Tag: pandemic

Two Major COVID Clinical Trials Were Paused Over Safety Concerns — Which Is Exactly How Trials Should Work

Trials for Eli Lilly’s antibody treatment and Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine were both paused this week.

Within 24 hours, two pharmaceutical companies separately confirmed that their COVID-19 clinical trials — one for a vaccine, the other for a therapy — were being paused over potential safety concerns.

A government-sponsored trial for Eli Lilly’s antibody drug was paused due to a “potential safety concern,” according to emails sent to testing sites on Tuesday. The company confirmed in a statement that an independent board overseeing the trial’s safety had made the decision “out of an abundance of caution.” Eli Lilly’s therapy is similar to another experimental treatment manufactured by Regeneron and used to treat President Donald Trump two weeks ago.

And on Monday, Johnson & Johnson confirmed that it paused its vaccine trial due to “an unexplained illness in a study participant,” as first reported by Stat. Continue reading.

House Education Finance Chair introduces bill to protect school funding amid declining enrollments

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SAINT PAUL, Minn. – House Education Finance Chair Jim Davnie (DFL-Minneapolis) introduced legislation this week that stabilizes school funding as COVID-19 creates uncertainty for students, families, and schools. It does this by authorizing the use of the prior year’s pupil count for the 2020-2021 school year funding formulas. 

“School districts around the state are experiencing an unprecedented variation in their enrollment numbers due to the pandemic,” said Chair Davnie. “Our schools are our community safety nets – they ensure that students are prepared for a successful future through meeting their needs as they grow and develop. In order to deliver on that healthy future, the legislature needs to provide school districts with as much support as possible right now and this bill will help do that.”

Rep. Davnie’s legislation would add temporary stability to districts’ bottom lines to keep supports flowing to students and would ensure districts can maintain current programs and current staffing levels.

“We are down 216 students to home school and 20 more to post-secondary enrollment options (PSEO) than in a normal year,” said Menahga School Board Chair Andrea Haverinen. “This will equate to a $2.5 million loss in revenue on a $11.5 million budget and is nearly a 22% loss in revenue for Menahga. If we are forced to go to all distance learning, we anticipate these numbers will nearly double. Menahga’s enrollment has been rising in the past years, and this is the first year in many that our numbers have declined.”

Legislators reconvened for a fifth special session on Monday. Rep. Davnie’s legislation awaits a remote public committee hearing.

Scientists have a powerful new tool for controlling the coronavirus: Its own genetic code.

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The United States, home to the world’s biggest outbreak, has failed to tap the technique’s full potential.

The six British patients seemed to have little in common besides this: Each was dealing with kidney failure, and each had tested positive for the coronavirus.

They were among scores of virus-stricken people showing up at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge in the early weeks of April. Had they lived in the United States instead of the United Kingdom, the link that allowed the contagion to spread among them might have slipped by unnoticed.

But the U.K. had done something in the early days of the pandemic that the United States and many other nations had not. It funded a national push to repeatedly decode the coronavirus genome as it made its way across the country. The process reveals tiny, otherwise invisible changes in the virus’s genetic code, leaving a fingerprint that gives scientists valuable glimpses into how the disease is spreading. It’s a cutting-edge technique that was not widely available in previous global pandemics but that researchers think can help hasten the end of this one. Continue reading.

First American catches COVID-19 twice — and second case was worse

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A Nevada man who caught COVID-19 twice is the first confirmed case of reinfection in North America.

A 25-year-old Nevada man became infected with the coronavirus on two separate occasions over the summer and experienced significantly more severe symptoms during the second infection, raising questions about how long people are protected from the coronavirus after their initial infection, according to a new study. 

The study led by researchers from the University of Nevada and Nevada State Public Health Laboratory published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal analyzed the case of the first American confirmed to have been reinfected with the coronavirus that has infected nearly 8 million people and left more than 215,000 dead in the U.S. 

Researchers said the resident of Washoe County began experiencing symptoms consistent with a viral infection in late March and first tested positive for COVID-19 on April 18. His symptoms fully cleared up on April 27 and he tested negative for the virus on two separate occasions, on May 9 and May 26.  Continue reading.

Republicans, Religious Leaders and Reporters Testing Positive of COVID-19 in October White House Outbreak

List updated October 14, 2020 at 4:45 PM

  1. President Donald Trump
  2. First Lady Melania Trump
  3. Barron Trump
  4. former Senior Presidential Advisor Kellyanne Conway
  5. Claudia Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s daughter
  6. Senior Presidential Advisor Hope Hicks
  7. Senior Presidential Advisor Stephen Miller
  8. Trump Campaign Manager Bill Stepien
  9. Trump Personal Assistant Nicholas Luna
  10. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany
  11. White House Assistant Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
  12. White House Assistant Press Secretary Chad Gilmartin
  13. White House Assistant Press Secretary Harrison W. Fields
  14. White House Assistant Press Secretary Jalen Drummond
  15. Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia’s wife, Trish Scalia
  16. RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel
  17. Sen. Mike Lee, R-North Carolina
  18. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin
  19. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-North Carolina
  20. Coast Guard Vice Commandant Vice Admiral Charles Ray
  21. former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie
  22. Presidential Military Aide Jayna McCarron
  23. an unnamed military aide
  24. an unnamed presidential valet
  25. The Rev. John Jenkins, President of Notre Dame University
  26. Paster Greg Laurie
  27. New York Times correspondent Michael D. Shear
  28. Michael Shear’s wife
  29. Photojournalist Al Drago
  30. a unidentified correspondent

Had to Quarantine

  1. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Millie
  2. Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman General John Hyten
  3. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Mike Gilday
  4. Army Chief of Staff General James McConville
  5. Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Brown
  6. General Gary Thomas
  7. Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps
  8. Chief of Space Operations General John Raymond
  9. National Guard Bureau Chief General Daniel Hokanson
  10. Commander of U.S. Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency John Nakasone
  11. Attorney General Bill Barr
  12. Jason Lewis, GOP U.S. Senate candidate for a second time
  13. Republican Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka
  14. House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt

‘What are we so afraid of?’

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Tony Green, on dismissing, denying, contracting and spreading the coronavirus

When President Trump got sick, I had this moment of deja vu back to when I first woke up in the hospital. I know what it’s like to be humiliated by this virus. I used to call it the “scamdemic.” I thought it was an overblown media hoax. I made fun of people for wearing masks. I went all the way down the rabbit hole and fell hard on my own sword, so if you want to hate me or blame me, that’s fine. I’m doing plenty of that myself.

The party was my idea. That’s what I can’t get over. Well, I mean, it wasn’t even a party — more like a get-together. There were just six of us, okay? My parents, my partner, and my partner’s parents. We’d been locked down for months at that point in Texas, and the governor had just come out and said small gatherings were probably okay. We’re a close family, and we hadn’t been together in forever. It was finally summer. I thought the worst was behind us. I was like: “Hell, let’s get on with our lives. What are we so afraid of?”

Some people in my family didn’t necessarily share all of my views, but I pushed it. I’ve always been out front with my opinions. I’m gay and I’m conservative, so either way I’m used to going against the grain. I stopped trusting the media for my information when it went hard against Trump in 2016. I got rid of my cable. It’s all opinion anyway, so I’d rather come up with my own. I find a little bit of truth here and a little there, and I pile it together to see what it makes. I have about 4,000 people in my personal network, and not one of them had gotten sick. Not one. You start to hear jokes about, you know, a skydiver jumps out of a plane without a parachute and dies of covid-19. You start to think: “Something’s really fishy here.” You start dismissing and denying. Continue reading.

‘A Dear Leader approach’: Trump’s critics compare his shows of strength around coronavirus to authoritarian tactics

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President Trump was boarding Marine One at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for a televised flight back to the White House on Monday when CNN analyst Brian Stelter called the dramatic images a “performative show of strength” from a president sickened by the coronavirus.

“This is the kind of thing you see from strongmen who want to appear to be leading — it’s a ‘Dear Leader’ sort of approach,” Stelter said, referring to the moniker of the late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.

Stelter wasn’t the only one to make the comparison in recent days. The actor and political activist George Takei questioned a lack of transparency from Trump’s physicians and joked on Twitter that his care was being handled by the “Dear Leader Cleanup Squad.” Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) ridiculed Trump’s appearance on Fox News with a doctor who vouched for his health: “What’s next? Is President Trump going to ask the press to refer to him as our ‘Dear ­Leader?’ ” Continue reading.

Here’s why it matters when Trump last tested negative for COVID-19

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White House officials and the president’s physician have refused to disclose when President Trump last tested negative for COVID-19, a key detail that has implications for how long the president could be infectious and who else he might have exposed to the highly contagious virus.

The White House has said Trump’s first positive test result came back Thursday. He is known to have shown symptoms Friday, including fatigue and fever, and required supplemental oxygen. But the timeline remains fuzzy beyond that.

“We’ve addressed this. We’re not asking to go back through a bunch of records and look backwards,” Brian Morgenstern, a deputy press secretary, told reporters Wednesday when asked when the president last tested negative. Continue reading.

Contact-tracing efforts scrutinized after COVID-19 outbreak spreads

‘It’s clear there’s not a comprehensive outbreak investigation going on at the White House and it is very concerning,’ public health expert says

Efforts to trace the contacts of officials in Washington should be more intensive, say public health experts who note that practices vary across different government branches.

A number of top officials, including President Donald Trump and three senators, announced their COVID-19 diagnoses in the past week.

The White House and Capitol Hill don’t appear to have the type of contact-tracing plan that would be recommended for such an outbreak, said David Harvey, the executive director of National Coalition of STD Directors, which has experience in tracing the contacts of people infected with diseases. Continue reading.

Contradictory and confusing White House statements offer an incomplete picture of Trump’s health

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Information about President Trump’s condition has been incomplete, confusing and, at times, contradictory since early Friday morning when the commander in chief announced that he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Trump’s medical team, led by White House physician Sean Conley, has been criticized for painting a rosy portrait of Trump’s conditionSaturday, without disclosing that the president had been given supplemental oxygen or put on a steroid that is usually reserved for severely ill coronavirus patients.

“I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, over his course of illness, has had,” Conley said. “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction. And in doing so, you know, it came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true. … The fact of the matter is that he’s doing really well.” Continue reading.