Side effects Bad news for anybody who enjoys erections: COVID can cause erectile dysfunction. Vaccines There are starting to be a few reports of inflammation of the heart in young people after getting an mRNA vaccine. This is very early, so it might be nothing… but it also might be something. Aaaannnd this paper talks… Continue reading 2021-04-19 General
2021-04-19 BC
Measures WorkSafeBC continues to not mess around, shutting five more businesses in Fraser Health. Press Briefing There was a LOT that was covered in the briefing today. See the slides. tl;dr: AZ in the pharmacies is opened up to everybody over 40; Measures stay in place for another 5 weeks, at which point things should… Continue reading 2021-04-19 BC
2021-04-18 General
Vaccines Yet another to add to the list of does-not-mount-good-antibodies: solid organ transplant recipients. Unlike many of the other patient groups (pregnant, lactating, some cancers, kidney dialysis), even a second shot isn’t good enough to get good antibody response. 🙁 Reminder: antibodies are not the whole story. T-cells are also important, and unfortunately are difficult… Continue reading 2021-04-18 General
2021-04-18 BC
Superspreader Events People have been talking about a big party on the beach Friday evening. I saw people talking about it, and sort of rolled my eyes because all the knowledgeable people I follow say that beach-shaming is the last thing we should do: being outside, in the sun, where there is usually a breeze,… Continue reading 2021-04-18 BC
2021-04-17 General
Vaccines Buried in this article about Moderna signing a contract with Rovi, a Spanish company, to make ingredients for their vax is something that mentions that Lonza (Moderna’s primary subcontractor) has two manufacturing lines that it expects to become operational in the next few weeks. Currently, only one line is operational. Tripling the Moderna output… Continue reading 2021-04-17 General
2021-04-16 General
Vaccines One might think you’d have to have quite a high vax rate before case counts would come down. Israel currently is basically back to normal, and their vax rate is only about 60%. Want to know more about what scientists think might be behind the AZ clotting issue? The Atlantic has a good article… Continue reading 2021-04-16 General
2021-04-16 BC
Supply Bad news, good news, and awesome news. Bad news: Moderna fell down on supply again, telling us that they will only ship half as much next week as they promised, so shorting BC by 78 kilodoses. (We are still waiting on a shipment of 106K this week, we’ll see if it comes through.) Good… Continue reading 2021-04-16 BC
2021-04-15 BC
Panic!!! There is a group of people calling themselves the BC Modelling Group which released a presentation yesterday. They are quite alarmed by the rise of the VOCs, and foresee an explosion of cases. There is also a guy Eric Feigl-Ding who has also been sounding the alarm about the levels of P.1 in BC,… Continue reading 2021-04-15 BC
2021-04-15 General
Vaccines The vaccines are good, but not perfect. In the US (which has had much greater levels of the virus), they had a 0.008% chance of getting COVID (out of 66 million fully vaccinated) 0.00056% chance of being hospitalized (7% of these infections) 0.00001% chance of dying from COVID(7 in 66 million vaccinees) (Chance of… Continue reading 2021-04-15 General
2021-04-14 BC
Vaccinations The province did a whole-of-community vaccination of Prince Rupert, and we can now see the results: that vaccinations work! Here’s a graph that Justin McElroy made: Note that the line hasn’t even bottomed out. This reminds me of a graph Dr. Henry showed in 11 March 2021 presentation which showed that it took about… Continue reading 2021-04-14 BC