Vaccines
Apparently there’s some people being concerned about mRNA vaccine ending up in the ovaries. This Twitter thread takes that idea down. Tl;dr: the lipid envelopes which contain the mRNA migrate around, and a small amount ends up in the ovaries (as it does to lots of organs, most notably the liver), but such a small amount that it’s not to worry.
People with various immune issues have trouble mounting a good response to vax, sometimes even with two doses. Solid-organ recipients have probably the worst time of it. This paper says that a third dose is better — dragging the prevalence of antibodies up from 40% of patients to 68%.
This article says that less than 0.5% the cases and 0.5% of the deaths in Canada since the start of the vaccine rollout have been in fully vaccinated people.
Variants
A new report says that Delta is “only” 40% more transmissible than Alpha, not 60%.
This article is a good explainer of “Delta Plus”, a new version of Delta with the mutation K417N which is also found in the Beta (“South African”) strain. There are actually two different strains of Delta plus K417N, AY.1 and AY.2, with slightly different additional mutations.
There are reports that it is resistant to monoclonal antibodies and fears that it will be vax resistant.
The first report was from April, and the numbers are still low, so it is likely that it is not more contagious.
Recommended Reading
There have been a lot of articles about anxieties about re-entering the in-person social and work worlds will be or is. This article talks about something I had not considered: returning to the research people were doing before dropping it all to focus on COVID-19.
If you want more on the origins-of-SARS-CoV-2, see this (longish) article. One thing the article reminds us of: even if it was a lab leak, that doesn’t mean that the virus was engineered.
This article is about solar panels, not vaccines, but its discussions of how to best advance technologies apply to vaccines. This article, I hope, makes clear why just making vaccine IP free is not enough to get vax to the world.