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Pfizer seeks FDA approval to vaccinate 6-month-old infants
If approved, Pfizer’s vaccine would be the first available for American children under the age of five
Freeport High School, New York, November 30, 2021
Pfizer and BioNTech announced on Tuesday that they were seeking approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to vaccinate children as young as 6 months old against Covid-19.
If given approval, children aged six months to five years old would be able to get vaccinated against Covid-19 with Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine. Currently, children aged five and above are able to get vaccinated in the US with Pfizer’s vaccine – though not Moderna and Janssen, which are restricted to over 18s.
Pfizer claimed in a press release that there was an “urgent public health need” for children under the age of five to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Of course, there has to be an element of hysteria in order to sell the idea. Also, the more doses, the more money for Pfizer.
“This application is for authorization of the first two 3 µg doses of a planned three-dose primary series in this age group,” Pfizer explained, adding that the company was still awaiting trial data on a third dose for young children.
“COVID-19 cases and related hospitalization among children have spiked dramatically across the United States during the Omicron variant surge,” the press release claimed, noting that “children under 4 accounted for 3.2% of the total hospitalizations” several weeks ago.
Pfizer boasted that, if approved, its vaccine would be the first available for children under five in the US. According to the CDC, over 80% of Americans aged five and over have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. Roughly 67.9% of Americans over the age of five are “fully vaccinated” with two doses of the vaccine.
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Antibody treatment could neutralize Omicron, researchers claim
A new treatment could potentially put humans “a step ahead” in the race
against the pandemic
A research team in China has developed a new antibody that they say could neutralize the Omicron strain of Covid, after synthesizing components of two antibodies produced by human immune cells.
While independent, these antibodies were ineffective against Omicron – but the synthesized version managed to neutralize the Covid strain, according to researchers from Fudan University in Shanghai.
Describing it as a surprise discovery that was developed with “God’s grace,” the researchers stated that the new treatment could put humans “a step ahead in the race” against the coronavirus.
The researchers, led by Professor Huang Jinghe and working at the National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Disease in Guangzhou, developed eight antibodies in a short period of time by synthesizing the normally human-produced immune cells.
The team expressed shock at their success, as the technology they used was not intended to be deployed against Omicron but for addressing another infectious disease, although Jinghe didn’t specify what other virus the researchers were investigating.
Bispecific antibodies are able to neutralize earlier strains of the virus, such as Delta, as well as tackling Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, limiting the ability of the virus to spread.
The team outlined their work and findings in a paper titled ‘Combating the Sars-CoV-2 Omicron variant with non-Omicron neutralizing antibodies’. The research has not yet been peer reviewed.
The Chinese scientists hope that the new approach to fighting the pandemic will help health officials “cope with shifting events by sticking to the basics.” With this method of producing a man-made antibody, the researchers suggest that “mass production will not be a problem.”
Lockdowns virtually useless in curbing Covid-19 deaths,
study claims
A meta-analysis suggested mandating social distancing was ineffective
during the first wave of the pandemic
©Adam Bradley / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Compulsory social distancing measures, touted to the public as necessary to fight back the spread of Covid-19, did not have any significant effect on mortality rates during the first wave of the disease, a new study said. Policymakers could have just trusted people to act rationally and responsibly and take precautions without any mandates.
The striking conclusion was made after a meta-analysis study of 24 scientific papers, which was described by a team of researchers led by Professor Steve H. Hanke, who co-directs the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise.
They wanted to see if there was empirical evidence that lockdowns – compulsory government policies on things like freedom of domestic and international movement, business operations or public gatherings – prevented deaths from Covid-19. The answer was no, according to the paper.
They wrote that “lockdowns in Europe and the United States only reduced Covid-19 mortality by 0.2% on average.” For the more restrictive ‘shelter-in-place-orders’ the same metric averaged 2.9%.
Studies of specific measures like school lockdowns or border closures were somewhat inconclusive, there was “no broad-based evidence” in favor. Forced closures of businesses may have been beneficial for mortality rates, probably because they forced bars and restaurants to shut down.
There was also some evidence that mask mandates had significant positive effects. But only two studies that qualified for the meta-analysis dealt with such measures, and one of them only looked into the effect of compulsory face cover for employees, so researchers were not certain about masks.
“Overall, we conclude that lockdowns are not an effective way of reducing mortality rates during a pandemic, at least not during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the researchers said.
The assessment is in line with what a team at the World Health Organization said in 2006 about the public response to the 1918 influenza pandemic as well as some other similar studies. A different meta-analysis study conducted in 2020 by Nadya Johanna of the University of Indonesia contrasted with the research, which Hanke and colleagues attributed to a different approach for selecting the underlying materials.
The researchers stressed that they didn’t try to explain why lockdowns wouldn’t work, but suggested several possible factors. The first one is that people react to dangerous situations regardless of government mandates, taking precautions when infection rates surge and ignoring rules when the rates go down.
Some non-pharmaceutical interventions are hard to mandate in the first place, like hand-washing and keeping a distance at supermarkets. And in some cases lockdowns may have unintended negative consequences. Banning people from relatively safe open public spaces and forcing them to spend all their time at home with family, who may be asymptomatic and infectious, is one example, the researchers said.
“In the early stages of a pandemic, before the arrival of vaccines and new treatments, a society can respond in two ways: mandated behavioral changes or voluntary behavioral changes,” the paper said. “Our study fails to demonstrate significant positive effects of mandated behavioral changes (lockdowns). This should draw our focus to the role of voluntary behavioral changes.”
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