Latest news with #covid19
Washington Post
4 days ago
- Health
- Washington Post
Sowing doubt about mRNA vaccines betrays Trump's legacy
Jerome Adams, a distinguished professor at Purdue University, was U.S. surgeon general from 2017 to 2021. I was in 'the room where it happens' during the harrowing early days of the covid-19 pandemic. I witnessed the birth of Operation Warp Speed, a triumph of American ingenuity that harnessed mRNA technology to halt a predicted tidal wave of death and despair. President Donald Trump rightly called Operation Warp Speed 'one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine.' A Commonwealth Fund study credits the operation with averting 3 million U.S. deaths and preventing more than 18 million hospitalizations in just its first two years. This historic feat positioned the United States as the global leader in biomedical innovation. It warranted Nobel Prize consideration for the president, because of its unprecedented impact on humanity and health.
BreakingNews.ie
5 days ago
- Health
- BreakingNews.ie
Wexford General Hospital hit with covid-19 outbreak
Wexford General Hospital has been hit for the second time in two months with an outbreak of covid-19, which is impacting on some wards. Services at the 280 bed-hospital are not affected and visiting is being permitted. Advertisement The situation will remain under review according to hospital management. Hospital management is asking members of the public not to visit if they are experiencing respiratory and/or covid-19 symptoms. The wearing of masks may be required in areas of the hospital. Visiting will be in accordance with hospital visiting hours other than in exceptional compassionate circumstances. Visitors are being asked to avoid congregating in hospital corridors, waiting areas or the hospital entrance. 'The measures are temporary but necessary to safeguard the health of patients, staff and visitors,' added management. At the end of June the hospital was also hit with an outbreak.
Gizmodo
6 days ago
- Health
- Gizmodo
The Pandemic Didn't Actually Spike America's Anxiety, Study Finds
The covid-19 pandemic was a horrific and earth-shattering world event. But it may not have scarred our collective psyche as profoundly as you would think. New research indicates that the pandemic didn't spike Americans' overall anxiety. Scientists at the University of Virginia led the study, which examined a decade's worth of survey data. They found evidence that our anxiety levels didn't significantly shift in the first years of the pandemic. People's mental fortitude during the pandemic was probably tougher than assumed, the researchers say. 'Our results might suggest that the mental health of U.S. adults is more resilient than public perception suggests, given the many news headlines about the U.S. currently experiencing a 'mental health crisis,'' said lead study author Noah French, a clinical psychology researcher at the UVA, in a statement from the university. French and his team analyzed yearly data from the Project Implicit website, a Harvard-run project aiming to better understand people's perceptions and biases lingering just beneath our conscious thoughts. As part of the project, volunteers are explicitly asked about their anxiety level and also undergo tests that measure their implicit associations related to themselves and anxiety. They studied the responses of nearly 100,000 volunteers who took the test between 2011 and 2022. To their surprise, they found the average level of people's anxiety did not spike in severity at the start of the pandemic, nor did the strength of people's implicit/explicit self-as-anxious associations. The yearly rate of change in people's anxiety also didn't abruptly jump in the first years of the pandemic as they had expected. 'Instead, anxiety mostly remained stable,' the authors wrote in their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science. The news isn't entirely good. Younger people under 25 continued to have higher anxiety levels on average than older individuals, for instance—a trend that didn't change during the pandemic years. Of course, even if most people didn't experience a major jump in anxiety during the pandemic, that doesn't mean there weren't many who did suffer as a result. Rates of certain conditions linked to our mental health, such as binge alcohol drinking, did appear to spike in the first years of the pandemic, for example. And many people lost family members and friends to covid-19, including hundreds of thousands of young children who lost a caregiver. The authors also caution there are important limitations to their data. Project Implicit volunteers tend to be more educated than the general public and had to intentionally sign up for these tests, meaning they might not be entirely representative of the average American. Indeed, the researchers say more studies like this are needed to truly understand the ups and downs of our collective mental state. They also argue that people should be dubious about scary-sounding soundbites based on limited data. 'One of my biggest personal takeaways from this project is that there is surprisingly little high-quality research tracking the mental health of entire populations over time,' French said. 'We need a lot more research in this space, and I will forever be skeptical of headlines that make strong claims about a certain mental health condition being 'on the rise.'' Speaking personally, I can say that my mental health stayed stable during covid-19, even if there were occasional dips early on as many of my friends and family became sick and even sometimes hospitalized. But I did develop an unhealthy obsession with cat videos that sadly continues to this day.
Washington Post
12-07-2025
- Washington Post
Amid Epstein backlash, Bondi ends case against MAGA-backed Utah doctor
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Saturday ordered an abrupt end to the Justice Department's prosecution of a Utah plastic surgeon charged with running a covid-19 fraud scheme, a case that had drawn backlash from prominent Republican lawmakers and vaccine skeptics. Michael Kirk Moore Jr. and three others connected to his practice were indicted in January 2023 on allegations that they destroyed coronavirus vaccines, issued fake vaccination cards and injected patients with saline instead of the vaccine per their request.
The Verge
24-06-2025
- Health
- The Verge
A nasal spray company wants to make it harder for the FTC to police health claims
In the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, a health products company called Xlear began advertising its saline nasal spray to people desperately searching for ways to protect themselves from a new virus. In its marketing, Xlear pointed to studies that it said supported the idea that ingredients in the spray could block viruses from sticking to the nasal cavity. Based on its interpretation of the science, Xlear promoted the product as one part of a 'layered defense' against contracting covid. In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission, in a bipartisan vote, decided to sue Xlear for making allegedly 'unsupported health claims,' saying the company had 'grossly misrepresented the purported findings and relevance of several scientific studies' in its advertising. Earlier this year, the Trump Justice Department, on the FTC's behalf, asked for the lawsuit to be dismissed with prejudice, though it didn't explain its reasoning. But Xlear still wanted its day in court. Now, it's suing the FTC because it wants a court to make it harder for the agency to attempt to go after health claims. Xlear is filing the lawsuit at a time where the government's standard operating procedures around both science and administrative law have been upended. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently expelled all the members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine policy advisory committee, a simultaneously radical and predictable outcome given his career in spreading anti-vaccine falsehoods. Meanwhile, the current FTC is engaged in helping President Donald Trump undermine the agency's long-standing independence from the White House. After Trump purported to fire its two Democratic commissioners, the FTC has even openly taken up long-standing conservative grievances over alleged censorship in the digital sphere. Like Kennedy, Xlear is advocating for a path that could open up the health products space to alternative — and possibly less-tested — upstarts. 'There's a tension here between the reform movement of MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] and the old-guard approach of the FTC,' Xlear's lead counsel, Rob Housman, tells The Verge. 'If you want to break our focus on drugs and pharmaceuticals, one of the things you have to do is make space for innovation and things like hygiene and other approaches.' 'There's a tension here between the reform movement of MAHA and the old-guard approach of the FTC' Xlear insists it's not trying to lower the bar for health marketing claims, but simply hold the FTC to a reasonable legal standard. Housman believes the Supreme Court's decision to strike down Chevron deference last year — removing long-standing precedent telling courts they should often defer to federal agencies' expertise — makes the case even easier. 'We don't want people to think we're trying to reduce the burden of science,' he says. 'We, in fact, want to up the burden of science. We just want to make sure that companies are complying with the law — not the law as the FTC says it is.' As Xlear sees it, the FTC has stepped beyond its authority to enforce the law against false and misleading claims, coming up with arbitrary standards of what kinds of evidence should be considered adequate to justify a health claim. Housman points to the agency's 2022 guidance that says randomized controlled trials (RCTs), especially when replicated at least once, are most reliable to substantiate health claims. There's no magic number for the number or kinds of studies, according to the guidance, but it says 'randomized, controlled human clinical trials (RCTs) are the most reliable form of evidence and are generally the type of substantiation that experts would require for health benefit claims.' The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. Xlear says this is far too high of a hurdle, especially for smaller companies that may not have the money to conduct such resource-intensive trials. Housman compares it to an adage about how there's no RCT trials to prove parachutes work — the punchline being that no one would conduct a study where a control group jumped out of a plane without a parachute. (It's unclear how removing this high hurdle would 'up the burden of science.') One reason it's bringing the lawsuit is so that it can freely make health claims about another product it sells, which it believes can be an alternative to fluoride Xlear says that one reason it's bringing the lawsuit is so that it can freely make health claims about another product it sells, which it believes can be an alternative to fluoride, which Kennedy wants to strip from the water supply. Fluoride is a mineral that prevents tooth decay. A recent study from the National Toxicology Program found that very high levels of fluoride (atypically high in the US) are linked to slightly lower IQ scores for kids, but fluoride has been the subject of conspiracy theories for almost a century, even making an appearance as a comedic bogeyman in the movie Dr. Strangelove, in which General Jack D. Ripper refers to it as 'the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot' to 'sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.' Housman says that even if Xlear wins its lawsuit on every count, 'this doesn't allow people to make up bogus marketing claims.' The FTC will still have the authority to take down truly false and misleading claims, just not by the allegedly arbitrary standard it has been. He adds that the threat of private lawsuits is effective to keep egregious marketing claims at bay. 'We don't believe anybody should be making bogus claims,' Housman says, 'but we also believe that the agency has the responsibility to do the work.'
