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WASHINGTON Today, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a staff memorandum titled Allegations of Wrongdoing and Illegal Activity by Dr. David Morens, Senior Advisor to National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases former-Director, Dr. Anthony Fauci. This memo presents overwhelming evidence from Dr. Morenss own email that he engaged in serious misconduct and potentially illegal actions while serving as a Senior Advisor to Dr. Fauci during the COVID-19 pandemic. The memo includes previously unreleased email correspondence, obtained by subpoena, that incriminates Dr. Morens in undermining the operations of the U.S. government, unlawfully deleting federal COVID-19 records, using a personal email to avoid the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and repeatedly acting unbecoming of a federal employee. Further, the memo reveals new emails suggesting Dr. Fauci was aware of Dr. Morenss nefarious behavior and may have even engaged in federal records violations himself.
Read the memo here.
View all the underlying evidence here.
Key Memo Findings:
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A doctor collects a swab for Covid-19 testing.
A new Covid-19 variant known as KP.2, or FLiRT, began to emerge in the United States in early March of this year. At that time, KP.2 represented only 0.4% of all SARS-CoV-2 strains being sequenced, but it has skyrocketed in the last two months to become the predominant strain of the virus, making up 28.2% of sequences as of May 11. This dramatic rise signals that KP.2 has properties that promote viral transmission and has experts discussing whether another Covid-19 surge is on the horizon.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the virus has undergone genetic changesor mutationsas the number of human infections has increased. In 2022, the Omicron variant emerged as the dominant strain, leading to dramatic rise in cases worldwide. The KP.2 variant is a descendant of Omicron and has several mutations in the gene encoding for the spike protein, which facilitates binding of the virus to receptors on a host cell. The spike protein is also the target for antibodies generated in response to Covid-19 vaccination.
Several mutations in KP.2 have led to amino acid changes in the spike proteinan F to L mutation and an R to T mutationthus giving the variant family the name FLiRT. These mutations likely allow the virus to evade neutralizing antibodies produced in response to prior infection or vaccination. In some ways, its like the virus has put on a disguise, allowing it to go unrecognized by the immune system.
Although it may be too early to know for sure, it does not appear that KP.2, or other members of the FLiRT variant group, cause unique symptoms or more significant disease. If symptoms do occur, KP.2 infection tends to be associated with a fever, sore throat, cough and body aches. Loss of taste or smell can also occur, as well as brain fog, which has been described for past variants.
Although FLiRT variants do not seem to cause more severe disease, it is important to highlight that as the number of infections increase, the likelihood of a susceptible individual (e.g., an immunocompromised host) becoming infected and developing severe symptoms also increases.
A patient uses a rapid antigen test kit for Covid-19 at home.
Since KP.2 and other FLiRT variants have mutations in the gene encoding the spike protein, existing tests should continue to detect these new viruses. Most at-home antigen tests look for a different viral proteincalled the nucleocapsid proteinso should not be affected by the new variants.
If using an at-home antigen test, it is still recommended to test when symptoms arise, and if negative, repeat the test in two to three days before ruling out Covid-19. Molecular, or PCR, tests should also be able to detect FLiRT variants. Most PCR tests look for at least two genetic regions of the virus, so even if one of the test components is impacted by mutations in the spike gene, the backup gene target should detect the virus.
The KP.2 variant possesses several mutations in the spike gene, which results in a protein being produced that may not be recognized by antibodies from prior infection or vaccination. So if its been greater than six months since your last vaccination or infection, its unlikely youre fully protected. Existing antibodies may prevent severe disease, but they may not prevent infection and subsequent mild- to moderate-illness. An updated vaccine that will be more specific to recent circulating strains is expected this fall and will likely be recommended alongside the annual flu vaccination.
As we have observed since 2020, the virus causing Covid-19 continues to evolve. Although emergency department visits and deaths due to Covid-19 are both down (-5.2% and -14.3%, respectively) in recent weeks, the rise of a new variant could alter the future landscape. Its important to remain vigilant to reduce transmission, including staying home when you are feeling sick, getting tested for Covid-19 and other common respiratory viruses (such as influenza), wearing a mask if you have symptoms and must go out in public and, most importantly, getting an updated Covid-19 vaccine. Taking these steps will reduce the chances of a future Covid-19 surge and help keep you and others safe and healthy.
Between January and April of 2024, there have been more COVID-19-related deaths in Allen County than homicides and traffic deaths combined.
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WFFT) -- The CDC warns of a potential surge in COVID-19 cases this summer.
Between January and April of 2024, there have been more COVID-19-related deaths in Allen County than homicides and traffic deaths combined.
26 people have died from COVID-19 in Allen County, according to the Allen County Department of Health, compared to 14 homicides and 10 traffic deaths.
However, officials say that number is far less than it was at this point last year.
The CDC says the new variants, known as FLiRT strands, are more contagious than those before them. They fall under the Omicron variant umbrella.
Super Shot Clinical Manager Staci Kaczmarek says this is the time to get the most recent vaccine for anyone who has not done so.
"We've said it from the beginning of the pandemic, but we're getting vaccinated not just for ourselves, but for the people around us as well, and so even if you feel like maybe COVID-19's not a big deal to you, you've done other things, remember that you're also helping to protect your community around you," Kaczmarek said.
The most recent vaccine was released in September, and anyone who has not gotten it can schedule an appointment with Super Shot to do so.
Have a story you want FOX 55 to cover or a news tip? Send an email tonews@wfft.com.
A new study from University of Missouri-Columbia researchers has determined that the virus which causes COVID-19 can enter the blood-retinal-barrier through systemic infection following inhalation rather than ocular transmission.
Writing in PLOS Pathogens, scientists highlighted that due to the presence of viral RNA in corneal and conjunctival tissue, there has previously been speculation that the eye may act as a transmission route for COVID-19 infection.
However, experiments in mice found that ocular exposure to the virus that causes COVID-19 did not result in a lung infection or severe illness.
In contrast, exposure through nasal tissue resulted in the presence of the virus in ocular tissues as well as a hyperinflammatory response within the retina.
Researchers found that the extended presence of the virus that causes COVID-19 in the retina can cause retinal microaneurysm, retinal artery and vein occlusion, and vascular leakage.
Dr Pawan Kumar Singh, an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, recommended that those who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 ask their eye care professional to check for signs of pathological change in the retina.
Even those who were asymptomatic could suffer from damage in the eyes over time because of COVID-19 associated complications, he said.
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In this section, the proposed framework has been explained. First, the used chest X-ray dataset has been described. Then, the developed framework, which includes pre-processing phase and the Classification using CNN models based on transfer learning phase, has been illustrated. Two different approaches have been used to train pre-trained CNN models using transfer learning. The first approach uses whole chest X-ray images, while the other approach uses lung-segmented images.
In this research, the data obtained from the COVID-19 Radiography Database has been used to apply the proposed framework. The database contains thousands of publicly available benchmark X-ray images and corresponding lung masks. The X-ray images are provided in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format with a resolution of 299299 pixels. The database includes 10,192 Normal cases, 3616 positive COVID-19 cases, 1345 Viral Pneumonia cases, and 6012 Lung Opacity images as shown in Table1. This database was developed by a team from Qatar University, Dhaka University, Bangladesh with cooperators from Malaysia and Pakistan and cooperators of medical doctors26. Figure1 illustrates samples from different classes in the COVID-19 Radiography Database.
Samples from COVID-19 radiography chest database representing different classes.
The purpose of the pre-processing phase is to prepare the X-ray images for classification using CNN pre-trained models. In this phase, different pre-processing steps are applied to improve the performance of the classification. The pre-processing steps can be summarized as follows:
Enhancing images is a significant step for the correct classification. It increases image contrast in order to improve classification performance. Different techniques can be applied to enhance the images. In this research, some of these techniques have been applied to the original X-ray images before introducing them to the classification models, they are as follows:
Histogram Equalization (HE): The purpose of histogram equalization (HE) is to spread the gray levels inside the image. It modifies the brightness and contrast of the images to improve the image quality27. The original X-ray images intensity has been enhanced using histogram equalization (HE).
Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE): It originated from Global Histogram Equalization (GHE), it is based on dividing the image into non-overlapping blocks, and after that, the histogram of each block is gotten using a pre-specified value28. In this research, CLAHE has been used to enhance the contrast of original X-ray images.
Image Complement: The complement or inverse of X-ray images transforms the dark positions to lighter and the light positions to darker. As this is a standard process, which is similar to that used by radiologists, it may aid a deep learning model for improving classification performance. The complement of the binary image can be obtained by changing the zeros to ones and ones to zeros. Whereas for a grayscale image, each pixel is subtracted from 255.
Figure2 shows an original X-ray image and its enhanced versions after applying HE, CLAHE and image complement on the original image with the corresponding histogram plots for each version.
An X-ray image and its enhanced versions after applying HE, CLAHE and complement to the original image and the corresponding histogram plots.
In the segmentation step, the regions of interest (ROI), which are the lungs region in our case, are cropped from the associated image. In this research, the ground truth lungs masks which are provided by the database have been used. A modified U-Net model was applied by the authors of the database on the X-ray images to get the lung masks associated with the full X-ray images. In this research, multiplication between each original image and the associated lung mask has been applied to get the segmented lungs. The same process of multiplication between different enhanced image versions and the associated masks has been applied to get different versions of segmented datasets with different enhancements. All these versions are introduced to CNN models as segmented versions of data. Figure3 shows the segmented images of the original image and of the different enhanced images for one of the COVID samples.
X-ray original image and its enhanced versions and the segmented lung region of each version.
Resizing the images is an essential process to satisfy the requirement of CNN of equally sized input images. In this research, the process of resizing X-ray images has been done to fit all X-ray images to the input size of the used pre-trained CNN models which are VGG19 and EfficientNetB0. Therefore, all images versions either full or segmented versions were resized to fit the CNNs input image size which is 224224 pixels. To expedite the training process, it was found that the size of 112112 pixels expedited the training without affecting the performance metrics.
In this research, different versions of either full or segmented chest X-ray images have been introduced to CNN models to train the classifiers. Different experiments have been carried out on the original and segmented lung X-ray images both with their different enhanced versions. The classification has been done using VGG1914 and EfficientNetB016 pre-trained CNN models. After the calculation of different performance metrics, the best model has been selected as the adopted model. The next subsections give a brief description of the used pre-trained models.
VGG19 is a variant of the VGG CNN model which was created by Visual Geometry Group (VGG) at Oxford University. VGG19 was one of the winners of the Image Net Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) in 2014. The size of the input image to VGG19 is (224 224). VGG19 contains 16 convolution layers, 5 max-pooling layers and 3 fully connected layers. The convolution layers are with (3 3) filters' size, stride of 1 pixel and padding of 1 pixel. The max-pooling layers are with a size of 2 2 and a stride of 2. The rectification (ReLU) activation function is utilized for all hidden layers. Then, the first 2 fully connected layers with 4096 channels each are uitilized followed by the last layer of 1000 channels to represent the different 1000 classes of the ImageNet with soft-max activation function15.
Google research group designed a family of models, called EfficientNets using a scaling method and achieved better efficiency and accuracy than previous ConvNets. EfficientNet is based on scaling CNNs and reaching better performance by balancing network width, depth, and resolution. Therefore, the focus is to present a scaling method to uniformly scale the 3 dimensions with a simple highly effective compound coefficient. Thus, it can be considered as an optimization problem to find the best coefficients for depth, width, and resolution that maximizes the accuracy of the network given the constraints of the available resources. The primary building block of the EfficientNet models is MBConv. The network's dimension equation was used to get the family of neural networks EfficientNet-B0 to B716. In this research, EfficientNetB0 was used for the classification of the chest X-ray images. Figure4 sums up the framework of the adopted methodology in this research.
The framework of the used methodology for Chest X-ray images classification.
This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by the author.
A NEW deadlier mpox strain is spreading in Africa and poses a "global threat", health officials have warned.
A surge in cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) raises concerns that the virus could jump to other countries.
2
The clade I strain detected in the DRC causes more severe illness and deaths than the clade II virus that triggered a global outbreak in 2022.
Since 2023, the DRC has recorded an unprecedented number of suspected Clade I virus cases, according to a new report by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
It found that there were 19,919 cases of clade I mpox reported between January 1, 2023, and April 14, 2024, along with 975 deaths.
CDC officials branded it DRC's "largest surge of mpox cases ever recorded".
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The clade 1 strain kills up to 10 per cent of all people who become infected, compared to just three per cent for clade II.
Health experts have since urged those most vulnerable to mpox to get vaccinated before the virus potentially returns.
"Two doses of the mpox vaccine is safe and protects from severe illness," Dr Jono Mermin,from the CDC, wrote on X, formally Twitter.
The CDC previously warned of cases of the disease in surrounding Central African countries.
There are currently no reported cases of the strain outside of Africa.
The report also comes after officials found a mutantstrain of clade 1 mpox with "pandemic potential"in the small town of Kamituga, in Congo.
The new bugcalled clade 1bhas evolved to be better at spreading and evading tests than its predecessor.
Experts have called for the rollout of vaccines, drugs, heightened surveillance and for contact tracing measures to be deployed in the area.
Cases among children and adults have been linked to interactions with infected animals or close, sustained contact with infected people.
The most obvious mpox symptom is the hallmark spots.
According to theNHS, these lesions go through four stages, from flat spots to raised spots, to blisters to scabs.
But people are also likely to experienceflu-likesymptoms, which will begin between five and 21 days after infection.
The symptoms often get better by themselves over two to four weeks.
The NHS says these include:
If you have some of these symptoms and believe you could have monkeypox, you should stay at home, avoid close contact with others and get medical help by phone until youre assessed.
There are some complications associated with mpox, such as bacterial infection from skin lesions, mpox affecting the brain (encephalitis), heart (myocarditis) or lungs (pneumonia), andey
This is evidencesuggesting Clade I is now mostly being spread via sex.
Mpox, once known as monkeypox, is a viral infection that spreads through close contact, causingflu-likesymptoms and pus-filled lesions.
Clade II, a milder version of mpox sparked a global epidemic in 2022, when it spread to more than 100 countries - including the UK.
It predominantly affected gay and bisexual men and mostly spread via sexual contact.
The vaccine is recommended for people whose sexual networks mean they are more likely to come into contact with mpox.
This includes men who have sex with men, some trans and non-binary people who have sex with men and healthcare workers in high-risk settings.
For those at risk of mpox exposure, a full course of two doses of vaccine given at least 28 days apart is recommended.
If youre eligible, some specialist sexual health clinics are offering the MVA vaccine.
You can find your nearest sexual health service here.
Dr. Allie Alvine went to Pierre in 2020 with a concern and came home with a mission.
At the state Capitol, she testified against a bill that would have repealed the immunization requirements that apply to most school children.
I saw the anti-vaxxers there, and they were a large group, she said.
Lawmakers rejected the bill, but Alvine, of Sioux Falls, feared the anti-vaccine movement was growing.
I had to get more involved, she said. I had to create a presence at our state Capitol in Pierre to counter their presence, to be the pro-vaccine voice.
Last year, she founded South Dakota Families for Vaccines, a state-level arm of the national Science and Families Engaged (SAFE) Communities Coalition.
As director of the state-level group, Alvines work includes talking to legislators and the public about the importance of vaccines, updating supporters about relevant legislation, and publishing local-level vaccination data and voter guides.
Those and other efforts earned Alvine the Excellence in Immunization Advocacy Award at the National Conference for Immunization Coalitions and Partnerships last month in Philadelphia. Another South Dakotan, Andrea Polkinghorn, received the Excellence in Immunization Collaboration Award for her work as president of Immunize South Dakota.
The two groups work together in the state. While South Dakota Families for Vaccines works at the grassroots level to influence policy, Immunize South Dakota works at the grass tops to raise immunization rates, Alvine said.
Alvine brings medical knowledge to her job: She went to medical school in Kansas and completed a psychiatry residency through the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine. She now uses her medical education exclusively for advocacy.
Following are portions of South Dakota Searchlights recent interview with Alvine, edited for length and clarity.
Juvenile rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease where your body attacks its joints, and its very painful and destroys joints. So the goal is to treat the disease and save the joints as much as possible, but the medications decrease your immune system.
So part of what I did in the Arthritis Foundation was promote vaccinations, because that population has a lot of patients on immune-compromising medications, and it makes you much more vulnerable to all diseases, and these people depend on their communities being vaccinated creating a community of immunity to protect them from these awful diseases, and especially the vaccine-preventable diseases. So that kind of started my journey in vaccine advocacy.
I knew some people were hesitant and thats absolutely OK to be hesitant and to ask questions, and to talk to your doctor or experts or our organization about vaccines. But back then I was not aware of the anti-vaccine movement as much. I knew they were out there, but they were kind of not on my radar back then.
They came on my radar while I was a member, through the Arthritis Foundation, of Immunize South Dakota. And they asked me to testify in 2020 on the bill that was brought forth in the state House of Representatives that would have gotten rid of school vaccinations, which would be horribly detrimental and dangerous and a disaster for our state. So I agreed to go testify as an M.D. and as a parent of an immunocompromised child.
During the pandemic, I was thinking, OK, we all went through such a hard time with masks, social distancing, schooling our children at home, work changes and isolation. It was really hard. I thought and a lot of vaccine advocates thought that with the rolling out of the vaccine, which was the only thing that was going to get us out of the pandemic and make life normal again, that maybe the anti-vaccine sentiment would die down.
But that was exactly opposite of what happened. The vaccine hesitancy increased, and the sharing of misinformation about the COVID vaccine, and people got more vaccine hesitant, and their feelings about the COVID vaccine started trickling down to childhood vaccines, and were seeing our rates drop across the country.
So what had happened was the SAFE Communities Coalition started in 2020 to counter the spread of vaccine misinformation and support pro-vaccine legislation. Immunize South Dakota talked with SAFE Communities, and they approached me to take on this role as director of South Dakota Families for Vaccines, and SAFE now has 11 states covered.
Its truly a group effort. I work together with all the other directors in other states, and SAFE supports our work. And I also work a lot with other organizations and partners in our state and nationally.
People say, Well, 93%, thats huge. The problem is that very small drops in rates have big effects on vaccine-preventable diseases. So where we want to be is 95%, and that has dropped. We were there, but that has dropped since 2020 to 93%, and thats all because vaccine misinformation is shared so rampantly.
Social media and the internet are great, but information is shared so fast, and a lot of people dont know whats a good source for medical information. TikTok is not a good source for this information. And people share things on Facebook and even websites, and they look professional and they look scientific, but you need to look at resources for the studies that they did, and who paid for it, and how many were in the study, and whether its been reproduced. Its hard for people to figure out whats good information, and a lot of the stuff that the anti-vaxxers are posting is really scary.
We always say now that vaccines are a victim of their own success. Older people in our communities can tell you about multiple family members that died of measles, and they remember polio and people living in iron lungs and dying, and multiple other vaccine-preventable diseases that have just ravaged peoples lives, but we dont see that anymore because of vaccines.
And so some people think that those diseases are just gone, and theyre not. If we get below 95%, measles is the first one that rears its head, because its so contagious. And were seeing that in areas of the country that have lower vaccine rates. Its expected. And if you drop any lower, other horrible diseases will start rearing their heads. And unlike what a lot of anti-vax people say, these diseases are not benign. Youre much safer to get the vaccine as opposed to getting any of these diseases.
We have lots of trainings. We have ways people can get involved and learn about how to do it. But the main goal is to keep the door open to conversation, and to be calm and not argumentative, because people just go into their corners when you argue. And to listen to their concerns. Ask them, what have you heard? What are you worried about? Then ask if you can give them the information that you have about vaccines.
Thats kind of the gist, because arguing doesnt do anything. And just reiterate that its fine to have questions. And then just talk about how vaccines have such a long history. The first smallpox vaccine was over 200 years ago. We have decades and decades of research that have proven that vaccines are well studied and extremely safe.
We need to have people in our health care communities stand up, now more than ever. Its so important to use their voice in this way, and a lot of people do. We have a lot of other medical professionals that do, but we need more nurses, all medical professionals. We work with a lot of pharmacists, too. Public health experts are in the mix, too. It takes a group effort.
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Covid-19 may not be raging any more, but a controversy over the AstraZeneca vaccine, sold as Covishield in India is. The issue first erupted when AstraZeneca, in a submission to a court in the UK, acknowledged that its vaccine could cause a rare, potentially life-threatening condition, known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome or TTS. This led to everything from outrage on social media, to political parties issuing statements and to a host of misinformation being circulated. What is significant is that this information about TTS is not new it was established as early as in 2021, when Indias vaccination programme was underway, and it has been a known fact now for well over three years. Just a short time after the court submission made headlines, AstraZeneca also announced the worldwide withdrawal of its vaccine, citing a decline in the demand. As of this year, India has administered over 1.5 billion doses of Covishield to its eligible population.
What led to the furore over the vaccines rare side effect and what do we know about it? How robust is Indias system to monitor adverse events arising from vaccinations? And what happens to Indias vaccination programme if Covishield is no longer available are there other options available for those who need them or for future immunisations?
Guest: Dr Anurag Agrawal, Dean, BioSciences and Health Research, Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University
Host: Zubeda Hamid
Edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian.
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