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Now More Than Ever: Cornering THE Telemedicine Solution for the 21st Century

Imagine a world where premium, one-on-one healthcare no longer requires you to…
The post Now More Than Ever: Cornering THE Telemedicine Solution for…

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Imagine a world where premium, one-on-one healthcare no longer requires you to get in your car or on a bus than sit in a waiting room, seemingly endlessly, until you got to see a doctor. Well, back in March, we reintroduced our Stockhouse investor audience to a company, and its CEO, Founder & President, that was truly revolutionizing the digital and virtual healthcare space with a proven virtual care platform.

Accelerating virtual care and remote patient monitoring solutions, Cloud DX Inc. (CDX) (TSX-V.CDX, OTC: CDXFF, Forum) says it’s “on a mission to make healthcare better for everyone”. Simply put, Cloud DX is a one-of-a-kind digital and virtual healthcare platform. It’s currently used by private and public hospitals, along with healthcare organizations across North America. The ingenious platform – or “Virtual Care as a Platform (VCaaP) – is designed to provide patient remote monitoring, enable aging in place, and delivering hospital quality post-surgical care. In turn, this helps to reduce the need for hospitalization and managing the costs of healthcare delivery through more efficient use of resources.

The company’s Connected Health remote patient monitoring platform is used by healthcare enterprises and care teams across North America to virtually manage chronic disease, enable aging in place, and deliver hospital-quality post-surgical care in the home. Cloud DX’s partners achieve better healthcare and patient outcomes, reduce the need for hospitalization or re-admission, and reduce healthcare delivery costs through more efficient use of resources.

In the News

On May 31st, Cloud DX announced Q1 2022 results; positive numbers that company shareholders and potential investors should pay keen attention to.

Financial Highlights:

  • Total Revenue of $337,263 – an increase of 11.4% over Q1 2021.
  • Operating Expenses increased 25.7% versus Q1 2021 due to increased staff size as well as increased sales, marketing, and operations expenses as we scale up.
  • The Company signed 12 new commercial contracts and saw 2 provincial/territorial contract extensions in the quarter, exceeding the total number of contracts/extensions signed in all of 2021.

Earlier in May, the company signed on its third paramedical service provider to date –Peterborough County (Ontario) Paramedics. Cloud DX said it will support the Peterborough County / City Community Paramedic team with its Connected Health™ solution for remote patient monitoring (RPM). Of note, paramedicine providers using RPM improve response rates, reduce hospital admissions, and improve community health.

Anthony Kaul, COO and co-founder at Cloud DX, shared what this means for the industry:

“Cloud DX powers patient monitoring in hospitals and clinics across North America. Now, Peterborough County brings Cloud DX into the community. Using our Connected Health™ solution, Peterborough Paramedic teams will improve the lives of community members: from supporting those with chronic conditions, conducting in-person hospital discharge follow-ups after, checking on those managing COVID at home, or supporting individuals awaiting a bed in long-term care.”

Other noteworthy news from late March – Cloud DX inking a deal for two new contracts with U.S. primary care clinics.

The Connected Health Kit: Telemedicine Right from the App!

What is telemedicine all about and how does it really work. Well, Cloud DX’s proprietary app allows any patient to:

  • Speak to a licensed clinician by text or video instantly
    • Track vital signs with easy-to-use FDA-cleared devices
    • Enables your online clinician to see the patient’s vital signs in real-time during the online consultation
    • “The most powerful, affordable connected health service available.”

From the CEO

Founder, President & CEO, Robert Kaul, has nearly 30 years of experience in sales, marketing, operations, and a successful track record leading early-stage technology companies, including Luna Technologies International Inc (where he served as Director of Operations) and ARA Safety Inc. (where he was COO). Mr. Kaul was the founder and CEO of Cloud Diagnostics LLC – a digital health distribution company launched in 2009. Within nine months Cloud Diagnostics exited with an asset sale to Biosign Technologies Inc. I served as Executive VP of Biosign from 2010-2011, and CEO from 2012 to 2014.

In conversation with The Market Herald Editorial, Mr. Kaul offered a detailed account of Cloud DX’s unique business model geared towards long-term growth.

TMH: To start off with and for those who may be unaware of Cloud DX, can you tell us a bit about yourself, the company, and what exactly it does?

RK: I am a serial entrepreneur. I am a Canadian citizen, but I live in New York City where we have our US headquarters. This is my sixth start-up and Cloud DX has been in business now since 2014.

Cloud DX is a Health Canada licensed, FDA-registered medical device manufacturer and software developer that offers a complete “end-to-end” virtual healthcare platform called Cloud DX Connected Health™. Cloud DX offers a very comprehensive remote patient monitoring solution that includes a kit of devices, the Cloud DX Connected Health kit. The kit is prescribed by physicians, is sent home with patients, and is used in the home by patients to monitor their health, their vital signs, symptoms, fill out surveys, even potentially take photos of surgical incisions and wounds that the surgeon can then review to make sure that wounds are healing properly. This is a system that’s garnered 96 to 97% patient satisfaction across hundreds and hundreds of patients across many, many months and in previous studies as well has received up to 100% patient satisfaction.

Typical Cloud DX customers include large hospitals and provincial health authorities in Canada, and physician practices and hospitals in the United States.

Our partners achieve better healthcare and patient outcomes, reduce the need for hospitalization or re-admission, and reduce healthcare delivery costs through more efficient use of resources.

We’re publicly traded on the TSXV. We’re also exchange-available in the OTCQB in the US.

TMH: You’ve just signed a deal with your third paramedical service provider in Peterborough Ontario. Can you unwrap the benefits of this contract and some of the other significant contracts over the past while e.g., Equitable Life?

RK: We just signed our FOURTH Paramedical Service Provider contract, this most recent one also in Ontario County. These are very exciting partnerships and we’re very proud to be servicing Ontario paramedic services who are bringing this new level of virtual care and remote patient monitoring to populations across Ontario.

The funding for these programs was announced in Oct. of 2021 and the Ontario government at the time announced up to $80 million in new funding for community-based paramedic units to offer remote monitoring across the province. What’s really exciting is the paramedic services now are very much on board and there are 33 counties across Ontario that have access to this funding, so we anticipate additional growth in this area in the next few months for 2022.

The real purpose of this particular type of remote monitoring is to help folks stay in their homes as long as possible. Older folks who have maybe one or more chronic illnesses, these are folks who would otherwise be looking at staying in a long-term care facility or nursing home, and for multiple reasons that is not the best possible outcome for many patients.

Our technology will play a vital role in providing medical support to clients when they need it the most and in improving their health outcomes and quality of life. Bringing RPM into the community improves user lifestyles, promotes aging in place, and adds more dignity to care.

EQUITABLE LIFE: This is a very important new type of customer, a new type of platform for delivery of care because up until this announcement in general, virtual care was delivered by healthcare systems, by doctors and by hospitals. Equitable Life to our knowledge is the first mutual insurance company to offer actual virtual care to all of the members in their critical illness insurance business. So Equitable itself is paying Cloud DX to deliver care for free to their users, to their critical injury clients. If you make a critical injury claim now at Equitable Life, you not only get a check, but you also get care from Cloud DX.

This proves in my opinion, that the concept of virtual care is now transforming more than just healthcare. It’s transforming insurance, it’s transforming the workplace, and we’re on the absolute forefront as leaders of that change.

The reason why Equitable has decided to partner with Cloud DX to improve outcomes for their members is because of the proof that we’ve published over the last several years that Connected Health and remote patient monitoring, when deployed correctly, decreases patient pain threshold, or reported pain; increases patient satisfaction; reduces the number of E.R. visits; reduces the number of hospitalizations likely for that patient. So, this is a case of Equitable not only wanting to do the best by their patients but also genuinely working to reduce the impact of those critical illnesses for their patients.

TMH: The Medtronic deal back in February was a real gamechanger for the company. How so and what does it mean long-term for Cloud DX moving forward?

RK: The Medtronic, Canada partnership gives us tremendous reach and additional distribution horsepower to really grow quickly in the next 12 to 18 months.

The very first hospital system under that new contract with Medtronic Canada signed up with us. St. Mary’s Hospital in our own hometown of Kitchener Ontario is deploying and using Cloud DX systems for Connected Health, in particular for pulmonary rehab. although other use cases are planned at St. Mary’s, and we expect more and more new Medtronic business to roll out of course, as that contract matures.

This partnership with Medtronic Canada is an ideal fit; both our companies are taking the lead in our commitments to innovating and creating improved healthcare delivery. This collaboration means remote care will be widely available across Canada. This cutting-edge level of care can directly impact over 1 million Canadians with life-changing support and truly modern healthcare solutions. Our Connected HealthTM virtual care platform is preferred by clinicians and has received 100% patient satisfaction scores in multiple studies; we have a proven track record of superior deployment and compliance and demonstrated unsurpassed expertise in the RPM sector space. The entire Cloud DX team is now ready to live up to being recognized and selected by such a leader in the medical technology industry as Medtronic.

TMH: You recently announced Fiscal 2021 financial results. Can you break down some of the numbers for our investor audience?

RK: We are celebrating a record first quarter at Cloud DX. Recognized revenues for the company were up 11% versus Q1 of 2021. Both product and service revenues increased. That’s not quite the whole story though, because in fact many of our contracts that we closed in Q1 of 2022 closed very close to the end of the quarter which means that in fact a lot of those contracts were fulfilled in Q2. So additional revenues signed in the quarter were actually going to be recognized later in the year.

Our revenue from subscriptions increased by 32%. Our revenue from product, which is primarily Connected Health kits increased by 62%. And even our revenue from professional services, which tends to be things like customizations we do for our clients increased by 11.4%. So, we’re very excited to see this trend and we’re hopeful this trend will continue all the way through 2022 as the whole company begins to really hit its stride moving forward with more and more sales.

TMH: Can you update us on the progress of ‘The Connected Health Kit’ platform? Can you tell us about it in detail and what this means for the company and for potential shareholders moving forward?

RK: Cloud DX has seen access to available patients suited to its remote patient monitoring products increase due to the execution of 12 contracts over the course of 2021. In particular, contracts with Lung Health Ontario, Hamilton Health Sciences, University of Waterloo and 8 US clinics with partner Maxwell Telecare showed accelerating growth in the period.

On December 1, 2021, the Company announced an exclusive contract with Medtronic Canada, under which that company (a subsidiary of Medtronic PLC (NYSE:MDT)) agreed to integrate Cloud DX Connected Health into all its main lines of business in Canada. Medtronic stated that they serve up to 1,000,000 patients in Canada annually.

TMH: Heath and biotech stocks have been up & down as of late. Can you tell our investor audience what kind of financial verticals they can expect from Cloud DX moving forward?

RK: The reality is that in our entire sector, the amount of trading in stock and shares in public Canadian health IT companies has dramatically dropped since 2021. We attribute this primarily to just sheer macroeconomic situations. I think that the reality is that many people are just not trading stocks right now. But for those who do, we do see a genuine increase in Cloud DX in the last little while. And we believe that the best way to improve this situation, both on the point of view and the share price point of view, is to continue doing our jobs, to continue having record quarters, to continue signing contracts, taking care of patients, getting those extremely high satisfaction numbers and continue to grow our company as fast as we can.

We do see this space growing very rapidly. Published studies and published marketing research reports show an increase in both access to and increase satisfaction with virtual care across North America.

Cloud DX has been the recipient of millions of dollars in non-dilutive funding, which really benefits investors because it helps pay for R&D without having to dilute our investors. So, announcements in that area are something else that we can really look forward to.

TMH: Tell us about the problems you solve in the connected healthcare space?

RK: Cloud DX is focused on offering the best possible virtual care experience. By manufacturing proprietary vital sign devices, the Company can constantly improve the patient-user experience (UX), making virtual care more engaging for those who need it most.

By collecting unique and accurate remote data, clinicians have more information to use in therapeutic decision-making, while streamlining workflow with automated monitoring.

Using advanced data science techniques, patterns are identified in patient-generated data that indicate the probability of poorer health outcomes, enabling rapid intervention and saving lives. By managing the full patient-to-provider experience costs can be reduced with improved ROI for healthcare payers including Canadian provinces, territories, and US insurance providers.

TMH: Robert, what are the company’s near-term objectives?

RK: A few points:

  • scaling partnerships and deployments through them (e.g., Medtronic)
  • achieving 10k onboarded patients this year (stated goal last year)
  • commercializing innovations from Cloud XR department

TMH: How are you building your company in this competitive virtual healthcare space?

RK: We are one of the most innovative companies in North America. We have a very strong and innovative program that delivers new types of medical devices, new types of virtual care features and that’s the reason giant companies like Medtronic Canada chose to partner with us. So, we are absolute leaders in innovation and you’re going to continue to see us leading from the front, with new software and new hardware to improve care. That’s the first thing. The second

thing is astonishing customer service and satisfaction. We’ve recently announced two completely separate third-party surveys that were done recently in Canada that show each show over 95% customer satisfaction and patient satisfaction using Cloud DX, Connected Health. That’s remarkable to have over 95% patient satisfaction on multiple announced surveys means our patients and customers absolutely love us. That’s a key differentiator and the third differentiator is our partnerships.

TMH: Cloud DX is the co-winner of the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, a 2021 Edison Award winner, a Fast Company “World Changing Idea” finalist, and was named a “New Innovator 2022” by Canadian Business magazine. Tell us about these well-deserved kudos?

RK: We’re very proud of these awards. Cloud Dx has earned many, many awards for innovation over the years. We’re probably one of the most awarded companies in this sector, if not the most. We’re excited because of two reasons. Many of these awards are very competitive, so they are a very much genuine stamp of approval and credibility because they’ve been awarded after very careful vetting. So, it really lifts Cloud DX up is an absolute leader in innovation, with many awards. This is an exception but many of these awards that we’ve earned, like the XPR award, the NCI awards, and so on also come with non-diluted funding and that, of course, should make investors very happy.

TMH: Simply put, what’s the overall narrative about Cloud DX investors should know about?

RK: We’re positioned as not only an innovation leader, as an intellectual property leader, as a customer service leader but as the best possible partner for those forward-looking companies. So, we want investors to know that as an investment Cloud DX’s future proof, we’re de-risking with these wonderful partnerships and supporting us and growing with us is potentially a great investment.

TMH: If there’s anything else you’d like to add, or think is important, please feel free to elaborate?

RK: Cloud XR. We’ve actually had what we call a metaverse project in the works for six years and so what our metaverse platform allows clinicians, doctors, and nurses to do is collaborate on the care of a patient, wearing a HoloLens headset from Microsoft or using an iPad with the Apple AR kit on there and interacting with multiple clinicians and patients in a virtual space in a way that they’re very comfortable with this expands the reach of virtual care in a whole brand new way.

The reason investors should care about it though, it proves that Cloud DX technology is future-proof. Our hospital customers don’t have to worry about trying to replace Cloud DX technology in five or six years with some other new thing. Cause we are the new thing, we’re the ones bringing the future to the table and that actually de-risks purchasing Cloud DX for our customers.

Meet the Team

The Investment Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic unequivocally demonstrated that reliable virtual healthcare is a global necessity of the highest order. The Cloud DX Connected Health platform meets and exceeds this existential need by offering convenient mobile apps for patients, a secure online clinician portal, automated symptom tracking, notification of the appearance of symptoms, secure video visits for Telemedicine, tools for improving compliance, and EMR integration of patient reports.

Savvy investors, both retail and institutional, are focussing on one of the global marketplace’s most dynamic, fastest-growing sectors – digital and virtual health care.

Today, high-quality telemedicine is a $250 billion annual marketplace generating recurring revenue demonstrated by continuing contract receipts that show significant growth year-over-year. Cloud DX is at the forefront of this digital revolution creating precision vital sign monitoring equipment, software, and mobile apps that cost less…and do more.

Stockhouse Video Q&A Interview with CEO, Founder & President Robert Kaul – Mar 9, 2022

https://jwp.io/s/8UzdHoYP

Click image to play video

For more information, visit www.clouddx.com.

FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by The Market Herald Canada.

The post Now More Than Ever: Cornering THE Telemedicine Solution for the 21st Century appeared first on The Market Herald.

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Fuel poverty in England is probably 2.5 times higher than government statistics show

The top 40% most energy efficient homes aren’t counted as being in fuel poverty, no matter what their bills or income are.

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Julian Hochgesang|Unsplash

The cap set on how much UK energy suppliers can charge for domestic gas and electricity is set to fall by 15% from April 1 2024. Despite this, prices remain shockingly high. The average household energy bill in 2023 was £2,592 a year, dwarfing the pre-pandemic average of £1,308 in 2019.

The term “fuel poverty” refers to a household’s ability to afford the energy required to maintain adequate warmth and the use of other essential appliances. Quite how it is measured varies from country to country. In England, the government uses what is known as the low income low energy efficiency (Lilee) indicator.

Since energy costs started rising sharply in 2021, UK households’ spending powers have plummeted. It would be reasonable to assume that these increasingly hostile economic conditions have caused fuel poverty rates to rise.

However, according to the Lilee fuel poverty metric, in England there have only been modest changes in fuel poverty incidence year on year. In fact, government statistics show a slight decrease in the nationwide rate, from 13.2% in 2020 to 13.0% in 2023.

Our recent study suggests that these figures are incorrect. We estimate the rate of fuel poverty in England to be around 2.5 times higher than what the government’s statistics show, because the criteria underpinning the Lilee estimation process leaves out a large number of financially vulnerable households which, in reality, are unable to afford and maintain adequate warmth.

Blocks of flats in London.
Household fuel poverty in England is calculated on the basis of the energy efficiency of the home. Igor Sporynin|Unsplash

Energy security

In 2022, we undertook an in-depth analysis of Lilee fuel poverty in Greater London. First, we combined fuel poverty, housing and employment data to provide an estimate of vulnerable homes which are omitted from Lilee statistics.

We also surveyed 2,886 residents of Greater London about their experiences of fuel poverty during the winter of 2022. We wanted to gauge energy security, which refers to a type of self-reported fuel poverty. Both parts of the study aimed to demonstrate the potential flaws of the Lilee definition.

Introduced in 2019, the Lilee metric considers a household to be “fuel poor” if it meets two criteria. First, after accounting for energy expenses, its income must fall below the poverty line (which is 60% of median income).

Second, the property must have an energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of D–G (the lowest four ratings). The government’s apparent logic for the Lilee metric is to quicken the net-zero transition of the housing sector.

In Sustainable Warmth, the policy paper that defined the Lilee approach, the government says that EPC A–C-rated homes “will not significantly benefit from energy-efficiency measures”. Hence, the focus on fuel poverty in D–G-rated properties.

Generally speaking, EPC A–C-rated homes (those with the highest three ratings) are considered energy efficient, while D–G-rated homes are deemed inefficient. The problem with how Lilee fuel poverty is measured is that the process assumes that EPC A–C-rated homes are too “energy efficient” to be considered fuel poor: the main focus of the fuel poverty assessment is a characteristic of the property, not the occupant’s financial situation.

In other words, by this metric, anyone living in an energy-efficient home cannot be considered to be in fuel poverty, no matter their financial situation. There is an obvious flaw here.

Around 40% of homes in England have an EPC rating of A–C. According to the Lilee definition, none of these homes can or ever will be classed as fuel poor. Even though energy prices are going through the roof, a single-parent household with dependent children whose only income is universal credit (or some other form of benefits) will still not be considered to be living in fuel poverty if their home is rated A-C.

The lack of protection afforded to these households against an extremely volatile energy market is highly concerning.

In our study, we estimate that 4.4% of London’s homes are rated A-C and also financially vulnerable. That is around 171,091 households, which are currently omitted by the Lilee metric but remain highly likely to be unable to afford adequate energy.

In most other European nations, what is known as the 10% indicator is used to gauge fuel poverty. This metric, which was also used in England from the 1990s until the mid 2010s, considers a home to be fuel poor if more than 10% of income is spent on energy. Here, the main focus of the fuel poverty assessment is the occupant’s financial situation, not the property.

Were such alternative fuel poverty metrics to be employed, a significant portion of those 171,091 households in London would almost certainly qualify as fuel poor.

This is confirmed by the findings of our survey. Our data shows that 28.2% of the 2,886 people who responded were “energy insecure”. This includes being unable to afford energy, making involuntary spending trade-offs between food and energy, and falling behind on energy payments.

Worryingly, we found that the rate of energy insecurity in the survey sample is around 2.5 times higher than the official rate of fuel poverty in London (11.5%), as assessed according to the Lilee metric.

It is likely that this figure can be extrapolated for the rest of England. If anything, energy insecurity may be even higher in other regions, given that Londoners tend to have higher-than-average household income.

The UK government is wrongly omitting hundreds of thousands of English households from fuel poverty statistics. Without a more accurate measure, vulnerable households will continue to be overlooked and not get the assistance they desperately need to stay warm.

The Conversation

Torran Semple receives funding from Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/S023305/1.

John Harvey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Looking Back At COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes

After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked,…

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After having moved from Canada to the United States, partly to be wealthier and partly to be freer (those two are connected, by the way), I was shocked, in March 2020, when President Trump and most US governors imposed heavy restrictions on people’s freedom. The purpose, said Trump and his COVID-19 advisers, was to “flatten the curve”: shut down people’s mobility for two weeks so that hospitals could catch up with the expected demand from COVID patients. In her book Silent Invasion, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, admitted that she was scrambling during those two weeks to come up with a reason to extend the lockdowns for much longer. As she put it, “I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them.” In short, she chose the goal and then tried to find the data to justify the goal. This, by the way, was from someone who, along with her task force colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci, kept talking about the importance of the scientific method. By the end of April 2020, the term “flatten the curve” had all but disappeared from public discussion.

Now that we are four years past that awful time, it makes sense to look back and see whether those heavy restrictions on the lives of people of all ages made sense. I’ll save you the suspense. They didn’t. The damage to the economy was huge. Remember that “the economy” is not a term used to describe a big machine; it’s a shorthand for the trillions of interactions among hundreds of millions of people. The lockdowns and the subsequent federal spending ballooned the budget deficit and consequent federal debt. The effect on children’s learning, not just in school but outside of school, was huge. These effects will be with us for a long time. It’s not as if there wasn’t another way to go. The people who came up with the idea of lockdowns did so on the basis of abstract models that had not been tested. They ignored a model of human behavior, which I’ll call Hayekian, that is tested every day.

These are the opening two paragraphs of my latest Defining Ideas article, “Looking Back at COVID’s Authoritarian Regimes,” Defining Ideas, March 14, 2024.

Another excerpt:

That wasn’t the only uncertainty. My daughter Karen lived in San Francisco and made her living teaching Pilates. San Francisco mayor London Breed shut down all the gyms, and so there went my daughter’s business. (The good news was that she quickly got online and shifted many of her clients to virtual Pilates. But that’s another story.) We tried to see her every six weeks or so, whether that meant our driving up to San Fran or her driving down to Monterey. But were we allowed to drive to see her? In that first month and a half, we simply didn’t know.

Read the whole thing, which is longer than usual.

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis…

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Problems After COVID-19 Vaccination More Prevalent Among Naturally Immune: Study

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

People who recovered from COVID-19 and received a COVID-19 shot were more likely to suffer adverse reactions, researchers in Europe are reporting.

A medical worker administers a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to a patient at a vaccination center in Ancenis-Saint-Gereon, France, on Nov. 17, 2021. (Stephane Mahe//Reuters)

Participants in the study were more likely to experience an adverse reaction after vaccination regardless of the type of shot, with one exception, the researchers found.

Across all vaccine brands, people with prior COVID-19 were 2.6 times as likely after dose one to suffer an adverse reaction, according to the new study. Such people are commonly known as having a type of protection known as natural immunity after recovery.

People with previous COVID-19 were also 1.25 times as likely after dose 2 to experience an adverse reaction.

The findings held true across all vaccine types following dose one.

Of the female participants who received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, for instance, 82 percent who had COVID-19 previously experienced an adverse reaction after their first dose, compared to 59 percent of females who did not have prior COVID-19.

The only exception to the trend was among males who received a second AstraZeneca dose. The percentage of males who suffered an adverse reaction was higher, 33 percent to 24 percent, among those without a COVID-19 history.

Participants who had a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection (confirmed with a positive test) experienced at least one adverse reaction more often after the 1st dose compared to participants who did not have prior COVID-19. This pattern was observed in both men and women and across vaccine brands,” Florence van Hunsel, an epidemiologist with the Netherlands Pharmacovigilance Centre Lareb, and her co-authors wrote.

There were only slightly higher odds of the naturally immune suffering an adverse reaction following receipt of a Pfizer or Moderna booster, the researchers also found.

The researchers performed what’s known as a cohort event monitoring study, following 29,387 participants as they received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The participants live in a European country such as Belgium, France, or Slovakia.

Overall, three-quarters of the participants reported at least one adverse reaction, although some were minor such as injection site pain.

Adverse reactions described as serious were reported by 0.24 percent of people who received a first or second dose and 0.26 percent for people who received a booster. Different examples of serious reactions were not listed in the study.

Participants were only specifically asked to record a range of minor adverse reactions (ADRs). They could provide details of other reactions in free text form.

“The unsolicited events were manually assessed and coded, and the seriousness was classified based on international criteria,” researchers said.

The free text answers were not provided by researchers in the paper.

The authors note, ‘In this manuscript, the focus was not on serious ADRs and adverse events of special interest.’” Yet, in their highlights section they state, “The percentage of serious ADRs in the study is low for 1st and 2nd vaccination and booster.”

Dr. Joel Wallskog, co-chair of the group React19, which advocates for people who were injured by vaccines, told The Epoch Times: “It is intellectually dishonest to set out to study minor adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination then make conclusions about the frequency of serious adverse events. They also fail to provide the free text data.” He added that the paper showed “yet another study that is in my opinion, deficient by design.”

Ms. Hunsel did not respond to a request for comment.

She and other researchers listed limitations in the paper, including how they did not provide data broken down by country.

The paper was published by the journal Vaccine on March 6.

The study was funded by the European Medicines Agency and the Dutch government.

No authors declared conflicts of interest.

Some previous papers have also found that people with prior COVID-19 infection had more adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination, including a 2021 paper from French researchers. A U.S. study identified prior COVID-19 as a predictor of the severity of side effects.

Some other studies have determined COVID-19 vaccines confer little or no benefit to people with a history of infection, including those who had received a primary series.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends people who recovered from COVID-19 receive a COVID-19 vaccine, although a number of other health authorities have stopped recommending the shot for people who have prior COVID-19.

Another New Study

In another new paper, South Korean researchers outlined how they found people were more likely to report certain adverse reactions after COVID-19 vaccination than after receipt of another vaccine.

The reporting of myocarditis, a form of heart inflammation, or pericarditis, a related condition, was nearly 20 times as high among children as the reporting odds following receipt of all other vaccines, the researchers found.

The reporting odds were also much higher for multisystem inflammatory syndrome or Kawasaki disease among adolescent COVID-19 recipients.

Researchers analyzed reports made to VigiBase, which is run by the World Health Organization.

Based on our results, close monitoring for these rare but serious inflammatory reactions after COVID-19 vaccination among adolescents until definitive causal relationship can be established,” the researchers wrote.

The study was published by the Journal of Korean Medical Science in its March edition.

Limitations include VigiBase receiving reports of problems, with some reports going unconfirmed.

Funding came from the South Korean government. One author reported receiving grants from pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer.

Tyler Durden Fri, 03/15/2024 - 05:00

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