2021-07-28 General

Vaccines

On 21 July’s General blog post, I reported a study which suggested that vaccine effectiveness waned over time. This tweet thread (by one of the original authors) says they don’t think that’s accurate: that they got the denominator wrong. The vaccines still work well.


Pfizer has released six-month data. Tl;dr: the vaccine works really really fucking well.

This article reports that the effectiveness dropped over the six months from 96% to 84%. I don’t know if they took into account that the virus got more virulent in those six months.


This preprint says that a COVID-19 infection plus one dose of J&J gives significantly better levels of all the blood goodness than just one dose of J&J.


This article says that Pfizer is going to make USD$33 billion (with a B) in 2021.


This study in Finland found a 48% secondary attack rate (i.e. the rate at which infected people passed it on to their household).


This preprint says that T-cells ride to the rescue about a week after an mRNA dose, even before antibodies show up.

Treatments

This literature review of ivermectin studies didn’t find any that showed that it worked. Translation: it probably doesn’t work.

Long COVID

This web page says that double-vaxxing decreases the risk of Long COVID-19 in breakout cases by 30% over unvaxxed COVID-19 patients.

Recommended Reading

This article gives a blow-by-blow of how SARS-CoV-2 infects cells. It translates technical stuff into terms understandable by an educated lay person.


This article describes how the Delta mutations make it more transmissible. Great for the COVID-geeky, give it a pass if you are more casual.