Health News at Your Fingertips

Authorities in northern Germany have appealed to thousands of people to get another shot of Covid vaccine after a police investigation found that a Red Cross nurse may have injected them with a saline solution.

The nurse is suspected of injecting salt solution into people’s arms instead of genuine doses at a vaccination centre in Friesland – a rural district near the North Sea coast – in the early spring, Reuters reports. Local authorities have issued a call to about 8,600 residents who may have been affected.

While saline solution is harmless, most people who got vaccinated in Germany in March and April when the suspected switch took place are elderly and at high risk of catching Covid.

The motive of the nurse, who was not named, was not clear but she had aired sceptical views about vaccines in social media posts, police investigators said.

Spain’s medicines agency has authorised the first round of clinical trials for the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Spanish company Hipra, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said.

The early stage clinical trial will recruit dozens of participants from Spanish hospitals to test the drug’s safety and tolerability, as well as its immunogenicity and efficacy, the medicines agency said.

Hipra, which has manufacturing bases in Spain and Brazil, said it could produce up to 400m doses in 2022 and 1.2bn in 2023, Reuters reports.

“Spain’s medicines and health products agency has just authorised clinical tests of the Spanish Covid vaccine on humans,” Sánchez said in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.

Hipra, a pharmaceutical lab that mainly researches and manufactures veterinary vaccines, has been working on two Covid shots. One is based on the same RNA messenger technology used in Pfizer and Moderna’s shots, while the second, which has just received approval for trial, uses a recombinant protein like US-based drugmaker Novavax.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has said that a clinical trial in 52 countries would study three anti-inflammatory drugs as potential treatments for Covid-19 patients.

“These therapies – artesunate, imatinib and infliximab – were selected by an independent expert panel for their potential in reducing the risk of death in hospitalised Covid-19 patients,” it said in a statement on the Solidarity Plus trial.

Artesunate is already used for severe malaria, imatinib for certain cancers, and infliximab for diseases of the immune system such as Crohn’s Disease and rheumatoid arthritis, Reuters reports.

The original Solidarity trial last year found that all four treatments evaluated – remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, lopinavir/ritonavir and interferon – had little or no effect in helping Covid patients. So far, the WHO has only deemed corticosteroids to be effective against severe and critical Covid-19.

In the trial, artesunate will be administered intravenously for seven days, using the standard dose recommended for the treatment of severe malaria.

Imatinib, produced by Novartis, is used to treat certain cancers. In the trial, it will be administered orally, once daily, for 14 days. Infliximab, produced by Johnson and Johnson, is used to treat diseases of the immune system. In the trial, it will be administered intravenously as a single dose, Reuters said.

A video of Republican senator Rand Paul disputing the effectiveness of wearing masks has been removed from YouTube, which suspended him for a week for violating its policy of Covid misinformation.

Its policy is to ban videos that “claim that masks do not play a role in preventing the contraction or transmission of Covid-19.” It is based on the guidance of the World Health Organization – which u-turned last year after initially refraining from recommending people wear face masks in public.

The New York Times reports that Paul said in the video: “Most of the masks you get over the counter don’t work. They don’t prevent infection … Trying to shape human behaviour isn’t the same as following the actual science, which tells us that cloth masks don’t work.”

But public health experts are now almost unanimous in the recommendation of masks, the NYT reports.

Paul said of his suspension: “I think this kind of censorship is very dangerous, incredibly anti-free speech and truly anti-progress of science, which involves skepticism and argumentation to arrive at the truth.”

It comes after Twitter suspended Republican congresswoman Marjorie Green after she tweeted US authorities should not give the coronavirus vaccines full approval and that the vaccines were “failing.” She tweeted: “There are too many reports of infection and spread of Covid-19 among vaccinated people.”

The controversial Congresswoman has previously criticised the “borderline monopolistic stranglehold” of a few big tech companies over American political discourse, the NYT reports.

In related news, the New York Times reports on a survey that suggests parents of American school-aged children are more supportive of school mask requirements than mandatory vaccines

The ongoing Kaiser Family Foundation, based on a representative sample of 1,259 parents, found that nearly two-thirds would like schools to insist on masks for students, teachers and staff members for the unvaccinated.

It also found that one in five parents of children ages 12 to 17 said their child would “definitely not” get vaccinated, with 88% of parents whose children were not vaccinated saying they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned that not enough is known about the long-term effects of Covid-19 vaccines in children.

“Despite controversy around the country about masks in schools, most parents want their school to require masks of unvaccinated students and staff,” Drew Altman, the foundation’s chief executive, said, as quoted by the NYT. “At the same time, most parents don’t want their schools to require their kids get a Covid-19 vaccine despite their effectiveness in combating Covid-19.”

School districts in Florida and Texas are bucking their Republican governors’ bans on requiring masks for children and teachers.

The Broward county school board in Florida has become the latest major district to flout an order by Republican governor Ron DeSantis outlawing mask requirements in that state, Reuters reports.

It prompted the administration of Democratic US president Joe Biden to say it was considering supporting the school districts financially if DeSantis retaliates against them by withholding funds from officials’ salaries.

The Dallas Independent School District has also said that it would require masks, despite an order banning such mandates from Republican governor Greg Abbott. Some staff had threatened to quit if masks were not mandated to protect children, teachers and others, and school district officials said they did not believe the governor’s order should be applied to them. Schools in Austin also plan to require masks.

In San Antonio, officials also ordered masks to be worn in public schools, after a judge granted a temporary injunction to allow the mandate in a blow to Abbott.

In Florida, where lawsuits have also been filed challenging the anti-mask order, DeSantis has threatened to withhold salaries from school district officials who flout his ban. “It’s about parental choice, not government mandate, and I think ultimately, parents will be able to exercise the choices that they deem appropriate for their kids,” he said.

In Arkansas, Republican governor Asa Hutchison said he regrets supporting a ban on mask mandates in his state.

The UK is sending low and middle-income countries who are struggling to access vaccines “to the back of the queue” by ordering millions of “overpriced” booster jabs from Pfizer.

Vaccine equity campaigners from Global Justice Now have criticised the pharmaceutical giant for “profiteering” during the pandemic as the company reportedly increases Covid-19 vaccine prices for the NHS by a fifth from £18 to £22 a dose.

The UK will pay £1bn for 35m doses of Pfizer’s vaccine for booster jabs next year following the “jacking up” of the prices which the group criticised as “shamefully unsurprising” – with the price of Covid jabs already comparatively high with other vaccines.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said:

Not content with profiting £10bn from their vaccine this year, it’s shamefully unsurprising that Pfizer is jacking up its prices for the NHS in the middle of a pandemic. But billions of people remain unvaccinated in countries with health systems that can ill-afford this kind of profiteering. Once again, low and middle-income countries will be sent to the back of the queue while the UK splashes out on overpriced booster jabs.

Yesterday, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group that developed the AstraZeneca jab, told MPs that for people in Britain to be getting three doses, while people in many parts of the world had not had one, would highlight “a moral failure”.

This morning, Prof Adam Finn, who sits on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said it was still unclear whether all over-50s should be given a third shot. He said a Covid booster jab would probably be required to protect a small number of the most vulnerable people, but a mass rollout may not be needed.

Meanwhile, Danny Altmann, a professor of immunology at Imperial College London, said future variants could mean vaccine immunity may never overcome Covid completely.

Here’s the full story on the Thai government being forced by a court injunction to rescind an order banning news that “causes public fear”, as it faces growing protests over its handling of the Covid pandemic, from my colleagues Rebecca Ratcliffe and Navaon Siradapuvadol.