2021-09-28 General

Treatments

It’s been observed often that obesity raises the risk of COVID-19. This preprint looked into it more closely, and found that the anti-obesity drug orlistat blocks COVID-19 in mice.

Mitigation Measures

This report from England looked how behaviour correlated with risk of getting COVID-19. People who reported that never wore masks were slightly over 1.5x more likely to catch COVID-19 than people who reported that they always wore masks. Interestingly, there was a category “not needed” which was for people who just didn’t go out, and they also had a ~1.5x times higher risk of catching COVID-19. I guess they were wrong when they thought it was not needed. :-/

Vaccines

This article reports that people have about the same level of side effects after a third dose of mRNA as they do after the second dose.


This article says that Sanofi (who makes 40% of the world’s influenza vaccines) is not going to make a primary COVID-19 vaccine, even though their mRNA COVID-19 vax had promising Phase 1/2 results. They say that by the time they could get it approved, there will be a glut of COVID-19 vaccines on the market, so they don’t want to play that game. Instead, they are shifting to make mRNA flu vaccines and make a COVID-19 booster shot. They didn’t say if the COVID-19 booster they are working on would be multivalent (e.g. COVID-19 Classic plus Beta plus Delta), but I hope it is.

It’s nice to see someone else saying that we are going to be swimming in COVID-19 vaccines in the not toooo far distant future.


Pfizer has submitted its data on 5-12 year-olds to the US FDA. I presume that means that Canada is on it as well. (Canada has a “rolling submission” process, so there magic dates that companies can use for press releases.)

Recommended Reading

This opinion piece talks about how the debate about boosters is not about science, it’s about values.