(Addendum 2025-08-15: I actually published this on 2025-08-11, not on 2025-08-13, but it’s too late now to change the URL. Oops, sorry.)
COVID-19
Vaccines
💉I might need to fly across the continent to support a relative who is going to get major surgery, so I tried to schedule a vax appointment in the US. No luck: the Spring vaccines have expired and the Fall vaccines have not arrived yet. You can’t get a COVID-19 vaccination for love or money right now. 🙁 I was misinformed! Vaccinations are in fact possible to get in the US right now. Apparently CVS has them.
Addendum2: An alert reader says that there is in fact at least one pharmacy in BC which has unexpired COVID-19 vaccines: Oh Pharmacy.
💉I was wondering what was up with PHAC and COVID vaccines, since I hadn’t heard boo in a log time. Is PHAC going to approve of the new second-gen Moderna vax? What strain are we going to get in the Fall?
That led me to the Summary of NACI Statement of January 10, 2025, which said that the Summary applies for “all of 2025 and up to the summer of 2026”. They do say later that they’ll use updated vax in Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 if available.
There is a section which talks about who should and may get a second shot. It says that people over 80, who live in care homes, and/or are immunocompromised should get a second shot in the year, and that people over 65 who are at increased risk may get a second shot. Nobody else was in the “may get a second shot” category.
I interpret that to mean that anyone under 65 — even people in jails, pregnant women, First Nations/Metis, health-care workers, people from equity-denied communities, and clinically vulnerable! — will not be allowed to get a second shot.
💉💰 This PHAC guidance document (2025-01-10) gives justification behind restricting the vax. Basically, they are doing cost-benefit tradeoffs. They estimate that it costs $7,830 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gained to vaccinate people over 65 once per year, while it cost almost nine times as much to annually vaccinate people 50 to 64 years with complex medical conditions.
That seems reasonable except that the PHAC studies undercounted the costs of catching COVID-19 to the healthcare system and seriously undercounted the cost to humans. The models in the studies they relied on:
- (mostly) only considered costs incurred by the health care system, not costs incurred by the patient (e.g. loss of income, time to go to appointments, caregiver time);
- (mostly) only considered costs incurred by the acute phase of the illness;
- rarely incorporated Long COVID into their models, and when they did, assumed it would last less than a year (!);
- frequently only considered patients who sought medical treatment when they very first got infected;
- did not take into account COVID-related excess death and sickness (i.e. higher risk of stroke, diabetes, gastrointestinal distress, erectile dysfunction, etc.);
- assumed people only caught COVID-19 once during their modelling period.
In short, the models which Public Health pays attention to are ones which look at the short-term impact on the medical system, not the long term impact on people.
Gory Details of the PHAC Studies
Here are the gory details of the three research papers which PHAC guidance document referenced which looked beyond strictly health care costs for people who sought treatment during their initial bout of COVID-19. You probably don’t care, but I analyzed them in great detail, dammit, and I want to capture that somewhere.
This preprint from Canada (2024-09-04) did attempt to account for non-acute-phase effects, yay! This study compared the costs to the provincial health care system for one year for people who had a documented COVID-19 case in 2020 compared to matched controls from before the pandemic. They found that the COVID-19 cohort had expenses on average of $2,553 more per person over 360 days.
This is an improvement, but it’s only over 360 days. Some of the long-term increased risks cause issues for much longer time periods: people who became diabetic after COVID-19 don’t stop being diabetic after 360 days; people with cardiac issues don’t stop having cardiac issues after 360 days. 🙁
**
These slides (2024-06-24) do consider symptomatic patients who don’t seek medical care, but don’t consider asymptomatic patients. They also do consider Long COVID — with a median duration of six to nine months. “Median” here is doing some really heavy lifting. The minimum is probably going to be three months (because that’s the duration most definitions of Long COVID require for a diagnosis), but the maximum is at least five years, and could be decades.
NB: this paper (2025-08-07) is the long-form of the above slide deck’s study. (I don’t know if PHAC had access to the whole paper or if they only had access to the slide deck.) In that paper, the authors explicitly say that Long COVID is “defined as ongoing COVID-19 symptoms for an average period of 5 months that limited daily function”. Median is not the same as average!!! This wickedly underestimates the burden of Long COVID and COVID-related excess sickness and death!
They did incorporate long-term non-Long COVID consequences, but only for complications from an ICU stay. Anybody else who had long-term consequences (like diabetes or cardiac conditions) didn’t count.
**
This paper from Canada (2025-05-24) did a very thorough job, even including the risk of Long COVID, but their model only included costs for people who sought medical treatment for COVID-19 during the acute phase. This means that any Long COVID treatments (or even lost time at work!) for people who didn’t seek medical treatment immediately didn’t get counted. Even so, this study found a cost of CAD$21,227 per QALY if everybody who wanted to got vaccinated (which is well below the $50,000 per QALY figure which is usually the highest amount that governments are willing to spend).
They also used the figure of a loss of 0.0712 QALY due to Long COVID per COVID-19 case (where people sought medical treatment during the acute phase); they derived that figure from the US CDC slide deck above (which assumed Long COVID lasted an average of five months).
COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness
😷 This paper from USA (2025-08-06) reports that children under 5 who caught COVID-19 in spring/summer 2002 were less likely than controls to get sick with a different infection in the next six months. Kids who got a COVID-19 infection were:
- 27% less likely to catch RSV than kids who had caught influenza;
- 22% less likely to catch RSV than kids who had caught any non-COVID respiratory disease;
- 38% less likely to catch any respiratory infection than kids who had caught influenza;
- 33% less likely to catch any infection than kids who had caught influenza.
This is in direct contradiction with this study (2023-10-13), which found that kids under 5 were more likely to catch RSV if they had a prior COVID-19 infection.
One slight difference in the two studies is that the 2023 counted kids who had any prior COVID-19 infection, while the 2025 study only counted kids who had a COVID-19 infection in the prior six months.
Strange. But y’know, this is how science works. 🤷♀️
☠️ This project on Codeberg (last update 2025-08-08) plots the age of death of people in Wikidata‘s example query of Humans of New York City:
The x-axis shows the year of death and the y-axis shows the age at death. The faint grey blotches represent humans (the more humans at a given point, the darker the blotch), with the blue line showing the locally estimated scatterplot smoothing.
You will notice that there have been a ton of people dying young in New York City since the start of the pandemic. It’s better now than it was a few years ago, but it sure looks to me like there currently a slight downwards trend, instead of a slight upwards trend like there was pre-pandemic.
You can also see from the darker blotches that a LOT of people died in NYC in 2020-2021.
(The little bump of a rise in early 2020? I presume that’s from reduced auto deaths and reduced influenza deaths, as a result of the various mitigation measures.)
This paper from USA (2025-08-05) reports that the risk of a new diagnosis of chronic kidney disease or end-stage kidney disease is 61% higher in people with Long COVID than in people who had COVID-19 but not Long COVID.
Long COVID
💉 Last week, I mentioned that this paper from USA (2025-07-31) reported that the more vaccines you got, the lower your risk of Long COVID. I realized that the study might actually be showing that the more recently you got a vaccination, the lower your risk of Long COVID. The data they used was from 2022, so the more vaccines a subject had, the more recent it had to have been.
The authors also pointed out that they couldn’t tell how much of the effect was from preventing COVID-19 infections.
🩸 This paper (2025-08-01) reports that if you add the SARS-CoV-2 Mpro protease to human blood, it triples the chances that the blood will coagulate. This lends support to the “microclots” theory of Long COVID.
🧠🩸 This paper from USA (2025-08-05) reports that patients with Long COVID had higher blood-brain-barrier (BBB) permeability. (Announcer voice: the BBB is not supposed to be permeable.)
Pathology
This paper (2025-08-05) found that injecting mice with the receptor-binding domain of the COVID-19 spike protein caused Parkinson’s Disease symptoms to get worse.
H5N1
Transmission
🐄🐦⬛😷 This preprint from USA (2025-08-02) reports that they found H5N1 in lots of places on dairy farms. They found it in the air in milking pens, in cows’ breath, and in wastewater (including “manure lakes).
I’d suggest putting masks on the cows, but if humans won’t wear them, cows probably won’t either.
Measles
Transmission
According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2025-08-05), in the week ending 26 July, the following jurisdictions had the following number of cases:
- Canada: 196;
- Alberta: 124;
- Ontario: 49;
- Manitoba: 8;
- BC: 7;
- Saskatchewan: 4;
- Nova Scotia: 2.
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