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    Mitch McConnell condemns petition to revoke approval of polio vaccine by RFK Jr adviser

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    US Senate minority leader and polio survivor Mitch McConnell has condemned attempts to undermine the polio vaccine after reports that a lawyer affiliated with Robert F Kennedy Jr – the health secretary pick for Donald Trump’s second presidency – petitioned for the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the vaccine.In a statement reported by numerous outlets on Friday, McConnell, who contracted the disease as a child in 1944 – 11 years before the licensing of the world’s first polio vaccine – said: “The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed – they’re dangerous.”The 82-year-old went on to add: “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”McConnell’s latest comment comes after the New York Times first reported that Aaron Siri, a lawyer helping Kennedy select incoming health officials for Trump’s second White House term, filed a petition in 2022 in which he called on the FDA to revoke its polio vaccine approval. Trump has nominated Kennedy, an avowed vaccine skeptic, as health secretary for his incoming administration – a move widely criticized by health experts.According to the New York Times, Siri filed the petition on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a major anti-vaccination organization in the US. Siri has also asked federal regulators to withdraw or suspend vaccines for hepatitis B and 13 other vaccines, the outlet reported.Kennedy’s anti-vaccination beliefs have been widely debunked, including the unsupported link between vaccines and autism.Polio, also known as poliomyelitis, is a highly infectious viral disease that mostly affects children under five years old. Transmitted through contaminated water, food or contact with an infected person, the poliovirus destroys nerve cells in the spinal cord, in turn causing muscle wasting and paralysis.Since 1988, polio cases have decreased by more than 99% across the world, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated on its website, adding that polio vaccines have prevented approximately 20m cases of paralysis in children since then.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response to the reports, a Trump spokesperson for Kennedy Jr told the Washington Post that Siri “has never had a conversation about these petitions with Mr Kennedy or any of the [health and human services] nominees at any point”.Among other things, the spokesperson added that the vaccine “should be investigated and studied appropriately”, which it already has been. More

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      Trump pick for US health agency proposed ‘herd immunity’ during Covid

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      Jay Bhattacharya, an unofficial Covid adviser in Trump’s first administration, has been selected as the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the leading biomedical research institutions in the world.The choice of Bhattacharya, a Stanford economist whose proposal for widespread Covid-19 infection was backed by the White House, signals a return to controversial and scientifically questionable health policies in the second Trump administration, experts say.Bhattacharya, an economist who attended medical school, has called for an “an absolute revamping of the scientific community”.He has questioned the safety of vaccines, testified against the effectiveness of face masks, and argued that NIH officials should not be involved with scientific policy.Bhattacharya did not respond to requests for comment.In early 2020, Bhattacharya downplayed Covid’s deadliness, and he soon joined two other scientists in a recommendation to let Covid spread with “focused protection” – a proposal on the scientific fringes that soon became politically mainstream.After the Trump administration adopted the strategy of “herd immunity” through infection, millions of Americans were disabled and killed, with a vastly higher mortality rate than peer nations.In April 2020, Santiago Sanchez, then a first-year student at Stanford Medical School, wanted to do something to help as the novel coronavirus swept the nation and brought the world to a standstill.That’s how he found himself volunteering in a makeshift laboratory in the ballroom of the Palo Alto Sheraton, carefully squeezing droplets of blood samples into rapid tests for 10 to 12 hours a day.The research project was an attempt to see how many people had already gotten sick from Covid. If more people than previously known had already gotten sick and recovered, that would mean the virus wasn’t as severe as it seemed, and it might also mean there were enough people out there with immunity to help stop the virus from spreading, Sanchez hoped.But as he saw negative result after negative result, Sanchez felt his optimism curdle. After two days, the volunteers had conducted more than 3,300 tests, but fewer than two dozen turned positive, as Sanchez remembers it.That’s why he was puzzled when one of the senior researchers of the study, Jay Bhattacharya, stepped into the ballroom, saw the handful of positive tests alongside stacks of negative tests, and said, “there’s definitely signal here,” according to Sanchez’s recollection.“That was my first sinking feeling, because I was like, ‘That is not how I am interpreting this experiment,’” Sanchez said.The ensuing preprint study estimated that between 2.5% to 4% of people in the region had been infected – a rate vastly higher than previously thought, and a figure significantly higher than the number of positive tests Sanchez says he saw.Bhattacharya became a fixture on Fox News and other networks, proclaiming the opposite of what Sanchez now believed: that many more people had the virus than anyone thought, and that meant the US should reopen.“He was everywhere during the pandemic except hospitals,” said Jonathan Howard, associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and author of the book We Want Them Infected. “He didn’t treat a single Covid patient himself and became famous despite having no real-world responsibility that way.”Scientists quickly discovered significant errors in the study: the people who gave blood weren’t a random sample; the positive tests may well have been false positives; and the study was sponsored in part by an airline founder who was an avid proponent of reopening in the midst of Covid’s strongest grip.Despite criticism, the study results “spiraled out of control”, Sanchez said. “I and many others who worked on this study had this shared feeling of being taken advantage of, like we had been pawns in an obviously ideological project that did not meet scientific muster.”A few months later, Bhattacharya and other skeptics of Covid precautions met with President Trump at the White House, at a time when Trump had stopped speaking with his chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci.Bhattacharya and two other scientists, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, soon unveiled a plan, known as the Great Barrington Declaration, to let the virus spread unchecked among the general population while attempting to protect the vulnerable. The authors believed this approach could stop the pandemic within three to six months.“This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous,” said Francis Collins, then director of the NIH.Yet the day after the proposal was released, the authors met with Alex Azar, then the secretary of Health and Human Services, who confirmed that the proposal echoed the Trump administration’s policy of reopening.Within months, the worst wave of deaths of the entire pandemic crashed into the US. The strategy of protecting the vulnerable never materialized; even Trump, perhaps the most protected person in the nation, was hospitalized with Covid.“He was a pro-infection doctor,” Howard said of Bhattacharya. “He said that parts of the country had reached herd immunity in summer 2020 … He said that one infection led to permanent, robust immunity, and he treated rare vaccine side effects as a fate worse than death.”In the past four years, Bhattacharya has testified in state and Canadian courts, as well as US congressional hearings. Bhattacharya has said that public health has become a “tool for authoritarian power … a political tool that’s been used to enforce the biosecurity state”, and that the field needs to be rebuilt.When Sanchez sees patients who say they don’t need a Covid booster, he wonders if they’ve been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Bhattacharya’s messages.And he sees a direct line from the economist’s Covid advice to his possible appointment at the NIH.“They handed Trump a huge gift. They gave him a way to talk about the pandemic that obviously reached a lot of people, that let them, in their own minds, compartmentalize what had happened and feel that it was okay to tolerate the amount of disability and death,” Sanchez said of the researchers.“It totally obfuscated people’s ability to even assess risk, to the point that we have well-established, highly efficacious childhood vaccines that are now being denied – to the point that measles is coming back in some parts of the United States.”With trust in public health greatly diminished, the repercussions could be long-lasting and tragic in coming years, particularly as Trump’s health nominees erode trust in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and other public-health precautions, Howard said.“Every measles outbreak, every pertussis outbreak, will be on them.” More

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      Hear me out: RFK could be a transformational health secretary | Neil Barsky

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      Among the cast of characters poised to join the Trump administration, no one is as exasperating, polarizing or potentially dangerous as Robert F Kennedy Jr. But in a twist that is emblematic of our times, no single nominee has the potential to do as much good for the American people.Bear with me. RFK Jr has been rightly pilloried for promoting a litany of theories linking vaccines with autism, chemicals in the water supply to gender identity, how people contract Aids and saying the Covid-19 vaccine, which in fact stemmed the deadliest pandemic of our lifetimes, was itself “the deadliest vaccine ever made”. He claimed Covid-19 was meant to target certain ethnic groups, Black people and Caucasians, while sparing Asians and Jewish people.In normal times, these notions would be disqualifying. Spouting unfounded scientific claims is corrosive to a functioning democracy. It weakens the bonds of trust in our public institutions, and feeds the rightwing narrative that all government is illegitimate. This is why, writing in the Guardian this September, I dismissed the prospect of RFK Jr, saying his “anti-vaccine work is more likely to make America have measles again”.But these are not normal times. RFK Jr is Donald Trump’s pick to run our country’s health and human services department. He will have a massive impact on our broken, expensive and largely ineffectual delivery of healthcare services. How shall we deal with this?On one hand, RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine views are beyond the pale. To obtain Senate approval, I think he will have to repudiate the unproven assertion that the Covid-19 vaccine was harmful, and embrace the scientific reality that vaccines for measles, smallpox, coronavirus and other contagious diseases are in fact modern medical miracles that spared the lives hundreds of millions of people. And here is where I will part company with many of my Trump-fighting friends: should RFK Jr be able to abandon his numerous conspiracy theories about vaccines, he can be the most transformative health secretary in our country’s history.This is because RFK Jr has articulated what our Democratic and Republican leaders have largely ignored: our healthcare system is a national disgrace hiding in plain sight. He recognizes the inordinate control the pharmaceutical and food industries over healthcare policy, and the revolving door that exists among congressional staffers, pharmaceutical lobbyists and corporate executives. In testimony during hearings chaired by the Republican senator Ron Johnson this past September, Kennedy offered a lucid analysis of what is making America metabolically sick; he railed against big pharma and big food, and drew links between the damage done by ultraprocessed foods such as seed oils and sugars to our health, as well as the efforts of the food industry to come up with chemicals that make these foods addictive.He advocates banning pharmaceutical advertising on television, and wants to clamp down on the corporate ties to federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and National Institute of Health. (To my knowledge, he has not spoken out against the egregious cost of life-saving drugs or unequal access to medical treatment, but hopefully he will get around to that as well.)We spend $4tn on healthcare annually, and lead the world in spending more than $12,000 per person, 50% more than Switzerland, which is the second biggest spender per capita. American doctors dominate the Nobel prizes for medicine, and our medical schools are considered the best in the world. Yet we appear incapable of stemming the epidemic of chronic diseases. A staggering 73% of us are obese or overweight and more than 38 million people suffer from diabetes.This issue hits home for me, as I was diagnosed with severe type 2 diabetes in 2021, and – after receiving terrible medical advice to rely on insulin and metformin – reversed my condition by adopting a diet low in carbohydrates. This year, I published a “follow the money” series for the Guardian, Death By Diabetes, in which I highlighted the heavy influence of big pharma and big food on the American Diabetes Association (ADA). The ADA is a so-called patient advocacy group that sets the standard of care for diabetes treatment in this country, and yet it accepts money from food companies such as the makers of Splenda and Idaho potatoes – two products which have been found to increase people’s risk of getting diabetes.I subsequently wrote about amputations, and the reality that African Americans with diabetes are four times more likely to endure that grim procedure than white people. I view nutrition and metabolic health as a matter of racial and economic equity. I am clear-eyed, I think, of the serious risks to public health that RFK Jr’s unfounded anti-vaccine views pose. But so long as we still have a voice and can find a drop of hope in these terrible times, I think we should try to tilt policy toward the public good where we can. To that end, here is the game plan I believe RFK Jr should pursue.

      Lose the conspiracies and stick to the science. RFK Jr is right, and there is more than ample research to focus on the deleterious impact of sugars and seed oils. Following the money has always been a valuable strategy. Let’s start there.

      Lean on the vast ecosystem of committed researchers, clinicians and writers who have devoted their career to promoting metabolic health, even while knowing they would forfeit access to government and pharmaceutical grants. Many of these mavericks come from top medical schools, but they are a decided minority on their faculties. They include clinicians such as Georgia Ede, Mariela Glandt, Tony Hampton, Eric Westman, scientists such as Benjamin Bikman, Ravi Kampala, Cate Shanahan, and writers such as Gary Taubes, Nina Teicholz and Casey Means. These are heroic people who, in getting to know them and reading their work, I have found to be intellectually honest health practitioners.

      Appoint a diabetes czar to come up with proposals to once and for all fix this deadly and utterly reversible disease. I choose this particularly chronic ailment because it is ubiquitous, ruinously expensive, a disease that disproportionately afflicts the poor, is closely connected to our obesity epidemic, and utterly reversible through diet. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could finally reverse type 2 diabetes in our lifetime?

      Increase federal funding of nutrition studies. The FDA and NIH historically have tilted the research scales in favor of studies that might produce the next blockbuster drug. In reality, we still do not understand why we get fat and why we have seen an increase in chronic (non-contagious) diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Crohn’s.

      Severely regulate the ability of cereal companies to market their sugary wares to children, and the ability of pharmaceutical companies to barrage the rest of us with advertisements. Will a Republican-controlled Congress allow for more government regulation – even if it saves lives?
      RFK Jr’s ascent represents a tricky issue for people like myself who strongly supported the election of Kamala Harris. Healthcare is far from the only issue I am committed to, and I am disgusted by the Trump administration’s plans to deport millions of undocumented people, its attack on democratic institutions, and possible abandonment of Ukraine and the Nato alliance. While I disagreed with Liz Cheney about many, if not most, issues, I also embraced her apostasy when it came to the election – I adhere to the approach of not interrupting people you disagree with while they are doing the right thing.After writing something unkind about RFK Jr in the days leading up to the election, I received a private note from Jan Baszucki, a prominent metabolic health advocate I have come to admire over the past year. “With all due respect,” she wrote. “I am a big fan of your reporting on type 2 diabetes. But your comments about RFK Jr … are not helpful to the cause of metabolic health, which is only on the national agenda because he put it there.”Leading up to the election, I believed RFK Jr was fair game. I was, and remain, particularly concerned that his fringe ideas about vaccines and poisons would get conflated with his excellent perspective on metabolic health, and hurt the cause. Now I think we should be constructive where we can advance the public good.The larger question hanging over RFK Jr’s term as HHS secretary is whether Donald Trump will back him up when he takes on the pharmaceutical and food industries. The US’s health is not an issue the president-elect has evinced an interest in in the past. And his embrace of corporate executives such as Tesla’s Elon Musk suggests crony capitalism could be the dominant theme of the second Trump administration. But if we know anything about what makes Trump tick, we know that he responds to positive reinforcement.After all, it was the criminal justice advocates such as Van Jones and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who coaxed him into supporting the First Step Act, a significant piece of criminal justice reform (and one which Trump now forswears). As founder of the Marshall Project, the non-profit journalism organization that covers the US criminal justice system, I believe criminal justice reform should also be a matter of national urgency, yet at the time, I was ambivalent about efforts to work with the administration. In retrospect, whatever harm Trump might have otherwise inflicted, I would say we are a better country for the First Step Act.We are in a similar dilemma with respect to healthcare today: the system is ruinously expensive and inhumane. If there is someone in the administration who wants to make things better, let’s not interrupt him.

      Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of the Marshall Project More

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      The Guardian view on the US and vaccine disinformation: a stupid, shocking and deadly game | Editorial

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      In July 2021, Joe Biden rightly inveighed against social media companies failing to tackle vaccine disinformation: “They’re killing people,” the US president said. Despite their pledges to take action, lies and sensationalised accounts were still spreading on platforms. Most of those dying in the US were unvaccinated. An additional source of frustration for the US was the fact that Russia and China were encouraging mistrust of western vaccines, questioning their efficacy, exaggerating side-effects and sensationalising the deaths of people who had been inoculated.How, then, would the US describe the effects of its own disinformation at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic? A shocking new report has revealed that its military ran a secret campaign to discredit China’s Sinovac vaccine with Filipinos – when nothing else was available to the Philippines. The Reuters investigation found that this spread to audiences in central Asia and the Middle East, with fake social media accounts not only questioning Sinovac’s efficacy and safety but also claiming it used pork gelatine, to discourage Muslims from receiving it. In the case of the Philippines, the poor take-up of vaccines contributed to one of the highest death rates in the region. Undermining confidence in a specific vaccine can also contribute to broader vaccine hesitancy.The campaign, conducted via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and other platforms, was launched under the Trump administration despite the objections of multiple state department officials. The Biden administration ended it after the national security council was alerted to the issue in spring 2021. The drive seems to have been retaliation for Chinese claims – without any evidence – that Covid had been brought to Wuhan by a US soldier. It was also driven by military concerns that the Philippines was growing closer to Beijing.It is all the more disturbing because the US has seen what happens when it plays strategic games with vaccination. In 2011, in preparation for the assassination of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the CIA tried to confirm that it had located him by gathering the DNA of relatives through a staged hepatitis B vaccination campaign. The backlash was entirely predictable, especially in an area that had already seen claims that the west was using polio vaccines to sterilise Pakistani Muslim girls. NGOs were vilified and polio vaccinators were murdered. Polio resurged in Pakistan; Islamist militants in Nigeria killed vaccinators subsequently.The report said that the Pentagon has now rescinded parts of the 2019 order that allowed the military to sidestep the state department when running psychological operations. But while the prospect of a second Trump administration resuming such tactics is alarming, the attitude that bred them goes deeper. Reuters pointed to a strategy document from last year in which generals noted that the US could weaponise information, adding: “Disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”The US is right to challenge the Kremlin’s troll farms, Beijing’s propaganda and the irresponsibility of social media companies. But it’s hard to take the moral high ground when you’ve been pumping out lies. The repercussions in this case were particularly predictable, clear and horrifying. It was indefensible to pursue a project with such obvious potential to cause unnecessary deaths. It must not be repeated. More

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      Anthony Fauci says he turned down $7m jobs because ‘I cared’ about US

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      Before Anthony Fauci retired from his lengthy run as the US government’s top infectious disease doctor, major pharmaceutical companies tried to lure him away from his post by offering him seven-figure jobs – but he turned them down because he “cared about … the health of the country” too much, he says in a new interview.Fauci’s comments on his loyalty to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niad) – which he directed for 38 years before retiring in December 2022 – come only a couple of weeks after he testified to Congress about receiving “credible death threats” from far-right extremists over his efforts to slow the spread of Covid-19 at the beginning of the pandemic.Speaking to medical correspondent Dr Jonathan Pook for the upcoming CBS News Sunday Morning episode, Fauci confirmed that pharmaceutical corporations offered him big money or chunks of private equity if he would leave Niad and work for them instead.“At the time that I was getting offered [that], I was making $125,000 to $200,000 – then I would get offered a job that would get me $5m, $6m, $7m a year,” Fauci said in an interview excerpt published on Friday by CBS.Pook asked Fauci: “So why didn’t you take it?”“Because I really felt what I was doing was having an impact on what I cared about, which was the health of the country and, indirectly, the health of the world,” Fauci replied. “Because the United States is such a leader in science, medicine and public health that what we do indirectly spills over on to the rest of the world. And to me, that is priceless.”That exchange in Pook’s interview with Fauci – which CBS plans to air in full at about 9am ET on Sunday – perhaps adds context to the bewilderment that the veteran doctor expressed during his 3 June appearance before a subcommittee of the US House’s oversight and accountability committee while discussing his efforts leading the country’s fight against Covid.Fauci recounted how two people had been arrested in connection with “credible death threats” against him and his family, requiring them to get round-the-clock security protection. He also said his retirement from the public sector had not stemmed the harassment.“It is very troublesome to me,” Fauci testified. “It is much more trouble because they’ve involved my wife and my three daughters at these moments.”Far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has embodied the contempt that US Republicans generally held against the doctor at the height of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. She once sparked outrage by comparing him to the Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who experimented on Jewish people imprisoned in concentration camps during the Holocaust.She also assailed Fauci during his testimony, arguing that it was abusive for Fauci to recommend that Americans wear masks and maintain social distancing at the start of Covid, when there were no protective vaccines available.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Do the American people deserve to be abused like that, Mr Fauci? Because you’re not Dr, you’re Mr, Fauci,” Taylor Greene said at the hearing.She later told reporters that Fauci should be imprisoned as well as “tried for mass murder and crimes against humanity” over his attempts to limit the number of Covid deaths in the US, which exceeded 350,000 in 2020.Fauci later described Taylor Greene’s behavior as an “unusual performance”.In a news release promoting the interview on Sunday, CBS said Fauci would elaborate on his reaction to the recent congressional hearing. The network also said Fauci would discuss his memoir, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service, which is scheduled to be released on Tuesday. More

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      Malaria drug Trump touted as Covid cure increased chance of death – study

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      People who took an anti-malaria treatment that Donald Trump touted as a cure for Covid-19 in the early days of the pandemic and waning days of his presidency were 11% more likely to die from the virus, according to a new scientific study.The study’s authors – who published their findings in the peer-reviewed Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy journal – also estimated that nearly 17,000 people in six different countries, including the US, died after contracting Covid-19 and taking the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine.Doctors who prescribed hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 at the height of activity restrictions meant to slow the spread of the virus did so off-label and without evidence that there was any clinical benefit, as the authors of the new study noted. The study’s conclusions “illustrate the hazard of drug repurposing with low-level evidence for the management of future pandemics”, its authors added.A meta-analysis of randomized trials produced the findings in the study released by Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy, a 67-year-old journal edited by DM Townsend of the Medical University of South Carolina.The study’s authors said they used public databases to establish the number of Covid-19 patients who were hospitalized during the early days of the pandemic. They said they then systematically reviewed 44 cohort studies to calculate that there was an 11% increase in mortality associated with cases involving the use of hydroxychloroquine, along with about 16,990 in-hospital deaths in the US, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey.Trump first hawked hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug that could cure Covid-19 in March 2020 as he railed against activity lockdowns, saying they would ruin the US economy.His remarks about anti-malaria medication led to a surge in prescriptions for the drug. The Food and Drug Administration – which didn’t approve the first Covid-19 vaccine until December 2020 – was forced to warn that hydroxychloroquine could cause irregular heartbeats and other cardiac trouble.And the regulatory agency also clarified that the medication had only been approved to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.The then-president later dismissed an early study which showed hydroxychloroquine was an ineffective Covid-19 treatment as a “Trump enemy statement”.“They were giving it to people that were … almost dead,” Trump said at one point as the White House claimed he himself was taking the medication prophylactically.Trump ultimately tested positive for Covid-19 on 26 September 2020 and was hospitalized within days. He recovered after doctors treated him with a new antibody cocktail that was nearly impossible for the general public to access.Weeks later, Trump lost his bid for a second term in the Oval Office to Joe Biden. He is now facing 91 pending criminal charges for attempting to subvert his electoral defeat, illegally retaining government secrets, and hush-money payments to an adult film actor who has alleged an extramarital sexual encounter with him.Trump nonetheless is leading the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and polls have suggested a rematch with Biden would be competitive.Before the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped keeping track in May, more than 1.1 million people had died from Covid-19 in the US, and nearly 105m cases had been reported, according to officials. More

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      US Covid emergency status ends as officials plan ‘new phase of managing’ virus

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      Thursday marked the end of Covid-19’s public health emergency status in the US, concluding more than three years of free access to testing, vaccines, virtual accommodations and treatment for the majority of Americans.The end of the emergency designation comes just weeks after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency. But the nation’s leading health officials also wanted to be sure Americans don’t confuse this marker for the end of Covid-19 concerns.“This does not mean it’s over. This is just a new phase of managing it,” Dr Becky Smith, infectious disease specialist and director of Duke Health News, said. “The ability to make the transition out of the public health emergency phase signals a lot of successes in vaccine development, immunity and effective therapeutics.“All of those successes have paid off and now because we’re seeing less severe disease we can sort of fold it into how we think about other respiratory infections.”The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates more than 1,000 people are still dying of Covid-19 in the United States every week and many suffer from long Covid symptoms months or years after being affected. Meanwhile, at the height of the pandemic, there were sometimes upwards of 20,000 people dying in the country in just one week.According to the CDC, both vaccines and medication, like Pfizer’s Paxlovid, will remain available for free “while supplies last”. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted access to these supplies under the Covid-19 emergency use authorization declaration and insured Americans can continue to get vaccinated at no cost.However, most Americans will be left to foot the bill for testing. Without public health emergency designation, insurance providers aren’t required to waive costs for testing. The federal government will continue to distribute tests online via their website through the end of May.For those who have Medicaid benefits, a program which largely insures low-income families, at-home and in-office testing will remain free until 24 September, when federal funding expires. At this point, those who are uninsured will no longer have access to free testing, though community health organizations and local clinics are still likely to offer these supplies.There are other ways that the emergency designation changed the US healthcare system that could extend beyond Thursday.Telehealth and telemedicine, for which many restrictions were lifted to expand access and stop viral spread, will remain largely intact for now.The Consolidated Appropriations Act passed last December and included provisions that extend access to telehealth through December 2024 for Americans with Medicare. In addition, clinics in rural areas can continue to see patients remotely.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThrough November 2024, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced, providers can still prescribe controlled substances via telehealth after the emergency is lifted.But for Medicaid recipients and children enrolled in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, telehealth flexibilities are up to the states.After years of updating maps and statistics, the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response team will disband after Thursday and Americans will lose access to data collected and shared by the CDC. Federal tracking of Covid-19 infections will be largely left to individual states.The Department of Health and Human Services will also no longer require labs to report Covid-19 test results, meaning data regarding test positivity at the county level will no longer be available.The CDC will end weekly updates of case and death counts and officials urge states to sign agreements to enable the sharing of vaccine administration data. More

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      ‘It’s just gotten crazy’: how the origins of Covid became a toxic US political debate

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      ‘It’s just gotten crazy’: how the origins of Covid became a toxic US political debateNew report supporting theory the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab has sparked the latest eruption in a long fight over how the virus started, clouding efforts to pursue a neutral, fact-based inquiryWhite House official John Kirby, standing at the podium where Donald Trump once railed against the “China virus” and praised the healing powers of bleach, faced questions on Monday about the origins of Covid-19. He had no choice but humility. “There is not a consensus right now in the US government about exactly how Covid started,” Kirby admitted. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”The renewed interest in a genuine scientific mystery followed a report in the Wall Street Journal that the US Department of Energy had determined the coronavirus most likely leaked by accident from a Chinese laboratory.This startling assessment appeared to have a solid foundation: according to the Washington Post, it was based on an analysis by experts from the national laboratory complex, including the “Z-Division”, known for carrying out some of the American government’s most secretive and technically challenging investigations of security threats from adversaries such as China and Russia.But the claim was not officially confirmed by the energy department or Kirby, and it came with a caveat: the department had “low confidence” in its assessment, which was provided to the White House and certain members of Congress, the Journal said.Even so, gleeful Republicans seized on the findings to claim vindication in their pursuit of the lab leak theory, triggering a fresh round of toxic debate in Washington and on social media.Opponents say there is still no hard evidence for a lab leak, as many scientists still believe the virus most probably came from animals, mutated and jumped into people. They note that the loudest champions of the lab leak hypothesis are often also trafficking in rightwing conspiracy theories, for example about the top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci.But the two do not necessarily go hand in hand. Some scientists and other observers argue that the lab leak theory cannot be ruled out and should be kept separate from the racist propaganda that often accompanies it. It demands careful investigation, not peremptory dismissal or acceptance, they contend.It is the latest chapter in a long fight over the origin of a virus that has caused close to 7m deaths worldwide, clouding efforts to pursue a neutral, fact-based inquiry. In its loud opinions, blue v red certainties and lack of nuance, the melee echoes clashes over pandemic lockdowns, masks and vaccines, as well as the investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “Isn’t this just like everything else in American politics, where a partisan position on one side invites a partisan response by the other? There’s a lot of what might be called reactive thinking going on because of the high degree of polarisation and the high stakes. Charges without foundation invite responses without foundation.”Calling for public hearings into the matter, Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, warned: “If this isn’t lifted out of the crucible of political debate right now, it’ll just get worse and worse.”Studies by experts around the world have indicated that Covid-19 most likely emerged from a live animal market in Wuhan, China. The hypothesis that it originated from an accidental lab leak was initially dismissed by most public health experts and government officials.In February 2020, the Lancet medical journal published a statement that rejected the lab leak theory, signed by 27 scientists and expressing “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China”. It asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” (The journal later disclosed that the organiser of the letter had links to the Wuhan lab at the center of the controversy.)That the lab leak theory was being pushed by Trump, who long played down the virus and used xenophobic language such as “China virus”, and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, may have contributed to the instinctive eagerness of some to dismiss the hypothesis – and to ostracise scientists who dared question the mainstream orthodoxy.“From the start, the lab leak theory was never properly framed and parsed,” David Relman, a microbiology and immunology professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, wrote in an email. “The hypothesis of a lab-associated origin became synonymous with deliberate efforts to engineer viruses and malevolent intent, and this has not been helpful. The emotions, assumptions about motives, obstructionism by the Chinese government, and poor scrutiny of the evidence have only made things worse.”Jackson Lears, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, echoed this view: “People who consider themselves Democratic party sympathisers and liberals uncritically arrayed themselves against this. It was a kind of a lockstep reaction against Trump, as in so many matters.”The lab leak hypothesis did begin to receive scrutiny after Joe Biden ordered an intelligence investigation in May 2021. The 90-day review was intended to push US intelligence agencies to collect more information and review what they already had.But the review proved inconclusive. A report summary said four members of the US intelligence community believed with low confidence that the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human, and a fifth believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab. Two agencies – including the CIA – remain undecided.Without the equivalent of a special counsel delivering a final report, the White House is left in a fog of uncertainty that satisfies no one. Lears commented: “There should have been a more carefully orchestrated investigation, more centralised, more high profile, with more legitimacy. Splitting it up and into many agencies is a way of defanging the whole situation.”Others agree that the multiple investigations give Biden a political headache, especially at a moment of rising tensions with China over trade, Taiwan, Ukraine and a recent spy balloon shot down after transiting US airspace.Laurie Garrett, a columnist at Foreign Policy magazine who spent time in China during the Sars outbreak, witnessing how animal markets operated, said: “The president said, ‘I want the relevant agencies in the government to take a close look at this.’ Well, every agency has its own prism, its own skill set.“In Britain if you asked the Home Office, MI5, the Metropolitan Police, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the British Medical Association to take a look, you would get seven different answers and that’s the situation that the Biden administration has created for itself. By trying to appease all the screaming and cut the rightwing Republicans off at the knees on this, they’ve essentially opened up a Pandora’s box because every single agency is going to have a different way of looking at the problem.”Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December served as Biden’s chief medical adviser, say they still believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to humans, an established phenomenon known as a spillover event. But the reports of dissent in the intelligence community will give enough oxygen to those with doubts, good faith or otherwise.Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and formerly USAid’s lead official for Covid-19, likens it to a Rorschach test. He said: “The priors that you come in with are going to shape a lot of how you interpret the evidence, because ultimately, the evidence may suggest one way or another, but it’s not definitive one way or another.“If you want to craft a narrative that justifies the lab leak theory, you can do so. If you want to craft a narrative that justifies a natural origin, natural spillover, market amplification theory, you can do so. There’s not enough on either side to definitively rule in or out either.”But that does not make them equally plausible, Konyndyk added. “The preponderance of evidence strongly points to a natural spillover, occurring at and certainly amplified at the market.” Konyndyk noted how online debate about the issue has become toxic, with proponents of the lab leak making death threats to scientists. “There’s been some really irresponsible behaviour and they’re not trying to turn the temperature down.“That has prompted in turn very strong views from some of the more vocal folks who believe in the natural origin theory because they’re getting attacked on Twitter with a larger and larger army of trolls. It’s just gotten crazy.”Earlier this month, Republicans in the House of Representatives issued letters to current and former Biden administration officials for documents and testimony, exploring the hypothesis of a lab leak. Congressman Brad Wenstrup, chair of the House oversight panel’s virus subcommittee, has accused US intelligence of withholding key facts about its investigation.Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, added: “My concern about where we are right now with this whole Wuhan origins question is that several very serious, real issues are getting conflated and they’re being manipulated for political purposes by people who don’t understand the issues at all and don’t care.“We’re not hearing in these congressional hearings this is what we should do to strengthen the chemical, biological warfare agreements and make lab research safe in the world. Nobody’s saying that. They couldn’t care less. That’s not their agenda. Their agenda is to tear down a man who was seen on camera in a live press conference putting his hand over his face and shaking his head as President Trump said, ‘Maybe bleach can cure Covid.’”TopicsCoronavirusUS politicsInfectious diseasesMicrobiologyMedical researchBiologyfeaturesReuse this content More

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      White House health officials: up-to-date vaccines key to move on from Covid

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      White House health officials: up-to-date vaccines key to move on from CovidFauci and Jha comments come amid campaign to encourage public to get the new coronavirus boosters as well as flu shots White House public health officials offered cautious optimism that Americans could begin to move on from coronavirus, but cautioned that keeping immunity vaccination up-to-date and combating scientific disinformation remained key for the country to successfully emerge from the three-year Covid-19 pandemic.“If you look at where we were a year ago at this time, when [coronavirus variant] Omicron started to surge, we were having 800,000 to 900,000 infections and 3,000 to 4,000 deaths [a day]. Today, we had less than 300 deaths. Yesterday, we had 350 deaths, and…anywhere from 27,000 to 45,000 cases” Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the US president, said.“That is much, much better than we were a year ago. But if you look at it in a vacuum, it’s still not a great place to be,” Fauci told CBS Face the Nation on Sunday.But he acknowledged that “everybody’s got Covid fatigue…and people just want it behind us.”The infectious disease expert, who is retiring at the end of the year after many decades as a leading public health official, said Covid was still concerning and “it is not at a level low enough where we should feel we’re done with it completely because we’re not.”Separately, White House Covid response coordinator Ashish Jha, told ABC’s This Week that: “It’s been, obviously, a long 2.5 years for Americans, and we understand that people want to move on. The good news is people can move on if they keep their immunity up to date.”The officials’ comments comes as the White House undertakes a campaign to encourage the public to get the new Covid boosters, designed to combat Omicron, as well as flu shots. The low take-up of both this fall has disappointed health experts, with just 11% of the population accepting the latest Covid vaccine and 42 million Americans receiving this year’s flu vaccine.“We think it’s incredibly important as we head into the holidays for people to update their immunity, get the new Covid vaccine, get the flu shot,” Jha said.Both Fauci and Jha addressed concerns that Covid vaccine hesitancy had translated into flu vaccine hesitancy in some states even as a “tripledemic” of flu, Covid, and the respiratory virus, RSV – hitting children and the elderly hardest – is straining hospitals in some places.“We know these vaccines are incredibly effective. They’re very safe. That’s point number one,” Jha said. “Our strategy is get out into the community, talk to religious leaders, talk to civil society leaders, community-based organizations, have them get out to the community and talk to people.”Fauci said he had been “very troubled” by the divisive state of American politics and its effects on public health.Asked why he thought the anti-vaccine movement, which had long existed among a minority on the left, is now prevalent among some conservatives in the US, Fauci blamed an expansion and amplification of anti-science, anti-vaccine thinking.He said it was “something I’ve never seen in my 54 years in medicine at the NIH (National Institutes of Health) is that the acceptance or not of a life-saving intervention is steered very heavily by your political ideology”.“Why would you ever want to see that ‘red’ [Republican-voting] states are under-vaccinated and ‘blue’ [Democratic-leaning] states are pretty well vaccinated and there are more deaths among red state Republicans than there are among blue states Democrats?” he added. “Divisions of political ideology…shouldn’t be a reason why you get sick or you don’t get sick.”Meanwhile, Jha said that China’s aims for zero-Covid, where fresh outbreaks across the vast nation result in lockdowns and now protests and crackdowns, was unrealistic.Depressed, powerless, angry: why frustration at China’s zero-Covid is spilling overRead more“Obviously, that’s not our strategy. We don’t think that’s realistic, certainly not for the American people. Our strategy has been build up immunity in the population by getting people vaccinated,” he said.TopicsOmicron variantCoronavirusBiden administrationInfectious diseasesUS politicsnewsReuse this content More