2025-11-07 General

COVID-19

Long COVID

💉 This paper from USA (2025-11-01) reports that vaccination cuts the risk of Long COVID in adolescents by 36%.

This paper from Alberta (2025-11-07) (and this press release on the paper) reports on differences between men with Long COVID and women with Long COVID.

  • Women had higher levels than men of proteins/polysaccharides which are associated with “leaky guts” / gut inflammation;
  • Replicating work from a previous preprint (2024-03-04) (which is now a paywalled paper (2024-11-13)), women with Long COVID were unusually low in testosterone and men with Long COVID were unusually low in estradiol;
  • Women had higher levels of anemia (reminding me of what this paper said about iron dysregulation).

The study notes that testosterone normally helps keep inflammation in check, and so low levels of testosterone might lead to chronic inflammation. Chronic neuroinflammation could cause brain fog.

Side note: this paper (2023-09-11) suggests that endometriosis increases the risk of leaky gut, and there is a well-known link betwen endometriosis and anemia. Note that Wikipedia’s Endometriosis page says that ~10% of women have endometriosis.

COVID-Related Excess Deaths and Sickness

I’ve talked before about how COVID-19 is not like the flu: the flu infects the respiratory system and then stops while COVID-19 goes almost everywhere in the body. This photo from this paper (2024-11-29) that shows where COVID-19 and influenza viruses end up in mice bodies gives a very vivid illustration of that:

This paper from USA (2025-10-04) reports that COVID-19 is bad for eye health.

👁️ Among people with COVID-19 infections, people who were vaccinated for COVID-19 had significantly lower rates of several eye diseases compared to unvaccinated COVID-19 patients:

COVID-19 patients also had higher risks of eye diseases than influenza patients:

🩸 This paper from UK (2025-11-04) reports that among people under 18, having a COVID-19 diagnosis significantly increased a number of risks compared to having no COVID-19 diagnosis in the first week after diagnosis:

  • 2.33 times the risk of a blood clot blocking an artery (arterial thromboembolism);
  • 4.9 times the risk of a blood clot blocking a vein (venous thromboembolism);
  • 3.64 times the risk of a low platelet count (thrombocytopenia);
  • 3.46 times the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis;
  • 14.84 times the risk of inflammatory conditions.

After 2-4 weeks, the risks dropped, but stayed elevated for more than a year for some things:

  • +39% higher risk of venous clots;
  • +42% higher risk of thrombocytopenia;
  • +42% higher risk of myocarditis or pericarditis.

Of the kids eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, there was a +84% higher risk of myocarditis or pericarditis within the first 4 weeks of vaccination for kids who got vaccinated compared to those who did not. Within six months, the risk of getting myocarditis or pericarditis from a COVID-19 infection was 2.63 times the risk of getting myocarditis or pericarditis from a COVID-19 vaccination.

Recommended Reading

🪖🎖️ This article from last year (2024-11-18) says that pandemics lead to eugenics, which leads to fascism.

RSV

Vaccines

💉 Okay, okay, nirsevimab (trade name Beyfortus) isn’t actually a vaccine, but it is used like one: it’s a monoclonal antibody given to babies to prevent RSV. This paper using data from many countries (2025-11-06) found that nirsevimab’s effectiveness waned over time. The vaccine effectiveness of nirsevimab against infection was:

  • 51% within six months;
  • 33% between six and eleven months;
  • minus 21% after a year (although the sample size of babies vaccinated a year or more before the study was very small).

Influenza

Vaccines

💉 This paper using data from Denmark and Spain (2025-10-17) reports that the high-dosage influenza vaccine is better than standard-dosage influenza vaccine for adults over 64. While there wasn’t a large difference between the two on some measures, the relative vaccine effectiveness (rVE) of the high-dose vax was higher than the low-dose vax on:laboratory-confirmed influenza hospitalization

  • laboratory-confirmed influenza hospitalization (rVE of 31.9%);
  • diagnosed hospitalization for influenza (rVE of 39.6%).

The high-dose vax only had slight advantages for:

  • hospitalization for pneumonia;
  • cardiorespiratory hospitalization;
  • all-cause hospitalization;
  • all-cause mortality.

On the other hand, this paper from Italy (2025-10-01) reports that among adults over 59, the high-dose was significantly better than the low-dose against influenza infection, with rVE of 29%; the rVE was even better for patients over 79 with rVE of 54%.

However, the participant pool was a little odd. They combined two pools of people

  • people over 17 who went to the ER then were hospitalized and had an influenza test but who didn’t have a documented influenza case before going to the ER (so if you saw your GP on Monday and they told you to rest, but you went to the ER on Thursday and got admitted, then you wouldn’t be part of the study);
  • people over 50 who visited a GP with an acute respiratory illness.

They excluded anybody under 60 and anyone who had not been vaccinated against the flu. Combining the hospitalized pool with the non-hospitalized pool seems a bit iffy to me.

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2025-11-03), in the week ending 25 October, the following jurisdictions had the following number of cases:

  • Canada: 29;
  • Saskatchewan: 11;
  • BC: 9;
  • Alberta: 7;
  • Ontario: 2.