News Roundup 10.5.2023

Whatever happened to that new COVID wave and Molnupiravir is shifted to the commercial market. Also, accepting Halloween topic recommendations.

Well, I hope many of you and your loved ones haven’t become zombified, although I guess if you did become a zombie you wouldn’t be reading this. Or maybe you reading this would be a sign of you being zombified, becoming addicted to reading Substack and other social media outlets.

Anyways, we’re now in October, the month of spookiness and other horrors. It would be a proper month to become zombified I suppose. Because of this it would be nice to think of some Halloween-esque topics to cover. I’ve kept some pieces on “deadliest plants” on the back burner. I may consider covering nature’s poisons.

But more on that later in the post! Here are a few bits of news that I found a bit interesting.

1. So much for a new wave…

Well, it appears that new, late summer wave of COVID is disappearing as quickly as it emerged.

Yesterday ABC News, and likely other outlets, reported that COVID hospitalizations appear to be on the decline, suggesting that we may be passed that peak.

As of now, several metrics regarding COVID seemed to have declined aside from deaths related to COVID (no discernment over with or from) as reported through updates from the CDC:

There does appear to be a lag in the data, and this may be due to the fact that the CDC has moved to release weekly updates for COVID data every Friday, which seems to be in-line with updates they provide for other respiratory infections. So it might be a bit presumptive to assume that cases are now going down without looking at more current data.

That being said, the timing of this is certainly ironic given the recent rollout of new boosters. However, it’s also fortunate that such a decline in hospitalizations appears to be occurring as access to these new boosters have been lackluster. Maybe cases will begin rising again as soon as the boosters become more available in order to drive up demand. 🤷‍♂️¹

The ABC News article suggests that the decline may mean the end of this new wave, much ahead of what was expected:

Public health experts told ABC News that it looks like the summer peak is over and all COVID metrics should be on the decline ahead of traditional respiratory virus season.

"Signs point to the fact that the increase that we saw late summer is now subsiding," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital and an ABC News contributor. "That's not so unexpected given that we've seen previous seasons where you get this smaller summer peak, possibly driven by people being indoors, kids coming back to school post-vacation."

It’s also worth including the fact that ABC News also reports that not all hospitalizations are related to COVID itself:

Experts said some of the hospitalizations were due to people who were in the hospital for other reasons and tested positive for COVID-19 incidentally.

"When we look at our numbers at NYU, we do both -- look at numbers of patients who are incidentally diagnosed... but we also look at our numbers for people who have been admitted for COVID-related pulmonary issues," Dr. Dana Mazo, a clinical associate professor of medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told ABC News. "And we did see an increase in both of those groups."

The last quote doesn’t provide much details without actual numbers. This overreporting has strangely been something that has been acknowledged but appears to never have been addressed by the CDC.

2. Molnupiravir will cost you now

As reported by Reuters, it appears that the US is moving to stop providing free doses of Merck’s COVID antiviral Molnupiravir, likely by the middle of next month.

This move appears to suggest that Molnupiravir will move into the commercial market, meaning that for those who wish to procure this drug they may need to pay, in much the same ways that many of the COVID vaccines are no longer “free”:

The U.S. government will stop distributing free doses of Merck & Co's COVID-19 antiviral treatment molnupiravir by the middle of next month and expects it to be sold on the commercial market instead.

The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement posted on its website late last week they anticipate transition of the drug, sold under the brand name Lagevrio, from government-managed to traditional commercial distribution in November.

In order to move into the commercial market Merck would need to receive authorization from the FDA.

This comes at a time in which Merck is gaining a bit of heat again for Molnupiravir, as a recent study published in Nature² raised questions over Molnupiravir’s mutagenic properties and whether it may be driving SARS-COV2 mutations.

This appears to be a formal publishing of a previously covered preprint, which I examined earlier in the year. Barring any changes between the preprint and this publication people can find my thoughts in the prior post:

In short, there’s a few details missing that would consider this study a slam dunk on Molnupiravir, most notably due to the fact that there isn’t any indication as to the prevalence of these mutations in the population and whether they are any more virulent than variants that have been in wide circulation. However, given that Molnupiravir was approved on the thinnest of margins, with even some on the approval committee raising concerns over Molnupiravir’s mutagenicity, it seems strange for Merck to act as if this isn’t something of concern. Merck appears to be taking the “correlation is not causation” route, as noted in The Guardian article:

MSD, the manufacturer of molnupiravir, said the drug impaired viral replication and reduced shedding, which in turn reduced the risk of transmission.

The company added: “The authors assume these mutations were associated with viral spread from molnupiravir-treated patients without documented evidence of that transmission,. Instead, the authors rely on circumstantial associations between the region from which the sequence was identified and timeframe of sequence collection in countries where molnupiravir is available to draw their conclusions.”

Like with everything, the concern over mutations may not be needed if people decide to just not take Molnupiravir. Like with everything, at some point we should hope that people don’t turn to pharma for quick fixes, especially as most of the country begins to move on from COVID.

3. Halloween-related suggestions

Now, as mentioned at the beginning of this post I’m looking for a few topics to cover that are Halloween-related. If anyone has anything interesting please let me know. Because of my post on Lily-of-the-Valley as well as Hemlock I was interested in looking at other toxic plants, and maybe even animal venom if readers like those sorts of things.

I would also like any suggestions for Halloween movies. I recall last year someone mentioned that I should watch Let Me In and I unfortunately never got around to that, but any other suggestions would be great!

That being said, I had a thought recently over what constitutes a “Halloween” movie. A lot of people seem to talk about Die Hard and whether it’s a Christmas movie. We tend to infer that horror movies are Halloween movies, but that’s not quite the case. I always tend to consider a Halloween movie one that has to relate around Halloween, whether through events that occur on Halloween or the setting is fully decked out in Halloween decorations and festivities.

Personally, it’s not enough to be considered a Halloween movie if it’s a horror film that takes place in the fall, or if it involves a haunted house or things of that nature. It has to infer Halloween in some way.

That being said, I am about to say something that may be considered controversial. Last year a friend recommended Adam Sandler’s movie Hubie Halloween, and I finally gave in and watched it.

In all honesty…I did not like it. The plot felt too contrived. I never could get into the idea that the whole town was out to kill Hubie, and this is made worse when, for all intents and purposes, the film is argued to be realistic in nature, which also makes some of the jokes not land as well. I also couldn’t figure out what character Hubie was supposed to be. Is he a character who just has a speech impediment, or is he a character who also has impaired mental faculties? Honestly, by the end of the film I had to just go with “both” because I couldn’t really tell what I’m supposed to think in regards to his mannerisms.

It also doesn’t help that Hubie has a love interest who also appears to be a single mother taking care of adopted children in a single house on a waitress’ salary. The ending was also extremely self-aggrandizing. It was almost like a Neil Breen film where the evil people start listing off all of the evil things that they have done. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that people all of a sudden had a change of heart and come to the realization that hey, maybe we shouldn’t go around attempting to kill someone?

What sucks is that all of these criticisms hurt, because the film is just so over the top with its Halloweenness. The entire town is fully decked out in Halloween, with most houses having elaborate decorations. There’s a Halloween festival going on, a drive-in horror movie marathon being shown, and all things of that nature. It’s almost like a nearby Spirit Halloween storage facility blew up and draped the entire town in Halloween.

Well, that’s my ramble. Come at me in the comments I suppose. Let me know of some good Halloween ideas or films.

Also, here’s a random poll that may as well be just as, if not more, controversial as what I have just said:

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1. I actually don’t believe this to be the case. It seems a bit more coincidental that the rollout failures are occurring as the hospitalization rates seem to be declining. Regardless, It’s a bit of a good thing when pharma can’t capitalize on a supposed crisis.

2. Sanderson, T., Hisner, R., Donovan-Banfield, I. et al. A molnupiravir-associated mutational signature in global SARS-CoV-2 genomes. Nature (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06649-6