Health News at Your Fingertips

Last November, the WEAR-TV news station in northern Florida aired a segment on Dr Benjamin Marble, a local doctor who created a free telehealth website offering consultations for Covid-19. Marble, the reporter said, had made it so “patients don’t have to pay a cent” for coronavirus treatment and believed his site could replace Obamacare.

To the average viewer, the segment on the ABC affiliate, which is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, was a local news report touting a local service. What the report didn’t mention, however, is that Marble is a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, a rightwing political group that gained notoriety in summer 2020 after some of its members appeared in a viral video touting unproven Covid-19 treatments as miracle cures.

AFD’s founder, Dr Simone Gold, has headlined anti-vaccine rallies and is facing charges for storming the Capitol during the 6 January riot. Also visible in a photo included in the clip was Dr Stella Immanuel, an AFD member who has claimed masks don’t help curb the spread of Covid-19 and repeatedly said some real world illnesses were caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches. Marble’s telehealth page itself links to anti-vaccine information and websites promoting unproven Covid-19 treatments such as the anti-parasite drug ivermectin.

Since the start of the pandemic, local newspapers, broadcast television and radio stations across the United States have been among the most popular sources for information about Covid-19. Many anti-vaccine activists as well as doctors and groups promoting unproven Covid-19 treatments have turned to those same channels to spread their message.

Read more of Nick Robins-Early’s report here: How anti-vaxxers and ivermectin advocates have co-opted local news in the US

By the way, we’ve got two other live blogs running this morning. Andrew Sparrow has our UK politics live blog which I would expect to see dominated by the Tory sleaze row as they try and avoid Owen Paterson being suspended from parliament for thirty days by re-writing the way that the cross-party Commons standards committee works. There will also be PMQs. You can find that here:

Also blogging live at the moment is Alan Evans, who is covering Cop26 in Glasgow for us. You can follow the day’s progress in Scotland with him here.

England’s deputy chief medical officer Prof Jonathan Van-Tam had some strong words appearing on the BBC this morning, saying that “Too many people believe that this pandemic is now over. I personally feel there are some hard months to come in the winter and it is not over.”

Reuters quotes him warning the UK public that “the caution that people take or don’t take in terms of interacting with each other: that is going to be a big determinant in what happens between now and the darkest months of the winter.”

In other comments to the media this morning, he said the flu vaccine has “never been more important”.

PA Media quotes him saying: “Don’t forget flu. We have very few restrictions in society at the moment – this means all the other respiratory winter viruses will come back.

“We didn’t have any flu to speak of last winter because of the lockdowns and so forth, and that means we have a population who are more susceptible, less immune to flu at the moment.

“So, for the people who are at high risk who need a flu jab in the winter, it could never have been more important than right now that you come forward to get it.”

A member of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has said it is “far too early” to be following the lead of the US by vaccinating children aged 11 and under against coronavirus – but added that there may be a case for some youngsters receiving a jab.

Jeremy Brown, professor of respiratory medicine at University College London Hospitals, said it is not the right time as the British regulatory bodies have not yet looked at the data from the US.

But he added that if the vaccines are approved for children aged 11 and under by regulators, they could be used for those who have underlying conditions.

PA Media quotes Prof Brown told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think there’s a case for using a vaccine on those children that have underlying diseases that make them more vulnerable to Covid, having severe side-effects from the Covid infection. That’s possible.”

Hong Kong will roll out booster doses of Covid-19 vaccines from next week, health secretary Sophia Chan said today. “The elderly are the most fragile group and we have a responsibility to protect their health,” Chan said.

The vaccination campaign in the global financial hub has lagged many other developed economies, with about 65% of the eligible population fully vaccinated with shots from either China’s Sinovac, or Germany’s BioNTech.

Reuters report that about 85% of those older than 80 in the Chinese-ruled city of 7.5 million have not been vaccinated. The elderly will get priority for the booster shots, along with health workers, cross-border truck drivers and others in categories deemed to be at higher risk of getting the disease.

About 1.86 million people are eligible for the booster, which they can start booking from 5 November, to receive it as soon as 11 November.

Russia today has confirmed 40,443 new Covid-19 infections and a new official pandemic record of 1,189 daily deaths. The country is in a week long enforced shutdown in order to try to stem the rising tide of infections.

South Korea has said it would ramp up Covid-19 testing at schools after a sharp rise of infections among children, weeks ahead of a plan to fully reopen schools nationwide.

The surge comes as new social distancing rules aimed at a phased return to normal came into effect on Monday as a part of the country’s plan to gradually move toward living with Covid-19.

South Korea has fully vaccinated nearly 90% of its adult population but only began inoculating children aged between 12 and 17 in recent weeks, administering just 0.6% of the age group with both doses so far.

“There is a growing concern as the frequency of new cluster outbreaks has been increasing, centred on educational facilities such as private tuition centres and schools,” interior and safety minister Jeon Hae-cheol said, Reuters reports.

The country recorded 2,667 new cases for Tuesday, an increase of more than 1,000 from the day earlier. Nearly a quarter of the new cases were found in teenagers, officials said.

“The teenagers spend a lot of time in communal living such as schools and tuition centres and they are also active in social activities,” Son Young-rae, a senior health ministry official, told a briefing.

“We believe that the risk of infection will inevitably rise and the confirmed cases will continue to surge stemming from these teenagers.”

England’s deputy chief medical officer, Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, has said he is worried that increasing numbers of deaths show “the infection is now starting to penetrate into older age groups”.

“Deaths are increasing – there might be some artefacts in the very latest figure – but essentially deaths are increasing,” PA Media quotes him telling BBC Breakfast and BBC Radio 5 Live.

“If you then look at hospital admissions, those have plateaued in the last four days. And if you look at the total number of patients in hospital with Covid, those have gone down in the last two or three days, but only a small bit.

“So what that tells me is that we have to just wait and see a bit longer – this could be a pause before things go up, it could be the very first signs that things are beginning to stabilise but at a high rate.

“On cases, they are now starting to fall, but that mainly reflects the fact that this big wave we’ve had in teenagers is now starting to slip away. But my worry is that the deaths are increasing and that shows that the infection is now starting to penetrate into those older age groups.

Faced with rising case numbers, the Ukrainian government has enacted a series of anti-Covid measures. Teachers, government employees and other workers have been told to get fully vaccinated by 8 November or face having their salary payments suspended. In addition, proof of vaccination or a negative test is now required to board planes, trains and long-distance buses. That has led to protests in the street today in the capital Kyiv.

Reuters reports that Ukraine lagged behind other European countries in obtaining coronavirus vaccines earlier this year and is now struggling to persuade a sceptical public to take them.

“Such rallies of people that we see today, with calls not to get vaccinated, in my opinion, make a mockery of our doctors and families, who, unfortunately, have lost their relatives due to the coronavirus,” Ukrainian health minister Viktor Lyashko told a televised news conference.

“Trust me, this anti-vaccination spirit quickly disappears in intensive care units, and fake certificates don’t work,” he said.

A health expert in Scotland has described the scenes of delegates queuing at the Cop26 conference in Glasgow as “really concerning” during a pandemic.

Prof Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said seeing pictures of hundreds of people in close proximity has left her anxious knowing how “fragile” the situation has been.

PA Media reports that, asked about the queues, Prof Sridhar told BBC Good Morning Scotland: “It is really concerning, this week I have been quite anxious seeing all that and knowing how fragile the situation has been.

“We’ve controlled the situation for quite a long time. Can we control it even after this big gathering? That’s the question. Will it lead to a spike, will it lead to a wave, will actually the mitigation measures have been enough?

“I know they thought a lot about making sure people were fully vaccinated, people were testing, it’s a really tricky one because obviously this is the worst timing ever during a pandemic, but at the same time I listened to those people who work in climate and they are saying now is the time, if not now we have an existential threat to humanity.”

Yesterday, Scotland’s health secretary, Humza Yousaf, said “scale and worldwide draw” of the summit “poses a risk of spread of Covid-19 both within delegates and to or from the local population of Scotland and the UK”.