Free Republic

Another San Diego County resident has succumbed to COVID-19 in a second so-called local "breakthough" case. In so-called coronavirus breakthrough infections, fully vaccinated people get the illness anyway, despite the fact that the vaccines typically offer strong protection against severe disease. There are rare cases, however, that result in hospitalizations and, rarer still, deaths. On June 9, a county spokesman said an "older" San Diego woman who was fully vaccinated and had "many pre-existing medical issues" and was sickened by the coronavirus and later died.

Unfounded fears that the coronavirus vaccine causes infertility, a need to question authority and politicization of vaccines are cited as leading reasons for lagging rates of youth vaccination in Ohio and across the country. “It’s frustrating,” said psychologist Juanita Martin, executive director of counseling and accessibility at the University of Akron. “Young people have a sense of, ‘I’m invincible, I’m young, I’m healthy — nothing is going to happen to me.’ The wider implications just don’t resonate with them.” The fast-spreading Delta variant is infecting younger people worldwide. This makes vaccinating this population more important. The national trends also are...

Researchers have found evidence that a coronavirus epidemic swept East Asia some 20,000 years ago and was devastating enough to leave an evolutionary imprint on the DNA of people alive today. The new study suggests that an ancient coronavirus plagued the region for many years, researchers say. The finding could have dire implications for the Covid-19 pandemic if it’s not brought under control soon through vaccination. Four other coronaviruses can also infect people, but they usually cause only mild colds. Scientists did not directly observe these coronaviruses becoming human pathogens, so they have relied on indirect clues to estimate when...

The news about a potential link between the Covid-19 vaccine and a cardiac ailment in young people may be striking fear in the hearts of some parents. But pediatric cardiologists have a message for these parents: Covid-19 should scare you more — a whole lot more — than the vaccine. And these doctors should know. They’ve treated young patients who’ve contracted this heart ailment after vaccination — it’s called myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle — and they’ve also treated young patients who’ve had Covid-19. There simply is no comparison between the two, they say.