COVID-19
Vaccines
💉 I don’t talk about pre-clinical trials much because there are so many of them, but I want to assure you that better vaccines do exist in the lab — lots of them, in fact. For example, this paper (2026-08-18) reports that their protein subunit vaccine protects hamsters from multiple COVID-19 strains for a year — and there’s good evidence that it might also protect against SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, and seasonal human cold CoVs.
Now, stuff that works in lab animals doesn’t always work in humans, so it’s not clear that this particular vaccine will work for you and me, but there are so many really promising studies in lab animals that I have to believe that at least one of them will work! It would be hard for me to count, but I’m guessing that I’ve seen on the order of 20? papers about vaccines that are significantly better than what we have now — effective against a broader range viruses/variants, and/or more effective, and/or more durable.
So don’t give up hope!
Long COVID
AGAIN 💊 This paper from USA (2026-10-29) reports that metformin taken right away reduced the risk of Long COVID by about half.
This paper from USA (2026-10-26) says that Long COVID rates are probably overstated.
There are issues with this paper. (Thanks to a particular scientist friend (you know who you are) for talking with me about the issues!)
The authors say that it’s wrong to compare rates of Long COVID in people who tested positive with people who were undiagnosed. They compared rates of somewhat ridiculous things (like later lightning strikes, drowning, firearm injuries, congenital malformations, etc.) between people who tested positive for COVID-19 and people who were not tested, and found a higher risk in people who were tested than in people who were not. When they compared people who tested positive for COVID-19 with people who tested negative, there was no difference in the risk profiles for the ridiculous things. They used that to argue that comparing positive-test people to never-tested people was the wrong way to do things.
Well, this does make sense if you remember that hospitals were testing everybody who got admitted for the first few years of the pandemic. That means that if you got hit by lightning, you went to hospital, you got tested. If you did not get hit by lightning, you wouldn’t go to the hospital, you wouldn’t get tested. That means that there would be much higher rates of lightning strikes in people who got tested. It probably close to 100% of the people who got hit by lightning got tested, at least for the first year or two.
My scientist friend also points out that doing anything with insurance records is problematic: if you complain of brain fog, but all of your tests are negative and so they don’t give you a diagnosis code, then you don’t exist as part of the Long COVID set.
The paper also wants to be answering the question of “how much Long COVID do COVID-19 infections cause?”, while the question it actually answers (perhaps poorly, since hospitals were testing all admits) is “does COVID-19 cause more long-term effects than other respiratory illnesses?”.
And of course, the paper doesn’t count anybody who doesn’t have the resources to go get tested – which disproportionally excluding the folks we know are most likely to get Long COVID — like low-income essential workers.
🩸 This paper from Sweden (2026-10-10) reports that people with Long COVID have a 15% higher risk of developing high blood pressure.
🎉💊 This article (2026-10-26) reports that low-dose Naltrexone helped some people with Long COVID a fair amount. This research was presented at a conference, so I’m having trouble getting any more information than that. I expect the researchers will publish a paper with more details, but I have no idea when, sorry. Just keep your eyes open for it.
🍆🍑😬 Long COVID is bad for you, part many-many (and duh, part many-many): this paper from Germany (2026-10-22) reports that people with Long COVID report significantly more impairments of their sex life than people without.
Pathology
💊 There is a class of drugs called Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors which are commonly used for autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and some cancers. This older paper (2025-05-02) reports that JAK inhibitors can also impair interferon responses, which makes people more vulnerable to infection. They tested influenza A, COVID-19, adenovirus, and Rift Valley fever and found that cells in the lab were more susceptible to infections from those viruses.
I wonder if the higher risk for COVID-19 for people with arthritis is actually due to the medicines they are on. 🙁
Transmission
🤘😢 Yes, you can catch COVID-19 outside. This paper from Korea (2026-09-22) reports that there were about twice as many COVID-19 cases after a multi-day festival featuring outdoor concerts as they would have expected.
Multiple Pathogens
Vaccines
🎉💉 In an earlier post (2026-03-06), I raved about how there were three different “universal vaccines” that had been published. Now there are four! This paper (2026-10-09) reports on a compound K3-SPG which gave mice quite good protection against influenza, despite not having any influenza pieces (antigens) in it! Interestingly, K3-SPG worked much better against flu when it was given nasally.
Again: I don’t think it’s a good idea to be on an immune booster permanently because it causes inflammation, and chronic inflammation is bad. However, being on one temporarily seems like it could be very useful.
Measles
Diagnoses
😬 This paper from USA (2026-10-26) reports that 6.9% of people with measles don’t get diagnosed the first time they are seen. (Many doctors have never seen a measles case, and many things can cause rashes.)
Transmission
According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2026-10-26), in the week ending 17 October 2026, the following jurisdictions had the following number of new measles cases:
- Canada: 2;
- Quebec: 2.