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‘Desperate' man fell from bridge after adverse reaction to Covid booster jab

‘Desperate' man fell from bridge after adverse reaction to Covid booster jab

Yahoo09-02-2025

A 'desperate' man died falling from a bridge after suffering an adverse reaction to the Covid-19 booster vaccination, an inquest heard.
Andrew Heys, 29, reacted 'very badly' and developed a rare autoimmune disease which saw him suffer both mentally and physically.
On the day of his death in March last year, Mr Heys, from Salford, climbed onto a bridge over the Manchester Ship Canal and dialled 999.
Phone signal problems, however, drove him to hang up and the case was 'closed', a coroner heard.
Mr Heys' final words to a GP on the phone were 'forget it'.
Moments later, he fell into the water. His body was found three days later by police divers.
A coroner has now raised concerns into the circumstances of Mr Heys' death after hearing the doctor failed to return the call to the ambulance service as she should have done, which would have potentially triggered a life-saving emergency response.
John Pollard, the assistant coroner for West Manchester, said Mr Heys received his booster vaccination against Covid-19 in December 2021.
It is not clear which brand of jab he was given.
'He reacted very badly to the vaccination and thereafter suffered from Autoimmune Encephalopathy, the effects of which were devastating both physically and mentally,' Mr Pollard said.
The rare condition causes the immune system to attack the brain. According to the NHS, symptoms include confusion or disorientation, seizures or fits, changes in personality and behaviour, difficulty speaking, weakness or loss of movement in some parts of the body and loss of consciousness.
The coroner said that on March 12 2024, just over two years after he received the vaccine, Mr Heys went to a bridge over Manchester Ship Canal in the city centre.
It was reported that Mr Heys called 999 in the early hours of the morning and was put through to an on-call locum GP, named in a January hearing before the coroner's court as Dr Naheed Anjum Noor.
Dr Noor told the inquest that she could not hear what Mr Hays was saying because his connection was bad.
'My understanding was that he doesn't want to engage anymore... he doesn't want help anymore,' she told Mr Pollard, the coroner, adding that she tried to call him back twice without success.
Mr Heys entered the water 8 to 10 minutes after the call ended, the inquest heard in January.
The coroner said Mr Heys' medical cause of death was as a result of drowning and Post-Vaccination Autoimmune Encephalopathy.
Mr Pollard said that during the inquest, he heard that Dr Noor, who worked for out-of-hours provider BARDOC, had 'never been trained' in how to follow the organisation's care pathways.
'This meant that she 'closed' the call after speaking to the patient, rather than returning it to the ambulance service as should have happened,' the coroner said in January, as reported by the Manchester Evening News.
'She was also confused about how she could access the patient's own GP records; again, she said she had not had any training in this regard.
'During the course of the evidence, I heard, yet again, the common complaint that one health professional is unable to access the health records of the patient held by another health professional.
'In this case, the manager of the 111 helpline agreed that the various IT systems do not 'talk to each other'.
'It is of concern to me as to why all bona fide health professionals cannot have access to all health data held anywhere within the NHS.'
BARDOC and the Department for Health and Social Care have 54 days from the date of the coroner's formal prevention of future deaths report to explain how they will change their processes to stop similar deaths from happening in future.
An open conclusion on Mr Hays' demise was reached, with Mr Pollard saying: 'This is a really sad set of events that led to the death of a fit and well and talented young man.
'The pain and embarrassment were such that a previously happy young man was rendered desperate and thinking of ending his own life.
'There's not sufficient evidence to prove an accident or misadventure.'
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NHS calls for 200,000 new blood donors as supplies run low
NHS calls for 200,000 new blood donors as supplies run low

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NHS calls for 200,000 new blood donors as supplies run low

The NHS has warned that it continues to face a "challenging" blood shortage, as it calls for 200,000 new donors to come forward. Concern over blood stocks prompted the health service to issue an "amber alert" last year, meaning supplies were running low enough to have an impact on patient treatment. Supplies have remained low ever since, with officials warning there is a "critical" need for more donors who have O negative blood, which can be given to the majority of patients. NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), the body that oversees England's blood donation system, said the number of regular donors needs to rise from around 800,000 to more than one million to maintain a safe and reliable supply. NHSBT chief executive Dr Jo Farrar said: "Our stocks over the past 12 months have been challenging. If we had a million regular donors, this would help keep our stocks healthy - you'd truly be one in a million." There is a pressing need to avoid a "red alert", which would mean demand far exceeds capacity, threatening public safety, NHSBT added. The body's chief medical officer said such an alert could see patients waiting longer for treatment. Dr Gail Miflin told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "It can mean, if you're not urgently needing blood, that you may be delayed or have an operation delayed. "But if you really need blood you'll still get it." Four-year-old Isaac receives transfusions every 12 weeks, which he calls "Hulk blood" because it makes him feel strong. Born with Spherocytosis, a condition which affects the red blood cells, he regularly becomes severely anaemic. His mother, Jasmin, said the "superhero blood" works like "magic" for Isaac, and that the shortage was worrying. "Everybody lives such busy lives. It isn't always a priority until it's someone you know or it's yourself that needs a transfusion," she told BBC Breakfast. Health Minister Baroness Merron said the NHS was in "urgent need" of more blood donors from all backgrounds. "We are working alongside NHS Blood and Transplant to make donating blood easier than ever before, opening up new donor centres and making appointments available closer to home," she added. NHSBT stressed the need for more black donors in particular, as they are more likely to have specific blood types which can help treat people with sickle cell disease. Just 2% of the population keep the nation's blood stocks afloat by donating regularly, the body said. Donors are defined as regular if they have donated in the last 12 months. The number of people registering as donors rose in 2024, but only 24% of them went on to donate. The appeal comes almost a year after the NHS issued an amber alert for only the second time in its history, last July. It was caused by what the NHS called a "perfect storm" of unfilled appointments at donor centres and increased demand following a cyber-attack, which affected services in London. At that time, stocks of O negative stood at just 1.6 days, and 4.3 days for all types of blood. Two thirds of the blood collected by NHSBT is used to treat people who rely on regular blood transfusions, including people with cancer and blood conditions. Those who want to give blood can register and book an appointment online. Get our flagship newsletter with all the headlines you need to start the day. Sign up here.

NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies
NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies

Yahoo

timean hour ago

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NIH employees publish ‘Bethesda Declaration' in dissent of Trump administration policies

In October 2020, two months before Covid-19 vaccines would become available in the US, Stanford health policy professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and two colleagues published an open letter calling for a contrarian approach to managing the risks of the pandemic: protecting the most vulnerable while allowing others largely to resume normal life, aiming to obtain herd immunity through infection with the virus. They called it the Great Barrington Declaration, for the Massachusetts town where they signed it. Backlash to it was swift, with the director-general of the World Health Organization calling the idea of allowing a dangerous new virus to sweep through unprotected populations 'unethical.' Bhattacharya later testified before Congress that it – and he – immediately became targets of suppression and censorship by those leading scientific agencies. Now, Bhattacharya is the one in charge, and staffers at the agency he leads, the US National Institutes of Health, published their own letter of dissent, taking issue with what they see as the politicization of research and destruction of scientific progress under the Trump administration. They called it the Bethesda Declaration, for the location of the NIH. 'We hope you will welcome this dissent, which we modeled after your Great Barrington Declaration,' the staffers wrote. The letter was signed by more than 300 employees across the biomedical research agency, according to the non-profit organization Stand Up for Science, which also posted it; while many employees signed anonymously because of fears of retaliation, nearly 100 - from graduate students to division chiefs - signed by name. It comes the day before Bhattacharya is due to testify before Congress once more, in a budget hearing to be held Tuesday by the Senate appropriations committee. It's just the latest sign of strife from inside the NIH, where some staff last month staged a walkout of a townhall with Bhattacharya to protest working conditions and an inability to discuss them with the director. 'If we don't speak up, we allow continued harm to research participants and public health in America and across the globe,' said Dr. Jenna Norton, a program officer at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and a lead organizer of the Declaration, in a news release from Stand Up for Science. She emphasized she was speaking in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the NIH. The letter, which the staffers said they also sent to US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and members of Congress who oversee the NIH, urged Bhattacharya to 'restore grants delayed or terminated for political reasons so that life-saving science can continue,' citing work in areas including health disparities, Covid-19, health impacts of climate change and others. They cited findings by two scientists that said about 2,100 NIH grants for about $9.5 billion have been terminated since the second Trump administration began. The NIH budget had been about $48 billion annually, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting it next year by about 40%. The research terminations 'throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars,' the NIH staffers wrote. 'Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million.' They also urged Bhattacharya to reverse a policy that aims to implement a new, and lower, flat 15% rate for paying for indirect costs of research at universities, which supports shared lab space, buildings, instruments and other infrastructure, as well as the firing of essential NIH staff. Those who wrote the Bethesda Declaration were joined Monday by outside supporters, in a second letter posted by Stand Up for Science and signed by members of the public, including more than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning scientists. 'We urge NIH and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) leadership to work with NIH staff to return the NIH to its mission and to abandon the strategy of using NIH as a tool for achieving political goals unrelated to that mission,' they wrote. The letter called for the grant-making process to be conducted by scientifically trained NIH staff, guided by rigorous peer review, not by 'anonymous individuals outside of NIH.' It also challenged assertions put forward by Kennedy, who often compares today's health outcomes with those around the time his uncle John F. Kennedy was president, in the early 1960s. 'Since 1960, the death rate due to heart disease has been cut in half, going from 560 deaths per 100,000 people to approximately 230 deaths per 100,000 today,' they wrote. 'From 1960 to the present day, the five-year survival rate for childhood leukemia has increased nearly 10-fold, to over 90% for some forms. In 1960, the rate of measles infection was approximately 250 cases per 100,000 people compared with a near zero rate now (at least until recently).' They acknowledged there's still much work to do, including addressing obesity, diabetes and opioid dependency, 'but,' they wrote, 'glamorizing a mythical past while ignoring important progress made through biomedical research does not enhance the health of the American people.' Support from the NIH, they argued, made the US 'the internationally recognized hub for biomedical research and training,' leading to major advances in improving human health. 'I've never heard anybody say, 'I'm just so frustrated that the government is spending so much money on cancer research, or trying to address Alzheimer's,' ' said Dr. Jeremy Berg, who organized the letter of outside support and previously served as director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. 'Health concerns are a universal human concern,' Berg told CNN. 'The NIH system is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but has been unbelievably productive in terms of generating progress on specific diseases.'

‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'
‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'

Atlantic

time2 hours ago

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‘We're Just Becoming a Weapon of the State'

Since winning President Donald Trump's nomination to serve as the director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya—a health economist and prominent COVID contrarian who advocated for reopening society in the early months of the pandemic—has pledged himself to a culture of dissent. 'Dissent is the very essence of science,' Bhattacharya said at his confirmation hearing in March. 'I'll foster a culture where NIH leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment where scientists, including early-career scientists and scientists that disagree with me, can express disagreement, respectfully.' Two months into his tenure at the agency, hundreds of NIH officials are taking Bhattacharya at his word. More than 300 officials, from across all of the NIH's 27 institutes and centers, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya that condemns the changes that have thrown the agency into chaos in recent months—and calls on their director to reverse some of the most damaging shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to fire thousands of its workers and rescind or withhold funding from thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya is set to appear before a Senate appropriations subcommittee to discuss a proposed $18 billion slash to the NIH budget—about 40 percent of the agency's current allocation. The letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (a reference to the NIH's location in Bethesda, Maryland), is modeled after the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 that criticized 'the prevailing COVID-19 policies' and argued that it was safe—even beneficial—for most people to resume life as normal. The approach that the Great Barrington Declaration laid out was, at the time, widely denounced by public-health experts, including the World Health Organization and then–NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unsound. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, isn't meant glibly: 'We hoped he might see himself in us as we were putting those concerns forward,' Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and one of the letter's organizers, told me. None of the NIH officials I spoke with for this story could recall another time in their agency's history when staff have spoken out so publicly against a director. But none of them could recall, either, ever seeing the NIH so aggressively jolted away from its core mission. 'It was time enough for us to speak out,' Sarah Kobrin, a branch chief at the National Cancer Institute, who has signed her name to the letter, told me. To preserve American research, government scientists—typically focused on scrutinizing and funding the projects most likely to advance the public's health—are now instead trying to persuade their agency's director to help them win a political fight with the White House. Bhattacharya, the NIH, and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The agency spends most of its nearly $48 billion budget powering science: It is the world's single-largest public funder of biomedical research. But since January, the NIH has canceled thousands of grants —originally awarded on the basis of merit—for political reasons: supporting DEI programming, having ties to universities that the administration has accused of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, advancing scientific fields that Trump officials have deemed wasteful. Prior to 2025, grant cancellations were virtually unheard-of. But one official at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional repercussions, told me that staff there now spend nearly as much time terminating grants as awarding them. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been directed to fund appear either to be geared toward confirming the administration's biases on specific health conditions, or to benefit NIH leaders. 'We're just becoming a weapon of the state,' another official, who signed their name anonymously to the letter, told me. 'They're using grants as a lever to punish institutions and academia, and to censor and stifle science.' NIH officials have tried to voice their concerns in other ways. At internal meetings, leaders of the agency's institutes and centers have questioned major grant-making policy shifts. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH staffers have been holding weekly vigils in Bethesda, commemorating, in the words of the organizers, ' the lives and knowledge lost through NIH cuts.' (Attendees are encouraged to wear black.) But these efforts have done little to slow the torrent of changes at the agency. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the letter's signers, told me that the NIH fellows union, which he is part of, has sent Bhattacharya repeated requests to engage in discussion since his first week at the NIH. 'All of those have been ignored,' Morgan said. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, is also organizing a public letter of support for the Bethesda Declaration, in partnership with Stand Up for Science, which has organized rallies in support of research.) Scientists elsewhere at HHS, which oversees the NIH, have become unusually public in defying political leadership, too. Last month, after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in a bizarre departure from precedent—announced on social media that he was sidestepping his own agency, the CDC, and purging COVID shots from the childhood-immunization schedule, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendations, under the condition of shared decision making with a health-care provider. Many signers of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, 'as a scientist, has some of the same values as us,' Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, told me. Perhaps, with his academic credentials and commitment to evidence, he'll be willing to aid in the pushback against the administration's overall attacks on science, and defend the agency's ability to power research. But other officials I spoke with weren't so optimistic. Many at the NIH now feel they work in a 'culture of fear,' Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been screamed at and bullied by HHS personnel pushing for policy changes; some of the NIH leaders who have been most outspoken against leadership have also been forcibly reassigned to irrelevant positions. At one point, Norton said, after she fought for a program focused on researcher diversity, some members of NIH leadership came to her office and cautioned her that they didn't want to see her on the next list of mass firings. (In conversations with me, all of the named officials I spoke with emphasized that they were speaking in their personal capacity, and not for the NIH.) Bhattacharya, who took over only two months ago, hasn't been the Trump appointee driving most of the decisions affecting the NIH—and therefore might not have the power to reverse or overrule them. HHS officials have pressured agency leadership to defy court orders, as I've reported; mass cullings of grants have been overseen by DOGE. And as much as Bhattacharya might welcome dissent, he so far seems unmoved by it. In early May, Berg emailed Bhattacharya to express alarm over the NIH's severe slowdown in grant making, and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to responsibly shepherd the funds Congress had appropriated to the agency. The next morning, according to the exchange shared with me by Berg, Bhattacharya replied saying that, 'contrary to the assertion you make in the letter,' his job was to ensure that the NIH's money would be spent on projects that advance American health, rather than 'on ideological boondoggles and on dangerous research.' And at a recent NIH town hall, Bhattacharya dismissed one staffer's concerns that the Trump administration was purging the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence back its use.) He echoed, instead, the Trump talking point that 'sex is a very cleanly defined variable,' and argued that gender shouldn't be included as 'a routine question in order to make an ideological point.' The officials I spoke with had few clear plans for what to do if their letter goes unheeded by leadership. Inside the agency, most see few levers left to pull. At the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the highly contentious notion that human research started the pandemic—and noted that NIH-funded science, specifically, might have been to blame. When dozens of staffers stood and left the auditorium in protest, prompting applause that interrupted Bhattacharya, he simply smiled

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