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Bollywood actor Shreyas Talpade suffered a massive heart attack at the age of 47in December, last year. Now with the news of the side effects of the 'Covishield Vaccine' and that it is causing blood clots has left many surprised, Shreyas also feels that his ill health could have been a result of the vaccine.
In an interview with Lehren Retro recently, Shreyas said, thinking of his health, he now realises he cannot negate the theory completely.
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He told the publication that it was only after the COVID vaccine that he started feeling fatigued and experienced tiredness as well.
"It was only after the COVID-19 vaccination that I started experiencing some fatigue and tiredness. There must be some truth in this. Maybe this is because of COVID, or maybe because of the vaccine; although I don't know completely about it, there is something. To be honest, we don't know what we have put into our bodies," he said.
Shreyas, who had suffered a major heart attack last year, is much better now and has also restarted his shooting.
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Talking about his health scare, Shreyas said he was surprised because he never smokes or is a daily drinker. "I don't smoke. I'm not really a daily drinker; I drink maybe once a month. No tobacco; yes, my cholesterol was a little high, which I was told is normal these days. I was taking medicine for it, and it had reduced to a great extent. If all the factors are there no diabetes, no blood pressure what could be the reason?' said Shreyas.
Talking about the vaccine side effects, he said, We trusted big companies because we had never heard of such incidents before. Only after Corona, such news and videos started appearing continuously that people were falling while playing, and there was no real reason for it. So this is quite scary.
On December 14, 2022, Shreyas suffered a major heart attack. He complained of discomfort during the shooting of his upcoming film, Welcome to the Jungle.
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He was rushed to Mumbai's Bellevue Hospital, where he underwent angioplasty. He has recovered from the incident and resumed his shoot, too.
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Scientists have created a jab to help protect against multiple coronaviruses, even the ones 'we dont even know about yet', according to its creators.
Created by experts from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Caltech in California, the project aims to 'proactively' build a vaccine before the next potential pandemic causing pathogen even becomes threat.
The experimental shot, which has so far only been tested on mice, works by training the immune system to recognise parts of many different coronaviruses, a family of viruses that includes Covid, SARS and MERS.
Current vaccines work by training the immune system to target a single specific type of virus, such as the measles jab.But the new jab can target several.
Such a jab could allow people to be protected from multiple types of coronaviruses in a single dose, including, in theory, ones currently unknown to science.
The jab works by using a tiny ball of proteins called a 'quartet nanocage'.
Scientists then used what they called a 'protein superglue' to attach antigens which are substances thattrigger an immune response in the body, enabling it to fight off pathogens.
The resulting vaccine enables the immune system to recognise parts of eight coronaviruses.
This includes some that arecurrently only found in wild bats but that could, in theory, go on to infect humans in future.
Using multiple antigens in this way allows the immune system to target parts of coronaviruses common across many individual viruses, including some that haven't been found yet.
For example, tests showed the jab helped mice fight off SARS-Cov-1, the pathogen that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak.
This is despite the jab not including any samples from this virus specifically.
Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in pharmacology at the University of Cambridges department of pharmacology and the first author of the report said:'Our focus is to create a vaccine that will protect us against the next coronaviruspandemic, and have it ready before the pandemic has even started.'
He added: 'Weve created a vaccine that provides protection against a broad range of different coronaviruses including ones we dont even know about yet.'
Professor Mark Howarth, a senior author of the study, said the results could be a stepping stone to making new vaccines even faster than those created during the darkest days of the Covid pandemic.
'Scientists did a great job in quickly producing an extremely effective Covid vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a massive crisis with a huge number of deaths,' he said.
'We need to work out how we can do even better than that in the future, and a powerful component of that is starting to build the vaccines in advance.'
Publishing their resultsNature Nanotechnologythe scientists hope to start clinical trials of their new vaccine by early 2025.
The news about 'Covishield Vaccine' causing blood clots has taken people by surprise. Several questions are arising in the minds of people. Social media users also voiced their concerns on Twitter. Now Bollywood actor Shreyas Talpade has reacted to this piece of news. For the unversed, the actor had a heart attack last year. Now he has said that there must be some truth behind the news about the Covid-19 vaccines.
Shreyas Talpade- I don't drink, I don't smoke, so what could be the reason?
Actor Shreyas Talpade suffered a heart attack in October last year. However, now the actor's health is much better and he has returned to his work, but once again Shreyas has shared his experiences. "I don't smoke. I'm not really a daily drinker, I drink maybe once a month. No tobacco, yes, my cholesterol was a little high, Which I was told is normal these days. I was taking medicine for it and it had reduced to a great extent. If all the factors - no diabetes, no blood pressure, what could be the reason?' said the actor.
Is vaccine the cause of heart attack?
Shreyas said that he cannot deny this theory. "It was only after the Covid-19 vaccination that I started experiencing some fatigue and tiredness. There must be some truth in this. Maybe this is because of Covid, or maybe because of the vaccine, although I don't know completely about it, but there is something. To be honest, we don't know what we have put into our body," said Talpade.
The actor further added that he did what everyone was saying. "We trusted big companies, because we had never heard of such incidents before. Only after Corona, such news and videos started appearing continuously that people were falling while playing and there was no real reason for it. So this is quite scary," added Shreyas Talpade.
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To estimate VE, we adapted case-control methods1 for prevalent COVID-like illness (CLI) as a proxy for confirmed COVID-19 cases. Therefore, our estimates of VE measure a vaccines ability to prevent suspected symptomatic infections defined by CLI. To allow for changes in variant-specific symptomatology, we iterate across all possible CLI defined by 66 pair-wise combinations of 12 self-reported symptoms (fever, cough, difficulty breathing, fatigue, stuffy or runny nose, aches or muscle pain, sore throat, chest pain, nausea, loss of smell or taste, headache, chills). We then cluster the vaccine effectiveness estimates according to a single symptom of interest and evaluate the median vaccine effectiveness across all CLI definitions in the cluster. As an example, using a COVID-19-specific symptom (loss of smell or taste) as an anchor symptom, we evaluate VE estimates for all CLI definitions inclusive of this symptom during Delta and Omicron waves of infections, resulting in VE estimates for 11 pairwise combinations of symptoms. Consistent with previous estimates of VE that used PCR test data as the outcome2, our analyses reveal a median VEDelta of 0.77, IQR[0.76, 0.80] (Fig.1a, triangle). In comparison, analyzing the data from the Omicron period reveals a median VEOmicron of 0.47, IQR[0.41, 0.53] (Fig.1a, circle). Further expanding the approach to all CLI definitions reveals a median VEDelta of 0.71, IQR[0.65, 0.75] (Fig.1b). In contrast, the VEOmicron estimate is even lower (median 0.29, IQR[0.20, 0.38]). Notably, our findings align with those from a recent meta-analysis study focused on real-world vaccine effectiveness for fully vaccinated individuals. This study reported a VE of 70.9% (95% CI, 68.972.7) against Delta infections and a VE of 23.5% (95% CI, 17.029.5) against Omicron variant infections12. To understand how VE estimates for each CLI definition vary by wave, we take the difference between the two VE period estimates (VEOmicronVEDelta) for each CLI definition. Doing so reveals a median within-CLI definition change of 0.40, IQR[0.45, 0.35] (Fig.2a), suggesting lower VEOmicron regardless of the CLI definition that is used. Additionally, we find that the pattern of change in VE across CLI definitions is similar when evaluating individual country estimates (see Supplementary Fig.1).
a VE estimates for symptoms paired with the loss of smell or taste for the Delta (triangle) and Omicron (circle) periods. 95% confidence intervals are calculated for each VE estimate, with Delta and Omicron period estimates derived from 64,283 and 79,697 survey responses, respectively. b Box and whisker plot of VE estimates across all 66 possible CLI defined by pairwise combinations of symptoms for Delta and Omicron periods. The box represents the interquartile range (IQR) of estimates, with the horizontal line inside the box indicating the median. The whiskers extend to the largest/smallest values up to 1.5 times the IQR. Outlier values are represented as points. The sample size for each VE estimate is consistent with the sample sizes described in panel (a).
a Distribution of within-CLI change (VEOmicronVEDelta) across all CLI definitions. b Distributions of VEOmicronVEDelta among CLI definitions within each anchor symptom. Each box-plot contains estimates for an anchor symptom paired with the 11 other symptoms. Box-plots are ordered according to the magnitude of the median change, with the median across all VE indicated by the gray dashed line. Each box represents the interquartile range (IQR) of estimates, with the horizontal line inside the box indicating the median. The whiskers extend to the largest/smallest values up to 1.5 times the IQR. Outlier values are represented as points. Each VE estimate from the Delta and Omicron periods is derived from 64,283 and 79,697 survey responses, respectively.
To identify potential alterations in COVID-19 symptomatology, we evaluate the change in VE estimates for CLI definitions with a single anchor symptom, like loss of smell and taste. We reason that if symptoms are similar across variants, the within-anchor median change in VE will be similar across anchor symptoms. Our analyses provide evidence for a potential change in COVID-19 symptomatology from the Delta period to the Omicron period, as we note that some symptoms have more or less decline in VE (Fig.2b). Specifically, we find that CLI definitions that include loss of smell or taste have the smallest median change in VE (median: 0.31, IQR[0.34, 0.28]), while definitions with the largest median change include a cough, or sore throat (cough median: 0.49, IQR[0.52, 0.45]; sore throat median: 0.47, IQR[0.49, 0.45]). The observed pattern of change in VE across anchor symptoms is similar when evaluating VE estimates from individual countries (see Supplementary Fig.2), however, with increased uncertainty in estimates as measured by the span of anchor symptom distributions (seeSupplementary Results). Similarly, a survey-based study that used PCR testing data as the outcome demonstrated a shift away from symptomatology that includes loss of smell or taste and towards upper-respiratory type symptoms (i.e., sore throat) during the Omicron period13. Furthermore, a study conducted in Jalisco, Mexico, analyzed reported symptoms for confirmed infections with wild-type SARS-CoV-2, Delta, and Omicron variants, revealing that Omicron infections were linked to a higher incidence of runny nose and sore throat, aligning with the findings of our country-level analysis for Mexico (see Supplementary Fig.3)14. These results corroborate our overall findings, which also identified increased reporting of sore throat during a wave of COVID-19 infections dominated by the Omicron variant. Collectively, these findings suggest a shift in symptomatology associated with the Omicron variant towards more upper respiratory-type symptoms.
In addition to providing insights into changes in COVID-19 symptomatology, the VE estimates also include information about a vaccines ability to protect against COVID-19 illness presenting at different levels of severity as defined by pairwise combinations of symptoms. Importantly, we do not have information about the true severity of each respondents reported illness, and we instead infer severity based on the presence and absence of key symptoms. For instance, all CLI definitions that include at least a fever, cough, aches or muscle pain, sore throat, nausea, loss of smell or taste, or a headache in the absence of difficulty breathing or chest pain are considered mild syndromes. However, according to the NIH, CLI definitions that include difficulty breathing or chest pain are considered more severe forms of illness15. To understand potential changes in VE against mild and severe COVID-19 syndromes, we partition our CLI-informed VE estimates according to the above classifications. As a result, we end up with 42 mild and 21 severe definitions of CLI. We find that severe definitions of illness were more protected than mild definitions during the Delta period (median severe VE: 0.74, IQR[0.70, 0.79], median mild VE: 0.54, IQR[0.45, 0.64]) (Fig.3). However, protection against mild and severe illness was similar during Omicron (median severe VE: 0.30, IQR[0.25, 0.38], median mild VE: 0.22, IQR[0.16, 0.33]). Importantly, VE against severe illness may appear higher, as vaccines are producing milder illness when an individual is infected with COVID-1916, making it seem as if VE against mild illness is less effective. During the Delta wave of infections, we observed a total of 13,220 reports of mild illness and 5316 reports of severe illness. In contrast, during the Omicron wave of infections, there were 24,408 reports of mild illness and 10,234 reports of severe illness.
VE estimates for pairwise combinations of symptoms that include a fever, cough, aches or muscle pain, sore throat, nausea, loss of smell or taste, or a headache in the absence of difficulty breathing or chest pain (mild illness), and pairwise combinations of symptoms that include difficulty breathing or chest pain (severe illness). Each box represents the interquartile range (IQR) of estimates, with the horizontal line inside the box indicating the median. The whiskers extend to the largest/smallest values up to 1.5 times the IQR. Outlier values are represented as points. Each VE estimate from the Delta and Omicron periods is derived from 64,283 and 79,697 survey responses, respectively.
Calgary
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Posted: 8 Hours Ago
After trending downward for several months, COVID-19 is on the upswing in Alberta once again.
The province's respiratory virus dashboard shows a number of key indicators, including case counts, hospitalization numbers and positivity rates, are ticking up.
"Many jurisdictions in Canada have seen a slight bump in late April in the number of COVID cases, the positivity rate and also in their wastewater monitoring," said Dr. Dan Gregson, an infectious diseases specialist in the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary.
There are likely a number of factors at play, he said.
"It's a combination of waning immunity and the virus becoming more transmissibleand escaping your immune system that's been adapted to the prior strain."
The latest data from Alberta Health shows 114 people hospitalizedwith SARS CoV-2, an increase of more than two dozen in two weeks. Six patients are in intensive care.
At the University of Alberta Hospital, infectious diseases physician Dr. Stephanie Smith said the latest uptick isn't translating into a spike in severe COVID cases, but she is seeing a clear trend.
"What we are seeing is we have people being admitted for other things and then becoming infected with COVID in the hospital because of visitors or sharing a room," she said.
"Most of them are not getting severely ill. Obviously there are exceptional cases of patients that are severely immunocompromised that can get severe disease. But we do have treatments to try and prevent disease from becoming severe for those that pick up COVIDin the hospital."
According to Smith, that's exacerbated by the strain on hospitals and overcrowding.
"We are so overcapacity in our hospitals, and that means patients are being put into hallways, and we have three people in rooms that are designed for two people, and that makes it really hard to prevent the spread of infection," said Smith.
"I would say that's probably our biggest challenge right now and why we're seeing transmission."
The Alberta Health Services website showsseven hospitals were reporting COVID-19 outbreaks as of April 30.
An enhanced masking directive, designed to prevent COVID-19 transmission,is nolonger in place in AHS facilities.
Smith said many health workers on the wards where she works still wear masks routinely.
The province's COVID-19 death toll continues to rise. A total of 552 Albertan's have died due to the illness since Aug. 27, according to publicly available data.
Both doctors are urgingAlbertans to know their level of risk for severe disease and plan their immunizations accordingly.
"The important thing is for people who are high risk to really make sure that their vaccine is up to date. That's the easiest thing to do," said Gregson.
"If you're really high risk and you're going to places where there's lots of people, you can mask to reduce your risk."
High-risk Albertans including seniors,immunocompromised individuals and First Nations, Metis and Inuit people became eligible for additional doses of theXBB.1.5 vaccineon April 15, if it's been six months since their last shot.
According to Gregson, while COVIDtransmission dropped for a number of months, it never went away.
"We have constant background noise that's occurring all the time and then we have waves. The last big wave was in the fall of 2023. Whether or not over the summer that goes down to zero or not, we'll wait and see," he said.
"It would be nice to have a break from this."
Jennifer Lee is a CBC News reporter based in Calgary. She worked at CBC Toronto, Saskatoon and Regina before landing in Calgary in 2002. If you have a health or human interest story to share, let her know. Jennifer.Lee@cbc.ca
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By Stephen Beech via SWNS
A new jab is effective against coronaviruses that havent even emerged yet, claim scientists.
Cambridge University researchers have developed new vaccine technology that has been shown in mice to provide protection against a wide range of viruses with potential for future devastating outbreaks.
Their aim is to create a vaccine that will protect people against the next coronavirus pandemic - and have it ready before the outbreak even begins.
The new approach - called "proactive vaccinology" - involves scientists building a vaccine before the disease-causing pathogen even emerges.
The new vaccine works by training the bodys immune system to recognize specific regions of eight different coronaviruses - including SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and several currently circulating in bats and have the potential to jump to humans and cause a pandemic.
Key to its effectiveness is that the specific virus regions the vaccine targets also appear in many related coronaviruses, say scientists.
By training the immune system to attack those regions, it gives protection against other coronaviruses not represented in the vaccine including ones that havent even been identified yet.
Conventional vaccines include a single antigen to train the immune system to target a single specific virus.
That may not protect against a diverse range of existing coronaviruses, or against pathogens that are newly emerging.
The researchers explained that the new vaccine, for example, does not include the SARS-CoV-1 coronavirus, which caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, yet it still induces an immune response to that virus.
Study first author Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in the University of Cambridges Department of Pharmacology, said: Our focus is to create a vaccine that will protect us against the next coronavirus pandemic, and have it ready before the pandemic has even started.
Weve created a vaccine that provides protection against a broad range of different coronaviruses including ones we dont even know about yet.
Senior author Professor Mark Howarth, also of Cambridges Department of Pharmacology, said: We dont have to wait for new coronaviruses to emerge.
"We know enough about coronaviruses, and different immune responses to them, that we can get going with building protective vaccines against unknown coronaviruses now,
He added: Scientists did a great job in quickly producing an extremely effective Covid vaccine during the last pandemic, but the world still had a massive crisis with a huge number of deaths.
"We need to work out how we can do even better than that in the future, and a powerful component of that is starting to build the vaccines in advance.
Prof Howarth explained that the new Quartet Nanocage vaccine is based on a structure called a nanoparticle a ball of proteins held together by incredibly strong interactions.
Chains of different viral antigens are attached to the nanoparticle using a novel protein superglue.
Prof Howarth says multiple antigens are included in the chains, which trains the immune system to target specific regions shared across a wide range of coronaviruses.
The findings of the study, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, show that the new vaccine raises a broad immune response, even in mice that were pre-immunized with SARS-CoV-2.
The new vaccine is much simpler in design than other broadly protective vaccines currently in development, which the researchers say should accelerate its route into clinical trials.
They believe the underlying technology they have developed also has potential for use in vaccine development to protect against other health problems.
The work involved a collaboration between scientists at Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the United States.
It improves on previous work, by the Oxford and Caltech groups, to develop a new "all-in-one" vaccine against coronavirus threats.
The vaccine developed by Oxford and Caltech is due to enter clinical trials next year, but scientists say its "complex" nature makes it "challenging" to manufacture which could limit large-scale production.
FLiRT, a sub-lineage of Omicron, includes two rapidly spreading mutations.
Published: 07 May 2024, 12:34 PM IST
What do we know about FLiRT COVID variant? (Representational image)
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The lul in COVID cases may soon change thanks to a new COVID-19 variant spreading fast in the US, say experts.
According to experts in the US, in just weeks, this new COVID-19 variant, nicknamed FLiRT, has overtaken the JN.1 omicron subvariant to become the dominant COVID-19 variant in the US.
Here are all your FAQs about the new variant answered.
What do we know about FLiRT?
This new COVID-19 variant, called FLiRT, is a sub-lineage of the Omicron JN.1 lineage. There are two mutation, KP.2 and KP 1.1 that are being classified as FLiRT.
Is it more infectious than previous COVID variants?
According to the Infectious Diseases Society Of America (IDSA), both mutations of the FLiRT variant, KP 1.1 and KP.2, are both spreading rapidly.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (US CDC), KP.2 currently accounts for one in four infections in the US.
KP 1.1, on the other hand, currently makes up 75 percent of the COVID cases in the country.
What are the symptoms of this variant?
So far, symptoms associated with FLiRT have been similar to those of other Omicron subvariants. These include,
Sore throat
Cough
Fatigue
Nasal congestion
Runny nose
Headache
Muscle aches
Fever
Gastric issues
Is it more dangerous than other COVID-19 variants?
Like other Omicron variants, FLiRT seems to be mostly causing mild illness, say experts in the US.
According to the US CDC, the severity of illness will depend more on a persons underlying health and immunity.
Has it been detected in India yet?
So far, FLiRT variants have not been detected in India. However, according to experts, considering how transmissable it is, it is likely to make its appearance soon.
Although, the underscore that knowing what we know about the variant and its pattern, this is not a cause for panic.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)
Updated May 7, 2024, 09:27 IST
Vaccine is made by attaching harmless proteins from different variants of coronavirus to very small nanoparticles
A team of scientists from leading universities in the world have developed a new all-in-one vaccine that they say can protect humans against all variants of coronaviruses. Including the ones that are yet to emerge.
The study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology is based on a new approach to the development of vaccines known as proactive vaccinology where vaccines are made even before the disease-causing pathogen emerges. Scientists say this has shown promising results in mouse models. The study, conducted jointly by the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Caltech says the vaccines work by making your body's immune system know about specific regions of coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which caused the COVID-19 outbreak.
This research has come more than two months after a JAMA Network study found that immunity against the omicron variant fades rapidly after a second and third dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine. A study also found that booster shots did not stop coronavirus spike proteins from binding to cells as well in omicron cases as they did with other strains.
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Scientists say the vaccine is made by attaching harmless proteins from different variants of coronavirus to very small nanoparticles that are then injected to prime your bodys defences to fight the viruses that may invade in the future.
And since the vaccine trains the immune system to target proteins shared across many different types of coronaviruses, the protection it induces is extremely broad, making it effective against known and unknown viruses in the same family. According to scientists, many variants of the virus are currently circulating in bats and have the potential to jump to humans and cause a pandemic.
Our focus is to create a vaccine that will protect us against the next coronavirus pandemic and have it ready before the pandemic has even started, Rory Hills, a graduate researcher in the University of Cambridges Department of Pharmacology and first author of the report, told the media.
If the vaccine is found to be safe and effective in humans, it could be used as a COVID-19 booster with the added benefit of protecting against other coronaviruses.
More likely is that countries would hold stocks of the vaccine, and others designed to target separate pathogens, once they have been manufactured and approved. If a coronavirus or other pathogen crosses over you could have pre-existing vaccine stocks ready and a clear plan to quickly scale up production if needed, Hills added.
Scientists say the key to the effectiveness of the virus is that the specific virus regions the vaccine targets also appear in many related coronaviruses. Training the immune system to attack these regions, gives protection against other coronaviruses not represented in the vaccine, including ones that have not even been identified yet.
Scientists say this new vaccine is much simpler in design than others that are presently in development, which could make it go for clinical trials faster than the others.
Experts say conventional vaccines include a single antigen to train the immune system to target a single specific virus, which may not protect against a diverse range of existing coronaviruses or against pathogens that are newly emerging.
