Mitigation Measures The land border into the USA from Canada will remain closed to non-essential non-Americans until at least 21 October. Vaccines This preprint says that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine has a vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic COVID-19 infection of 48% and 76% effectiveness against severe disease. I think this is huge news,… Continue reading 2021-09-21 General
Category: Vaccines
2021-09-18/19/20 General
It was a busy weekend, it’s going to be a very busy day for me. I wasn’t going to post today, but there’s great news! Vaccines Pfizer/BioNTech announced that their trial in kids from 5-11 years old has finished, and the results look good!
2021-09-17 General
COVID-19 Origins This preprint says they have found a bat coronavirus which looks really close to SARS-CoV-2. It looks to me like that’s the origin! Does this mean an end to speculation about SARS-CoV-2 coming from a Chinese lab? Oh hell no, because they have too much fun with conspiracy theories and because it’s not… Continue reading 2021-09-17 General
2021-09-16 General
Vaccines IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, GET A VACCINE. This article says that pregnant people are five times more likely to get admitted to hospital and ten times more likely to end up in the ICU. According to this article, Health Canada has approved vaccine names: Moderna -> Spikevax Pfizer -> Comirnaty AZ -> Vaxzevria With… Continue reading 2021-09-16 General
2021-09-15 General
Vaccines I mentioned a study from England yesterday which looked at waning immunity. This tweet thread looks more closely, and there’s good stuff in the report that I missed. First, here’s the original study. Yes, it looks you’ve got a significant loss in effectiveness against infection if you look at the over-sixteens, but if you… Continue reading 2021-09-15 General
2021-09-14 General
Vaccines This article has a graph of AZ and Pfizer’s effectiveness over time for old folks. It’s not pretty (but remember that they used a short dose interval, and Canada mostly used a long interval). Even for younger people, it’s not great news: This preprint says that people who have a spare tire around their… Continue reading 2021-09-14 General
2021-09-11/12/13 General
Transmission This report says that seroprevalence of COVID-19 antibodies from infection in Canadian blood donors went up to 4.5%, up from 4.0% in May. (How can they tell the difference? Vaccines only make antibodies to the spike protein, so if there are antibodies to some other part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, then it was acquired… Continue reading 2021-09-11/12/13 General
2021-09-10 General
Vaccines The National Advisory Committee on Immunization recommends a third shot for various types of immunocompromised people. From this tweet, using data from Public Health England: From this tweet, also using data from Public Health England (note that it’s a LOG scale!): This US CDC report says that: the effectiveness against hospitalization was 76% for… Continue reading 2021-09-10 General
2021-09-09 General
Variants A US CDC report found that COVID-19 didn’t cause more hospitalized children to go to the ICU than in pre-Delta times. Vaccines Moderna announced that they have gotten really good results (in mice) from a vaccine which combines COVID-19, influenza, and RSV. This article says that COVID-19 frequently attacks kidneys, and that it really… Continue reading 2021-09-09 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