Tag: Vaccine

COVID-19 myocarditis illusions: A new cardiac MRI study raises questions about the diagnosis

Feb 7, 2023• 2

BY ANISH KOKA

One of the hallmarks of the last two years has been the distance that frequently exists between published research and reality. I’m a cardiologist, and the first disconnect that became glaringly obvious very quickly was the impact COVID was having on the heart. As I walked through COVID rooms in the Spring of 2020 trying to hold my breath, I waited for a COVID cardiac tsunami. After all social media had been full of videos from Wuhan and Iran of people suddenly dropping in the streets. My hyperventilating colleagues made me hyperventilate. Could it be that Sars-COV2 had some predilection for heart damage?

Happily, I was destined for disappointment. There never was a cardiac tsunami from COVID.

There were, unhappily, lots of severely ill patients with lungs that were whited out who quickly developed multi-organ dysfunction while hospitalized. The lungs were where almost all the action was. Every other organ got hit hard because of the systemic illness that unfortunately often is a downstream result of a severe respiratory illness. Cardiac Cath labs waiting for some major influx of COVID heart damage not only didn’t see patients presenting with COVID heart attacks, but they idled as patients terrified of coming to the hospital stayed home rather than come to the hospital with chest pain. (Public health messaging about COVID appears to have kept people away from hospitals, and autopsy series of deaths during the pandemic found that reduced access to health care systems (for conditions such as myocardial infarction) was further likely to be identified as a contributory factor to death than undiagnosed COVID-19).

So imagine my surprise when I saw peer-reviewed research based on a cardiac MRI study come out in 2020 suggesting that 78% of patients who survived COVID may have significant heart damage. A more detailed read of the paper, of course, threw up massive problems. The article and authors were more suited as writers for Oprah and Dr. Phil than for a well-respected academic journal. But the damage was done, and the notion that COVID was attacking hearts spread via a social media influencer class that should have had the credentials and smarts to know better, but clearly didn’t.

The “Secret Sauce” – A Comparison of TSMC and Pfizer

Oct 22, 2021

By MIKE MAGEE

This week’s Tom Friedman Opinion piece in the New York Times contained a title impossible to ignore: “China’s Bullying Is Becoming a Danger To The World and Itself.” The editorial has much to recommend it. But the item that caught my eye was Friedman’s full-throated endorsement of Taiwan’s “most sophisticated microchip manufacturer in the world,” Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

TSMC owns 50% of the world’s microchip manufacturing market, and along with South Korea’s Samsung, is one of only two companies currently producing the ultra-small 5-nanometer chips. Next year, TSMC will take sole ownership of the lead with a 3-nanometer chip. In this field, the smaller the better. (For comparison, most of China’s output is 14 to 28 nanometers.)

U.S. Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and recently Intel contract with TSMC rather than produce chips on their own. In addition, the key machines and chemicals necessary to produce the chips are willing supplied to TSMC by U.S. and European manufacturers. TSMC’s secret sauce, according to Friedman, is “trust.” As he writes, “Over the years, TSMC has built an amazing ecosystem of trusted partners that share their intellectual property with TSMC to build their proprietary chips.”

“Trust me” is not a phrase often associated with intellectual property. Consider, for example, Washington Post’s reporting the very same day as Friedman’s under the banner, “In secret vaccine contracts with governments, Pfizer took hard-line in the push for profit, report says.” The article reveals documents in a Public Citizen report that confirms that Pfizer has been maximizing their vaccine profits “behind a veil of strict secrecy, allowing for little public scrutiny… even as demand surges…”

As I describe in my book “Code Blue: Inside the Medical Industrial Complex” (Grove 2020), Pfizer’s focus on intellectual property as a commercial weapon has a history that extends back a half-century.

What, Us Worry

Nov 25, 2020

By KIM BELLARD

2020 has been an awful year. Hurricanes, wildfires, murder hornets, unjustified shootings, a divisive Presidential election, and, of course, a pandemic. Most of us are spending unprecedented amounts of time sheltering in place, millions have lost their jobs, the economy is sputtering, and over a quarter million of us didn’t survive to Thanksgiving. If you haven’t been depressed at some point, you haven’t been paying enough attention.

Within the last two weeks, though, there has finally been some cause for hope. Whether you want to credit Operation Warp Speed or just science doing what it does, we are on the cusp of having vaccines to battle COVID-19. First Pfizer/BioNTech, then Moderna, and most recently, AstraZenica, announced vaccines that appear to be highly effective.

We’re having our Paul Revere moment, only this time with good news. The vaccines are coming! The vaccines are coming!

It strikes me, though, that our enthusiasm about these vaccines says a lot about why the U.S. has had such a hard time with the pandemic; indeed, it tells us a lot about why our healthcare system is in the state it is. We’re suckers for the quick fix, the medical intervention that will bring us health.

Unless you were alive when Woodrow Wilson was President, COVID-19 has been the worst public health crisis of our lifetime. It took some time for us to fully realize how bad it was going to be, and, even then, most of us underestimated exactly how bad that would be. We may still be underestimating how bad these next few months will be.

Addressing Unapproved Meningitis Vaccine at Princeton

Nov 18, 2013• 4

By ARTHUR CAPLAN

Emergency doses of a meningitis vaccine not approved for use in the U.S. are likely to be on the way to Princeton University to halt a meningitis outbreak that has already sickened seven students. There are approved meningitis vaccines available, but they do not protect against Meningitis B—a strain not covered by the shots given in the U.S. and not a strain prevalent here.

Government health officials said Friday they have agreed to import Bexsero, a vaccine licensed only in Europe and Australia that does protect against meningitis B. And that decision seems entirely reasonable given the threat that this nasty strain of meningitis poses.

That said, the question arises — what should those getting the vaccine be told? Are they being offered a proven vaccine, an experimental vaccine, a vaccine believed to be the best choice given the threat of an epidemic or something else? Can a student, campus worker or faculty member refuse the vaccination and stay in school or in a dorm? Should those who have visited the campus recently be tracked down and offered the vaccine? If people do refuse should they identify themselves in anyway as unvaccinated and to whom?

In general when using a drug or device that has not been approved by the FDA or other federal advisory agencies those who are offered the vaccine should be treated more as research subjects than patients. They should be told all the facts about the vaccine, why it has not been approved in the U.S. and about the all too real threat that meningitis poses. They should be given the opportunity to ask questions. There is a duty to try and monitor those who get the vaccine or a representative sample of such persons, to watch for both efficacy and safety. Vaccine refusal might be accepted, herd immunity could help in this regard, but university officials will need a policy concerning refusers and where they ought to go to study, live and work until the potential epidemic subsides.

Using a vaccine very likely to be safe and effective to stave off an outbreak of a nasty disease makes good moral sense. However, it is important to treat emergency use as such and to do what can be done to inform subjects, track the results in those who are vaccinated and to find a path for those who will not accept vaccination.

Arthur Caplan, Ph.D. is head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center. This post originally appeared in bioethics.net blog.

The Great Influenza of 2013?

Dec 9, 2012• 9

By DAVID KATZ, MD

The CDC has noted an early and nasty start to the flu season. Perhaps their own website has caught it, because as I’m writing this, the whole thing is down. Assuming it recovers, I will insert relevant links per routine. Otherwise, I wish it well, and leave you to find your way there on your own.

It’s a bit soon to say, but the virus and the outbreak pattern at this point seem to resemble those of the 2003-2004 flu season, in which nearly 50,000 Americans died. At least two children have already died of flu complications this fall.

This is not the sort of stuff a public health physician can ignore.

So, I recently noted on LinkedIn andTwitter that I’ve been vaccinated — as I am every year — and recommend this year’s vaccine, which appears to match the prevailing viral strain quite well, to everyone else. I promptly got comments back from naysayers, including at least one self-identified microbiologist, who noted he never got vaccinated, and had “never gotten the flu.”

I believe him. But this is like that proverbial “Uncle Joe” everyone knows, who smoked three packs a day and lived to be 119. It could happen — but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it. Uncle Joe is that rare character who somehow comes away from a train crash with a minor flesh wound. The rest of us are mortal.

But there is something more fundamentally wrong with the “I’ve never gotten the flu, and therefore don’t need to be vaccinated” stance than the Uncle Joe fallacy. Let’s face it — those who were ultimately beneficiaries of smallpox or polio immunization never had smallpox or polio, either. If they ever had, it would have been too late for those vaccines to do them any good.