2025-09-05 General

COVID-19

Government

This article (2025-09-03) says that Public Health Agency of Canada will be laying off about 300 people, about a tenth of its headcount.

That article plus this article (2025-01-23) report that the PHAC headcount:

  • was “over 2,300” before 2020;
  • was “over 4,200” in 2022;
  • was 4,251 at the end of March 2024;
  • is “just over 3,000 workers” now.

Vaccines

💉 Okay, folks. Last week I told y’all that Americans could get vaccines in Ontario and Quebec, but not in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Manitoba. I called around and found that Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Yukon Territory also require having a health services card, but that doesn’t matter now. A lot of US states are doing various legal things to make sure that the vast majority of people (including kids!) can get a vaccine. In order of how far along in the process they are, here are articles describing what they are doing: Massachusetts, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington State, New Mexico, New York, Illinois, and California/Oregon/Hawai’i).

In fact, now Canadians might want to go to the US for a shot!

This is all happening very fast. More states are making vax available almost faster than I can update this page.

NB: Some of the states are limiting it to residents of the states. I don’t have good information on which.

Long COVID

🩸 This paper from Netherlands (2025-08-30) reports that people with Long COVID had different immunological characteristics of their blood. Compared to people without Long COVID, the long haulers had:

  • significantly lower levels of anti-spike IgG and IgA antibodies, which might mean that long haulers have more trouble fighting off SARS-CoV-2, or maybe that they’ve been fighting SARS-CoV-2 for a long time and are depleted? (I don’t know);
  • higher levels of anti-spike IgG for two common-cold coronaviruses (OC43 and HKU1), which might mean that people who had gotten OC43 and/or HKU1 infections are more likely to get Long COVID;
  • higher ratios of IgM to IgG, which means that long hauler’s mechanism for converting IgM to IgG might be impaired;
  • lower levels of cytomegalovirus (CMV) p65 IgG antibodies, and I don’t have a clue what the implications of that are.

This paper from USA (2025-09-01) reports that different age groups have different risk profiles for Long COVID. Compared to adults under 40, the risks of having Long COVID were

  • +40% for people 40-49 y/o;
  • +31% for people 50-59 y/o;
  • +9% for people 60-69 y/o;
  • -32% for people 70 y/o and older (yes, lower).

Older and younger people also had different chances of being in the clusters defined in this paper. Compared to people under 40 y/o, the people 40 and over had

  • higher risks of being in cluster 1 (loss of taste or smell) or cluster 2 (GI, cough, heart palpitations) but
  • lower risks of cluster 3 (brain fog without loss of smell/taste) or cluster 4 (mixed).

🎉🎉 This paper from USA (2025-09-01) reports that obese and overweight people who took metformin within 90 days after a COVID-19 infection had a 63% lower risk of Long COVID than people who did not take metformin.

‼️😬 This article from a Swiss health insurance consortium (2025-09-04) about a survey says that Swiss people report that their health has gone downhill: 22% thought their health was very good in 2020, but only 11% think so now. The percentage that said that they currently have the following symptoms was:

  • difficulty sleeping: 80% 😲;
  • exhaustion: 69%;
  • pain: 49%;
  • stress: 41%.

While the article didn’t say anything about COVID-19 — instead suggesting screen time and/or wellness monitoring apps might be factors — this sure looks like Long COVID to me!

🎉🎉🎉‼️ This preprint from USA (2025-09-03) reports that a small study of a combination therapy gave really good self-reported benefits to a group of long haulers. The participants got either

  • long-term valacyclovir (an anti-viral effective against herpes-family) and celecoxib (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory), or
  • long-term valacyclovir and celecoxib plus 15 days of nirmatrelvir/ritonavir (Paxlovid).

Both groups had improvements, with the plus-Paxlovid group doing particularly well. Not only that, but the improvement was long-lasting, being pretty stable for up to 720 days!

Addendum 2025-09-11: It’s not clear to me if the participants stayed on the cocktail for 120 days or basically forever. The paper is a bit ambiguous on the subject.

Treatments

🎉🎉🎉‼️ This paper from Germany (2025-09-02) reports that an H1-antihistamine nasal spray reduced the risk of COVID-19 infection by 69%. It also dropped the risk of rhinovirus by 71% and common-cold coronaviruses (OC43 or HKU1) by 47%. (There were only three influenza cases and one RSV case — which seems odd.)

The nasal spray was a 0.1% solution azelastine (a second-generation H1-antihistamine), administered three times per day for the 56 days of the study.

Note that 69% protection is still a lot lower than 100%. (And don’t figure you can use vaccines to give you the other 31%, either — most of the people in both cohorts of the study were vaccinated.) 56 days is a lot lower than one year, or two years, or five years. It’s not perfect — but the study does say it can help.

Azelastine nasal spray is available in the US under the name Astepro in a 0.15% solution. As far as I know, there are no H1-antihistamine nasal sprays available in Canada. (NB: on 2025-01-18, I said that Astepro was a first-generation H1-antihistamine. I was wrong: it’s a second-generation H1-antihistamine.)

CW: Rebuttals to Arguments Against (for research nerds only!)

One person on teh socials pointed out that the azelastine might muck with the testing to give false negatives as opposed to actually being negative. I have no counter to that argument: the paper doesn’t say how much time elapsed between sprays and the tests.

I have seen some references to this blog post talking smack about nasal-spray-against-COVID-studies. The author — a guy who got a PhD in biochemistry studying COVID — makes these arguments:

  1. The sprays can interfere with COVID-19 tests and give false negatives;
  2. Some papers do not have placebos;
  3. No testing for asymptomatic/presymptomatic infections;
  4. Bias because the researchers have a commercial interest in the outcome.

I would like to rebut some of the arguments:

  1. This is a valid concern for the azelastine paper. The paper doesn’t describe how they prevented this (e.g. how long it was between spray application and rapid antigen test). However, they also tested people hard if the participant had respiratory symptoms and figured out what the participant had. I didn’t see any cases listed of “the participant was sick but we couldn’t figure out what they had”, which I would have expected if the COVID-19 test gave a false negative.
  2. This study had a placebo. In addition, sometimes you can have a sort of implied control group. For example, this case study (2021-01-16) of two nursing homes in Spain in 2020 found that ZERO of their residents, who were given antihistamines as soon as they got sick, went to the hospital and/or died, while 28% of nursing home residents elsewhere in the country died. That wasn’t a controlled study exactly, but the population of “everybody else in a nursing home” acted as an implicit control group.
  3. This study did rapid tests twice per week. If there was an issue with asymptomatic infections, you’d expect that it would be just as bad in the control groups (assuming that the nasal spray doesn’t lead to more false negatives). The participants also took the spray for 56 days, which means presymptomatic infections should have been caught after they turned symptomatic.
  4. Oh, come on. Nobody does randomized control trials unless they have a commercial interest in the outcome — they are too expensive! Pfizer did the studies on Comirnaty, Moderna did the studies on Spikevax, Novavax did the studies on Nuvaxovid. Yes, of course there is a risk of bias — but if we throw out every random controlled trial which could have bias, we would have to throw out >95% of all studies.

Meanwhile, this tweet by someone I respect pointed out that if the people who dropped out of the study got sick in very precise patterns, then the results would no longer be statistically significant. However, to get to an insignificant result, the outcome distribution of people who dropped out has to be quite a bit different than the outcome distribution pattern of the people who stayed in.

I acknowledge that I am biased because I want there to be a good prophylactic for COVID-19. I acknowledge that there’s a weakness in possible false negatives.

However, I would like to also remind you of this paper (2025-11-26) which found that a first-generation H1-antihistamine nasal spray hugely dropped the severity of Long COVID cases compared to placebo — 72% of the placebo cohort had at least one symptom, compared to 0.7% in the antihistamine cohort. Nasal sprays messing up RAT/PCR tests would have zero effect on this paper, and yet there was a strong positive effect of an H1-antihistamine against COVID-19-damage. That’s not proof that this paper is correct, but another piece of evidence that H1-antihistamites are good for you if you have COVID-19.

Transmission

How many infections have people had?

This post (2025-09-04) points out that in the azelastine paper (see above under Treatments), 6.7% of the people in the placebo group got infected in 56 days. That implies that people get infected every 2.5 years (which is lower than both the poster and I expected).

Of course, if the nasal spray interferes with RATs/PCRs, that will mean the 2.5 years is an underestimate. On the other other hand, a commenter pointed out that COVID-19 risks vary across time and space.

This site (updated 2025-09-01) estimates that Americans have gotten COVID-19 4.57 times on average since March 2020. (The estimate is based on wastewater data.)

This paper (2024-08-14) reports that at 75% of Canadian blood donors showed evidence of a COVID-19 infection in their blood by March 2023 (and it is my understanding that the traces of an infection become harder to detect over time, so 75% is an underestimate, plus that was two years ago).

Mitigation Measures

Working from home increases productivity in some ways: this article from Canada (2025-08-31) reports that the number of sick days that federal workers took dropped from more than 9 days per year pre-pandemic to 5.9 in 2020 and less than 9 for the next two years. In 2023, when federal workers were ordered back into the office, the average number of sick days went above 9 again.

Recommended Reading

If you are a vax nerd, Hilda Bastian’s monthly vax update is out!

This article (2025-09-02) by a long hauler talks about the desperation that makes her gullible.

This post (2025-08-31) explains in great detail — slightly technical but not too deep — the pathology of SARS-CoV-2. (I think I finally understand the furin cleavage site!)

This article (2025-08-04) explains in great detail just how far up his ass RFK Jr.’s head is when he claims that mRNA vaccines are dangerous and ineffective.

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2025-08-25), in the week ending 16 August, the following jurisdictions had the following number of cases:

  • Canada: 82;
  • Alberta: 30;
  • BC: 20;
  • Nova Scotia: 13;
  • Manitoba: 10;
  • Ontario: 8;
  • New Brunswick: 1.