The outlets where I usually get my news are filled this week with articles speculating on what the Trump win means for health care in the USA, crowding out pandemic news. So it’s a slow news week.

COVID-19

Vaccines

⭐ This article (2024-11-04) helps to explain why we aren’t getting Novavax vaccine in Canada. In February 2021, the Government of Canada and Novavax struck a deal to make Novavax in Canada in partnership with the government-funded Biologics Manufacturing Centre (BMC) in Montreal.

Well, Novavax hasn’t come through and it doesn’t look like they are likely to. I’m not sure they even tried: the article says that not even one vial has come out of the plant.

The government is legally allowed to cancel the deal if Novavax doesn’t come through, but it doesn’t look like there are many companies waiting to take over. 🙁

This paper from Australia (2024-09-26) reports pretty convincingly that mRNAs are more effective (in test tubes) as boosters than Novavax.

This paper (2024-11-07) reports that unvaccinated kids get the very serious multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) much more than vaccinated kids. The risk is:

3.3x higher in unvaccinated for kids 5 to 11 years old than vaccinated;
22.9x higher in unvaccinated for kids 12 to 17 years old than vaccinated.

AGAIN This paper from USA (2024-11-06) reports that side effects weren’t any worse in people who got simultaneous flu and COVID-19 vaccinations than in people who got them a few weeks apart.

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

AGAIN This paper from Japan (2024-11-06) reports that people who got vaccinated recently were much less likely to get various Bad Things after COVID-19 infections than people who got vaccinated more than six months or a year before their COVID-19 infections. The effects were not subtle, and they were wide-ranging. Waving my hands and squinting a bit, people’s risk of a Bad Thing was cut in about half if they had been vaccinated recently compared to vaccinated a year ago, but there was a bit of a range. Recently vaxxed people were particularly protected for some things (compared to vaxxed over a year ago), with these risk reductions:

62% lower risk of stroke;
71% lower risk of appendicitis;
73% lower risk of hernia;
57% lower risk of fracture;
78% lower risk of taste disorder;
74% higher risk of cancer.

Some of these look kind of strange: how could COVID-19 give you a fracture? But it might be that COVID-19 makes you weaker, so you drag your foot, so you trip, so you break something. Or maybe your cognitive function is impaired enough that your reflexes get slower, so you get in a car accident.

Recent vaccinations did not protect against mood disorders or depression.

AGAIN This paper from South Korea (2024-11-06) reported that people had more diagnoses of various autoimmune and autoinflammatory connective tissue disorder in the 180 day period after getting a COVID-19 infection than people who did not get COVID-19. The increased risk of various conditions was:

Alopecia areata (spot baldness): +11%;
alopecia totalis (loss of all hair on head and face) : +24%;
vitiligo (loss of pigmentation): +11%;
Behçet disease : +45%;
Crohn disease : +35%;
ulcerative colitis : +15%;
arthritis : +9%;
lupus : +14%;
Sjögren syndrome : +13%;
ankylosing spondylitis : +11%;
bullous pemphigoid : +62%

Pathology

⭐ Good news! This paper from Canada (2024-11-07) reports that prenatal exposure to COVID-19 does not impact babies’ neurological development. Babies who had prenatal exposure to COVID-19 actually did slightly better on one of the measures (regulatory control).

⭐ This paper from China (2024-11-08) reports that after China lifted its zero-COVID policy, they saw a huge spike in both COVID-19 cases situs inversus — babies born with their organs mirror-imaged, so e.g. their appendix is on their left. They found that babies were almost seven times more likely to have situs inversus if their mothers had COVID-19 infections between week 4 and week 6 than if the moms did not.

Situs inversus is not intrinsically harmful, as everything is reversed. However, if your doctors don’t know that all your organs are backwards, that can be harmful. (I recall family stories about an uncle of mine who turned out to be situs inversus who almost died of undiagnosed appendicitis because his right abdomen wasn’t sore.)

H5N1

Transmission

⭐ This report from US CDC (2024-11-07) found that seven percent of workers on farms with H5N1 outbreaks got infected. This is higher than the number of confirmed cases would indicate, i.e. they have been missing cases. In this briefing, US CDC said that they are expanding their recommendation for who should get tested, recommending Tamiflu for exposed workers — even asymptomatic ones — and training workers harder on PPE usage.

This article (2024-11-07) says that the total number of confirmed human H5N1 cases in the USA is 46.

This article (2024-11-06) reports that the total number of confirmed infected dairy herds is 443 across 15 states.

Mpox

Mpox is still chugging along, but there’s nothing really actionable for you. This article (2024-11-07) says that there have been about 50,000 mpox cases in Africa, but vaccination is happening. Everybody wishes they had more vaccine, everybody wishes that the vaccination push was going faster, but it does seem to be going.

The above article also mentions that they are working on getting approval to use the Jynneos vaccine for kids.