In an interim report published on Mar. 11, 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the effectiveness rate of the influenza vaccine at 16 percent during 2021-2022. The rate, which the CDC termed as “not statistically significant,” is based on a study involving 3,636 children, adolescents and adults in the United […]
American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna, Inc., which partnered with the U.S. National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to develop an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine being distributed in the United States under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) announced that it is developing a combined single-dose booster vaccine for COVID-19 and seasonal influenza.1 In a […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told The Epoch Times in an e-mail that as of Mar. 8, 2021 over 92 million doses of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 have been injected, with 1,637 deaths occurring following the injections. The CDC claims the vaccines are safe, but a comparison between the rates of deaths […]
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued new updates for influenza vaccines for 2020–2021 “flu season,” primarily for Fluzone and Fluad vaccines. In November 2019, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensed inactivated injectable Fluzone High-Dose Quadrivalent (HD-IIV4) for use in persons aged […]
In a new document providing guidance for public health officials on COVID-19, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates the infection fatality rate (IFR) for the disease at 0.4 percent, or about half the nearly one percent fatality rate the CDC estimated in March 2020 when it was predicting up to 1.7 […]
Health experts say the mortality rate of the coronavirus will likely drop as more is learned about the virus and more cases are accounted for. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization’s director general said, globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than one percent […]
As vaccine-related bills are being introduced into state legislatures this month, a bill (HB1090) has been proposed in the Virginia legislature to require school children to receive every dose of all current and future vaccines added to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) appointed by the U.S. Centers […]
Harvard Medical School graduate and pediatric oncologist Stephanie Taylor, MD once took care of children with cancer at a teaching hospital. She wondered why many of her young patients contracted infections, such as influenza, despite the hospital’s heavy emphasis on prevention. Taylor began to suspect increased susceptibility to contracting infections might have something to do […]
On Aug. 6, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG submitted a biologics license application (BLA) for the spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) gene therapy Zolgensma (onasemnogene abeparvovec-xioi) with manipulated data and failed to inform regulators until June 28, 2019—more than a month after the […]
In a lawsuit filed by the state of Oklahoma against Johnson & Johnson, Inc., Purdue Pharma LP and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries were ordered on Aug. 26, 2019 to pay $572 million in penalties for helping to fuel the opioid crisis in Oklahoma.1 Before the trial […]