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Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
@DrEricDing
Feb 18, 2022 • 14 tweets • 10 min read • Read on X
⚠️Worrisome—New lab experiments from Japan show that #BA2 may have features that make it as capable of causing serious illness as older variants–including Delta! And yet as evasive as old #Omicron cousin BA1. #BA2 🌍 surging—needs upgrade to VOC asap @WHO!
cnn.com/2022/02/17/hea…
2) BA2 is seriously bad news. It’s both faster transmission than BA2 and if it’s truly more severe and as evasive against prior immunity including BA1 old #Omicron immunity— then it’d be the worse of 4 worlds. 👀
3) Faster is bad. Very bad. Hard to imagine faster than old Omicron — yet here we are!!! 🤦🏻‍♂️
4) Resistant to Omicron BA.1 induced immunity. Being BA1 immune from past infection provided immunity against BA1– ➡️ but significantly less against BA2. 👀

Good thing we aren’t dropping mitigations anywhere right??? 🤦🏻‍♂️ Image
5) for vaccine evasion- BA2 is similar to BA1 albeit both are MUCH more evasive than Delta. Boosters still good ~70-74% VE for symptomatic infection. But not enough people boosted. biorxiv.org/content/10.110… Image
6) just how fast is BA2??? It’s now 90% of all #COVID in Denmark. And there’s even two different BA2 versions! Red and blue below. The red H78Y is surging even more 👀

Ht @DrWilliamKu Image
7) Let’s look at it this way—BA2 is much more aggressive than anything —both pink and green below are BA2 — but the green H78Y subtype of BA2 extra aggressive it seems. Meanwhile BA1 old Omicron near extinct in 🇩🇰! That doesn’t happen by chance. We need to raise BA2 as VOC asap! Image
8) here is what is happening in the country with the most #BA2 variant so far.., 🇩🇰 has been BA2 dominant for weeks and have now almost no mitigations either… now their excess deaths are spiking again…
9) "[#BA2] might be, from a human's perspective, a worse virus than BA.1 and might be able to transmit better and cause worse disease," says Dr. Daniel Rhoads, section head of microbiology at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. BA2 needs a new designation now!!!
10) Worse— monoclonal antibody drug now fails against #BA2 VARIANT—one of the last monoclonal antibody drug still available fails—the rapidly spreading #Omicron BA.2 sublineage "exhibited marked resistance" to sotrovimab in lab experiments. Shit.

medscape.com/viewarticle/96…
11) Meanwhile, we know #BA2 is also surging fast in the US. CDC needs to update its BA2 data — it’s been almost 2 weeks with no new data released!! C’mon @CDCgov - release the new BA2 numbers. The world is watching @CDCDirector
12) Even the @WHO is getting very concerned about #BA2 variant outcompeting and displacing old #Omicron. WHO’s COVID lead @mvankerkhove now warns about a likely BA2 related surge. We must be vigilant. This is not a drill—BA2 is real.

HT @Cleavon_MD.
13) we must act quickly with high urgency to stop the rise of BA2. We have not learned from the past — if we ignore BA2, we could be facing another / continued wave of excess deaths. Let’s learn from history rather than repeat it. 🙏
14) The other urgency is that vaccine effectiveness is only high with boosters in face of #Omicronc whether BA1 or BA2. But most folks aren’t boosted in most countries. Thus are we truly prepared for #BA2 given we know BA1 infection immunity isn’t as good versus BA2? #GetBoosted

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More from @DrEricDing

Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
Apr 3
Now economists know how scientists felt back when he pushed “hydroxychloroquine”
2) HCQ preventing COVID deaths has been debunked— and it’s now been linked with deaths.

@JoshuaPCohen1
forbes.com/sites/joshuaco…Image
@JoshuaPCohen1 3) JPMorgan on Trump Tariffs: “The largest tax increase since 1968” Image
Read 6 tweets
Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
Mar 28
My god—Earthquake (a Richter ~7.7) causes a skyscraper to collapse in Bangkok. Hope all the construction workers made it out.
2) this skyscraper collapse was captured from a distant car’s dashcam while on a highway

3) another view of the collapse. For those who lived through 9/11, this collapse is a bit triggering.
Read 5 tweets
Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
Mar 27
Welp—kiss public health & medical research infrastructure in America goodbye for the next 4 years. RFK Jr plans to cut 10,000 jobs from Trump HHS. Image
2) this will not make America healthy again… not by a long shot. So dangerous and irresponsible.
3) “Kennedy is set to announce Thursday the planned changes, which include axing 10,000 full-time employees spread across departments tasked with responding to disease outbreaks, approving new drugs, providing insurance for the poorest Americans and more”.
Read 5 tweets
Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
Mar 15
SICKENING—Trump’s DHS just deported a surgeon from Brown University Medical School—who is here legally on an H1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027, and has committed no crimes. Trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, University of Washington, and Yale as a **transplant surgeon** (one of the most difficult surgical fields in all of medicine!!!), she is a highly trained doctor on kidney transplants, which cannot be easily replaced. Her phone was seized at the border. A federal judge handed down an injunction against her deportation—but she was already deported on a plane en route to Paris. Brown’s kidney transplant clinic is now strained by her deportation.Image
Image
2) Full text:

PROVIDENCE — A Rhode Island doctor who had traveled to Lebanon to see her parents was prevented from re-entering the United States at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Thursday evening, her lawyer and a colleague said.

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, who lives in Providence, has been working at Brown Medicine’s Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension since last July, and she [has] been part of the transplant service at Rhode Island Hospital, according to Dr. George Bayliss, the organ transplant division’s medical director. She has been studying and working in the United States for about six years, he said Friday.

The US consulate in Lebanon had issued her an H-1B visa, which is given to people in specialty occupations requiring expertise. The visa was valid through mid-2027, said Thomas S. Brown, an attorney representing her and Brown Medicine.

Alawieh was detained when she returned to Logan airport, and family members are afraid that she is about to be deported to Lebanon, he said.

“We are at a loss as to why this happened,” Brown said. “I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of the Trump crackdown on immigration. I don’t know if it’s a travel ban or some other issue.”

He said her phone has been seized and he has not been able to contact Alawieh.

Bayliss said a lawyer filed a petition with the US District Court in Massachusetts, and Judge Leo T. Sorokin issued an order saying Alawieh should not be moved outside of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice. But he said that message apparently did not reach immigration officials in time, and a plane carrying Alawieh left for Paris.

“This is outrageous,” Bayliss said in an interview. “This is a person who is legally entitled to be in the U.S., who is stopped from re-entering the country for reasons no one knows. It’s depriving her patients of a good physician.”

A US Customs and Border Patrol spokesperson, Ryan Brissette, was not able to immediately answer questions about Alawieh on Friday evening.

Bayliss said Alawieh graduated from the American University of Beirut medical school and came to the United States for a nephrology fellowship at Ohio State University. She then landed a transplant fellowship at University of Washington and had a residency in the Yale hospital system before starting at Brown Medicine last July, he said.

“She’s really a very humble and able person,” Bayliss said. “She takes care of her patients. She is talented and thoughtful and a great addition to our division.”

Bayliss said Alawieh went to Lebanon to visit parents and planned to be gone for two weeks. He said she texted a colleague at 6:30 p.m. Thursday saying she was back in Boston, but then her family heard from immigration officials.

Dr. Paul Morrissey, surgical director of the organ transplant division at Brown University Health, said Alawieh works on getting people in Rhode Island on the list for a kidney transplants, and that’s a crucial job at a time when there has been a lot of focus on the need for kidneys and their equitable distribution.

He said Alawieh should not have had any problem traveling out of the country with an H-1B visa.

“It’s an unfortunate set of circumstances,” Morrissey said. “It’s putting a strain on our office. Her work has been exceptional.”

bostonglobe.com/2025/03/14/met…Image
3) There is a new Trump ban against many countries, including tourist visa bans against all countries in the red and orange lists. This list is still tentative. And it shouldn’t have affected people with existing visas, such and the Brown kidney transplant surgeon Image
Read 8 tweets
Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
Mar 14
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again… once upon a time, liberals did have our own “Leftist Joe Rogan”… his name was Joe Rogan…

Here he is advocating for socialized medicine, healthcare for all, and supporting labor unions to protect workers.
2) Recall, Rogan was once pro Obama and pro Bernie Sanders, and pro Yang Gang, and anti Trump. It’s sad he has since failed to the dark side. But like Vader… maybe he can be redeemed someday and come back to the light.
3) *Fallen, not failed (above).

Joe Rogan was also pro gay rights and pro DACA and pro helping inner city communities that suffer economic and social injustices. It’s sad what he has become. I feel we should try to pull & welcome him back someday. Everyone can be redeemed.
Read 4 tweets
Eric Feigl-Ding Profile picture
Feb 26
BREAKING—FDA suddenly cancels meeting to update next season’s flu vaccines, with zero explanations. Any delays will jeopardize next year’s vaccine supply chain. Image
2) Folks who follow me know that I’m no bullshitter. I criticized past pandemic response right and left, and have called balls and strikes without bias. And I often say things that doctors & epidemiologists are whispering among themselves but don’t say publicly. (Cough cough) ⬇️
3) While I don’t recommend hoarding… I think stocking up on flu antivirals, which you can obtain prophylactically (preventively) from doctors if you ask nicely why you’re high risk, can be a good idea. I know many doctors, epidemiologists and virologists who do for their family.
Read 6 tweets

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