Vaccines
There’s yet another paper which says that AZ is crap against B.1.351 — 10.5%.
There is some suggestion that AZ is um crap against B.1.351 because it doesn’t have the 2-proline stabilizer (unlike the mRNAs and J&J). The 2-proline stabilizer is a little tweak to the spike protein to keep it in its prefusion shape, i.e. the shape before it starts to “open the ACE2 lock”. See here for a backgrounder.
I haven’t posted much on the putative link between AZ and blot clotting disorders because it sure seems to me like coincidence and not causality. If you want to read about it, go here.
There apparently are some people who argued against the elderly and frail in vaccine distribution precisely because that population is going to have a lot of people get sick and die from totally other things, but people being people will panic, mistaking coincidence for causality.
If you long for more info on vaccines, see this amazing, comprehensive, long article on vaccines.
One of the things that the author mentions is vaccine combos: do a first dose with vax A and a second dose with vax B. Theory and preliminary data says that heterogenous combos work better than homogeneous combos.
She also has this very nice graph:
Long COVID
Yet another reason to want to avoid COVID-19: someone got rheumatoid arthritis post-COVID. It might be coincidence, but it might not be.
Kids
This paper found that there wasn’t a lot of transmission in primary schools in the UK in June and September. Note, however, that was before B.1.1.7 took over England. I believe the jury is still out on how well kids transmit the variants.
A woman who got a COVID-19 vaccine while she was pregnant passed antibodies on to her baby.