What Happened Today: January 3, 2022
Covid vaccines fueling virus; Million dollar drugs in our future; What's in our food?
The Big Story
A rapidly spreading Omicron subvariant known as XBB.1.5 has accounted for roughly 75% of new COVID-19 cases in the Northeast region of the United States after sweeping through several Asian nations. Although the XBB family of viruses are no more deadly than previous strains of COVID-19, recent studies show its mutations allow it to evade vaccines designed against earlier strains, existing monoclonal antibody treatments, and previous COVID-19 infections. The findings suggest that multiple doses of COVID-19 vaccines might in fact make people “more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution,” as Allysia Finley wrote on Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.
Observing what appears to be XBB’s evolution to evade human antibodies created in response to both the vaccines and breakthrough infections in those who received the vaccines, a study published in December in Nature offers that “current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants.” This week, the journal Cell found that antibodies in people who’d received four vaccine shots were 145 times as high against earlier COVID-19 strains as they were against the XBB mutation. Similar findings appeared in a December study of healthcare workers who’d received bivalent vaccines, which were designed to thwart the Wuhan and BA.5 variants. Cleveland Clinic found its employees had reduced their chances of infection by 30% when BA.5 was in circulation, but that those who went on to receive four doses were more than three times as likely to become infected compared to the unvaccinated.
“This is not the only study to find a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19,” the Cleveland Clinic authors wrote. “In addition to a vaccine’s effectiveness it is important to examine whether multiple vaccine doses given over time may not be having the beneficial effect that is generally assumed.”
As early as 2020, medical professionals like the Belgian virus expert Geert Vanden Bossche raised concerns that widespread distribution of multiple-dose vaccine treatments could eventually trigger more robust variants that are resistant to both vaccines and human antibodies, thus becoming more deadly to the population as a whole. Bossche was roundly criticized and professionally ostracized at the time for raising questions about the public-health implications of a one-size-fits-all vaccination program.
In the Back Pages: Breathing Trouble
The Rest
→ Children and adults suffering from rare debilitating genetic diseases can tap into a new pool of next-generation treatments that could cure them with a single dose—but there’s a catch: These drugs can cost as much as $3.5 million per dose.
Though it was once a scandal to charge patients more than six figures for any single medicine, drug makers say the types of gene therapy drugs they’re offering can ultimately save patients money because they can cure or significantly improve their condition, meaning they will no longer spend years, if not decades, on other types of medications.
“Yes, this is not an inexpensive treatment,” said Robert Lojewski, a senior vice president at CSL Behring, which recently released a $3.5 million treatment for Hemophilia B. But keep in mind, Lojewski told The Wall Street Journal, “if it works for a number of years, how much savings it actually brings at that price tag.”
For most uninsured patients, seven-figure drugs are out of the question. The big question for insurance companies will be if they foot the bill on these pricey therapies as drug makers start to target diseases that affect larger segments of the population.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-prices-reach-new-highin-the-millions-11671990099
→ Number of the Day: 156
That’s how many times more likely an Orthodox Jew is to become the victim of a hate crime in New York compared to a Jew who is not Orthodox. And compared to other minority groups like Black Americans, the chance of a visibly Jewish American being the victim of a hate crime is 44 times more likely, according to Yisrael Eliashiv, a Substack writer who recently crunched new hate-crime stats from the New York Police and FBI.
Read More: https://mobile.twitter.com/shevereshtus/status/1608276066354749442
→ Thread of the Day:
The thread here is from Calley Means, an entrepreneur who recently founded a health-food and exercise start-up, which might be as much about monetizing America’s obsession with its own obesity as it is to make amends for his time as a consultant for Coca-Cola. As Means writes, he worked for the soda giant just as it rolled out its full-court press against soda taxes while protecting the sugary bottles’ eligibility for food-stamp funding. Alongside efforts to smear anyone critical of soda as essentially racist, Coke also poured millions of dollars into media and academic publications that pushed the idea that soda’s sugar-spiked addictive qualities aside, there’s no bad food, just bad diets.
→ Japan is asking families to please get out of Tokyo, and they’re throwing in a million yen per child—about $7,600—to help them relocate outside the city. For years now, younger people have flocked to the capital city from smaller urban areas and rural villages, leaving behind an older population that’s seen their local businesses flounder without customers or a viable workforce. At the same time, the nation’s birth rate has been on the decline. Population forecasts for 2022 predict the number of new births fell below 800,000, which would be the lowest it’s been in Japan in more than 120 years. Some 1,300 municipalities are currently enrolled in the program that hopes to welcome larger families eager to try on life in a quieter, more rural locale, but in 2021, fewer than 3,000 departing Tokyo denizens signed on to the minimum five-year commitment—statistically so small a slice of the 38 million living in greater Tokyo that it rounded down to zero.
→ Chart of the Day:
Speaking of international food conglomerates with massive lobbying influence, here’s a nice rundown of some of the terrific chemicals available to American consumers that other countries have banned because of adverse health effects and possible links to disease. The list includes ractopamine, a supplement used to feed American cows and pigs but which has been banned in 160 countries in part because of the serious, sometimes deadly effects it has on animals and the potential to damage the human cardiovascular system. Also included is brominated vegetable oil, which is banned in the European Union, Japan, and India but used in American Mountain Dew, despite causing memory loss for long-time users.
→ Flour costs are rising and bread prices are surging all across Europe—but baguette bakers in France are holding the line, at least for now. Thanks in large part to President Emmanuel Macron’s voter-friendly push for energy subsidies during his successful reelection campaign, France has avoided some of the consumer inflation shocks that have zapped other major European economies like Germany and Spain. Macron’s early economic intervention could very well mean France avoids the recession that’s on the horizon for its European neighbors—which is good news for at least the tens of thousands of bakeries and pastry makers in France who’ve only had to increase their prices by about 8% while Europeans on average have seen a loaf of bread jump up by more than twice that. The cheap carbs might yet still come at a cost, however, as the additional level of national debt used to finance the subsidies could crunch the French treasury if interest rates continue to climb or if Europe endures another economically devastating event like a pandemic.
→ Tweet of the Day:
We never did get those flying cars of the future, but at least we’ve got thousands of hours of podcasts to keep us entertained. A software engineer at Stripe, Yacine Brahimi, has posted what appears to be an automated podcast episode using the AI-driven ChatGPT and recently published academic papers about machine learning, all narrated in machine-generated voices of Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss. A boon certainly for that niche group of high-achieving autodidacts who love research papers but don’t like to read, it seems inevitable that soon this automated technology will be able to turn everything into a podcast or YouTube video—maybe even The Scroll included.
→ At least 63 Russian soldiers, and perhaps several hundred, were killed in what amounts to the deadliest strike yet by Ukrainian forces after an air attack last week on a military barracks in Makiivka, a town occupied by the Russians in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Often quiet about battlefield casualties, Moscow nonetheless acknowledged the air-strike fatalities, but a pro-Russian military blogger, Igor Girkin, echoed other pro-Kremlin online analysts who say at least hundreds of troops were killed or missing after four missiles hit the makeshift deployment base. The bloggers were likewise critical of the Russian decision to place such a large number of mobilized troops in an unsecured facility that was adjacent to an armory. “Housing them next to ammunition storage is simply a leadership failure,” Rob Lee, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, wrote on Twitter.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Southern Baptists Look to Revitalize Their Congregations by Maggie Phillips
New churches get ‘planted’ and old ones get ‘replanted,’ trying to turn around declining attendance
When Whodunits Become Woke by Zac Bissonnette
Jonathan Kellerman’s Milo Sturgis is the bestselling, longest-running gay detective in crime fiction history. Could Kellerman create him today?
Glass Onion and the American Con by Ben Samuels
The film’s themes are like its central conceit—painfully obvious and painfully facile
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Breathing Trouble
New research shows the risks from prolonged use of face masks
By Ugo Bardi and Harald Walach
There’s an old story about a guy who jumped into a thorn bush: He wanted to collect berries, but he failed to consider the adverse effects of the plan. Something similar happened with face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Masks were promoted, and often mandated, as necessary safeguards for reducing the chance of infection, while their possible adverse effects were brushed aside. While the science on the benefits of masking is still inconclusive, the latest research now shows that the prolonged use of face masks—especially those with tighter fits like the N95s—could harm wearers by exposing them to dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide.
The risks appear to be especially pronounced for young people. As part of a team of scientists, one of the authors of this article conducted a randomized study of the effects of masking on healthy school aged children in Germany. The results of this research, published in September 2022 in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Research, concluded that wearing masks raised the carbon dioxide (CO₂) “content in inhaled air quickly to a very high level in healthy children in a seated resting position that might be hazardous to children's health.”
These results should not have come as a surprise. It has long been suspected that mask-wearing poses risks. In Germany, for instance, workers required to wear an N95/FFP2 respirator must get a certificate verifying their ability to do so, and even with said certificate, those workers are mandated to take a 30-minute break every 90 minutes.
Only in the 19th century, with the development of germ theory, did masks begin being used as health devices. Then in the early 20th century, masks gained a foothold in hospitals, usually worn by doctors and nurses. The “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918-20 was perhaps the first case of masks being worn by the general public, but we only have scattered photographic pictures of masked people and don’t know how frequently they were worn.
During the 20th century, most scientists believed that masks could be useful only in hospitals for the prevention of surgical wound infections in high-risk cases. Still in 2010, a study overseen by Dr. Ben Cowling, a professor of public health at the University of Hong Kong, found weak evidence, if any, that masks could be a useful tool for stopping airborne infections.
There’s thus every reason to believe that, in March 2020, when Dr. Anthony Fauci discouraged Americans from wearing masks, he was simply stating a widely accepted medical orthodoxy. Population-level mandatory face masking had never been attempted before, and there was no reliable data proving its effectiveness, nor data detailing its adverse effects. It was reasonable to be cautious before recommending such a drastic and untested solution.
Yet this attitude rapidly changed, most likely because of political factors. It is not that politicians were directly meddling with medicine; more likely, they simply wanted to be seen as “doing something.” Masks offered visible evidence that the leaders were acting against the pandemic, and so masks appeared to be a good idea. The medical authorities rapidly sensed what was expected of them—back up the politicos—and they complied, even in the absence of data supporting the decision.
After more than two years of widespread masking, which remained mandatory for young school children long after it was abandoned by the politicians who imposed such measures, we are starting to see more data. But many studies are of poor quality, performed on small populations, based on questionable assumptions, using debatable statistical methods, and often using air that is unnaturally saturated with viral particles.
Some studies do indicate that, at least in some conditions, masks can slow down the diffusion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Masks are not, however, a miracle device that can fully stop the virus. As doctors were saying in early 2020 before the public health establishment reversed its position on the issue, aerosol particles carrying the coronavirus are simply too small to be completely stopped by the filtering tissue of standard masks, and even less so because of how often masks are worn incorrectly.
It is our view, then, after considering the available scholarship, that we cannot establish any clear and conclusive benefits to widespread masking.
Can we establish the presence of any harmful effects? Here, we enter a complicated field of study, as it is difficult to determine the adverse effect of masks on wearers. Such a gap in knowledge is part of a pattern: In the history of medicine, there have been some glaring failures in detecting adverse effects. You may remember, for instance, the story of thalidomide, a drug marketed in the 1950s as a sedative, that was later found to cause birth defects. It had not been properly tested on pregnant women.
One problem with determining adverse effects is that you can’t knowingly expose people to something that you suspect causes serious harm, not even in the name of science. The Nuremberg Code, a set of international ethical principles created after the Doctors Trial for Nazi medical war crimes, prohibits experimentation on human subjects without their explicit consent. Another problem is that adverse effects are often delayed in time. Think of the health effects of cigarettes. Nobody ever died because they smoked one cigarette. After several decades of studies, however, it was possible to determine that if you are a smoker your life expectancy is reduced by a significant number of years.
Just like smoking a single cigarette never killed anyone, wearing a face mask for a few hours or a few days does not cause irreversible damage either. But the immediate short-term physiological effects are detectable: A recent study led by Pritam Sukul, senior medical scientist at the University Medicine Rostock in Germany, found masks to cause hypercarbia (high concentration of CO₂ in the blood), arterial oxygen decline, blood pressure fluctuations, and concomitant physiological and metabolic effects. On a time scale of weeks or months, these effects appear to be reversible. But how can we know what can happen to people who wear masks for several hours a day for several years? Will we have to wait for decades before concluding that masks are bad for people’s health, as was the case with cigarettes?
Not necessarily, for we are able to assess face masks in terms of the air quality breathed by the wearers. One important parameter for air quality is CO₂ concentration. Over the years, a lot of data has been accumulated in this field from miners, astronauts, submariners, and other people exposed to high concentrations of CO₂. Measurable negative effects on mental alertness already occur at CO₂ concentrations over 600 parts per million (ppm), which is only slightly higher than the average concentration in open air (a little more than 400 ppm). Values higher than 1,000-2,000 ppm are not recommended for living spaces, especially for children and pregnant women. 5,000 ppm is the commonly accepted limit in working environments or in submarines and spaceships. Concentrations in the range of 10,000-20,000 ppm are not immediately life-threatening but can only be withstood for short periods. Even higher concentrations may lead to loss of consciousness and death.
So what kind of CO₂ concentration are people exposed to when they wear a face mask? Measuring the concentration of CO₂ inside the small volume of a face mask while it is being used poses practical problems, and there are no standardised methods and procedures to evaluate this. Nevertheless, during the past few years, several papers dealing with this subject were published.
Some of these papers were criticised, but often baselessly. For instance, some fact checkers claimed that the same amount of CO₂ could be found without face masks in exhaled breath. This is true, but trivial. The studies mentioned above measured the amount of CO₂ in the inhaled air under face masks; the fact checkers measured the air exhaled. Other fact checkers provided a priori statements by "experts," including a sports reporter.
Meanwhile, studies that rely on robust capnographic methods that calculate inhaled CO₂ levels from the end-tidal volume of CO₂ under strictly controlled conditions have corroborated our findings about elevated CO₂ levels in masks. In short, there is strong evidence that people wearing face masks, especially the FFP2/N95 type, breathe a concentration of carbon dioxide several times higher than the recommended concentration limits, in the range of over 5,000 ppm and often over 10,000 ppm. In other words, masks may multiply the external CO₂ concentration by a factor of 10, if not more.
Individuals wearing a tight, N95-style face mask are thus breathing air of comparable quality to the air in spacecrafts and submarines. Astronauts and submarines, though, are well trained and in peak physical condition; masks, meanwhile, are often worn by the elderly, the young, and people affected by chronic pathologies. A recent study of more than 20,000 German children who wore masks for an average of more than four hours per day showed that 68% of them reported these kinds of problems.
There are additional risks associated with face masks that should be considered, such as psychological effects and infections from pathogens accumulated in the mask tissue, but we believe that the increased concentrations of CO₂ breathed by mask-wearers is a clear and demonstrated adverse effect that should be known and considered when deciding policies. In short, face masks are not harmless.
Wearing a face mask is not a purely symbolic gesture like wearing a lapel pin or waving a flag, as some people have come to believe. It is not simply an expression of social solidarity, belief in science, or support for health care workers. It can have important adverse effects on health—especially in the case of N95s—and, at the very minimum, citizens should be alerted to the downsides of masking before they make up their minds on the issue. Face masks should be mandated only in special circumstances, and ordinary citizens should wear them only when there is a real and evident risk of infection.
Ugo Bardi is a former professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017), Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021). He has specific experience studying pollutants.
Harald Walach is a clinical psychologist, philosopher, and historian of science. He is currently a Professorial Research Fellow at the Next Society Institute of Kazimieras Simonavicius University in Vilnius, Lithuania. He has conducted a study measuring CO₂ content under face masks in children.
A finding that masking may reduce brain function explains so much of what we’ve experienced the past few years.
Another story about the dangers of wearing a face mask, full of "coulds" and "mights" cause brain damage. Yikes! Did anyone tell all those surgeons who wear one every time they have to breathe over your exposed innards- you know, cause they might or could sneeze that might or could have germs. I hope you don't have the same issue with washing your hands, even when you don't leave anything visible behind.