Vaccines This Twitter thread is an excellent discussion of how to understand the “do vaccines wane” discussion. Please go read it. The US FDA today gave full approval to Pfizer, as opposed to the Emergency Use Authorization that it had given. This is important because there were entities which were not legally able to require… Continue reading 2021-08-23 General
Category: Variants
2021-08-18 General
Vaccines There has been a lot of discussing recently about waning effectiveness of vaccines. I want to editorialize for a moment: you expect vaccine effectiveness against infection to appear worse in real life than in the studies, and to appear worse over time. More time to get infected. If the vaccine is 95% effective over… Continue reading 2021-08-18 General
2021-08-17 General
Variants This article talks about a lot of things, but says: Breakthrough cases appear to be increasing for Delta. However, they don’t give any “before” numbers, and it’s not clear if it’s just because the number of vaccinated people is increasing. The absolute number of breakthrough cases is still low. The average age of a… Continue reading 2021-08-17 General
2021-08-14 General
Mitigation Measures Huh. This web page from the US CDC says that an N95 with an exhalation valve is as good or better at source control (i.e. protecting the people the wearer is close to) than a procedure mask (the standard medical hook-over-your-ears mask that you see unfortunately frequently see lying on the ground as… Continue reading 2021-08-14 General
2021-08-11/12 General
Testing Three dogs have been trained in Vancouver to sniff out COVID-19 with very high accuracy! Transmission Yow! This preprint says that 6.8% of COVID-19 patients in England caught it in the hospital. Vaccines Good news! Adolescents tolerated two doses of Moderna, and the vax arm had no cases vs. four in the placebo arm.… Continue reading 2021-08-11/12 General
2021-08-10 General
Vaccines Sigh. Yesterday I showed a graph from Israel which looked a little funny, and repeated the explanations that were given. (BTW, I had heard before that Israel’s cases looked funny because the outbreak started in areas that were highly vaxxed and social separate from the unvaxxed places.) Today, one of the authors of the… Continue reading 2021-08-10 General
2021-08-06 General
Vaccines Novavax is having such trouble manufacturing that the US has paused funding. This study looked at mixing and matching AZ and Pfizer. It found that side effects were similar for all the combinations. It found that AZ first then Pfizer was about the same as Pfizer+Pfizer in terms of antibodies; it found that AZ+Pfizer… Continue reading 2021-08-06 General
2021-08-04 General
Treatments This preprint says that injecting REGEN-COV (a monoclonal antibody treatment that you might know by the name of the company, Regeneron) into people who have been exposed to COVID-19 prevents developing a symptomatic infection with efficacy of 92.6%. This is a BFD. Before, they had to give it as an infusion i.e. the patients… Continue reading 2021-08-04 General
2021-07-31/08-01/02 General
Okay, I’ve been gone for a few days. First there wasn’t much news, then I was busy. Some general trends in articles I have noticed recently: There have recently been a number of articles expressing frustration and/or sadness that we thought we had the pandemic licked, and now Delta comes to get us. I have… Continue reading 2021-07-31/08-01/02 General
2021-07-30 General
Variants The US CDC changed its advice about masks, advising people to wear them more, because of what they’ve found about Delta. They were particularly shook by info from a big outbreak (~900 people) in Providencetown, MA. The study looked at 469 cases in more detail. (Here is the US CDC’s report on it, if… Continue reading 2021-07-30 General