Moderna Asks FDA To Approve COVID Vaccine — You Know, For Kids
The vaccine for kids under 5 could finally be here — in June.
At long last, parents of very young kids may soon be able to get their little darlings vaccinated against COVID-19. Moderna today submitted an application to the Food and Drug Administration to authorize its vaccine for use in young children aged 6 months through five years, citing clinical trials showing the vaccine is effective in preventing serious illness in that age group. The FDA is expected to make a final decision on whether to authorize the vaccine for little kids by June.
As of right now, children under 5 are the only age group in the US who aren't yet authorized to get vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is available for all ages 5 and up, but the Moderna and Johnson and Johnson vaccines are only approved for folks 18 and up.
NBC News reports that the Moderna vax for kids will be two 25-microgram doses given four weeks apart; that's a quarter of the adult dose.
Unlike the adult vaccines, clinical trials of the child dosage found that it isn't especially effective at preventing infection with the coronavirus, but Moderna is pursuing approval because it does prevent serious illness.
Moderna chief medical officer Dr. Paul Burton told NBC News that the lower efficacy against infection was due to the extremely contagious omicron variant, which has dealt a blow to the effectiveness of the current vaccines for other age groups as well.
Still, the two-dose vaccine for young children provides a “good level of protection” and “can protect these kids,” Burton said.
The vaccine will be a huge relief for parents, since one of the scarier things about Omicron is that when it was surging earlier this year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that kiddos under 5 were hospitalized roughly five times as often as they had been during the earlier Delta variant wave of 2021.
The Omicron wave got a lot of kids and teenagers sick, too, NBC News notes:
The CDC estimates that, by February, three-quarters of children and teens in the U.S. caught Covid at least once, though agency officials noted it remains unclear how long that protection from those previous infections will last or whether it's as robust as the protection provided by the vaccines.
But since the "natural" immunity resulting from previous infection varies widely from person to person, having a vaccine that provides more predictable protection from serious illness will be extremely valuable in keeping kids healthy.
Pfizer is also getting ready to try again for FDA authorization of its vaccine for kids under five; it had submitted an application for authorization of a two-dose vaccine earlier this year, but then withdrew the request because clinical trial data didn't show it was particularly effective, and the FDA asked for more testing with a three-dose regimen instead. NBC News notes that it's not clear yet whether the FDA would authorize the two companies' vaccines for tots "one at a time, or hold off and authorize both at the same time," which might reduce confusion and ensure supplies are available more widely.
A bit farther out, Moderna is also preparing to
seek authorization for a booster dose for the age group. The shot could be available in the fall, [Burton] said, and could be a so-called bivalent vaccine, which targets two strains of the coronavirus in a single shot.
Separately, Pfizer this week has submitted paperwork for authorization of booster shots for its vaccine for kids aged five to 11; currently, boosters are only available for ages 12 and up.
You know what would also be really good? If Republicans in Congress would recognize that the virus is still dangerous (it's still killing 376 people a day), and without a new funding package, there soon won't be any money for vaccines, testing, or treatment, to say nothing of developing and distributing new vaccines and treatments.
Maybe we could start a rumor that the virus is turning people gay. That might shake loose some funding.
[NBC News / NPR / AP / Photo: Heather Hazzan for Self Magazine, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Sean Hannity: Horse Paster? I Don't Even Know Her!
OR DOES HE.
Fox News host Sean Hannity, never one to let a good fabrication get in the way of reality, lied his fool face off Friday and insisted that he had never once recommended the deworming medication ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. But he did it on his syndicated radio show, so you couldn't see his fool face come off, and they put it back on him before his Fox News TV show.
Fact check: bullshit. Media Matters debunks the claim in hilarious detail, noting multiple occasions when Hannity did in fact say that ivermectin was a legitimate treatment for the deadly infection. This is where we remind you again that ivermectin is great if your farm animals have worms, but it doesn't do diddly for COVID, as seen recently in yet another controlled study. The new study, from Brazil, found that ivermectin did nothing to prevent hospitalizations or severe illness among people who'd been diagnosed with COVID-19.
Read More: Horse Paste Officially Horse Sh*t — Science
Hannity was absolutely certain he's blameless when it comes to spreading medical misinformation, all while spreading even more medical misinformation. Noting that infections are increasing due to the new BA.2 version of the Omicron variant, Hannity groused that the government had cruelly stopped letting everyone have monoclonal antibody treatments that had worked perfectly, although he left out the minor detail that all but one of those treatments were ineffective against Omicron (hey, that's only been known since January).
Then it was on to his lie about horse paste. Hannity asked his producer to back him up on his perfectly unblemished record of pure medical fact, as long as you ignored the previous 60 seconds.
Hannity: People wrote this story, by the way, that I had been telling people [to use] ivermectin. Linda, is that not the one thing that I kept saying, there’s not a single study that I’ve seen that shows that it works?
Producer: One hundred percent.
Hannity: And I've also said, and repeated, that the manufacturer of ivermectin said "Neeaah, we don't want it used for off-label use for COVID. [Hannity really made sort of a horse noise there — Dok] There's no evidence that it works.
Hannity then added that maaaaaybe some of his guests might have mentioned ivermectin as "part of their protocol; anecdotally they say it works,” and insisted that "there have been studies" that showed that hydroxychloroquine, in fact, taken early, mitigates symptoms." (Fact check: he didn't mention that larger clinical trials showed no such effects.)
Media Matters put together a fun video starting with Hannity's claim that he'd never once promoted ivermectin, followed by clips of Hannity very much touting ivermectin.
Including the multiple examples in the video, Media Matters notes that Hannity's show mentioned ivermectin at least 25 times during the pandemic, between December 2020 and early April of this year. However, maybe Hannity really is the good guy here, since his show only included the fourth-most mentions of the useless drug among all Fox broadcasts. Surely there's some sort of "Not as bad as Tucker" Miss Congeniality prize?
A few details! Note that by the time Hannity (like the rest of Fox News) was pushing horse paste, there were plentiful supplies of the highly effective COVID-19 vaccines available, which prevent deaths and hospitalizations for serious disease, but also help reduce the spread of the virus.
- July 13, 2021: "We now have numerous studies about therapeutics, Regeneron, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, that show that taken early, it can mitigate symptoms of COVID-19."
- August 2, 2021: "We're also going to discuss something often overlooked and that is the incredible therapeutics that are now being used to treat not just breakthrough cases, but all cases. That includes, yes, the [monoclonal antibody] cocktail known as Regeneron, the Eli Lilly version of Regeneron. Even, yes, hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin. You get to decide.”
- August 6, 2021: "Therapeutics like Regeneron and ivermectin as well as other proactive treatments and practices were already helping COVID-19 patients all across the country."
Hannity's final mention of the miraculous horse paste was just a little over two months ago, on February 2, when he defended Joe Rogan for taking ivermectin along with a lot of other crap. By then, Hannity had backed off his earlier claims that ivermectin was clinically proven, but he certainly didn't say ivermectin was useless, just that he'd "never seen a study on ivermectin."
In conclusion, hooray for Sean Hannity, who managed to lie several times about treatments for COVID-19 while insisting he'd always warned people away from horse paste. Give that man a commemorative bronzed road apple from the county fair!
[Media Matters / New England Journal of Medicine / National Institutes of Health]
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LAPD Needs Like A Million Cops To Arrest Four Scientists At Climate Protest
Maybe they were dangerous giant mutant super scientists?
During an unseasonable heat wave in Los Angeles Wednesday, a group of climate activists protested outside the JP Morgan Chase building downtown. Four scientists — a climate scientist, a science teacher, an engineer, and a physicist — chained themselves to the bank's doors as part of a global climate protest organized by the groups Extinction Rebellion and Scientist Rebellion.
The protest was held just a few days after the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an alarming new report saying the world can still meet the best-case Paris goal for limiting the damage done by global warming, but only by making "immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors," and far more quickly than industrialized nations have committed to — to say nothing of the enormous greenhouse gas emissions actually happening.
LAist's Erin Stone describes the protest:
The four men — climate scientist Peter Kalmus, science educator Allan Chornak, physicist Greg Spooner and engineer Eric Gill — donned white lab coats and chained themselves to the bank’s front doors in protest of the bank’s investments in coal, oil and gas projects. They chose JP Morgan Chase because the bank has funded more new fossil fuel projects than any other bank, according to a report by a group of NGOs.
The other climate activists soon joined the scientists, marching and chanting while holding up signs reading “Chase fuels the crisis” and “1.5° is dead! Climate revolution now!”
NASA Climate scientist Peter Kalmus choked up as he spoke about the stakes, and the price of inaction: "The scientists of the world have been being ignored and it’s got to stop [...] we're going to lose everything."
@ClimateHuman chokes up speaking when talking about his son and why he\u2019s chaining himself to Chase bank entrance, along w three other scientists:pic.twitter.com/r2vt8YDy3n— Erin Stone (she/her) (@Erin Stone (she/her)) 1649275948
We’re not joking, we’re not lying, we’re not exaggerating. This is so bad that we’re willing to take this risk and more and more scientists and more and more people are gonna start joining us.
After the small, peaceful protest had gone on for a few hours, the Los Angeles Police Department sent in riot officers; one activist group estimated on Twitter that there were about 10 cops for each protester:
LOS ANGELES CLIMATE PROTEST\n\nAre you all seeing LAPD\u2019s response to a few climate scientists chained to a door? There\u2019s about 10 for each protestor.\n\nLAPD is going all out in riot gear in preparation for the cop riot. Where are the elected officials in Los Angeles? This is absurd.pic.twitter.com/op3pacRdGz— People's City Council - Los Angeles (@People's City Council - Los Angeles) 1649287541
Around 5 p.m., the cops declared the protest an unlawful assembly, and cleared everyone out: protesters, media, and onlookers.
Officers clear the whole block.pic.twitter.com/F4yL4OHWbn— Erin Stone (she/her) (@Erin Stone (she/her)) 1649289058
The four scientists were arrested (with about 50 cops taking part all told), then slapped with misdemeanor trespassing charges and released early Thursday morning.
The world continues to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere this morning and every morning, and the IPCC warns that by the time it releases its next report on climate mitigation, in five or six years, humanity will have most likely burned through the remainder of the "carbon budget" that's left before there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere to meet the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial levels.
The only good news here is that it's still not too late to limit the damage: For every tenth of a degree we can limit total warming, the planet will be a little better off, a little less screwed. If the options for our future are "pretty fucked" and "enormously, civilization-threateningly fucked," then we'll take the version with less fucked in it, please.
But we need to demand immediate action. It's a matter of life and death. We're all in the lifeboats now, so grab an oar and row for dear life.
[IPCC report / LAist / Inside Climate News / Scientific American / Photo: Scientist Rebellion on Twitter]
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Lara Logan, Sh*tcanned By Fox News, Emerges From Cocoon As Full-Fledged Antisemitic Loon
International Jewry is why your daughter dresses slutty, also too.
Disgraced former "60 Minutes" reporter Lara Logan was shitcanned by Fox News and its streaming service, Fox Nation, Logan told a wingnut livestream Monday. Logan hadn't appeared on either the cable channel or the streaming platform since last November, when she proclaimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci was just like the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed monstrous medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz. (We should note that Fox's far more popular host Tucker Carlson, who said the same week that Fauci was exactly like fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, still has his job.)
As Rolling Stone reports, Logan told the "Stand Up America With Major General Paul Vallely" show (how do they come up with these titles?), "I was dumped by Fox. That’s what happened to me.”
We're guessing something else may also have happened to Logan, who over the years has become more and more unhinged in her embrace of rightwing conspiracy theories. More recently, as Media Matters also reported on Monday, Logan has veered out of mainstream, "respectable" wingnut fantasies like Trump's Big Lie or anti-vaccine panic, and has graduated to open antisemitism, combining extremely crude antisemitic slurs with a bunch of crazy conspiracy bullshit.
The now-former host of the Fox Nation streaming show "Lara Logan Has No Agenda" now has no show, and has also spouted any number of conspiracy theories about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, because there's nothing like a world crisis to fuel conspiratorial beliefs. Among other things, she's claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a "moron" who was "installed by the CIA," and claimed that he's really just an actor, while unknown other bad people are really running Ukraine, we just don't know who. Earlier this month she claimed on a rightwing internet show that
"there are “evil, horrible people who want to rule over all of us and enslave us” and that “we're sitting at the gates of Auschwitz” while arguing about “climate change.”
Oh, also, Pizzagate was real, while both the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville and January 6 insurrection were fake, because of course.
She's also claimed that Russia's annexation of Crimea was legitimate, because people there wanted to be free from Ukrainian Nazis, and so on. Some of her bullshit has even been used by Russia to justify the war.
The crazy antisemitism seems to be Logan's latest obsession. On a QAnon internet show called "And We Know," Logan recently explained that Darwin's theory of evolution had to be funded by somebody, and it was probably "the Rothschilds," for reasons. We like the way the video flashes the name of the show every few seconds, which is a really good way to make sure people can follow the thread of Logan's logic, if any.
Does anybody know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from? Look it up: the Rothschilds! It goes right back to 10 Downing Street, and the same people who employed Darwin, and that's when Darwin wrote his theory of evolution and so on and so on.
Logan insisted she wasn't saying any of this was true (although clearly you can "look it up"), just that "Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory, right?"
Also something something all the scientists don't really have the answers, because some scientist "said there's no such thing as freedom," but really they don't know how life came into being, and something made life and the universe happen, so there! Also, have you ever looked at your fingerprints, I mean really looked, man?
Good heavens. In addition to the antisemitism, she's rediscovered Bill O'Reilly's eloquent proof of God's existence, "How'd the Moon get there?"
And then there's Logan's brave March 15 post to her personal Gettr account, in which she bravely declares "Nobody owns me & nobody ever will," which links to a whole assload of crazy antisemitic conspiracy ravings.
That's pretty shocking, really. We thought Gettr had already gone belly-up, and it's still in existence?
The linked article — which appears to date from the Obama administration, since it's full of Barack Obama and bereft of Donald Trump — is really something! At least Logan can say she didn't write it herself, though it's bad enough she seems to think it proves how free she is.
Here's a sample of the prose style:
In 1999 Billy Clinton Over Throws The Glass Steagall Act And Opens The Door For The Rothschild Criminal Banking Family To Pilfer America By Pump/Dump Investment Schemes. To Date, We Once Again See America In The After Wakes Of Schemes Such As The Housing Bubble Scheme And Subjugating America To Years Of Paying Off A False Debt Made By Worthless Derivative Mortgagees. America Enters Another Financial Depression.
We find its ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to its newsletter!
The article also includes the contention that "the Rothschilds" were behind the US Civil War and the JFK and Lincoln assassinations — both of the latter attributed to "OBAMA PUPPET MASTERS ~ THE ROTHSCHILDS" which you have to admit is quite a feat for a Muslim Indonesian child born in Hawaii, Kenya, in 1961.
Also too — near the top, and possibly a great comfort to Logan, with her pro-Russia sentiments — the piece praises Vladimir Putin for his "Purge Of The Rothschild Money Changers," and contends that Putin freed Russia from the grimdark horrors of the "Rothschild-run International Monetary Fund" and the "Rothschild-controlled Paris & London Club Of Creditors was over 36 billion dollars."
We're fairly certain that's not how the IMF actually works.
The crazy-ass rant also included this useful little meme asking the important question, “What Would Zionists Do?” The answer, it appears, is everything bad, from radical feminism, the Queen of England, and open borders, to the Federal Reserve, Hollywood, and porn.
Heck, those nasty Jews are even "the reason your daughter has low self esteem and desperately dresses like a whore."
Also, you gotta love that very timely inset of the popular modern hit "The Little Rascals," featuring the photoshopped faces of Queen Elizabeth, George Soros, Barack Obama, and Jacob Rothschild.
Mind you, we'll again note it's unclear how much of that crap Logan herself believes, but if she's linking to it with the declaration that "nobody owns me," that's pretty freaking telling all on its own. Her crazy claim about "the Rothschilds" funding Charles Darwin seems of a piece with the rest of it, too.
Rolling Stone's description of Logan's Monday interview on a wingnut internet show doesn't appear to contain any such overt antisemitic madness, just the regular conspiratorial madness Logan has been spreading about Russia and Ukraine. She complained that her former network was mostly in the tank for Ukraine and Zelenskyy,
with the exception, she noted, of “a few people like Jesse Watters and Tucker Carlson who are doing their best to add some context and to show what this war is really about.”
Offering her own conspiratorial “context,” Logan insisted that “we’re being lied to” about Ukraine. She claimed without evidence that the country’s military is overrun not just by “neo-Nazis” but by “the descendants of Ukraine’s Nazis … the actual Nazis … the Nazis of World War II.”
Logan also seemed surprised that she's being unfairly called some kind of nut for insisting that Ukraine and its Jewish president — who's a figurehead anyway, remember — are literal Nazis, because aren't Nazis bad and shouldn't she be praised for her courage?
Not that there's necessarily any great contradiction between spreading antisemitic garbage and also denouncing "Nazis," since when you're as far into non-reality as Logan apparently is, logic is only a pretty little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Is she sure her circuits are registering correctly? Her ears are green.
[Media Matters/ Rolling Stone]
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