Vaccines This article reports that Health Canada has approved half-dose Moderna as a booster for people over 18. Mitigation Measures This article says that organized crime stole relief funds in various ways. Recommended Reading In the Before Times, there were a fair number of international medical personnel stationed in Uganda. This article says that when… Continue reading 2021-11-12 General
Category: General
2021-11-11 General
Assholes to Assholes This article says that people are paying money for fake vax cards, and the providers… just pocket the money and never send the card. LOL. Vaccines This article from the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations says that the world is going to have a glut of vaccines by June 2022.… Continue reading 2021-11-11 General
2021-11-10 General
Treatments Okay, this preprint is wild — if I understand it correctly. My understanding is that the authors made a thing — a Therapeutic Interfering Particle or TIP — which looks just like SARS-CoV-2 except it has a vastly stripped-down genome, one that doesn’t have all the instructions needed to make the enzymes and proteins… Continue reading 2021-11-10 General
2021-11-09 General
Vaccines This article reports that Health Canada approved the Pfizer booster for everyone over 18 today. This study gives the Phase 3 results for the pediatric Pfizer shots, showing a vaccine effectiveness of 90.7%. Recommended Reading This article is about the theory of risk compensation — which they say is bogus and harmful. You won’t… Continue reading 2021-11-09 General
2021-11-06/7/8 General
Disease As I mentioned back in May 2020, they discovered a new coronavirus in Malaysia in samples from 2017 and 2018 which appears to have jumped directly from dogs to humans. They found this coronavirus because someone decided to go looking for unknown coronaviruses, and whaddayaknow, there one is! There wasn’t a big fuss because… Continue reading 2021-11-06/7/8 General
2021-11-05 General
Treatment Fantastic news! Pfizer has a pill which, if you take it in the first three days after symptoms appear, cuts hospitalization by NINETY F PERCENT!!! If taken within the first five days, it’s ~85% effective. The pill, called Paxlovid, is a protease inhibitor, which ought to be easy to make and have low side… Continue reading 2021-11-05 General
2021-11-04 General
Genetics This preprint talks about using virus-like particles to study viruses. It looks enough like SARS-CoV-2 that it can get into cells, but then it can’t replicate. Essentially, it’s shooting blanks. This study identified a specific gene variant (which comes from Neanderthals!) which gives a 2x risk of respiratory failure. About 60% of people of… Continue reading 2021-11-04 General
2021-11-03 General
Deaths/Demographics In addition to just “numbers of deaths”, you can also estimate “years of life lost” to describe how bad an epidemic is. For example, HIV had a huuuuge number of years of life lost because the people who died from it were unusually young. This article looked at years of life lost to COVID-19… Continue reading 2021-11-03 General
2021-11-02 General
Vaccines This article says that vaccine effectiveness in England was only about 50-60% against infection in the June/July 2021 period. There’s a stat called the number needed to vaccinate (NNV), which is a measure of how many people you would need to vaccinate to prevent some outcome. The NNV for 80 year olds to prevent… Continue reading 2021-11-02 General
2021-10-30 to 11-01 General
Vaccines This preprint from Israel says that the vaccine effectiveness of a third dose of Pfizer vs. two doses of Pfizer at least five months ago was: 93% against hospitalization, 92% against severe disease (which I think is equivalent to “ICU” here), 81% against death. This article says that Novavax has finished its rolling review… Continue reading 2021-10-30 to 11-01 General