CU Anschutz In The News

But as David Saxon of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus explained to me, the problems with fen-phen derived from the “fen” and not the “phen”—which is to say, a different drug called fenfluramine. “Phen,” for its part, has been prescribed as a weight-loss drug for more than half a century—far longer than any GLP-1 agonist has been on the market—and has shown no clear signs of causing serious problems. Its known side effects are similar to those of Adderall, a drug that is now used by more than 40 million Americans.

Create vaccine pop-ups. For many older adults and people with limited mobility, getting vaccinated was largely a logistical challenge. Setting up temporary clinics where they lived—at senior centers or low-income housing, as in East Boston, for instance—helped ensure that transportation would not be an obstacle for them, said Josh Barocas, an infectious-diseases doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Recent data hint at this possibility. Past brushes with the virus or the original vaccine seem to mold, or even muffle, people’s reactions to bivalent shots—“I have no doubt about that,” Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.

Policies are what normalize behaviors, says Daniel Goldberg, a public-health ethicist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. If that process begins to operate in reverse—“if you always just permit what people are doing to set your policies, guaranteed, you’re going to preserve the status quo.”

Elizabeth Carlton, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, suggests starting with the CDC’s community-levels map, which assigns counties colors using a combination of three metrics (one of which is cases). Green is low, yellow is medium, and red is high. If your county is in the red, then “no more data-sleuthing needed,”she wrote in an email—start wearing a mask indoors.

Some recent research shows that even once they’ve been infected, the vaccinated are less likely to spread the coronavirus than the unvaccinated. “We’re back in this category of, Yeah, it can happen, but it seems to be a very rare event,” Ross Kedl, an immunology professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.

In later decades, researchers described other worm species that dropped segments from several chromosomes during early rounds of cell division in embryos. “But they didn’t have the technology to really explore it,” says Richard Davis, an emeritus molecular biologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in Aurora.

Elizabeth Carlton, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, offered a three-step approach. First, ensure that everyone in your party who can be vaccinated is vaccinated. Then figure out if you have high-risk attendees (perhaps an unvaccinated child or an immunosuppressed uncle). If you do, consider adding additional layers of protection, such as testing beforehand or moving your celebration outside.