Category: General

2022-03-05/06/07

Pathology This preprint from the UK which compared brain scans made during the Alpha wave to brain scans in the same people several years prior. They found that people who had had COVID infections had more degradation in their brains (on average) than those who had not. They excluded people who had been hospitalized from… Continue reading 2022-03-05/06/07

2022-03-03 General

Vaccines You might be wondering what the holdup is with shots for toddlers and babies. After all, the Pfizer shots were effective (during the Delta regime) for the under-two babies, just not for the toddlers (presumably because the dose:weight ratio was high enough for the babies but not the toddlers). This article about the approval… Continue reading 2022-03-03 General

2022-03-02 General

Pathology This preprint says that they used immuno–positron emission tomography to see SARS-CoV-2 infection in cells, and found it kind of all over the male genital tract of macaques. Here’s a lay article on the subject, which added that 10-20% of men who get COVID-19 have problems with their genitals. Men, don’t get COVID-19, it’s… Continue reading 2022-03-02 General

2022-03-01 General

Pathology This article reports that a team can predict with 83% accuracy the severity of COVID-19 by looking at three components of blood (mostly TH17, a helper T cell, and immune system cells IL-17 and IFNG). Vaccines Yesterday I referenced a preprint which said that vaccine effectiveness in kidlets was awful. Today, there’s a different… Continue reading 2022-03-01 General

2022-02-26/27/28 General

Transmission This preprint looked at COVID-19 in some white-tailed deer killed by hunters in Ontario. It found COVID-19 in ~6% of the deer, and the whole-genome sequencing found that the viruses have mutated a lot. (“Highly divergent” was the language in the preprint.) Furthermore, they found one human from the same geographic area with known… Continue reading 2022-02-26/27/28 General

2022-02-25 General

Pathology This article suggests that the reason that COVID-19 hits old people so much harder than young people is that old people have more antibodies to important pieces of their own innate immune system, particularly interferons. (In other words, they attack critical pieces of their own immune system.) They found that the proportion of people… Continue reading 2022-02-25 General

2022-02-24 General

Vaccines This article reports that Health Canada approved Medicago’s Covifenz, a plant-derived protein subunit vaccine. In trials, Covifenz had 71% effectiveness against Delta infection, and 100% effective against hospitalization. According to their product monograph, it is fridge-stable, but needs to be handled gently. Medicago’s vax is a virus-like particle, what I generally call a “spikey… Continue reading 2022-02-24 General