Month: May 2021

A professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine advised Americans recently to "ignore" guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention due to the public health agency's puzzling refusal to recognize natural immunity from previous infection. What are the details? Dr. Marty Makary, who also serves as a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, suggested during a Tuesday appearance on "The Vince Coglianese Show" that 150 million Americans, or "half the country," likely already have natural immunity to COVID-19 due to having been infected with the virus and then recovering. Yet despite that staggering figure, Makary lamented the fact that the CDC, in concert with Biden administration officials, have neglected to recognize the reality of the situation...

A healthcare worker administers a dose of a Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to a child at a pediatrician's office in Bingham Farms, Michigan, U.S., on Wednesday, May 19, 2021. Emily Elconin | Bloomberg | Getty Images A heart inflammation condition in adolescents and young adults who received Covid-19 vaccines appears to be very rare and it remains unclear if the issue is actually related to the shots, the Food and Drug Administration's top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, said Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's vaccine safety group said last week it was looking into a condition called myocarditis, which is an inflammation of the heart muscle, in a "relatively few" people who received Covid vaccinations. Myocarditis can affect one'...

Jayant Malhotra says he won’t ever forget the sight of the bodies. They arrived in a relentless, urgent flow for cremation—a service he and his father offer in New Delhi free-of-charge for victims of Covid-19. Exhausted workmen prepared row upon row of funeral pyres, struggling to keep pace with the scale of death as the solemn Hindu rite became a symbol of a besieged nation’s shared grief. “We were cremating 20 bodies by noon. Before we could finish those, there were 10 more. By afternoon, there were 10 more,” said Mr. Malhotra, who is 23 years old, describing several weeks in April and May in the national capital. “We’ve seen such horrors.” With each body came a tale of a life—and a death. One man died in a hospital parking lot where he had spent the nig...

Most people who recover from COVID-19 could have immunity that lasts at least a year or even longer — and may not need a booster shot after being vaccinated, as pair of new studies suggest. The first study, published Monday in the journal Nature, found most people who were infected with the virus about a year earlier had immunological memory of the disease in their bone marrow, suggesting they’re still able to produce antibodies. And another report, which was published on the pre-print server BioRxic, found that these cells — called “memory B” — were robust for at least 12 months after infection. Memory B cells rapidly reproduce and generate antibodies upon encountering the virus again. Michel Nussenzweig, a researcher at Rockefeller University in N...