Recommended Reading
🐎🤮 Did you know there was a horse flu epidemic in 1872 (also see this Wikipedia section) which crippled the US (and probably Canada)? I didn’t. 🤯
COVID-19
Long COVID
🎉 This older paper (2023-02-07) reports that maraviroc and pravastatin — two HIV treatments — significantly reduced symptoms in Long COVID patients. (Both maraviroc and pravastatin target receptors on some monocytes (a type of white blood cells) which lets HIV infect those cells.) The study was small (only 18 people) and was more of a large case study than a trial, but it was still useful — it led to a formal clinical trial currently being run by two prominent researchers.
🧠 This paper from Spain (2025-02-12) reports (again!) that the brains of long haulers looks different on MRIs than brains of healthy controls (increased cortical thickness in the right superior frontal and the right rostral middle frontal gyri in the long haulers). This study also found correlations between the thickness of the gyri and cognitive issues.
🎉💉 This paper from USA (2025-02-24) reports that vaccination reduces the risk of Long COVID in children by 57%.
😢 This study from USA (2025-02-26) reports that people who had a documented case of COVID-19 were almost twice as likely to have lingering symptoms at 90 days than people with a documented influenza case.
😢🫁 This paper from Germany (2025-02-25) reports that children with Long COVID had significantly poor blood flow in the lungs, and the blood flow deficiencies correlated with fatigue.
The paper used MRI to calculate blood flow, and referenced a different paper to say that the normal tests that kids take to measure blood flow in the lungs sometimes doesn’t catch lung problems. Now I’m wondering if they should use the MRI tests to look at the lungs of adults with Long COVID.
🧠 This paper from UK (2025-02-28) reports that people who had persistent symptoms for more than 12 weeks but eventually recovered had similar cognitive scores as people who recovered in less than four weeks. Both groups had slightly worse cognition scores than people who had never had COVID-19.
😢 This paper from Germany (2025-02-21) reports that even elite athletes had trouble recovering from COVID-19. 16 weeks after a positive PCR test, 64% said that they had “ongoing limitations in sports participation, with mental and physical fatigue as the most prominent limiting factor, followed by shortness of breath and joint and muscle pain.”
COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Disease
😢 This paper from France (2025-02-27) reports that people who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 were more likely to be hospitalized for something else within the next 30 months than controls. Compared to controls, people who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 had:
- 35% higher risk of any hospitalization;
- 22% higher risk of cardiovascular hospitalization;
- 41% higher risk of psychiatric hospitalization;
- 50% higher risk of neurological hospitalization;
- 99% higher risk of respiratory hospitalization;
- 79% higher risk of hospitalization for renal failure;
- 89% higher risk of diabetes;
- 30% higher risk of death.
The risk was significantly higher in the first six months, but it stayed elevated for the the entire 30-month study for neurological, respiratory disorders, chronic renal failure and diabetes.
😢🍆 This study from Japan (2025-02-21) found that 19% of men who had been hospitalized for COVID-19 one or two years later had erectile dysfunction.
Vaccines
🤔🤷⁇🤬💉As I mentioned in last week’s General post (2025-02-17), this preprint (revised 2025-02-25) reported on a small number of people who got Long COVID-ish symptoms from the vaccine. WELL. This has caused a bit of a shitstorm.
- Apparently the antivaxxers have picked up on the findings, saying that proves that the vaccines are bad. (It does not. The number of people who have gotten Long COVID from the virus itself is much higher, and people were getting Long COVID before the vaccines were even approved.)
- The authors of the preprint have been getting flack from pro-vaxxers that they shouldn’t have published the work because it gave ammunition to the antivaxxers. One of the authors responded by saying he felt it was his duty to the patients he worked with to publish his findings, regardless of whether or not the results were inconvenient. IMHO, that’s the right attitude to take.
- There were some people suggesting that the patients’ problems weren’t actually from the vax, but from undiagnosed infections. Another scientist/doctor complained on social media pointed out that it would have been easy to tell if the symptoms were due to virus. However, that’s not a failsafe: What if they had a vaccine injury and then got COVID-19?
Here’s a longer article (2025-02-24) on the shitshow.
🤬💉This article (2025-02-25) reports that RFK Jr. issued a 90-day stop-work order on the Department of Health and Human Services’ contract with Vaxart to make an oral COVID-19 vaccine.
👍💉 This US CDC report (2025-02-27) reports that this year’s booster vaccine’s vaccine effectiveness (VE) was 33% against hospitalization for adults compared to people who did not get a booster. Please note that the 33% isn’t the protection it gives someone who has been raised in a sterile bubble and gotten no vaccinations, it means that in the general current population — people who have gotten COVID-19 infections, people who have gotten vaccinations, old people, young people, rich people, poor people — your risk is 33% lower if you get a booster than if you don’t. The booster gives you protection on top of whatever other protection you’ve got from exposures, a healthy lifestyle, previous vaccinations, etc.
Pathology
🎉❤️ This paper from USA (2025-02-25) found that young athletes were no more likely to have sudden cardiac arrests or sudden cardiac deaths after the pandemic than before. 🎉
“Regular” Influenza
Vaccines
🤬💉This article (2025-02-27) reports that the meeting of the US FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPA) meeting that had been scheduled for March to decide which strains should go into the winter 2025-2026 flu vaccine has been cancelled. Apparently not postponed, cancelled. This has made some people wonder if the US is even going to have a flu vax next fall, and if not, did that mean that Canada wasn’t going to get a flu vax.
I am not worried.
- This article (2025-02-26) reports that a FDA spokesperson said that the FDA will make strain recommendations in time to manufacture next fall/winter’s flu vax.
- This article (2025-02-27) talks about the issue at length, and at the end mentions that the FDA doesn’t actually have to have a VRBPA meeting before deciding on the strains.
- There are almost 8 billion people who live in about 250 countries which are not the United States who also get influenza. I don’t know how much Canada follows in lockstep with the United States, but even if we do normally follow the US, we can just follow someone else, or decide on our own.
- Canada does not need the US to decide what strains should go into its flu vaccines. The World Health Organization makes recommendations twice per year (once for the northern hemisphere, once for the southern) on which strains should go into the flu vaccine (as per this example (2024-02-23)).
- As this article (2017-11-15) describes, the WHO does use information it gets from the US CDC when it makes its recommendations. It is possible that they will have slightly less data and make a slightly worse recommendation. However, from having read proceedings of a strain-decision-making-session in the past, I will tell you that my impression was that there was still an element of a die roll because they didn’t really know which strains would circulate. It was their best guess, but it was still a guess. I suspect the randomness of which strain actually circulates has a much bigger effect on the effectiveness of the strain than the CDC’s data.
- However, this article (2025-02-24) reports that US CDC representatives were at the WHO meeting despite Trump pulling out of WHO. Go figure.
- This press release (2025-02-28) reports that WHO has made their northern hemisphere strain selection.
- The flu vaccines use a very straightforward process to make, using a very mature technology. Yes, there are problems sometimes with the vaccine, but that has to do more with how the virus interacts with the egg than with technical challenges of incubating the eggs or extracting the vaccine. Yes, the eggs are grown in eggs; yes, egg laying farms have been hit with H5N1, but the chickens which lay eggs for vaccine production are kept in especially biosecure facilities. (And if the US isn’t going to make flu vaccine, they won’t need all the eggs which were targeted for US flu vaccines.)
Testing
In this press release (2025-02-24) from the makers of the Metrix tests report that they now have a combo COVID-19 / influenza test.
H5N1
Transmission
🐦⬛☠️🐓 This article (2025-02-24) reports that in the past 30 days, 19 million poultry birds have been culled due to detected H5N1 infections.
🐦⬛🤮🧍The CDC says that 70 humans in the US have been known to have gotten H5N1 infections, with one fatality ☠️.
🐦⬛🤮🐄 This article (2025-02-27) reports that the national total of confirmed H5N1 infections of dairy herds is now 976.
🐦⬛☠️🐈 This article (2025-02-28) reports that two cats in New Jersey died from H5N1. One was feral and one was an indoor/outdoor cat. Neither cat associated with dairy cattle or got raw pet food, so presumably they got it from wild birds.
🐦⬛☠️🐈 This article (2025-02-28) reports that some more housecats in Washington state died after eating raw pet food from Wild Coast, which already recalled a few batches of food. Apparently, the owner thought that of course Wild Coast would be testing all their product now for H5N1. Uh, no.
Folks, just don’t feed your animals raw food. Sorry if you like doing that, but IMHO it’s just not safe right now.
Testing
🐦⬛🤮🐄 This paper (2025-02-20) estimates that the dairy cattle infection in Nevada which was quarantined on 24 Feb had been going on since early December. 😬 The authors point out that yeah, while the bulk testing program caught it (yay), it took a whopping 17(!) days to go from first sample collection to positive H5N1 test. Yes, I believe that means that contaminated milk was in the food chain for more than two weeks.😬 🤢
Variants
🐦⬛🤮🐦⬛🧍🧍This article (2025-02-27) reports that two recent human H5N1 cases had slightly troubling mutations. A Wyoming patient had a mutation (E627K) and a Nevada patient had a mutation (D701N) — both of which appear to help the virus replicate in mammals. The E627K was also seen in a human in Texas last year; the D701N was seen in a human in Chile in 2023.
Both of these cases were the D1.1 strain — the “bird strain” 🐦⬛of H5N1 and not the “cattle strain” 🐄. The Wyoming patient got it from backyard chickens 🐓; the Nevada patient was a dairy worker at one of the herds 🐄 which appears to have recently caught H5N1 from wild birds 🐦⬛ (not from other cows 🐄).
Mystery Illness
☠️🌍 This article about the mystery illness in DR Congo (2025-02-26) reports that the mystery illness in DR Congo has now killed 50 people. There had been some hope that it was “just” malaria in a malnourished population, but this article suggests that known diseases aren’t all of it. This article suggests that the mystery illness is not Marburg, not Ebola, not dengue, not yellow fever, and it’s not malaria. (Well, it’s not all malaria.)
On the other hand, this article (2025-02-27) suggests that it is not something new, “just” known diseases which are plaguing a weakened population.
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