Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 157

On and on and on it goes, when it ends, I certainly don’t know.  We appear in some places to be gearing up for another round of mask mandates and other restrictions, including vax and mask mandates for school kids, as though we haven’t done enough damage to them.

And more evidence of that damage from a new report on routine child vax rates.  Worldwide there was a huge drop in those rates, which will mean more serious disease and deaths in children (non-Covid vax we are referring to here).  This problem extends to developed countries like the US, but is worst in poor nations.  This has nothing to do with the virus and everything to do with the public health terror campaign waged by the public health authorities and politicians.  (Nature Article)

Children’s immune response may be different than adults, as their systems are still developing.  This paper finds that upon CV-19 infection, children aged 6 to 14 don’t develop a particularly strong antibody response, although that response is improved by reinfection and by vax, but do obtain excellent T cell responses.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This study based on national data from Portugal finds that a prior infection does limit subsequent infection by the latest Omicron variant.  Now 98% of the population was vaxed, so this is combo protection in most cases.  If you were infected by the original strain, you were 53% less likely to get infected; 55% for Alpha, 62% for Delta and 80% for a prior Omicron variant.  Passage of time could be partly responsible for the difference in effectiveness, since Alpha, for example, was largely gone over a year ago.  But the results also show that vax alone is pretty ineffective, otherwise you would not see any difference compared to vax with no prior infection. (Medrxiv Paper)

And another study from Portugal finds that vaccination is less likely to prevent infection from the recent Omicron variants but still offers good protection against hospitalization and death from those variants.  Prior infection, as the other study notes, was also strongly protective.  The passage of time between an immune-response event was not factored in, unfortunately.   (Medrxiv Paper)

There are those trying to pimp the idea that vaccines are causing thousands of excess deaths, usually by mysterious cardiac causes.  They always conveniently ignore the fact that most vaccinated persons have also had a CV-19 infection at some point.  And they ignore research like this piece from Hong Kong that finds that rates of heart attack mortality are much higher in the time after a CV-19 infection in the unvaxed than the rate is among the vaxed population.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Or how about this study from Netherlands, on the entire population, finding that there was a reduced risk of CV-19 mortality following vax and no increase in risk of death from other causes.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Asymptomatic infection induced as good a memory B cell response as a mild infection, in a generally younger, healthy population, according to this paper.  (JID Article)

I am fascinated by the physics of viruses and transmission.  This paper discusses environmental factors that may affect the stability of enveloped viruses, like CV-19.  Droplet size, and the relative humidity, which can affect how fast a droplet evaporates, are apparently major factors in virus transmission and survival.  (Medrxiv Paper)