Vaccines This paper says that there is a blood-olfactory barrier (similar to the blood-brain barrier) and that blood-borne antibodies can’t get to the olfactory epithelium (mucous membrane lining). (Note that SARS-CoV-2 can get to the brain via the olfactory bulb. !!) That suggests that we are never going to get to sterilizing immunity (i.e. you… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-22 General
Category: General
week ending 2022-09-15 General
Pathology This paper from the USA says that what gut microbes you have affects how badly COVD-19 hits you. (That’s a slight simplification — they looked at population-level frequency of various gut bacteria and compared it to population-level hospitalization rate.) This article from July 2020 says that the amount of fermented food that people eat… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-15 General
week ending 2022-09-08 General
Unwanted Side Effects This paper from Paris found that, while infant head trauma (which is usually caused by child abuse) did not go up in 2020, it doubled in 2021. 😬 Vaccines Good news on the mucosal antibodies front! (Reminder: you want antibodies in the mucous because COVID-19 hits the mucous membranes of the respiratory… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-08 General
week ending 2022-09-01 General
Vaccines This article says that Health Canada approved a BA.1 booster from Moderna today for adults and immunocompromised children over 12. 780K are supposed to arrive in-country tomorrow, with another 10.5M at the end of September. There isn’t good data from random clinical trials in humans yet for the new bivalent vaccines. This preprint from… Continue reading week ending 2022-09-01 General
week ending 2022-08-25 General
Long COVID This article reports on this (difficult-for-lay-people-to-understand) research report which says that Long COVID patients had an imbalance in the clot-promoting and clot-removing proteins in the blood. (Note: in the Recommended Reading section, there’s a link to a long article on clotting and Long COVID.) Pathology This paper says that physical exercise makes your… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-25 General
week ending 2022-08-18 General
Live Attenuated Virus Vaccines This paper from Massachusetts found that vaccination with the tuberculosis BCG vaccine gave a 92% efficacy against COVID-19. (Also see this mass media article, which talks about other studies too.) BCG is a live attenuated virus vaccine (LAV); I’ve talked about LAVs before and how they appear to boost the innate… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-18 General
week ending 2022-08-11 General
Mitigation Measures This paper from eastern Massachusetts found that school districts which dropped mask mandates right away had 44 cases of COVID-19 per 1000 students/staff (accounting for 30% of cases) compared to schools which kept masks. (Before they were allowed to drop mask mandates, the case rates were similar.) Here’s a Twitter thread with an… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-11 General
week ending 2022-08-04 General
Variants The current data, while confusing and somewhat contradictory, at least shows that our wave is not getting lots worse, and might even be going down. This seems really strange, when compared to how many other jurisdictions have gotten hammered. According to this blog post, the US had large shares of BA.2.12.1 — which shares… Continue reading week ending 2022-08-04 General
week ending 2022-07-28 General
Transmission Here’s another preprint (from the UK) which says that the “you don’t have to isolate longer than five days” guidance is bullshit. It says that the median person was infectious — even if asymptomatic — for 7 to ten days. This paper from the USA found that while adults who were not exposed to… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-28 General
week ending 2022-07-21 General
You might have noticed that I now frequently put the country where the research was carried out next to the link. I do think because different countries have different demographic profiles, different vaccination programs/history, different wave histories, etc. Sometimes this matters, and I am not clever enough to figure out when. If work is done… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-21 General