🤦♀️🇺🇸 If this post feels unusually short, that’s, well, because it is. There has been a really striking lack of news appropriate for this blog this week. The English-language health news has been absolutely overwhelmed with stories of the fusterclucks going on in US health politics.
Recommended Reading
⭐️💉 Some people note that kids these days are getting way more vaccines than they used to, and are concerned about the effect on their immune system. This article (2025-06-24) looks at the number of antigens which kids get exposed to because of vaccines. It turns out that kids these days get way, way fewer exposures to antigens in today’s vaccines because vaccines now are much, much, much more targeted.
(And the author didn’t even bother to point out that you’ll get exposed to a lot more antigens from the disease than from a vaccine.)
COVID-19
🌊 The NB.1.8.1 wave has shown up more gently than I was expecting. It’s here, the levels are rising, but more slowly than I expected. It’s more of a steadily rising tide than a crashing wave.
Long COVID
This large study from South Korea (2025-05-22) found that people who had pre-existing mental illness had a higher risk of Long COVID than people who did not. In 12 major health domains and 141 diseases, people with pre-existing mental illness had higher risks, generally in the +25% to +50% range. The difference in risks was largest in the first 6-12 months, and went away almost completely by 18 months.
This paper (2025-06-21) found that SARS-CoV-2 produced damage to gastric cells in mice with human immune systems.
Vaccines
💉 This paper from USA (2025-06-25) reports on the measured vaccine effectiveness (VE) of the monovalent XBB.1.5 COVID-19 vaccines against various outcomes over various time periods in immunocompetent adults, compared to people who didn’t get that vaccine:
| Against | 7 to 59 days post-vax | 60 to 90 days post-vax | 90 to 120 days post-vax | 180-299 days post-vax |
| ED or UC | 49% | 26% | 18% | −7% |
| hospitalization | 51% | 36% | 22% | −4% |
| critical care | 68% | 54% | 41% | 16% |
A reminder that some (many?) of the controls may have had infections which provided some protection, making the measured VE look less effective than it actually is. (Which is why the measured VE can be negative.)
It is also clearly obvious that the vaccines are only slightly more useful than fish bicycles after six months.
💉 This presentation to the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee (2025-06-25) reports that the vaccine effectiveness is about 40% against ER/urgent care visits for working age adults compared to unvaccinated people (who might have immunity from infections!) for the first two months. Unfortunately, the effectiveness drops to about 20% in the four-to-six month timeframe.
VE against hospitalization is a bit better:
Treatment
💊 This paper from Germany (2025-06-26) reports that hospitalized COVID-19 patients with “moderate” severity disease who got treated with antibiotics for pneumonia were five times more likely to have their condition deteriorate. 😬
Mitigation Measures
😷💧 I had always thought that getting a mask wet would ruin its effectiveness, but I’ve been hearing things on socials about low-resource people boiling their masks to clean them and the masks only having a slight decrease in performance. I looked into it, and this paper by the inventor of the N95 mask material says “masks will retain 92.4% FE after boiling” (presumably compared to 95% filtration before). NB: It does say not to boil the elastic straps!
(To be clear, I am NOT recommending boiling for sanitizing reasons. Just letting the mask sit for a few days will let all the germs die off! I’m only showing that getting a mask wet is not as big a deal as I thought.)
This Twitter/X thread author tried boiling heavily-used masks and found that their filtering effectiveness dropped from a bit more than 98% to a bit more than 97%:
This unroll of a Twitter/X thread describes how the author swam in their mask with even less effect. The swimmer did before/after testing, both when it was wet and when it was dry. Their 3M Aura 1870+ (which coincidentally I now have 440 of!) dropped from 99.0% effective to 98.2% effective when soaking wet!
So I’m going to stop worrying so hard about protecting my mask from the rain!
Recommended Reading
💉🤰 Yes, all the research says that getting vaccinated while pregnant is a really, really good idea. This blog post (2025-06-27) shows that in great detail. (FYI, it’s probably too much detail unless you or a loved one is pregnant. But if you care, this is the place to go.)
RSV
Pathology
🫀 This paper from USA (2025-06-12) reports that people were 18.5 times more likely to have a cardiovascular event in the 28 days after hospitalization for RSV than during their pre-hospitalization period. (It’s almost like viruses are bad for you!) NB: The data is almost entirely pre-COVID, ending in “winter 2019-2020”.
🏥 This paper from Hong Kong (2025-06-20) reports that people hospitalized with RSV were significantly more likely than people with influenza to have a variety of bad outcomes:
- 83% higher risk of dying in the hospital;
- 70% higher risk of severe respiratory failure;
- 55% higher risk of secondary bacterial pneumonia;
- 26% higher risk of acute kidney injury.
Vaccines
💉 This paper from UK (2025-06-25) reports that the RSV vaccine, like the shingles vaccine, decreases the risk of dementia. It also theorizes that it’s the adjuvant — AS01 — that is responsible, since both Shingrix and Arexvy contain AS01. The flu shots do not contain AS01, and this paper found that the flu shots do not decrease the risk of dementia.
However, that doesn’t explain why Zostavax — the first shingles vaccine — also decreased the risk of dementia. I believe that AS01 is a GlaxoSmithKline technology, and Zostavax is made by Merck. There are three different RSV vaccines; it would be interesting to repeat this study with the three different RSV vaccines.
Health Canada’s RSV vax page (2025-04-09) says that they have approved three different brands of RSV vax: Arexvy (from GSK), Abrysvo (Pfizer), mRNA-1345 (Moderna). However, the BC RSV vax page (2025-03-26) doesn’t list mRNA-1345 as an option. (FWIW, I believe that I had no choice when I got my RSV vax, and I got Arexvy.)
Measles
Transmission
The Government of Canada’s measles page (2025-06-23) says that there were 221 measles cases in the week ending 2025-06-14, with most cases in Ontario and Alberta.
This article (2025-06-24) says there were recently three measles cases in Chilliwack BC which appear to have been locally contracted.
This article (2025-06-27) says there were recently five measles cases in the Interior.
BC CDC has a web page which they update with measles exposure information and statistics.