All-out fight to save Lake Tahoe as Caldor fire closes in – Los Angeles Times

Highway 50 remains closed due to the Caldor fire as smoke and ash fill the air in the Lake Tahoe Basin. The Caldor fire has swelled past 143,000 acres and continues to burn toward South Lake Tahoe, where evacuation warnings have people on high alert.

Source: All-out fight to save Lake Tahoe as Caldor fire closes in – Los Angeles Times

Americans Are Poisoning Themselves With This Unapproved COVID Drug – Mother Jones (Me: bewildering – won’t get vaccinated but will take horse deworming meds promoted on the internet and fake news by fools!)

Reports of poisonings have been pouring out of a handful of states hard-hit by the COVID surge, as desperate people attempt to self-medicate with a livestock de-wormer called Ivermectin. The medicine is approved for human use by prescription, for certain other things, but the FDA is warning people against using it—the veterinary version especially—to try and treat or thwart COVID.  Texas Public Radio reports that ranch and feed stores are sold out of the drug, and the state poison control hotline has been burning up with people worried about the effects they are experiencing from taking it. “Nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain,” the director of the Texas Poison Center told TPR. “However, you can have further problems, including mental status changes, coma, even seizures… I haven’t seen any deaths here in Texas, but these are things that are reported by the manufacturer with people who use large doses.”

Source: Americans Are Poisoning Themselves With This Unapproved COVID Drug – Mother Jones

At a Children’s Hospital, a Wave of Young Patients Struggling to Breathe – The New York Times

Helpless to improve her infant son’s breathing as he was about to be intubated, Catherine Perrilloux did the only thing that came naturally to her in that moment, the worst of her life: She looked away and prayed. The boy, known as Junior, was two months old and gravely ill with Covid-19.

“I see a bunch of them crowding around the room with the ventilator machine, and then they pull out the tubing, and I’m just losing control,” Ms. Perrilloux, a dean at a nearby private school, recalled last week in her son’s room in the pediatric intensive care unit. “There’s nothing that you could say to make it better. You can’t do anything. It’s just paralyzing.”

At Children’s Hospital New Orleans, where the intensive care unit has been jammed with Covid-19 patients, scenes like this have played out unrelentingly over the past month. Nurses raced around monitoring one gut-wrenching case after another. One child was getting a complicated breathing treatment known as ECMO, a last resort after ventilators fail, which nurses said was almost unheard-of for pediatric cases. About a half-dozen others were in various stages of distress.

“We all thought, ‘Well, thankfully it’s not happening to the kids; none of us would be able to stomach that,’” said Mark Melancon, a longtime nurse at the hospital, recalling previous stages of the coronavirus pandemic. “Fast forward to now, and it’s happening with the kids.”

 

Some Hotels Are Mandating Vaccines. Will Others Follow? – The New York Times

Accommodations such as PUBLIC HotelEquinox Hotel and Wythe Hotel, all in New York City, Urban Cowboy Lodge in Big Indian, N.Y., a hamlet in the Catskill Mountains, and Pilgrim House in Provincetown, Mass., are among the first in the United States to announce that they will require evidence of vaccination, via a physical card or a digital verification, from their guests.

The precedent for hotels requiring vaccination is already being set beyond the contiguous United States. In August, Puerto Rico issued an island-wide vaccine mandate that requires guests and staff at all hotels, guesthouses and short-term rentals, including Airbnb, to provide proof of vaccination or a negative PCR or antigen test taken within 72 hours before their visit. If a person is staying longer than a week, they will need to present negative tests to hotel staff on a weekly basis.

Elite Island Resorts, a Florida-based company that runs a collection of all-inclusive Caribbean resorts stretching from Antigua to Panama, announced that all guests over the age of 12 would be required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination upon arrival beginning on Sept. 1.

BioNTech mulls producing malaria jabs in Rwanda, Senegal | News | DW | 27.08.2021

BioNTech could start producing malaria and tuberculosis vaccines in Rwanda and Senegal, the company said after the presidents of the two African countries met with with EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin in Berlin on Thursday.

The German pharma giant is developing malaria and tuberculosis jabs based on the same mRNA technology used to make in-demand COVID-19 shots, BioNTech said.

At the Berlin meeting with Sahin and Ursula von der Leyen, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Senegal’s Macky Sall discussed setting up facilities to use this technology in Africa, which currently imports 99% of its vaccines and is limited to a yellow fever inoculation producer in Senegal.

New vaccines thanks to COVID-19 profits

BioNTech announced in July it would start developing malaria and tuberculosis vaccines with the first phase funded from profits gained by the global sale of its COVID-19 vaccine.

Source: BioNTech mulls producing malaria jabs in Rwanda, Senegal | News | DW | 27.08.2021