⚠️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. 👀
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??? 🤦🏻♂️
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…
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 👀
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!
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.
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.
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
JUST IN— W.H.O. Declares Global Emergency Over New Mpox Outbreak. The threat this time is deadlier. Since the beginning of this year, the Democratic Republic of Congo alone has reported more than 14,000 mpox cases and 524 deaths. Those most at risk include women and children under 15. The outbreak has spread through 13 countries in Africa, including a few that had never reported mpox cases before.
2) public health emergency of international concern— Also known as PHEIC, this is a status given by WHO to “extraordinary events” that pose a public health risk to other countries through the international spread of disease.
3) The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention declared the outbreak a public health emergency of continental security the day before — the first such declaration by the agency since its inception in 2017.
Concerning—CDC now says that 42 states are seeing rising rates of #COVID19 again—with levels high or very high in 35 states (and rising). COVID wastewater levels have already surpassed last summer’s peak and climbing fast. #CovidIsNotOver cdc.gov/forecast-outbr…
2) Substantial 28% increase in one week. Question is how high it will go. It’s a new variant (mostly KP2 and KP3 and JN1), which are evasive against past infection and past vaccines.
A girl using cover name JANE DOE testified under oath at Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal trial that she was introduced to Trump by Jeffrey Epstein when she was 14 years old. Pass it on.
Trump’s name appears 7 times in Epstein’s latest files. They regularly called each other according to phone logs. Trump says Epstein is a “terrific guy”. And he traveled on flights, according to logs, to Epstein’s island multiple times.
3) THIS STUFF IS NEW—not old Epstein-Trump info. New information regarding Epstein's child trafficking activities was released 7/2/24. Documents from 2016 are now out of date and do not show the depth of Trump's dealings with Epstein... READ MORE:
Reminder—Trump had expressed executing people on many occasions while President, according to his own Attorney General. Now the Supreme Court has green lit any official act with full presidential immunity. Germany did the same in 1933. It turned out great.
2) If we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it. How Germany became Nazi Germany in 1933….
📍 The New York Times Is Failing Its Readers Badly on Covid
📌“Example of ‘science opinion’ run amok in the [NY Times] is a piece… by Zeynep Tufekci, a commentator with no training in biological science or epidemiology… ➡️Tufekci plays into the hands of the anti-science politicians who now seek vengeance on the flimsiest of grounds.”
2) “Tufekci also adds to the ongoing pile-on about whether the directive to maintain a distance of six feet from others was needed. Although the precise distance was indeed somewhat arbitrary, there was no possibility of obtaining hard data in the relevant time frame. The six-foot distance was a reasonable assumption based on public health history, and the practice of social distancing for other respiratory pathogens, particularly those spread by droplets. It was also adopted in multiple other countries, for the same reasons.”
3) “The problem here isn’t that Tufekci is questioning the evidentiary basis of the six-foot rule—science and public health cannot progress if we don’t evaluate the results of our work. But that progress is more effective when grounded in good-faith inquiry, rather than the kinds of attacks Tufekci levels against government scientists for doing their best in desperate circumstances. This only serves to bolster the forces who seek to destroy the US public health infrastructure, not make it better.
Tufekci also leaves the impression that she alone realized SARS-CoV-2 was airborne early on. In fact, the debate about transmission was fast and furious within the scientific community at that time”