Promising New Coronavirus Vaccine

[digitaldog]

From last week's "The Week Magazine":

Ivermectin doesn't work:
The antiparasitic ivermectin-touted as a wonder drug by many Republicans is entirely ineffective in treating severe cases of Covid-19, a new study shows.
Researchers in Malaysia looked at 490 Covid patients 50 and older, all of whom were considered high risk because of their age and underlying health. Half were put
on ivermectin for five days, while the other half received fever-reducing medications and other routine treatment for symptoms. The researchers found that there was little
difference in outcomes between the two groups, reports UPI.com. About 2 percent of the ivermectin group was admitted to ICU compared with 3 percent of the control group, a difference not statistically significant. But the ivermectin takers had more side effects, including heart attacks and anemia. The study is considered the most rigorous examination of the drug's impact on Covid thus far. "People infected with Covid-19 should not resort to self-medication with ivermectin," says study
co-author Steven Lim. from the Raja Permaisuri Bainun Hospital in Malaysia. The drug, he says, *does not reduce their risk of deterioration to severe disease.

[Robert Roaldi]

From last week's "The Week Magazine":

This is off-topic for this thread, but is there no legal recourse (law suit if nothing else) available? It should NOT be ok for people in positions of authority to speak out irresponsibly about things they don't know anything about. I understand that politicians may do that very thing often when it comes to matters of opinion, but surely in this case where expert medical knowledge is easily available, there should be a way to discourage and maybe even punish such behaviour. This seems like a bug in the code.

[LesPalenik]

In Germany, the number of cases in the last 24 hours shot up suddenly to 245,000. That's much higher than anytime since the beginning of the pandemic,

[Robert Roaldi]

In Germany, the number of cases in the last 24 hours shot up suddenly to 245,000. That's much higher than anytime since the beginning of the pandemic,

I saw a report yesterday of new lockdowns in China, but I can't remember where I read it.

[Robert Roaldi]

At week's end the Worldometer 7-day average of US daily Covid deaths is showing a consistent downward slope. It is still at about 1000 per day, not nothing, but it's going in the right direction.

I read that there's now an Omicron sub-variant on the loose, but I've read no dire warnings about it. Most Canadian provinces will have removed Covid protocols soon, but some specific places are keeping mask requirements in place for a few more weeks.

How lucky we are that vaccine researchers were hard at work in the last 10-20 years.

[Robert Roaldi]

We missed noting that the US reached one million Covid deaths on Worldometer recently. The 7-day moving average daily deaths has continued to decline and is at around 400 deaths per day at the moment.

In at least Quebec and Ontario we are entering the 6th wave. Quebec has extended their mask mandate to the end of April from April 15th, but no new changes in Ontario, which is pretty open at the moment. Most employees in food stores and restaurants/cafés continue to wear masks, as do I when inside anywhere. About half the clients do. The city of Ottawa monitors Covid viruses in sewage water and has set daily records for 5-6 days in a row now. Hospitalizations have increased but daily deaths are still in single figures for the province. Anybody with any sense is watching those numbers closely. Ontario has just recommended a 4th vaccine shot for those 60 and over.

[Chris Kern]

In at least Quebec and Ontario we are entering the 6th wave. . . . The city of Ottawa monitors Covid viruses in sewage water and has set daily records for 5-6 days in a row now. Hospitalizations have increased but daily deaths are still in single figures for the province. Anybody with any sense is watching those numbers closely. Ontario has just recommended a 4th vaccine shot for those 60 and over.

Somewhat further south, we're also experiencing the beginning of a predicted spike in cases caused by the Omicron BA.2 subvariant; New York City and Washington, D.C. are the two most prominent epicenters.  In the Maryland county where I live, about a 30-minute drive north of Washington, the case rate has been increasing fairly rapidly for two weeks now.  However, we're not seeing a significant increase in deaths nor, as far as I can tell, hospitalizations.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized a fourth dose (second booster) of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines for people with compromised immune systems and anyone over 50.  There has been considerable debate among the medical experts about whether another booster makes sense at this time, especially since all the current vaccines were designed to protect against the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that were circulating in 2020 and early 2021 rather than the mutations that are infecting people now.  (My wife and I decided to get the additional dose, anyway: we figured it might provide additional protection against severe disease and there seemed to be little reason to avoid it.)

A retrospective study of older patients in Israel that was published earlier this week in the New England Journal of Medicine (attached) suggests that an extra Pfizer-BioNTech booster may provide increased short-term protection from infection as well as longer-lasting protection from severe disease compared to a three-dose regime.  This came as a bit of a surprise precisely because the vaccine formulation was based on an old version of the coronavirus.

The omicron variant is genetically divergent from the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 strain for which the BNT162b2 vaccine was tailored. The results presented here indicate that as compared with three vaccine doses given at least 4 months earlier, a fourth dose provides added short-term protection against confirmed infections and severe illness caused by the omicron variant. The incidence rate for confirmed infection was lower by a factor of 2 and the rate of severe disease lower by a factor of 3 among persons in the fourth week after receiving the fourth dose than among eligible persons who did not receive the fourth dose.

Comparing the rate ratio over time since the fourth dose . . . suggests that the protection against confirmed infection with the omicron variant reaches a maximum in the fourth week after vaccination, after which the rate ratio decreases to approximately 1.1 by the eighth week; these findings suggest that protection against confirmed infection wanes quickly. In contrast, protection against severe illness did not appear to decrease by the sixth week after receipt of the fourth dose. More follow-up is needed in order to evaluate the protection of the fourth dose against severe illness over longer periods.

It seems likely that similar benefits would accrue to a fourth dose of the Moderna product, which is also based on mRNA vaccine technology.

[digitaldog]

Well seems today, the US hit more than one million dead from Covid-19. Very likely higher of course.
What a relief that the LuLa virologist has confirmed that "now that Covid is on the way out..."