Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 237

I do find it humorous how people for whatever warped reason can’t let go of CV-19.  Some get worked up over the terrifying new variant, supposed high hospitalization numbers, etc.  I still see people driving in cars by themselves wearing a mask.  I might like to empathize, but I can’t help but wonder if you can really be that stupid or ignorant or that engaged in wishful thinking or that bought into the terror campaign.

Excess deaths during the epidemic and after has proven to be a complex topic, one prone to mis-interpretation and bad analysis, particularly by vax safety nuts and their mirror images, those who want to pretend the lockdowns and terror campaign did no harm.  This study looks at some specific causes, which is good, related to deaths of despair.  It finds that in both 2020 and 2021 there were large numbers of excess deaths from drug overdoses and alcohol misuse, accounting for over a third of all non-CV-19 excess deaths.  (Medrxiv Paper) 

This study has been cited by some vax safety nuts as evidence that repeated mRNA vax may increase a specific type of antibody response which could have less beneficial effects.  Of course, they don’t tell anyone that the study was sponsored by Novavax, which has a competing type of CV-19 vax.  They also don’t tell you that the Novavax vaccine doesn’t work as well as the mRNA ones.  They also don’t tell you that the authors of this paper note a somewhat enhanced stimulation of this particular class of antibody response by mRNA vax, but can’t identify any clinical consequences.  (Medrxiv Paper)

Research published in a Nature journal discusses how CV-19 is so good at evading immune responses and anti-viral drugs.  In particular, a common molecular target for drugs like Paxlovid has the ability to switch its functionality and continue its role in the replication process despite the presence of the drug.  The researchers believe they have discovered an approach which avoids this issue, but nature is pretty smart and I suspect that give the billions and billions of replication events occurring for CV-19 at any moment, it will figure out a survival strategy.  (Nature Article)

This study upends the validity of yet another foolish and expensive effort to suppress CV-19 transmission.  It examines whether installing HEPA filters in schools appeared to affect case numbers and compared kindergartens with and without the filters.  No statistically significant difference was found.  (BMJ Article)

A primary part of the response to any infection is the development of T cells which can recognize future attempted infections by the same pathogen.  Some of these cells act as sentinels that identify the pathogen and signal other immune system cells to attempt to clear it, and some are the clearing agents.  A new piece of research finds that if both these kinds of cells are present in the upper respiratory tract, the likelihood of an or a new infection is greatly reduced.  (Medrxiv Paper)

An interesting study looks at the components of an antibody response to an infection, or to a vaccination, or to an infection after vaccination.  Vaccination generates a response almost exclusively to the receptor binding domain of the spike protein, while infection, before or after vaccination, generates a response to a larger area of the spike protein.  As you might imagine, the combination of infection and vaccination appears to generate the broadest and strongest antibody response.  Either alone appears more prone to the phenomenon of imprinting whereby memory cells only recognize the sequence of the original virus or vax that were presented to the immune system.  (Medrxiv Paper)