2021-10-19 General

Vaccines This preprint is yet another study showing that infection+vaccination gives a stronger and more durable response that vaccination alone or infection alone. There have been so many studies showing that result that I am getting tired and bored with them, and probably will not post any more. This preprint about vaccines and pregnancy found:… Continue reading 2021-10-19 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

2021-10-13 General

Diagnosis / Equity This Twitter thread suggests that the reason darker-skinned people have higher fatality rates from COVID-19 is because, well, they have darker skin: pulse oximeters, which are used to judge how serious a case is, don’t work on dark-skinned people. Economic effects This video from January 2021 makes the economic case — not… Continue reading 2021-10-13 General

2010-10-09/10/11/12 General

Mitigation Measures This article says that the US will allow fully-vaccinated Canadians to enter, starting sometime in November. “Fully-vaccinated” has not been clearly defined yet. Vaccines Novavax has published data from their Phase 3 trials in the USA and Mexico in this preprint. I wanted to be snarky and say that maybe this means that… Continue reading 2010-10-09/10/11/12 General

2021-10-07 General

Long COVID This study from the UK found: there were subtle differences in T cells which correlated strongly (but not perfectly) with having Long COVID; giving histamine receptor antagonists made 72% of them better (!!!); something which the histamine receptor antagonists never helped was dysautonomia, which suggests that there is some different mechanism causing that.… Continue reading 2021-10-07 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