Month: February 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Authorities in Spain said they broke up a SIM-swapping crime ring that used identity theft and falsified documents and texts to target victims’ bank accounts.

In a press release, Spain’s National Police agency said it arrested eight individuals in connection with the operation, which began no later than last March. The suspects, the authorities said, posed as bank employees and used fake messages to obtain personal information and bank details of targeted individuals.

“With this, they deceived the employees of phone stores to obtain duplicate SIM cards and, in this way, have access to the bank’s security confirmation messages,” the release stated. “In this way, they could operate in online banking and access bank accounts to empty them after receiving security confirmation messages from the banks.”

Enlarge / A child getting a vaccination on February 19, 2021, in Bonn, Germany. (credit: Getty | Ute Grabowsky)

The Food and Drug Administration, Pfizer, and BioNTech announced on Friday that they are abandoning plans to pursue the authorization of a two-dose regimen of COVID-19 vaccines for children ages six months to four years. Instead, they will again put the possibility of an authorization on hold as they await data on the efficacy of a third dose for the youngest children. That data is now expected in early April.

In a press release this afternoon, Pfizer and its partner BioNTech reported that COVID-19 cases among children enrolled in the initial two-dose trial “continue to accumulate according to the study protocol, and more data are being generated because rates of infection and illness remain high in children of this age, especially due to the recent omicron surge.”

“Given that the study is advancing at a rapid pace, the companies will wait for the three-dose data as Pfizer and BioNTech continue to believe it may provide a higher level of protection in this age group,” the press release continued.

Enlarge / X-ray technicians take a chest X-ray of an unvaccinated COVID-19 patient on the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) floor at Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2022. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

A bout of COVID-19 can take a hefty toll on the heart and blood vessels; people who recover from the infection have substantially higher risks of developing any of 20 serious cardiovascular disorders in the year following their recovery. Those disorders include heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart), and blood clots in the lungs.

Cardiovascular risks increase with the severity of an infection—that is, people who need intensive care for COVID-19 face the highest cardiovascular risks. But, overall, the pandemic virus appears to be indiscriminate, wreaking havoc on cardiovascular systems and increasing risks in all groups of patients, from those with mild disease, to the young, to those without underlying conditions or pre-existing cardiovascular diseases.

That’s all according to an open-access study involving more than 11 million veterans published this week in Nature Medicine by researchers at the VA St. Louis Health Care System and Washington University in St. Louis.