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As virus data grows, the J.&J. vaccine holds its own.

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As virus data grows, the J.&J. vaccine holds its own.

Roughly 17 million Individuals obtained the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine, solely to be instructed later that it was the least protecting of the choices out there in the USA. However new knowledge counsel that the vaccine is now stopping infections, hospitalizations and deaths not less than in addition to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines.

The explanations aren’t clear, and never all consultants are satisfied that the vaccine has vindicated itself. However the accumulating knowledge nonetheless supply appreciable reassurance to recipients of the vaccine and, if confirmed, have broad implications for its deployment in components of the world.

In Africa, for instance, distribution of a single-dose vaccine that may be refrigerated for months is by far probably the most sensible possibility.

Johnson & Johnson has not less than quickly shut down the one plant making usable batches of the vaccine. However the South Africa-based Aspen Pharmacare is gearing as much as provide giant portions to the remainder of the continent. Solely about 13 p.c of Africans are absolutely vaccinated, and solely about 1 p.c have obtained a booster dose.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was billed as a lovely possibility for communities with restricted entry to well being care, together with some inside the USA, due to its ease of supply and delicate negative effects. But it surely has had a bumpy journey.

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The shot appeared to provide a weaker preliminary immune response, and extra individuals who bought the single-dose vaccine had breakthrough infections, in contrast with those that bought two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, the mRNA vaccines.

In April, federal well being officers in the USA and in South Africa paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine’s distribution as they examined stories of a uncommon blood-clotting dysfunction in ladies. Although each international locations resumed the rollouts quickly after, the vaccine’s repute by no means absolutely recovered.

However the notion that the vaccine is inferior has grown outdated, some consultants mentioned.

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Susan F. Wood, Who Quit F.D.A. Over Contraception Pill Delay, Dies at 66

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Susan F. Wood, Who Quit F.D.A. Over Contraception Pill Delay, Dies at 66

Susan F. Wood, a women’s health expert who resigned in protest from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, accusing the agency of knuckling under to politics by not approving over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill known as Plan B, died on Jan. 17 at her home in London. She was 66.

The cause was the brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme, said Richard Payne, her husband.

Dr. Wood was assistant commissioner for women’s health at the F.D.A. during the presidency of George W. Bush when Plan B, a form of emergency contraception, became a flashpoint in the abortion wars.

An F.D.A. advisory panel voted 28-0 in 2003 that the pill was safe for nonprescription use. But senior agency officials disregarded precedent and refused to approve over-the-counter sales.

Plan B contains high levels of progestin, a hormone found in ordinary birth control pills, and agency scientists considered it to be a contraceptive. But abortion opponents argued that its use was tantamount to ending pregnancies. They further warned that ready access would lead to promiscuous behavior by teenagers, though no data supported that claim.

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Dr. Wood and others believed that having emergency contraception available without a prescription would mean fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions.

In August 2005, the F.D.A. commissioner, Lester M. Crawford, announced that the agency could not reach a decision on whether to authorize over-the-counter use of Plan B and did not expect to reach one soon.

Dr. Wood blamed politics for the agency’s foot-dragging and resigned from a job she had held for five years. In an email to the staff, she wrote that she could no longer remain “when scientific and clinical evidence, fully evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staff here, has been overruled.”

A report later that year by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, found that top agency officials had rejected over-the-counter sales even before the scientific review of Plan B was complete. Officials disputed the findings.

Dr. Wood addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006 and received a standing ovation. She criticized the F.D.A. for ignoring science because “social conservatives have extreme undue influence.”

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Susan Franklin Wood was born on Nov. 5, 1958, in Jacksonville, Fla., one of four children of Dr. Jonathan Wood, a surgeon, and Betty (Dorscheid) Wood.

She graduated from the Episcopal School of Jacksonville in 1976 and Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) in 1980. After earning a Ph.D. in biology from Boston University in 1989, she shifted her focus to health policy.

In 1990, she received a fellowship as a science adviser to the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues, a bipartisan group. Over five years on Capitol Hill, she helped push legislation to increase the representation of women in clinical trials and to expand research into breast cancer, infertility and contraception.

In 1995 she became policy director in the Office on Women’s Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. She joined the F.D.A. in 2000 to lead the women’s health department.

Objections to approving Plan B for over-the-counter sales zeroed in on whether it should be available to younger teenagers. The manufacturer, Barr Laboratories, proposed restricting sales to people 16 and up.

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A senior F.D.A. official told Dr. Wood that the drug was on track to win nonprescription approval for those 17 and older, Dr. Wood recalled in an oral history that she recorded for the agency in 2019.

“I heard that with my own little ears,” she said. “And everyone was waiting for the decision to come out, silently.”

“But,” she added, “the decision never came out.”

On a Friday afternoon, Dr. Crawford announced that an age restriction for over-the-counter sales would be hard for pharmacies to manage. The issue, he said, needed more study. In the meantime, nonprescription use was not approved for anyone.

Dr. Wood quit the next Tuesday. She expected her decision to go mostly unnoticed. Instead, the news media instantly reported on it.

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“I ended up spending the next eight months really just traveling and speaking about this,” she said. “It affected the perception of whether or not you could trust government at the time.”

In 2006, Dr. Wood joined the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University as a research professor. She became a full professor in 2017 and directed the Jacobs Institute of Women’s Health there. She and her husband moved to the Isle of Mull in Scotland in 2017, with a second residence in London; she continued to teach remotely until she retired in 2022.

Besides her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Bettie Wood Payne.

The contretemps over Plan B faded, overshadowed by more contentious episodes of abortion politics. Plan B finally won over-the-counter approval in 2013, though some states allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense it.

In 2019, Dr. Wood said fears that easy access to a morning-after pill would be a “dangerous, radical, crazy” thing proved to be overblown.

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“Once it’s over the counter, it’s no big deal,” she said. “And, sure enough, that’s what happened. It’s no big deal.”

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Cows Have Been Infected With a Second Form of Bird Flu

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Cows Have Been Infected With a Second Form of Bird Flu

Dairy cows in Nevada have been infected with a new form of bird flu that is distinct from the version that has been spreading through herds over the last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced on Wednesday.

The finding indicates that the virus, known as H5N1, has spilled from birds into cows at least twice — leading to these two sets of infections — and that it could continue to do so. It also suggests that the virus may pose a persistent risk to cows and to the people who work closely with them.

Before last year, scientists did not know that cows were susceptible to this type of influenza.

“This is not what anyone wanted to see,” said Louise Moncla, an evolutionary biologist who studies avian influenza at the University of Pennsylvania. “We need to now consider the possibility that cows are more broadly susceptible to these viruses than we initially thought.”

The news was announced in a news release from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture. Federal agencies have not held a news briefing on bird flu since President Trump took office.

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The virus that has been spreading through the nation’s dairies is a version of H5N1 known as B3.13, which has infected more than 950 herds in 16 states. Scientists believe that it initially jumped to cows from birds about a year ago, somewhere in the Texas panhandle. That transition took scientists by surprise, and this new one even more so.

“I was kind of under the belief that the bird-to-cow movement was a pretty rare event,” said Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The fact that it has happened again is “a little bit of a ‘wow’ to me,” he added.

The cows in Nevada were infected with a version of the virus known as D1.1, which has been spreading in wild birds and poultry. It was initially detected in milk collected from a silo as part of a national milk testing strategy announced by the U.S.D.A. late last year.

The D1.1 form of H5N1 has also shown itself to be dangerous to people. Of the 67 Americans known to have become ill with H5N1 so far, the only one who died was infected with this version. That person, a Louisiana resident older than 65, had cared for sick and dying birds and died in early January.

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In November, a 13-year-old Canadian girl also became infected with the D1.1 virus, but it is unclear where she might have acquired it. Her only risk factor was obesity, but she, too, became seriously ill and was placed on life support because of organ failure. She eventually recovered.

Avian influenza is so called because it is best adapted to infecting birds. But in both these individuals, the virus gained mutations during the course of infection that might allow it to better infect people.

“It is possible that the virus is more permissive for human adaptive mutations,” said Scott Hensley, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reassuringly, the virus did not seem to spread from either person to anyone else. Still, its evolution indicated that it was capable of gaining the ability to efficiently spread among people.

So far, at least, the spread of D1.1 to cows “doesn’t change the average person’s life,” Dr. Moncla said. But it poses risks for dairy workers and the dairy industry, experts said. It also suggests the possibility that cows already infected once with B.3.13 could become ill a second time with D1.1, Dr. Webby said.

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“It’s no longer just one virus,” he said. “This, to me, suggests that it’s going to be a lingering problem.”

Since January 2022, when H5N1 was detected in wild aquatic birds in the United States, the virus has affected more than 153 million commercial, backyard and wild birds, resulting in record prices on eggs.

It has also struck dozens of mammalian species, including cats both wild and domesticated, raccoons, bears and sea lions.

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Deadly version of H5N1 bird flu spills over into Nevada dairy cattle

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Deadly version of H5N1 bird flu spills over into Nevada dairy cattle

A version of the H5N1 bird flu virus that killed a person in Louisiana and severely sickened a teenager in Canada has now been detected in dairy herds in Nevada. The version, known as D1.1, is circulating in wild birds around the nation — causing massive die-offs in places such as Chicago, upstate New York and Ohio.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service confirmed the finding Wednesday.

It’s different from the version circulating in dairy cows, which has caused only relatively mild illness in humans, although it has killed scores of domestic and wild cats. Both versions belong to the H5N1 virus family — each with slightly different histories and genetic structures.

Finding D1.1 in dairy cows caught investigators off-guard, but it is just the latest surprise as the H5N1 bird flu continues to flummox researchers and public health officials. It’s a stark reminder that this virus does not behave like a “typical” flu virus.

“I can’t overemphasize what a big deal it is,” said John Korslund, a former USDA scientist, in an email. “This is truly … unfolding into a nightmare scenario. We have no idea how widespread this version of the virus already is in cattle herds. Every time poultry flocks break (with virus), we’ll need to investigate cattle contacts (which are many) as well as wild bird and other poultry contacts.”

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Richard Webby, an influenza researcher in the department of infectious diseases at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., said that while he thinks the findings are unlikely to change the risk outlook for the general population, it will affect the dairy industry.

Anja Raudabaugh, CEO of Western United Dairies — a California dairy trade group — said the discovery was “extraordinary” and should exacerbate industry concern about the virus, which she described as already being “very high.” She hopes it will compel federal officials to work on a bovine vaccine “ASAP” to stop or slow the spread of the disease between cows.

“My farmers do not want to go through another summer with this virus,” she said.

Most researchers believed there was a singular contact event between a bird infected with H5N1 B3.13 and a dairy cow in the Texas Panhandle in late 2023. That interaction led to an outbreak that has now affected more than 950 herds across 16 states and sickened 67 people, including 40 dairy workers.

But this new finding suggests such an occurrence was not a one-off — and that we may see more such spillover events from wild birds into cattle.

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“I think many of us, including myself, thought that the first introduction was sort of a fluke,” said Seema Lakdawala, a microbiologist at Emory University in Atlanta. But, she added, the discovery of D1.1 in dairy cows “clearly means that other bird viruses can get into cows.”

The virus was discovered as a result of the USDA’s National Milk Testing Program, which requires testing of milk in 38 states, including Nevada, where the herds infected with the D1.1 version were found.

Researchers are still trying to pin down exactly how the cows in Nevada became infected. One theory has to do with nonnative European starlings, which state officials described in a news release about the infected cattle as “a nuisance population” that spreads disease and contaminates food and water sources for animals, putting them at risk of bird flu. That said, Tanya Espinosa, a USDA spokeswoman, said the agency had not found H5N1 in any starling in Nevada.

In any case, as these viruses circulate in and jump back and forth between birds and cows, they can pick up new traits, potentially allowing the viruses to spread more easily and make the animals they infect sicker.

Korslund said the discovery raises several questions that epidemiologists and health officials will need to address: How will it affect dairy workers? Dairy cows and feedlot cows? How about other livestock, such as swine, sheep, goats, and horses? What symptoms should farmers and veterinarians be on the lookout for? Will milk testing and reporting now require fields for both versions of the virus? Will herds that have been infected by B3.13 have immunity to D1.1?

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And he’s worried about the political climate, and the appetite the Trump administration will have for addressing this outbreak.

“So many unanswered questions yet on how this strain will behave in cattle,” he said. “We may have to hope that Canada does the research because our federal researchers appear to be temporarily paralyzed by the political process.”

Nevertheless, he urged health officials to begin testing livestock — not just dairy cows — in places with densely situated agricultural operations, such as in Ohio, where since Jan. 1, H5N1 (assumed to be D1.1) has been found in 40 commercial poultry farms in a two-county area.

“The entire livestock population in the area should be screened now to sort out susceptibility and viral hosting, given the circumstances,” Korslund said.

But of all his worries, it’s the farmworkers at the viral battlefront about whom he’s most concerned.

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“No caring public health personnel can currently in good conscience recommend that sick, undocumented farm animal caretakers or flock depopulation employees get tested, knowing that ICE could show up at testing sites to demand citizenship verification,” he wrote. “Better to push the Tamiflu and recommend staying home a day or two … any worker testing initiatives are dead in the water and viral isolates will not be monitored for genomic changes by public health officials.”

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