COVID-19

Vaccines

💉😡🇺🇸 This article (2025-04-25) reports that the Trump administration has issued stop work orders for GeoVax and Castlevax, joining Vaxart (which got a stop work order in February). Both GeoVax and CastleVax say they expect funding to disappear but that they are going to keep working on it anyway.

💉🇺🇸 RFK Jr giveth and RFK Jr taketh away. Or rather, taketh away and then giveth. In my 2025-03-01 General posting, I mentioned that the US government put a stop-work order on the Phase 2B clinical trial of Vaxart’s COVID-19 oral vaccine. Well, this article (2025-04-28) says that the government has turned the trial back on. (Emotional whiplash, anybody?)

Maybe that means that they will also eventually rescind the stop work order on GeoVax and CastleVax, but the tone of the articles I’ve read has been more pessimistic about GeoVax and CastleVax. On the other hand, DOGE seems to re-hire people it fires pretty frequently, so who knows?

💉🎉❓ This preprint from Florida (2025-04-29) has some strong claims in it. Before I continue, I want to caution that one of the authors was Florida’s Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, who has a history of spouting misinformation about vaccines. (For example, he said young men shouldn’t get COVID-19 vaccines because it increased their risk of myocarditis and pericarditis — completely ignoring that getting a COVID-19 infection increases the risk much more.) That doesn’t mean this study is wrong, just that you should treat this preprint with a little bit of caution.

The preprint says that Floridians who got Pfizer COVID-19 vaccines did much worse on a number of different measures than matched people who got Moderna vaccines:

+38% risk of all-cause mortality;
+54% risk of cardiovascular mortality;
+88% risk of COVID-19 mortality;
+36% risk of non-COVID mortality.

💉 One form of bias in calculating vaccine effectiveness from electronic record queries is that people who get vaccinated might be healthier in general, perhaps because e.g. they take better care of themselves, or because people in hospice don’t bother getting vaccinated. This is called the “healthy vaccinee effect” (HVE) or the “healthy vaccinee bias”.

This study from Austria (2025-04-30) tried to figure out how strong HVE is for COVID-19 vaccinations. They did an electronic records search during two months with relatively low COVID-19 rates, and matched for age, gender, and nursing home residency among vaccinated and unvaccinated cohorts, at least at the beginning of the vaccination period where getting vaccinated took a little bit more work. Compared to unvaccinated people, vaccinated people had lower risks of non-COVID deaths in Q4 2021 as follows:

31% lower risk after 1 dose;
35% lower risk after 2 doses;
44% lower risk after 3 doses.

However, as time went on, people who had one or two doses weren’t any less likely to die from non-COVID causes by Q4 2022, and in fact were more likely to die than the unvaccinated. I look at this and say, “of course, these were people who passed up getting a booster”. (I’d had five doses by the end of 2022.)

Now, another possibility that the authors talked about is that the “non-COVID” deaths might have actually been deaths which were a result of COVID-19 but which didn’t look like COVID-19, e.g. a heart attack from silent damage from SARS-CoV-2. The authors pointed out that the difference in mortality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people was the same regardless of whether the levels of circulating COVID-19 were high or low, which they say argues for it being HVE more than misclassified COVID-19 deaths.

One thing that I thought was a little strange was that the HVE was strongest in the two weeks after vaccination. Why would that be? If my personality is such that I take better care of myself by getting vaccinated, why is that going to be strongest in the two weeks after I get vaccinated? Won’t I have the same diligent/responsible/pessimistic/whatever personality in a year as I have now?

The bottom line was that HVE can affect the measured vaccine effectiveness in non-intuitive ways.

💉💪💉💪This paper from Australia (2025-04-28) reports that people who got a Pfizer booster in the same arm as the Pfizer first dose had a more rapid immune response than people who got the two doses in opposite arms. (Not better, not stronger, but faster.

Treatments

🎉💊 This paper from Greece (2025-04-24) reports that 0% of patients got Long COVID when they took a dietary supplement containing glucosamine sulfate and fucoidan for four months, starting two weeks after a COVID-19 infection. 21.4% of the placebo cohort got Long COVID.

💉🧠 From an article in Sick Times (2025-04-28): “A new clinical trial called ADDRESS-LC is currently recruiting to test the drug Bezisterim (NE3107) for neurological symptoms of Long COVID. The study, funded by the Department of Defense, will evaluate the anti-inflammatory drug which is also being investigated for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and traumatic brain injury. The trial has four sites in California, Florida, Maryland, and Michigan. Participants will take the drug or a placebo twice a day for 84 days and visit the trial site five times. Contact: Penelope Markham, pmarkham@bioviepharma.com.”

Pathology

👶🤧 In last week’s General post (2025-04-27), I mentioned that a baby girl in Hong Kong who was co-infected with both COVID-19 and human metapneumoniavirus was in bad shape. This press release from Hong Kong (2025-04-30) says that now there’s a hospitalized baby boy co-infected with COVID-19 and rhinovirus/enterovirus. Again, I don’t know if this is unusually bad because it’s a co-infection or not. Hong Kong’s public health agency thought it was interesting enough to issue a press release.

This paper from USA (2025-04-29) reports that lingering symptoms were very different between COVID-19, flu, and pneumonia. Compared to COVID-19 patients, influenza patients had a 23% lower risk of having at least one lingering symptom at 1 month post-diagnosis, falling to 32% lower at six months.

For pneumonia patients, however, things were worse than for COVID-19 patients. Post-pneumonia patients were 124% more likely than COVID-19 patients to have lingering symptoms than COVID-19 patients at the 1 month mark, which increased to 146% at the six-month mark.

Justice

👨🏻🧑🏾‍🦱This paper from Ontario (2025-04-03) reports that when they moved people out of jails because of COVID-19, white people disproportionately got out. Compared to pre-pandemic, the relative rates of jailed people and time in custody after decarceration by race were:

Race	rate of being in custody	time in custody
White	70%	73%
Indigenous	76%	82%
Black	76%	79%
non-Black racialized	76%	79%

compared to pre-pandemic; groups are exclusive, i.e. “White” means “White non-indigenous”

H5N1

Transmission

🐄🐦‍⬛🤧 This article (2025-04-30) reports that there have been 1,047 dairy herds infected with H5N1 from 17 states. Idaho has recently been a hot spot, with 86 herds.

2025-05-03 General