COVID-19 Vaccines ❌ The acting head of the US CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, blocked publication of a paper in the US CDC’s weekly (and highly respected) journal. It is hugely unusual for a paper to get blocked like that by a high official (probably unprecedented, though I don’t know all of the US CDC’s history),… Continue reading 2026-05-01 General
Category: General
2026-04-24 General
COVID-19 Long COVID This long article (2026-04-21) on transauricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) talks a little bit about how some long haulers experimenting with (non-approved) taVNS self-treatment have found relief from taVNS, but the article talks even more about how it has negative effects for some long haulers. (TL;DR: be careful about your experimenting with… Continue reading 2026-04-24 General
2026-04-18 General
Multiple Pathogens Hospitals This article (2026-04-16) about this report (2026-04-16) says that the number of hospitalizations for vaccine-preventable respiratory diseases for Canadians more than doubled between 2019 and 2024, from 66 per 100,000 to 142 per 100,000. (BC had 125 vaccine-preventable respiratory diseases per 100,000 in 2024.) There were almost 60,000 vaccine-preventable respiratory hospitalizations in… Continue reading 2026-04-18 General
2026-04-10 General
Multiple Pathogens 💊 Metformin seems to be a bit of a wonder drug. It helps Type 2 diabetics, people with polycystic ovary syndrome, and it inhibits weight gain. Studies of using metformin to treat or prevent COVID-19 and Long COVID are mixed, but on balance it tends to help, and it helps some groups with… Continue reading 2026-04-10 General
2026-04-03 General
COVID-19 Treatments 🎉 This paper from Israel (2026-03-25) reports that they’ve isolated a monoclonal antibody from recovered COVID-19 patients which works against all variants known so far! The antibody works against a highly-conserved area, and makes the top part of the spike fall off prematurely. Without the top part, the virus can’t dock with the… Continue reading 2026-04-03 General
2026-03-27 General
Multiple Pathogens Pathology This paper from Ontario (2026-03-22) reports, to put it bluntly, that the “immunity debt” theory is hogwash. (The immunity debt theory says that the immune system is like a muscle, and requires exercise to stay in top form so when lockdown reduced exposure to pathogens, the immune system “got out of shape”.)… Continue reading 2026-03-27 General
2026-03-20 General
This week’s post is short. That happens sometimes. There just was not very much material that seemed appropriate/worthwhile this week. Multiple Pathogens Transmission 😲 This paper with data from three countries and regions over three years (2026-03-14) reports that an influenza A infection decreases your risk of COVID-19 by 94.24%(!) for five weeks. On the… Continue reading 2026-03-20 General
2026-03-13 General
COVID-19 Long COVID A question that I get asked surprisingly frequently is, “but hasn’t Long COVID decreased a lot?” and I surprisingly didn’t have really good evidence either way to point to. Well, now I have something: this review paper (2026-03-10) reports that Long COVID prevalence was 35.5% in the pre-Omicron era and is 22.8%… Continue reading 2026-03-13 General
2026-03-06 General
Multiple Pathogens Vaccines 💉👃 I know I am repeating myself, but there is something extraordinary going on that I want to repeat/summarize. I have talked about “universal vaccines” which work by revving up the immune system in isolation, but I want to point out that there are THREE nasal “universal vaccines” that have had animal… Continue reading 2026-03-06 General
2026-02-28 General
Multiple Pathogens Vaccines 🎉🎉🎉👃🐁 You might have read articles like this one (2026-02-19) about this paper (2026-02-19) reporting the development of a nasal spray that protected mice for at least three months from a lot of different respiratory diseases, including SARS1, COVID-19, a bat coronavirus, and at least two bacteria. It even quieted reactions to… Continue reading 2026-02-28 General