Vaccines
This article says that Novavax — once it gets approved and once the manufacturing line gets booted up in 2022 — will be produced in Montreal! The article says they expect to be able to make about 2M doses per month.
This article mentions how the US’ vaccination of young children has an added benefit: moar data! The initial Pfizer study had a relatively small study population (~4600), which means that rare side effects probably wouldn’t show up. However, the US has vaccinated almost a million kidlets by now, so rare side effects should show up. (And history shows that side effects always show up pretty quickly, not years later.)
This preprint claims that the level of neutralizing antibodies against VOCs can be used to predict how effective a vaccine will be (“correlates of protection“). This, if it holds, is a big deal: that means that tweaks to a vaccine can be tested by looking at a few volunteers’ instead of having to do a big randomized clinical trial.
This preprint says that Pfizer boosters in England were ~85% effective against symptomatic disease compared to two shots with no boosters. Relative to unvaccinated people, a Pfizer booster brought the effectiveness to ~94%.
Recommended Reading
This article talks about the harassment that healthcare workers are getting.
This article discusses COVID-19 in non-humans, including pets.
This article talks about how, in the US, hospitals didn’t provide access to journalists, which meant that the COVID-19 pandemic was kind of hidden. Money quote: “This is one of the most stunning facets of the pandemic’s opening stages: America’s hospital industry may have been even more effective in censoring the media than China’s government.”