Vaccines
This preprint from Israel says that a fourth dose is helpful, but not that much. The efficacy versus people who had three doses was:
- 30% for Pfizer;
- 11% for Moderna.
In other words, in cohorts of
- N people with three doses,
- N people with three doses plus 1 dose of Pfizer, and
- N people with three doses plus 1 dose of Moderna
for every ten people in the three-dose cohort who got a COVID-19 infection, seven people in the plus-one-Pfizer cohort got sick and about nine in the plus-one-Moderna cohort got sick.
Vaccine injuries do happen. (AZ had problems with blood clots, for example.) This article, about a man trying to get compensation from the federal Vaccine Injury Support Program, says that
- There have been 400 requests for vaccine injury to the fund (out of 32M, or 0.00125%).
- The Vaccine Injury Support Program is not paying out as fast as it should.
Long COVID
There are several papers and articles and videos about ME/CFS and/or Long COVID which say that the problem might be that some (not all) red blood cells become too stiff to get into the tiniest capillaries. It’s a bit fuzzy to me (this is all terribly leading-edge), but somehow autoantibodies are related. They have given (a very small number) of patients a medicine called BC007 which something something binds to the autoantibodies, and destiffens the red blood cells, and the (small number of patients) got much better very fast.
An interesting side note: I was surprised that a group at the forefront of this is some German ophthalmologists. Ophthalmologists?!?!? It turns out that the eye is one of the best places to look at blood vessels.
Tunnelling down into the ME/CFS literature got me to some other promising Long COVID treatments. This paper from December 2021 says that blocking the nerves which carry fight-or-flight signals helped two patients for at least sixty days. (My mental model, after reading about it, is that it reboots the sympathetic nervous system.)
This article discusses current Long COVID research and this article discusses ME/CFS clinical trials which will finish soon.
Unsolicited endorsement: the Health Rising website is an amazing ME/CFS resource: it appears to be a one-person blog that with extremely thorough and well-written articles on all kinds of things.