2025-10-06 General

NB: I am travelling, so this is going to be shorter than normal.

I have stopped talking about some things because I decided to focus (mostly) on things that are more actionable. For two examples: papers about vaccine trials or biomarkers for Long COVID. For both, it takes a looooooong time for the papers to turn into changes in standards of care.

However, I want to promise you that there is still a lot activity, a lot of research papers with very promising looking vaccines and biomarkers in them. Have hope!

COVID-19

Vaccines

💉 For my US readers, KFF has been tracking who can get a vaccine in which states here (see Table 1).

COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness

This paper using USA data (2025-09-24) reports that people who had a COVID-19 infection in 2020 had a higher risk of diabetes compared to people who did not have an infection:

  • pre-diabetes:
    • +87% risk in the first month after a COVID-19 infection;
    • +23% risk over five years;
  • type 2 diabetes:
    • +87% risk in the first month;
    • +48% risk over five years.

Long COVID

🧠 This paper from UK (2025-09-22) found that Long COVID patients had measureable small neuron dysfunction of various sorts.

Pathology

This preprint (2025-09-26) reports that insulin-deficient mice has significantly smaller germinal cells than mice with normal levels of insulin. (Geminal cells are where a lot of the immune system gets its training.) Mice who were vaccinated showed lower antigen-specific IgG antibody responses, decreased B-cell and T-cell numbers, and lower germinal center B-cell counts in their geminal cells. Bottom line: diabetes frigs with the immune system, not just your endocrine system. 🙁

🧠 This paper using UK data (2025-10-01) reports that people who had had COVID-19 infections were 77% more likely to get vascular dementia in the following two years than healthy controls. They were not more likely to get Alzheimer’s than healthy controls.

There was not a significant difference in the risk of vascular dementia between people who had COVID-19 infections and people who had different upper respiratory diseases. It’s almost like pathogens are bad for you, who knew?

Treatments

🩸 This blog post (2025-10-01) talks about a treatment mentioned in this press release (2024-06-06). The author says that they took cytotoxic T lymphocytes (which they are calling TVGN 489) from people who had recovered from COVID-19 and injected them into the blood of people who people who had immunity challenges. Not only did TVGN 489 quickly kill off the acute COVID-19, but the lympocytes stuck around for at least six months! The author says that this is strange, that the foreign cells should have been rejected, but not only were they not immediately rejected, they seemed to “patrol” against COVID-19 for longer than people who didn’t get the cytotoxic T lymphocytes from other people.

Metaphorically, it seems like instead of these vulnerable people in the study training their own army, so they contracted with a bunch of mercenaries and the mercenaries were not only good at wiping out the invaders in the main battle, they also stuck around to pick off the stragglers.

This paper with data from six countries (2025-09-27) reports that among 500 patients hospitalized for COVID-19, the ones who inhaled nebulised unfractionated heparin (UFH) had a 56% lower risk of being intubated or dying than those who just got the standard care. Splitting out death in the hospital alone, the UFH patients had a 74% lower risk of dying in hospital.

Heparin is a bog-standard, cheap, old, widely used blood thinner. It’s not usually inhaled, though.

‼️🎉 This article (2025-08-23) about this paper (2025-08-15) describes how they might be able to make a therapy which works against ALL viruses! There’s a downside: you end up with low-grade inflammation all over your body, but they think they can figure out how to make that (and the protection) temporary.

They believe that during the period while an attacking virus can’t hurt you, your immune system will still be able to train on the attacking virus. So it essentially turns the attacking virus into its own vaccine!

Furthermore, having a temporary pan-virus vaccine could be really useful in some cases, even if it doesn’t help you autovaccinate. For example, inoculating medical personnel who are treating an outbreak of a mystery disease or doing ring vaccination where the mystery disease has broken out would be helpful.

Transmission

🩸 I occasionally see stats that only about 85% of people’s blood has anti-nucleocapsid antibodies (which shows that they have definitely had COVID-19). For example, this paper from Brazil (2025-09-25) reports that 48.2% of participants had a positive PCR test but 85.7% tested positive for anti-nucleocapsid antibodies.

I find this really strange, because I only know three people personally who reasonably (in my opinion) believe they have not had COVID-19 yet, and two of them are my spouse and I. (It is even possible that the mild cold Spouse and I caught in London in February 2020 was COVID-19, we don’t know.)

However, this older paper from UK (2022-08-18) reports that only 80.45% of participants who had a positive PCR test had detectable antibodies.

Yeah, okay, “everybody” has been infected with SARS-CoV-2.

Recommended Reading

💉 For vax nerds, Hilda Bastian’s monthly vaccine roundup (2025-10-01) is out, and talks about (among other things the progress on mucousal vaccines.

H5N1

Transmission

🥛 This paper (2025-09-26) provides more evidence that proper pasteurization makes H5N1-contaminated milk safe.

The paper reports that pasteurization of milk (in a lab setting) which was deliberately contaminated with H5N1 virus didn’t have any detectable live virus afterwards.

Because mice infected with H1N1 have some protection against later infection with H5N1, they fed mice milk contaminated with H1N1 to see if the mice would get H1N1 from the milk; they did not.

Mice who were fed unpasteurized H1N1 milk later had protection from H5N1. This is important because:

  • most adults in most places have already had H1N1 infections: we humans might have some protection against H5N1;
  • drinking the pasteurized milk did not teach the mice that H1N1 was food and actually fine (this is called oral tolerance, and keeps food allergies down).

They also dosed {mice who were fed pasteurized H1N1} with H5N1; they died. The combo of the two cohorts showed that the H1N1 pasteurized milk had no significant effect on the mice — positive or negative.

They fed some other mice milk contaminated with H5N1 then pasteurized, and those mice didn’t get sick. They then fed those mice and control mice a lethal dose of H5N1; they all died at the same speed. This showed that exposure to H5N1 proteins in the milk didn’t make a positive or negative difference.

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2025-09-22), in the week ending 13 September, the following jurisdictions had the following number of cases:

  • Canada: 34;
  • Alberta: 12;
  • Saskatchewan: 12;
  • Manitoba: 8;
  • BC: 2.

This is down significantly from last week.