Mitigation Measures
This preprint looked at high-risk exposures and said that the risk of catching COVID-19 was:
- 3.02x higher if the infected person was part of your household (versus not),
- 2.1x higher if the transmission was indoors (versus outdoors),
- 2.15x higher if the interaction lasted 3 hrs or more (vs. shorter) among unvaccinated and partially-vaccinated individuals (but wasn’t any higher among fully-vaccinated people)
Furthermore, the people who got infected were half as likely to have been wearing masks. The benefits of masking were highest for people who were partially- or un-vaccinated, and when interacting with non-household members and without physical contact.
Vaccines
This study found no differences between vaxxed and unvaxxed people on any measure associated with in-vitro fertilization: not on pregnancy rates, not on pregnancy-loss rates, not on mature oocytes retrieved, not on mature oocytes ratio, not on blastulation rate, not on the number of eggs with abnormal chromosome count, NOTHING. Show your fertility-fearful vax hesitant friends and family this paper!
This study looked at germinal centres (the place where antibodies train, essentially) and found that:
- vaccination gives rise to more different types of antibodies than infection does;
- the types of antibodies resulting from infection keeps increasing for several months;
- infection gives rise to variant-specific antibodies, but a prior mRNA vaccination biases the antibodies to COVID Classic antibodies;
- mRNA vaccination keeps the germinal cells active and productive for about eight weeks.
This article reports that an Israeli study found a higher myocarditis level in adolescent boys than the US CDC did (1 in 12K vs. 1 in 16K). Note, however, that the US CDC number is within the error bounds of the Israeli study.
I don’t like to talk about speculative things; I prefer to wait until they are finished. I also don’t talk a lot about who did things, because you’ll forget and you don’t care, it doesn’t matter. However, there’s a virologist that I’m all fanperson over, and her team has come up with a brilliant vaccine technique (detailed in this preprint and this long, clear Twitter thread). That’s enough for me to throw caution to the wind and enthuse about it.
They gave mice one low dose of regular old mRNA intramuscular vax. Then they followed it up with a nasal spray of little disconnected spike proteins. This protected all of the mice from a lethal dose of COVID-19, and gave the mice increased mucosal protection. (One problem with the intramuscular shots is that SARS-CoV-2 almost never infects people via the muscles, but via mucous membranes like the sinus and bronchial tubes. Lots of people have had the idea that a nasal spray would give better protection against infection.) In fact, it boosted protection all over: in the nose, lungs, and blood.
So this is pretty damn interesting, especially given that a nasal spray would be cheap, temperature-stable, and doesn’t require a needle. (I also speculate that you could get Novavax to make your spikes for you, as that is exactly what their vax is.) You do still have to have an expensive, needle-based vax for the first pass, but hey, having one instead of two is still an improvement.
But wait, it gets better: if you make the nasal spray with spikes from a different variant, it still works. Even if you make it with spikes from a different coronavirus, it still works: they used spikes from SARS-CoV-1 (<- that’s SARS, not COVID-19) for the nasal spray, and got protection against both SARS and COVID-19!
It is easy to imagine a world where I (triple-vaxxed) just get a self-administered nasal spray in the mail every time a new variant comes out.
Awesome.
Variants
This study found that Omicron positivity rates 12-26 December 2021 weren’t much different in tests from populations who had, zero, one, or two doses of vaccine. However, people who had three doses had about half the Omicron positivity rate.
Long COVID
This report found that getting two doses of vax before getting infected dropped your chances of getting Long COVID by 41%.
This paper found that the gut bacteria of patients with Long COVID were different from people who had never had COVID and from people who had had COVID-19 but recovered.
Recommended Reading
This article examines literal human sacrifice throughout history and, from that, posits that the US Republicans’ anti-vax stance is literal human sacrifice.