I’ve got almost nothing on COVID-19 this week. There have been some extremely technical, boring, non-actionable papers; there have been news stories about the (*sigh*) normal fecal tornadoes in the US health administration, there have been stories about people convicted of defrauding various other governments of COVID-19 relief funds, stories of Olympians *gasp* wearing masks, stories about measles in the US, stories about a polio case in Africa etc. etc. etc, but not much on COVID-19 that fits this blog.

There was nothing actionable and only one paper on COVID-19 that’s interesting enough to overcome not being actionable.

There are a few interesting papers/articles on other communicable diseases, however.

Viruses in General

Vaccines

💉 If you have been listening to RFK Jr. talking about how important it is to get all the aluminum out of vaccines, this article (2026-02-10) about this paywalled paper from USA (2026-02-09) points out that the lifetime exposure to aluminum from diet/environment is hundreds of times the exposure you could possibly get from vaccines.

💊 This article from USA (2026-02-10) reports that a virologist made a oral vaccine with brewer’s yeast! That worked, at least partially! Apparently the live yeast protected the important bits from stomach acids.

COVID-19

Vaccines

💉🩸 This article (2026-02-11) about this paper (2026-02-11) explains why the AstraZeneca vaccine sometimes caused blood clots coupled with bleeding out. Back in the day, they figured out pretty quickly that antibodies generated by the AstraZeneca vaccine glommed on to an important blood factor (PF4), but they didn’t know why that happened.

It turns out that there’s a piece of the adenovirus (pVII) which looks similar to PF4. Antibodies which target pVII sometimes mutate in a way that they attach really firmly to PF4. The drop in PF4 causes lots platelets to clot together. This causes clots in the bloodstream, and also makes patients more likely to bleed out — because all the platelets which should form clots at the source of a cut are busy making clots in unhelpful places!

This is actually a big problem: it’s relatively common for vaccine makers to use adenoviruses in their vaccines. Sputnik V (from Russia) and CanSino (from China) are two widely-used COVID-19 vaccines, and they both were built on top of an adenovirus. The Ebola vaccine uses an adenovirus, and there are other adenovirus-vectored vaccines in the pipeline. Ulp. 😬

Why doesn’t this happen just with adenoviruses? It does! It’s rare but possible. (It’s almost like viruses are bad for you!)

The good news is that vaccine makers might be able to tweak the adenovirus that they vector with so that it won’t ever induce the PF4-glomming antibodies. (No, I don’t know how, that wasn’t in the articles.) And of course, it will be expensive to change trials which are already in progress.

The other good news is that there is a highly effective treatment for the clotting. As this thread (2026-02-12) explains, flooding bloodstream with gamma globulin binds the platelets to the IgG so they can’t form clots. (This seems like to me patients would still be susceptible to bleeding out, but — everybody say it with me! — I’m not a doctor or microbiologists.)

The best news is that the vaccine safety surveillance did exactly what it was supposed to do: it spotted a very rare harmful side effect of the vaccine!

Influenza (non bird)

Vaccines

💉 This article (2026-02-11) reports that the US FDA won’t even look at Moderna’s application for their influenza vaccination. The FDA is saying, “Your standard-of-care arm of the trial should have used the high-potency vaccine that is available for people over 65.” Moderna is saying, “Uh, you said that we could use a different comparison vaccine when we cleared this study with you, and besides, we want to give this vax to people under 65.” (Note: it’s normal for companies to use the weakest approved vaccine as their comparison, and that makes sense: if vaccine X is good enough to be approved and your vax is better than X, then your vaccine ought to be good enough to get approved.)

Rejecting because the control arm isn’t strong enought is double-strange because various MAHA people (including RFK Jr) think that the only valid clinical trials are ones which use placebo for the control arm of the trial. (Somebody tell MAHA that placebos are literally the least effective vaccine you can make.)

Now, Canada is not beholden to the US FDA, so in the short term, this won’t matter to us. Health Canada will probably approve the Moderna mRNA influenza shot. Long term, this could a problem. If companies can’t count on the US FDA being reasonable. If the US FDA rejects lots of vaccines for no good reason, that will change the vaccine producers risk:reward calculations. While there are approximately eight billion people outside of the USA, this article (2025-06-05) says that USA has 34% of the world’s liquid private wealth (!!!!!!). A vaccine which might be profitable with the USA might not be profitable without the USA.

The other thing that might happen is that vaccines not approved in the USA get more expensive because the manufacturers can’t amortize across as large a customer base.

💉 This study using data from Canada (2026-02-05) reports that this year’s influenza vaccine was 40% effective against the aggregate of all influenza infections, but only 37% effective against infections of influenza subclade K.

Testing

🐄🐦‍⬛🤧🥛 This paper from USA (2026-01-30) reports that they found H5N1 in retail milk in a lot more states than they expected at first. They tested milk in 13 states in April/May 2024, and found H5N1 traces in a whopping 36.3% of retail pasteurized milk samples! That must have goosed the USA administration to make some changes, because by Dec 2024/Jan 2025, they only found H5N1 in 6.9% of samples from 25 states — and only from California.

The good news is that while they found non-viable fragments of H5N1, they found zero viable H5N1 in the pasteurized milk they sampled.

Enterovirus A71

Vaccines

🎉💉 Enterovirus A71 causes hand-foot-mouth disease and herpangina (a certain type of mouth sore). This paper from Taiwan (2026-02-12) reports that a phase 3 trial of a Enterovirus A71 vaccine was 99% effective! 😲

Measles

Transmission

According to the Government of Canada Measles and Rubella Monitoring Report (updated 2026-02-09), in the week ending 31 January 2025, the following jurisdictions had the following number of measles cases:

Canada: 41;
Manitoba: 29 (!);
BC: 6;
Alberta: 5;
Nova Scotia: 1.