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 2022-07-14 General

Vaccines This article reports that Moderna has been approved in Canada for kiddies between six months and five years old. This article reports that an Alberta judge ruled that it was okay to require transplant patients to get a COVID vax, given the scarcity of organs and the much higher likelihood that unvaxxed organ recipients… Continue reading week ending 2022-07-14 General

week ending 2022-06-30 General

Folks, BA.5 is coming and it’s going to be bad. Mentally prepare yourself for a big wave this summer. I don’t know where to put it, but this paper says that compared to peer countries, Canada: Did really well on per capita vaccinated, cases, and deaths. (You could argue that we’re fudging the numbers, but… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-30 General

week ending 2022-06-23 General

Sorry this was late. Life happened. Pathology This article summarizes this paper which says that the chances of bad COVID outcomes are cumulative with exposures. Getting COVID-19 twice is worse than once, three times is worse than two, etc. (Here’s a blog post which talks about this paper more.) As you can see, you are… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-23 General

week ending 2022-06-16 General

Long COVID This article about Long COVID in the US is interesting. It says that a lot of the indicators which you would expect to see Long COVID shift (e.g. number of disability claims, health care expenditures), have not in fact shifted. The article gives a number of possiblities: A lot of disabled people died… Continue reading week ending 2022-06-16 General

week ending 2022-04-28 General

Vaccines This article says that Moderna has formally filed a request that the US FDA approve their vax for children between 6 months and 5 years, yay! Moderna says the two-dose regime is 51% effective against infection. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is compared to kids without vax (who don’t get sick as… Continue reading week ending 2022-04-28 General

Week ending 2022-04-14 General

Because the rest of the world has decided that COVID doesn’t exist any more, I am dropping down to one post per week. I am going to stop posting articles which are repetitive, especially ones of the form “Oh look! {Vaccines, boosters, treatments} still work against {Omicron, older variants}”; “Oh look! Vaccines wane in effectiveness!”;… Continue reading Week ending 2022-04-14 General

2022-03-17/18 General

Mitigation Measures Yep, they did it. On Wednesday I said that the government planned to drop the testing requirement to enter Canada. This article reports that it happened. This article says that as more restrictions are being lifted, a hospital in Montreal reports seeing an increase in “normal” child trauma: broken legs, scrapes, stomach flu,… Continue reading 2022-03-17/18 General