Mitigation Measures This article talks about $7.4B in relief spending that the Government of Canada has announced. All three of these programs will go until 7 May 2022. Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will be replaced by the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit and will provide $300 a week to eligible people. The Tourism and Hospitality Recovery… Continue reading 2021-10-21 General
Category: Treatments
2021-10-15 General
A friend kept ragging on me about using the trade names for various vaccines. I held firm because it was more correct and accurate. He complained that nobody knew the names, but I pointed out that people got used to Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta. I now give up. Nobody and I mean nobody but… Continue reading 2021-10-15 General
2021-10-14 General
Vaccines Someone is live-tweeting the La Jolla Immunology Conference, and during a panel about an important paper from May that I’ve already talked about, they said something which I missed: that inter-individual variations in antibody responses are larger than the variations between responses to different variants. I’ve talked about the two-proline (2P) and six-proline (6P)… Continue reading 2021-10-14 General
2021-10-01 General
Vaccines Today, during a BC Ministry of Health press conference about something else, Dr. Henry got a question about when little kids’ vaccinations (ages 5-11). Dr. Henry said that Pfizer had submitted (or was about to submit?) data for the study, which had a new formulation: 1/3 of the adult active ingredient (10 mg vs.… Continue reading 2021-10-01 General
2021-09-29 General
Testing/Diagnostics In this study, they put a wristwatch-like thing on the wrists of people who willingly allowed themselves to be infected with either rhinovirus, flu, or placebo. The wristwatch thingie was able to predict illness about a day before symptoms showed up. This could be really useful for diagnosing other respiratory infections (like ahem COVID-19).… Continue reading 2021-09-29 General
2021-09-28 General
Treatments It’s been observed often that obesity raises the risk of COVID-19. This preprint looked into it more closely, and found that the anti-obesity drug orlistat blocks COVID-19 in mice. Mitigation Measures This report from England looked how behaviour correlated with risk of getting COVID-19. People who reported that never wore masks were slightly over… Continue reading 2021-09-28 General
2021-09-25/26/27 General
Pathology A paper last week said that the risk of heart inflammation in young men was one in a thousand. As this article reports, they were waaaaaay off in their count of the total number of vaccinations in Ontario; the correct figure turns out to be one in 1 in 25,000. I can’t for the… Continue reading 2021-09-25/26/27 General
2021-09-23 General
Vaccines This long and highly technical preprint also says that the MMR vaccine gives some protection against and that the Tdap (Tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) vaccine does. The authors did two things: They took T cells from blood which had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (either from infection or vaccination) and added either MMR or Tdap vaccines, and… Continue reading 2021-09-23 General
2021-09-08 General
Vaccines This large study from Scotland from March 2020 to November 2020 found that household members of healthcare workers were less than half as likely to get an infection after the healthcare worker got vaccinated. (Note: don’t forget that some of the household members got infected in the community.) This study of Pfizer found that:… Continue reading 2021-09-08 General
2021-09-01 General
Treatments Good news! This preprint says that baricitinib reduces all-causes mortality of hospitalized COVID-19 patients by 38.2%! Vaccines Remember how I was saying that I thought we’d see that longer doses were better? It turns out that waaay longer is better. This preprint says that for AstraZeneca, antibody levels were four times higher in people… Continue reading 2021-09-01 General