2026-05-01 General

COVID-19

Vaccines

❌ The acting head of the US CDC, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, blocked publication of a paper in the US CDC’s weekly (and highly respected) journal. It is hugely unusual for a paper to get blocked like that by a high official (probably unprecedented, though I don’t know all of the US CDC’s history), and his objections were ludicrously flimsy.

The results of the paper have been widely discussed, but this (respected) blog writer got his hands on a copy and revealed it in this post (2026-04-27) as here. (It’s unpublished, so I don’t exactly have a date for it.) It says that the vaccine effectiveness of the 2025/2026 COVID-19 shots was:

  • 50% against urgent care/emergency department care for all adults;
  • 50% against urgent care/emergency department care for adults over 65 y/o;
  • 53% against hospital admission for adults over 65 y/o.

💉 According to this press release with data from USA (2026-04-18), 43.1% of the people who got Novavax shots had moderate-to-severe side effects compared to 61.3% of people who got mNEXSPIKE. (NB: SPIKEVAX (Moderna’s first-gen vax) has about 50% more severe side effects than mNEXSPIKE (Moderna’s second-generation vaccine, the one you probably have gotten yourself).)

Treatments

💊 As I mentioned last week, this paper (2026-04-22) using data USA and Canada found that Paxlovid was no better than placebo against acute COVID-19 in higher-risk, vaccinated patients.

This blog post (2026-04-27) makes the strong case that Paxlovid no longer being useful is a good thing. There were zero deaths in either arm of the study, so basically all of us have strong enough immunity to COVID-19 that our immune system doesn’t need Paxlovid’s help to shrug it off.

💊 This paper from the Czech Republic (2026-03-31) reports that the case fatality rate for people with COVID-19 infections treated with inosine pranobex (an anti-viral) was 22% lower than those that didn’t get the drug in the pre-Omicron period. In the Omicron period, the mortality risk was 65% lower for people who got inosine pranobex.

This study covered Mar 1, 2020, up to the latest available data point, Dec 31, 2023, while the Paxlovid study above ran through 2024. I don’t know if the inosine pranobex was recent enough to encounter people who were immune enough that they didn’t need an antiviral, as in the Paxlovid study above.

(Inosine pranobex, also known as isoprinosine or dimepranol, is used a lot in Eastern and Central Europe. This page says that its use has been discontinued in Canada. I couldn’t find any information about why it had been discontinued.)

Long COVID

NB: The article under this disclosure triangle set off the AI-slop-detector of one of my loyal readers. I can’t tell. Maybe it’s real? Maybe it’s not?

I hadn’t ever thought about it, but this article (2026-03-27) makes the strong case that balance problems and weakness are significant problems for people with ME/CFS-type Long COVID.

Testing

💩💧 As I discussed in last week’s BC post, all three Lower Mainland waste treatment plants showed zero COVID-19 detections. One possibility is that the tests were not sensitive enough, but this paper (2026-04-30) reports that with a more sensitive test, they believe they were able to identify a measles case from one person in a Chicago (1M customer) plant’s wastewater. 🎉

RSV

Transmission

This paper from Canada (2026-04-27) reports that the rate of pediatric hospitalization for RSV in 2022/2023 was more than double the pre-pandemic rate. They think that it’s because

  • RSV didn’t circulate much when COVID-19 mitigation measures were in place, so
  • the kidlets didn’t have immunity, so
  • RSV spread widely.

This was also just before monoclonal RSV antibodies (approved in Canada 2023-04-22) for neonates and maternal vaccination for RSV (approved in Canada 2024-01-04) were approved to protect kidlets. If those preventatives had been around just one season earlier, the 2022/2023 outbreak would have looked a lot different. 🙁

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2026-04-27), in the week ending 184 April 2025, the following jurisdictions had the following number of measles cases:

  • Canada: 36;
  • Manitoba: 27;
  • Alberta: 8;
  • BC: 1.