Vaccines
A few days ago, I wrote about how the world was going to have more than enough vaccine for everybody by the end of the year, and listed all the vaccines which I thought would be approved in time to help people this year? Well, one that had not even been on my radar (Medigen) has filed for emergency use authorization in Taiwan. I didn’t consider it because it hasn’t even started Phase 3 trials.
Taiwan’s Food and Drug Administration has said that companies can use “immunobridging” to prove efficacy — using tests on the blood of vaccinated volunteers to show that the vaccine gives adequate immune responses. (IMHO, this is a reasonable shortcut for a regulatory agency to take in the middle of a pandemic.) Presumably, Medigen will show evidence of antibody production and maybe also T cells. (They still have to do Phase 3 trials, which Medigen will do in Paraguay.)
I tell you about this not because I think Medigen is awesome or anything like that, but to show that there are even more vaccines that will assist in vaxxing the world.
Disease
Oops, I forgot to include this article yesterday. It says that there is in fact a strong seasonal component to COVID — that R0 drops by 42% from winter to summer.
This study used a new way of looking at neurological impairments from COVID-19, and found much more impairment than standard measures.
Treatments
It’s an early study, but this article suggests that giving people hospitalized with COVID-19 an anti-coagulant right off the bat might be helpful.
Recommended Reading
This article talks about mixing vaccines and why it might be a good thing.
This article is sort of a rah-rah yay Canada discussion of how we managed to have the highest vax rate of any of the big countries. If you ave Canadian, you won’t learn anything, but it will make you feel good.
(I think they don’t give enough weight to the most important thing: we’ve got vax now. Lack of hesitancy (probably due in part to less political divisiveness fomented along intellectual lines) helps, but without the vax supply which our government laid in, it’s nothing.)
Want to see where the next pandemic will come from? This article talks about a long-standing project to evaluate (and rank) animal viruses by how scary they are.