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Health

Study finds Paxlovid can interact badly with some heart medications, and White House renews COVID emergency through Jan. 11

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A new study has found that the COVID antiviral Paxlovid can interact badly with certain heart medications, raising concerns for patients with cardiovascular risk who test positive.

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and found the reaction involved such medications as blood thinners and statins. As patients who are hospitalized with COVID are at elevated risk of heart problems, they are likely to be described Paxlovid, which was developed by Pfizer
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 “Co-administration of NMVr (Paxlovid) with medications commonly used to manage cardiovascular conditions can potentially cause significant drug-drug interactions and may lead to severe adverse effects,” the authors wrote. “It is crucial to be aware of such interactions and take appropriate measures to avoid them.”

The news comes just days after the White House made a renewed push to encourage Americans above the age of 50 to take Paxlovid or use monoclonal antibodies if they test positive and are at risk of developing severe disease.

White House coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha told the New York Times that greater use of the medicine could reduce the average daily death count to about 50 a day from close to 400 currently.

“I think almost everybody benefits from Paxlovid,” Jha said. “For some people, the benefit is tiny. For others, the benefit is massive.” 

Yet a smaller share of 80-year-olds with COVID in the U.S. is taking it than 45-year-olds, Jha said, citing data said he has seen.

On Thursday, the White House extended its COVID pubic health emergency through Jan. 11 as it prepares for an expected rise in cases in the colder months, the Associated Press reported.

The public health emergency, first declared in January 2020 and renewed every 90 days since, has dramatically changed how health services are delivered.

The declaration enabled the emergency authorization of COVID vaccines, as well as free testing and treatments. It expanded Medicaid coverage to millions of people, many of whom will risk losing that coverage once the emergency ends. It temporarily opened up telehealth access for Medicare recipients, enabling doctors to collect the same rates for those visits and encouraging health networks to adopt telehealth technology.

Since the beginning of this year, Republicans have pressed the administration to end the public health emergency.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has urged Congress to provide billions more in aid to pay for vaccines and testing. Amid Republican opposition to that request, the federal government ceased sending free COVID tests in the mail last month, saying it had run out of funds for that effort.

Separately, the head of the World Health Organization urged countries to continue to surveil, monitor and track COVID and to ensure poorer countries get access to vaccines, diagnostics and treatments, reiterating that the pandemic is not yet over.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said most countries no longer have measures in place to limit the spread of the virus, even though cases are rising again in places including Europe.

“Most countries have reduced surveillance drastically, while testing and sequencing rates are also much lower,” Tedros said in opening remarks at the IHR Emergency Committee on COVID-19 Pandemic on Thursday.

“This,” said the WHO leader, “is blinding us to the evolution of the virus and the impact of current and future variants.”

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease and now stand at their lowest level since late April, although the true tally is likely higher given how many people overall are testing at home, where the data are not being collected.

The daily average for new cases stood at 38,530 on Thursday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 19% from two weeks ago. Cases are rising in six states, namely Nevada, New Mexico, Kansas, Maine, Wisconsin and Vermont, and are flat in Wyoming. They are falling everywhere else.

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 7% at 26,665, while the daily average for deaths is down 7% to 377. 

The new bivalent vaccine might be the first step in developing annual Covid shots, which could follow a similar process to the one used to update flu vaccines every year. Here’s what that process looks like, and why applying it to Covid could be challenging. Illustration: Ryan Trefes

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has urged German states to reintroduce face-mask requirements for indoor spaces due to high COVID cases numbers, the Local.de reported. Lauterbach was launching his ministry’s new COVID campaign on Friday. “The direction we are heading in is not a good one,” he said at a press conference in Berlin, adding it’s better to take smaller measures now than be forced into drastic ones later.

• Health officials in Washington and Oregon said Thursday that a fall and winter COVID surge is likely headed to the Pacific Northwest after months of relatively low case levels, the AP reported. King County (Wash.) Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin said during a news briefing that virus trends in Europe show a concerning picture of what the U.S. could soon see, the Seattle Times reported.

Two banners unfurled from a highway overpass in Beijing condemned Chinese President Xi Jinping and his strict Covid policies, in a rare display of defiance. The protest took place days before the expected extension of the leader’s tenure.

• Kevin Spacey’s trial on sexual-misconduct allegations will continue without a lawyer who tested positive for COVID on Thursday, Yahoo News reported. The “American Beauty” and “House of Cards” star is on trial in Manhattan federal court facing allegations in a $40 million civil lawsuit that he preyed upon actor Anthony Rapp in 1986 when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was 26. Jennifer Keller’s diagnosis comes after she spent about five hours cross-examining Rapp on the witness stand over two days — a few feet away from the jury box without wearing a mask.

• A man who presents himself as an Orthodox Christian monk and an attorney with whom he lived fraudulently obtained $3.5 million in federal pandemic relief funds for nonprofit religious organizations and related businesses they controlled, and spent some of it to fund a “lavish lifestyle,” federal prosecutors said Thursday. Brian Andrew Bushell, 47, and Tracey M.A. Stockton, 64, are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and unlawful monetary transactions, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston said in a statement, as reported by the AP.

Here’s what the numbers say:

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 623.9 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.56 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 96.9 million cases and 1,064,821 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 226.2 million people living in the U.S., equal to 68.1% of the total population, are fully vaccinated, meaning they have had their primary shots. Just 110.8 million have had a booster, equal to 49% of the vaccinated population, and 25.6 million of those who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 39% of those who received a first booster.

Some 14.8 million people have had a shot of the new bivalent booster that targets the new omicron subvariants.

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Health

Paxlovid: Covid-19 treatment can interact with common heart medications, doctors warn

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CNN
 — 

Covid-19 patients with a history of cardiovascular disease are at an increased risk of developing severe illness and could benefit most from the Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid – but there’s a catch.

Paxlovid can have dangerous interactions with some of the most common medications for cardiovascular disease, including certain statins and heart failure therapies, a new paper warns.

The review paper, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, lists dozens of cardiovascular medications and whether they are safe to give along with Paxlovid or whether they could have interactions.

Some medications such as aspirin are safe to take with Paxlovid, according to the paper, but other drugs could have interactions, and therefore, their dosage should be adjusted or temporarily discontinued while a patient is taking Paxlovid.

When President Joe Biden tested positive for Covid-19 and started Paxlovid in July, his physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor temporarily took him off Crestor and Eliquis, two heart medications that the President takes for his pre-existing conditions. Doctors say there is no short-term risk to stopping these drugs.

The review paper says that interactions between Paxlovid and certain blood thinners can cause an increased risk of bleeding. Interactions between Paxlovid and some cholesterol medications such as statins can be toxic to the liver, and interactions between Paxlovid and certain blood pressure medications could cause low blood pressure, flushing and swelling.

“There are some drugs that you simply will not be able to stop, and a doctor will have to make a decision. It’s a risk-benefit analysis,” said Dr. Jayne Morgan, a cardiologist and clinical director of the Covid Task Force at Piedmont Hospital/Healthcare in Atlanta, who was not involved in the new paper.

For cardiovascular medications that patients could discontinue in order to take Paxlovid, Morgan noted that the Covid-19 treatment is a five-day regimen.

“You’ve got to make the diagnosis and then stop your drugs and have all of that done in time to still meet that five-day window,” Morgan said, adding that people will have to consult with their doctors about what’s best for them.

The authors of the new paper – from Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, Harvard Medical School and other US institutions – wrote that Paxlovid should be avoided when potentially interacting cardiovascular medications cannot be “safely interrupted.”

Paxlovid, an oral antiviral drug, was authorized in December for the treatment of mild to moderate Covid-19 in people 12 and older who are at high risk of severe illness, hospitalization or death.

“Awareness of the presence of drug-drug interactions of Paxlovid with common cardiovascular drugs is key. System-level interventions by integrating drug-drug interactions into electronic medical records could help avoid related adverse events,” the paper’s senior author, Dr. Sarju Ganatra, director of the cardio-oncology program at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Massachusetts, said in a news release.

“The prescription of Paxlovid could be incorporated into an order set, which allows physicians, whether it be primary care physicians or cardiology providers, to consciously rule out any contraindications to the co-administration of Paxlovid. Consultation with other members of the health care team, particularly pharmacists, can prove to be extremely valuable,” Ganatra said. “However, a health care provider’s fundamental understanding of the drug-drug interactions with cardiovascular medications is key.”

Interactions between Paxlovid and common heart medications are well known, said Dr. Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who was not involved in the new paper.

“Drug interactions have been reported, but I think that Paxlovid has been prescribed so widely that some doctors and patients may not be as attuned as they should be,” Barouch said.

Paxlovid is made of two antivirals, nirmatrelvir and ritonavir.

“The second drug, ritonavir, is a nonspecific drug that inhibits metabolism and increases the dose of the other drug. But the ritonavir in Paxlovid also can inhibit the metabolism of other drugs. So you have to be really careful when you prescribe Paxlovid for people who are on certain blood thinners, cardiac medications, statins and other drugs,” Barouch said. “So it’s not just a free pass.”

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Science

NASA Beamed a Doctor to The ISS in a World-First ‘Holoportation’ Achievement

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There’s never been a house call quite like this. In a first for telepresence communication, a NASA flight surgeon was ‘holoported’ to the International Space Station (ISS), appearing and conversing as a virtual presence in real time, hundreds of miles above the surface of Earth.

 

If it sounds like Star Trek, you’re not too far off. (after all, Star Trek: Voyager did feature an artificial physician who was a holographic projection.)

But this isn’t science fiction. When NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid was beamed up to the ISS in October of last year, the illusion was made possible thanks to Microsoft’s ‘holoportation’ technology, which lets users interact with 3D representations of remote participants in real time.

“This is [a] completely new manner of human communication across vast distances,” says Schmid. “It is a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet.”

Schmid and other team members during the holoportation session. (ESA/Thomas Pesquet)

Unlike traditional holographic projections that appear to hover in the air for anybody to see, holoportation requires the use of an augmented reality headset, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, for the wearer to be able to perceive (and interact with) the remotely captured individual(s), who are filmed with a multiple-camera setup in their actual location.

In this case, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who was on board the ISS and wearing such a headset, had a two-way conversation with Schmid and members of his medical team, along with Fernando De La Pena Llaca, the CEO of AEXA Aerospace, which develops custom holoportation software (the kind that made this ISS session possible).

 

While Microsoft’s holoportation technology has existed – in various stages of development – for several years, it’s never been used for something as ambitious as this before: connecting Earth-based medical researchers with astronauts on mission, orbiting the planet hundreds of miles up in the sky.

Yet it’s this exact kind of capability – bridging physical gaps to connect people over huge distances in space – that could be important for future space-exploration missions. This way, scientists could virtually interact with real-time 3D representations of remote participants on Earth, space stations, or other spacecraft, enabling collaborations that can be much more involving and immersive than standard 2D video calls.

“Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there,” says Schmid.

“Imagine you can bring the best instructor or the actual designer of a particularly complex technology right beside you wherever you might be working on it.”

NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid holoported onto the ISS. (ESA/Thomas Pesquet)

The next step in the technology’s evolution is to enable fully two-way holoportation interactions.

During this experiment, Pesquet was the only participant wearing an augmented reality headset that enabled him to perceive the other participants as digital 3D holograms, as Schmid and the other participants did not wear such devices themselves.

 

Once all participants are similarly equipped, however, the possibilities to jump into someone else’s reality could become even more instructive and transformative for off-world astronauts – whether you’re consulting Earth-bound doctors about a medical issue, or exchanging important ideas about mission objectives with NASA researchers.

“What it really plays into is opportunities for more longer duration spaceflight and more deep spaceflight,” Christian Maender, a research director at space infrastructure company Axiom Space, explained to the Verge in 2021.

“Where you are really talking about wanting to create a human connection between your crew – no matter where they’re traveling – and back to someone on the planet.”

 

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Science

New Theory Suggests That Dark Matter Could Be an Extra-Dimensional Cosmic Refugee

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Dark matter, the elusive substance that accounts for the majority of the mass in the Universe, may be made up of massive particles called gravitons that first popped into existence in the first moment after the Big Bang.

 

And these hypothetical particles might be cosmic refugees from extra dimensions, a new theory suggests. 

The researchers’ calculations hint that these particles could have been created in just the right quantities to explain dark matter, which can only be “seen” through its gravitational pull on ordinary matter.

“Massive gravitons are produced by collisions of ordinary particles in the early Universe.

This process was believed to be too rare for the massive gravitons to be dark matter candidates,” study co-author Giacomo Cacciapaglia, a physicist at the University of Lyon in France, told Live Science.

But in a new study published in February in the journal Physical Review Letters, Cacciapaglia, along with Korea University physicists Haiying Cai and Seung J. Lee, found that enough of these gravitons would have been made in the early Universe to account for all of the dark matter we currently detect in the Universe.

The gravitons, if they exist, would have a mass of less than 1 megaelectronvolt (MeV), so no more than twice the mass of an electron, the study found.

This mass level is well below the scale at which the Higgs boson generates mass for ordinary matter – which is key for the model to produce enough of them to account for all the dark matter in the Universe. (For comparison, the lightest known particle, the neutrino, weighs less than 2 electronvolts, while a proton weighs roughly 940 MeV, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.)

 

The team found these hypothetical gravitons while hunting for evidence of extra dimensions, which some physicists suspect exist alongside the observed three dimensions of space and the fourth dimension, time.

In the team’s theory, when gravity propagates through extra dimensions, it materializes in our Universe as massive gravitons. 

But these particles would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, and only via the force of gravity.

This description is eerily similar to what we know about dark matter, which does not interact with light yet has a gravitational influence felt everywhere in the Universe. This gravitational influence, for instance, is what prevents galaxies from flying apart.

“The main advantage of massive gravitons as dark matter particles is that they only interact gravitationally, hence they can escape attempts to detect their presence,” Cacciapaglia said.

In contrast, other proposed dark matter candidates – such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions, and neutrinos – might also be felt by their very subtle interactions with other forces and fields.

The fact that massive gravitons barely interact via gravity with the other particles and forces in the Universe offers another advantage.

 

“Due to their very weak interactions, they decay so slowly that they remain stable over the lifetime of the Universe,” Cacciapaglia said, “For the same reason, they are slowly produced during the expansion of the Universe and accumulate there until today.”

In the past, physicists thought gravitons were unlikely dark matter candidates because the processes that create them are extremely rare. As a result, gravitons would be created at much lower rates than other particles.

But the team found that in the picosecond (trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang, more of these gravitons would have been created than past theories suggested.

This enhancement was enough for massive gravitons to completely explain the amount of dark matter we detect in the Universe, the study found. 

“The enhancement did come as a shock,” Cacciapaglia said. “We had to perform many checks to make sure that the result was correct, as it results in a paradigm shift in the way we consider massive gravitons as potential dark matter candidates.”

Because massive gravitons form below the energy scale of the Higgs boson, they are freed from uncertainties related to higher energy scales, which current particle physics doesn’t describe very well.

 

The team’s theory connects physics studied at particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider with the physics of gravity.

This means that powerful particle accelerators like the Future Circular Collider at CERN, which should begin operating in 2035, could hunt for evidence of these potential dark matter particles.

“Probably the best shot we have is at future high-precision particle colliders,” Cacciapaglia said. “This is something we are currently investigating.”

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

 

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