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How a tiny Swiss lab and two old blood samples created one of the only effective drugs against Omicron (and why we have so little of it)

Exactly a decade before a novel coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, Davide Corti — a newly-minted immunologist with frameless glasses and a quick laugh — walked into a cramped lab on the top floor of an office building two hours outside Zurich. He had…

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Exactly a decade before a novel coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, Davide Corti — a newly-minted immunologist with frameless glasses and a quick laugh — walked into a cramped lab on the top floor of an office building two hours outside Zurich. He had only enough money for two technicians and the ceiling was so low in parts that short stature was a job requirement, but Corti believed it’d be enough to test an idea he thought could change medicine.

Corti and his old postdoctoral advisor, well-known Italian immunologist Antonio Lanzavecchia, had a new idea for how to isolate antibodies against a pathogen from the blood of recovered patients.

They believed it could eventually yield drugs to subdue humanity’s many infectious foes, but to test it out, they had started in 2004 with one that had just made headlines: Lanzavecchia used his connections to get a blood sample from a 35-year-old SARS survivor in China.

By then, though, the epidemic had already vanished. No one expected the survivors’ blood would ever yield an actual approved drug.

Davide Corti

“It was really seen as a great opportunity to explore this new platform,” Corti said in a recent interview.

Today, though, that SARS survivor’s blood — along with a second collected in 2013 — has yielded one of the most coveted substances on the planet. After reports of the new outbreak in December 2019, Corti took the samples out of deep-freeze and isolated an antibody, sotrovimab, that could neutralize both the original SARS virus and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

For most of the last year, sotrovimab has been one of three antibody treatments authorized in the US to prevent hospitalization from Covid-19. That changed with Omicron. Both Regeneron and Eli Lilly’s drugs are virtually useless against the new variant. In part because of its unique history, sotrovimab remained effective, leaving it as one of the last available interventions as cases and hospitalizations shatter record levels.

Except it’s not very available. With the new Covid pills still in short supply, a steady demand for sotrovimab has become a frenzy. Health officials in Arizona, California and Texas have reported shortages. Echoed by several congressmen, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott publicly called on the Biden administration to send the state more doses.

On December 30, Massachusetts General Hospital emailed patients to warn it had “limited supplies” of the antibody and “not all patients referred will be able to receive the treatment.” A spokesperson said this week the hospital has gone from giving 260 antibody treatments per week to 160.

“It is a mess,” Vincent Marconi, an infectious disease specialist at Emory, said in an email after a day on the university hospital’s antibody service. “We are still substantially short on [sotrovimab] and cannot get sufficient access to the orals.”

The White House has said a million doses will eventually be available. And on Monday, HHS signed an expanded deal with GlaxoSmithKline and Vir Biotechnology, the companies that developed the drug, but much of it may come too late for the Omicron surge.

The shortfall is in part a policy failure. The story of sotrovimab, the last working Covid antibody in the US and Europe, how it succeeded where rivals failed and why there’s not nearly enough, is a quintessentially pandemic story: one of prescient, decade-plus preparation, bleary-eyed execution in the face of a crisis, and ultimately politically motivated policy-making.

Doses of the antibody have always been in shorter supply than other antibody drugs. Although they gave billion-dollar contracts to Regeneron and Eli Lilly, the Trump White House declined to invest in Vir’s therapy, in part because the company’s manufacturing network included partners in China, said one person with knowledge of Operation Warp Speed’s deliberations.

“For whatever reason, that was seen as a political hot potato,” they said.

Asked about government talks, Bob Nelsen, the venture capitalist who founded Vir and a board member, said: “I don’t want to comment, but I can say the government finally gets it.”

‘Our species didn’t need more than two warnings’

Corti nearly didn’t make it to Lanzavecchia’s lab. A promising student at the University of Bern, he emailed the immunologist three times to inquire about doing a postdoc and received no reply. “I thought, well, he’s not interested,” Corti said.

His then-girlfriend (now wife), though, convinced him to try a fourth. Lanzavecchia saw it and invited Corti to Bellinzona, a sleepy provincial capital near the Italian border.

Lanzavecchia had already made key discoveries in how both T cells and B cells recognize and respond to pathogens. But when Corti arrived, he explained their latest project: isolating and cloning B cells — the body’s antibody factories — from patients.

Antonio Lanzavecchia at the opening of Humabs new lab in 2019

Click on the image to see the full-sized version

By 2004, scientists had already been making antibody for two decades. One treatment was even approved for a virus that causes a seasonal infection, called RSV. But these were generally derived from mice, a slow and cumbersome process that made inferior drugs.

“For human therapy, you want a human molecule,” said Erica Saphire, a longtime antibody expert and head of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

After 5 years in Lanzavecchia’s academic lab, Corti became CSO of his fledging startup, Humabs. Before the pandemic, infectious disease rarely ginned up investor enthusiasm — cancer, immunology, neuroscience are all seen as more profitable — but Bill Rutter, a retired UCSF professor and early biotech pioneer then pushing 80, saw potential. He gave enough cash for Corti’s dingy penthouse laboratory.

Bob Nelsen

“He just funded great science,” said Nelsen.

Then in 2016, Nelsen, already famous for launching a massive neuroscience and cancer company, met with two academics developing an HIV vaccine and decided he wanted to pour half-a-billion dollars into an infectious disease startup. He dispatched an executive to scour the world for the best vaccine and antiviral technologies and bought out four different startups, including Humabs for $42 million and up to $240 million in milestone payments.

It raised a few eyebrows.

“People used to ask why are you investing in infectious disease? What, are you crazy?” said Nelsen. “And the joke was, well you never know, there might be a pandemic.”

By then, Humabs was already in the middle of its first big test. NIH researchers approached Corti and Lanzavecchia with blood from an Ebola survivor and asked if he could make an antibody against the terrifying disease. In 2019, it would prove one of the first two effective Ebola drugs, alongside an antibody cocktail from Regeneron.

Skip Virgin

Vir’s business case was built on chronic infections like hepatitis, but CSO Skip Virgin wanted them to be prepared for a pandemic. A longtime friend of Lanzavecchia and a well-respected academic in his own right, Virgin decided Humabs should focus on two potential outbreaks: pandemic flu — Corti had already developed antibodies that neutralized every strain since 1918 —  and coronavirus.

He noted there had already been two deadly coronavirus spillovers in barely a decade: SARS and MERS.

“We assumed our species didn’t need more than two warnings,” he said.

[Related]https://endpts.com/gsk-and-vir-turn-to-us-for-distribution-as-covid-19-mab-treatment-nears-blockbuster-status/[/Related]

‘We got you, you son of a bitch’

When the new coronavirus broke out in 2019, a blood sample from another SARS patient, collected in 2013, was frozen in a liquid nitrogen tank at a shiny new facility Vir built down the road from the old Humabs lab.

Corti screened the 2013 sample and the original antibodies they isolated from the 2004 sample for any that could also block SARS-CoV-2. Although technology to rapidly isolate antibodies from blood is now widely available, no other major Covid-19 antibody effort started with samples from the original SARS virus, as opposed to SARS-CoV-2.

Because SARS and SARS-CoV-2 diverged roughly 50 years ago, any antibodies that neutralized both likely bound to a part of the spike protein that is essential and difficult for the virus to mutate and still survive. It’s part of why Corti and Virgin believed a single antibody could be effective, when nearly every other company developed a combo.

Additionally, B cell responses mature over time, meaning blood taken a decade after SARS infection could have a more versatile repertoire than those taken from the blood of Covid-19 survivors.

Erica Saphire

By March 8, Virgin and Corti had narrowed the list from thousands to less than 15. They had to pick one to manufacture for clinical testing. The wrong decision could set them back months. Complicating matters was their favored antibody, a molecule from the 2013 sample called S309, didn’t look stellar by the usual metric to evaluate antibodies: how well S309 blocked virus from entering cells in a dish.

“It looked fine. It looked good,” said Saphire, who has also been running a Gates-backed consortium analyzing hundreds of Covid-19 antibodies. “But there were others (from other companies) that were ultra-potent.”

There were also questions at the time about a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement: Some researchers believed SARS-CoV-2 was one of many viruses that use the tails of antibodies, an immune cell beacon called the Fc receptor, to deepen infection.

AstraZeneca was so concerned they completely deactivated the beacon on their experimental antibody treatment. Vir, by contrast, wanted to make the beacon stronger in a bid to make more effective antibodies.

Corti and Virgin debated by phone, each stuck largely alone as the world shut down. Corti and most of his team’s families were over the border in Italy, which was in the midst of a terrifying outbreak.

Virgin was isolated in his San Francisco apartment, his family in St. Louis where he used to teach. He lay awake all night on March 8, tossing and turning and running over everything they knew about antibody-dependent enhancement from their decade-plus of coronavirus work, everything their limited experiments told them about S309. It was almost uniquely broad — no less potent against SARS-CoV-2 than against SARS.

Eventually, he just looked up at the ceiling and yelled, “We got you, son of a bitch.” They sent S309’s sequences to the manufacturer the next day.

In the ensuing months, as Regeneron and Eli Lilly grabbed headlines, Vir executives say they were criticized by researchers and executives at other companies — “companies that starts with an ‘R,’” said Nelsen — for going with a single antibody that was clearly less potent than rivals’ combinations.

Nelsen highlighted the threat of variants, telling people, “Regeneron is focused on where the virus is today. Vir is focused on where the virus is going.” But it fell on deaf ears as leading virologists argued coronaviruses didn’t mutate fast enough to allow for immune escape.

Vir, though, proved just as effective as the Regeneron and Lilly combos, reducing hospitalizations of high-risk Covid patients by 85% in a large Phase III trial. (AstraZeneca’s Fc-deficient antibodies failed entirely in some settings, though that might be a product of poor trial design; the drug can prevent disease in patients not yet exposed.)

Then came Omicron. Structural biologists looking at the sequence from South African scientists over Thanksgiving weekend immediately saw the Regeneron and Lilly antibodies would fail, which later lab experiments proved. But Nelsen isn’t gloating.

“If my mom gets Covid, she’s probably not going to be able to get antibodies,” said Nelsen, whose mother is approaching 90. “I hate the idea that we were (right).”

‘They were our mainstays’

The loss of Regeneron and Lilly treatments took away the two most common tools doctors used to keep high-risk patients, such as the immunocompromised and diabetics, from developing severe Covid-19. With government investment, the two drugs were being produced at far greater quantities than Vir’s.

Rajesh Gandhi

Between Oct. 11, when the government took over sotrovimab distribution and Dec. 23, when HHS halted Regeneron and Lilly distribution because of Omicron, the US shipped out 1.7 million doses of Regeneron, 466,000 doses of Lilly and 235,000 of Vir.

“They were our mainstays,” said Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious disease physician at MGH and professor of medicine at Harvard.

Vir has since taken steps to expand supply. CEO George Scangos said in an interview last month they were “working aggressively,” adding there was a chance they could increase capacity “in weeks” by finding new partners to expedite the logistical gauntlet of turning bulk drug substances into shippable vials.

HHS agreed to buy doses for the first time in September, with Vir agreeing to supply 600,000 more doses through Q1. But for now, HHS is shipping 55,000 doses per week of sotrovimab.

Physicians say it will be reserved for the highest-risk patients, along with Paxlovid, the Pfizer pill that is as effective at preventing hospitalization but is in similarly short supply and can’t be taken by a significant chunk of the population. At-risk patients unable to access Paxlovid or sotrovimab are advised to get molnupiravir, the controversial Merck drug that appears 30% effective at preventing hospitalization.

“Availability is probably the biggest factor that’s going to influence people over the next couple of weeks,” said Scott Weisenberg, an infectious disease specialist at NYU.

HHS is still shipping Regeneron and Lilly, but with Omicron now accounting for over 95% of new US cases, they are unlikely to be widely used. A fourth option is remdesivir, the antiviral used since spring 2020 to treat hospitalized patients. A recent study showed giving it to newly-diagnosed patients can reduce hospitalizations by nearly 90%, but it has to be administered by IV over three consecutive days.

Scott Weisenberg

Physicians are likely to prescribe it only to patients who get Covid-19 while hospitalized for another condition, or who are living in settings like nursing homes, where a daily IV might be feasible, Gandhi said.

Corti, meanwhile, is still working at his Bellinzona lab to find yet more broadly neutralizing antibodies. Saphire said it was both strategy and luck sotrovimab survived — Adagio raised over $750 million for a universal antibody that flopped against Omicron — but their story offers a lesson for developing therapies against future outbreaks.

“You need many, because you don’t know what’s going to evolve. You can start from a place of looking for breadth,” she said.

Companies should also prioritize easier routes of administration, she said, and despite Vir’s success, use combinations to prevent resistance. (AstraZeneca’s prophylactic combo still has activity against Omicron, albeit reduced, and a combo from Brii Biosciences, approved in China, maintains most of its efficacy.)

Corti’s new project is also geared to future outbreaks. Borrowing a strategy from the HIV field, he is trying to reverse-engineer a universal vaccine for betacoronavirus, the family that includes SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2, and prevent a similar virus from ever triggering another pandemic. Researchers generate thousands of antibodies, figure out which location on the virus the most broadly neutralizing ones bind to, and then try to build a vaccine that elicits an immune response to that exact spot.

Progress in HIV, humanity’s most cunning viral foe, has been slow and experts said it will be difficult to build a vaccine that truly protects against every betacoronavirus. But Corti’s Covid-19 success has given him hope.

It’s “the same principle that has guided our discovery of monoclonal antibodies,” Corti said. “Go for breadth, not running behind the virus — the evolution of the virus — but trying to anticipate the virus.”

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super…

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Are Voters Recoiling Against Disorder?

Authored by Michael Barone via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The headlines coming out of the Super Tuesday primaries have got it right. Barring cataclysmic changes, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be the Republican and Democratic nominees for president in 2024.

(Left) President Joe Biden delivers remarks on canceling student debt at Culver City Julian Dixon Library in Culver City, Calif., on Feb. 21, 2024. (Right) Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump stands on stage during a campaign event at Big League Dreams Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nev., on Jan. 27, 2024. (Mario Tama/Getty Images; David Becker/Getty Images)

With Nikki Haley’s withdrawal, there will be no more significantly contested primaries or caucuses—the earliest both parties’ races have been over since something like the current primary-dominated system was put in place in 1972.

The primary results have spotlighted some of both nominees’ weaknesses.

Donald Trump lost high-income, high-educated constituencies, including the entire metro area—aka the Swamp. Many but by no means all Haley votes there were cast by Biden Democrats. Mr. Trump can’t afford to lose too many of the others in target states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Majorities and large minorities of voters in overwhelmingly Latino counties in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley and some in Houston voted against Joe Biden, and even more against Senate nominee Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas).

Returns from Hispanic precincts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts show the same thing. Mr. Biden can’t afford to lose too many Latino votes in target states like Arizona and Georgia.

When Mr. Trump rode down that escalator in 2015, commentators assumed he’d repel Latinos. Instead, Latino voters nationally, and especially the closest eyewitnesses of Biden’s open-border policy, have been trending heavily Republican.

High-income liberal Democrats may sport lawn signs proclaiming, “In this house, we believe ... no human is illegal.” The logical consequence of that belief is an open border. But modest-income folks in border counties know that flows of illegal immigrants result in disorder, disease, and crime.

There is plenty of impatience with increased disorder in election returns below the presidential level. Consider Los Angeles County, America’s largest county, with nearly 10 million people, more people than 40 of the 50 states. It voted 71 percent for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Current returns show county District Attorney George Gascon winning only 21 percent of the vote in the nonpartisan primary. He’ll apparently face Republican Nathan Hochman, a critic of his liberal policies, in November.

Gascon, elected after the May 2020 death of counterfeit-passing suspect George Floyd in Minneapolis, is one of many county prosecutors supported by billionaire George Soros. His policies include not charging juveniles as adults, not seeking higher penalties for gang membership or use of firearms, and bringing fewer misdemeanor cases.

The predictable result has been increased car thefts, burglaries, and personal robberies. Some 120 assistant district attorneys have left the office, and there’s a backlog of 10,000 unprosecuted cases.

More than a dozen other Soros-backed and similarly liberal prosecutors have faced strong opposition or have left office.

St. Louis prosecutor Kim Gardner resigned last May amid lawsuits seeking her removal, Milwaukee’s John Chisholm retired in January, and Baltimore’s Marilyn Mosby was defeated in July 2022 and convicted of perjury in September 2023. Last November, Loudoun County, Virginia, voters (62 percent Biden) ousted liberal Buta Biberaj, who declined to prosecute a transgender student for assault, and in June 2022 voters in San Francisco (85 percent Biden) recalled famed radical Chesa Boudin.

Similarly, this Tuesday, voters in San Francisco passed ballot measures strengthening police powers and requiring treatment of drug-addicted welfare recipients.

In retrospect, it appears the Floyd video, appearing after three months of COVID-19 confinement, sparked a frenzied, even crazed reaction, especially among the highly educated and articulate. One fatal incident was seen as proof that America’s “systemic racism” was worse than ever and that police forces should be defunded and perhaps abolished.

2020 was “the year America went crazy,” I wrote in January 2021, a year in which police funding was actually cut by Democrats in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. A year in which young New York Times (NYT) staffers claimed they were endangered by the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-Ark.) opinion article advocating calling in military forces if necessary to stop rioting, as had been done in Detroit in 1967 and Los Angeles in 1992. A craven NYT publisher even fired the editorial page editor for running the article.

Evidence of visible and tangible discontent with increasing violence and its consequences—barren and locked shelves in Manhattan chain drugstores, skyrocketing carjackings in Washington, D.C.—is as unmistakable in polls and election results as it is in daily life in large metropolitan areas. Maybe 2024 will turn out to be the year even liberal America stopped acting crazy.

Chaos and disorder work against incumbents, as they did in 1968 when Democrats saw their party’s popular vote fall from 61 percent to 43 percent.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 23:20

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The…

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate In Place Without Evidence

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

Doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in Washington in a file image. (Jacquelyn Martin/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 22:10

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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