Want your picture with the Milwaukee Bucks championship trophy? People who receiveaCOVID-19 vaccine at a Saturday clinic at Fiserv Forum will get that chance, according to a Milwaukee Health Department news release.
The health department and the Bucks are teaming up for a vaccine clinic from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday in the atrium of Fiserv Forum, 1111 Vel R. Phillips Ave., Milwaukee.
"Everyone vaccinated at this clinic will have the opportunity to take a photo with the Larry OBrien Championship Trophy," a news release said.
The focus of this clinicis on children ages 5 to 11.The clinic will offerpediatric Pfizer COVID-19vaccines.
Vaccination is the best tool to keep ourselves and our children safe from COVID-19," Milwaukee Health Commissioner Kirsten Johnson said in a news release. "We hope the opportunity to take a shot in the home of the 2021 World Champion Milwaukee Bucks will encourage Milwaukee children and families to get vaccinated."
The clinic will also offer first, secondand booster doses of Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines foreligible individuals, the news release said. Flu shots will be available as well.
Those under the age of 18 will need permission from a parent or guardian to receive avaccine.
Free parking will be available in the Highland Street Parking Garage, 1030 North6th Street.
Another vaccine clinic will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 4 to administer second doses of the vaccine.
People who return to complete their vaccine series will be entered to win one of two family four-packs of tickets for that night's game against the Miami Heat. The drawing will be held following the completion of the clinic. Winners will be notified and emailed their tickets.
Contact Hannah Kirby at hannah.kirby@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HannahHopeKirby.
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People who spread misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines are "criminals" and have cost "millions of lives," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Tuesday.
Speaking with Washington D.C.-based think tank Atlantic Council, Bourla said there is a "very small" group of people that purposefully circulate misinformation on the shots, misleading those who are already hesitant about getting vaccinated.
"Those people are criminals," he told Atlantic Council CEO Frederick Kempe. "They're not bad people. They're criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives."
Bourla's comments come as millions of eligible adults in the U.S. have yet to get vaccinated even though the shots have been available to most Americans most of this year. Public health experts say misinformation is likely playing a large role.
According to a survey published Monday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than three-quarters of U.S. adults either believe or aren't sure about at least one of eight false statements about Covid or the vaccines, with unvaccinated adults and Republicans among those most likely to hold misconceptions.
Among the falsehoods are that Covid vaccines contain microchips, cause infertility and change one's DNA, according to the survey.
Bourla said Tuesday that life for many people can go "back to normal" once many of the unvaccinated get vaccinated.
"The only thing that stands between the new way of life and the current way of life is, frankly, hesitancy to vaccinations," he said.
As U.S. health authorities expand use of the leading Covid-19 vaccines, researchers investigating heart-related risks linked to the shots are exploring several emerging theories, including one centered on the spike protein made in response to vaccination.
Researchers arent certain why the messenger RNA vaccines, one from Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE and the other from Moderna Inc., are likely causing the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis in a small number of cases.
Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images
Eugene Mymrin/Getty Images
Kelly LaDue thought she was done with COVID-19 in the fall of 2020 after being tormented by the virus for a miserable couple of weeks.
"And then I started with really bad heart-racing with any exertion. It was weird," says LaDue, 54, of Ontario, N.Y. "Walking up the stairs, I'd have to sit down and rest. And I was short of breath. I had to rest after everything I did."
A year later, LaDue still feels like a wreck. She gets bad headaches and wakes up with pain all over her body on more days than not. She also experiences a sudden high-pitched whistling in her ears, bizarre phantom smells and vibrations in her legs. Her brain is so foggy most of the time that she had to quit her job as a nurse and is afraid to drive.
"These symptoms, they come and go," she says. "You think: 'It's gone.' You think: 'This is it. I'm getting better.' And then it'll just rear back up again."
Kelly LaDue, of Ontario, N.Y., was working as a nurse when she got COVID-19 and recovered. But a year later, she's still grappling with a strange constellation of symptoms. Kelly LaDue hide caption
Kelly LaDue, of Ontario, N.Y., was working as a nurse when she got COVID-19 and recovered. But a year later, she's still grappling with a strange constellation of symptoms.
Patients like LaDue have researchers scrambling to figure out why some people experience persistent, often debilitating symptoms after catching SARS-CoV-2. It remains unclear how often it occurs. But if only a small fraction of the hundreds of millions of people who've had COVID-19 are left struggling with long-term health problems, it's a major public health problem.
"I think it's the post-pandemic pandemic," says Dr. Angela Cheung, who's studying long-COVID-19 at the University of Toronto. "If we are conservative and think that only 10% of patients who develop COVID-19 would get long COVID, that's a huge number."
So far there are more theories than clear answers for what's going on, and there is good reason to think the varied constellation of symptoms could have different causes in different people. Maybe, in some, the virus is still hiding in the body somewhere, directly damaging nerves or other parts of the body. Maybe the chronic presence of the virus, or remnants of the virus, keeps the immune system kind of simmering at a low boil, causing the symptoms. Maybe the virus is gone but left the immune system out of whack, so it's now attacking the body. Or maybe there's another cause.
"It's still early days. But we believe that long COVID is not caused by one thing. That there are multiple diseases that are happening," says Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale University who is also studying long COVID-19.
But Iwasaki and others have started finding some tantalizing clues in the blood of some patients. Those include unusual levels of cytokines, which are chemical messengers that the immune system uses to communicate, as well as proteins produced by the immune system known as autoantibodies, which attack cells and tissues in the body instead of the virus.
"We are finding elevated cytokines in long-COVID patients and we're trying to decode what those cytokines mean. We're also seeing some distinct autoantibody reactivity and are trying to find out what those antibodies are doing and whether they are causing harm," Iwasaki says.
Other researchers have produced similar findings. Dr. Steven Deeks at the University of California, San Francisco, found long-COVID-19 patients appear to have elevated levels of a cytokine called interleukin-6, suggesting they may be suffering from a state of chronic inflammation.
"The first couple of weeks of the infection is associated with a massive amount of inflammation. The virus just blows up the immune system," Deeks says. "So it's reasonable to think that, in some people, the acute COVID results in an inflammatory state that can contribute to long-COVID over time."
Yet another clue found in one subgroup of patients is an unusual pattern of activity by key immune system cells, such as as T-cells, which may support the idea that the virus is hiding in the body.
"That's a signature or pattern which could be consistent with a low-level, but persistent, infection in the long-COVID syndrome patient," says Dr. Igor Koralnik at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine.
While much more research is needed, the researchers hope these findings could eventually lead to ways to help long-COVID patients. One possible therapy for some patients might turn out to be anti-viral drugs that target a virus hiding in the body. Another possibility might be clearing the virus with a vaccine, which does seem to help some long-COVID patients. Researchers think drugs that dampen down the immune system may also help.
"We need to understand what's going on in each patient because the treatment option will be very different depending on what they actually have," Iwasaki says.
But others are not so sure that any of the evidence produced so far linking subtle changes in lab tests to physical problems in long-COVID-19 patients is very convincing. That includes any signs that the immune system is the problem what's known as an autoimmune disease.
"The thing that has struck me most now in a year and a half of seeing these patients and extensively testing them is that we are finding little to no abnormalities," says Dr. Michael Sneller, who has been conducting a battery of detailed tests on hundreds of long-COVID-19 patients at the National Institutes of Health.
"Echocardiogram, pulmonary function tests, X-rays, brain MRIs. You name it. Laboratory markers of organ dysfunction. We're not seeing any of that," Sneller says of the patients in his study. "And precious little evidence of immune activation, looking just at the sort of standard markers of inflammation. I'm running out of tests to do basically."
But Sneller says his team hasn't ruled out anything and is continuing to analyze data about the immune system. His team is also conducting psychological testing on their study's subjects though not because he doubts their symptoms.
"It's 100% real. These people have these symptoms. Absolutely. The question is what's causing them," he says. "Anxiety can produce real symptoms."
For her part, LaDue hopes researchers eventually figure out what's going with her and other patients.
"I want to feel normal, and I hope to be back to normal again someday," she says. "The hardest part, definitely, is trying to look and be normal but not feeling normal."
Patients gasping for air in hospital hallways, trailers serving as makeshift morgues, emergency medical tents erected in New Yorks Central Park: In March 2020, what we watched happening in high-income settings in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world seemed to us in Uganda like scenes from a science fiction movie.
As physician-researchers who are acutely aware of our countrys deficits of Covid-19 diagnostics, personal protective equipment, and intensive care beds with medical oxygen, we grew increasingly worried about the devastation this new virus could bring to Uganda and our medical practices.
With no Covid-19 cases yet reported locally, there was still time to make potentially life-saving preparations, from providing infection-control training for hospital staff to educating the public about prevention and symptoms. Another positive was that, as a result of Ugandan universities longstanding global health partnerships, health experts from U.S. and European academic medical centers and humanitarian organizations were already stationed in health facilities around the country.
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With their extensive experience treating patients with infectious diseases and researching infectious pathogens in low-income countries, along with their stated goals of serving the global poor, these skilled workers were well-positioned to support Uganda as it faced the worlds biggest public health challenge in decades.
Like soldiers on a battlefield confronting a foe that threatened populations everywhere, we assumed that combatants and commanders alike would not retreat or surrender in the face of danger. But despite years of consensus around the need to stand with populations in materially impoverished settings, the known consequences of Ugandas health worker shortages, and the urgency of preparing for the pandemic, our international collaborators were suddenly acting like the idea that their staff would stay in Uganda was absurd.
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In the days following the initial chaotic reports from Italy, New York, and elsewhere, we watched our non-Ugandan colleagues receive a wave of evacuation orders from their respective home organizations and countries. By the end of that March 2020, we found ourselves fighting Covid-19 essentially alone.
Ugandan policymakers did everything they could to keep cases to a minimum implementing strong social distancing policies and contact tracing programs but within months the horror scenes we had previously watched on the news were playing out in Ugandas underfunded and understaffed hospitals. From a safe distance, many partners from the Global North sent messages asking how they could be of help, a sentiment that was appreciated yet did not address the void left by their abrupt disappearance.
From our experiences during Ebola epidemics, we fully understand the fear of working during a disease outbreak, including how challenging it can be to be separated from loved ones in such moments. At the same time, the isolation through which weve endured Covid-19 underscores a reality that Uganda and other countries in Africa have known for a long time: Equity in global health partnerships almost always feels like a moving target.
Although collaborations between scientists from high-income and low-income settings have yielded tremendous public health achievements, partnership priorities are too often dictated by the perspectives of those who control project funding, not necessarily by the individuals living in the communities where these programs take place.
Sometimes, as was the case for Covid-19 staff withdrawals, choices affecting both parties are made without the collaborating local scientists and clinicians being asked for their opinions at all.
Medical and public health workers in Uganda are well acquainted with the consequences of this power imbalance, from the many studies conducted here that fail to include local authors to the large pay differentials between collaborating investigators of different nationalities employed by the same programs. Local health specialists rarely openly highlight these inequitable practices, fearing that speaking up could cause them or their beneficiary communities to lose access to much-needed funds and resources. Even facing a threat as existential as Covid-19, many Ugandan experts have not felt empowered to protest the ways in which they have felt abandoned and instead have remained silent as international partners try to fix our public health systems over email.
We hope that as American and European organizations become more aware of these challenges, the response is not to draw back even further from places like Uganda but rather to take action so essential global health programs can be delivered in fairer ways. With no end to the pandemic yet in sight and the indisputable threat of future disease outbreaks, we especially hope that international collaborators will work to create more equitable contingency plans for continuing operations in the face of public health threats.
Although evacuations can be justifiable in situations of targeted risk, such as instances of rebel insurgency or abductions of foreign workers, pathogens like Covid-19 affect all susceptible hosts regardless of nationality visitor or local and can spread to populations everywhere if not quickly addressed. We call on global health practitioners to more clearly identify opportunities to respond to such situations in partnership and to be transparent about conditions that would render impossible in-person support from visiting staff.
Clinicians and public health experts from the Global North have remarkable expertise in responding to infectious diseases, but outbreak response teams in the Global South need to know whether they can rely on them in their moments of greatest need.
There has been talk for decades about how the most challenging global health problems must be tackled together as a global community. As health workers in Uganda mark almost two years of fighting Covid-19 largely on their own, we wonder whether solidarity will indeed be the new norm, or whether withdrawals will be once again be repeated when another pandemic hits.
Stephen Asiimwe is an epidemiologist and program director of the Global Health Collaborative at Mbarara University of Science and Technology as well as principal investigator at the Kabwohe Clinical Research Center. Edith Nakku-Joloba is a senior lecturer in epidemiology at Makerere University School of Public Health, a sexually transmitted infections specialist, and a consultant with the Uganda Ministry of Health. Aggrey Semeere is a senior physician at the Infectious Diseases Institute at Makerere University and principal investigator for the East African International Databases to Evaluate AIDS.
An employee of Toyota company works on an assembly line on April 21, 2020 in Onnaing, northern France. FRANCOIS LO PRESTI/AFP via Getty Images hide caption
An employee of Toyota company works on an assembly line on April 21, 2020 in Onnaing, northern France.
Toyota, one of the world's largest vehicle manufacturers, said it will increase production in December as it recovers from parts shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Japanese automaker announced it expects to build 800,000 vehicles globally next month, up from the roughly 760,000 it made last December.
The company also said it was maintaining its forecast of producing 9 million vehicles in the current fiscal year, which ends March 31. Toyota produced about 7.6 million units in the previous fiscal year.
"We would like to express our gratitude to all parties concerned for their immense support in helping us maintain production," Toyota said in a statement.
Automakers have recently struggled to make enough vehicles in the face of a parts shortage, particularly semiconductors. Meanwhile, soaring demand has driven prices up at the dealership.
All of Toyota's 14 plants and 28 production lines in Japan will be operating normally for the first time since May, the company announced, further helping it rev up production.
Still, the company said it was responding to a continuing shortage of some parts by attempting to shore up its supply chain.
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Instruction
Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have passed 251.4 million globally, according to Johns Hopkins University. The number of confirmed deaths has now passed 5.07 million. More than 7.36 billion vaccination doses have been administered globally, according to Our World in Data.
Germany reported a record 50,196 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, the fourth day in a row it has posted a fresh daily high, as a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections sweeps the country.
Russia on Thursday reported 1,237 coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours, close to a record one-day toll recorded the previous day, amid a nationwide surge in cases.
France is at the beginning of a fifth wave of the coronavirus epidemic, Health Minister Olivier Veran has said. The health ministry registered 11,883 new cases on Wednesday, the second day in a row with a new case tally over 10,000. New cases have seen double-digit percentage increases week-on-week since around mid-October.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and senior aides holed up in a war bunker on Thursday during an exercise simulating an outbreak of a lethal new COVID-19 variant. He described the day-long "Omega Drill", named after a fictitious virus strain, as a precaution to ensure Israel was prepared for "any scenario".
Denmark will impose self-isolation requirements on travellers from Singapore, its embassy in the city-state said on Thursday, following a surge in COVID-19 infections. Singapore was removed this week from a European Union list of non-EU countries for which travel restrictions should be lifted.
Malaysia will reopen its borders to international visitors by Jan. 1 at the latest, a government advisory council said on Thursday, as the country seeks to revive its ailing tourism sector.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday the United States has brokered a deal between Johnson & Johnson and the COVAX vaccine-sharing programme for the delivery of the company's COVID-19 vaccine to people living in conflict zones.
One year on: we look back at how the Forums networks have navigated the global response to COVID-19.
Using a multistakeholder approach, the Forum and its partners through its COVID Action Platform have provided countless solutions to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, protecting lives and livelihoods.
Throughout 2020, along with launching its COVID Action Platform, the Forum and its Partners launched more than 40 initiatives in response to the pandemic.
The work continues. As one example, the COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs is supporting 90,000 social entrepreneurs, with an impact on 1.4 billion people, working to serve the needs of excluded, marginalized and vulnerable groups in more than 190 countries.
Read more about the COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, our support of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, the Coalition for Epidemics Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI), and the COVAX initiative and innovative approaches to solve the pandemic, like our Common Trust Network aiming to help roll out a digital passport in our Impact Story.
Britain's economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic lagged behind that of other rich nations in the July-September period, according to official data on Thursday which underscored the interest rate dilemma facing the Bank of England.
Gross domestic product grew by 1.3%, the weakest three-month growth since Britain was under lockdown in early 2021.
The Bank of England and a Reuters poll of economists had forecast an expansion of 1.5%.
The Office for National Statistics said Britain's economy remained 2.1% smaller than it was at the end of 2019, a bigger shortfall than in fellow Group of Seven countries Germany, Italy and France.
The United States has already surpassed its pre-crisis size. Canada and Japan, the other G7 members, have yet to report third-quarter growth data but had already regained more ground by the second quarter than Britain had achieved by the third quarter.
How the global economy is projected to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Image: OECD
The risk of severe illness from COVID-19 is higher in people with obstructive sleep apnea and other breathing problems that cause oxygen levels to drop during sleep, researchers say.
They tracked 5,402 adults with these problems and found that roughly a third of them eventually tested posted for the coronavirus.
While the chance of being infected did not increase with the severity of their problems, people with higher scores on the "apnea-hypopnia index" - a measure of the severity of their sleep-related breathing problems - had higher odds of needing to be hospitalized or dying from COVID-19, Drs. Cinthya Pena Orbea, Reena Mehra and their colleagues at the Cleveland Clinic reported on Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.
It is not clear if treatments that improve sleep apnea, such as CPAP machines that push air into patients' airways during sleep, would also reduce the risk of severe COVID-19, said Pene Orbea and Mehra.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Lorraine Charinda got her first shot of the vaccine on October 23 and her second on Wednesday. It was all thanks to a US church that raised money to get her from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Columbus, Ohio, the church said.
"Everyone else, we are still waiting," Charinda told CNN, referring to the millions of people around the world who haven't been offered the chance to get vaccinated. "So it's shocking to hear that vaccines can even expire and be thrown (away) just because people don't want to be vaccinated. If we had that opportunity, really, it would help us a lot."
For Charinda, who works in a poor, rural area called Kamina, she said they could not find the vaccine anywhere in her province. She did not believe she was set to get the vaccine until she was at the airport.
"We're trying always to look for the vaccine and we couldn't find it," the 32-year-old said. "And because there were no centers in the province, you had to go somewhere to continue to look for it."
The experience of the pandemic is even more real to Charinda because she saw her mother fight Covid-19. She met her in Zambia when her mother became ill and she watched her struggle to breathe and battle a fever in June 2021.
"I really didn't know how serious the pandemic was until I saw my mother lie next to me having those symptoms and difficulty breathing, coughing, fever," she said. "It's like it's real when you're looking at it -- it's like staring at you in the face."
Her mother was sick for 7 to 10 days and sent Charinde back to the DRC so she would not get sick.
By some miracle, Charinda said, she did not get sick after meeting her mom.
"Every time I get a negative result I am like, is this real?" she said. "I'm just looking up to the heavens and asking God if this is real."
Charinda's vaccine moment came to fruition because of the West Ohio Conference of The United Methodist Church. The conference has had a relationship with the DRC since 2002 and Charinda started working there as a missionary through General Board of Global Ministries in 2018, a spokeswoman for the West Ohio Conference told CNN.
"She is a key leader and her work provides food and financial sustainability for communities across the DRC," spokeswoman Kay Panovec wrote.
The organization raised $4,000 within 24 hours in order to bring Charinda to the US, she wrote. The money came from West Ohio congregations and individuals and OhioHealth administered her shots, she added.
In coming to the US, Charinda said the access Americans have to the vaccine is remarkable. She hopes that her story can help others, she said.
"I encourage people to take vaccines. It's really not a joke and it's not anything about politics or what, but it's something real," she said. "You will not realize it until your loved one gets sick, and the fear is that you have that you don't know that person is going to live."
CNN's Daniel Wolfe contributed to this report.
