New Coronavirus News from 1 Sep 2022

Anthony Fauci, loved and hated, plots his next move: 'I'm not going ... [Science, 1 Sep 2022]

HOMENEWSSCIENCEINSIDERANTHONY FAUCI, LOVED AND HATED, PLOTS HIS NEXT MOVE: ‘I’M NOT GOING TO SIT IN MY HOUSE’

Anthony Fauci, loved and hated, plots his next move: ‘I’m not going to sit in my house’
In a candid exit interview, the NIAID head reflects on the seven presidents he served, controversial decisions, and feuding with Rand Paul

In 1984, when Anthony Fauci took over as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), his wife gave him a plant for the new office. Both the palm and the 81-year-old physician are still there, the giant plant now crowding the office of one of the most celebrated—and polarizing—scientific figures in U.S. history. But not for much longer. Fauci announced on 22 August that he would step down at the end of the year from both NIAID and his post as the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden.

“What am I going to do with this plant? It’s a monster. I can’t fit it in any other place,” he joked this week from his NIAID office to Science Senior Correspondent Jon Cohen, who has conducted many candid interviews with the institute chief, starting more than 30 years ago with the emergence of an earlier pandemic, AIDS.

For many people in the United States, Fauci became the public figure trusted above all others to guide them through COVID-19. The hero worship was evident in Fauci bobbleheads, “In Fauci We Trust” yard signs, and baseball cards that feature him throwing out a first pitch. But many others—including former President Donald Trump and some of his top advisers—turned on Fauci. They saw his advice as inconsistent and misleading, and portrayed him as a threat to the social order, the economy, and the health of the public. In this alternative world, the yard signs say “Fauci for Prison,” T-shirts declare “Even My Dog Hates Fauci,” and ballcaps call him a fraud or worse. He and his family have faced death threats, and his house has had a Secret Service detail stationed outside for protection.

In a 2021 webcast interview at the annual meeting of AAAS (publisher of Science), Fauci said he wouldn’t retire until there were vaccines for HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis (TB). In his interview with Science this week, Fauci explained his change of mind, acknowledged some missteps during the pandemic, and discussed what he might do next. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What triggered your decision to leave at the end of this year? You had a much longer range view when we spoke in February 2021 for the AAAS meeting, and then you later said you would retire at the end of Biden’s first term.

A: No, no, I never said that I would retire at the end of Biden’s first term. Please go back and look at my words. Somebody asked me on television, if Donald Trump was the next president, would you stay and work with him? And I said, it doesn’t matter if he’s the next president or if there’s another Republican or even if Joe Biden has a second term. I don’t plan to be here at the end of the day.

I walked onto the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus as a 27-year-old guy who just finished his medical residency at the New York hospital, and it’s 6 decades years later. I’ve accumulated an unprecedented amount of experience. One of the things I had wanted to do deep down was to be here at the end of the discovery of an HIV vaccine. And this is the truth—and I’m telling you and I haven’t told anybody—I said, you know, we’re not going to get an HIV vaccine for another decade at least. I was joking when I said malaria and TB.

Q: You really haven’t answered the question precisely. Was it the threats to your three daughters and your wife? The attacks in the media and Congress? What is it that finally just made you say, I’m done with this job?

A: It was none of the above. As a guy whose known me for decades, I don’t lie to you. As the Trump administration was ending, I was vaguely considering wanting to have at least a few years when I’m still energetic, enthusiastic, and passionate about doing something outside of the realm of the government. Then the president calls me up right after being elected and says, one of the first things I’m going to do, Tony, is ask you to be my chief medical adviser. I said yes, fully thinking that at the end of that first year of the Biden administration, we’d be done with COVID, it really would be in the rearview mirror.

At the end of that year, it became clear that that’s not going to happen. And I had long conversations with my best adviser, namely my wife, who said, you know, this is not going to disappear. [Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, heads the bioethics division at NIH’s Clinical Center.]

So I said to myself, you know, I’m going to be 82 in December, what do I have further to offer?

Despite the knives and the slings and the arrows, I’ve achieved a degree of being kind of a hero to some people. So let me use that to inspire people. So I said, when can I do that? I decided over the spring and summer that the best time to do it is when you’re getting somewhat of a steady state with this disease, so I could transition out of here.

Q: Is some of the vitriol toward you about being a flip-flopper with your pandemic advice a result of having to make public health decisions in public in real time?

A: When you’re doing an experiment, you collect data, you validate it, you scrub it, you analyze it, and then you write something that’s based on science that’s not dynamic, but is immutable.

When you’re dealing with a pandemic response, it’s very dynamic, and a somewhat mysterious evolution of a process that has a lot of consequences, because people’s lives are involved. The public expects you to analyze the situation and come out with daily proclamations about what should be done. When you’re humble and scientific enough to say, you know, we were saying this a week, a month, 2 months ago, but now things have really changed, that’s taken as flip-flopping, being wrong, and having made a mistake.

The classic one I know that you’re referring to is about masks, right? How many times are we gonna go over that? The surgeon general tweets, please do not buy masks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, masks are unnecessary. I, as one spokesman, say, you know, we don’t know if it works outside of the health care setting. Nobody is fully aware of the aerosol spread. And we had no real idea that 60% of the transmissions were by an asymptomatic person. So, right then, we shouldn’t necessarily be wearing a mask. As soon as [the known facts] changed. I said, whoa, wait a minute, we better be wearing a mask in an indoor setting. And that becomes flip-flopping arrogance.

Q: In retrospect, do you think you could have framed it more cautiously in the early days and said, we don’t really know enough right now, it doesn’t look like we need masks, and there’s a shortage of N95s?

A: Yeah, probably so but that’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear what should we do? I probably should have retrospectively couched it in a way that was a little bit more flexible. But I can tell you, Jon, if I did, it’s likely I would have been labeled as a wallflower, he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Q: So what are you going to do? You’ve said you’re going to write a memoir. You’ve never been much motivated by money.

A: If I was motivated by money, I would have taken the 100 jobs I’ve been offered for 20 times my salary.

I don’t know, Jon, and I’m being very honest with you. Let me tell you what I did. I went to the Office of the General Counsel, and I said, I want to know what I can plan [for my post-NIAID retirement]. And they said, if you want to stay pristine, you plan nothing until you walk out the door. Then no one can accuse you of any conflicts of interest, of letting out little signals about what I’m going to do. Why are you looking so skeptically at me?

Q: I just imagine you have some dreams.

A: I don’t know what that’s going to be. It may be hooking up with a university that’s willing to make me a senior professor on their faculty. It may be going with a foundation. I can tell you one thing I’m not going to do. I’m not going to sit in my house with a Gmail address.

Q: You’ve published more than 1100 papers. Your first one was in 1965 on celiac disease, and then over the next 15 years, you published 62 papers on Wegener’s granulomatosis. That could have been your career. You never broke into Nature or Science with those papers. It isn’t until AIDS surfaced that you started regularly publishing in high-impact journals. You were already well into your career before you found what became your deep passion and focus.

A: When I started seeing desperately ill young gay men, it turned me around. That moved me like I never was moved before in medicine. And I decided I was going to pivot. I had had a very successful career that had already gotten me into most of the societies, the young Turks, the old Turks, but then I said, this is really something that I want to devote my career to. From the fall of 1981, right up through the time that we had very successful antiviral drugs, I was taking care of very, very sick people who had HIV. And that inspired me with a passion that we really have got to learn about this disease. And that’s what got me being fanatically a workaholic, about research on that.

Q: Looking back, who was the easiest president to work with? I know who the most difficult one was.

A: I wouldn’t want to say who was the easiest. They were very different. And the difference often was dictated by the circumstances that defined their presidency. I had a very, very warm, almost grandfather-to-grandson relationship with George H.W. Bush. A fine, fine gentleman. I had probably the most impactful relationship with George W. Bush, because he allowed me to be the chief architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR]. If you want to look at my career, in lives saved, the most important thing I’ve done might be PEPFAR.

[PEPFAR has invested $100 billion in helping more than 50 countries prevent and treat HIV infections.] But I wouldn’t have been in a position to do what I did with PEPFAR unless I had the president trusting me as I did in [Bill] Clinton’s administration.

Q: Do you think NIH directors should stay in the same position for decades, the way you have? Or should NIH set term limits?

A: It should be flexible. And it depends on the individual and on what’s going on. I don’t buy those kinds of broad statements. I think you should be evaluated the way we are, every 4 years, by an outside group. I’m all for performance-based longevity.

Q: Do you have any advice for NIH about who they should look for or what type of person?

A: The type of person but not a person—that would not be appropriate. You need somebody who clearly has scientific credibility and really understands the science. It also has to be somebody who is articulate enough to be able to navigate the degree of public exposure you will have, because you will be involved in the next outbreak and the next public health crisis, which very often is an infectious disease.

Q: What do you want to accomplish between now and December?

A: I’d like to guide the good research being done in the arena of both mucosal, nasal vaccines for respiratory diseases, as well as more durable vaccines that protect against entire families of viruses. I’m a pusher. We meet as a group at least three, four times a week and I go OK, what are we doing? I try to be not a pain in the ass, but I’d like to keep my foot on the pedal between now and then to keep that thing going.

Q: I’ve seen loads of people confront you over more than 30 years. No one seems to get under your skin as much as Senator Rand Paul (R–KY). Why does that guy piss you off so much? [Paul has accused Fauci of helping trigger the pandemic by funding scientists in Wuhan, China, whom Paul and others allege either created SARS-CoV-2 or had an accidental lab leak of a bat virus they had collected.]

A: I came into what I thought was a good faith, oversight hearing where politicians ask questions for the purpose of improving the situation, for the purpose of protecting and preserving the health of the country. When you start off by saying, how do you explain the fact that you are responsible for the death of 5 million people? No way am I going to stand for that on public television, on C-SPAN. Sorry, Jon. No way.

Q: You got into a debate with him about the meaning of gain of function. [The Wuhan scientists combined a bat coronavirus growing in culture with a piece from another one, and the chimeric virus, in mouse experiments, was more deadly than the original one—but it could not have been used to create SARS-CoV-2.] The Tony Fauci I know, who’s very calm under pressure, would have said, yes, the virus in this experiment gained some function, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about whether it met a definition of gain of function that put the public at risk.

A: You’re absolutely right. If I had to do it over again, I would have done it a little differently. Instead of responding to his accusatory tone, I should have just said, that’s irrelevant to the safety of the country. It stunned me when he publicly called me a murderer of 5 million people. I just should have dropped back off and said, this guy’s a jerk.

There’s an important difference between that kind of attack versus when the AIDS activists were attacking me in the ’80s. What they were saying was based on real suffering, reaching out to get my attention. So when they put my head on a spike outside this window, those were people who were hurting, and they wanted me to listen to them. And I did listen to them. And it was one of the best things that I’ve ever done. I never, ever got angry with the activists.

Q: If the House of Representatives becomes Republican-majority, and they hold hearings, will you testify?

A: If I’m asked to testify, I’ll testify. I have nothing to hide. I can explain everything I’ve done and I could defend everything I’ve done. But if it becomes clear that it’s not an in-good-faith oversight, but a character assassination, I might not play ball.

Q: A last question for you. Do you have a motto that you told your kids, like, this is what I learned in life?

A: Yeah, it’s what I go by. It’s called precision of thought and economy of expression. Know what your message is, know your audience, and say it in as few words as possible.

No, NIH doesn’t recommend using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 [PolitiFact, 1 Sep 2022]

The National Institutes of Health has recommended against using ivermectin to treat COVID-19 except in clinical trials, but recent social media posts claim the federal agency has quietly OK’d the drug.

"NIH adds ivermectin to list of COVID approved treatments," a Sept. 1 Instagram post from One America News said.
In a Sept. 7 Facebook post, comedian Russell Brand said "yesterday, the National Institutes of Health added ivermectin to the list of COVID treatments."

The posts were flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

Brand’s post included an image of a page about "COVID-19 treatment guidelines" and "antiviral therapy" on the NIH’s website.

"These sections summarize the data on ritonavir-boosted nirmatrelvir, remdesivir, and other antiviral medications," the original page says. Among the medications listed is ivermectin.

"Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that is being evaluated to treat COVID-19," it reads.

But its inclusion here isn’t new.

We searched archived versions of this page and found one from as long ago as June 2021.

The same language about ivermectin was on the page then, too.

PolitiFact emailed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases press office about this. The statement the agency sent back confirmed there had been no change.

"The inclusion of ivermectin to the treatment guidelines is not new," the statement read.
"Importantly, the COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines panel recommends against the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19." This recommendation largely hinges on the results of recently published randomized controlled trials. "The primary outcomes of these trials showed that the use of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 had no clinical benefit," NIH wrote.

These guidelines are updated regularly as new data becomes available, the institute said, but this is not such a case.

We rate this post False.

Japan records over 300 COVID-19 deaths for 3rd consecutive day [Xinhua, 1 Sep 2022]

TOKYO, Sept. 1 (Xinhua) -- Japan's daily COVID-19-related deaths surpassed 300 for the third consecutive day, amid a strain on the country's medical system fueled by the seventh wave of infections.

Japan reported 303 new coronavirus-related deaths over the last 24 hours, pushing the national death toll to 40,258, exceeding 40,000 for the first time. Meanwhile, the country logged 149,906 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total number to 19,117,599.

Despite the fast-spreading new wave of infections across the country, the government has not imposed any anti-virus restrictions. Moreover, Japan will raise its daily entry cap on arrivals to 50,000 from the current 20,000 from Sept. 7 in a further easing of strict COVID-19 border controls, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Wednesday.

Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said on Wednesday that although the number of newly confirmed cases has begun to decrease nationally, the COVID-19 infection level remains high and the hospital bed occupancy rate hovers at a high level.

In terms of medical treatment, there have been many cases of difficulty in emergency transportation and the absence of medical staff, which has caused a great burden on the general medical system as well, the ministry added.

According to Kyodo News, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday that in the week from Aug. 22 to 28, the number of new COVID-19 cases in Japan reached 1,258,772, the highest number in the world for six consecutive weeks. During the same period, Japan's death toll from the coronavirus increased by 23 percent from the previous week to 1,990, ranking second in the world after the United States. ■

Japan endures its worst COVID-19 wave, as strict entry rules deter tourists [ABC News, 1 Sep 2022]

By Joshua Boscaini

Japan, which was praised for keeping its coronavirus cases and deaths largely under control earlier in the pandemic, is experiencing its most severe coronavirus wave so far and has become a hotspot for the virus in East Asia.

Key points:
• Japan's latest COVID-19 wave has been driven by the Omicron variant, low immunity and transmission among young people
• The country's strict border restrictions are impacting Japanese businesses reliant on foreign tourists
• Experts say if the strict measures continue for long, it could impact Japan's reputation as a business and tourism hotspot

The country still has restrictions on the number of foreign tourists allowed to enter and has only just announced it will relax strict rules that limit movement for those willing to visit.

At 1,476,374, Japan reported the world's highest number of weekly cases during the week to August 21, according to the World Health Organization's (WHO) latest epidemiological update on the COVID-19 pandemic.

It also recorded the second-highest number of deaths in the world after the United States, with 1,624, the WHO said in its weekly update.

Kentaro Iwata, a professor of infectious diseases at Kobe University, told the ABC the seventh wave has been driven by the BA.5 Omicron variant, a lack of immunity and low vaccination among young people.

Professor Iwata said Japan managed to keep outbreaks of previous Omicron variants under control, unlike the US and many European countries, meaning there was less immunity in the community.

"We protected ourselves from the infections up until recently, which means we lacked the immunity given by the natural infection. Therefore we are very susceptible to many infections," he said.

He said most of the cases were spreading among young adults who have generally been more complacent and have lower vaccination rates than other age groups.

On Japan's COVID-19 death rate during this wave, Professor Iwata said Japan struggled to distribute enough anti-viral medication, like Paxlovid, to vulnerable people, resulting in a higher death rate.

"Japan's government failed to distribute this medicine very well. So we use this medicine only for 60,000 people, whereas in Korea more than 300,000 received this medicine by now with about half the population size comparing to Japan."

Can I travel to Japan?

As the country experiences another wave of coronavirus cases, the government has made cautious moves to relax border restrictions that came into place at the start of the pandemic.

In June, Japan started allowing foreign tourists back in but capped the total number of travellers at 20,000 a day.

Visitors can only travel in small organised tours, must strictly follow their guides and can only leave their accommodation for planned outings.

But overnight, Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced the cap would be lifted to 50,000 and the requirement to travel on organised tours only would be dropped from September 7.

Some travellers are still required to be vaccinated and provide a negative PCR test on arrival, depending on which country they are coming from.

But the requirement to present a negative PCR test will be dropped entirely from September 7.

Australian passport holders, unlike previously, also need a valid visa to enter.

But the moves to slowly open up aren't enough to attract large groups of people back, according to one local business dependent on tourists.

'We don't need a babysitter'
Omakase Tour CEO, Takeshi Sakamoto, told the ABC foreigners enquiring for trips to Japan with his company had postponed trips or were put off travelling there altogether after learning about the country's strict tourist travel rules.

He said his company has only been able to take a few tourists, because most had either postponed or reconsidered travelling to Japan.

"[It is] completely not sustainable and helpful. Due to those kind of rules, we have been losing a lot of business opportunities," Mr Sakamoto said.

"In an email, some American customers said 'we don't need a babysitter' … so it's really annoying for them."

Mr Sakamoto said he welcomed an announcement last week from the Prime Minister that removed the need to have a PCR test on arrival.

He told the ABC, before yesterday's announcement on group tours, that while testing was one less thing for tourists to worry about at the border, he hoped other rules forcing guides to accompany customers throughout their trip would end soon.

Alcohol sales fall and so does government revenue
Monica Chien, senior lecturer in tourism and business at the University of Queensland, told the ABC that the restricted number of tourists filtering through Japan's tightly controlled border wasn't enough to support businesses, like Mr Sakamoto's, that relied heavily on international travellers.

Dr Chien said the Japanese government's "test tourism" was a compromise that aims to balance economic recovery with voter concerns about reintroducing foreigners and the risk of further spreading COVID-19.

"While it may benefit some tour companies, it doesn't really have a widespread impact on the entire tourism community … because test tourism is very restricted," Dr Chien said.

She said the rules ended up actually resulting in a decrease in the number of in-bound tourists.
"[They] actually discouraged people from coming to Japan," she said.

She said if the measures drag on for too long, it could have an impact on the country's reputation as a business and tourism destination.

COVID-19 restrictions have also led to a drop in alcohol sales in Japan, so the National Tax Agency has invited people to help them find ways of encouraging younger Japanese people to drink more alcohol.

Japanese bars and Izakayas have been hit hard by the pandemic — alcohol sales halved from 2019 to 2020, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

The ministry said nearly 8 per cent of people in their 20s drank regularly, compared with 30 per cent of people aged in their 40s to 60s.

Revenue from alcohol sales is decreasing, so the government wants the the "Sake Viva!" campaign to "stimulate demand among young people" for alcohol, according to CNN.