Vaccination against COVID-19 did not affect fertility outcomes in patients undergoing in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a new study has found. The findings, which were published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, add to the growing body of evidence providing reassurance that COVID-19 vaccination does not affect fertility.
Investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (Icahn Mount Sinai), New York City, and Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York (RMA of New York) compared rates of fertilization, pregnancy, and early miscarriage in IVF patients who had received two doses of vaccines manufactured by Pfizer or Moderna with the same outcomes in nonvaccinated patients.
"This is one of the largest studies to review fertility and IVF cycle outcomes in patients who received COVID-19 vaccinations. The study found no significant differences in response to ovarian stimulation, egg quality, embryo development, or pregnancy outcomes between the vaccinated compared to unvaccinated patients." said Devora A. Aharon, MD, first author of the study. Dr. Aharon is a fellow in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Icahn Mount Sinai and RMA of New York. "Our findings that vaccination had no impact on these outcomes should be reassuring to those who are trying to conceive or are in early pregnancy."
https://medicalxpres...ion-affect.html
INDIANAPOLIS -- The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted both the necessity and the difficulty of using clinical data to inform state and national public health policymaking. In a new study, Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University researchers demonstrate that machine learning models trained using clinical data from a statewide health information exchange can predict, on a patient level, the likelihood of hospitalization of individuals with the virus.
“It has been quite challenging to bring the bread-and-butter data generated by healthcare systems together with public health decision-making – entities which have long been separate and distinct,” said study senior author Shaun Grannis, M.D., M.S., Regenstrief Institute vice president for data and analytics and professor of family medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine. “Our work shows how you can build and employ AI (artificial intelligence) models to securely utilize the clinical information in a health information exchange to support public health needs such as predicting hospital utilization within one week and within six weeks of onset of COVID infection.
“When new circumstances requiring rapid response arise, such as emergence of omicron or other new variants, once there are sufficient cases to train models, one can confidently access and plug clinical data into these readily available models to make accurate public health predictions and provide valuable insights into patient-level need for healthcare resource utilization,” said Dr. Grannis.
https://www.eurekale...releases/941269
To explore the inner workings of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, researchers from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a novel technique.
The team—including computational scientists Debsindhu Bhowmik, Serena Chen and John Gounley—ran molecular dynamics simulations of the novel virus that caused the COVID-19 disease pandemic on ORNL's Summit supercomputer, an IBM AC922 system. The researchers then analyzed the output with a customized deep learning approach to produce a complete molecular picture of the "spike" protein on the virus's surface.
This method enabled them to pinpoint specific flexible regions, which they studied in extreme detail to reveal promising therapeutic targets. Aiming for these targets could create more reliable treatment avenues that interrupt key structural transitions in the virus's lifecycle while also supporting the body's natural immune response.
"A better understanding of the spike protein could complement current COVID-19 vaccines by informing new treatments and providing insights into potential drug design," Bhowmik said.
Using the Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics, or NAMD, code on Summit, the nation's most powerful supercomputer, the researchers simulated the spike proteins' molecular structures for SARS-CoV-2 and three other human coronaviruses: SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and HCoV-HKU1. After completing this unique and comprehensive comparison of four different spike proteins, they compared the components and behavior of SARS-CoV-2 with thousands of sample structures from the other viruses using a deep learning architecture called a convolutional variational autoencoder, or CVAE.
https://medicalxpres...inhibiting.html
More than 800 deaths may have been avoided due to air quality improvements during the first lockdown phase in Europe
Government actions linked to road travel had the greatest impact on lowering NO2 concentrations and reducing deaths
https://www.eurekale...releases/941141
National identity predicts support for public health measures during coronavirus pandemic
Analysis of 67 countries shows those who identify more strongly with their nation report greater engagement with public health behaviors and support for public health policies
https://www.eurekale...releases/940946
Knesset members have officially banned participants addressing parliamentary committees from sharing screens via the teleconferencing app Zoom after an anti-vaccination activist showed **rnographic photos in a meeting, according to Israeli media reports.
The activist was speaking to the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee on Sunday when he shared the **rnographic photos. The committee’s chairman, Gilad Kariv, stopped the Zoom broadcast immediately.
The photos were not shown on the committee's broadcast online and on television, a spokesperson for the committee said.
https://english.alar...t-covid-meeting
According to Norwegian researchers, the “very surprising” findings from the same time the disease was officially discovered in China “change the history of the corona pandemic both in Norway and in the entire world”.
Researchers at Akershus University Hospital (Ahus) have found antibodies against COVID-19 dating back to December 2019, a month before the first case was detected in Europe.
The first case in Europe was detected on 27 January 2020. Officially, the virus didn't spread to Norway until 24 February of the same year. Ahus’s discovery thus stems from the same period as the first proven case was found in China.
The researchers themselves described the discovery as “very surprising”.
“The discovery changes the story of the corona epidemic”, Ahus project manager Anne Eskild said in a statement.
The researchers searched for antibodies in anonymously stored blood samples, in accordance with the Infection Control Act. The samples were taken from pregnant women in the first trimester and as part of maternity care and stored to monitor potential infectious diseases.
https://sputniknews....1092520273.html
Pfizer, BioNTech start clinical trial of Omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccine
http://www.ecns.cn/n...fa9717723.shtml
Biden admin withdraws Covid vaccination mandate for businesses
https://www.rawstory...for-businesses/
Howard Stern is urging Meat Loaf’s family to advocate for people to be vaccinated against Covid-19 following the singer’s death on Jan. 20, as Variety reports.
https://www.rollings...accine-1290644/
Florida Shuts Down Monoclonal Antibody Site After FDA Says Treatment is Useless Against Omicron
https://sputniknews....1092516170.html
At up to $8,000/week, America's travel nurses keep COVID-slammed hospitals afloat
https://www.rawstory...spitals-afloat/
The panoply of economic support measures prompted by the pandemic have been the subject of controversy from the moment they were enacted, almost all of it to do with whether the government was being too generous to working families. There was one program that largely escaped this hand-wringing and criticism, though: the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), meant to prop businesses up through the restrictions and disruptions of the pandemic via forgivable federal loans.
It’s interesting that it has, because a recent analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has found the program was everything Washington lawmakers and officials have cited to justify dragging their feet on measures like canceling student debt or stimulus checks: it was un-targeted, inefficient, and regressive, distributing money overwhelmingly to upper-income earners.
While ostensibly meant to subsidize workers’ incomes, the majority of the PPP money didn’t go to paychecks, with between 66 and 77 percent flowing to business owners and stakeholders like creditors and suppliers, according to the report, produced by ten economists from the Federal Reserve, MIT, and other entities. The result is that a little less than three-quarters of the $510 billion given out via the program in 2020, or $365.9 billion, went to the top income quintile of households, with the bottom quintile receiving only $13.2 billion.
Unlike similar programs in other countries, which paid wage subsidies out on a sliding scale proportional to the declines in businesses’ revenues or as a fraction of their wage bill, the US government took an un-targeted “fire hose approach,” the report states, so that “virtually the entire small business sector was doused with money.” Because business ownership and shareholding tends to be concentrated among upper-income earners, the federal dollars consequently flowed to those at the top.
https://jacobinmag.c...ing-inequality/