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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by Missouri and nine other states – mostly Republican-led – to President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for workers in healthcare facilities that receive federal funds.

The justices turned away an appeal by the states after a lower court declined to immediately consider their claims that the vaccine rule violates federal administrative law and tramples over powers reserved for the states under the U.S. Constitution. The Democratic president’s administration issued the rule in November 2021…

The federal healthcare worker rule requires vaccination for about 10.3 million workers at 76,000 healthcare facilities including hospitals and nursing homes that accept money from the Medicare and Medicaid government health insurance programs for elderly, disabled and low-income Americans.

The Supreme Court in January concluded that Biden’s regulation fit within the power Congress conferred on the federal government to impose conditions on Medicaid and Medicare funds. It decided that ensuring that medical providers take steps to avoid transmitting a dangerous virus to their patients is consistent with the “fundamental principle of the medical profession: first, do no harm.”…

And this final pandemic piece is a distilled shot of the argument I’ve been brewing for 3 yrs. This has been soul-crushing work. We constantly forfeited the chance to do better. But that chance still exists, and we can’t afford the luxury of nihilism. 6/ https://t.co/KG8EuVcWKS

— Ed Yong is on sabbatical (@edyong209) September 30, 2022

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MASSIVE #COVID19 undercount.@WHO reported 513,955,910 cases btwn Jan1, 2020 & May6, 2022 with 6,190,349 deaths.
BUT math models show underreporting of cases ranging up to 1 in 4.7 — translates to global #pandemic of betwn 600 million & 2.4 billion cases.https://t.co/SPV86bjOxE

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) October 4, 2022

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Monday / Tuesday, Oct. 3-4Post + Comments (53)

#COVID19 questions scientists still can't answer

– Where did the #coronavirus come from?
– How is the virus evolving, will there be new variants?
– Can we develop vaccine that will protect against future variants?
– Why do some people develop #LongCovid?https://t.co/BY7RvQ22WN

— MicrobesInfect (@MicrobesInfect) September 28, 2022

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, Sept. 29-30Post + Comments (47)

Pfizer Inc and its German partner BioNTech on Monday sought the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's authorization for an Omicron-tailored COVID-19 vaccine booster for children aged 5 through 11 years. https://t.co/CYoKYvcgrg

— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) September 26, 2022

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If rich nations think the pandemic is over, they should help lower-income countries reach that point too, a senior World Health Organization official told Reuters. https://t.co/pgcpeudx9D

— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) September 23, 2022

there's always the *potential* for something to get much bigger but the government playbook for this is traditionally pretty good at handling it

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) September 26, 2022

(link)

More than 800 dancers and others, who took part in a popular mid-summer dance festival in western Japan, were found to have contracted the #coronavirus.https://t.co/iOu9J3gG1Q

— NHK WORLD News (@NHKWORLD_News) September 23, 2022

Japan is simplifying its coronavirus reporting system by focusing on elderly and high-risk people to reduce the administrative burden on hospitals. https://t.co/zxCNo4yNQ3

— The Japan Times (@japantimes) September 27, 2022

Canada ends vaccine entry rules https://t.co/q5J09E7wC8

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 26, 2022

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It really is fascinating — there’s someone working in a Wisconsin office building who’s got a whole network of virologists searching for them…

Virologist Dave O’Connor admits that he was getting desperate when he started asking dog owners for poo samples.

For much of 2022, O’Connor, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his colleagues have been tracking a heavily mutated variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Early this year, they discovered the variant in Wisconsin waste water drawn from more than 100,000 people.

Following the sewer system to ever-smaller watersheds, they narrowed the variant’s source to one particular area. O’Connor and his team thought that the variant might be circulating in dogs, in part because they found canine genetic material in the same wastewater samples. So they headed to the local dog park. “It was the strangest request you’re ever going to hear: ‘Hey, we’re scientists. Can we just have that bag of dog poop that you’re throwing away?’”

The dogs turned out to be another red herring in the team’s months-long quest to trace the variant’s origin.

Similar-looking variants have turned up in people with compromised immune systems — and, increasingly, researchers think that variants from chronic infections in these people might give rise to pandemic-altering lineages, such as Omicron.

O’Connor and his team think that they’re searching for a person carrying the variant — there’s no evidence that the lineage has spread to anyone else. The researchers are working with public-health officials, who hope that by identifying the person — who has been infected for at least eight months — they can treat the infection and reduce the chances of it ever spreading.

No individual case stands much chance of brewing the next super-variant (likely to be dubbed Pi under the WHO’s variant-naming system). But tracing the source of one potential variant — among the thousands probably circulating globally — might help researchers to understand the biological factors that caused variants such as Omicron to emerge. Such infections could also act as a crystal ball into the virus’s future.

“This is where Pi is going to come from. I don’t think people realize how much it’s already here. A lot of the lineages we are finding make Omicron look pedestrian,” says Marc Johnson, a virologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia who, with O’Connor, is co-leading efforts to trace wastewater lineages in Wisconsin, and spearheading searches for similar variants in two dozen other places…

Cognitive impairment as a result of severe #COVID19 is similar to that sustained between 50 & 70 years of age — – equivalent to losing 10 IQ points, say scientists from the University of Cambridge.https://t.co/6f8lawLg1w

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 26, 2022

This: "#SARSCoV2 infection is assoc'ed w/impairments in sustained attentn, processing speed, self-reported fatigue & concentration"
Some have such sympts despite never feeling ill w/#COVID19 : "infection can have unexpected & persistent subclin conseqs."https://t.co/qvsKqI7iOl

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) September 26, 2022

These 2 large studies are consistent and concerning.
Reminder: it took ~15 years after the 1918-9 pandemic to pick up the increased risk of Parkinson's disease among survivors.

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) September 23, 2022

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What's interesting about this is that it's likely that most unvaxxed ppl have had Covid at least once, so they had natural immunity. And yet being double boosted offered substantial protection against serious illness. https://t.co/4I4Qn0ceB0

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) September 25, 2022

(link)

… The White House said more than 5 million people received the new boosters by its own estimate that accounts for reporting lags in states.

Health experts said it is too early to predict whether demand would match up with the 171 million doses of the new boosters the U.S. ordered for the fall…

A temporary shortage of Moderna vaccine caused some pharmacies to cancel appointments while encouraging people to reschedule for a Pfizer vaccine. The issue was expected to resolve as government regulators wrapped up an inspection and cleared batches of vaccine doses for distribution.

“I do expect this to pick up in the weeks ahead,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. “We’ve been thinking and talking about this as an annual vaccine like the flu vaccine. Flu vaccine season picks up in late September and early October. We’re just getting our education campaign going. So we expect to see, despite the fact that this was a strong start, we actually expect this to ramp up stronger.”…

Some Americans who plan to get the shot, designed to target the most common omicron strains, said they are waiting because they either had COVID-19 recently or another booster. They are following public health advice to wait several months to get the full benefit of their existing virus-fighting antibodies.

Others are scheduling shots closer to holiday gatherings and winter months when respiratory viruses spread more easily…

Dr. Anthony Fauci, asked Thursday by a panel of biodefense experts what still keeps him up at night, noted that half of vaccinated Americans never got an initial booster dose.

“We have a vulnerability in our population that will continue to have us in a mode of potential disruption of our social order,” Fauci said. “I think that we have to do better as a nation.”…

People who had COVID-19 are at higher risk for a host of brain injuries a year later compared with people who were never infected by the coronavirus, a finding that could affect millions of Americans, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday. https://t.co/AGCU6KwgwQ

— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) September 23, 2022

Bad news for the country, and the world. But before you panic, keep in mind it’s a (depressingly) large increase in a small percentage of cases:

… The year-long study, published in Nature Medicine, assessed brain health across 44 different disorders using medical records without patient identifiers from millions of U.S. veterans.

Brain and other neurological disorders occurred in 7% more of those who had been infected with COVID compared with a similar group of veterans who had never been infected. That translates into roughly 6.6 million Americans who had brain impairments linked with their COVID infections, the team said…

Memory impairments, commonly referred to as brain fog, were the most common symptom. Compared with the control groups, people infected with COVID had a 77% higher risk of developing memory problems.

People infected with the virus also were 50% more likely to have an ischemic stroke, which is caused by blood clots, compared with the never infected group.

Those who had COVID were 80% more likely to have seizures, 43% more likely to have mental health issues, such as anxiety or depression, 35% more likely to have headaches and 42% more likely to suffer movement disorders, such as tremors, compared with the control groups…

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, Sept. 22-23Post + Comments (53)

Most of the experts who spoke with STAT echoed a version of Barry’s remarks: In some respects, the pandemic is over when people stop taking measures to protect themselves, when they stop following advice about how to lower their risk, when they resume pre-pandemic behavior…

Some people might assume the WHO will issue a decree of sorts, an all-clear declaration. But in reality that’s not something the global health agency does, said Alexandra Phelan, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security. The WHO didn’t declare the start of the pandemic and it won’t declare an end to it, she said.

At some point, however, the WHO will announce the lifting of the state of emergency it declared in late January of 2020 when Tedros declared the new disease constituted a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC, as the instrument is known in public health circles. The director-general seeks advice from a committee of outside experts on issues related to the PHEIC; that committee must meet at least every three months, though it could meet sooner if Tedros asked it to.

The Covid emergency committee last met on July 8, which means an early October meeting must be held. Phelan doesn’t think the committee will advise calling off the PHEIC at that point, though she thinks conditions may allow for it toward the end of the year.

The U.S. government also has an emergency declaration in effect, a tool that gives it powers that have eased its ability to enact policies, allocate funding, and fast-track the authorization of Covid vaccines, drugs, and tests. At some point it will be declared at an end, but that is not what Biden was signaling in the “60 Minutes” interview.

The Department of Health and Human Services has said it will give a 60-day notice to states before it terminates the public health emergency, or allows it to expire. The next date for extending the emergency declaration is in October…

#LongCovid & myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome—ME/CFS—patients protest in front of White House. Protesters expressed frustration that President Biden declared the pandemic over https://t.co/DOmXSL6HzB

— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) September 20, 2022

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From a longer thread:

Guiyang officials offered a sincere apology for the accident and expressed condolences to the victims' families. A full review is ongoing and those at fault will be held accountable, but people are saying this isn't enough https://t.co/GhN209ZldF

— Linda Lew 刘凌达 (@Lindadalew) September 19, 2022

Hong Kong flags COVID quarantine policy change, wants an orderly opening-up https://t.co/MrXt4YdEZI pic.twitter.com/d11YwkeBhP

— Reuters (@Reuters) September 20, 2022

Japan has begun its rollout of vaccines against the omicron coronavirus variant as part of efforts to stem the ongoing seventh wave of COVID-19 infections in the country. https://t.co/mUtLiRVviP

— The Japan Times (@japantimes) September 20, 2022

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Looking back, Francis Collins wishes pandemic response leaders were clearer from the jump that evolving situations require evolving guidance.
That's a problem with every outbreak of a new disease. Not sure why we haven't learned that lesson. https://t.co/rVCi0f1WXG

— Helen Branswell 🇺🇦 (@HelenBranswell) September 19, 2022

Lots of people still die from Covid and the need for new drugs is very real. But at this stage of our fight with the disease, it's more difficult to test new approaches, as @Jasonmmast explains in this smart piece. https://t.co/Nun4Q8JpON

— Helen Branswell 🇺🇦 (@HelenBranswell) September 19, 2022

In the lab: New genomic test can identify patients at risk of severe #Covid. The approach has proved >90% accurate at predicting outcomes for >2 dozen patients in an ICU at Univ of Virginia & 100 patients from data gathered from Duke and Harvard https://t.co/9b5Tp5kY7B pic.twitter.com/ysRtBLQj0r

— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) September 17, 2022

A Boston Univ researcher is proposing a nat'l program to support people w/ #LongCovid. The condition affects millions in the US & has driven many to quit their jobs. Dr. Howard Bauchner wants the govt to commit to a Nat'l Long Covid Compensation Program https://t.co/aHrKLbfBeR pic.twitter.com/0NlTFLRYrC

— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) September 18, 2022

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Mortality isn’t the only relevant metric for the pandemic’s damage, but it remains the case that US elevated mortality is being primarily driven by under-vaccination among seniors. https://t.co/NC7EKp3mab

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 19, 2022

I’m not sure the lesson is “polio is over, so why did they make us get that stupid polio vaccine?”

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) September 19, 2022

COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, Sept. 15-16Post + Comments (39)