Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said on Monday that he intended to leave government service in December to “pursue the next chapter” of his career, and that he would step down as President Biden’s top medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he has led for 38 years.
The announcement by Dr. Fauci, 81, was not entirely unexpected. He has hinted for some time that he was thinking of retiring, saying last month that he would “almost certainly” do so by 2025. In an interview Sunday evening, he said he was “not retiring in the classic sense” but would devote himself to traveling, writing and encouraging young people to enter government service.
Cases: Pasadena reported 54 new infections on Friday but no additional fatalities. Los Angeles County reported 3,379 new cases on Thursday, including Long Beach and Pasadena. LA County also reported 16 additional fatalities on Thursday.
As the latest coronavirus wave fueled by the super-infectious Omicron subvariant BA.5 continues to recede, health officials are turning a wary eye to what might come next. Experts in California are closely tracking two newer subvariants, BA.4.6 and BA.2.75 — themselves members of the Omicron family. It is unclear whether they will eventually spread to a worrisome extent in the state, but there’s reason to pay attention as they’ve caused concern elsewhere in the world.
The most pressing question is whether either can outcompete BA.5, which essentially elbowed out all other coronavirus strains during its stunning rise to dominance this summer. If they can, that could potentially point to another spin in an all-too-familiar cycle, where the emergence of an even-more-infectious strain threatens to trigger a fresh rise in cases.
At this point, BA.5 is far and away the most common version of the coronavirus circulating in California and nationwide. It was estimated to constitute 88% of coronavirus cases in the U.S. for the week that ended Aug. 13, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
However, the proportion of infections attributed to BA.4.6 has inched upward. That subvariant was estimated to constitute 5.6% of cases over the week ending Aug. 13, up from 5% the week before.
At-home coronavirus screening has become a way of life for many Californians, but some medical experts are now cautioning that one test may not be enough to definitively determine whether someone is infected.
Health officials stress that at-home tests are a vital and accurate way of tracking COVID-19 infections but that an initial negative test doesn’t mean people are out of the woods.
At-home COVID-19 rapid tests are expected to detect a coronavirus infection at least 80% of the time, according to the FDA. By contrast, a lab-based PCR test is generally expected to detect the virus 95% of the time someone is infected. But PCR tests can take a day or longer to process, whereas rapid test results are available in 15 minutes.
CDC: Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Wednesday delivered a sweeping rebuke of her agency’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, saying it had failed to respond quickly enough and needed to be overhauled.
“To be frank, we are responsible for some pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes, from testing to data to communications,” she said in a video distributed to the agency’s roughly 11,000 employees.
Dr. Walensky said the C.D.C.’s future depended on whether it could absorb the lessons of the last few years, during which much of the public lost trust in the agency’s ability to handle a pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “This is our watershed moment. We must pivot,” she said.
Her admission of the agency’s failings came after she received the findings of an examination she ordered in April amid scathing criticism of the C.D.C.’s performance. The report itself was not released; an agency official said it was not yet finished but would be made public soon.
Dr. Walensky laid out her basic conclusion from the review in candid terms: The C.D.C. must refocus itself on public health needs, respond much faster to emergencies and outbreaks of disease, and provide information in a way that ordinary people and state and local health authorities can understand and put to use.
In an interview on Monday, Dr. Walensky stressed that hundreds of Americans were still dying each day from the coronavirus and that while the country has not yet seen deaths from the outbreak of a new disease — monkeypox — it has presented some of the same challenges for the agency.
The C.D.C. has been criticized for years as being too academic and insular. The coronavirus pandemic brought those failings into public view, with even some of the agency’s staunchest defenders criticizing its response as inept.
It remains unclear whether Dr. Walensky, an infectious disease expert whom President Biden picked to lead the agency in December 2020, can bring about the changes many see as necessary.
The review was led by James Macrae, who has held senior positions at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the C.D.C. He interviewed about 120 people inside and outside the agency.
The agency has been under fire since the outset of the coronavirus pandemic two and a half years ago. It bent to political pressure from the Trump White House to alter key public health guidance or withhold it from the public — decisions that cost it a measure of public trust that experts say it still has not recaptured. It also made its own serious errors, including deploying a faulty Covid-19 test that set back the nation’s efforts to curtail spread of the virus.
While it has steadied itself since Dr. Walensky assumed control about 18 months ago, the C.D.C. has continued to fall short.
Its public guidance has often been confusing, even to public health experts. Leaders of its Covid team rotate so frequently that other senior federal health officials have at times been unsure about who is in charge. And important data was sometimes released too late to inform federal decisions, including studies on breakthrough infections that could have influenced a federal recommendation on authorizing a round of booster shots.
Regardless of who led the agency, “an honest and unbiased read of our recent history will yield the same conclusion,” Dr. Walensky told employees. “It is time for C.D.C. to change.”
What will it take to defeat monkeypox? from the LA Times: Since May, nearly 90 countries have reported monkeypox , totaling more than 31,000 cases.
The World Health Organization classified the escalating outbreak of the once-rare disease as a global emergency in July; the U.S. declared it a national public health emergency last week. Outside of Africa, 98% of cases are in men who have sex with men. With only a limited supply of vaccines , authorities are racing to stop monkeypox before it becomes entrenched as a new disease.
Can monkeypox be contained? Theoretically, yes. The virus does not spread easily and there is a vaccine . But there are only about 16 million doses available now, and only one company makes the shot. Except for Africa, there is no sign of sustained monkeypox transmission beyond men who have sex with men, meaning that stopping spread among that group could effectively end the outbreak. Last week, British scientists said there were “early signs” the monkeypox cases in the U.K. — which once had the world’s biggest outbreak outside Africa — had peaked.
Is this another pandemic? No. A pandemic means that a disease outbreak has spread to the entire world. Monkeypox does not transmit as quickly as the coronavirus, and stopping it will not require dramatic interventions like the COVID-19 lockdowns. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he declared monkeypox an emergency in part to prompt countries to take the epidemic seriously, saying there is still an opportunity to contain the disease before it becomes a global problem.
How does it spread? Monkeypox spread typically requires skin-to-skin or skin-to-mouth contact with an infected patient’s lesions. People can also be infected through contact with the clothing or bedsheets of someone who has monkeypox lesions.
It also can be spread through contact with respiratory droplets , but scientists are still trying to figure out how often that happens. British health officials say they haven’t confirmed any instances of airborne transmission.
Who is getting infected? A large percentage of cases have been in gay and bisexual men. The initial outbreaks in Europe and North America were likely triggered by sex associated with two raves in Spain and Belgium. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 99% of monkeypox cases in the U.S. involved men. Of those, 94% reported sexual contact with other men in the three weeks before they developed symptoms. Still, anyone can catch the virus if they are in close contact with an infected person or fabrics that touched an infected person.
Who is getting vaccinated? With supplies limited, health officials are not recommending mass vaccination. They are suggesting the shots for health workers, people who have been in close contact with an infected person, and men at high risk. Officials are also trying to stretch supplies of the vaccine, Jynneos . It requires two doses, but many places are giving only one dose. U.S. health officials on Tuesday authorized a new strategy that would allow health professionals to vaccinate up to five people instead of one with each vial. The approach uses a fraction of the typical amount of vaccine and administers it with an injection just under the skin rather than into deeper tissue. Recipients would still get two shots a month apart.
The version of monkeypox spreading in Europe and North America has a lower fatality rate than the one circulating in Africa. Countries that didn’t see many cases before this outbreak have reported a few deaths, while Africa has had at least 100 deaths in suspected cases this year.
The Economy: Pasadena has seen a 28-percent increase in collected sales tax in the period between January and March 2022 in comparison to the same period last year, a key indicator of surging retail sales.
This was among other findings which are set to be reported Tuesday in an Economic Development Update before the City Council’s Economic Development and Technology (EDTech) Committee. The committee meets at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. Meetings continue to be via videoconference and are open to the Pasadena community.
David Klug, Economic Development Director, said all business type categories in Pasadena, except for New Motor Dealers/Auto Lease, showed strong growth from the prior year.
He added some of the upward change is due to inflation, especially in the Service Stations category, where cost is driving the increase rather than consumption.
“Historically, the first quarter is the smallest quarter of the year from a taxable retail spending perspective since it follows the holidays,” a memorandum by David Klug, Economic Development Director, said. “The year-over-year comparison should continue to be taken in context similar to the last few quarterly updates, since the January to March 2021 period was still a time where some businesses were closed entirely or operating at a reduced capacity due to COVID-19.”
The Economic Development Team also reported some slowing has been seen in taxes generated from online retailers, some of whom have shifted back to local brick-and-mortar locations.
Federal Reserve officials are predicting a slowdown in the housing market. There have been conflicting signals: Home sales have slowed, while housing prices remain high. But a mere slowdown is unlikely to stop the Fed in its crusade to crush inflation, which has led to an increase in interest rates, putting pressure on mortgage rates.
Yesterday the Fed released the minutes from its most recent policy meeting in late July. Fed officials, according to the minutes, think inflation remains too high, and are committed to raising rates. They’re almost certain to raise rates again when they meet next month.
Fed officials did see trouble coming in housing. They said housing activity had “weakened notably,” in large part because of higher mortgage rates. Meeting participants “anticipated that this slowdown in housing activity would continue,” the minutes said. Many have predicted that the Fed’s efforts to slow inflation would crash housing prices, after a big run-up during the pandemic. And a housing bust might force the Fed to stop raising rates, perhaps before it was able to tame inflation.
Retail sales are flat in July as consumers grow cautious-LOWER gas prices in July probably freed up money for people to spend elsewhere.
UK inflation is on course to hit 18.6 per cent in January — the highest peak in almost half a century — due to soaring wholesale gas prices, according to a new forecast from Citi based on the latest market prices.