Germany, France, and Italy halt COVID vaccines over blood clot fears – Now banned in 17 Nations
Boris Johnson, UK scientists and regulators say the jab is safe and there is currently no proof it was the cause of fatal blood clots in people who had recently received it.
The countries which have suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine
But Britain's closest neighbours - France, Germany and Italy - add to a growing list of countries which have taken extra cautious measures while investigations are ongoing - even if it means slowing down the rollout.
In a bid to persuade more countries from pausing the roll-out of the jab, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) insisted the rate of clots "in vaccinated people seems not to be higher than that seen in the general population."
The EMA, currently probing the link between clots and the jab, added that its benefits "outweigh the risks of side effects."
It will hold emergency meetings to discuss the safety of the jab tomorrow and Thursday.
The full list of countries that are currently not using the British-created jab are:
FranceGermanySpainItalyNetherlandsIrelandPortugalIcelandDenmarkNorwayBulgariaLuxembourgEstoniaLatviaLithuaniaAustriaRomaniaThailandDemocratic Republic of CongoIndonesia
The UK medicine regulator - the MHRA - says the AstraZeneca (AZ) jab is safe and encourages Brits to accept their offer, supported by the PM.
Medical experts have said the blood clots are just a "coincidence", with others claiming that it's a "step too far" to stop people getting a jab that would protect them from serious disease.
Spain’s health minister tonight announced a two-week ban on using the vaccine.
It comes as:
A third wave of Covid cases will hit in Autumn warns stats chiefOver-40s could be offered Covid jab before EasterNetherlands joins AstraZeneca Covid vaccine suspension - but Oxford scientists say ‘no link’ to blood clotsItaly plunges into another lockdown and Paris evacuates Covid patients on planes
AstraZeneca has been instrumental in UK vaccine rollout
French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday the country was halting use of the AZ vaccinesCredit: AFP
Germany's Health minister Jens Spahn said the decision to stop using the AZ vaccine was taken as a precautionCredit: AFP
German regulators called for further investigation of people who had suffered blood clotting in the days after their jabCredit: EPA
Germany's Health minister Jens Spahn said the decision to stop using the AZ vaccine was taken as a precaution and on the advice of regulators at the Paul Ehrlich Institute.
Regulators noted a "conspicuous accumulation" of seven cases of a type of blood clotting in the brain together with lack of blood platelets, known as thrombocytopenia.
Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday the country was halting use for just one day awaiting updated guidance from the EMA on Tuesday afternoon.
"The decision which has been taken out of precaution is to suspend vaccinating with the AstraZeneca vaccine in the hope that we can resume quickly if the EMA gives the green light," Macron told a press conference with Spain's prime minister.
"We are therefore suspending its use until tomorrow afternoon."
Italy’s medicines regulator announced on Monday it had also suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine nationwide "as a precaution and temporarily".
Initially Italy's northern region of Piedmont had blocked certain batches after citing a man who fell ill and died in the days after having an AZ dose.
Some 400,000 jabs from one batch have been seized as part of the probe.
This evening, Conservative MP for North Shropshire Owen Paterson accused the EU of spreading "fake news " in the wake of its shambolic vaccine rollout.
He tweeted: "EU fake news against the @AstraZeneca vaccine began when the @EU_Commission bungled its orders for AZ.
"It was then amplified by @EmmanuelMacron. The EU’s hostility is now getting ridiculous.
"As @MHRAgovuk says, evidence confirms that the AZ vaccine is safe."
Europe's suspension of the AZ vaccine - developed by scientists at the University of Oxford - comes amid a shambolic rollout and rising infection rates.
The EU has given first doses to just 11 per cent of its population so far compared to 37 per cent in the UK, according to Our World in Data.
And last week, the programme suffered yet another serious setback after another 55 million doses have been delayed.
Italy and much of Central Europe have seen a steep rise in infections over the past fortnight.
In Germany 12,800 new Covid infections were reported on Friday, a rise of over 3000 from the previous week.
The country’s infectious disease agency has acknowledged that the country was now in the grip of a third wave of Covid-19.
UK BACKS AZ
The MHRA issued a statement last week saying more than 11 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered across the UK with no issues.
Professor Anthony Harnden, deputy chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said today there was "no demonstrable difference" between the two groups.
He told BBC Breakfast: "We have to remember that there are 3,000 blood clots a month on average in the general population and because we're immunising so many people, we are bound to see blood clots at the same time as the vaccination, and that's not because they are due to the vaccination. That's because they occur naturally in the population."
After the Republic of Ireland’s decision to suspend use on Sunday, Dr Phil Bryan, MHRA vaccines safety lead said: “We are closely reviewing reports but given the large number of doses administered, and the frequency at which blood clots can occur naturally, the evidence available does not suggest the vaccine is the cause.”
He said people “should still go and get their Covid-19 vaccine when asked to do so".
The Prime Minister was asked during a visit to Coventry for his views on the situation.
Asked directly if he could tell the public that the vaccine is safe, Boris Johnson said: “Yes, I can. In the MHRA we have one of the toughest and most experienced regulators in the world.
“They see no reason at all to discontinue the vaccination programme… for either of the vaccines that we’re currently using.
“They believe that they are highly effective in driving down not just hospitalisation but also serious disease and mortality.
Asked directly if he could tell the public that the vaccine is safe, Boris Johnson said: “Yes, I can." The Prime Minister was asked during a visit to Coventry todayCredit: Reuters
UK scientists and regulators have encouraged Brits to keep getting their vaccines. Pictured: Patients receive the Oxford AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine at the community vaccination centre at Kingston University's Penrhyn Road campus, London, on March 12Credit: Getty
“We continue to be very confident about the programme and it’s great to see it being rolled out at such speed across the UK.”
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said there was “no evidence” that blood clots are any more likely to occur following vaccination.
They said: “The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine remains both safe and effective, and we urge anybody asked to come forward to receive a vaccine to do so."
It comes after British scientists overwhelming assured there is no certain link between blood clots and the vaccine, and the reported cases could easily be coincidental.
Dr Hilary Jones told Good Morning Britain: "It’s almost certainly a coincidence.
"It’s absolutely right and reassuring that we have got an investigation in place to look at the level of blood clots that have been reported in Norway and Ireland and in all the EU countries and the UK and around the world."
Dr Peter English, a retired consultant in communicable disease control and immediate past chair of the BMA Public Health Medicine Committee, said: “When a vaccine is administered to millions of people, it is inevitable that some adverse events - that would have happened anyway - will happen shortly after vaccination.
“It is most regrettable that countries have stopped vaccination on such 'precautionary' grounds: it risks doing real harm to the goal of vaccinating enough people to slow the spread of the virus, and to end the pandemic.”
DEADLY CLOTS
Blood clots can travel through the body and cause heart attacks, strokes and deadly blockages in the lungs.
The Netherlands also announced its suspension of the AZ jab earlier today, citing a small number of new reports in Denmark and Norway of blood clotting and lowered levels of blood platelets in people aged under 50.
Four people in Norway had been hospitalised for their condition.
At least one death has been reported in Denmark, Austria and Italy.
The first halt of a batch of the AstraZeneca vaccine was announced by Austria on March 8, following the death of a 49-year-old nurse from "severe bleeding disorders" days after receiving it.
But there have been very few details on the patients, including if they had any other risk factors that would have increased their risk of getting a blood clot
https://www.the-sun.com/news/2516094/astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-france-suspended-blood-clots
Big Brother is creating technology that the Antichrist will use in the future
In major cities, thousands of highly advanced security cameras (many equipped with facial recognition technology) are monitoring your every move. If authorities detect that you are doing something suspicious, they can quickly pull up your criminal, financial and medical records.
Of course if they want to dig deeper, your phone and your computer are constantly producing a treasure trove of surveillance data. Nothing that you do on either one of them is ever private.
In the past, compiling all of that information would take a great deal of time. But now tech giants such as Microsoft, Motorola, Cisco and Palantir are selling "fusion systems" to governments all over the planet.
These "fusion systems" can instantly integrate surveillance data from thousands of different sources, and this has totally transformed how law enforcement is conducted in many of our largest cities.
Arthur Holland Michel is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and he was given a tour of a "fusion system" that is used by the city of Chicago called Citigraf...
He clicked "INVESTIGATE," and Citigraf got to work on the reported assault. The software runs on what Genetec calls a "correlation engine," a suite of algorithms that trawl through a city's historical police records and live sensor feeds, looking for patterns and connections.
Seconds later, a long list of possible leads appeared onscreen, including a lineup of individuals previously arrested in the neighborhood for violent crimes, the home addresses of parolees living nearby, a catalog of similar recent 911 calls, photographs and license plate numbers of vehicles that had been detected speeding away from the scene, and video feeds from any cameras that might have picked up evidence of the crime itself, including those mounted on passing buses and trains. More than enough information, in other words, for an officer to respond to that original 911 call with a nearly telepathic sense of what has just unfolded.
But these systems are not just used to track down criminals.
In fact, they can be used to investigate literally anyone.
On another occasion, Arthur Holland Michel got the opportunity to test out the "fusion system" that Microsoft had built for New York City...
The NYPD official showed me how he could pull up any city resident's rap sheet, lists of their known associates, cases in which they were named as a victim of a crime or as a witness, and, if they had a car, a heatmap of where they tended to drive and a full history of their parking violations. Then he handed me the phone. Go ahead, he said; search a name.
A flurry of people came to mind: Friends. Lovers. Enemies. In the end, I chose the victim of a shooting I'd witnessed in Brooklyn a couple of years earlier. He popped right up, along with what felt like more personal information than I, or even perhaps a curious officer, had any right to know without a court order. Feeling a little dizzy, I gave the phone back.
If this is what is going on in major cities such as Chicago and New York, can you imagine the technology that the alphabet agencies of the federal government must now possess?
Of course this isn't just happening in the United States.
On the other side of the Atlantic, a joint European surveillance project known as ROXANNE is causing a great deal of concern...
An acronym for Real time netwOrk, teXt, and speaker ANalytics for combating orgaNized crimE, it was announced in November the Republic's involvement in the project currently being developed in Switzerland.
A biometrics based platform ostensibly to monitor and crack down on organised crime, an additional application of ROXANNE which its creators advertise freely is the ability to monitor those guilty of alleged hate speech and political extremism.
Strict new laws against "hate speech" and "political extremism" are being instituted all over Europe, and this new tool will help to track down "thought criminals".
In particular, this new tool will be heavily monitoring "social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube as well as normal telecommunications platforms"...
A product of the EU funded Horizon 2020 to foster new surveillance technology, ROXANNE works across social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube as well as normal telecommunications platforms to identify, categorise, and track faces and voices enabling authorities to paint a more in depth picture of the network being investigated, whether it be in relation to criminal activity or those deemed politically extreme.
Enabling authorities to draw on raw data from a variety of sources and platforms in order to recognise common speech patterns, facial features, and geolocation, the end result is both to identify suspects and paint an intricate picture of the networks being put under the microscope.
So if you live in Europe and you think that you might be guilty of "thought crime" at some point, you might want to get rid of your phone and your computer.
Seriously.
Things really have gotten that bad over there, and it is just a matter of time before the madness gets to the same level in the United States, because we are going down the exact same road.
Here in the U.S., more political voices are being "deplatformed" with each passing day. Progressive reporter Jordan Chariton originally cheered when conservatives were being deplatformed, but at this point he regrets his calls for censorship now that YouTube has taken down one of his videos...
However, after YouTube pulled video from his own channel featuring footage of the January 6 riot for violating the platform's policies against "spam and deceptive practices," the Chariton reversed his position.
"With time to reflect, & seeing Silicon Valley's censorship onslaught, I regret this tweet made in the heat of moment," the progressive journalist wrote. "Whether certain cable/YouTube outlets mislead audiences w/ dishonest claims lacking real evidence, they shouldn't be targeted."
It is all fun and games when it is happening to "the other side", but when it happens to you suddenly it becomes real.
They really do want to control what all of us do, say and think, and the Big Brother surveillance grid is becoming more suffocating with each passing year.
If we do not put limits on this technology while we still can, it is just a matter of time before our society becomes a dystopian nightmare far more horrible than anything than George Orwell ever dared to imagine.
Originally published at End Of The American Dream - reposted with permission.
https://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=4554
Doctors Worry about “Apocalyptic Fall”
The US is on the brink of 200,000 coronavirus deaths, with the number of new cases rising in 28 states, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
Updated CDC guidance says coronavirus can spread through the air from a person's breath
"We may be in for a very apocalyptic fall, I'm sorry to say," said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
"And it's happening because we're forcing schools to reopen in areas of high transmission. We're forcing colleges to reopen, and we don't have the leadership nationally, telling people to wear masks and to social distance and do all the things we need to do."
Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said she agrees this fall "could be apocalyptic" after recent spikes.
Coronavirus' spread in US
The United States is struggling to keep the virus under control, as new cases are reported each day. Gray bars represent the number of new cases reported each day. The dashed red line shows the seven-day moving average.
Why are we going back up? I think there are a few reasons," Marrazzo said,
One is that there is general fatigue. People are really tired of this," she said. "And then the second thing is ... the completely contradictory messages that we're getting -- not just the misinformation, but also the confusion about how things are spread."
She cited a recent update from the CDC that said you can get Covid-19 just by inhaling tiny particles from an infected person's breath that linger or travel in the air.
"There is growing evidence that droplets and airborne particles can remain suspended in the air and be breathed in by others, and travel distances beyond 6 feet," the CDC's website said in an update Friday. "In general, indoor environments without good ventilation increase this risk."
Many doctors have known that for months -- hence their pleas for the public to wear masks.
"The updated guidance would have been fine if it came out last May," Hotez said. "We knew all of these things months ago."
But by Monday afternoon, the CDC's update was removed.
The fact that they retracted this, even though this is common scientific knowledge at this point, one has to wonder what's behind it," said Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and an emergency physician at George Washington University.
"Was there political pressure? Political interference that's driving this rather than science?"
The removal was not the result of political pressure, according to a federal official familiar with the situation.
"This was totally the CDC's doing," the official said. "It was posted by mistake. It wasn't ready to be posted."
The official said the guideline change was published without first being thoroughly reviewed by CDC experts.
"Somebody hit the button and shouldn't have," the official said.
The official added that the guidance is "getting revised," but didn't say when the revision would be posted to the CDC's website.
Both the heads of the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration were appointed by President Donald Trump. And while Trump said he gives himself an "A+" on his handling of the pandemic, he has also said he "wanted to always play it down."
When asked why the CDC retracted its update on aerosolized spread, a spokesman for the agency said it was posted in error.
"A draft version of proposed changes to these recommendations was posted in error to the agency's official website," CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said in an email to CNN.
"CDC is currently updating its recommendations regarding airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). Once this process has been completed, the update language will be posted."
The heads of the CDC and the FDA are appointed by the president. Why that might be a problem
Where Covid-19 cases are rising and falling
As of Monday, 28 states had more new cases this past week compared to the previous week, according to Johns Hopkins data.
Sixteen states are holding steady, and only six states are showing declines in new cases: Delaware, Hawaii, Louisiana, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont.
New signs of Covid-19 complacency even as the US death toll nears 200,000
But it's not just the raw numbers of new cases that the public should pay attention to. It's also the test positivity rates -- the percentage of tests taken that turn out to be positive.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has advised governments maintain test positivity rates at or below 5% for at least two weeks before businesses reopen.
As of Monday morning, 27 states and Puerto Rico had test positivity rates higher than that 5% threshold, according Johns Hopkins University.
On the other end of the spectrum, five states have test positivity rates lower than 1% -- Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and New York.
How some states got creative in controlling Covid-19
The race for a (safe and effective) vaccine
CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has said a vaccine might not be available to most Americans until mid-2021.
A couple married for over 50 years died of Covid-19 minutes apart while holding hands
A couple married for over 50 years died of Covid-19 minutes apart while holding hands
But Moncef Slaoui, chief adviser to Operation Warp Speed, told CNBC Monday that "we are pretty close" to having a vaccine for Covid-19.
Operation Warp Speed is the federal government's effort to speed development of drugs, vaccines and other measures to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
At least three vaccines are in Phase 3 clinical trials in the US. Slaoui said it's possible vaccine efficacy could be determined between October and January.
"The longer we wait, the more likely," Slaoui said.
If approval or authorization is granted by November or December, "we may be able, for instance, to immunize the most susceptible populations in the US by December of 2020," Slaoui said.
"Most of the elderly population and first-line workers in January of 2021, and the rest of the US population progressively in the month of February, March and April," Slaoui said.
CNN's Elizabeth Cohen, Steve Almasy, Naomi Thomas and Jamie Gumbrecht contributed to this report.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/21/health/us-coronavirus-monday/index.html