2026-09-05 General

Multiple Pathogens

Vaccines

💉🧬 This manifesto (2026-03-17) by PopVax is interesting and very, very long. They want to make a ton of mRNA vaccines in India. They think that they should and can do it.

Why they should:

  • There are five common diseases (TB, strep, flu, hepatits C, and HIV) which do not have vaccines and kill more than 3 million people per year.
  • There are some pathogens which aren’t that bad in the acute phase, but which have really nasty long-term effects (e.g. Epstein-Barr virus, Cytomegalovirus, Herpes Simplex Viruses HSV 1 & 2).
  • There are seven relatively common antibiotic-resistant bacteria which kill more than 4.4 millon people per year.
  • Oh yeah, malaria.

Why they can/how they are going to do it:

  • Capability/cost/speed advantages:
    • India’s got talent (and is getting more all the time as the USA research institutions implode).
    • India has lower costs for all aspects of vaccine development, but especially for clinical trials.
    • mRNA has lower costs and faster turnarounds.
    • AI reduces costs and increases speed.
    • PopVax has developed high-throughput screening methods.
  • Proprietary tech:
    • PopVax has developed an mRNA technology that makes the payload self-assemble into virus-like-particles. (So for a COVID-19 vaccine, instead of just delivering a bunch of little disconnected spikes, they would deliver ball with spikes on it.) They say that provides better neutralization.
    • PopVax has developed a better lipid nanoparticle technology.
    • PopVax has been co-developing a microarray patch for delivering vaccines. (Note: not done yet.)
    • Lab animals kind of suck for preclinical tests (basically, mice and humans are different), but organoids with human tissue can be much more accurate models of humans. PopVax has been working on figuring out how to use organoids for preclinical testing. (Note: not done yet.)
    • PopVax is working on collecting preclinical data from thousands of vaccine candidates and feeding that back into their AI models: “each round of experiments leaves us with more task-specific data that good biological models need”. (Note: not done yet.)

They go hard on the idea of speed, speed, speed, lots of candidates, lots of trials, throw lots of things at the wall and something’s gotta stick, and generate data, data, data that you can use to make even more candidates.

In addition the manifesto has a strain of “nobody else is going to make the vaccines” because of misaligned incentives and the USA being so f’d right now.

💉 This older article (2021-03-23) explains why manufacturing vaccines at scale is hard.

  • For mRNAs, it’s the mixing of the mRNA with the lipid nanoparticles.
  • For viral-vector vaccines, it’s growing mammal cells that you have to feed and keep alive. (Also, companies don’t want to introduce a production line which has viruses into a factory which is making recombinant proteins or inactivated virus because there’s a huge risk if the live virus escapes into those other lines — and there aren’t many companies now with live virus in their lines.)
  • All vaccine lines have to do very rigorous testing/quality control.

COVID-19

Long COVID

AGAIN 💊😢 This paper from USA (2026-08-31) reports that an extended course of Paxlovid didn’t help people with Long COVID.

🤰 This paper from USA (2026-08-27) reports that having Long COVID while pregnant was not an immediate danger to the fetus, it was hard on the pregnant person. People with Long COVID weren’t any more likely to have an preterm delivery, but people with Long COVID were 51% more likely to have gestational high blood pressure than pregnant people without Long COVID.

😬 This paper from USA (2026-08-20) reports that Long COVID gives a higher risk of all kinds of things, including various cardiovascular, renal, and respiratory problems compared to people without Long COVID, especially for pulmonary fibrosis and chronic respiratory failure.

💪 This paper from Brazil (2026-08-15) reports that people who exercised regularly before catching COVID-19 had a 20% lower risk of having some sort of functional disability two years later than those who did not exercise.

Vaccines / Preventatives

This paper from Australia (2026-08-30) reports that getting COVID-19 vaccinations dropped the risk of major adverse cardiac events by about 20-25% compared to unvaccinated people. More vaccinations gave more protection.

Interestingly, they think that about 68% of the effect comes from something besides just reducing the risk of a COVID-19 infection.

👃💨💊🎉 This paper from Germany (2026-09-02) reports that people who used an azelastine nasal spray three times per day had only about a third of the risk of getting a COVID-19 infection as people who got a placebo. (They also had about one-third of the risk of getting a rhinovirus infection.)

Variants

This paper from USA (2026-07-17) reports that children were 2.85 times as likely to have a moderate case of Omicron COVID-19 than from earlier variants; they were 3.95 times as likely to have a severe case. (This is backwards from adults, for whom Omicron is, on average, less severe than earlier variants.) Boys had higher risks on moderate or severe cases than girls, and younger kids had more moderate or severe cases than older kids.

Reminder that in medical-speak “moderate case” usually means “hospitalized” and “severe case” usually means “ICU”.

HPV

Pathology

HPV doesn’t just give you cancer(s), it can also affect your heart. This study from Sweden (2026-09-01) found that women with HPV had a 25% higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease than women who did not have documented HPV infections. (Get your HPV vaccinations!)

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2026-08-31), in the week ending 22 August 2026, the following jurisdictions had the following number of new measles cases:

  • Canada: 1;
  • Ontario: 1.