2021-11-11 General

Assholes to Assholes

This article says that people are paying money for fake vax cards, and the providers… just pocket the money and never send the card. LOL.

Vaccines

This article from the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations says that the world is going to have a glut of vaccines by June 2022.


This article says that the European Medicines Agency (their drug regulator) recommended adding transverse myelitis as a side effect to the J&J vaccine. (The article seemed to imply it might also turn out to be a problem with AZ.)


Speaking of side effects, this article from Tuesday says that Health Canada put a warning about immune thrombocytopenia on the J&J and AZ vax labels. When I read that, I was puzzled because it sure looks to me like the same thing as the blood clots which are old news. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but now you can’t say I didn’t tell you about it.

Testing

Current vaccines only carry information about the spike protein, which means that you can tell if someone has been infected by looking for antibodies to COVID-19 proteins other than the spike. The common tests these days look for antibodies to nucleocapsid proteins. This preprint says that unfortunately, nucleocapsid antibodies decline quickly after infection. (The body prunes antibodies which are not helpful, so it makes sense to me that the antibodies to the nucleocapsid would decline: the nucleocapsid is inside the spiky ball of SARS-CoV-2, so antibodies can’t “see” the nucleocapsid while SARS-CoV-2 is in the blood.) The authors say that antibodies to membrane (the “ball” part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus) proteins stick around for at least a year, and so are much better for determining if someone has had COVID-19 infection or not.

As this tweet says, “Should we stop saying ‘not everyone seroconverts’ and start saying ‘we’re looking for the wrong antibodies’?”

Recommended Reading

This article says there is zero evidence of a lab leak.


This article about how long SARS-CoV-2 hangs around in the body is from 27 July, but I just found it (and it’s good). One thing it mentions is that after seventeen days of isolation, six of fourteen men on an Antarctic expedition got colds!