel and his colleagues showed that countries in which people were most in favour of precautionary measures tended to be those that fostered a sense of public unity and cohesion. A sense, he says, that “we’re all in this together”. That was somewhat counter-intuitive. Right-wing political ideology correlated with resistance to public-health measures among survey participants, but, on the whole, a strong national identity predicted more support for such measures. Van Bavel says this suggests that it might be possible to leverage national identity when promoting public-health policies.

Other work has shown that who delivers the message really matters. A study3 published in February surveyed more than 12,000 people in 6 countries — Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the United States — about their willingness to share a message encouraging social distancing. The message could be endorsed by actor Tom Hanks, celebrity Kim Kardashian, a prominent government official from the survey-taker’s country or Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. Respondents from all countries were most willing to share the message when it came from Fauci (although in the United States, where COVID-19 has been highly politicized, he has become a divisive figure for some). Celebrity endorsements were relatively ineffective by comparison.

Preliminary research suggests that aligning the message with recipients’ values or highlighting social approval can also be influential. Michele Gelfand, a psychologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, is part of a team running an ‘intervention tournament’ to identify ways of promoting mask wearing among conservatives and liberals in the United States.

The researchers are testing eight interventions, or ‘nudges’, that reflect different moral values and factors specific to COVID-19. The aim is to work out which are most effective at encouraging these political groups to adhere to public-health guidance. One message they are testing emphasizes that mask wearing will ‘help us to reopen our economy more quickly’ — an approach designed to appeal to Republicans, who are more likely to view the pandemic as an economic crisis than a health one. Another intervention highlights harm avoidance — a value that liberal people say is important to them. The message emphasizes that a mask ‘will keep you safe’.

“We’re pitting them against one another to see which nudge works best,” Gelfand says. It’s a study design that can test multiple interventions simultaneously, and could be deployed on a large scale across many geographical regions — a benefit made more urgent by the pandemic. The results have not yet been published.

Others started using a similar approach to encourage vaccination even before a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was available. The Behavior Change For Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia was testing nudges that encourage people to get the influenza vaccine. Katherine Milkman, a behavioural researcher at the university’s Wharton School, and her colleagues tested around 20 messaging strategies — everything from jokes to direct appeals. “We’re seeing things that work,” Milkman says. They’ve found, for example, that texting people to say a flu shot had been reserved especially for them boosted vaccination rates4,5.

The findings were almost immediately put to work by researchers seeking to increase COVID-19 vaccination uptake. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), tried replicating the strategy among people being treated at the UCLA Health system in February and March6, and found that it “proved quite useful for nudging COVID-19 vaccination”, Milkman says.

And, in March, Milkman received an e-mail from Steve Martin, chief executive of the behavioural-science consultancy Influence at Work in Harpenden, UK, telling her that his team had implemented her findings on the island of Jersey in the English Channel. Martin and his colleague Rebecca Sherrington, associate chief nurse for the Government of Jersey, incorporated Milkman’s insight that it was possible to increase the likelihood of someone coming in for a vaccine if they were given “a sense of ownership” — for instance, by telling them that ‘this vaccine has been reserved for you’. “We’ve had a real problem engaging care-home staff — particularly young females, many of whom are sceptical about the vaccine,” Martin says. But using Milkman’s approach, along with other insights (such as the idea that the messenger’s identity also matters), Martin’s programme attained 93% coverage of care-home staff on Jersey, compared with around 80% in other jurisdictions.

Depolarization research

Technologies such as geotracking are helping social scientists to trace the way people really behave, not just how they say they do. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a dramatic split along political lines in many places, and because so many people own smartphones that include GPS trackers, researchers can quantify how partisanship has translated into behaviour during the pandemic.

Van Bavel and his colleagues used geotracking data from 15 million smartphones per day to look at correlations between US voting patterns and adherence to public-health recommendations7. People in counties that voted for Republican Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, for example, practised 14% less physical distancing between March and May 2020 than did people in areas that voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton. The study also identified a correlation between the consumption of conservative news and reduced physical distancing, and found that the partisan differences regarding physical distancing increased over time.

The research possibilities opened up by geotracking are “beyond my dreams”, says Walter Quattrociocchi, a data scientist at the Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. “We have so much more data to measure social processes now,” he says, and the pandemic has provided a way to put these data to work.

His group used location data from 13 million Facebook users to look at how people moved around France, Italy and the United Kingdom during the early months of the pandemic. The three countries displayed different patterns of mobility that reflect their underlying infrastructure and geography. Movements in the United Kingdom and France were more centralized around London and Paris, respectively, but were more dispersed among Italy’s major population centres8. Such results, he says, could help to predict economic resilience in the face of other disasters.

Researchers are also increasingly using Internet-based surveys, a trend accelerated by the pandemic. A US study9 of people’s daily activities during the pandemic — such as going to work, visiting family or dining at restaurants — received more than 6,700 responses per day on average. Results showed that political partisanship had a much greater role than did local COVID-19 rates in influencing safe behaviours. Self-identified Republicans were nearly 28% more likely to be mobile than Democrats were, and this gap widened over the course of the study period from April to September last year.

Post-lockdown legacy

The pandemic is clearly changing how researchers study behaviour — and in ways that could outlast the lockdowns. “I think people will continue to seek to do bigger studies with more laboratories to produce more robust and widely applicable findings,” says Van Bavel. The samples collected through these projects are more diverse than they are for typical approaches, and so the impact from these studies could be much higher, he says.

The COVID-19 crisis has also made researchers much more willing to collaborate and share information, says Milkman. And the pace of publishing and implementing findings has sped up, she says. “I wrote a paper about some of our findings over the Christmas holidays in a week,” she says — work that would have normally taken her several months. She expedited the manuscript because she felt the findings were urgent and she wanted to get them into the public domain.

The constraints of COVID-19 have nudged social science in a good direction, says Milkman. “We should be doing ‘big science’,” she says, in the way that fields such as physics and astronomy do. Instead of running single, small experiments, researchers can now conduct mega-studies that bring together large groups of researchers to test 20 or even 50 treatment arms at once, she says.

The inability to gather people indoors to conduct research has also forced innovations in how scientists recruit and study participants, says Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a behavioural scientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She is an investigator on the Understanding America Study, which has been repeatedly surveying about 9,000 nationally representative US households on questions related to the pandemic, such as ‘Do you intend to get vaccinated?’ and ‘How likely do you think it is that you will become infected?’. Being forced to develop procedures to recruit large, nationally representative samples has allowed Bruine de Bruin and her colleagues to recruit more widely. “You don’t have to stay local,” she says, and because participants don’t have to come into the lab, it’s easier to recruit a more diverse sample. “I do think it will push social science forward,” she says.

Technical workarounds spurred by the pandemic could also end up strengthening science. Alexander Holcombe, a psychologist at the University of Sydney, Australia, studies visual perception, which he describes as “a very narrow area of science where people weren’t doing online studies” before the pandemic. Social-distancing practices forced him and his team to learn the computer programming necessary to make their experiments work online. The upshot is that they’re able to get bigger sample sizes, he says — an important improvement on the methodology.

Brian Nosek, executive director at the Center for Open Science, a non-profit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, sees the pandemic as a chance to rethink some of the fundamentals of how science is done. “It’s given us an occasion to say, ‘Well, how should we be doing this?’” he says, with ‘this’ being everything from teaching and lab work, to study designs and collaboration. The ways that people communicate in the field and engage with collaborators have “fundamentally changed”, he says. “I don’t imagine we’ll go back.”

Quote from Fm1

Nanofiber filter captures almost 100% of coronavirus aerosols

The filter could help curb airborne spread of COVID-19 virus

This is at least 10 years behind the US company airlock that is now finalizing the FDA certification. Their mask filters all nano particles. The technology is already used in the space station for water cleaning. No virus do pass!

Quote from Fm1

Martin and his colleague Rebecca Sherrington, associate chief nurse for the Government of Jersey, incorporated Milkman’s insight that it was possible to increase the likelihood of someone coming in for a vaccine if they were given “a sense of ownership” — for instance, by telling them that ‘this vaccine has been reserved for you’.

This I call vaccine trafficking. Not telling people the truth about the simple cure with Ivermectin and lying about the duration of protection from a natural infection.

We know from SARS-COV1 that the natural protection lasts at least 20 years!!! But people are cheated with the anti body lie that the number is important. There is only question: Are there antibodies or are there none. If there are anti bodies then there is a T-cell memory. T-Cells can live on mucosa but antibodies circulate only inside the body...

With a RNA vaccine there is a very narrow T-Cell memory only - worst Pfizer. Moderna presents two parts of the spike what makes it 2x better. The Chinese vaccine presents the whole virus. So it will work with all mutations.

Quote from Wyttenbach

This is at least 10 years behind the US company airlock that is now finalizing the FDA certification. Their mask filters all nano particles. The technology is already used in the space station for water cleaning. No virus do pass!

The real problem is the public in general has no clue about using ventilation in indoor settings. If authorities issued public guidelines on ventilation, lockdowns would be out the window so to speak.

‘Public Health 101 failure’: CDC mask decision may knock out Biden’s workplace Covid crackdown

Guidance that nixes masks for the vaccinated appears at odds with pending OSHA regulations that were expected to mandate masks on the job

https://www.politico.com/amp/n…uidance-workplaces-489456

The CDC’s surprise mask-dropping guidance for those who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 may have killed any effort to require their blanket use in workplaces — a bitter disappointment to unions and other safety advocates who have been pushing the Biden administration to tighten things up on the job, not loosen them.

“It’s a Public Health 101 failure,” said David Michaels, an epidemiologist who led Occupational Safety and Health Administration during the Obama administration who is now a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health. “By giving advice to vaccinated people, but ignoring the fact that many or most people in many settings will not be vaccinated, the CDC is causing confusion and setting back our efforts to stop this pandemic.”

The White House is in the last stages of finalizing emergency Covid-19 workplace safety rules from OSHA, which unions, management-side attorneys and workplace safety experts broadly expected to include a mask mandate — until the administration’s latest changes to its guidelines last week.

Worker safety advocates now fear the Biden administration is abandoning its promise to issue stringent workplace safety rules employers must follow to protect their workers from the coronavirus, and experts in the field are bewildered.

“Who the hell knows what's gonna happen?” Jordan Barab, the second in command at OSHA during the Obama administration, who is now retired, said of the pending emergency rules. “At this point, it's hard to see, you know, how OSHA actually releases this thing or what it's going to have in it.”

House Education and Labor Chair Bobby Scott (D-Va.) blasted the Biden administration for "dragging its feet on a review process that has no end in sight."

Nurses and essential food and retail workers are expressing serious concerns that the CDC’s new guidance on masks, coupled with the Biden Administration’s failure to issue an enforceable workplace safety standard, is once again forcing workers to rely on an honor system that has been a tragic failure," he said in a statement Tuesday.

On Monday, OSHA advised employers to follow the CDC’s new guidance for “measures appropriate to protect fully vaccinated workers.”

The CDC’s guidance said that fully vaccinated people — except those in health care settings, correctional facilities and homeless shelters — can resume activities indoors without wearing masks or physically distancing, even if some in their group are unvaccinated.

OSHA said it was reviewing the new CDC recommendations and would update its own guidelines "accordingly.”

There's no coordination,” Michaels, the former OSHA chief said. “The CDC didn’t coordinate with either OSHA or EEOC. And that's resulted in chaos in the workplaces across the country.”

Attorneys who specialize in federal safety law say they would be surprised if CDC and OSHA went different directions on masking rules. OSHA rules are strongly informed by the CDC’s guidelines, which have been changed twice by the Biden administration in less than a month.

“The last thing employers want to do is change the policy that changed back. That's really the worst thing of all worlds. So, trying to predict what OSHA is going to do has been somewhat of a challenge,” said David Barron, labor and employment attorney at Cozen O’Connor. “You would think that OSHA wouldn’t say something different than the CDC.”

Unions including National Nurses United and the United Food and Commercial Workers say the new guidance is dangerous for workers and flouts the medical community's understanding on how the virus spreads.

The nurses union argues that the studies cited by the CDC to back up its policy change "present data that is incomplete, not yet peer reviewed, potentially biased, or show poor statistical certainty."

After the CDC announcement, some major employers, such as Walmart, quickly announced plans to let their fully vaccinated employees work without masks in regions where that would be permitted. Others have decided to continue requiring masking for now, creating a patchwork of approaches across the country.

Michaels cautioned that if employers implement the CDC’s recommendations to relax masking and social distancing rules for vaccinated people at work, it could cause a backslide in efforts to contain the coronavirus. Currently, only 37 percent of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.

“We know that the workplace exposures are one of the drivers of the pandemic,” Michaels added. “If workers get sick and they spread it to their families, in their communities, it will only be harder to control the pandemic.”

Safety experts’ main criticism of the CDC’s guidance is that it fails to address the workplace at all, creating confusion and ignoring conditions some workers face in some industries, where there is crowding and poor ventilation.

“The new guidance fails to address mitigation measures needed to protect workers in workplaces where large numbers of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals work in enclosed spaces, including meatpacking, grocery stores, warehouses and food processing where large numbers of workers have been infected and outbreaks continue to occur,” said Rebecca Dixon, executive director at the left-leaning National Employment Law Project.

NELP is pushing the CDC and OSHA to “jointly and immediately make clear” that workplace Covid-19 mitigation measures like masking, ventilation and physical distancing to protect workers “are still needed in many workplaces.”

Businesses have for months been bracing for the mandatory workplace safety rules President Joe Biden campaigned on. In a January executive order, Biden instructed the agency to decide whether to issue the rules by mid-March. But the rules weren’t sent to the Office of Management and Budget for final review until April 26.

As POLITICO reported, several senior White House officials said the CDC did not warn them the agency was going to recommend vaccinated people could forego masks until the morning of its announcement. And officials inside the CDC, White House and HHS have often disagreed on whether to loosen restrictions for vaccinated individuals.

Once the OSHA workplace rules clear the White House budget office, they will become public and go into effect. However, states that run their own occupational safety and health programs will have the ability to issue stricter workplace rules as they see fit.

More than a dozen states have issued their own Covid-19 rules already. For example, California’s emergency Covid-19 safety standard requires masking and social distancing, although the state is considering amendments to the rule later this week.

And despite the green light from the CDC for fully vaccinated people to remove their masks, some states, big retailers and industry groups say they will keep their mask rules in place for the time being.

California announced on Monday that it was not lifting its non-workplace mask requirements until June 15.

Chip Rogers, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, said in a statement Monday that hotel employees “should continue to wear face-coverings indoors for the time being” until the CDC provides further direction on how its guidance applies to business.

“For vaccinated employees working outside, or not in close contact with others, our guidelines will permit hotels to implement protocols easing face-covering requirements,” Rogers said.

Fast-casual chain Chipotle, as well as CVS Pharmacy, will still require its employees to wear masks, while removing mask mandates for fully-vaccinated customers where local regulations allow.

But other companies already jumped to change their policies soon after the CDC issued its new recommendations last Thursday.

Walmart, the country’s largest retailer, and subsidiary Sam’s Club, said Friday it would stop requiring masks — depending on state and local rules — for fully vaccinated staff and customers, effective Tuesday.

“Unvaccinated associates must still wear face coverings, per CDC guidance,” the company said. “Some associates may choose to continue to wear masks, and as part of our value of respect for the individual we should all support their right to do so.”

Home Depot, Publix and Target have also changed their rules so that vaccinated workers and patrons don’t have to wear masks.

Business groups that are opposed to mandatory Covid-19 rules say that while the change from the Biden administration regarding masks has created optimism among employers, it still raises a host of unknowns.

Management-side attorneys have cautioned employers throughout the pandemic to be careful when asking follow-up questions after inquiring about the vaccination status of their employees, which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has warned can run afoul of federal anti-discrimination laws.

The agency also announced Monday that it was considering the impact of the CDC’s new advice on masking on its Covid-19 anti-discrimination guidelines.

“Embedded in it are a lot larger questions,” Marc Freedman, vice president of employment policy at the Chamber of Commerce, said of the new CDC masking advice. “For an employer to say employees no longer have to wear a mask, it's all about their vaccination status. So it implies the employer has to inquire about their vaccination status and rely on what the employee tells them.”

Quote from Fm1

The CDC’s surprise mask-dropping guidance for those who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 may have killed any effort to require their blanket use in workplaces — a bitter disappointment to unions and other safety advocates who have been pushing the Biden administration to tighten things up on the job, not loosen them.

As said, felt a 100 times, surgical mask protect nobody indoors. So to many uninformed people cross talk. If all older and people at risk are vaccinated then there is no need for masks quarantine etc.. the rest can be handled with Ivermectin.

But big Pharma Daddy Biden has a different target: Fix fascists rules to force people to vaccinate. Only freedom for followers...

Quote from Mark U

And here I thought the fall in cases might be because of the ongoing closure of basketball courts, tennis courts, baseball, soccer, golf, marinas, etc.

I wouldn't know about Canada. In the U.S. and Japan, such measures are only a temporary expedient. They cause a temporary fall in cases, but as soon as you let up, the number of cases goes right back up to where it was before. These measures are only useful for two purposes: 1. To flatten the curve and keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. 2. To buy time before vaccines are available to everyone.

In 1918 when the pandemic reached high levels they closed bars, movie theaters and moved court trials outside to stem the spread of the disease. That worked, because they reached herd immunity, and the epidemic went away. 675,000 people died, but the number would have been higher if they had not closed bars and movie theaters. In cities where places like movie theaters remained open, a larger percent of the population died. So, closing things did reduce the percent needed to reach herd immunity. The virus reached fewer people before going extinct. Suppose herd immunity takes ~70%. Suppose 10% of the population is isolated and never comes in contact with other people for the duration of the pandemic. You only need 60% with acquired immunity before the disease goes away. People were careful to protect family members from contact with the public during the worst weeks. In my father's family on Long Island, no one went out in public except my grandfather. When he came home, he went in the basement door, changed his clothes and showered before going upstairs. The family was okay. My sister-in-law's family, in upstate New York, was not so lucky. Her grandmother, who was pregnant, died and was buried in a mass grave, location unknown.

If we had no vaccine, and the only way to stop the 2020 pandemic would be to reach herd immunity, so it would make sense to keep gyms, schools and other places closed until the virus went extinct. That would kill approximately 1.2 million more Americans, but it would still be less than the number who would die if we do not close these places. See:

https://www.healthaffairs.org/…1377/hblog20210329.51293/

Since we now have the vaccine, we don't need to close anything. We don't even need masks. All we have to do is prevent people who have not been vaccinated from flying on airplanes, and it would be good if we could stop them from going into gyms, schools, and grocery stores without a mask. Needless to say, people who will not get the vaccine are idiots who will probably not wear masks. We can prevent them from getting on airplanes and cruise ships with a vaccine passport, but we cannot keep them out of grocery stores. You cannot tell who they are, and a vaccine passport would be unworkable for a grocery store. So, these people will continue to endanger themselves and the rest of us. Fortunately, vaccinated people are at a very low risk when they encounter a sick person without a mask in a grocery store. Being cooped up with a sick person in an airplane for hours is a lot more dangerous. The ventilation is not as good, and the duration of exposure makes a big difference. For the most part, people who refuse vaccines will sicken and kill themselves, but not the rest of the population. This is on them. It is a shame the rest of us will have to help pay their hospital bills, but we can't leave them to die at home.

Quote from Wyttenbach

As said, felt a 100 times, surgical mask protect nobody indoors.

And as the CDC and every other public health agency and sane doctor in the world says, they do protect you, indoors and outdoors. That has been a certain fact for the last 140 years. That is why surgeons and doctors all wear them, especially when treating COVID patients. We would have lots more dead doctors if they had not done this. These doctors know way more than you do. That is also why masks were mandated in 1918, and people were jailed for not wearing them. You can say that 100 times or a thousand times, but you are still wrong. You are also wrong about nearly everything else you say. It is pretty much a given that whatever you say, the opposite is true. If you say it is raining, we can be confident the sun is shining. In that sense, you are a semi-useful source of information. Negative information.

Quote from JedRothwell

That is why surgeons and doctors all wear them, especially when treating COVID patients. We would have lots more dead doctors if they had not done this.

Outraging nonsense. Doctors only treat CoV-19 patients with a high grade mask. You mix up what happens in a OP. Surgical masks are here for droplets protection only - not for aerosols.

>99% of all CoV-19 infections are by aerosols. They reach at least 20 meters around a super spreader. All shown in papers.

Quote from Wyttenbach

Outraging nonsense. Doctors only treat CoV-19 patients with a high grade mask.

In 1918, they only used low grade masks, because that is all they had. From 1880 until high grade masks were invented, that is all they had, but they used them. N-95 masks were invented in 1995. More to the point, every doctor and public health agency says that ordinary masks help prevent COVID-19, whether the mask is on the patient or on the healthy person. All of the studies of animals in cages separated by masks shows this, with every kind of mask. All of the physical tests and simulations show this. In nations and cities where masks are widely used, the COVID infection rate is much lower than places where idiots go unmasked. Influenza is also lower. In short every single legitimate source of information on earth proves this. But you say you know better. Does it ever occur to you that you might be mistaken? About this, or anything else? No, obviously that thought has never crossed your mind, because you have an ego the size of the grand canyon.

Quote from Fm1

The real problem is the public in general has no clue about using ventilation in indoor settings. If authorities issued public guidelines on ventilation, lockdowns would be out the window so to speak.

They have issued public guidelines. Unfortunately it would cost a lot of money and time to implement them. That is a big problem in schools in Georgia. By the time you retrofit the schools, the pandemic will be long gone. They should probably do it anyway, gradually over time as HVAC equipment wears out. They should do this in case of future pandemics, and to reduce illness such as influenza.

The CDC, architects and building engineers did not think about this much in the past. We can't fault them for not anticipating future problems. There are any number of things we might do to improve safety and reduce illness.

Aircraft manufacturer began to address this in the 1990s. Modern airplanes are less likely to spread diseases than older ones. But they are still unsafe.

Quote from JedRothwell

If the union said this, they are confused. The CDC will continue to tally all infections, vaccinated, unvaccinated, light or severe. They will no longer do an intense investigation of breakthrough cases that result in a light illness not requiring hospitalization, but they will tally any case reported by a doctor or patient. They will -- of course! -- review any breakthrough case that results in hospitalization or death. Such cases are extremely rare.

It takes a lot of effort to do an intense review of a case, so this seems like a sensible policy to me. All breakthrough cases will still be categorized (coded for a computer search) and available for review. They will be reviewed by the AI tools that examine the database automatically. So, if a pattern emerges we will know. If a researcher anywhere in the world wants to take a closer look at the breakthrough cases, the data will all be there, ready to be examined.

Before May 2021, if you tested positive and had been vaccinated, you were directed to have the "COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigation Form" form filled out.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/c…se-Investigation-Form.pdf

But now you have to enter hospital and/or die to have the form filled out. We can no longer tell what number of the reported positive cases were vaccinated or unvaccinated. Here is the CDC's excuse for this :

In the coming weeks, CDC will transition from monitoring all reported vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only vaccine breakthrough infections that result in hospitalization or death. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance.

They're saying that lowing the quantity of forms filled out will maximize the quality of the data. Brilliant.

If you're vaccinated or unvaccinated and sick at home with Covid (without going to the hospital) it's now all the same to them.

Quote from JedRothwell

The CDC VAERS database accepts any report from anyone, no matter how far fetched. Years ago a doctor submitted a report claiming that vaccination turned him into the Hulk comic book character. The report was uploaded and I gather it is still there.

Of course, the VAERS database has naught to do with 'vaccine breakthrough' cases.

Incidentally, one has to marvel over the new term 'vaccine breakthrough' that has replaced the traditional term 'vaccine failure'.