2021-04-09/10 General

Sorry that there was no blog posting yesterday, I got my first shot of AstraZeneca and was wiped out.

Vaccines

Pfizer has announced excellent results from their clinical trial with adolescents, and has asked the FDA for approval! It is not a surprise that it’s effective in children as well, but it’s great news that the trial has finished.


A preprint studying Israeli cases says that B.1.1.7 is more likely than COVID Classic to give asymptomatic cases, and B.1.351 is even more likely to give asymptomatic cases. (The paper was careful to add that even so, vaccination worked really well.) Here is a mass-media article about the study.

The paper also suggested that B.1.1.7 spreads better than B.1.351.


The US CDC found that mRNA vaccines give about 80% protection against even asymptomatic infection after one dose, 90% after two.


A county in the US stopped using J&J vax after 18 of 2300 people had reactions to inoculations. Fourteen were deemed minor — things like feeling woozy — but four were serious enough to take to hospital, though from the article it sounded like mostly it was for observation out of an abundance of caution, not like they had face-huggers bursting out of their chests.

A reminder that these J&J vaccines came from the Emergent plant in Baltimore which has had some sketchy manufacturing issues.


While most of the studies about real-world effectiveness against VOCs have been antibody studies, this preprint says that T-cells are more important.


If you are interested in the science behind the AZ blood clotting issues, check out this paper and this paper. It turns out to be the same mechanism as in heparin-induced thrombocytopenia.

Reinfection

A study found that getting COVID19 gave you 84% lower risk of reinfection for at least seven months.