COVID-19 Delta variant spreads, vaccine hesitancy and another approval for FoundationOne’s cancer test
The COVID-19 delta variant wrecks havoc in much of the US and the world yet many Americans are still hesitant to get the vaccine
Healthcare & Medicine: COVID-19 update
TLDR: Approximately ⅓ of Americans remain unvaccinated, and the unvaccinated population is mostly republicans or republican leaning people.
Physicians are having a considerably difficult time changing the minds of the unvaccinated population, in fact vaccination discourse with patients has become a cause of physician burnout.
World View: while the United States is administering around 600,000 doses of the vaccine every day now (higher than the peak on the 4th of July weekend), China is administering over 16 million. That is more than 26x the number of vaccinations in the US while their population is only about 4x that of the US. In fact, China is limited by the amount of vaccines being produced, rather than unwillingness to get vaccinated.
It is ironic that the chief reason for their ability to do so is because of their promotion and coercion with patriotism, calling on people to get vaccinated by declaring the pandemic a “people’s war” while the “patriotic” group of Americans who frequently call their liberal counterparts “unpatriotic” are holding back vaccination rates in the US.
The pandemic is definitely a “people’s war” and getting vaccinated is absolutely a means of showing patriotism. We wonder if promoting such propaganda would promote vaccination among unvaccinated populations?
Florida became the new epicenter for US COVID-19 cases last week just a day after their governor Ron Desanstis signed an executive order banning mask mandates at schools. 409 Floridians died of COVID-19 in the past week and hospitals are becoming overwhelmed with 720+ new COVID hospitalizations daily. It seems that AdventHealth’s decision to put off elective procedures last week when the COVID cases were rising in the state had incredible foresight.
The schools in Broward county, FL may be fighting back against governor Desantis’ order on the mask mandate.
Medical tech news
FoundationOne, a subsidiary of Roche, got FDA approval for using its liquid cancer tissue biopsy testing kit for certain types of lung cancer. This approval merely added to the list of cancers that this test kit is certified to diagnose but the kit as a whole is quite interesting regardless. This kit does not diagnose cancer but finds the specific mutations responsible for the cancer the patient is suffering from and provides potential treatment options.
Cancer is not the same for everyone and each patient with the same type of cancer can have different cancer causing mutations in their genes. In other words, two people who both have lung cancer could have different mutations that are causing it in them. This is why cancer is so challenging to treat. Most experimental therapies that are in development treat specific mutations and therefore to treat a cancer with experimental therapies, you need to know what mutation caused it. This is where this test kit and others like it come in.
These kits take a tumor biopsy and use the DNA hanging around outside the cells (aka cell free DNA) for sequencing and compare it to its database of about 350 genes that commonly show cancerous mutations. In theory, this test kit can be used to detect mutations for a large variety of cancers since many cancers show mutations in similar sets of genes. But in practice, FoundationOne needs to show that their test kit can accurately detect each type of cancer to the FDA and get approvals for them one at a time.
The reason for this is so the FDA can ensure it doesn’t give too many false positives or false negatives, which would be incredibly dangerous. It would be quite problematic to approve the device without thoroughly testing its ability to detect each cancer type.
This cancer detection test is not entirely new and there are some others out there like this that exist but it's the first to take liquid biopsies (which basically means a blood test) and tests for so many mutations. The test results also list clinical trials that patients can participate in after having their mutations identified.
In practice, a physician takes a blood sample which is sent to the FoundationOne labs wherein the cell free DNA from the sample is extracted and sequenced to identify cancerous mutations. These results are then fed to a computer that recommends FDA approved and experimental treatments along with a list of ineffective treatments.
Overall, this is not the most innovative test but still an interesting one to look at due to the sheer quantity of mutations it tests. It is also important to note that the parent company Roche has a whole list of trials and therapies in development for treating cancer so in the future it could be programmed to recommend those treatments, regardless of whether those are the most effective or not. Not to be conspiracy theorists or anything but we know this already happens when corporations pay physicians a commission for recommending certain treatments so having a machine do so would only be easier.
Health & Wellness
Laugh.
Seriously, laughter is the best medicine. The Mayo Clinic has listed enough health benefits for you to join the local laughter club (or just laugh at a mirror by yourself for 5 minutes) in their Healthy Lifestyle section.
And if you think laughter is just for the home, ha ha (get it? We’re laughing sarcastically… tough crowd…).
Check out “Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life (And How Anyone Can Harness It. Even You.)” by the instructors of the same class at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas. Because, as they say, and I quote “Humor is serious business”.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress-relief/art-20044456
Study Highlight
A study conducted at Harvard university looked at the effect of toxic workers at a variety of workplaces to answer the ultimate question of employee recruitment. Is it better to hire cooperative workers who are less productive in independent work or highly productive people that do not get along with others. Result: the independent but toxic workers lowered workplace productivity for everyone else so significantly that they couldn’t make up for it alone.
Lesson: Teamwork makes a dream work.
Featured Fake News
News of COVID-19 vaccines causing miscarriages has been rather rampant on social media. In this article the author calculates a miscarriage rate of 81.9% in women after they received the COVID-19 vaccine. In actuality, there were over 3,000 participants. The 827 were only counting those participants who have either given birth or had a still birth up till now.
Moreover while the 12.6% miscarriage rate may still sound a little high to some, keep in mind that the general rate of miscarriages is between 10-20% and can go as high as 40-50% in some populations based on age.
