Christiane Druml, Herwig Czech: Comment. A Pandemic is no private matter: the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in Austria, in: The Lancet Respiratory Medicine online (February 17, 2022), online in: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(22)00063-7. On February 5, 2022, the first mandatory Covid 19 vaccination law in Europe came into force in Austria. In their commentary, the authors trace the history and path of the law, which represented a sudden about-face by the Austrian government.
Yearly archives: 2022
96 posts
The Lancet Respiratory Medicine (ed.): Editorial. Future pandemics: failing to prepare means preparing to fail, in: The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 10, Issue 3 (March 1, 2022), pp. 221-222, online in: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(22)00056-X. In their editorial, the editors of The Lancet Respiratory Medicine advocate for a global pandemic response with an integrative and multi-pronged approach that includes not only the Covid-19 pandemic but also other current and future pandemics. Many countries, especially those with middle and low incomes, are still heavily involved in the fight against covid-19 and are also inadequately prepared for future pandemics. Investments made through global funds in mechanisms […]
Stéphanie Vandentorren, Sabira Smaïli u. a.: The effect of social deprivation on the dynamic of SARS-CoV-2 infection in France: a population-based analysis, in: The Lancet Public Health 7 (March 2022), S. e240-e249, online in: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(22)00007-X. Summary of the article: “Background Data on health inequalities related to the dynamic of SARS-CoV-2 infection in France are scarce. The aim of this study was to analyse the association between an area-based deprivation indicator and SARS-CoV-2 incidence, positivity, and testing rates between May 2020 and April 2021. Methods We analysed data reported to the Système d’Information de Dépistage Populationnel surveillance system between May 14, […]
RECOVERY Collaborative Group (ed.): Casirivimab and imdevimab in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled,open-label, platform trial, in: The Lancet 339, Issue 10325 (February 12, 2022), S. 665-676, online in: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00163-5. Summary of the study “Background Casirivimab and imdevimab are non-competing monoclonal antibodies that bind to two different sites on the receptor binding domain of the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein, blocking viral entry into host cells. The authors aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of casirivimab and imdevimab administered in combination in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. Methods RECOVERY is a randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial […]
Max Schroeder, Spyridon Lazarakis, Rebecca Mancy, Konstantinos Angelopoulos: How Do Pandemics End? Two Decades of Recurrent Outbreak Risk Following the Main Waves, in: CESifo Working Paper Nr. 9475 (December 2021). Abstract “The risk of recurrent outbreaks following the main waves of a pandemic has been acknowledged. The authors provide evidence of the scale and duration of this outbreak risk. They compile municipal public health records and use national data to model the stochastic process of mortality rates after the main pandemic waves of two historical pandemics across multiple locations. For the 1890-91 influenza pandemic in England and Wales, as well […]
Yan Xie, Evan Xu, Benjamin Bowe, Ziyad Al-Aly: Long-term cardiovascular outcomes of COVID-19, in: Nature Medicine (Februrary 7, 2022), online in: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01689-3. Abstract “The cardiovascular complications of acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are well described, but the post-acute cardiovascular manifestations of COVID-19 have not yet been comprehensively characterized. In their study the authors used national healthcare databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs to build a cohort of 153,760 individuals with COVID-19, as well as two sets of control cohorts with 5,637,647 (contemporary controls) and 5,859,411 (historical controls) individuals, to estimate risks and 1-year burdens of a set of […]
Interviews Lea Gekle: The Great Fear of 2020 by Karl Heinz Roth, in: Endnotes (May 2022; Interview conducted on March 10, 2022). “Below we publish Lea Gekle’s interview with Roth, in which he presents his analysis of these measures, as well as his criticisms of the Zero Covid platform defended by some on the German left. Today, when the severe lockdown in Shanghai is producing desperate hunger riots, Roth’s book is a timely intervention. We hope, as he suggests, that it can be the beginning of a serious debate on the return of what he and his comrades in the […]
Monday, March 21 in Bremen Lecture and discussion, moderated by Arno Armgort Venue: Haus der Wissenschaft Sandstr. 4/5 28195 Bremen Start of event: 7:30 p.m. Link to the event announcement Tuesday, March 22 in Münster Talk with Michael Ramminger from ITPOL Venue: Hörsaal F2 am Fürstenberghaus Domplatz 20-22 48143 Münster Start of event: 6:30 p.m. Link to the event announcement Wednesday, March 23 in Wuppertal Lecture and discussion, moderated by Dieter Nelles Venue: Kommunikationszentrum Die Börse Wolkenburg 100 42119 Wuppertal Start of event: 7 p.m. Link to the event announcement Thursday, March 24 in Munich Book […]
Karl Heinz Roth: Kein Grund zur Entwarnung [No reason to give the all-clear], in: Tagebuch No. 3 (March 1, 2022). In his article, Karl Heinz Roth outlines the Covid 19 pandemic as “the worst respiratory pandemic since the influenza catastrophe of 1918 to 1920.” He describes the lack of preparation, despite all advance warnings, and the panic-stricken responses of those with political responsibility. Alternative concepts had been marginalized. The vaccination campaign relied increasingly on coercive measures, and the situation was aggravated by the rise of vaccination nationalism, especially in emerging and developing countries. The manifold consequences of the pandemic could […]
Erik Duijvelaar u.a.: Long-term clinical outcomes of COVID-19 patients treated with imatinib, in: The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, online in: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(22)00052-2 (February 17, 2022). In this article the authors report the 90-day outcomes of the CounterCOVID study and investigate the mechanisms underlying the clinical benefit of imatinib. “Hypoxaemia in COVID-19 is primarily caused by disruption of the alveolocapillary barrier on inflammation and dysfunction of the endothelium. To date, antiviral or immune-modulatory treatment options have been thoroughly studied, yet there is no approved therapy targeting endothelial dysfunction. Imatinib is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor that attenuates vascular leakage under inflammatory conditions. In the […]
Lavienraj Premraj, Nivedha V. Kannapadi, Jack Briggs, Stella M. Seal, Denise Battaglini, Jonathon Fanning, Jacky Suen, Chiara Robba, John Fraser, Sung-Min Cho: Mid and long-term neurological and neuropsychiatric manifestations of post-COVID-19 syndrome: A meta-analysis, in: Journal of the Neurological Sciences 434 (2022) 120162, 7 pages. Key points Question: How commonly are neurological and neuropsychiatric symptoms reported three months or more after acute COVID-19 onset in adults? Findings: In a meta-analysis of 19 studies encompassing 11,324 patients (hospitalised and non-hospitalised), overall prevalence for neurological symptoms three months after COVID-19 onset was: fatigue (37%), brain fog (32%), memory issues (27%), attention […]
David Adam: Die wahre Zahl der Coronapandemie-Toten. Übersterblichkeit wegen COVID-19 [The true number of corona pandemic deaths. Excess mortality due to COVID-19], in: Spektrum.de (January 24, 2022). According to official estimates, more than 5 million people should have died as a result of COVID-19 by the beginning of 2022. This estimate does not take into account the number of unreported cases. As the author of this article has pointed out, according to The Economist magazine, the number of actual deaths is two to four times higher than the official figure. Meanwhile, a determination of the actual number of Covid-19 fatalities, […]
Kasper Staub et al.: Historically High Excess Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain, in: Annals of Internal Medicine (February 2022), M21-3824, online in: https://doi.org/10.7326/M21-3824. Abstract Background: Excess mortality quantifies the overall mortality impact of a pandemic. Mortality data have been accessible for many countries in recent decades, but few continuous data have been available for longer periods. Objective: To assess the historical dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 for 3 countries with reliable death count data over an uninterrupted span of more than 100 years. Setting: Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain, which were militarily neutral and […]
Paul-Ehrlich-Institut: Sicherheitsbericht. Verdachtsfälle von Nebenwirkungen und Impfkomplikationen nach Impfung zum Schutz vor COVID-19 seit Beginn derImpfkampagne am 27.12.2020 bis zum 31.12.2021, Langen, February 7, 2022. The Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), as the Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedical Products, reports on suspected cases of adverse reactions or vaccine complications reported from Germany in temporal association with vaccination with the mRNA vaccines Comirnaty (BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH) and Spikevax (MODERNA BIOTECH SPAIN, S.L.) and the vector vaccines Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca AB) and COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen for protection against COVID-19 from the start of the vaccination campaign on Dec. 27, 2020, to Dec. 31, […]
Paul-Ehrlich-Institut: Sicherheitsbericht. Verdachtsfälle von Nebenwirkungen und Impfkomplikationen nach Impfung zum Schutz vor COVID-19 seit Beginn derImpfkampagne am 27.12.2020 bis zum 30.11.2021, Langen, December 23, 2021. The Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), as the Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines, reports on suspected cases of adverse reactions or vaccine complications reported from Germany in temporal relation to vaccination with the mRNA vaccines Comirnaty (BioNTech Manufacturing GmbH) and Spikevax (MODERNA BIOTECH SPAIN, S.L.) and the vector vaccines Vaxzevria (AstraZeneca AB) and COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen for protection against COVID-19 from the start of the vaccination campaign on Dec. 27, 2020, to Nov. 30, 2021. […]
International Labour Organization (ed.): ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the world of work. Eighth edition. Updated estimates and analysis (October 27, 2021). The report gives a global overview of how countries are grappling with the recovery, eighteen months into the crisis. Based on new data, it provides a detailed picture of the different recovery trends between developed and developing countries. It also analyzes the impact of vaccination rates on labour market by region, and the distortions the COVID-19 crisis is having on productivity and enterprises.
Pierre L. Siklos: Did the great influenza of 1918-1920 trigger a reversal of the first era of globalization?, CAMA (Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis) Working Paper 95/2021 (November 2021). The author revisits the 1918-20 pandemic and asks whether it led to a reversal in the rise of trade and financial globalization that preceded it. Using annual data for 17 countries for the 1870-1928 period, a variety of tests and techniques are used to draw some robust conclusions. Overall, the pandemic a century ago interrupted, but did not put an end, to the first globalization of the 20th century. However, two […]
Francesco Brusa and Paolo Do, Interview with Sergio Bologna: What remains of the 1970s tradition of ‘Medicina democratica’ in today’s protests against the Green Pass?, published in Italian in: DinamoPress (October 25, 2021). From Trump to anti-vaccinationists, today people caught up in neoliberal ideology claim the concept of ”freedom”. Do you see any contradictions in its widespread use? The contradictions one can run into when using the term ”freedom” is an issue that has preoccupied me since the late 1980s, when I began thinking about self-employment. Free and independent work, it was said, was far removed from the slavery […]
International Monetary Fund: World Economic Outlook Update. Rising Caseloads, A Disrupted Recovery, and Higher Inflation, January 2022. The World Economic Outlook is a report by the staff of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), usually published twice a year. It contains the IMF staff economists’ analyses of short- and medium-term developments in the world economy. The chapters provide both an overview and more detailed analysis of the world economy; they address issues affecting industrial countries, developing countries, and economies in transition to market economies; and they deal with topics of urgent current interest. Appendices, boxes, graphs, and an extensive statistical appendix […]
World Bank: Global Economic Prospects, January 2022. The global recovery is set to decelerate amid diminished policy support, continued COVID-19 flare-ups, and lingering supply bottlenecks. In contrast to that in advanced economies, output in emerging market and developing economies will remain markedly below pre-pandemic trends over the forecast horizon. The outlook is clouded by various downside risks, including new COVID-19 outbreaks, the possibility of de-anchored inflation expectations, and financial stress in a context of record-high debt levels. If some countries eventually require debt restructuring, this will be more difficult to achieve than in the past. Climate change may increase commodity […]