🚨 Can common infections cause psychiatric conditions in children? Yes.

A UK health minister Maria Caulfield told parliament on September 12th that the childhood condition PANDAS/PANS exists and is caused by infections. It will fund more research.🧵 Lack of recognition of PANDAS/PANS is a problem internationaly.

A new piece by me describes the growing consensus that the condition seems to be driven by an autoimmune reaction that targets regions of the brain
@DrChrisPitt @DAgalliu @More4Scienceeconomist.com/science-and-te…

So one of the new narratives emerging is that @MichaelWorobey went on a media blitz to promote their version of events—in order to bolster the case for a zoonosis in Wuhan.

I suspect this is inaccurate.

For one thing *prior* to this story breaking in the Atlantic, Worobey… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… In other words it seems likely the team had hoped and planned to keep a media silence around this discussion of the new data—because it wasn’t theirs.

But as the group of people who knew about that meeting grew, it would have likely proven difficult to keep a lid on the story.

So @who weekly presser started and @tedros talking. Says data was uploaded in late January. Data not definitive answer to how pandemic began @WHO @tedros This data should have been shared three years ago says @tedros. Calls on China to be transparent. Understanding how covid began moral and scientific imperative

Help needed. Poll at the end. 🧵

Should we say "obese people"?

One researcher tells me not to do this because we don't say "cancer people" and it is stigmatising.

One of our style gurus (SG) counters: "obese is an adjective, cancer is a noun". So one might write "obese mothers have a higher risk of gestational diabetes".

I go back to the researcher and he counters back:

"cancerous is also an adjective. But you would never use it to describe someone with cancer".

Researcher adds,

Couple of interesting @Airfinity slides at the @IFPMA briefing earlier.

First one shows that if 50% of production is shifted to make a variant vaccine that there will be a three billion dose shortfall by the middle of 2022.

Why? The reason is the overheads that accrue with switching from one vaccine to another on a production line. (Stop the line, clean it, restart it, get it inspected, and so on).

This is the first quantification I have seen of the hidden costs of moving to variant vaccines.

"At this point we believe there is hope that the severity is lower" #Omicron

https://twitter.com/natashaloder/status/1470683177438040067

My latest. 📰

A new analysis of vaccine forecasts by @Airfinity suggests that this month, G7 countries could redistribute 500m doses of vaccine with no impact on their vaccination plans (inc. boosters)* 💉🌍

economist.com/international/… And this year, 1.2bn surplus doses can be moved from G7 countries (exc. 🇯🇵)

Another analysis by @airfinity suggests the consequences of not doing this will be the loss of more than 1m lives.

There is also surplus vaccine outside the G7.

So the JCVI on children's vaccines.

I'm going to stick my neck out a bit and say that I'm actually glad that the group did an analysis that only considers the benefits of vaccination to children.

Let me explain... Many argue that educational considerations and broader benefits to society etc mean that vaccines for 12-15 are warranted. That is certainly correct.

But parents of kids want to know where the risk-benefit lies in this new vaccine just for their own children.

1/ A bit of overmatter. One of the shifts that has gone fairly unremarked is how @WHO has recently moved from being out of favour with America, to being firmly out of favour with China. 🧵 2/ This is recent Chinese propaganda (which is also anti-semitic) showing @drtedros doing @SecBlinken's bidding on tracing the origins of covid-19 🦇

I was talking to @MMKavanagh about China, the US and @WHO recently for a piece I'm working on.

⛓️Let's talk about vaccine supply chains! (yay!) 💉🌍✌️

If we are to make 11bn doses of vaccine this year, there is an urgent need to address supply chain issues or we will not be able to make all these doses. 🧵 ⛓️Recap: in March many firms in the sector met at Chatham House and talked about their concerns over vaccine supply chains.

At the time there were no stated impacts on covid vaccines but the signs were ominous. (Problems on lines that make drugs using the same equipment.)

So finally I have an answer to what has happened to Novavax production in India, thanks to the difficulty getting raw materials out of the US. The news was worse than I expected.

There is says, Stan Erck of that firm, a "global raw material supply difficulty".

https://twitter.com/natashaloder/status/1388777022558703617

Novavax lines in India and the UK have been affected by shortages of items needed from the US.

Start with the UK which has been manufacturing this vaccine for a while (not yet approved).

Novavax is struggling with 3 key things: biobags, media, and filters. @halhod

Deputy chief medical officer Van Tam says UK covid cases are as low as they are going to get. Here is a visual reminder of where Israel and UK are at currently with cases (ours are just over 2,000 a day). The briefing can be seen here:

January 23rd edition. We have so many vaccine and covid stories & visuals this week, I've assembled a reading list of them all.

How fast can vaccination against covid-19 make a difference? Israel has some answers. economist.com/science-and-te… A successful vaccination drive will be a shot in the arm for Boris Johnson's government
economist.com/britain/2021/0…

For anyone following the dosing debate @peterbachmd @matthewherper this has just been published.

Unfortunately, I have to go and make supper for my family. I look forward to reading your thoughts.

Breaking: Singapore proposing social distancing measures in the wake of evidence of some community spread. Warns more stringent measures might be necessary. #2019n_CoV Minister says: First, we will advise all event organisers to cancel or defer non-essential large-scale events. For those who wish to proceed, we will want them to take all necessary precautions....#2019n_CoV

@JohnTuckerPhD @John_LaMattina Peer reviewed paper in Addiction. sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/… @JohnTuckerPhD @John_LaMattina “Put simply, drug-related payments to physicians seem to increase drug prescriptions, and higher payments seem to increase them more."

Fantastic news. @DrMikeRyan from @WHO spoke this morning of significant progress in DRC, and expresses gratitude and hope that the world is getting on top of this virus.

Ebola is still transmitting but is now cornered in a smaller geographic area. Lots of hard work getting to this point with Ebola. @DrMikeRyan says “I do think that vaccination has had a major impact on the dynamics of the epidemic”.

THREAD: Sometime in the next few weeks I'm expecting Apple to switch on its ECG function on its watch in the UK. Apple is not ready to discuss how this device will be approved. Nor whether it has provided any data on its watch to the health services such as @NHSEngland that will have to handle patients.

@JulianTreadwel1 @BBCNewsnight @deb_cohen @carlheneghan Having talked with @DRBLUNGS & @carlheneghan I think it is worth explaining that the Manchester lung health check study has not killed 1 in 1,000 people. They have done over 2500 scans and have no screening-related deaths. This is also true for the Liverpool pilot (1300 people). @JulianTreadwel1 @BBCNewsnight @deb_cohen @carlheneghan @DRBLUNGS The Canadian analysis said to be best evidence for lung cancer screening uses US protocol written *20 years ago*. Clinicians like @DRBLUNGS know that it is possible to do vastly better and has been saying so since 2013.

My goodness, these new documents about Purdue Pharma and its ties to Tufts University medical school and Massachusetts General Hospital, and the influence Purdue had on the curriculum of student docs and the perception of #opioids are hair raising.

statnews.com/2019/01/15/mas… According to this filing by the Mass AG. Purdue established the Tufts Masters of Science in Pain Research, Education and Policy, an annual lecture on pain medicine, a Sackler was on the board of the school of medicine, and Purdue employees regularly taught a seminar on opioids...