COVID-19
US Politics
I avoid talking about 🇺🇸US politics too much; I try to focus on what is relevant for BC. But as this article (2025-03-25) reports, the Trump administration has cancelled USD$11.4 billion (with a B) in US CDC funds for COVID-19 testing, vaccination, community health workers, initiatives to address Covid health disparities among high-risk and underserved populations, and global Covid projects.
The press release is kind of stunning. It said, “The COVID-19 pandemic is over 😮, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent🤯 pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago 😮,” HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
In addition, this article (2025-03-25) reports that they are 💸killing funding to (at least) 29 research programs related to COVID-19. Nine of them were researching antiviral drugs. Some were researching Long COVID.
And, on the same day, they shut down the US Health and Human Services’ Long COVID office, as this article (2025-03-25) reports.
🤬 Does that mean that Long COVID is non-existent? That they want to stop funding things that are endemic? Cancer is endemic, should we pull funding for cancer too?
News flash! This article (2025-03-28) says that some of the Long COVID research grants have been restored, but I don’t know how many.
This matters to 🇨🇦Canada because we are so close and have such tight integration with the USA. If they have a disease which is spreading a lot, we’ll catch it too.🤧 If they don’t find better treatments for COVID-19 and Long COVID (and a bunch of other viral diseases), we will also be the poorer for it. 😢
This article (2025-03-18) says that visits from Canada to the US by car has dropped to below when the border had COVID-19 restrictions. February 2025 had 21% fewer people cross to the US than Febrary 2024 — the lowest it has been since 2022 (when there were still restrictions in place). Plane travel is also down: this article (2025-03-27) reports that flight bookings between the USA and Canada are down by 70%.
Attitudes
This surprised me. This article (2025-03-23), reporting on a survey (I couldn’t find the original, sorry) says that almost half of the people in the UK aged 16-44 years old miss aspects of the pandemic. (Very few people over 60 said the same.) People said that they liked the slower pace, the chance to spend more time with family, and lower social pressure. Huh.
Long COVID
This paper from UK (2025-03-19) reports that 👩🏾🦳disadvantaged women were least likely to recover from Long COVID, while 🧔🏻♂️highly advantaged men were most likely to recover.
🤯 This paper (2025-03-21) discusses a study where they attached a radioactive tracer to a non-neutralizing monoclonal antibody for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein so that they could see, in real time, where the SARS-CoV-2 viruses were in infected macaques. They could see that SARS-CoV-2 was in the lungs and brain three months after the infection. (They also could see virus in many organs during acute infection.)
This paper from USA (2025-01-07) reports that the rate of cases of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) has gone up more than fourteen times compared to pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the rate was 1.42 cases per million people per year; now it’s 20.3 per million per year. Interestingly, there wasn’t much of a change until a big jump in 2023. I don’t know what caused that jump, unless it’s that nobody took long haulers seriously before 2023, so they didn’t test for POTS?
This paper from USA (2025-03-12) reports that Long COVID rates are highest in regions with the worst health care outcomes.
This paper from USA (2025-03-22) reports that high-risk patients who got sotrovimab (a monoclonal antibody had an 8% lower risk of getting Long COVID. Now, sotrovimab was approved during the data collection phase of the paper, but it was de-approved very shortly afterwards because it was no longer effective against the circulating strains. So on one hand, I’m not very impressed with an 8% improvement, but on the other hand, maybe it would have been higher with a monoclonal antibody which was more effective.
This paper from Singapore (2025-03-10) says that 👸women are 13.4 times more likely to get Long COVID if they are 🤰pregnant than if they are 🚫🤰not, with the danger highest if they catch COVID-19 in the third trimester.
🩸This paper from USA (2025-03-22) reports that the blood oxygen saturation when sleeping is slightly lower in people who have Long COVID than in people who don’t.
Vaccines
Well this sucks. Vaxart was working on a 💊pill-based COVID-19 vaccine, and was just about to start a huge trial, but this article (2025-03-21) says that the Trump administration paused the trial on 21 Feb. The stop-work order will get restarted, extended, or killed by around 21 May, but Vaxart couldn’t hold on that long: it laid off 10% of its workforce.
The right wing likes to say that you should run the government “like a business”, but anybody who ran a business like this would be fired. 🤬
This warmed-over press release (2025-03-25) reports that researchers have found great success with a vaccine that, as part of its work, strips off the sugars coating the SARS-CoV-2 molecule to uncover a stable part of the virus. What they don’t explain to my satisfaction is how they keep the sugar-stripper from stripping off sugars that my body needs to function properly.
Pathology
🩸This paper (2024-07-29) reports that SARS-CoV-2 can interact with / activate the CD147 receptor to get into lymphocytes (T-cells and B-cells). (This older paper (2020-12-04) also reports that SARS-CoV-2 can use CD147 receptors, but didn’t say that it could infect lymphocytes via the CD147 receptor.) Is no cell safe from SARS-CoV-2???
This paper (2025-03-12) reports that researchers have identified — using computer simulations — parts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which look like useful parts of the human body. (The theory is that autoimmune disorders happen when the immune system learns to attack things on a virus that look just like useful parts of the human body — and then starts attacking the human body instead of the virus.)
Treatments
Two nearly identical papers (one, two) came out on the same day (2025-03-26)! Each found a small protein which helps infected Syrian golden hamsters a lot. The proteins are different, but both target the membrane of the virus. Both teams were mostly Belgian. I don’t know if there some industrial espionage going on here, but it’s encouraging to get similar results from two different labs so quickly!
H5N1
Transmission
This press release from UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Animal and Plant Health Agency (2025-03-24) says that a sheep tested positive for 🐑🐦⬛🤧 H5N1. (It was on a farm that had a poultry outbreak, and as part of the cleanup from the poultry outbreak, they checked a bunch of the other animals.) This page (2025-03-24) says that the sheep had inflammation of the udder but no other symptoms.
This article (2025-03-25) reports that a three-year-old boy in Cambodia died from 🐦⬛🐦⬛🤧 bird flu. That makes three deaths☠️ in three cases in Cambodia in 2025. 😭
The article didn’t say which clade the boy’s flu belonged to. This article (2016-07-07) says that the 2.3.2.1c clade circulated widely in Asia, but this preprint (2025-01-06) reports that a cross between 2.3.2.1c and 2.3.4.4b (which the majority of what’s circulating in 🐄🐦⬛🤧 cows and most 🐦⬛🐦⬛🤧 birds in North America) has been found in Cambodia.
This paper (2025-05-25) reports that cows had a lot of influenza A in 2023 and 2024 — especially 🧍♂️🤧human flu — but not a lot of 🐦⬛🤧 H5N1. The researchers looked at 1,724 old blood samples from Jan 2023 through May 2024 and found that about a third had antibodies to influenza. They found 🧍♂️🤧 human H1H1 and H3N2 influenza, swine 🐖🤧H3N2 and H1N2 influenza, and some 🐄cows tested positive for some 🤧 influenzas that affect 🐦⬛birds. However, zero of them tested positive for the 🐄🐦⬛🤧 H5N1 strain that is currently circulating in 🐄US cows.
While I guess it’s nice that infecting cows with 🐦⬛🤧bird flu is relatively rare, it’s not nice that the cows had so much 🧍♂️🤧human flu. That makes it more likely that a cow co-infected with 🧍♂️🤧human flu and 🐦⬛🤧bird bird flu could reassort into something that was nastier to humans.
🐄🐦⬛🤧 This article (2025-03-26) reports that the number of infected dairy herds since March 2024 in the US is now 993 across 17 states. 🐈⬛ Eleven more housecats have tested positive. (Looking through the USDA’s database, it looks like 126 cats total in the US have tested positive for H5N1 since 2022.)
Measles
There’s a lot of measles in the USA. There’s so much happening, it’s so well-covered in other media, and it’s so fucking preventable that I’m not going to spend a lot of words on it. I will talk about measles in BC in my BC-specific posts.