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KPFA - Corona Calls episodes
- Corona Calls for 01.06.2025
Discussed in this episode:
- There’s another case of confirmed severe bird flu requiring hospitalization — this time in Louisiana.This is a different strain (D1.1) from the one infecting cattle herds (B3.13); the most likely source of infection was a bird.
- A recently-documented case of the D1.1 strain in a teenager in British Columbia required three weeks of breathing support via intubation.
- The current CDC guidance allows for COVID vaccination at up to 2-month intervals for adults who are immunocompromised (scroll down to the bottom of Table 2).
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]
Tune in live Monday mornings at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org.
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 01.06.2025 appeared first on KPFA.
26 min - Corona Calls for 12.23.24
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]
Tune in live Monday mornings at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org.
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 12.23.24 appeared first on KPFA.
39 min - Corona Calls for 12.16.2024 – Where is the winter wave?
Discussed in this episode:
- The CDC’s dashboard shows little indication of a winter surge in cases so far. This may only indicate a delayed surge, owing to residual population immunity from a summer case surge that carried into the fall.
- Brian (who is writing this) screwed up! A child illness in Marin possibly related to consuming raw milk has not, in fact, been been ruled out as a case of avian influenza case.
What’s going on: there are conflicting results from lab tests of specimens taken from the sick child, so public health authorities have not conclusively determined whether the illness did or didn’t result from avian influenza.How Brian got it wrong:- This article in a local news outlet was, initially, incorrectly-headlined “Marin illness ruled out as avian influenza,” even though the body of the story makes clear that avian influenza was not ruled out. (News headlines are generally not written by the reporters who write the stories).
- Google’s cached search results preserved the false headline even after it had been changed on the paper’s website.
- Brian saw the headline float by over the weekend without reading the story, then did a quick Google search during the live show when the topic came up, and relayed the bad information from the search preview on the air. Which is a great study in how misinformation can spread without malicious intent, and a reminder to read past the headline if you’re going to rely on any information from a story.
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]
Tune in live Monday mornings at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org.
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 12.16.2024 – Where is the winter wave? appeared first on KPFA.
42 min - Corona Calls for 12.09.2024 – Boosters reduce Long Covid
Discussed in this episode:
- The USDA has announced a national program for testing milk samples from dairies for H5N1 avian influenza.
- A new study on health data in Singapore suggests getting boosted with newer bivalent vaccines reduced the chances of getting Long Covid after infection by about 38% (when compared to people who just got boosted with the original COVID vaccine)
- The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its 500+ page report. It blames the pandemic a on a lab leak (a possibility that expert communities have not written off, but consider unlikely), criticizes social distancing and masking mandates that were used to manage the spread of COVID early on, and praises the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed (which accelerated development of COVID vaccines) and that administration’s travel bans (which did almost nothing to slow the spread of COVID). The committee’s Democratic minority released a report rebutting many of the major conclusions. If there’s a takeaway, it’s that public health policy — which was an area of bipartisan lawmaking for the first couple years of the pandemic — has become politically polarized.
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]
Tune in live Monday mornings at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org.
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 12.09.2024 – Boosters reduce Long Covid appeared first on KPFA.
27 min - Corona Calls for 12.02.2024 – Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to head NIH
Discussed in this episode:
- To head the National Institutes of Health, incoming President Donald Trump has picked Jay Bhattacharya, a medical doctor who’s never practiced medicine, and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration — an early-covid manifesto that basically called for . . . letting it rip.
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]
Tune in live Monday mornings at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org.
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 12.02.2024 – Trump picks Jay Bhattacharya to head NIH appeared first on KPFA.
38 min - Corona Calls for 11.25.2024 – public health under Trump 2.0
Discussed in this episode:
- Donald Trump has announced his picks to hold key public health positions: prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is up for Secretary of Health and Human Services; former Republican lawmaker David Weldon, a frequent critic of vaccination programs run by the Centers for Disease Control, is his pick to run . . . the Centers for Disease Control.
- H5N1 Avian Influenza keeps picking up steam. In California, a batch of raw milk has tested with high levels of the virus; in Canada, a teenager’s been hospitalized and put on breathing support with a variant of the virus with mutations that appear to increase the likelihood of human-to-human transmission.
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected] . Tune in live Monday mornings at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org.
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 11.25.2024 – public health under Trump 2.0 appeared first on KPFA.
40 min - Corona Calls for 11.12.2024
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]. Tune in live Monday mornings (or Tuesdays when Monday’s a holiday) at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 11.12.2024 appeared first on KPFA.
38 min - Corona Calls for 10.28.2024 – the next round of vaccines
Discussed in this episode:
- After considering reams of data, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has recommended another round of COVID vaccination in the spring for people who are older or more-vulnerable for other reasons.
- The federal government has started to put some significant money into the development of next-generation COVID vaccines, including nasal sprays that may prove better at preventing infection (injectable vaccines are quite effective at preventing hospitalization and death, but their effectiveness against developing any infection at all wanes quickly).
- Anti-vax icon RFK Jr. says he’ll be part of Donald Trump’s transition team, vetting agency appointments.
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]. Tune in live Monday mornings (or Tuesdays when Monday’s a holiday) at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 10.28.2024 – the next round of vaccines appeared first on KPFA.
38 min - Corona Calls for 10.21.2024 – 13 Bird Flu Cases in California
Discussed in this episode:
- California now has 13 confirmed cases of H5N1 Avian Influenza in humans – an order of magnitude more than any other state.
- It might be possible to build a vaccine using virus-like particles that induces long-lasting B-cell immunity, by placing the spike proteins closer together.
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]. Tune in live Monday mornings (or Tuesdays when Monday’s a holiday) at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 10.21.2024 – 13 Bird Flu Cases in California appeared first on KPFA.
39 min - Corona Calls for 09.30.2024 – COVID and the brain
Discussed in the episode:
- Two new studies are out on the long-term impacts of COVID on the brain: the first tracked impacts on people with COVID severe enough to require hospitalization, and found cognitive deficits equivalent in magnitude to 20 years of ageing; the second studied the impacts of deliberately (!) exposing young, healthy volunteers to the original strain of the Sars-COV2 virus, and found measurably worse cognitive performance in the ones who contracted COVID a year after they were infected.
- A new paper casts more light on why COVID immunity doesn’t seem to last very long: neither vaccination, nor vaccination plus natural infection, induce the body to make the long-lived plasma cells which produce neutralizing antibodies for Sars-COV2. (High antibody levels can prevent an exposure from turning into an infection, whereas T-cell immunity — which does endure after vaccination — is more helpful at stopping an infection from becoming life-threatening.)
To send us a question in advance of next week’s show, write to: [email protected]. Tune in live Monday mornings (or Tuesdays when Monday’s a holiday) at 7:30am Pacific at kpfa.org
To chip in: Mention Corona Calls when you contribute to KPFA’s fund drive at kpfa.org/support
Podcast music credit: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
The post Corona Calls for 09.30.2024 – COVID and the brain appeared first on KPFA.
37 min
About KPFA - Corona Calls
From the publisher's feed
A weekly update on new research and developments concerning COVID-19 (and occasionally other infectious diseases that hit the news).
We take questions via call-in during the live broadcast, Mondays at 7:33am Pacific, streaming via kpfa.org. Podcasts with show notes go up later the same day. Between live shows, we take questions via email at [email protected] .
Our guest most weeks is Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus of infectious diseases at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Our question-wrangler most weeks is Brian Edwards-Tiekert, host of KPFA’s morning public affairs program, UpFront.
Music: Now Son by Podington Bear, licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.