Special double-issue today, and I spent all day yesterday doing my taxes. Vaccines Canada might be facing another vaccine drought. First, the European Union said yesterday they would embargo all vaccines from leaving the EU. Note that the EU is mad at AstraZeneca Inc. — the EU says that AZ has been sending vax to… Continue reading 2021-03-23/4 General
Category: Vaccines
2021-03-22 General
Vaccines A big Phase 3 trial of AZ in the US just finished. While their previous trials has some ah irregularities, this one seemed to be done well.. Fortunately, this trial showed good results in the general population and in old people. (And no blood clotting issues.) Except… there was a highly unusual announcement from… Continue reading 2021-03-22 General
2021-03-20 General
VOCs There has been some research lately which pegs the P.1 transmissibility at 2.5x more than COVID Classic. Ulp. The good news is that everything I have seen is that the vaccines work well against it. Scientists have found that mice — just your regular standard lab mice — can get the P.1 and B.1.351… Continue reading 2021-03-20 General
2021-03-19 General
Vaccines Well, that’s depressing. A paper in The Lancet reports on a mathematical model which says that vaccination without pharmaceutical measures (e.g. masking, keeping 2m apart, etc) is likely to only bring R down to 1.58. Translation: vaccination alone won’t get rid of the virus. However, this smells off to me. Measles has an R0… Continue reading 2021-03-19 General
2021-03-17 General
Vaccines As more information is discovered, it looks like maybe the blood clotting problems soon after vaccination is causal and not coincidence. Research has shown that the spike protein can lead to an attack on blood vessels, and the common vaccines right now flood the body with spike proteins. This has made several countries concerned… Continue reading 2021-03-17 General
2021-03-16 General
Vaccines There’s yet another paper which says that AZ is crap against B.1.351 — 10.5%. There is some suggestion that AZ is um crap against B.1.351 because it doesn’t have the 2-proline stabilizer (unlike the mRNAs and J&J). The 2-proline stabilizer is a little tweak to the spike protein to keep it in its prefusion… Continue reading 2021-03-16 General
2021-03-15 General
Vaccines Moderna has registered to do a small Ph2/3 trials on children. A preprint says that the first vax dose for cancer patients is not very effective, but that the second dose gives them good protection. Zeynep Tufekci has an essay arguing that the language of “we should vaccinate them over there so they don’t… Continue reading 2021-03-15 General
2021-03-13 General
Vaccines BioNTech (which is the company behind Pfizer’s vaccine) is going to partner with an additional 13 companies to make up to 2 billion (yes, billion with a B) doses this year. There’s a nice study done by Public Health Scotland where they looked at household members of healthcare workers who did and did not… Continue reading 2021-03-13 General
2021-03-12 General
Long COVID Respected COVID journalist Zeynep Tufekci points out problems with the claims that a very large percentage of the people who have Long COVID had very mild symptoms originally. She points out that the most commonly cited study has real problems with confirmation bias, definitions of “asymptomatic”, and missing baselines. Vaccines Novavax announced that… Continue reading 2021-03-12 General
2021-03-11 General
Odds The Economist has a really great article which models the influence of age and comorbidities on hospitalization and death. Here’s a graph from the article: Vaccine Effectiveness Pfizer issued a press release, saying that its vaccine was 97% effective at preventing symptomatic disease in Israel (which has mostly B.1.1.7). (Are you getting the message?… Continue reading 2021-03-11 General