Health/Sick Care
The company’s shares fell 3.5% in volatile premarket trading on Monday as Pfizer said it would stop developing its therapy lotiglipron.
Pfizer Inc said it is scrapping its once-a-day experimental obesity pill because of concerns about liver safety, but will continue developing its other obesity pill, the twice daily treatment danuglipron, as it races to rival the success of other weight loss treatments.
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Read MoreMerck’s best-selling asthma medicine, Singulair, has been linked for years to suicides and psychiatric problems, often in children. But lawsuits over the drug are stymied by one of Corporate America’s most effective liability shields: the doctrine of federal preemption.
By DAN LEVINE, ROBIN RESPAUT, KRISTINA COOKE, MIKE SPECTOR, and BENJAMIN LESSER Filed June 26, 2023, 10 a.m. GMT
Nicholas England, a healthy 22-year-old from Virginia, shot himself in the head in 2017, less than two weeks after he started taking an allergy medicine that had been linked for years to episodes of depression and suicidal thinking.
His parents soon started exploring a lawsuit against Merck, the developer of the blockbuster asthma and allergy drug, Singulair, along with the manufacturer of the generic version their son took. Nicholas had no history of mental-health problems, they said.
The Englands were shocked to learn from legal advisers that they had no case. Like countless other potential plaintiffs, they had run into one of Corporate America’s most effective liability shields: the legal doctrine of preemption, the principle that federal law supersedes state law.
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Read MoreSeveral billions of dollars left in a scheme to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to the world’s poorest could be diverted to prepare for other pandemics or to support vaccine manufacturing in Africa, the scheme’s partners said.
The COVAX initiative, run by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), has $2.6 billion left in its coffers as the emergency phase of the pandemic draws to a close, according to documents seen by Reuters and two sources close to the scheme.
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The initiative is set to wind up at the end of this year, although some of its work will continue. With demand for COVID-19 vaccines dwindling, the partners are now working out how best to use the remaining cash – a significant sum in global health – alongside the donors who originally pledged it.
Around $600 million was given as part of a “contingency” fund in case the pandemic escalated again. The remaining $2 billion has come back to COVAX after drugmakers agreed to refund deals agreed for vaccines at the height of the pandemic.
“This money was designed as an instrument of contingency, so we could respond to the twists and turns of the pandemic,” said Marie-Ange Saraka-Yao, Gavi’s head of resource mobilization. “We don’t want the money to be idle.”
Around $700 million is likely to be used for an ongoing COVID-19 vaccination programme in countries supported by Gavi, for 2024 and 2025. This option will be discussed by Gavi’s board this week. Another portion of the money will be used for booster shots this year and next.
Saraka-Yao said the donors, including rich countries like the United States and Germany as well as philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, had all been asked if they wanted the rest of the money back at a meeting in March. None did. The donors, and the WHO, were not immediately available for comment.
A CEPI spokesperson said that while no decision had been made on the funds, it was “prudent to remain prepared” both in case the COVID-19 situation changes, and for future pandemics.
“They [donors] want to keep the spirit of the political intent when the money was given… to help protect the rest of the world,” Saraka-Yao said.
One option is to invest in wider pandemic preparedness initiatives, Gavi said. Another idea that has gained traction is to use some of the money to boost vaccine manufacturing in Africa, Saraka-Yao said.
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Read MoreFormer National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) chief Dr. Anthony Fauci will move on from advising those in the highest levels of the U.S. government to training the next generation of doctors.
Georgetown University announced Monday that Fauci will join the school’s Department of Medicine as a “Distinguished University Professor,” the school’s highest professional honor. Beginning on July 1, the 82-year-old doctor will be a part of the Division of Infectious Diseases, which provides clinical care, conducts research, and trains future physicians in infectious diseases,” according to a Georgetown press release.
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Read MoreProfessional basketball player Óscar Cabrera Adames died last week at a health center in the Dominican Republic after an apparent heart attack, Fox News reported.
Sports commentator Héctor Gómez first broke the news on Instagram that the 28-year-old Dominican player, who plays in the Spanish professional league, had been undergoing a stress test when he died.
It is unclear, according to reports, whether the stress test — designed to examine heart functioning during physical activity — precipitated the heart attack.
Cabrera Adames previously was hospitalized after collapsing on the court during a December 2021 game. At the time, he blamed his collapse on COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis, posting on social media:
“I got a damn Myocarditis from taking a f—ing vaccine. (I got 2 doses of Pfizer) And I knew it! Many people warned me.”
Cabrera Adames wrote that he was required to get the vaccine in order to continue playing professionally.
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Read MoreThis is the last in a three-part series.
I LAID out the legal instruments and agendas that are being pursued by the WHO in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. As the co-founder and CEO of the UK Medical Freedom Alliance, who have been campaigning on issues relating to medical ethics, informed consent, bodily autonomy, and medical choice since October 2020, I will now explore the implications of the proposed WHO IHR Amendments, WHO CA+ (Pandemic Treaty) and One Health agenda from an ethical and moral perspective. I will highlight the catastrophic impact that these dystopian policies would have on the sacred doctor-patient relationship and the wider practice of medicine.
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Read MoreGlyphosate, the primary ingredient in Bayer and Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, has been a longstanding source of controversy and litigation, especially due to health and environmental concerns. The conglomerate Bayer and Monsanto, having merged in a $63 billion deal in 2018, are now once again in the limelight. The two have been fined $6.9 million for violating an agreement they made with the New York state government to cease making misleading claims about the safety of their glyphosate-based herbicides.
The Roundup controversy has a history spanning several decades. Monsanto introduced the herbicide Roundup in the mid-1970s and it quickly became the most widely used herbicide globally. Glyphosate, its active ingredient, kills weeds by inhibiting a critical plant enzyme.
However, the safety of glyphosate has been hotly debated, with studies linking it to a wide array of adverse effects on pollinators, laboratory animals, and humans. A groundbreaking study in March connected Roundup to liver and metabolic diseases in children, highlighting potential risks for human health.
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Read More5G and the IoT will add millions of new, ultra-high frequency cell towers and tens of thousands of low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites to our planet. This will essentially bathe the planet in electrosmog; a constant blanket of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) 24/7. No living thing on Earth will be free of it’s deadly radiation.
Stop 5G. Bee proactive. Bee heroic.
All life on Earth exists and thrives around the Schumann Resonance: 7.83 Hz, with mild fluctuations. Second, third and Forth Generation (2/3/4G) technologies have negative impacts on us because they change they physiologically change this inside our bodies, with particular impacts on our brain and heart; and with the rollout of 5G (a frequency increase of about 10,000X), will come a swift, immediate, and deadly change to our environment.
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Read MoreThe following is from The Vaccine Reaction.
On June 8, 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee (AMDAC) voted unanimously (21-0) in favor of AstraZeneca and Sanofi’s new nirsevimab (Beyfortus) monoclonal antibody drug believed to provide protection for infants from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease and other lower respiratory tract infections during their first year of life.
The path to pharmaceutical RSV protection spans several decades, with clinical trials for an RSV vaccine ending abruptly in the 1960s after the shot unexpectedly sickened and hospitalized 80 percent of children in the trial.
The inactivated virus used in the shot exacerbated the disease once trial participants caught RSV naturally, leading to two children’s deaths and researchers going back to the drawing board.
Today, more than 60 years later, 12 infants have died during clinical trials of the new nirsevimab, two from “unknown causes” thought to be linked to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
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Read More‘Confidential’ documents released by BioNTech to the European Medicines Agency reveal tens of thousands of serious adverse events and thousands of deaths among people who received the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine during a time period when the vaccine makers insisted they saw no “safety signals.”
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