Tag Archives: illness

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #27 – Dr. Paul Offit – Covid Vaccines

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Dr. Paul A. Offit is Director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Offit is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of virology and immunology, and was a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He is a member of the Food and Drug Administration Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, a member of the Institute of Medicine and co-editor of the foremost vaccine text, Vaccines.

He is a scientist, a skeptic, a thinker and an individual deeply passionate about children’s health.

This week we sit down to discuss Covid, vaccines and children’s health.

I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Offit,

 

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 12 Issue 31

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Coronavirus Update #66

This week is another close look at the current variants of the Omicron lineage, especially BA.5. What is the deal with this strain? Is it causing more heart ache in the United States or just an annoying highly infectious variant? In my opinion, when we have global flairs of Covid 19, there is clear evidence now that individuals that are immune compromised have unwittingly become breeding grounds for genomic mutations in SARS2 leading to variants of concern. These variants become our new circulating troublemakers. Thus, in my opinion, we should be making vaccines in this country that are high quality and targeted to the current strain. Then we should be releasing it worldwide very quickly to people in immune compromised states. This should have the effect of slowing down these emerging VOC’s that are evading our natural and vaccine induced immunity. Finally, we end with a discussion of chronic rhino sinusitis.

Enjoy,

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 12 Issue 27

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Coronavirus Update #64

What is the current state of affairs? We have a highly contagious and mutational SARS2 virus that is present in the United States. The mutations usually occur overseas in vaccine naive areas. The landscape here has changed as most of us have some immunity as vaccine induced, viral induced or a hybrid combination. That reality has dramatically reduced the death and hospitalization rate so that my colleagues in the ICU feel little to no stress anymore from Covid despite relatively high circulating case volume compared to other waves except wave 4. We discussed boosters and much more this week.

Enjoy,

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 12 Issue 25

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Coronavirus Update 63 plus other stuff – Lots on boosters today while the persistent world of Covid exposure drags on. Omicron US strains: newer variant BA.2 makes up 35% of current case volume based on different parts of the country while omicron BA BA 1.1.529 is at 6% and B 2.12.1 is 59%. Delta is gone by competition. Cases are increasing in some cities with little increase in hospital morbidity and mortality. In essence we are still fairing quite well in the new norm. Quick Hits and other musings!
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 11 Issues 37 Covid Update #43

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Delta is a pain in the BUTT, but our T and B cells are ready to wage war once we have either had natural infection or received the SARS2 vaccine.
Evolution of the SARS2 coronavirus may have reached a perfect level of fitness with the delta variant. It is incredibly effective at transmission while not being more deadly than alpha. Time will ultimately tell if it evolves again in a significant way. If you think of the evolution of humanity with respect to SARS2/Covid19 risk, it is clear to me that this virus would have been much less deadly 30 or 50 or 100 years ago before the invention of modern processed foods, chemicals and stress that have upended human immune health and lead to an era of metabolic diseases and disease. I have thought about this for some time and the reality is as such. We are here to some extent by our own doing and that is a tragedy of our time.
Some may say that modern medicine is saving countless lives and that is so, but how many would have never entered the hospital based on much better baseline health? Ah, these are questions that we cannot answer less we just hypothesize.
Read more for COVID #43….https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/patient-education/dr-magryta-s-newsletter
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Audiocast Volume 11 Issues 33 and 35 Covid Update #41/42

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A few people are asking about the need to vaccinate if you have already had COVID natural illness. What is the story here? Hot off of the press from Cell Reports Medicine, we see: “Ending the COVID-19 pandemic will require long-lived immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Here, we evaluate 254 COVID-19 patients longitudinally up to 8 months and find durable broad-based immune responses. SARS-CoV-2 spike binding and neutralizing antibodies exhibit a bi-phasic decay with an extended half-life of >200 days suggesting the generation of longer-lived plasma cells. SARS-CoV-2 infection also boosts antibody titers to SARS-CoV-1 and common betacoronaviruses. In addition, spike-specific IgG+ memory B cells persist, which bodes well for a rapid antibody response upon virus re-exposure or vaccination. Virus-specific CD4+ and CD8+ T cells are polyfunctional and maintained with an estimated half-life of 200 days. Interestingly, CD4+ T cell responses equally target several SARS-CoV-2 proteins, whereas the CD8+ T cell responses preferentially target the nucleoprotein, highlighting the potential importance of including the nucleoprotein in future vaccines. Taken together, these results suggest that broad and effective immunity may persist long-term in recovered COVID-19 patients.” (Cohen et. al. 2021)

Read more for COVID #41……https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/patient-education/dr-magryta-s-newsletter/988-volume-11-letter-33-coronavirus-update-42

Read more for COVID #42……https://www.salisburypediatrics.com/patient-education/dr-magryta-s-newsletter/994-coronavirus-update-42

Happy listening

Dr. M

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