Attention Parents:
Please read this. I am pleading with you to get your children the flu shot before November. Here is why: 1. While children seem to have low risk from COVID, they have dramatically higher risk from influenza most years. Last year it is estimated that 600
children in the US died due to influenza or it’s complications. Even if you are not worried about COVID, please be concerned about influenza, especially since we have a vaccine that can protect them from flu. 2. The flu shot is safe. The shot does not contain live virus, so you
cannot catch the flu from the shot. 3. The flu shot is effective. It appears that there is a fairly good match between the circulating strains of influenza and those in the vaccine this year. Even when the match isn’t that great, it generally is close enough to at least make a
case of the flu milder. 4. With the COVID pandemic and hospitals in some parts of Idaho and the country already stretched, we want to do whatever we can to reduce the burden on healthcare providers for having to manage a flu epidemic at the same time we are dealing with a COVID
pandemic. In a typical year, 7 - 26 thousand children under the age of 5 are admitted to the hospital due to influenza. 5. Children over the age of 6 months can receive the flu vaccine. It is especially important for young children, because it is exactly the opposite of COVID.
While younger kids are less vulnerable in general than older kids to COVID, children under 5 and especially those under 2 are the most vulnerable to flu. 6. While it remains unclear what role children play in the transmission of COVID, school-aged children are the major agents of
spread of influenza to their households. If kids get sick this fall/winter, everyone will rightly be concerned that perhaps they have COVID. Preventing the flu by getting a flu shot will minimize the strain on your family, your child’s school and your child’s doctor office of
having to sort out whether they have COVID or the flu. In addition, we have mounting evidence that people who get both COVID and influenza do more poorly than those that just get one or the other. So, even if you are not worried about your child, your child getting the flu will
cause increased risk for any vulnerable persons living in your home.
Please get everyone in your family vaccinated for the flu now or at least sometime before the end of October. You can go to your local doctor or many of your local grocery stores (e.g., Albertsons, Walmart)
or pharmacies (e.g., Walgreens, RiteAid) . @SaintAlsHealth has drive through flu shot sites. @primaryhealth has “clean clinics” (meaning they screen patients ahead of time and do not see patients that have symptoms of COVID or other respiratory viruses at these clinics) where you
can go to get your flu shots. You can get flu shots at @StLukesHealth clinics and urgent care centers. For most people with insurance, you will not have a charge for your flu shot. If you cannot afford the flu vaccine, contact your local public health department so that they can
make arrangements with you to get free flu shots. Please trust me. Even if you ordinarily don’t get flu shots, this is the year to do it! Trust me, you’ll be glad you did! #MaskUpIdaho and #GetYourFluShot
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@PeterHotez makes an important point here. We must be preparing for the next outbreak with pandemic potential. Even during the current pandemic, we have seen the potential for new pandemics with MPox, Ebola & avian influenza, to name just a few. And, unfortunately, we seem to be
making the same mistakes. Most recently, we saw shortages in certain antibiotics and children’s cold and cough medicines. We are not prepared, and I am not sure that we have learned many of the lessons that this pandemic should have taught us. We have been wasting time for the
past three years that should have been devoted to revising our pandemic plans and beginning to improve our preparedness. We have learned that most people are willing to accept infections with a 1-3% case fatality rate. But @PeterHotez and I could name a dozen viruses with
There are so many reasons to be extremely skeptical of Dr. Cole’s claims in addition to the lies and purposeful misrepresentations he has made: 1. I don’t remember exactly when in 2021 Dr. Cole began making his claims of a 20x increase in cancers, but I remember thinking that it
was way too short a timeline to be due to the vaccines. We have seen and studied the process of the development of cancer from a mutagen and this process takes years or decades in every instance that I can think of off the top of my head - not weeks. 2. Remember that a 20-fold
increase is a 2,000% increase, which itself is huge and unprecedented. At that level, it should be setting off alarms all across the world, yet we were not getting those reports. It is pretty hard to come up with an explanation as to why we would only see the increase in cancers
But keep 3 things in mind. Sequencing data will be at least a week old data due to
the time it takes for sequencing and reporting. Some of these sub-variants appear to have doubling times that are on the order of a week, so fast growing sub-variants may have already increased in percentages by the time we see these numbers.
Secondly, these are 15-day rolling
trends, which underestimate any percentages for fast growing sub-variants because they get averaged out over the 15 days.
Finally, the geographic variation in the distribution of these sub-variants, the number of sub-variants, and the still relatively low percentages, make it
I hope that we will learn the lessons from this pandemic. It won’t be our last. That is why Dr. Epperly and I wrote our book that will come out in April.
Just as you have pointed out, doctors are seeing many of these cases where people with “mild” to moderate COVID have died
suddenly in the year following with massive pulmonary emboli (blood clots to the lungs), heart attacks or other causes of sudden death. We have had studies showing that your chances of having cardiovascular conditions following COVID significantly increase in the year following
infection. It doesn’t have to be this scary. There is so much we as a society could do. In fact, Dr. Epperly and I make 117 recommendations for the next pandemic. I am less concerned for those who have been following all of the guidance we have been providing. It works. My wife
The problem is we don’t sequence all the + specimens; we only do a small percentage for surveillance; and my understanding is that those report only the predominant variant identified in a sample, which might be the only variant. (Happy to be corrected by virologists or other
experts out there.) I don’t know of any source that reports the frequency with which a sample contains more than one variant or what variants are involved in co-infection. We clearly know that co-infections with more than one variant or sub variant can occur, because a number of
recombinants (a new variant formed as a consequence of the exchange of genetic material between two others) have been identified, including the XBB recombinant that has been circulating in Singapore and has now been identified in the US. One group of patients that we would be
@audreydutton and @Idaho_Liberty76 CK.2.1.1 is a fast growing sub variant that has now become one of the top identified circulating sub-variants in the world. It is a sub, sub, sub …. Variant of BA.5, specifically of BA.5.2.24 with the addition of 5 potentially problematic
mutations. It was first identified and designated on October 7. It has been circulating in Spain, Germany, England, Denmark, Austria, the U.S., Canada, France and Australia. As best I can tell, it was not detected in the US until 3 weeks ago, so I was surprised earlier today when
my daughter called me and told me we had identified it in the City of Boise wastewater. Right now, we have a lot of unknowns. It is unclear if one of these new variants will out-compete the others. If so, my bet would be on BQ.1.1, but I probably wouldn’t bet more than ten bucks